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

Readers will recognize the obvious separation and also the lasting connection between the young and the old Cioran. Already aging, he seems, at the time of writing these “notes,” more sensitive to human suffering, more vulnerable and even more tolerant. His loneliness and lucidity still play with negation, even in some frivolous form, but his melancholy runs deeper as the consequence of a painful knowledge that the end of his earthly, pagan adventure is near. He seems, indeed, “more inclined to accept even the liberal democratic Western world with its quintessential injustice, with its vermin of businessmen and shopkeepers, with its freedoms,” as Matei Calinescu wrote in an excellent study, “Reading Cioran” ( Salmagundi ). And yet, Cioran still thought, in 1960, in History of Utopia that: “‘Freedoms’ prosper only in a sick body politic: tolerance and impotence are synonymous.”

As a master of paradox and, therefore, an “anti” type of thinker, a fighter of banality, canons, and standards, common sense and common taste, Cioran always followed his stubborn “anti”-ness, even when the result was not necessarily of real spiritual relevance. “Being paradoxical — embracing ideas and opinions that go against the grain, that are shocking to the common sense or to what is more or less generally accepted — becomes an imperative, a categorical aesthetic (and implicitly amoral) imperative, as it were. A certain kind of (theoretical) extremism is always involved,” proposed Matei Calinescu.

This may also be a key for reading some of the fragments from Cahiers. It may contribute, in a way, even to the understanding of the most scandalous statement, such as “There is something worse than anti-Semitism: it is anti-anti Semitism.” What exactly does Cioran mean by this? Does he equate anti-Semitism with the gas chambers? Does he see anti-anti-Semitism as a profitable “show,” a false rhetoric and demagogical militancy? And can these two be compared? He doesn’t qualify the terms: neither dark or frivolous or boring anti-Semitism, nor cheap or vigorous or inflated or boring anti-anti-Semitism. The reader should be reminded, at this point, that Cioran’s relationship with Jews and their fate was never simple. He never wrote about the Jews in the consistently harsh way he wrote about his fellow Romanians, and we, probably, cannot ask for more from a zealous nihilist and a heretic. Yet, his statements about Jews were always ambiguous and often held double meanings.

In 1937, when Romanian anti-Semitism was booming and the generic iconoclastic Rebel-Cioran was already a supporter of the extreme right-wing political movement, he proved ready to adopt the “banal” view that the Jewish “antinational spirit” was, of course, a threat to the country. He added, however, that another threat was Jewish “superiority.” This was a quite daring “paradoxical” statement, at a time when anti-Semitic laws were based on the assumption of the inferiority of the “Jewish race,” but it was not necessarily a statement of sympathy or solidarity with the “enemies” of his country. Similarly, he wrote, then, that anti-Semitism was “the greatest tribute paid to the Jews.”

During and after the war, Cioran was, it seems, shocked by the Jewish tragedy, by what happened to his Jewish friends (the novelist Mihail Sebastian, who remained in Bucharest; the Romanian-French poet Benjamin Fondane, killed at Auschwitz; the Romanian-German poet Paul Celan, who committed suicide in Paris). In his postwar essay dedicated to the Jews (“A People of Solitaries”), which Susan Sontag considered “surprisingly cursory and high-handed,” Cioran attempted a kind of codified dialogue with his prewar texts on the same topic. “I found myself loathing them with the fury of a love turned to hate … I had only a bookish commiseration for their suffering, and could not divine what was in store for them.”

We may assume, perhaps, that after stating in Cahiers “I am metaphysically Jewish,” he had forgotten, however, that he had also introduced himself, in the same notes, as a Mongol, a Hungarian, a Slav, a Central-European, people not known as great friends of the Jews or of “anti-anti-Semites …” He thought he might allow himself the kind of statement with which some real Jews, well known for their bittersweet humor and sarcastic self-criticism, would have agreed. So, gambling with negativity, playing tricks on himself and on the entire world … equating anti-Semitism with anti-anti-Semitism (and, hard to believe, even less than equating) seemed, probably, simply too easy for that promoter of any and all “anti” impulses.

Translated by Patrick Camiller, 1998

When the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane left Romania for France in 1929 he did so, as he himself declared, because “he couldn’t bear living in a backwater French cultural colony any longer”; he wanted the Center.

The witticism gives a sense of the prestige that the Nouvelle Revue Française ( NRF ) held in Romanian cultural circles at the time, a prestige that remained intact even after the imposition of a communist dictatorship in Romania by its victorious neighbor to the east. By then, however, the prestige was measured in absence. The famous journal was no longer available outside of a few libraries here and there; even then it was held under lock and key, and available for consultation only by special authorization.

A grotesque and tragic episode with profound implications for today’s NRF anniversary celebrations* would take place in 1957 when the magazine published Emile Cioran’s “Letter to a Faraway Friend,” a text that reflected the NRF ’s commitment to encompass the widest possible range of cultural issues. Not for nothing had François Mauriac referred to the role of the journal as a “rose des vents,” or Compass Rose.

The addressee of Cioran’s letter was unnamed but the text followed upon a series of recent epistolary debates between Cioran and his friend and fellow thinker Constantin Noica. Before the war both of them had been sympathizers of the Iron Guard. Against the advice of his friends, Constantin Noica unwisely posted a reply to the message from Paris in December of 1957. Aware (but belatedly, I would say) of the risk to which he had exposed Noica, Cioran blocked publication of the response; the text circulated only among the circle of Romanian exiles in France.

*This text was written for these celebrations.

Cioran lived in the city he adored, but indulged in a melancholy shaded with sarcasm when it came to the “domestication” of his old rebellious and nihilist tendencies; condescending about the free world, he didn’t deny himself its pleasures. As for Noica, he survived in a communist totalitarian regime that, while opposed to the one he had earlier supported, often resembled it in numerous, terrifying ways. As a flash of wit that made the rounds of Bucharest in those years had it:

Captain!

Don’t take it so hard.

In the Communist Party

You’ll still find the Guard!

Its author would soon be charged in the Noica treason trials convened by the Military Tribunal.

If the same skepticism regarding democracy and its moral and spiritual vacuum can be discerned in both correspondents, Cioran is obviously “resigned” to living in a free, prosperous society, whereas Noica denounces the decadence and betrayals of the West and asks to what extent the “necessity” of a totalitarian regime should not be accepted, even if the cost is the renunciation of freedom. Both of them, of course, rue the absence of utopian idealism or ambition in the day-to-day Western postwar world.