If there is a writer destined to fail the tests of good conduct for posterity, it is Louis Ferdinand Destouches, alias Céline. I have a copy of his pamphlet Trivia for a massacre in original edition of 1937, inherited from a collector. Uplifting reading!
We understand how far human conscience can sink, when hatred, anti-Semitism and other screaming demons are unleashed to mislead it.
One of the greatest writers in the world, however. The author of journey to the Edge of the Night, also a doctor of the poor, will have launched a cry of humanism and despair there that will tear your eardrums apart with shocking images, reinvented spoken language, incredible energy, a refusal to talk about it, vertigo. Enough to suppose that a blow to the head during a puzzle mission during the First World War, partly linked to a syndrome of post-traumatic stress, would explain his ideological drifts later. Without being sure of anything, jostled by the enigma of the character, admiring his incendiary and dark work. No question of canonizing Céline, but genius and virtue do not always go hand in hand. Might as well admit it.
In Paris, after the Cannes Film Festival, a trip to the end of its night, I went to the Gallimard Gallery to see the exhibition The manuscripts foundwith writings, photos, postcards, letters, various documents and artefacts shedding light on the context of the recent publication of the War by Celine. The book, I had bought it and devoured it in France, before it landed here.
A capital piece
This unpublished work found after the death of his widow, Lucette, returned with other parts of his work last year, is really worth the detour. The author believed War and other writings (including London, expected on the shelves in the fall) lost forever, following the ransacking of his Montmartre lair after the Liberation. In From one castle to another, he evoked the abduction of his possessions: “All my books and my instruments, my furniture and my manuscripts!…. all the mess…! I found nothing! »
Céline will have been imprisoned, treated as a traitor, a collaborator, an instigator of anti-Semitic violence and so on, with good reason. Pariah, but rushing in the stretchers, writing, belching, his pen soaked in vitriol until his death in Meudon in 1961.
But here it is! War is a vital piece of the Celinian puzzle. Glued to journey to the Edge of the Night and to Death on credit, his best period, with fragments drawn from reality, others visibly very fictionalized. The episode of Ferdinand’s march wounded in combat, the pain in his head that never subsided, the hospitals, human weakness, the great military butchery that traumatized him are at the heart of the story.
“I caught the war in my head,” he wrote. It’s locked in my head. »
Another thundering theme: sexuality, whose salacious descriptions will disturb decent people. Especially since one of the nurses makes her alter ego Ferdinand suffer the last outrages on her bed of misery.
Moreover, as a foreword to War, one of Céline’s great exegetes, her biographer François Gibault, speaks of this real or fictitious nurse “who seems to take advantage of the situation to engage in practices that morality condemns on the wounded”. Without specifying to what extent bloody war, which kills and cripples soldiers, constitutes a practice that morality should reprove much more. The puritanism of the hour blurs the view.
And if certain rabid revisionists managed one day to have Céline’s works banned, it would perhaps be less for the infamous political positions of the pamphlets than for the pornography of her novels.
In War, all of Céline is there, with raw words, bad faith, black humor, the genius of the language, misogyny, misanthropy, tinnitus, cruelty, betrayals, grief in the face of the death of others, especially that of Bébert, the mackerel friend, so loose and so fragile. The hospital episode and its aftermath are experienced through hell: “For the experience, I was aging a month a week, he summarizes. This is the train you have to go to avoid being shot in the war. “But also, opening the lid of his bruised mind:” I believe more in facilities. I learned to make music, sleep, forgiveness and, you see, beautiful literature too, with little bits of horror torn from the endless noise
never. »
He is more often in refusal to cry over his fate, Céline. Yelling, gesticulating, embracing the human condition with its animality, its fierce instincts stronger than the shadow of the beginning of reason. Without ever believing in the tomorrows that sing. Here it is again shattered like this mirror held out to the world. His prose dazzles us.