SHORT SHRIFT

SHOWN AN EPIGRAM of a line and half, Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–94), himself a master of mordant brevity, remarked that it would have exhibited greater wit if it had been shorter. The epigram, the aphorism, the maxim are the haiku of thought. They seek to compact the greatest pointedness of insight into the fewest possible words. Almost by definition, and even where it sticks strictly to colloquial prose, the aphorism nears the condition of poetry. Its formal economy aims to startle in a flash of authority; it aims to be singularly memorable, as does a poem. Indeed, celebrated maxims or apothegms often modulate between great poetry or drama and the anonymity of the proverbial. Momentarily, we are at a loss to recall the exact and personal source. Who first taught us that “discretion is the better part of valor” or that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb”? In what text do we find the dictum, which helped to initiate an entire revolution in the history of perception and of form, that “nature imitates art”? The terse revelations of Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, and Oscar Wilde have passed into the glory of common speech.

In French literature, aphorismic and epigrammatic modes play an exceptional role. The composition of pensées, of “thoughts” or “reflections” formulated as briefly as possible, is a distinctively Gallic tradition. In Pascal—and this is a rare accomplishment in any language or literature—the aphorismic strategy extends to the most complex, sublime reaches of theology and metaphysics. In Paul Valéry, it affords a supremely concise elegance to a lifelong meditation on the nature of poetry and the arts. The maxims of La Rochefoucauld, of Vauvenargues, of Chamfort are very likely the most eloquent in the Western tradition. A contemporary poet, René Char, has deliberately effaced the distinction between the sententia (the Latin name for a one-sentence dictum or proposition) and the short lyric. At his best, Char, like Valéry, articulates a musical moment in thought.

Why this French predilection for the aphorismic? (In German, the aphoristic manner of Lichtenberg and of Nietzsche is openly indebted to the French precedent.) One answer lies with a proud, explicit Latinity. French literature and thought take pride in their affinity to the Roman source. Roman mores, in the domains both of political power and of discourse, attached eminent value to terseness. Not only was brevity the soul of wit, it was a convention of masculine command and self-command even under extreme pressure of private or civic peril. Much in the French practice of maxims and pensées appears to go back directly to the marmoreal authority and lapidary concision of Roman inscriptions. “Cigît Gide” was André Gide’s recommendation for his own epitaph. It is from its Latin inheritance that the French language itself draws its ideal of la litote. “Understatement” is a lame translation. A litote, as we find it persistently in the greatest of all French writers—in Racine—is the tightly, densely concentrated expression of some central immensity, or even enormity, in human recognitions and emotions. It is, at its most characteristic, that rush of silence which pilots report at the center point of a hurricane.

As I have said, the French tradition encompasses within the bounds of the maxim areas as diverse as religion and aesthetics, psychology and politics. But the dominant focus is that of the moralistes. Again, translation is awkward. A moraliste, particularly as he flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, brings to bear universal values and principles on problems of social conduct. He looks sharply at, he “needles,” mundane conventions in the implicit light of eternity. The true moraliste moralizes only obliquely, by isolating laconically, by giving monumental formulation to some ephemeral but symptomatic gesture, rite, or received verity in the society of his day. The genius of La Rochefoucauld or of Vauvenargues consists in the exact wealth of observed human behavior which underwrites the sparsity, the seeming generality of his notations. Behind La Rochefoucauld’s tranquil observation, as radical as any in the annals of insight, that there is something which does not displease us in the misfortunes of a good friend there lies not only a flash of individual scrutiny but a felt knowledge of the ways of the court and of the beau monde as comprehensive as that of Saint-Simon or of Proust.

Having emigrated from Bucharest to Paris on the eve of the Second World War, E. M. Cioran has, over the past four decades, established for himself an esoteric but undoubted reputation as an essayist and aphorist of historical-cultural despair. “Drawn and Quartered” (Seaver Books; $9.95) is the translation of a text published in French, as “Écartèlement,” in 1971. The maxims and reflections that make up the main part of “Drawn and Quartered” are preceded by an apocalyptic prologue. Gazing upon the immigrants, the hybrids, the rootless flotsam of humanity that now tide through our anonymous cities, Cioran concludes that it is indeed—as Cyril Connolly proclaimed—“closing-time in the gardens of the West.” We are Rome in its febrile and macabre decline: “Having governed two hemispheres, the West is now becoming their laughingstock: subtle specters, end of the line in the literal sense, doomed to the status of pariahs, of flabby and faltering slaves, a status which perhaps the Russians will escape, those last White Men.” But the dynamics of inevitable degradation extend far beyond the particular situation of the capitalist and technological Western sphere. It is history itself that is running down:

In any case it is manifest that man has given the best of himself, and that even if we were to witness the emergence of other civilizations, they would certainly not be worth the ancient ones, nor even the modern ones, not counting the fact that they could not avoid the contagion of the end, which has become for us a kind of obligation and program. From prehistory to ourselves, and from ourselves to posthistory, such is the road toward a gigantic fiasco, prepared and announced by every period, including apogee epochs. Even utopianists identify the future with a failure, since they invent a regime supposed to escape any kind of becoming: their vision is that of another time within time . . . something like an inexhaustible failure, unbroached by temporality and superior to it. But history, of which Ahriman is the master, tramples such divagations.

