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
THROUGH ROMANIAN EYES: A HALF CENTURY OF THE NRF IN BUCHAREST
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.
“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.