E.M.

Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond

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E.M. Cioran:
To Infinity
And Beyond
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why
Cioran's writing refuses explanation
contact Stephen Mitchelmore
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"Nothing is more irritating than those works which 'co-ordinate' the
luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything
except a system."

What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911,
the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood
in the country and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion. For
years he didn't sleep - until he took up cycling. He passed sleepless
nights wandering the dodgy streets of an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he
moved to Paris and wrote, producing what are generally classified as
'aphorisms', collected together under such titles as The Temptation To
Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The Trouble With Being Born. He knew
Samuel Beckett, who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late in
life he gave up writing, not wanting to "slander the universe" anymore,
and died a few years later after an encounter with an over-excited dog.
I hope none of this helps.
Cioran's sentences are of little or no help. That is their worth. Just
think of the aphorisms; each sentence has the company of only one or two
others. The gaps between groups of sentences appear like sands of the
desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way around? That the
answer is so unclear is the worth of Cioran's sentences.
His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents of the Nineteenth
century. They open wounds. Still, Cioran is not studied. This is the
academic orthodoxy. And that's fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read
diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche 40, Existentialism,
forever. Alternatively, just read the sentences.

"... lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity."

The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial elation and
despair. (The want of elation and despair generating their presence in the
vertiginous lack which is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is
like consciousness in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical. His style
is a varient on song. At the same time he is a writer of solitude and
subjectivity. This last word has gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin
to solipsism, selfishness, ignorance, certainly 'untruth'. But let us
wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the state of struggle
of one who is alive, within time: sleepless.
"Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the
next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this?
Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces
the indictment of birth."

A special type of sleeplessness being where one is oneself forever and

knows it. It is also an indictment of lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the
suppression of subjectivity, the impossible denial of 'three in the
morning'. Adorno's call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz is a
wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a revolution lyrical to
its evil core. The Volk wanted to sleep. Then it was mass rallies at
Nuremburg, now its anything you care to name: popular culture indeed.
Cioran's physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt for those who
craved such sleep. He needed it too, to stay alive. A familiar irony:
Cioran's tragedy was also his saving. "Melancholy redeems this universe,
and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it."
When Cioran began to write in French he had, by then, conquered his
insomnia. Exhausted by long bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing
tries to abide in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse into
the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran's writing tends to
disperse the "three in the morning" in lyric expression. So, a bit of a
disappointment, to say the least.

"As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be
impatient, that it will come soon or later, that it will hold off long
enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The
disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same
time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present."

To say again then, his disappointment with writing was inevitable. But
this only drives one on, to divest words of their common usage and apply
them to this moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his
disillusionment with writing's other products, particularly those where
disappointment is not an issue: ideas, grand narratives, systems.
"Philosophers are constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad
sense." Elsewhere: "Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel - three enslavers of the
mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in
everything." Yet how can one write without constructing some system, even
if it is negative?

"'Optimists write badly' (Valery). But pessimists do not write." [Maurice

Blanchot]

The violence of Cioran's work, its verbosity and arrogance, results from a
struggle with inevitable positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of
this. It demands our opposition. The blank following the sentences rises
up before us. Our exasperation leaves the same silent space hovering
there. This is the placeless heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us
to. It is pointless to oppose or argue - or explain. One can scan the
biographical parabola that gives shape to a life, thereby explaining it
and the work, but something is left behind; this place he takes us to. The
facts of a life help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is
left behind. Generally, it seems students study, reviewers review, writers
write and readers read in the hope of avoiding this. It's what the people
want, after all.
Cioran has also written essays. They demand the same kind of reading as
the aphorisms. It just takes longer. In the landmark essays, the
brilliance burns long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less
identical to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the breathing
space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suffocation. What is lost is the
very sense of its inspiration, the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of
the moment. Instead, Cioran has something to say. In 'Beyond the Novel',
Cioran examines our self-conscious age with regard to what helped
constitute it - the novel.
The essay develops out of the idea that the novel grew out of metaphysical
poverty. It allowed us to understand our history and our psychology in a
world where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that the decay has
reached a zero point, producing the kind of works bereft even of the
certainty of the self as subject. If you don't know what novels these are,
they're the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however repulsively
anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and virtually every novel
published is a journalistic novel), Cioran wonders what is the point of
writing more than one novel of absence:

"[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to the erosion of

being the inexhaustible reality of nothingness. Logically valueless, such
a conception is nonetheless true affectively (to speak of nothingness in
any other terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates a
research without points of reference, an experiment pursued within an
unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experienced through sensation, as well as a
dialectic paradoxically frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and
emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of non-meaning:
the supreme impasse."

