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

On his first visit to Paris in 1972, the philosopher surprised his friends and admirers in the Romanian exile community when he asked them to take him off the pedestal where they had placed him, saying, “I have eliminated the ethical from my universe.” After their reunion, Cioran would say of his old friend: “He has the soul of a disciple, a perfidious disciple. How could he ever understand that I have abandoned everything he defends? I can’t discuss anything with someone who teaches illusion, who does not suffer with and from the passage of time, and learns from it nothing at all. I ask of my friends that they do me the favor of growing old.” The reference to the political illusions of youth and the status of the disciple are reminders of the old nationalist ideological obsessions of writers who were supporters of the extreme nationalist, pro-Nazi Iron Guard.

Mircea Eliade was comparably severe with a Noica entrenched in his roles as hermit and mentor and indifferent to the always more terrible reality around him, convinced as he was that Ceau sescu represented the “national way.” Eliade also alluded to Noica’s bitterness at his and Cioran’s guilty silence during the heinous trial in Bucharest that, without intending to, Noica’s old comrades had provoked. Eliade’s justification — that had they said anything publicly they could have been accused by the communists of being “legionnaires”—seems willfully naïve, since despite such pathetic prudence the communists unmasked their past as right-wing legionnaires anyway. The simplest solution would have been to acknowledge publicly their former erring ways and disavow them, thus freeing themselves to attack totalitarianism of every stripe, including the communist dictatorship.

When, in later years, he came upon the draft of his 1957 reply to Cioran, Noica exclaimed: “How savage life is, how savagely beautiful.” It is not incongruous, perhaps, to take up his exclamation ourselves in paying deserved homage to an eternally young Lady NRF, on the celebration of her glorious anniversary.

Translated by John Anzalone, October 2008

In the fall of 1989, at Bard College, New York State, I started a course entitled “Eastern European Writers.” I had selected mostly authors who, like me, were exiles: Milosz, Koestler, Kundera, Danilo Kiš, Ionescu. I was thus trying to liberate myself from the confusion of the oriental-communist degeneracy (whose imminent implosion I, in fact, did not foresee) and still remain connected to my distant homeland.

The besieged man had finally escaped from the Colony of Rhino. He had got tired of shouting by himself, crouched in the cell of his room and deafened by the trampling of the street guards: “I will resist, I will not surrender! It’s my duty! I will stay that way to the end, no matter what, to the very end!”

He had finally run from the black wind of disaster; he had not resisted. The big words had fled too, as guilty as he. The prisoner did not prove to be a “superior” man, as he had dreamed of being. He was just a poor lost man, too attached to petty survival.

The passage from the state of contraction in Rhinoromania of the ninth decade to the state of expansion on the great stage of the free Carnival had not been easy. The liberating shipwreck had also been a siege fraught with doubts and anguish.

In 1989, the transitional passage suddenly unfolded into bracing sunshine, under a clear and fresh sky.

July 9, 1989 was a glorious day in the wanderer’s calendar. The small brown Honda, battered and tenacious, drove heroically through the gates of the American college — a paradisal enclave of trees and flowers and small houses in which teachers and students were practicing the traditional didactic Glass Bead game.

I was given the gold key to my lodging that very same day. As in a fairy tale where the wizardly benefactor imposes a deadline, I was offered refuge for an entire year. Everything seemed to have come together under a lucky star. Time was eminently hospitable, as in my distant or more recent youth. That spectacular summer, with its sun that had turned solemn and imperial, heralded the beginning of a new era.

Exile is also an initiation into simulacrum, an exercise in inventive theatricality. This is what interior exile is about, the solitary man’s alienation within the ubiquitous totalitarian masquerade. But what of exile proper? On the new stage, the newcomer had been cast in a role he had never played before. Professor! … In a foreign world and a foreign language, in front of a foreign audience.

The idyllic academic enclave could not dispel the exile’s doubts; it only rebuked them, every day, through the majestic peaceful woods and the perfect sky. With every dusk, the hospitable summer months were bringing the debut closer, the meeting with the public, scheduled for that fall.

He had many doubts. He wondered how he could avoid the old role that had made him famous. “The Lost One” … Not yet at home with life? With its confused forces? Lost, any way, anywhere, any time?

When I opened the door to the classroom, I was amazed by the casual, typically American look of my young audience. Quite a few of them were barefoot …. The relaxing effect of the superb September afternoon or the pleasure of annoying the Martian who had been trained on his bizarre native planet according to strict rules.

The dialogue with the students became natural quite soon. Despite a certain cultural deficit, most of them were bright and open to anything new. They had been educated in and for freedom; they were accustomed to the critical spirit and defied preconceived ideas, even the most honored. Gradually, my new position was moderating into its own routine.

Toward the end of the semester, around November, when in Eastern Europe the Berlin Wall and the walls within ourselves were being broken to pieces from one day to another, something out of the ordinary happened in my class.

Among the midterm papers, I had received one on Eugen Ionescu’s Rhinoceros. Hesitating to evaluate it, I decided to read it to the class, without disclosing the author’s name, then to ask them to comment on it and suggest a grade.

There was nothing spectacular in the beginning:

Berenger cannot believe his eyes when his close friend, Jean, joins the epidemic sweeping their village and transforms himself into a rhinoceros. As the horn swells on his forehead and guttural moaning bulges from his thickening throat, the frantic Jean sings the blessing of freedom to a bewildered Berenger. “Morals! I’m sick of morals! We must go beyond moral standards. Nature has its own laws. Morals is [ sic ] against nature!” From a responsible obedient citizen who ostracized Berenger for his senseless rebellion, Jean has become a raving reactionary. He gradually turns green as he denounces the societal structure he so vehemently protected as a human. Along with the release of his human form, Jean is released from the laws and the rules he had been conditioned (forced) to uphold. Berenger is terrorized. Before him stands the man who had always symbolized order — a man he had felt too weak to imitate. Berenger cannot get beyond the absurdity of this revolution against the human condition. He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection.”

However natural and acceptable it seemed, the last sentence was somehow already announcing the novelty.

The class sensed the potential turn; the silence was complete. I read the last sentences again, before going on. “Berenger cannot get beyond the absurdity of this revolution against the human condition. He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection.”