A
Further Heraclitean Duality
It is largely accepted that the two greatest literary
stylists in France during the last century were Marcel Proust ( 1871-1922) and
Louis Ferdinand Céline ( 1894-1961). There is a duality at work here, and it
works on many levels; literary – Proust famously wrote interminably long and
complex sentences full of multiple clauses and which went on and on sometimes
for pages on end, while Céline’s style was the very antithesis, his sentences
were broken down into mere phrase often terminating in the famous three dots…
followed by an exclamation point! And, while Proust came from a wealthy family,
his father being a doctor was a member of what we used to call the professional
classes, and they lived in the fashionable part of Paris where the young writer
attended the Lycée Condorcet, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in
Paris and which introduced the young Proust into the world of the upper middle
classes which he was to spend his entire life documenting, while the young
Céline went into employment at a relatively young age, being the only son of a
relatively middle class family who were quick to send him off to both England
and Germany so that he might gain practical experience in learning languages,
which he could later put to good professional use. As for religious background,
Proust’s mother came from a Jewish background and this is certainly a very
determining factor in his work, the Dreyfuss Affair frames a lot of the background
of the monumental chronicle of the characters who come and go during the eight
volumes, while Céline is still a notorious figure due to the virulently
antisemitic pamphlets that he wrote during the nineteen thirties and forties.
Yet, despite all of these apparent differences, in their writings they shared
one common value which has made them the writers they are, and that is both of
them understood the power and importance of human emotion to tell a story, and
this is the subject of their commonality and which I want to explore in the
present article. If we just take a couple of pages at random from both authors,
I have decided to take the first couple of pages from À l’ombre des jeunne
filles en fleurs by Proust, and a chapter, one that I was actually reading,
from D’un château l’autre by Céline and by examining some passages from
both works, it may just surprise the reader how similar, despite their very
different literary styles, both writers actually are. Again, this is a
Heraclitean element which, no doubt, as I often do, I shall also be remarking
on.
Ma mère, quand il fut question d’avoir pour la première
fois M. de Norpois à dîner, ayant exprimé le regret que
le professeur Cottard fût en voyage et qu’elle-même eût
entièrement cessé de fréquenter Swann, car l’un et
l’autre
eussent sans doute intéressé l’ancien ambassadeur, mon
père répondit qu’un convive éminent, un savant illustré,
comme Cottard, ne pouvait jamais mal faire dans une
dîner,
mais que Swann, avec son ostentation, avec sa manière
de crier sur les toits ses moindres relations, était un
vulgaire esbroufeur que le marquis de Norpois eût sans
doute trouvé, selon son expression, « puant ».[1]
Here, in the microcosm of this one long complex
sentence, made up of multiple non-defining relative clauses ( the infinite
Proustian loop), the whole macro-cosmos of the Proustian universe may be
dissected and exposed for what it in fact is. An emotional world, in a
nutshell. In this opening sentence, Proust inserts the two words in any
language which are going to provoke an emotional response, however subliminal,
on any reader, and they are – Ma mère and mon père. Proust goes
straight in, the very first two words which begin the novel are Ma mère!
He takes you right into the heart of the matter in his story, in any one’s
story, by introducing you straightaway to his parents, or at least, the parents
of the leading protagonist, who is based on himself the author. And this is yet
another factor which both these writers have in common, they both used the
substance of their own lives to create the characters and plots of their own
supposed literary fictions.
A second thing, after introducing you to his parents,
in the very first sentence, he then inserts an opportune occasion for a bit of
humour, after emotion comedy, or humour, and the two are of course incredibly
linked, is the next thing which both authors used to the maximum advantage for
getting the reader on their side as what are the two things that anyone, any
human at least, needs for entertainment but some kind of emotional content that
they can to some degree sympathise with, everyone, for good or bad, has
parents, in some form or another, and, being human, so is caught up in the
emotional entanglements of their parents and will side with either one or
another, or, contrarywise like Céline, choose to remain detached or apart from
them. For Proust, despite his great feelings for his father, his mother, and
women in general, are very much the object of his attention; it’s all in the
book’s title, after all.
Swann is, of course, the catalyst for Proust’s
parent’s cause for debate. For despite the fact that his mother has, and by her
own admission ‘entièrement cessé de frequenter Swann’, but at the same time
expresses the regret that she has, in a sense, as Norpois would have
appreciated his company if he had been invited to dine also, while his father
is much more emphatic on the subject of Swann and whom he explicitly detests
because of his ‘ostentation, avec sa manière de crier sur les toits ses
moindres relations’, he is, according to his father, a poser, a name dropper,
‘un vulgaire esbroufeur’ and which even the marquis de Norpois, himself, would
‘selon son expression’, Stink. It's a very funny first sentence and it is a
sign of Proust’s genius how he wins, or not, the reader straight away and
thereby brings them immediately into the story by practically inviting them
into his family home. Is this a very Jewish trait? I merely ask the question as
it reminds me, very much, of the humour of Woody Allen, again a Jewish writer
and film maker, who, once again, uses emotions and humour to get a direct
response from the cinema goer.
