Céline’s Guerre
The publication of
Guerre ( 2022) [1]by Gallimard caused a literary sensation the likes of
which we haven’t seen in such a long time. I must admit that I did not in fact
procure a copy for myself until almost a year elapsed so sceptical was I of the
whole affair, there are so many examples of publishers taking advantage of
publishing, often, mediocre writings by famous authors with the sole intention
of making as much profit from them as they possibly can. That is their sole
business, after all, to make a financial profit from the sale of literary
works, and, in those very rare cases, such as the case here, I believe, to act
as the curators and trustees, to a certain degree, of very prestigious literary
works which are, in a sense, a part of the literary patrimony of the world. In
the following article, I shall be looking at first and foremost how Céline’s
wartime injuries and the overall destruction that he witnessed during his
experience as a soldier during the early stages of the Great War were to have
such a profound effect on his overall worldview, and how this traumatic experience
were to have an impact on his overall vision of the world, a fundamentally dystopian
vision it has to be said, and how this overall deeply pessimistic vision was to
impact on his use of language. His creative force, like that of Martin Heidegger
and indeed so many other creatives, was of a profoundly destructive nature, his
overall aim, literally, was to destroy the beautiful style of French literature
and his overall fracturing of French syntax, which is most clearly visible in
the final trilogy of novels set again during wartime, such as in D’un chateau
l’autre ( 1957), but it is in the most newly discovered novel Guerre that
the real extent of Céline’s notorious fury can be most properly understood, I
will be positing, making this text a key piece in understanding this most
complex and controversial novelist.
In the introduction of Guerre,
François Gibault makes reference to a document concerning the deceased author’s
health and which he had made while he was in exile in Demark just after the end
of WW2.
Oreille: complètement sourd oreille gauche avec bourdonnements
et sifflements intensifs ininterrompus. Cet état est le mien depuis 1914
lors de ma première blessure lorsque je fus projeté par un éclatement
d’obus contre un
arbre.[2]
The above extract, in which the author
reports that he is ‘completely deaf in his left ear and that he suffers from
intense noises and whistling sounds which go on uninterruptedly’, and which he
has suffered from, he goes on, since he was thrown against a tree by a bomb
blast in the opening stages of the Great War in 1914. Céline was decorated for
his services in the war and it is, without any doubt, thanks to his service in
the French army during the Great War that he was given clemency by a French
military tribunal after having been convicted of the crime of collaboration
with the Vichy government during WW2, a claim which he always denied, and quite
furiously. Fury is a term much used in connection with the French writer who is
considered, by many, to be the greatest stylist in the French language
alongside Marcel Proust. Before I
continue in my appraisal of the newly published novel, I feel I need to access
my own relationship with the writings of such a controversial writer.
I first read Journey to the End of the
Night in English translation in the eighties ( translated by Ralph Manheim)
when I was still living in Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. I liked it so much
that I quickly followed it up by reading Death on the Instalment Plan,
again translated by Manheim, a Jewish translator of great repute it should be
mentioned and who was also responsible for translating Hitler’s Mein Kampf
( 1998). So, I was very aware of Céline before moving to live in Paris at the
very end of the 1980s. It was while reading the biography of Jim Morrison No
One Here Gets Out Alive by Gerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman ( 1980) that I
was first made aware of the French writer who was apparently the source of
reference for the song Journey to the End of the Night by the North
American poet and rock star.[3]
I have very little recollection of reading
Céline in French while living in France, although I know that I did as I had a
paperback copy of Voyage au bout de la nuit and which I used to look
into now and again. I remember thinking that it was a very poetic book, at the
time. I remember also buying a sort of biography of the writer, a sure sign
that I was very interested in not just the writer but also the man. It
contained a lot of black and white photographs of the writer with his artistic
friends in Montmartre. It was quite a thorough book focusing particularly on
the author’s later work, which I hadn’t read. So, the context of my current
reading of Céline’s novel Guerre is very much with the war in Ukraine
going on and which has been compared to, by many military analysts, as somewhat
comparable on scale and tragedy with both the Great War of 1914-1918, which
Céline fought in, and with the epic battles of WW2 and which Céline famously
documented, particularly in his ‘Exile Trilogy’ comprising of: D’un château
l’autre ( 1957), Nord ( 1960) and Rigodon ( 1961). This text should therefore be considered
as a kind of re-engagement with the writings of Céline, and which the
publication of Guerre was very much responsible for. I should point out
that my interest in the works of the writer flagged, largely because of the
very awful reputation that the writer has had since his death, and so one of
the crucial aspects about the French writer that I want to address here is this
very point, and I think this is one of the most fascinating things about the
discovery of the ‘stolen manuscripts’[4] of Céline
as the publication of these texts in France has caused an absolute sensation,
it is extremely rare, after all, that such a horde of previously unpublished
material by a major writer has ever been discovered posthumously like this, and
so, naturally, would also create a very opportune moment to reevaluate the
writer since his death in 1961.
