Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Indeed, during the period between the wars, the leftist Romanian press labeled some of Eliade’s novels “fascistic,” an example of just such abusive and fanatical simplification. (In his monograph, Ricketts ably rejects distortions of this kind.) Writing about the case of Paul de Man, Denis Donoghue recently observed that “it would answer injustice with injustice if one were to assert that Deconstruction is compromised by de Man’s wartime journalism. The current attempt to smear Deconstruction by denouncing de Man is sordid.” The same may be said of any attempt to smear Eliade’s scholarship with his politics.

Many literary critics in Romania and elsewhere have stressed, moreover, the humanist value of his literary work: the stimulating and mysterious ambiguity of his prose, his magical fantasy and enigmatically coded reality, the free play and the dreamy compassion of his writing. But this does not diminish the questions that must be raised. Quite the contrary, it aggravates them. Literature must meet primarily aesthetic criteria, not moral ones, just as scholarly work must meet scholarly standards. But journals, memoirs, autobiography: such strictly personal reckonings cannot avoid the ethical test.

The contrast between Eliade’s fiction and his fascist journalism is as pronounced as the contrast between Eliade the supporter of the fascist Iron Guard and Eliade the respected intellectual of later years, remembered by his friends in the cordial and cosmopolitan atmosphere of his American home, always hospitable and affable with colleagues and acquaintances of all races and faiths. No one could see (and perhaps Eliade himself managed to forget) the hovering ghost of another time, another personality.

And so the issue that the Journals avoid returns persistently to haunt them. Eliade’s “happy guilt” does not refer only to his remembered adoration for Nae Ionescu; in old age, after all, the nostalgia for youthful joys and passions often goes beyond acceptable limits. (Eliade’s friend, the Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, was also in his youth an admirer of Ionescu, but he would probably have recalled his admiration differently in 1985.) It is harder, however, to excuse a passage like this one from the Autobiography :

I don’t know how Corneliu Codreanu will be judged by history. The fact is that four months after the phenomenal electoral success of the Legionary movement, its head found himself sentenced to ten years at hard labor, and five months after that he was executed — events that reconfirmed my belief that our generation did not have a political destiny.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was violently anti-Semitic and anti-democratic, and he committed odious murders. Yet Eliade appears to be uncertain, four decades after the war, in Chicago, how history will judge him. He is still fascinated by Codreanu’s electoral “success,” he fails to mention the murders committed by this “martyr,” and he does not hesitate to identify himself with that “generation” and even its political destiny. And the same treatment is accorded the Leader’s “lieutenants” the martyrs Ion Mo ta and Vasile Marin, slain in January 1937 as volunteers for Franco in the Spanish Civil War (dramatically evoked by Eliade at the time and later recalled as “models” of sacrifice in the Legion’s view). It was really a case of retaining an outlook. Eliade’s conception of the best social and political solution for Romania seems to have remained constant. It was a traditional and conservative vision, “fundamentalist” in its orthodoxy (“I don’t believe in God, I believe in Jesus”), skeptical about democracy and modernity, tied to ethnicity and to the cultural values of the place.

V

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent call for a Slavophile Russian state comes at a time when the old conflict has reawakened in Eastern Europe between the “separatists” and the “integrationists,” between the supporters of independent states and the “Europeanists.” In Romania this dispute was tragically manipulated during the years between the wars. Now it is reappearing in a changed historical situation, pitting those who want integration into Europe against those who want to strengthen the national state and the national character.

The right is still no smarter, though, than the left; it learns neither from its own disasters nor from those of the other side. Nor are the intellectuals always capable of protecting their illusions, ideas, and aspirations from evil associations, notwithstanding their own grievous experience. In the 1970s, according to his friend Noica (as reported by Katherine Verdery of Johns Hopkins University), Eliade encouraged Professor Edgar Papu, from his distant American home, to launch a debate in Romania about “protochronism.” This debate was launched initially to emphasize the Romanian contribution to world culture, and more generally the role of small isolated cultures in stimulating important intellectual achievements. It gradually degenerated, however, into odious, ideological, “patriotic” pressure, similar to the pressure of Stalin’s requirement that the Soviet press discover new aspects of the “supremacy” of Soviet culture over Western culture. This debate occupied the Romanian cultural scene for some fifteen years, and led to one of the most sinister campaigns against the intelligentsia by the Ceau sescu regime.

The political schemers, of course, soon bridged the abyss between Eliade’s thinking and their own immediate interests. Which does not make his unhappy guilt (involuntary, this time) any less. Eliade was, after all, an intellectual with much experience in such matters. In contrast to his great predecessors in Romanian culture (such writers and thinkers with a similar right-wing vision as Eminescu, Hasdeu, Vasile Pârvan, and Iorga), Eliade had the “advantage” of witnessing the Holocaust, the unfolding of Stalinist genocide, the horrors of right-wing and left-wing dictators. Eliade lived the longest part of his life in a democratic society, in which he could see that, besides its economic and intellectual achievements, and despite its many shortcomings, democracy is the only system in which there can be a dialogue between the right and the left, even in their extremist forms.

In its everyday, domestic aspects, the reality of “totalitarian” systems such as Nazism and communism has been far more complicated than is suggested by the classifications and the denunciations. Honesty requires those who have lived with “true socialism” to reject simplistic recrimination, which is more likely to cut off than to help an understanding of the truth. The current spectacle of millions of former Party members in Romania now madly reciting anti-communist slogans is moving, because it forces us to think twice before returning to our comfortable categories. How quickly these people forget not only their own guilt, not only the unhappiness of those who were truly oppressed or marginalized by the totalitarian powers, but also the many “happy” moments enjoyed during their somnolent complicity. Guilty pleasures? Happy guilt? It would be hard for these opportunists, past and present, to admit to this kind of ambiguous happiness, just as hard as it probably was for many Nazis — genuine and “convinced” Nazis who only in retrospect were forced to acknowledge the horror, and to speak of their happy Nazi youth, of the demonstrations, the balls, the lectures, and the other ecstasies of their own felix culpa.

An honest and critical analysis of the significance of Eliade’s life would have been important to the whole of Romanian culture. Banned in Romania for the first decades after the war, Eliade began to be “retrieved” in the 1970s. This was not without complications: though Ceau sescu’s “National Stalinist” regime sought the kind of nationalist legitimacy that the Legion had enjoyed, the last leaders of the communist “old guard” could not forget the political orientation of their old enemy. It is now known, for instance, that in 1937, on learning that the student Gogu R dulescu, a communist who later rose to become vice-president of the Council of State and a member of the executive of the Romanian Communist Party under Ceau sescu, had been detained at Legion headquarters and beaten with wet ropes. Eliade not only expressed satisfaction with this barbarous “punishment,” but said that he would have put out R dulescu’s eyes.