To Speak Frankly.!... Orality in D’un château l’autre by Louis Ferdinand Céline

 

  

To Speak Frankly.!...

Orality in D’un château l’autre

By Louis Ferdinand Céline

 

In the following article I will be discussing the very systematic use of discourse markers, signposts, paraphrasing and simple acts of repetition in D’un château l’autre by Céline, and how this very systematic method of work, mode de travail, enabled him to paradoxically create an astonishing semblance of orality in this later novel and which I would regard as one of the very greatest novels in Céline’s entire literary output. Due to the recent publication of ‘trois brouillons !...’[1] – Guerre ( 2022), Londres ( 2022) and Le volonté du roi Krogold ( 2023), there has been a renewed interest in the French writer who has long remained in relative obscurity in English speaking countries, particularly today, due to his very controversial reputation regarding his antisemitic publications during the thirties and early forties and his subsequent imprisonment by the Danish authorities after the war when he was finally released in the early fifties and given clemency by the French government ( 1951) and he returned to France to live in Meudon along the banks of the Seine where the first part of   D'un château l’autre is set. One of the motivating factors behind this article is that I think the name of Céline needs some rehabilitating as there have been many studies concerning the writer and particularly by Jewish writers, among them the commentator Stéphane Zagdanski ( 1993), which give a greater clarity to this most complex writer and who is, in my opinion, as important in scale, and quite easily so, as other modernist writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Indeed, the latter, I will be making the case, was profoundly influenced by Céline, particularly in his last full length novel in French Comment c’est ( 1961) and this is another aspect of this text in which I shall be comparing the orality in both works.

To begin, the very first phrase which D’un château l’autre begins is the following, ‘Pour parler franc,’[2] and it is the first signpost which starts the novel, one out of a series of signposts which most of the opening paragraphs commence with – ‘Je vous parle de ma mère,’[3], ‘Je reviens à Bellevue…’[4], ‘Je vous parlais d’en bas,’ [5] ‘Parlons médecine…’[6] ‘Les malades don’t je vous parlais,’ [7], ‘Pour ce qui me concerne, je vous disais que la vie,’[8] – and it goes on and on creating in the mind of the reader the impression that the narrator, Louis Ferdinand Céline, the pseudonym of Doctor Destouches, is sitting there beside you having a good chat with you, and speaking quite frankly as he does.

These signposts are just the first factor in a systematic use of language by the author in which he creates an incredibly fluid oral quality, repetition, he repeatedly tells you that he is talking to you, as Lucretius knew well, is the great instructor. Céline repeats and repeats and repeats the fiction that he is talking to you, when in fact he is writing the words down on a page, but while he repeats and repeats the lie, as Goebbels knew, you, the reader, begin to believe it!  

to be continued...

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[1] Céline, Louis-Ferdinand : D’un château l’autre, Gallimard, Paris, 1981, p.19.

[2] Ibid, p.7.

[3] Ibid, p.10.

[4] Ibid, p.11.

[5] Ibid, p.12.

[6] Ibid, p.12.

[7] Ibid, p.13.

[8] Ibid, p.14.