Searching for Cioran

6. Romania’s Transfiguration, Continuing Controversy

6 Romania’s Transfiguration, Continuing Controversy I can’t find myself in it. . . . —Cioran, foreword to the second edition of Romania’s Transfiguration (1990) Romania’s Transfiguration occupies a peculiar space in Cioran’s œuvre. It is his only Romanian book that has never been translated; it is significantly absent, for example, from Gallimard’s recent Quarto edition of the Œuvres (1995). Yet it is at the same time the most notorious of his works, since it is reputed to be the book in which he “reveals” his fascistic tendencies, or, at the very least, the extent of his flirtation with the peculiar brand of European fascism represented by the Romanian Iron Guard movement. As such, it becomes Exhibit A when Cioran is hailed into the court of retrospective world opinion and subjected, like Mircea Eliade, Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and 112 The Romanian Life of Emil Cioran many others, to rigorous questioning about the extent to which his “youthful errors” represent, in fact, a permanent, ineradicably contaminating sub-stratum to all his other works, despite their determinedly apolitical, “existential,” and aphoristic appearance. Cioran appears in this court as a somewhat sympathetic witness for himself, since he both acknowledged his early political writings and disavowed them as unforgivable “stupidities” and “the ravings of a wild madman.” He did not, however, like to talk about them, nor did he spend much time in his mature later (French) life in apologizing for them—which, for polemicists dedicated to unearthing any hint of fascism and anti-Semitism in the writings of otherwise culturally honored modernist writers (for example, T. S. Eliot), amounts to a kind of tacit admission of continuing guilt, since only if the writer in question were to continue forever acknowledging his guilt would the moral polemicists be satisfied. In these prosecutions, to have been a fascist once, to whatever degree, constitutes a permanent stain and ineradicable guilt; memories may fade, but the cancerous cells are always there.1 Paying attention to Cioran’s youthful fascism is fair and just, if we are to gain a full picture of his stature and development. But some of his critics seem to follow a logic similar to that of the House Un-American Activities Committee used in its witch-hunts during the 1950s McCarthy era, especially against former Communists or Communist sympathizers in Hollywood during the years we are concerned with here: the 1930s. But whereas HUAC was concerned with former Communists on the Left, in Europe the hunt for proto-fascists on the Right has been much more intense, and only relatively recently have commentators dared to take a wider view and observe that European cultural critics have been more forgiving toward youthful Communist sympathies than toward youthful fascist leanings—for obvious reasons, in the historical perspective of World War II and its aftermath. I will not enter into the extremely difficult moral determination of which is worse, fascism or communism, given their horrific records of state-justified murder—even if we agree that, on balance, fascism, at least in its German National Socialist form, is worse. But the fact is, to do meaningful research and writing on the key question, what could have led these sometimes brilliant young people into such errors?—and thus perhaps illuminate our thinking about them—we cannot soundly judge their errors , or the extent of their commitment to them, if we begin with the a priori, almost Manichean, assumption that all such people were “just evil.”2 It is not my intention to excuse Cioran’s extremist statements in Romania’s Transfiguration , since he has made his own defense, however unsatisfying it may be to some contemporary analysts, such as Patrice Bollon and Alexandra Laignel-Lavanstine.3 Nor, however, is it my intention to take the easy road of rebuttal and maintain that Romania’s Transfiguration is an exception in Cioran’s œuvre, which can therefore be set aside as an unhappy experimental chapter in the on-going story of his self-creation. Romania’s Transfiguration, Continuing Controversy 113 On the contrary, though the book is the only one of Cioran’s works with a markedly socio-political content, it is my contention that it should be seen as part of the same cloth as Cioran’s other works, both earlier and later. That is, though the book “looks” political, and can be made to sound like the ravings of a committed young...