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

“We find ourselves faced with two types of intolerable societies,” writes Cioran in “Letter to a Faraway Friend”:

… the abuses of yours permit mine to persevere in its own abuses, to set its own horrors quite effectively against those your society practices. The central criticism that can be addressed to your regime is that it has ruined utopia, that principle of the renewal of institutions and of peoples …. In the end, a life without Utopia becomes unbreathable, at least for the masses. Without some new delirium in the world, the danger is that we turn to stone …. The difference between regimes is less important than it may seem: you are alone by force, we are alone if uncoerced. Is the gap that great between hell and a deplorable paradise?

The essential theme of freedom is treated with jaded wariness: “For those of us who possess it, it is just an illusion, because we know we’re going to lose it and because it is, in any case, meant to be lost.” Cioran even believes that rather than let the East have “the privilege of realizing the unrealizable,” the West should humanize and liberalize communism “and gain the power and prestige of the most beautiful modern illusion.”

Noica sees in communism the “message of Europe itself,” and in a sense the pain-racked transformation of the Russian soul into a Faustian soul. In the decline of the West, the philosopher perceives the death of the “esprit de finesse”; the triumph of communism appears to him to be the victory of the “esprit de géométrie.” And so he says in this warning to his former comrade: “You would prefer to sink in the ‘esprit de finesse’ rather than consent to logical barbarity.” Although the Pascalian shorthand does not do full justice to the issues involved, it does at least point to a conceptual opposition that had become familiar in debates between proponents of “Eastern” and “Western” political ideology. For the captive in the East, the problem of European man seems to be the reconciliation of Pascal with Aristotle, of freedom with necessity. The socialist utopia “would quite precisely give necessity back to man … along with the risk … that a number of freedoms might be taken away from him.” The choice of the socialist “utopia” would entail “an attempt to remove man from the ‘alienation’ caused by wealth,” or comfort. Noica is not unaware of the sickness of a society that “even as it constantly evokes Hegel and contradiction as the principle of life, is not only unable to bear the contradictor from outside and fears him, but would actually go to any lengths to stifle the contradictor who naturally arises from within.” He pleads for “collaboration,” in the conviction that the friend on the other side will acknowledge the vapidity of the standard Western values and the “banality” of an “exile which risks making you nostalgic, patriotic and sentimental,” whereas his own brand of exile, “in his own world, but a world emptied of itself,” is preferable, because more “subtle.” Noica’s conclusion is clear: “All things considered, exile [in Noica’s own world] is better here.”

The so-called “better” aspect of internal exile under a dictatorship was something Noica would unfortunately soon experience; and the skeptical Cioran would over the coming months discover just how different “hell and a deplorable paradise” could be.

As was their custom, the commissars and technocrats of the Party could easily have found in the letters of Cioran and Noica, in their critiques of the bourgeoisie, of the institutions of democracy and its vacuity, quite enough material to manipulate in the service of their own propaganda. But the official reaction was quick and harsh. After the publication of a few inflammatory pamphlets in the official press, Noica and a group of twenty-two others, most of them his friends, were arrested and charged. Among them were notable personalities in Romanian intellectual circles.

The order referring Noica’s case to the courts was issued on December 1, 1958 and mentions that the detainee “kept up relationships with the legionnaires Cioran Emile and Eliade Mircea among others.” It was claimed that he received from them “documents hostile to the popular democratic regime of the People’s Republic of Romania, documents he then reportedly spread widely among his circle of friends and acquaintances during secretly organized meetings in his home.” The philosopher was accused of “writings whose content is hostile to the government,” of transmitting them to his friends and associates in his country and “by illegal means” to “legionnaires that fled to France for the purpose of publishing them.” He was said to have set the tone for hostile conversations “in the pursuit of the violent overthrow of the popular democratic regime of the People’s Republic of Romania.” The hostile documents referred to by the penal investigator of the Securitate who drew up the charges were books published in France by Cioran and Eliade; a manuscript of Noica’s entitled Povestiri din Hegel (Tales from Hegel), another manuscript on Goethe; and, of course, Cioran’s NRF “Letter to a Faraway Friend” and Noica’s unpublished response.

Then followed the interrogations, the torture, the forced confessions, the manipulations: a sinister system of incarceration for the prisoners and terror for their families.

After Stalin’s death and the famous Khrushchev report, the Soviet bloc seemed to enter a period of relative détente. In his novella of the same name, Ilya Ehrenburg called this period “the Thaw.” Still, the Communist Party lived by its own meteorology: spring in Moscow, Prague, or Bucharest remained an iffy proposition, and cataclysms took no account of the seasons — we need only recall the autumn of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Not for the first time, Romania found itself in 1958 in a byzantine situation. Having succeeded in convincing Khrushchev to withdraw from Romania the troops stationed there through the Warsaw Military Pact, the country’s leaders needed to prove that they were in complete control of the country. In 1954, Molotov told Gheorghiu Dej, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party: “You won’t last three days without the presence of the Soviet army in Romania.” The Romanian Communist Party needed to show itself master of the situation, so as to avoid internal rebellion and any attempt to depose the Stalinist group in power, as had already occurred in neighboring countries. Internal terror was about to stiffen.

This was the atmosphere on February 15, 1960 when testimony at the Military Tribunal began in the sinister Noica trial. Referring to the accusations and to Noica’s Povestiri din Hegel manuscript, the military prosecutor emphasized its “fascist content” and the “attempt to rehabilitate ideology with the practice of fascism.” Noica’s manuscript about Goethe supposedly “rid [Goethe’s] works of everything useful to the people, larding them instead with foreign [that is, legionary] theses.” The “Letter to a Faraway Friend,” received by the accused in an “illegal” manner from abroad, was said to have a “subversive content, full of irony.” As for Noica’s reply, it would be shown to be “far more hostile than the article by Cioran Emile.”

The prosecutor added for the edification of the audience that “Cioran Emile is an old man with dull teeth, whereas Noica is the spitting image of a hungry wolf with razor sharp fangs.”

Noica was condemned to twenty-five years’ hard labor while others also received stiff sentences. They would be paroled after four years, during yet another period of “liberalization,” but many would then be forced to become informers for the Securitate. Noica published three conversion texts and undertook “the collaboration” he had earlier asked for in his letter to Cioran. He would go on to publish the rest of his writings under Ceau sescu’s regime, becoming a sort of guru to young intellectuals hungry for culture. Today he is considered Romania’s most important postwar philosopher.