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

But after the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, the open society itself is in a deep crisis, it seems, with the loss of decency, of humanitarian and fair principles, of generosity and grandeur. The need for an enemy (ethnic enemy, ideological enemy, gender enemy, religious enemy) both drives and confuses people, whether they are in a society obsessed with lies or in a society obsessed with money. Demagogy, censorship, bigotry, and cynicism survive, under different labels, even in the market of the free world.

The exiles are not the only ones to recognize the dangerous hidden similarities between closed and open societies. The Western man is now their fellow man, as they are his. And all of us know that playing with hell and illusions is not the best way to avoid hell or to overcome costly illusions.

Translated by Patrick Camiller, spring 1996

Notes

1. As quoted in the “Introduction” by Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy to Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 32, which appeared after its partial publication as “Progulki’s Pushkinom,” in the Russian journal Oktyabr (April 1989).

2. Ibid., p. 37.

3. Ibid., p. 38.

4. Ibid.

5. Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, p. 145.

6. Igor Shafarevich, “A Phenomenon of the Emigration,” Literaturnaya Rossiya, September 8, 1989.

7. As quoted in Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Sinyavsky’s ‘Return’ to the Soviet Union,” Formations, 6 (spring 1991), p. 13.

8. See his comment on Strolls with Pushkin that appeared in Vestnik Russkogo Khristyanskogo Dvizheniia, 142 (1984), p. 152.

9. As quoted in Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Sinyavsky’s ‘Return,’” p. 13.

10. Ibid., p. 35.

11. Ibid., p. 36.

12. My Eliade piece appears here on pp. 92–118 above.

13. Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1992.

14. România Mare, March 20, 1992.

15. “Mircea Eliade, Culture and the Inquisitions,” 22, no. 12 (1992).

16. David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 202.

17. “Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture” in Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971).

In the spring of 1990, I was invited to attend the Salon du Livre in Paris, on the occasion of Albin Michel’s publication of my first volume in French, Le thé de Proust.

The year before my trip there, I had got to know a friend of Cioran’s, Edouard Roditi, a fabled pilgrim of letters. It seems he had written to Cioran about me. One day he showed me a surprising message that had come from Cioran, in French, dated September 25, 1989.

Mon cher ami,

Thank you for your letter, which has come at just the right moment. Just a few days ago I was struck, or rather deeply shaken, by Norman Manea’s piece. It is the best thing I have read on the Romanian nightmare … I left Romania fifty years ago, and it is mainly out of masochism that I take an interest in my origins. How can one explain that the shallowest of all nations should have such a destiny?

Cioran was referring to my essay “Rumänien in 3 (kommentierten) Sätze” (“Romania — Three Lines with Commentary”), which had just appeared in the German magazine Akzente. The same issue had also carried a piece by Cioran entitled “ Begegnungen mit Paul Celan” (“Encounters with Paul Celan”), a coincidence which probably prompted what he wrote to Roditi regarding “the right moment.”

Naturally, I wrote Cioran. I have always considered him a great writer, even if I have had some doubts about his philosophy. He answered with an extremely cordial letter in which he did not forget to stress that his leaving Romania had been the most intelligent act of his life. (“C’est de loin l’acte le plus intelligent que j’aie jamais commis.”) And, of course, he advised me to come to live in Paris, too (“l’endroit idéal pour rater sa vie”).

When I telephoned him upon arriving in Paris, he invited me and my wife over to 21 rue l’Odeon, for dinner.

This fierce cynic, who delighted in overturning axioms and canons, values and virtues, was a short, thin, frail man, both amiable and courteous. He, who had written that he would have killed himself had he been a Jew and who rejected God while admiring the Führer and the Romanian fascist Zelea Codreanu, the “Captain” of the Iron Guard, came across as modest, gentle, polite. The sharpshooter so adulated by French literati lived in a student garret. He told us that until a lift was installed a few years earlier he had heroically scrambled up the stairs several times a day — even after midnight when he returned from his long solitary walks that were well known to the district policeman.

My intention was not to ask him anything but to leave him at the mercy of his own nature and words. Still, if the opportunity had arisen, I should have been happy for us to discuss, for instance, the “barbarity of enthusiasm,” one of his many striking phrases in Le Mauvais Demiurge. I thought that, even for a nihilistic prophet of the apocalypse, it might have been interesting to consider the relationship between his youthful enthusiasm for barbarism and his later determined skepticism of civilization, progress, and democracy. But we did not get on to such complicated and important matters. He seemed to have prepared himself for a relaxed Mozartian evening, drugged with beauty like the Parisian spring. His gaze and gestures, seeking and bestowing admiration, were directed with a delicate touch of gallantry towards my wife, Cella ….

Yet, his conversation was not lacking in sarcasm. Although he was briefly exhilarated by the anti-Ceau sescu “revolution” of 1989, Romania still remained to Cioran “the space of failure, where things were ruined for good”—comments he repeated with visible pleasure. Less expected, given that this was our first meeting, were his caustic remarks about old friends — especially the Romanian philosopher Noica. With excitement in his voice, he enjoyed describing the servility and grotesque flattery in the Maestro’s dealings with fellow professors, students, and friends; nor did he hold back from telling us, virtual strangers, about some embarrassing visits that the author of The Romanian Sense of Being used to make in his way around Paris. According to Cioran, who seemed more condescending than disgusted, the “transcendental” thinker Noica played the role of a loyal defender of the “Greatest Son” of Communist Romania. “What is this you’ve got against Ceau sescu, eh?” Noica (in fact, Cioran’s old comrade) is supposed to have asked with almost pious astonishment. Apparently, Noica also kept a little notebook in which he jotted down the names of everyone he met and talked to in Paris, so that later, returning to Romania, he was able to show these notes, as a sign of gratitude, to his connections in the secret police who had given him a passport to travel abroad.

The evening continued after midnight, amid anecdotes and paradoxes, under the spell of a host unstinting in verve. “What you need now are some literary prizes. Awards! In Paris you arrange literary glory over dinners. At restaurants, the best restaurants.” He could not possibly accept, as he saw it, the scandalous slipshod behavior of my publisher who had failed to arrange fancy promotional lunch and dinner parties for an author who had come all the way across the ocean. His physical frailty seemed offset by a robust high-born suppleness. He had an open, welcoming air and was enamored of Paris and his local quartier, happy to enjoy the benefit of a civilization that he never ceased to mock.