THE ODYSSEY OF M. ELIADE'S HEROES. A MEDITATION ON TIME.

The present research focuses mainly on highlighting and analyzing the spacetime dimension in Mircea Eliade's works of fiction. The paper also presents the considerations made by the author on this topic in his scientific papers. The detailing of the concepts related to the myth highlights the presence in contemporary prose of cosmogony, eschatology, and calendar myths. We show that the two temporal subsystems, cosmogony and eschatology, blend harmoniously with two spatial subsystems, the vertical and the horizontal, to demonstrate that temporal symbolism exists only in terms of spatial symbolism. The demonstration of the mythical character of the space-time structure is based on the revelation of the sacredness of the mythical space and time and on the sacred-profane opposition, inside this dimension of contemporary prose. The paper highlights aspects that demonstrate that the use of mythical structures and their understanding are different in contemporary prose culminating in changing their meaning, with the transition to postmodernism. This passage is marked by the change of the symbolic code with the naturalistic one, the postmodern writers using the same mythical motives and structures as the modern ones but giving them a different meaning. The research reveals a certain parallelism between the scientific works and Mircea Eliade's prose, by illustrating the concepts related to time and space, and by depicting in his short stories and novels the sacred camouflaged in history and the heroes' attempt to find a privileged space in order to succeed in coming out of profane time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]