…on m’a tout vole à Montmartre !...tout !...rue Giradon !...
je le répète…je le repéterai jamais assez !...on fait semblant
de ne pas m’entendre… juste les choses qu’il faut entendrendre !
…je mets pourtant les points sur les i…tout !... des gens, libérateurs
vengeurs, sont entrés chez moi, par effraction, et ils on tout emmené aux
puces !...[5]
When I first read the passage above, which
appears very early on in the novel ( 1957), it read like the ravings of someone
who was possessed and I thought to myself, like I am sure many did, that Dr
Louis Ferdinand Destouches, the doctor now domiciled in Meudon in complete
disgrace and was back working as a general practitioner which he was forced to
do as his financial situation necessitated it, had finally lost it. There was
always this very thin line separating the life of the doctor, Louis Ferdinand
Destouches, and the once celebrated, he had won the Prix Renaudot (
1932) for the publication of his monumental novel Voyage au bout de la nuit,
novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline. The fact that he called his alter ego
Ferdinand did not help matters. This was Céline’s force which acted like a
double-edged sword against him. His literary style, which he laboured at long
into the night, was almost miraculous. One in a million. And he knew it. The
famous ‘music’, as he called it. There are very few people who can write like
they talk, as a language support teacher working in a post-primary school in
one of the city centre schools in Dublin, I had seen it only once and the irony
was that they had called me in to correct that boy’s writing! When I
read it, I thought immediately of Céline. But the difference between that boy
and Céline is that the boy did not have any choice in the matter, in other
words he was not free. His texts were fully of grammatical inconsistencies, he
wrote just like he spoke, almost phonetically. Whereas, Céline wrote the way he
did by choosing to write this way, that is the miracle. It is a highly stylised
form of writing, very deliberately construed to sound natural but as Céline
insisted again and again in that famous film clip when he was interviewed by
Louis Pauwels (1959) for the French television programme En Français sur le
texte, famously responding to Pauwels when asked about his writing “ C’est
rare un style…”.[6]
To return to Guerre, in the context
of style, one of the stylistic features of this newly discovered novel is the
use of slang, or argot, which has always been one of the stylistic
features of Céline and with all iconoclastic French writers down through the
ages. While reading the lexicon of military and medical slang terminology which
Céline uses in Guerre, I was very much reminded of Rabelais. This is a
very important point, I believe, as this use of popular idiomatic phraseology
is directly connected up with the bottom up approach, as with Rabelais, that is
so very much apart of Céline’s overall approach, just as Proust’s was a top
down, and of course this is the ‘real’ reason, according to Céline, why he was
being systematically abused by the state, either directly, in the guise of the
judiciary, or indirectly, by resistance partisans who were taking their
‘revenge’ on him. After all, slang, in any language, is the unofficial language
of the people to usurp the power of the state. A state, that of France, which
for Céline had lost all credibility due to the horrors that the war of
1914-1918 brought, mainly, on the French working class. The issue of class is a
huge theme in Céline, and references to it in Guerre pop up all the time
and the use of slang is one of the greatest linguistic manifestations of class;
just as Proust uses the extremely formal, and so legitimate, language of the
ruling, or, upper classes, with the interminable sentences that are made up of
a labyrinthian network of clauses, so too does Céline make use of simple
sentence structures, the famous morse chatter of the interminable three
dots…simplicity itself, an offering a direct pathway to the great unwashed!
