cioran's style

 

Unlike, say, happiness or sadness, despair doesn’t easily select, among a repertoire of performances, those which express its substance – or rather, its tone. The attraction, such as it is, of Cioran’s work is that here, one feels, despair gets free play. Massively, in fact. In his essays, the absence of act that characterises despair, its sunken violence – for despair, as Cioran sees it, is the child of a precedent and excessive violence – becomes the substance of the text, and as such fights a rearguard action with its very motive. If despair cuts us off from motive itself, it seems to remove at the same time its elemental right as a mood. This isn’t a matter of auto-erasure, as it is about the futility of all marks.

Cioran started out as an intellectual as a Romanian fascist: this is the point from which, whether overtly or implicitly, he always start in his subsequent writings. It is the image of that intellectual madness that haunts him. He was cured of this set of beliefs/prejudices – including the nastiest and most sinister, anti-semitism; but the rescue was not logical or discursive, but characterological, and as such, confirmed his notion that the logical and discursive were a kind of foam on the wave – an epiphenomenon, and not a matter of the depths.  The Cioran who praised Hitler as a young man had pulled himself out of that violence when, in 1944, he pled for the life of Benjamin Fondane  

-          Cioran went with Jean Paulhan, who he had contacted,  to the police station where the Gestapo was keeping  Fondane and his sister. He wanted to get them to release Fondane, and thought he’d plead the importance of the man.  The Gestapo offered a nasty little deal: Fondane could leave if he’d leave his siser. In an act that Cioran must have reflected on  often, Fondane refused to abandon his sister.  So they took them both, and both were murdered at Auschwitz.

There’s a famous passage in his History and Utopia which outlines Cioran’s notion of what is, for any real writer since the early modern era, the real thing he was after - the Work in all its dark and frustrating glory. But what a self-divided goal it turns out to be!

“The idle man who loves violence safeguards his savoir-vivre in confining it to an abstract hell. Unhanding the individual, letting go of names and faces, he goes after the imprecise, the general, and, orienting his thirst for exterminations toward the impalpable, imagines a new genre: the pamphlet without an object. “

 In Cioran, every lapidary statement is eventually thrown back in his face. In “Drawn and Quartered” one of his last books, Cioran’s idle man conceives a different genre under which to classify his writing:”One should not chain oneself to a Work, one must instead say the kind of thing that can be murmured in the ear of a drunk or a dying person.” The ephemeral and the absolute must, somehow, be forced to merge. This is the very duty of style.

A wonderful and terrifying artistic credo to work under.