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

Nevertheless, the French publishing house did something for its guest. The next day, Albin Michel had arranged a photo session with Mme. Giles Rolle, a well-known professional. “I know your fellow countryman, Emil Cioran. I have photographed him, too,” she told me cheerfully. “Some of the pictures came out really well — disastrously well.” Cioran had looked at them with delight in his eyes, continued Mme. Rolle, and had then torn them all up. “Forbidden! Prohibited! Me, Cioran, smiling? No one should ever see Cioran smiling.”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in touch with Cioran after that trip to Paris. Some years later I heard of his long, slow agony, the senility in which the former iconoclast and cynic was peacefully slumbering. The exile who had learned perfect French, becoming one of France’s most brilliant contemporary stylists, had suddenly lost his linguistic refuge and had started to speak in Romanian again, the language he had been so happy to abandon half a century ago. Was it a new form of Alzheimer’s disease? It certainly was, as the Romanian writer Ion Vartic remarked acutely, a “successful regression,” about which Cioran had always dreamed. A way of regressing to the state of the unborn and, at the same time, a way of unknowingly returning from exile, coming home to his pre-birth homeland. “Unconsciousness is a homeland,” Cioran himself had written.

Then, in an irony of fate, the world’s major newspapers announced the death of this skeptic who had always stressed his indifference to glory and his boredom with the paradoxes of posterity.

In a New York Times obituary, Susan Sontag — one of the first in America to write about Cioran — observed that he had practiced “a new kind of philosophizing: personal, aphoristic, lyrical, antisystematic.” She illustrated this with a characteristic Cioran quote: “However much I have frequented the mystic, deep down I have always sided with the Devil, unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.” It was a quotation that combined his rebellious vitality with the provocative seduction of his phrases, their twisted glowing spikes, the nervous shudder, the icy irradiation of his ever-youthful prose, his gnomic solitary thought.

I, too, was asked to characterize Cioran. I recalled that one evening we spent together, and the question I did not manage to ask him. In a few sentences, I tried to relate Cioran’s evolution to the evolution of our contemporary world, to the watershed represented by World War II. In the issue of the New York Times dated June 22, 1993, my comment appeared as a laconic statement: “He was a brilliant rebel and a challenging misanthrope who tried again and again to awaken us to the nothingness of human existence.”

Soon after his death, a stormy controversy (called by some participants “Cioran’s second death,” although it might have been seen rather as a rebirth) arose in the French and Romanian press. It focused on the political extremism of his youthful misanthropy and rebellion, his involvement with Romanian fascism, his outrageous statements about Hitler and Zelea Codreanu.

Readers were reminded that he wrote in 1937, “No other politician of today inspires a greater sympathy than Hitler … Hitler’s merit consists in depriving his nation of its critical spirit,” or what he said, in 1940, at the commemoration of his beloved “Captain,” whom he saw as a kind of new Messiah: “With the exception of Jesus, no other dead figure was more present among the living.”

In 1995, Gallimard published Cioran, l’herétique, Patrice Bollon’s balanced critical analysis of Cioran’s life and work. The book provoked a violent debate in the French newspapers. Jean-Paul Enthoven wrote that “the second death of Cioran promises his orphans a vast loneliness”; Bernard-Henry Levy described a meeting, in 1989, at which Cioran seemed very cautious in talking about his past and quite uncomfortable when asked about his extreme right-wing militantism of the 1930s and 1940s. Cioran was passionately defended by Edgar Morin, André Comte-Sponville, and François Furet. The latter wrote: “Cioran is a great writer and a great moralist, whatever his ephemeral commitment to the Iron Guard was.” Finally, Alain Etchegoyen explained, on a French television program, without any trace of irony, that “Cioran’s main regret was well and nicely expressed through his silence and his pessimism. Opposite to the penitent Stalinists, he had the merit of discretion. The Stalinists maintained their arrogance, which isn’t necessarily a philosophical habit.”

In Romania the debate was enhanced by the publication, after the collapse of communism, of Cioran’s entire work, including part of his hitherto unknown correspondence. And the appearance, after his death, in France, of two posthumous books, Mon Pays (Gallimard, 1996), and Cahiers, 1957–1972 (Gallimard, 1997) was, of course, extensively commented on in both countries. These books show that, unlike his fellow Romanian intellectuals with whom he was associated in the right-wing political movement (Eliade, Noica), Cioran was, after the war, continuously obsessed with his “guilty” youth. He viewed his political commitment to the extreme rightwing “Revolution” as a mixture of craziness and stupidity, due to the suffocating environment of his mediocre and apathetic homeland, an oppressive dead end, without past or future. “My Country! I wanted, by hook or by crook, to cavil at her but she wasn’t even there for me to cavil to,” he wrote in the early 1950s. Thinking again and again about his country, his countrymen and himself, Cioran concludes, in obvious disgust: “I hated my country, I hated everybody and the entire universe: so that, in the end, nothing was left to hate but myself: which I did, in the devious way of desperation.” And he adds: “When I look back … it is another man whom I abjure now, everything that means ‘Me’ is now elsewhere, two thousand leagues away from what I was.”

As ambiguous or superficial as his statements may still sometimes be (he thought, for instance, that the “error” of the Iron Guard was “to conceive a future for a place without one,” transferring their guilt onto the country and its people, even while he still believed the Iron Guard’s martyrs “achieved for themselves a destiny which exempted their country from having one”), it’s obvious that, after the war, Cioran was ashamed and burdened by his past political commitment, and that he kept his distance, in fact, from any political connections.

Yet, what still proved to be an impossible, never-ending, complicated, and troubled process was the taming of his genuine, innate nihilism. For better or worse, his nihilism remained the energetic spiritual force behind his creative writing, behind its originality and style. He kept his lonely struggle alive, as a writer, as a performer, a clownish philosopher mocking philosophy, I would say, a solitary apatride with a Buster Keaton mask, and as a seducer, of course, even if the seduction was rarely obtained through virtuous means. He was ever the Devil’s advocate.

The Romanian writer Marta Petreu remarked recently, in a rigorous essay, “ Doctrina legionara si intelighentia interbelica ” (Apostrof, 1998), that Cioran was a heretic even as he was a supporter of the Iron Guard. Knowing too well that the political project of the Iron Guard meant, in the end, a total suppression of freedom, he still wanted to be a “free man”: claiming for himself the right to rebel, to be different, unique, above the mob. His “elitism” seemed to be, as Marta Petreu emphasizes, the essential reason for his ultra-reactionary political views of the 1930s and 1940s. “An epoch of boundless liberties, of ‘sincere’ and extreme democracy, lingering indefinitely, would mean an inevitable collapse of humankind. The mob wants to be ordered about,” Cioran wrote in 1937.