This passage - representative of the whole - jerks the steering wheel as

if to herald an eternal roundabout. But this will be Cioran's own journey.
Instead of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending his own
judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the doubt. "Is [the novel]
really dead, or only dying? My incompetence keeps me from making up my
mind ... I leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise
degree of its agony."
Instead of only railing against repetitious failure, Cioran gives us the
guidelines to which potential writers must abide if they are to create an
art for the wilderness. In Kafka's words, this is the help going away
without helping. 'Beyond the Novel' adds to the demands of genuine
creation, and thus the unexpected joy of what has been and might be
achieved. Instead of postmodern cacophony - its sloppy apologia borne on
positive negativism - we get to hear the silence behind the noise. One
thinks of Beckett, of course, and the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To
confirm this, Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might
describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from hopelessness and
bitter regret:

"Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful

... Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be
reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against
ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our
functions and our limits, the futility of having a life."

Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near to abstract

celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to others with 'the courage of
dilution' to give us the succour using the 'banalities' necessary for the
novel. His admiration for other writers is due precisely to their ability
use the banal surface to reach the subterranean. Cioran's rapid lyricism
will not spread into a delta plain of banality to allow such an
exploration. This is his limit.
Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamiliarizing us with what
is important. Perhaps his most worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms,
we can find in his short pieces on other writers collected in Anathemas
And Admirations . In particular, the essay on Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a
writer one might otherwise ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by
a lazy world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on the time
when Fitzgerald awoke from the American Dream into the intensity of lucid
consciousness, something "that transcends contingencies and continents".
By this time, Fitzgerald's famous books have been written, the American
definition of success achieved: fame, money and even requited love.
"Literally and figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then sleep
left him." Why? Returning to the his deepest theme, Cioran answers:
"Insomnia sheds a light on us which we do not desire but to which,
unconsciously, we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against
ourselves."
Fitzgerald's inner experience remained despite worldly success, indeed was
heightened as a result. On the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote
'The Crack-Up'. Cioran's commentary on this non-work - it was a series of
fragments - is like most of Cioran's commentaries, a commentary on his own
procedure, also a series of fragments. 'The Crack-Up' represents for
Cioran the direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than regarding
it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by going to Hollywood to
write screenplays. Fitzgerald is rightly judged inferior to what he
discovered, unlike a Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.
"Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure
and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career.
We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to
that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a
second-order mind that cannot choose between literature and the real dark
night of the soul".

In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure with sickness. The
healthy, he says, keep a certain distance from our 'contradictory and
intense' states, while to be sick is 'to coincide totally with oneself'.
The former allows us to act. But isn't it precisely one's distance from
oneself a part of sickness; it is the part which can never act?

"When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you
regard as histrionic all zealots ... But doesn't detachment, too, have a
histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action
is one as well. Yet a noble mummery."
The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is left to the
silent and invisible. 'The Crack-Up' is called the work of a sick man, yet
its impressive lucidity is a histrionics of detachment, more or less
identical to Cioran's own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot achieve
oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely human, hence our fascination
with good and evil. Perhaps this sharp division between sickness and
health is where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald was prone
to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify the inherent hubris of
writing and publishing. Aware of this, Cioran tells us not to worry about
those who are excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity
preserves reason.

"This is not a paradox ... for such brooding over our miseries proceeds
from an alarm in our vitality, from our reaction of energy, at the same
time that it expresses an elegiac disguise of our instinct of
self-preservation."

This helps answer a perennial question: why did Cioran live so long
without killing himself? Sickness can increase self-pity, thereby reason,
thereby self-preservation. To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our
purpose, we must use both sickness and health, self-pity and detachment,
the desert and the oasis. To deny either is either fatal or contemptible.
Cioran shows by example, how various the tension between opposites is
manifested. His examples have one thing in common it seems: the admittance
of lucidity, that which lies behind all stories, all systems, all action,
all help.
As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism, rewarding instead
skills of memory and language, it might be worth stepping into the
vanishing point Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the
stagnant wounds of our lucidity.
 "The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse
beyond the nothing that is in him".

You can buy E.M. Cioran's books online from

Amazon.com in the US and
Amazon.co.uk in the UK
Related links:
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography
Spike's exploration the Beckett enigma
Waiting For Go.Dot
Spike ponders the significance of names in fiction and film
Albert Camus: Solitaire Et Solidaire
Spike's exclusive interview with Catherine Camus, daughter of Albert
Camus, about his final, unfinished novel, The First Man

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