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Sunday, June 25, 2023

Céline’s Guerre - a Reengagement with the French Writer after 30 years...


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.