The war inside Céline’s head

In France, it is the literary event of spring, if not of the year: the publication of War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the first of a series of unpublished manuscripts to be published from the found manuscripts of the writer – 5,324 pages which had disappeared since 1944. The initial print run of 80,000 copies by Gallimard announced the importance of this unexpected discovery. We are now on the fourth reprint while War sits at the top of sales.

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, known as Céline, literary genius for some, abominable anti-Semitic pamphleteer for others – he is those two things for exegetes – is back on the front page of the news, as if he were speaking to us from beyond the grave, not to say from his hell.

The story of these manuscripts, a disappearance that Céline denounced until her death in 1961, would be worth a novel in itself. It would begin with the Liberation of Paris, when the writer and his spouse Lucette Destouches, feeling the hot water, hastily left their apartment in Montmartre with the cat Bébert, to join the Pétainists. Thus are abandoned in a cupboard thousands of sheets written by hand, held by clothespins, which will mysteriously disappear, before rising to the surface only last year.

They were in the hands of Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, a former critic of the newspaper Release, who then contacts the rights holders without revealing where they come from, and they will respond by legal means. Why such a long silence? It seems that the person who held the manuscripts did not want Lucette, the widow of Céline, who died in 2019 (at 107 years old), to receive the slightest penny from the publication of these unpublished works. The manuscripts finally returned to the heirs of Lucette Destouches, Véronique Chovin and François Gibault, who signed the foreword to Warwhere he recalls that as early as 1934, in a letter to her publisher Robert Denoël, Céline wanted to publish three books after Death on credit : Childhood, War and London.

It’s that War, deciphered by the great specialist Pascal Fouché, which we have in our hands. Gallimard will publish London in the fall and will follow a tale, King Krogol’s will, as well as the complete version of the novel pipe breaker.

These recovered manuscripts are truly a gold mine.

Journey to the end of Celine

You never quite come back from reading the journey to the Edge of the Night by Céline, considered a masterpiece of 20th century literature^e century. I read it very young, knowing nothing of the man and his life, but I remember exactly where I was, the weather and how I felt when I finished it . I had never read such a ruthless charge against war, nationalism, colonialism and, more generally, the bullshit and cruelty of men. All accompanied by ordinary misogyny. Misanthrope, in my opinion, and that, in a unique language, raw and vulgar, like war, but not without these poetic flashes that make you want not to abandon the unbearable Ferdinand Bardamu.

For some specialistsWarwhich would have been written in a first draft around 1934, would be a missing link between journey to the Edge of the Night and Death on credit. No doubt the author would have corrected it before publication, because it is shorter than these two famous titles, and does not contain the three small dots characteristic of his style. I found there the violence of Céline, intact, still recent, fueled by the First World War, a butchery and an incredible trauma for those who lived through it – the survivors were not called “broken faces” for nothing. And they weren’t just broken in the face, their souls had gone there too.

With WarCéline responds to a devastating experience by the sole means of writing, in a kind of savagery where one feels a very literary jubilation, both ferocious and aggressive.

I have changed as a reader over the past 25 years. Hundreds of readings separate me from my first impressive encounter with Doctor Destouches. He is aggressive. He wants the whole world. He will always look for scapegoats, especially among the Jews.

It is already there, in the style and in the writing, before the pamphlets, this violence. In this language that he created from slang and popular anger – the novel is fortunately accompanied by a very instructive lexicon, where we wade through swear words. “Wherever I was from, I would have liked, in order to die, to have to play music that was more my own, more lively, we read in War. The cruellest thing about all this disgust is that I didn’t like the music of my father’s phrases. Dead, I would have got up I think to puke at him on his sentences. We don’t redo each other. Pushing your squeak again can be done, it’s all that precedes that exhausts poetry for you, all the cold cuts, the drooling, the tortures that precede the hiccups of the end. It must therefore be either brief or rich. »

War starts from the very beginning on the battlefield. Ferdinand, Céline’s alter ego, is wounded in the arm and in the head, he screams among the corpses, he almost passes out, telling himself that it is useless to revolt. “Except during the hours when I was operated on, I never completely lost consciousness again. I have always slept like this in the excruciating noise since December 14. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head. »

Thus, Céline returns to his wounds of the First World War which he said he had suffered all his life. He complained all his life, even after the concentration camps of World War II.

The young Destouches had spent his convalescence in a military hospital in Hazebrouck, renamed here Peurdu-sur-la-Lys. In this strange theater where you can hear the bombs in the distance, there is a doctor who wants to butcher him, a nurse, “La L’Espinasse”, who jerks off the wounded soldiers, and his friend Bébert, named in this manuscript Cascade, the Angèle’s pimp. Ferdinand will leave with Angèle for London after the execution of her friend, with the help of an English client of the prostitute. We are in a destroyed and pitiless world.

At the time, we weren’t talking about post-traumatic stress syndrome. His character is constantly haunted by the haunting sounds of war. “I looked at her life, almost torturing myself. When she puts me in agony for good, I’ll spit in her face like that. She’s all stupid from a certain point, don’t fool me, I know her well. I saw it. We will meet each other again. We have an account together. Fuck him. »

It looks like a program and a promise where you don’t believe that “life is so fragile”, because Ferdinand’s suffering and aggressiveness are mixed with a frontal lubricity, like a ferocious drive for life after having survived the horror. . War is also a pornographic novel, which wants to show the obscene everywhere, and not only in sex, very present in the novel. “I felt that there was still a lot of life inside, which was defending itself, so to speak. I would never have believed it possible if someone had told me. He says, precisely. And I realize that I only quoted to you a few snippets from the first pages of War, which I leave you free to discover. Because read Warwhich we never thought we’d find, it’s basically a personal rediscovery for Céline readers, who want to go to the end of a journey where the night is endless.

War

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Gallimard

184 pages
In bookshops on Thursday