Abstract: The Clown – a Metaphor for the Artist Identity in the Circus of History and Existence at Matei Vișniec and Norman Manea. The paper will highlight affinities and differences in the way Norman Manea and Matei Vișniec, two prominent writers of the Romanian exile from the 80s, narrate the existential failure in the novel The Black Envelope and respectively in the play Old clown wanted, making extensive use of the modalities provided by an intensely poetic imaginary. The dreamlike representations, which acquire opposite connotations in the plots of the two authors, as well as certain image-metaphors, elaborated according to the models inspired by Federico Fellini, highlight some aspects that distinguish the perspective expressed by each writer regarding the dense and broad semantics of the circus. In Matei Vișniec’s play, the circus topos declines in the forms of precariousness, which defines the artist’s condition as well as the general human condition - perpetually threatened by the inexorable passage of Time. As for Norman Manea’s novel, the writer concentrates in this plot the perception of History as a buffoonish and vulgar manifestation, which condemns the individual, the artist in the first instance, to the status of victim. In this way Manea and Vișniec actually explore the forms of manifestation peculiar to a cultural and linguistic imaginary related to the representation of individual and collective identity.

Keywords: clown, circle, artist, dictator, history, theater within theater, poeticity