{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Schopenhauer said that the best way to show one's contempt or disdain for those who torment you is to have nothing to do with them.

How do these novelists transform the pain and anguish and brutality we experience in this life into literature?

In ‘Beyond the Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with regard to what helped constitute it – the 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.”

Narrating death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an industrial and destabilized culture.  The essay develops out of the idea that the novel grew out of metaphysical poverty.

From Spike Magazine, E.M Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond:

Cioran gives him [the novelist] 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.”

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.”

note:  ELEGY = "a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead"


Also see The anguishes of E.M. Cioran by Roger Kimball.