Louis-Ferdinand Céline et l'idée de la mort… (lundi 1er juillet 2019, cela fait 58 ans que Louis-Ferdinand Céline est mort)

18 heures à Meudon, point de suspension… 

«Dans l'histoire des temps la vie n'est qu'une ivresse, la Vérité, c'est la mort»
L.-F. Céline, Semmelweis

Louis-Ferdinand Céline et l'idée de la mort

L’idée de la mort est présente dans toute l’œuvre de Céline; elle en est sa principale source d’inspiration, le point de départ d’un cheminement littéraire hors du commun. Au cœur du mystère de la mort, il puise force et courage pour un voyage périlleux traversant la nature humaine; périlleux, mais nécessaire pour affronter la vérité du monde, vision de prophète qui transgresse sa pensée jusqu’au délire des mots et de leur magie. Céline récite de longues suites de formules incantatoires afin de conjuguer le mauvais sort.
Comprendre la mort et sa malédiction… entreprise hasardeuse pour un homme aussi seul, vulnérable et angoissé par le destin tragique de l’humanité, résigné par l’habitude de subir leur propre folie. Céline consacre la puissance de son mysticisme à percer le secret des ombres, responsable des malheurs de son siècle; il en prédit les d’horreurs, mais en il paiera amèrement la note pour trop de lucidité.
Pendant toute sa vie, il côtoie cette mort à la fois terrible et sublime, navigue entre ses récifs et en longe les rives insondables. Il cohabite avec le néant, force l’obscurité, subit le silence, assume seul les risques, dénonce, prévient et accumule les haines. La sorcellerie de l’écriture célinienne est le résultat de cette recherche intime, un foisonnement d’émotions, un grouillement de fantômes et d’êtres étranges, un tâtonnement dans la nuit éternelle, la rencontre de spectres au détour de sentiers tortueux et d’enchevêtrements où le délire mystique se mêle à l’absurdité de l’existence.
Très tôt, il affronte cette mort dans sa représentation la plus terrible, la rencontre est directe et sans nuances; il apprend que « la raison d’État » ne fait pas dans la dentelle… Le choc! La guerre! L’esprit du temps! L’image de la réalité est cruelle et d’une absurdité complète. Il apprend, contrairement à la propagande habituelle des élites, que la guerre n’est pas un jeu de salon, parades d’uniformes, femmes, bénédictions et revues à cheval sur la grande place; celui qui crève là-bas n’a rien d’autre à gagner que l’oubli.
Sur le terrain, c’est pire que dans les histoires, la terre est nue, labourée d’obus, les arbres, les villes; la campagne enlisée dans une boue de sang et de putréfaction; tout cela n’est que recommencement et justification aux temps figés dans la mort. Fort de sa sensibilité, Céline entre dans la danse macabre par la guerre et la certitude de ses mensonges et de ses fausses promesses : la der des ders, la liberté, la démocratie, les valeurs, la morale, Dieu avec nous, le drapeau, la République, le courage, la gloire… le mensonge et la guerre toujours… une n’attend pas l’autre, indéfiniment, des siècles et des millénaires ainsi à se taper dessus.
La guerre et seulement la guerre, suffisance des généraux, complicité du politique et des curés… cette grande marche des civilisations, cent fois chantées par ceux qui restent et avivent le besoin de chair.
Puis, médecin, Céline constate la guerre des jours ordinaires, sa triste banalité, bouffer, produire, procréer avorter, la maladie, la vieillesse, la souffrance… encore crever… La mort en tant que moteur des sociétés… l’économie, la séduction, l’apprentissage, la médecine et même l’écriture, une bataille constante entre l’encre et le papier « sa peau sur la table » et au bout de tout cela, la nuit célinienne, éternelle, celle de chacun d’entre nous.
L’homme n’est pas un être de vie, mais de guerre, c’est-à-dire de mort. Là est la seule vérité ; la finalité et nul n’y échappe.
Cette évidence est pourtant inacceptable aux yeux de l’ensemble et d’autant la refuse d’où une banalisation de l’acte de mourir et le refus de le considérer comme une normalité permanente. Comment réagirait Céline avec notre immortalité du moment présent où demain n’existe pas?
Le modèle Ford de Voyage est le pâle prélude à l’exclusivité de l’éphémère, la consommation ultra rapide et répétée à l’infinie, à la chaine, offrir l’illusion d’une vie trop bien remplie pour ne pas s’arrêter à songer à l’état de permanence de la mort. La nier, elle est devenue le taboue le plus importants de la vie, un non-sens absolu et un refus de la réalité.

