“Lola, I refuse war and everything in it […] Would they be nine hundred and ninety-five million and me alone, it’s them who are wrong, Lola, and it’s me who’s right, because I’m the only one who knows what I want: I don’t don’t want to die anymore. These words from Ferdinand Bardamu, Celine’s double in Journey to the Edge of the Night, pierce the sky, but do not make us forget the great writer’s anti-Semitism and mythomania.
At a time when we are publishing unpublished works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose real surname Destouches (1894-1961), where, in particular, the French author denounces in the First World War an “international slaughterhouse in madness “, academics, particularly from Quebec, are leading a collective work devoted to the first novel (1932) of the absolute pacifist. For Read Journey to the End of the Nightthey brought together 18 collaborators, including the novelists Jean-François Chassay and Anne Élaine Cliche.
The pacifist profession of faith that Bardamu delivers to Lola, an American, is illuminated by the nihilism that the main character sums up as follows: “The truth is an endless agony. The truth of this world is death. You have to choose, die or lie. One of the contributors to the collective work, Ludivine Fustin, makes a very enlightening judgment: “What the cynical novelist likes above all is to put his reader in an unstable position. »
“We, readers of Céline, are strange creatures. Reading Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) has accustomed us to the fact that literature is always the experience of the “supreme danger” that Walter Benjamin evokes about Hölderlin. »
Celinian cynicism expresses itself in a visceral contempt for literature, at least in its elitist dimension. “I have always been far from Art and Artists”, proclaimed the writer in 1932 in a letter to Élie Faure, a renowned esthete. This deep feeling goes hand in hand with his rehabilitation of the popular language in the romantic style, up to the poetic transfiguration.
Didn’t Céline write in 1947 to the American literary critic Milton Hindus that it is necessary to achieve, by demomifying the language, “a monologue of spoken intimacy, but transposed” by the “return of the spontaneous poetry of the savage”? Ludivine Fustin is aware of the importance of the references she cites, but, no more than other collaborators sensitive to the Celinian style, such as François-Xavier Lavenne, Jean-François Duclos, Bernabé Wesley, she does not transmit the thrill of the master damn.
But could one ask the impossible of university critics or even novelists produced by the university? By exalting “the spontaneous poetry of the savage”, Céline marginalizes herself to the extreme. He isolates himself from all normal rigorous thought by the stylistic fall which, surprisingly, becomes the only fragmented reason for his pacifism: “I don’t want to die anymore. For Céline, this insolent irreducible, the university would be, without the slightest doubt, the height of the mummification of intelligence.