So, to recapitulate, in the very first sentence of
Proust’s novel À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs we are immediately
struck by two things; the very emotive content of the text, or novel, which is
that of a family discussion about something as banal as an invitation to a
dinner party and the subsequent social politics that goes along with such an
event, be they working class, middle class or upper, everyone can relate to the
content of the subject that’s under discussion any they can also relate to the different
alliances that go also go with such social interactions, and, secondly, the very
long complex sentence structure or organisation of the content, those complex
clauses in which a lot of non-essential information is being given, but, and
this is the whole point, knowing the very complex intricacies of all human
relationships, the form is dictated, in a sense, by the complexity of the
social interactions of the characters who are being presented. Humour, then, is
the solidifying agent that unites the reader to the emotional content of the
topic that is under discussion and it is these two last points which,
crucially, bypass the very complex social interactions that are being discussed
for, at the end of the day, whether the characters under discussion are
upper-middleclass Jews, middle class protestant or agnostics or working class
Catholics, the creeds are irrelevant as the culture is one in the same, and
that is human. This is the transcendental agent, as it were, which allows
Proust to connect, and from the very first line, with the intelligence of the
reader. Let us now turn our attention to Monsieur Céline.
Mois qui croyait!...en fait les malades reviennent
pas !...ni les impatients des W-C…, tout ça doit être
filé aux caves, aux grottes…leurs caves préférées…
ou sous le Château ?...la frousse les tient…pire que
les passages d’R.A.F., Aïcha et la chambre 36 ! je
suis
sûr…Lili et Aïcha sont là, sur le palier…elles parlent
de ci, de ca, de tout…bon ! …moi, je dois aller
chez Luther… la consultation de Kurt Luther, méde-
cin mobilisé fritz…c’est l’heure !...[2]
‘Moi’ first word, chez Céline, that hits us on the
page, first word that opens this particular chapter and it is further paralleled
by the phrase ‘je suis sûr’, Me…I am sure, the first singular pronoun ‘moi’ is
paraphrased by ‘je suis’ and further down, it is once again repeated ‘moi, je
dois aller’, me, I have to go, so the narrator, Céline, as is typical of his
work, is putting himself central to the text, all of the action is happening around
the ‘I’ or the ‘Moi’, and, of course, this is a much more immediate locus to for
the reader to enter into as everyone can identify with the I, it is one of the
great privileges of reading to be able to shed one’s own circumstances and
through the prism of the pronoun enter into the world of an altogether different
subject, but whose context, through the ‘moi’ through the ‘je’ we can enter
more immediately into the world of this other who has in a sense become us, in
that we see the world now more immediately through them. And, because of the
pronoun, its proximity to us, we can also jettison the formality of the speech…as
we are talking directly to ‘oursleves’, oneself. Céline, that is, is targeting
the other through himself, in the directness of the self and so the content,
once again, determines the form, in a sense, and so the language must, by
necessity become much more immediate. So all of the social conventions of the French
language proper, as Proust employs them, all of the elaborate structure of the
clauses, which is as complex and structured as the society in which we the
readers now find ourselves, here in Céline, becomes altogether redundant. ‘elles
parlent de ci, de ca, de tout…bon!...moi, je dois aller chez Luther…’What is
comical, and here Céline’s genius is on parallel with Proust’s, here is the way
in which Céline is so dismissive of the content of the women’s discussion. If
this were Proust, Proust would have gone into every detail of the discussion
that both Lili and Aïcha were having at that particular moment in time. But
chez Céline, not a chance. He wants to get on with the subject at hand, which
is to say the main events going on around the castle in Siegmaringen, namely
the constant attacks from the sky of the combined allied air forces and the
almost complete obliteration of the Luftwaffe.
je vous ai dit…y a pas que l’Armada!... elle est
haute !...
y a les maurauders, rase-motte !...vous avez
vu, je vous
ai raconté la promenade, la façon qu’ils nous avaient
comme
sertis de balles pendant tout le long du Danube…[3]
The repetition is explicit, ‘je vous ai dit…’, the
narrator, Ferdinand, is talking to you directly, situating you exactly on the
spot. He is talking to you directly. ‘…vous avez vu, je vous ai raconté la
promenade,’ he’s not using the informal tu, he is still using the formal
vous, but here he is just following polite French social conventions,
and so is even all the more to be trusted, the voice that is.
Puisque je vous reparle de la promenade, à y
repenser, c’est évident, s’ils avaient pas touché
Pétain, ni sa queue leu leu des ministres, c’est qu’ils
voulaient pas ! un jeu !...et pas un avion
fritz en l’air !
