Writing was the first human activity to acquire a more or less permanent chronicle of its history. During the past century and a half, when all other human functions—psychological, biological, political, social, economic, cultural—were submitted to the austere revisions that transformed them into their own antitypes, writing alone escaped. For if it was not the instrument of critique, it was at least its absolute bearer. With everything else around it rethought and rewritten, writing now seems to be undergoing its own revolution from within, largely because it has the leisure, as well as the loneliness, to be freed of other business. The newest knowledges have not fully availed themselves of linear script: this is especially true in physics, mathematics and biology, even in linguistics. Modern literature has converted a dependence on writing into a method for isolating writing from what is natural, forcing it consequently to be haunted by problems that challenge its legitimacy, its intelligibility, and especially its continuity. Literally understood, the radical movement in literature and philosophy makes of writing an acquired mannerism whose performance, whose characteristic gesture, is based on the desire to leave the page for the healthier spaces of “life,” the desire not to be written. The difficulty of poets like Mallarmé and Eliot, for instance, is that their writing does not want to be a text. Our fury as readers is that we watch words that wish not to be on a page, or words that want to be read before their appearance on the page, or words that happen to be on a page. Self-repugnance, originality, and chance—these are the signs by which writing reveals how it has turned on itself.
Writing therefore is a visible, but dissatisfied, barrier between language as a totality, and speech: this is perhaps a minimum description. The genres, like poetry, drama, fiction, are prior dreams, but only the essay (strictly speaking, an attempt) can be realized with the slenderest and the most naive projection: the essential grammatological hope of inscribing words on a page. The poet wants a poem; the essayist merely sets out to write an essay, and if he manages the least discourse he need not necessarily have succeeded, but he will have tried: hence his essay, whereas the poet cannot safely say whether he made the poem he wanted. In The Soul and Its Forms, the obscure, proleptic book that inaugurates Lukács’ philosophical career, he reflects that in the essay its form becomes its fate, yet since the essay’s form is basically
an idea of hesitating trial and of provocation, rather than of completed achievement, there is no fate in the essay. Plato, according to Lukács, is the primal essayist, and the form of his work is Socrates’ life, which is not a tragic one crowned with a true end, but an ironic life terminated by arbitrary intrusion. The center of the Platonic essay is the Idea: anterior to any of its manifestations, abstract, colorless, without extension, ungraspable. For the modern essayist, however, I think there is only the idea of writing itself, at best a biography of fading traces of thought, at worst a problematic stimulant to thought.
Along with only one other of the forms of writing the essay can afford to make no concessions to narrative description—it has no image in mind but itself—and to forsake what Hopkins called pitch, or utterly faithful accuracy, in the interests of play. Montaigne comes to mind immediately, also Oscar Wilde. In the modern perspective their essays are expatriations from things (as Wilde has one of his characters say, “things exist only to be argued about”) and explorations in a language whose written version surprises by its wit, invention, sheer novelty. Writing, in other words, that delights in the mere fact of its being written cleverly, as if by a child first learning to scratch words on a page, seeing them as pretty and strangely meaningful bursts of script that transgress the unrelieved blankness of the paper. The epigram and the aphorism in the essay are what characters are to a play, or what philology is to literature. The subject of the essay does not exist beforehand, and neither does the subject go on existing after it—the subject is neither predictive nor prolonged beyond the essay, yet the subject is a choice made, as E. M. Cioran puts it, for “a break with the quietude of Unity.” Thus some of his own essays, collected and translated under a title (The Temptation to Exist)1 that preserves the essay’s primitive hesitancy, “advance, dissociated from [their own] footsteps,” and what they undertake is to give “knowledge without information.” Cioran’s project in writing coexists admirably with what he calls “the essential tendency of the modern mind”: “to pulverize the acquired.”
Such a project does not of course enhance the coherence of Cioran’s work. Nevertheless, he is an exquisitely intelligible writer who “prowls around the Absolute,” preferring what he calls the fragility of subtlety to wholehearted sincerity that might obscure the very finest points. He cannot really be read consecutively, since his prose (to which Yeats’s image of a fly struggling in marmalade is very suited) accomplishes turn after turn of dense thought that seems always to leave the reader elsewhere. Yet the vigilance of his writing is an expression of his, and his writing’s, consciousness, and that is explicitly based on self-hatred. For what is the pulverization of the acquired but a desire to destroy the closest and the most intimate of our gained possessions, the self? “It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges, hence it is in self-hatred that we must seek the point of departure of the human phenomenon. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.” When he charges us “to become a source, an origin, a starting point … to multiply by all means our cosmogonic moments,” he urges us to convert our misanthropy into energy, and into spectacle. A desire consequently to be interesting is saturated with hatred, although interest is productive. Cioran’s characteristic idiom then forges together consciousness (which includes being interesting, and hating it) with the production of thought and prose (which includes a wish to pulverize, and the means to work that end). As a form of provocation his writing deposits the reader into amaelstrom of discomforts. Here is an image from an essay (“The Evil Demiurge”), which appeared in the Summer 1967 issue of the Hudson Review, that analogically turns back on the prose that delivers it: “We find it inadmissible that a god, or for that matter a man, could issue from a round of gymnastics consummated by a groan.”