The human species, intones Cioran, is beginning to put itself out of date. The only interest a moraliste and prophet of finality can take in man stems from the fact that “he is tracked and cornered, sinking ever deeper.” If he continues on his doomed, sordid path, it is because he lacks the strength needed to capitulate, to commit rational suicide. Only one thing is absolutely certain of man: “He is stricken in his depths . . . he is rotten to the roots.” (The plangent but self-mocking lilt of “rotten to the core, Maude” comes irresistibly to mind.)

What, then, lies ahead? Cioran replies:

We advance en masse toward a confusion without analogy, we shall rise up one against the other like convulsive defectives, like hallucinated puppets, because, everything having become impossible and unbreathable for us all, no one will deign to live except to liquidate and to liquidate himself. The sole frenzy we are still capable of is the frenzy of the end.

The sum of history is “a futile odyssey,” and it is legitimate—indeed, compelling—“to wonder if humanity as it is would not be better off eliminating itself now rather than fading and foundering in expectation, exposing itself to an era of agony in which it would risk losing all ambition, even the ambition to vanish.” After which rumination, Cioran bows out with a little pirouette of self-teasing irony: “Let us then renounce all prophecies, those frantic hypotheses, let us no longer allow ourselves to be deceived by the image of a remote and improbable future; let us abide by our certitudes, our indubitable abysses.”

The quarrel with this kind of writing and pseudo thinking is not one of evidence. The century of Auschwitz and of the thermonuclear-arms race, of large-scale starvation and totalitarian madness may indeed be hastening toward a suicidal close. It is conceivable that human greed, the enigmatic necessities of mutual hatred which fuel both internal and external politics, and the sheer intricacy of economic-political problems may bring on catastrophic international conflicts, civil wars, and the inward collapse of aging as well as of immature societies. We all know this. And this knowledge has been the undercurrent of serious political thought, of philosophic debates on history, since 1914–18 and Spengler’s model of the decline of the West. Nor is it possible to refute an intuitive sense, a persuasive intimation, of a sort of nervous exhaustion, of entropy, in the inward resources of Western culture. We seem to be governed by more or less mendacious dwarfs and mountebanks. Our responses to crises display a certain somnambular automatism. Our arts and letters are, arguably, those of epigones. Per se, Cioran’s funeral sermon (and it has been uttered by many before him) may well turn out to be right. As it happens, my own instincts are only marginally more cheerful.

No, the objections to be urged are twofold. The passages I have quoted bear witness to a massive, brutal oversimplification. The grain of human affairs is, always has been, tragicomic. Hence Shakespeare’s centrality and his refusal of absolute darkness. Fortinbras is a lesser being than Hamlet; he will very probably govern better. Birnam wood will reflower after it has marched on Dunsinane. History and the lives of politics and of societies are far too manifold to be subsumed under any one grandiloquent pattern. The bestialities of our age, its potential for self-ruin are evident; but so is the plain fact that more men and women than ever before in the history of this planet are beginning to be adequately fed, housed, and medically cared for. Our politics are indeed those of mass murder, yet for the first time in recorded social history the notion is being articulated and realized that the human species has positive responsibilities toward the handicapped and the mentally infirm, toward animals and the environment. I have, often enough, written about the venom of current nationalism, about the virus of ethnic and parochial fury which impels men to slaughter their neighbors and reduce their own communities to ash (in the Middle East, in Africa, in Central America, in India). However, subtle but forceful countercurrents are beginning to emerge. Multinational organizations and businesses, the freemasonry of the natural and applied sciences, youth cultures, the revolution in the dissemination of information, and the popular arts are generating wholly novel chances and imperatives of coexistence. They are eroding frontiers. The chances do remain slight; but it may be that they will come in time to inhibit the scenario of Armageddon. It would be fatuous arrogance to rule otherwise. To put it anecdotally, I recall a seminar given by C. S. Lewis. Knowing Lewis’s profound nostalgia for what he called “the unbroken image” of the medieval and early-Renaissance cosmos, knowing Lewis’s displeasure at the vulgarities and moral confusions of the twentieth-century tone, a graduate student launched on an encomium of times past. Lewis listened for a few moments, his massive head buried in his hands. Then, brusquely, he turned on the speaker. “Do stop mouthing easy rot,” he enjoined. “Do close your eyes and concentrate your sensitive soul on exactly what your life would lave been like before chloroform!”

