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less 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
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
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
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