Comment écrirait Céline, aujourd’hui sur la mort, la vie et ses mensonges?
L’humain ne meurt plus, il quitte le monde, part en voyage, traverse un long couloir attiré par une lumière, blanche et éclatante… une multitude d’élucubrations et de faux espoirs que Céline n’a jamais ressenti. Il a fréquenté la mort de trop près pour se farcir de rêveries religieuses sur l’éternité paradisiaque, la réincarnation ou l’intégration d’une énergie spirituelle liée à un grand tout féérique; sorte d’univers spectacle télévisé, big-bang, feux d’artifice et supernova en trois dimensions.
En fait, l’idée de la mort est devenue libérale et démocratique, la dernière étape du consommateur consciencieux de son importance et satisfait d’une vie passée à entretenir l’éphémère. À la fin, le moribond peut choisir parmi des dizaines d’options possibles, selon la mode du moment, le type d’éternité qui lui convient. Peu importe, il en a le droit et ne pourra revenir accuser les vendeurs de rêve de charlatanisme.
Plus que jamais, l’œuvre de Céline apparaît comme incontournable, elle replace la mort dans une juste perspective, c’est-à-dire au centre de la vie. Il en fait la seule vérité possible; la vie, l’existence, le bonheur, est le plus grand des mensonges, la plus grande supercherie. Dès la naissance, il n’y a pas d’autres options que la mort, toujours à venir, menaçante et Céline ne peut accepter que d’autres refusent de l’admettre, de voir la réalité… assurément par lâcheté, croit-il. Pour lui, la « grande faucheuse » n’est nullement un mythe, que l’Ankou, chaque nuit, remplit sa charrette de passagers et, la seule certitude est qu’il reviendra demain et encore après, jusqu’au moment où il s’arrêtera devant sa porte.

Pierre Lalanne DIMANCHE 12 JUILLET 2009
https://celinelfombre.blogspot.com

«on ne devient pas antisémite en lisant Céline, c’est idiot de penser cela.» Jean Paul Louis, éditeur de L'Année Céline

«la question de la réédition des pamphlets 

n’est pas primordiale...»

Dans un Télérama Hors-Série de légende… (juin 2011)

Jean Paul Louis édite L’Année Céline, qui recense toutes les publications consacrées à l’écrivain. Pour lui, la question de la réédition des pamphlets n’est pas primordiale ...

C’est à Tusson, en Charente, que sont installées, depuis leur création, en 1982, les éditions du Lérot. Plus précisément, c’est la mention «libraire-éditeur et imprimeur de campagne» que Jean Paul Louis a inscrite sur sa carte de visite. Car, en plus de l’activité d’édition, où Céline occupe une place importante, voire centrale, Le Lérot est aussi une entreprise d’imprimerie en offset, spécialisée dans la fabrication de livres et doublée d’un atelier de brochage. Jean Paul Louis est par ailleurs auteur d’une thèse sur la correspondance de Céline, coresponsable avec Henri Godard de l’édition des Lettres de l’écrivain en Pléiade et de sa correspondance avec Marie Canavaggia (Lettres à Marie Canavaggia,1936-1960, éd. Gallimard).

Les éditions du Lérot ont-elles été créées autour de Céline, pour éditer Céline?

Quand ont été créées les éditions du Lérot, je travaillais déjà avec Henri Godard, qui a dirigé ma thèse, sur l’édition de la correspondance de Céline. Mais à ce moment-là et durant les premières années d’existence, Céline n’est pas particulièrement présent au catalogue. Quand on crée une maison d’édition, on ne sait pas précisément où on va, ça ne se passe pas comme ça, le catalogue évolue au fil du temps. La maison d’édition a commencé à publier les actes des colloques de la Société d’études céliniennes, tous