…jamais !...et pas une mitrailleuse au sol ! en
somme, pas de « passive » ! n’importe quel
bonhomme,
vache, chien, chat, à 400 à l’heure ! vu ! visé !
feu ! salut !...[4]
And now, we are directly in the matter at hand. In one
clean line, Céline describes the situation directly as it was, emotively to any
one who will ‘listen’. ‘He’ is, or rather his Ferdinand, is your eyes and ears
on the ground in the environs of Siegmaringen when the allies were strafing the
roads, shooting anything that moved, being Lords of the Skies, the German Airforce
having been completely annihilated at this late stage in the war. And he is
speaking to you directly in a language that you can trust, no frills, no
embellishments, the Anti-Proust, in a sense. And in this sense you could say,
that Céline, just as Proust is describing the mundane world of the upper
classes using suitably upper class register, in other words perfectly
formulated grammar, so perfectly formulated in fact as to be almost hyperbole,
and in this too there is much humour to be mined, as the register is maintained
to the absolute rigour for the entire eight volumes; and so, Céline, on his
part, takes on the role of the exact counterpart of Proust, socially, in other
words the language and ‘largo’, or slang, of the working classes. Stripped of every
artifice, you could say.
j’étais dans la “Consigne Routine…
Rien sur les routes !... la même des boches ou des Anglais !
« Rien sur des routes ! » ni chats, ni
chiens, ni bonhommes !
ni brouettes !...tout ce qui bouge : rigodon !
ptof !...[5]
Yannick Gomez, in his singularly unique comparative
study of Céline and Beethoven D’un musicien l’autre, makes the point
that onomatopoeia is one of the distinguishing or key factors that Céline
manages to create his famous ‘music’. ‘Ici comme plus tard dans Féerie II et sa copieuse description de
bombardements, nous retrouvons ces mêmes onomatopée qu’il réemploiera à satiété
dans la trilogie allemande. Cette écriture accidentée produit in petto des
changements de tempo dans l’oreille du lecteur.’[6]
The repetitions, the constant para-phrasing in Céline,
is all part of an extremely complex literary style which he had to copiously apply
and reapply by writing and rewriting in order to pare the style right back to
its fundamentals, so that while the reader reads the prose with the ease and
fluidity of hearing a stream flow or perhaps more so a river flowing along
smoothly, the writing has been very meticulously crafted, just as with Proust, so
that it is creating the illusion of typical spoken speech patterns of a
particular kind of class of person, the immediacy found in the very informal
use of language, the slang, all are helping to contribute to the ease and flow
of a certain kind of person coming from what we could describe as the more
common or ordinary kind of French person from the – dare I say it – ‘working
classes’. And, just as Proust, with his very complex and elaborate French
usage, is trying to portray the upper classes of French society just before,
during and after WWI, Céline is attempting to portray a certain kind of French person
of before, during and after WW2, at least in the latter novels. But the social
elements, or points of view, are completely superficial for what both writers
are ultimately trying to portray in their characters and plots is the utterly
human.
Or cette réponse de mon père demande quelque mots
d’explications, certaines personnes se souvenant peut-être
d’un Cottard bien médiocre et d’un Swann poussant jusqu’a
la plus extrême délicatesse, en matière mondaine, la
modestie
et la discrétion. Mais pour ce que regarde celui-ci, il était
arrivé qu’au « fils Swann » et aussi au Swann
du Jockey,
l’ancien ami de mes parents avait ajouté une personnalité
nouvelle ( et qui ne devait pas être la dernière), celle
de
mari Odette.[7]
Whatever class distinction you wish to underline with
either author, one thing becomes very clear when you are reading both and that
is the complexity of human behaviour and human communication, language being very
much a part of this. As we have remarked, with different classes different ways
of employing language are necessary, vital one could say, but when one looks behind
the words, the language, one notices very simply that there is another guiding
force that is animating the words, and which both Proust and Céline are tapping
into, and that is the human register. What Samuel Beckett says about Proust can
equally apply to Céline, indeed must.
For
Proust the quality of language is more important
than
any system of ethics or aesthetics. Indeed he makes
no
attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is concretion
of
the other, the revelation of a world.[8]
This is an extremely important point in our times when
we are living in such a polarised world and when forces seem to be at work to
keep us ever so deeply entrenched in our altogether superficial differences;
class, gender, sex, race, creed, nationality, etc., etc. As the man said above,
respect for the other is all that counts. So, whenever you hear some idiot praising
Proust above Céline or Céline above Proust, you know then in your heart that
the cretin didn’t understand anything as both authors, as we have so far seen,
are merely interested in describing what is human, altogether being simply
human and as the sage of Ephesus well knew, the opposites at both ends are but
two forms of the mean.
[1] Proust, Marcel: À l’ombre des
jeunes filles en fleurs, Folio Classique, Paris, 2007, p.3.
[2] Céline, Louis Ferdinand: D’un château l’autre,
Folio, Paris, 2023.
[3]
Ibid, p.211.
[4]
Ibid, pp.211-212.
[5]
Ibid, p.212.
[6] Gomez, Yannick: D’un musicien l’autre, De Céline à
Beethoven, Préface de Michael Donely, La Nouvelle Libraire, Éditions,
Paris, 2023, p.49.
[7]
Ibid, p.3.
[8]
Beckett, Samuel: Proust
and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, John Calder, London, 1987, p.88.
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