Cioran is peculiar enough to be a case, but not an example. His pages are dotted with impossible words like abulia, presbyopic, succedanea, aporia, mirific, obnubilation, incivism. Development, for example, is foreign to him, just as he is studiously foreign, actually and metaphysically, in everything he does. He is a Rumanian who writes French which, in Richard Howard’s translation, comes over in English with very much the same jerky intellectual queerness. The essays that have been published over the past five years in the Hudson Review (translated by Marthiel Mathews and Frederick Brown) emerged from other collections, but bearing the same marks of what Cioran calls the hybrid intellectual: a talent for “voyeurism of the void,” the incapacity to emulate Eastern or mystical abstraction, the distraction that keeps his rages from final nihilism. He has written on Joseph de Maistre, Machiavelli, utopias, but above all on decomposition. Most of all, he thinks, he suffers from the inability “to take place.” Like Rameau’s nephew he sees the world, and his writing therefore acts out, a series of positions taken—but only for a short while. Then he abandons them all since “meaning,” he avers, “is beginning to date.” Inescapably the predicament returns him to an awareness of the impasse of writing itself:
If today’s artist takes refuge in obscurity, it is because he can no longer create with what he knows. The extent of his information has turned him into a commentator, an Aristarchus without illusions. To safeguard his originality he has no recourse save an excursion into the unintelligible. He will therefore abandon the facts inflicted on him by an erudite and barren age.
If he is a poet, he discovers that none of his words, in its legitimate acceptation, has a future; if he wants them to be viable, he must fracture their meaning, court impropriety. In the world of Letters as a whole, we are witnessing the capitulation of the Word which, curiously enough, is even more exhausted than we are. Let us follow the descending curve of its vitality, surrender to its degree of overwork and decrepitude, espouse the process of its agony. Paradoxically, it was never so free before; its submission is its triumph: emancipated from reality, from experience, it indulges in the final luxury of no longer expressing anything except the ambiguity of its own action.
Such a view of language makes it rather difficult to summarize systematically Cioran’s own thought, although he is plainly a man of very strong dislikes, which include himself, other writers, and the novel preeminently. His attacks on Christianity, and on St. Paul in particular, are unlike Nietzsche’s in that, first of all, they see the religion only as a bundle of depressing contradictions and, second of all, they cannot forgive Christianity for being passé. For Cioran, however, the premise of his withering criticism is not as it was for Marx in the criticism of religion, but rather in the attack upon time and history. Here Cioran rejoins the radical critique of writing of which I spoke earlier. For writing is a moving image of time: every word and letter is an addition to previous writing just as—to force the parallel a little closer— every moment adds to the prior sum. Whether as writer or as man, the urge to add to, which Cioran identifies as the demiurge in man, is a disease, the result “of centuries of attention to time”:
Instead of letting it erode us gradually, we decided to go time one better, to add to its moments our own. This new time grafted onto the old one, this time elaborated and projected, soon revealed its virulence: objectivized, it became history, a monster we have called up against ourselves, a fatality we cannot escape, even by recourse to the formulas of passivity, the recipes of wisdom.
In whatever we do, or write, we are acting against ourselves by remembering, rewriting (though digressively) the tired script of history. Thus “when a writer’s gifts are exhausted, it is the ineptitude of a spiritual director that comes to fill the blanks of his inspiration.” Such a man then is “a spoiler suspended between speech and silence.” Most writing is fraudulent, a mask for the void behind it, and the novelist, because his fictions are the most exorbitant, is “an archeologist of absence.”
The greatest justice that can be done to Cioran is to apply these strictures to his own writings, to let his thought think against itself. His relish for extreme statement, as I suggested earlier, is always indulged; one statement first animates, then precipitates steps toward a new statement, equally extreme—this is what Cioran himself calls “the idolatry of becoming.” The essays are a biography of movements, in the way that an oscillograph conveys a version of music that is not the music itself. To be “up against itself at last,” as he claims his work to be, means that Cioran’s essays instead toss about at a remove from everything they attempt to touch. He puts it very well:
We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our painting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes.
A victim of its own temporal fixation, Cioran’s writing is reduced to a particularly energetic variety of what Roland Barthes has called writing at the zero degree.
I find it difficult therefore to agree with Susan Sontag (who has provided a set of valiant, but not always pertinent, notes as an introduction) when she claims Cioran for the tradition of Novalis, Rilke, and Kafka. On the contrary, he seems a mocking ghost of all traditions, which in effect means that he mocks all writing in some of the same ways that Jacques Derrida, for example, has closed the world of writing by treating it as mere writing. Even less—and here Sontag curiously implies this while stating the opposite—does Cioran resemble John Cage, for whom a kind of joyous freedom, jouissance, underlies every one of his efforts in either prose, music, or silence. Cioran, by his own admission, is “a fanatic without convictions,” firmly, even hysterically, committed to the amateurism of the insoluble. His prose is perfect for what it does, and it is airless as well: like the Europe he characterizes mercilessly, the prose becomes more interesting as it masters the art of surviving itself. His highest praise is bestowed on the Jews, for they, he thinks, have always represented what in a sense his writing wishes to accomplish, “failure on the move.”
Cioran is to the essay what Borges, I think, is to fiction. That is, when we read both writers we are constantly in the presence of the mask and of the apocryphal utterance, one undercutting the other, and so on until we are tired out by the unceasing game. Borges’ fable and what Cioran calls “abstract autobiography” are pretexts by which, as Cioran goes on to say, the writer “can continue to cry out: ‘Anything, except my truths!’” We might call this the insomniac stage of writing, and were it not for the preservation of ironic hauteur, the stage seems a needless punishment. Yet the sustained pose of such a style—detached from and yet thoroughly implicated in its revulsions— gives one pause. For after all writing has triumphed, with the universe reduced to the articulations of the sentence, prose as the unique reality, the word self-absorbed, emancipated from the object and from the world: a sonority-in-itself, cut off from the exterior, the tragic ipseity of a language bound to its own finitude.
Notes:
1. E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard, intro. Susan Sontag (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).
SAID, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. London: Granta Books, 2001. [PDF]
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