Every day, the thousands of new items about people agitating for rights, recognition, revenge, and fame demonstrate an ever more cynical renunciation of dialogue. Chosen at random, any such piece of news comes to illustrate the carnivalesque hysteria of today’s world, in which fanaticism is not necessarily religious, or necessarily antireligious, because it does not necessarily have any meaning other than the release of a huge frustration.
Cohabiting with the Outrageous
Unfortunately, one can see an increasingly pronounced blurring of the meaning of opposites. The reverse of closed-mindedness sometimes appears to be merely its complement. And culture seems to be ever more visibly losing “the insistence of the ideal” (what the English critic George Steiner once called “the blackmail of perfection”) — that is, the nonmystical relationship, not infrequently adversarial and always contradictory, but in any case profound, between religious spirituality and the spirituality of culture.
The perception of outrageousness is being lost; we are now reaching a routine cohabitation with the outrageous. Always permissible, made banal, it is even becoming in a way indispensable. The elimination of all criteria, hence of all limitation, has destructive effects that are incalculable and, above all, seem hard, if not impossible, to stop.
The horrors of this century do not seem to have marked only “the death of God.” As George Steiner rightly observes,
Much has been said of man’s bewilderment and solitude after the disappearance of Heaven from active belief. We know of neutral emptiness of the skies and of the terrors it has brought. But it may be that the loss of Hell is the more severe dislocation …. To have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat. Of the two, Hell proved the easier to re-create …. Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run it on earth.
A world that has more in common with a carnival, however, than with an over-perfect hell. Carnival aspiring, without success, to blasphemy.
In the great free-market carnival of the modern world, nothing appears audible unless it is scandalous, but nothing is scandalous enough to become memorable. An imperfect world, to be sure. Its citizens undoubtedly have enough grounds for dissatisfaction and concern. Sometimes they receive strange confirmation of the privileges they enjoy when they look at the ever more numerous exiles coming to live among them. The majority of these exiles have known captive man in the dark carnival of tyranny, before being able to contemplate free man and the not always happy carnival of liberty.
Without hell, no illusions. The memory of their life stories is the memory of a perverse and closed utopia, in which individuality as such was blasphemy.
What Exiles Remember
Exiles living in the West know the alternative to the often stupefying spectacle of man in freedom. They recognize, of course, the huge differences between a closed society, distorted by terror and misery, and an open society, distorted by selfish competition and trivial publicity; between a manipulated collectivism and a welltrained individualism. They will never forget that totalitarianism, not democracy, provoked the Holocaust and the Gulag, and the Cambodian and Chinese genocides, and that ethnic and religious fanaticism provoked the Bosnian tragedy.
But after the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, the open society itself is in a deep crisis, it seems, with the loss of decency, of humanitarian and fair principles, of generosity and grandeur. The need for an enemy (ethnic enemy, ideological enemy, gender enemy, religious enemy) both drives and confuses people, whether they are in a society obsessed with lies or in a society obsessed with money. Demagogy, censorship, bigotry, and cynicism survive, under different labels, even in the market of the free world.
The exiles are not the only ones to recognize the dangerous hidden similarities between closed and open societies. The Western man is now their fellow man, as they are his. And all of us know that playing with hell and illusions is not the best way to avoid hell or to overcome costly illusions.
Translated by Patrick Camiller, spring 1996
Notes
1. As quoted in the “Introduction” by Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy to Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 32, which appeared after its partial publication as “Progulki’s Pushkinom,” in the Russian journal Oktyabr (April 1989).
2. Ibid., p. 37.
3. Ibid., p. 38.
4. Ibid.
5. Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, p. 145.
6. Igor Shafarevich, “A Phenomenon of the Emigration,” Literaturnaya Rossiya, September 8, 1989.
7. As quoted in Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Sinyavsky’s ‘Return’ to the Soviet Union,” Formations, 6 (spring 1991), p. 13.
8. See his comment on Strolls with Pushkin that appeared in Vestnik Russkogo Khristyanskogo Dvizheniia, 142 (1984), p. 152.
9. As quoted in Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Sinyavsky’s ‘Return,’” p. 13.
10. Ibid., p. 35.
11. Ibid., p. 36.
12. My Eliade piece appears here on pp. 92–118 above.
13. Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1992.
14. România Mare, March 20, 1992.
15. “Mircea Eliade, Culture and the Inquisitions,” 22, no. 12 (1992).
16. David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 202.
17. “Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture” in Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971).
CIORAN
In the spring of 1990, I was invited to attend the Salon du Livre in Paris, on the occasion of Albin Michel’s publication of my first volume in French, Le thé de Proust.
The year before my trip there, I had got to know a friend of Cioran’s, Edouard Roditi, a fabled pilgrim of letters. It seems he had written to Cioran about me. One day he showed me a surprising message that had come from Cioran, in French, dated September 25, 1989.
Mon cher ami,
Thank you for your letter, which has come at just the right moment. Just a few days ago I was struck, or rather deeply shaken, by Norman Manea’s piece. It is the best thing I have read on the Romanian nightmare … I left Romania fifty years ago, and it is mainly out of masochism that I take an interest in my origins. How can one explain that the shallowest of all nations should have such a destiny?
Cioran was referring to my essay “Rumänien in 3 (kommentierten) Sätze” (“Romania — Three Lines with Commentary”), which had just appeared in the German magazine Akzente. The same issue had also carried a piece by Cioran entitled “Begegnungen mit Paul Celan” (“Encounters with Paul Celan”), a coincidence which probably prompted what he wrote to Roditi regarding “the right moment.”
Naturally, I wrote Cioran. I have always considered him a great writer, even if I have had some doubts about his philosophy. He answered with an extremely cordial letter in which he did not forget to stress that his leaving Romania had been the most intelligent act of his life. (“C’est de loin l’acte le plus intelligent que j’aie jamais commis.”) And, of course, he advised me to come to live in Paris, too (“l’endroit idéal pour rater sa vie”).