Écrire « dans la vraie nuit de l’âme ». Cioran lecteur de Fitzgerald

In this article, we explore the main sources of the fascination that Cioran (1911-1955), a French writer of Romanian origin, shows to the late work of the American novelist Francis Scott Fitzgerald (The Crack-Up, 1936), in the portrait he devotes to him in Exercices d’admiration (1986), taking into account some of his favorite themes: the necessary collapse to reach the depths of being, the importance of crisis and the corresponding lucidity, the disillusionment and the impossibility of writing. This close reading will allow us to identify first some features of how Cioran reads the foreign text and then to observe the mechanisms he uses to integrate his reading notes into the making of his own text. The experience of the broken identity discovered through the reading of the Fitzgeraldian text will allow Cioran not only to find a confirmation of his own thoughts and meditations on the same topic, but also to initiate literary creation, despite the constant fear of the impossibility of scriptural gesture.