Bien Ferdinand, que j’aye dit, t’as pas crevé à temps,
t’es qu’un beau lâche, t’es un putain de jean-foutre, tant,
pis pour ta sale gueule de con.[7]
The way that Ferdinand speaks, and
remember he is supposed to be a young man, twenty years of age, who has just
seen the most atrocious horrors that he has ever seen in his life. So, in order
for the character to be credible, he has to talk like a twenty- year old
soldier, and, this is how young soldiers would have spoken at the time.
A lot of the humour in the book, and in Céline’s writing in general, one could
say, can be found in this kind of use of extremely informal and very popular
way of speaking. It is what brings so much authenticity to the character, in
any case. It’s funny, yet as I was reading Guerre, I found myself
thinking a little about the character of Holden Caulfield in John Salinger’s
classic novel The Catcher in the Rye ( 1951). I have no idea if Salinger
was aware of Céline when he was over in France during WW2, but I would imagine
that he would have been aware of the existence of Voyage au bout de la nuit (
1932), as a writer it would have been core reading at the time.
But to come back to the very deliberate
use of slang in relation to Céline’s style, I think, and this is something
which the publication of Guerre really underlines , it is all part of
the very systematic destruction of the very formal French literary style that
Céline was to make so central to his very nature as not only a man but also as
an artist, and I am making this very specific differentiation in regard to
Céline, as the man and the writer become almost indistinguishable at times. You
will perhaps remember my reaction to his novel D’un chateau l’autre,
when furious Ferdinand, the extremely disgruntled writer/artist at Meudon,
complete with costume of the dishevelled writer/artist in strong contrast, a
veritable contrast one could say, with the manicured perfection of Proust,
complete with top hat and tails. Of course, Céline made his lifelong project
very clear from day one. If we take the portrayal of Ferdinand’s father in Guerre,
here is an extract taken from section two when his parents come to visit him in
the military hospital where he has been recuperating after having sustained two
bad wounds – one to the head, which has left him reeling - ‘J’ai attrapé la
guerre dans ma tête.’ [8]
De mon pére des lettres parfaitement écrites en parfait style.
Il m’exhortait à la patience, il me présidait la paix prochaine,
il me parler de leurs difficultés, du magasin passage des
Bérésinas, des inexplicables méchancetés des voisins, des
travaux supplémentaires qu’il effectuait à La Coccinelle pour
remplacer les combattants.[9]
Despite the fact that Ferdinand is lying
in a military hospital having sustained traumatic injuries which will affect
him for the rest of his life, and the parallels with his own life couldn’t be
closer, his father’s only concern would appear to be about maintaining the
family honour, and the maintenance of upholding middle class appearances,
despite everything. Ferdinand has run up a rather large debt in the canteen and
the woman responsible for managing the business pursues his parents to the
train station and causes a bit of a scene before finally recuperating the sum
of money that Ferdinand owed her. All of this disgusts Ferdinand. In fact, it
is the letters of his father, with their perfect French syntax and style, that
particularly disgust the young man, as they are representative of everything
that he has come to detest about France, his family and the so called values of
a society that has, as far as he is concerned, completely abandoned him.
Céline’s character Ferdinand in Guerre is perhaps the greatest example,
and this is why the lost novel is such an important discovery, of what
Hemingway famously once described as ‘the lost generation’( 1926) , but whereas
what Hemingway merely describes, and herein lies the difference, Céline IS.