The key word here is “easy.” There is throughout Cioran’s jeremiads an ominous facility. It requires no sustained analytic thought, no closeness or clarity of argument to pontificate on the “rottenness,” on the “gangrene,” of man, and on the terminal cancer of history. The pages on which have drawn not only are easy to write, they flatter the writer with the tenebrous incense of the oracular. One need only turn to the work of Tocqueville, of Henry Adams, or of Schopenhauer to see the drastic difference. These are masters of a clairvoyant sadness no less comprehensive than Cioran’s. Their reading of history is no rosier. But the cases they put are scrupulously argued, not declaimed; they are informed, at each node and articulation of proposal, with a just sense of the complex, contradictory nature of historical evidence. The doubts expressed by these thinkers, the qualifications brought to their own persuasions honor the reader. They call not for numbed assent or complaisant echo but for reëxamination and criticism. The question that remains is this: Do Cioran’s apocalyptic convictions, his mortal pessimism and disgust occasion original and radical perceptions? Are the pensées, the aphorisms and maxims, that constitute his tide to fame truly in the lineage of Pascal, of La Rochefoucauld, or of his immediate exemplar Nietzsche?

“Drawn and Quartered” contains numerous aphorisms on death. This is always a favorite topic for aphorists—for, indeed, is there ever much to be said about death? “Death is a state of perfection, the only one within a mortal’s grasp” (the point implicit is a feeble, traditional wordplay on the Latin sense of “perfection”). “There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another” (echoing La Rochefoucauld). “Death, what a dishonor! To become suddenly an object”—which is followed by the wholly unconvincing assertion that “nothing makes us modest, not even the sight of a corpse.” The tone rises to a macabre chic: “Whatever is exempt from the funereal is necessarily vulgar.” The climax of portentous silliness is this: “Death is the solidest thing life has invented, so far.”

Let us try another theme, that of the acts of writing and of thought. “A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.” Quite so—and said, a long time ago, almost verbatim, by Franz Kafka. “One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something.” Fair enough. “Existing is plagiarism.” A witty, suggestive hit. “When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.” True enough; but professed often, and with irrefutable authority, by Kafka, by Karl Kraus, by Wittgenstein and Beckett, “The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.” Cf. Rousseau and Nietzsche, who arrived at the same finding, but with far greater circumstantial force. (To which caveat, Cioran might reply, “I have invented nothing, I have merely been the secretary of my sensations.”) “An author who claims to write for posterity must be a bad one. We should never know for whom we write.” The admonition may be unexceptionable; a moment’s thought of Horace, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, or Stendhal reveals its shallowness.

Cioran is the author of an interesting essay on De Maistre, the great thinker of counterrevolution and antidemocratic pessimism. A number of aphorisms—and they are among the more substantial—point to this strain in Cioran’s own nocturnal politics: “Never lose sight of the fact that the plebs regretted Nero.” “All these people in the street make me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating man!” “The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses.” “Whoever speaks the language of Utopia is more alien to me than a reptile from another geological era.” “Torquemada was sincere, hence inflexible, inhuman. The corrupt popes were charitable, like all who can be bought.” I happen to believe that Cioran’s stoic élitism, his rejection of meliorism à l’américaine, has more truth in it than most of the currently modish brands of ecumenical liberality. But nothing very fresh or arresting is being added here to the plea for darkness in De Maistre, in Nietzsche, or in the visionary politics of Dostoyevski. The aphorism on Torquemada, for instance, with its modish frisson, comes directly out of De Maistre’s immensely powerful tractate in favor of the hangman.

The most revealing aphorisms are those in which Cioran testifies to his own bleak, fatigued condition: “All my ideas come down to various discomforts debased into generalities.” “I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.” There is a lucid pathos in Cioran’s confession that he could more easily found an empire than a family, and immediate persuasion in his remark that original sin can be doubted only by those who have not had children. One instinctively trusts and ponders the proposition “I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.” But, as a British idiom has it, a little world-weariness does go a very long way. One hundred and eighty pages, climaxing in the (ludicrous) cry “Man is unacceptable,” leave one recalcitrant.

The trouble may well lie with Cioran’s dictum that in aphorisms, as in poems, the single word is king. This may be true of certain types of poetry, mainly lyrical. It is not true of the great aphorists, for whom the sententia is sovereign, and sovereign precisely insofar as it compels on the reader’s mind an internalized but elided wealth of historical, social, philosophic background. The finest aphorismic text of recent decades, T. W. Adorno’s “Minima Moralia,” brims with the authority of a true shorthand, of a script whose concision retranslates, compels retranslation, into a full-scale psychology and sociology of observant historical consciousness. Any honest comparison with “Drawn and Quartered” is devastating. No doubt there are better examples of Cioran’s work, particularly from before the time when his writings turned into self-repetition. But a collection of this order, all too faithfully rendered by Richard Howard, does raise the question not so much whether the emperor has any clothes as whether there is any emperor.