CIORAN Emil M. (1911-1995). Autograph manuscript... Lot 36

CIORAN Emil M. (1911-1995). Autograph manuscript for Écartèlement; 4 spiral notebooks in-4 (27 x 21 cm) of 43, 45, 51 and 88 leaves, numbered II (yellow cover), III and IV (green covers), and V (blue cover, Joseph Gibert). Interesting workbooks for Écartèlement (Gallimard, 1979). Written in blue ballpoint pen, sometimes red, but also sometimes green or in blue felt-tip pen, on the front of the pages, with a few additions or corrections on the blank pages opposite, these notebooks are abundantly crossed out and corrected. This working manuscript, which sometimes even appears to be a first draft, is a first state of what will become, after elaboration and reclassification, Écartèlement. We find there, in an order that is not yet the order of the book, a quantity of thoughts and aphorisms that we will find in the four sections of Ébauches de vertige, in a primitive version, often overloaded with corrections. On the cover of notebook II, various titles have been crossed out: The two truths / The two truths / The end of history / The reader of memories; then Cioran noted: Fluctuations II. These are roughly the titles of the first three chapters of Scattering: The Two Truths; The Memoir Lover; After History. Notebook V bears this note on the cover: "the previous September 1977 [June 1978 crossed out]. Some thoughts are abundantly crossed out and corrected; others are crossed out; others are marked in the margins with crosses and question marks. Many of them will be greatly modified for Écartèlement, and appear here in a first version different from that of the book. Thus, in Book II, this entry: "In this Norman port, we have just caught a large fish called 'Moon Fish', which would have been carried away by a warm current, as it does not live in these regions. Lying on the jetty, it jerked and twisted, then calmed down and didn't move again. Clearly, he has given up the fight. No more "drama." How well one dies if one is lucky enough not to be a man!"; in Écartèlement (Ébauches de vertige, IV), the last three sentences will be replaced by this one: "An agony without agonies, a model agony. Let's quote, as an example of Cioran's correction work, this entry from notebook V, which will be found with variations in section III of Ébauches de vertige, but which is already here overloaded with corrections in red and green pens (the words in brackets have been crossed out or correspond to the first draft): "At the Spanish border, [we were] a few hundred tourists, most of them [Scandinavian] Scandinavians, [who] were waiting in front of the customs. A telegram was brought to a strong, visibly Iberian lady. She opened it and immediately began to howl [worthy of her constitution]. It was her mother who had just died, and we had just witnessed one of those explosions] and calling for her mother whose death she had just learned. [She is lucky] What a boon for her, I thought, to be able to unload her grief [immediately] at once, instead of concealing it, [smothering it,] storing it up as any of those blond women who look at her in bewilderment and who, [by excess] victims of their discretion and [by superstition of the] of their dress, [and of their anaemia,] [end up dragging neuroses to length ruin themselves at the psychoanalyst's] [will end up ruining themselves with the psychoanalyst] [will sink one day into neurosis] will ruin themselves one day with the psychoanalyst". Other thoughts will pass in Aveux et anathèmes (1987), like the one that opens book III: "A young German, on the banks of the Seine, asks me for a franc. I enter into conversation with him, and he tells me that he has travelled the world, that he has been to India, where he likes the vagabonds he thinks he resembles. But one does not belong to a serious nation with impunity. I looked at him begging; he looked as if he had come out of a tramp school. [The rest is crossed out: Westerners, in general, when they set out to imitate the East, are in reality only falling apart: they only attain a simulacrum of wisdom by slumming it. Others seem to have remained unpublished. In notebook V, we find twice the apostrophe: "Clio, I hate you!", followed on a loose leaf by this note: "Clio, that imbecile", which will become in the book: "Abominable Clio! In this same notebook, Cioran inserted, in addition to the above-mentioned sheet, two sheets of typed aphorisms, with autograph corrections; and, at the end of the notebook, two autograph sheets paginated a and b.