Dans les lettres de mon père y avait toute ma garce de jeunesse
qu’était morte. Je regrettais rien , c’était qu’un fumier puant, anxieux,
une horreur, mais c’était quand même mon petit passé de môme pourri
qu’il cernait sur les cartes censure, avec des phrases bien équilibrée et
bien faites.[10]
One can only imagine the amount of lonely
young man, hanging on at death’s door, who felt the same. This is Céline the
man, the successful novelist and doctor, looking back at his former twenty
-year old self, taking stock of the whole bloody debacle that was once his
youth, and he is still furious. This point is extremely important, as his
parents, Ferdinand’s, and in particular his father’s use of language, becomes
the target of all of his disgust and it is here, in this second section of Guerre
that we as readers of Céline begin to, perhaps, finally appreciate just how
much the author’s wartime experiences were to have shaped his overall bleak
vision of the not only the world but of the universe itself, and in this sense Céline
must be considered in the school of writers comprising of Baudelaire and
Beckett, for example, whose vision of humanity was also extremely bleak, but,
and this is what this incredible triad of writers have in common – their extremely
negative viewpoint is not an obstacle, in other words a negative force
for them nor their readers but rather the negativity, or destructive force, is
a creative and dynamic force making itself manifest particularly in the humour
of all three writers. The humour being, I would say, Heraclitean..
D'ou que je me trouvais j’aurais bien voulu, question de crever,
avoir pour y passer une musique plus à moi, plus vivante. Le plus
cruel de toute cette dégueulasserie c’est que je l’aimais pas la musique
des phrases à mon père. [11]
It is an extraordinary thing to read the
above passage, Céline, all his life, referred to his style of writing as ‘music’,
in both the interviews with the author which I have already cited here in this
article you will hear him speaking about his style of writing as being akin to
music. Of course, Céline is not the first writer to do so, just off hand I am
reminded of both Beckett and Joyce making similar references. Joyce was such a
good singer of Italian opera that, at one stage, he almost contemplated a
career as a singer, he was good friends with the celebrated tenor John
McCormack ( 1884-1945) and there are musical references throughout Joyce’s
entire literary output – his earliest collection of poetry is called Chamber
Music ( 1907). As for Beckett, he used to play Schubert and sing his lieder
and referred to Beethoven in relation to his use of silence in his writings. On
a similar note, a recent study on Céline and Beethoven has just been published
by Yannick Gomez, who happens to be a both a pianist and a composer as well as
being a writer.[12]
[1] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: Guerre, Édition Établi
par Pascale Fouché, Avant-Propos de François Gibault, Gallimard, Paris, 2022.
(
This is the edition I will be referring to throughout this text)
[2]
Ibid ( p.12)
[3]
The exclusion of the poetry
of Jim Morrison from contemporary anthologies of North American Poetry must be
one of the most scandalous things in the so -called literary world today, and
must surely be the subject of an entire article in itself.
[4]
The whole mystery of the
disappearance of the manuscripts of Dr Louis Ferdinand Destouches, called
Céline, is the subject of an entire investigation unto itself and is still
shrouded in controversy. To give you some example of which, the surviving
members of his family, godchildren of his first marriage, are currently suing
Gallimard, his French publisher, for publishing Guerre and the other two
books Londres ( 2022) and La
Volonté du roi Krogold ( 2023) all published by Gallimard and which were
apparently stolen from his apartment in Paris when he went into exile with his
wife after the arrival of the Allies in Normandy in 1944. The texts all
surfaced some years ago and were only recently deposited with his former
publisher, Gallimard, after first having been vetted by the French authorities.
[5] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: D’un château l’autre,
Collection Folio, Les Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2011, p.10.
[7] Céline,
Louis Ferdinand: Guerre, Édition Établi par Pascale Fouché, Avant-Propos
de François Gibault, Gallimard, Paris, 2022, p.45. ‘ Okay Ferdinand, I said to myself,
you don’t have much time ta kill, you ain’t nothin but an old coward and a good
for nothin, so good enough for you, you stupid cunt.’ ( my translation)
[8] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: Guerre, Édition Établi
par Pascale Fouché, Avant-Propos de François Gibault, Gallimard, Paris, 2022,
p.26.
[9] Ibid, p.59.
[10] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: Guerre, Édition Établi
par Pascale Fouché, Avant-Propos de François Gibault, Gallimard, Paris, 2022,
p.60.
[11] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: Guerre, Édition Établi
par Pascale Fouché, Avant-Propos de François Gibault, Gallimard, Paris, 2022,
p.60.
[12] Gomez, Yannick: D’un musicien l’autre, De Céline
à Beethoven, La Nouvelle Librarie, Paris, 2023.