les deux ans. Mais c’est vraiment à partir de 1990 que le projet célinien a pris de l’ampleur. Avec la création de L’Année Céline, qui est une idée d’Henri Godard. Il s’agit d’un périodique annuel qui recense les travaux et les études consacrés à Céline — un vrai besoin, dans le cas d’un écrivain de son importance. Depuis vingt et un ans, la forme de L’Année Céline a peu évolué. Elle se présente comme un volume de 200 à 350 pages, en trois parties. La première rassemble des textes de Céline retrouvés au cours de l’année, essentiellement des lettres qui surgissent lors de ventes aux enchères ou de dispersion de collections privées. La deuxième partie est documentaire, elle rassemble des études autour de faits. Enfin, une troisième partie, plus universitaire, recense les travaux consacrés à l’écrivain et en donne des extraits. À quoi s’ajoute une bibliographie, afin de faire chaque année le point sur ce qui se publie. À côté de cela, nous avons publié également de petits volumes de textes de ou sur Céline, comme le volume de Préfaces et dédicaces (1987), le recueil 31, cité d’Antin (1988) ou l’attachant Céline de mes souvenirs, de Serge Perrault (1992). Et des études très fouillées comme le Relevé des sources et citations dans Bagatelles pour un massacre, d’Alice Kaplan, la thèse de Michaël Ferrier Céline et la chanson ou celle de Régis Tettamanzi sur Céline et «l’esthétique de l’outrance». Je publie ces ouvrages très spécialisés parce que je sais que personne d’autre ne le fera. Ce sont des volumes tirés à 500 exemplaires. Étant imprimeur, maîtrisant l’impression et le brochage, je peux revenir à des procédés techniques d’autrefois pour faire vraiment le nombre d’exemplaires que je souhaite.

Ce regard que vous posez sur les publications consacrées à Céline et l’intérêt que suscitent vos propres publications auprès du public vous permettent-ils d’estimer année après année la vigueur de l’actualité de Céline?

Cette année, on observe une inflation considérable de publications, liée au cinquantenaire de la mort de Céline. On observe toujours de tels pics quand il y a un référent événementiel. Quant à la progression ou non du lectorat de Céline, je ne sais pas. Mais je remarque que, dans mes fichiers de clients fidèles de L’Année Céline, il y a régulièrement de nouveaux inscrits, et des personnes qui se manifestent et veulent l’intégralité de la collection. Chaque volume est tiré entre 500 et 600 exemplaires, et je m’arrange pour que la série soit toujours entièrement disponible. C’est important, essentiel même, cette disponibilité des anciens volumes, quand on est, comme c’est le cas, lancé dans une entreprise éditoriale de longue haleine. Ce qui est certain, c’est qu’il existe une relève parmi les jeunes chercheurs. Je pense notamment au plus doué d’entre eux, Gaël Richard, qui a publié au Lérot le volume de documents commentés Le Procès de Céline, 1944-1951, paru en 2010.

Faut-il ou non rééditer les pamphlets de Céline? Quelle est votre position?

La question ne me paraît pas primordiale. En tant que lecteur de Céline, ce sont des textes que je relis rarement. Je trouve que Céline est bon dans l’invective courte, pas du tout dans la parole pamphlétaire construite. L’École des cadavres est certainement le plus mauvais livre qu’il ait écrit, et on ne peut que regretter qu’il ait abandonné Casse-pipe pour produire ce volume de circonstance. L’ensemble est stylistiquement faible, voire médiocre, sauf la fin de Bagatelles et certains passages des Beaux Draps. Que les pamphlets soient réédités ou pas, quelle importance? Rien n’est plus simple que se les procurer aujourd’hui, en achetant des éditions pirates sur Internet ou des éditions d’époque chez des libraires d’ancien: ce sont des livres très courants, étant donné leurs tirages importants. En même temps, si on les rééditait, je ne vois pas non plus où serait le problème. Le risque de contagion antisémite? Mais l’antisémitisme n’est pas contagieux, et on ne devient pas antisémite en lisant Céline, c’est idiot de penser cela.

www.dulerotediteur.fr

Propos recueillis par Nathalie Crom 

Photos : Benoît Linero pour Télérama

Au cœur de l'histoire: Louis Ferdinand Céline (Franck Ferrand)

André DUNAND : L’extraordinaire épopée de Ferdinand Bardamu

Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE & Roger NIMIER par Marc DAMBRE (2011)

La virulente polémique de Céline par Dominique Venner

Un samouraï d’Occident, Le Bréviaire des insoumis
de Dominique Venner, Editions Pierre Guillaume de Roux,2013 

La virulente polémique de Céline

Considéré comme le plus grand écrivain français du XXe siècle, rénovateur de la langue et du style, habité par une sorte de délire prophétique, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, Céline en littérature, constitue un autre exemple de radicale insoumission. Gravement blessé au cours des premiers combats de 1914, il fut décoré et réformé. Ayant entrepris des études de médecine, il soutint sa thèse en 1924 sur la vie et l'œuvre du Dr Semmelweis. Entré au Service d'hygiène de la S.D.N., il fut envoyé en mission aux U.S.A., en Europe et en Afrique jusqu'en 1927. Cinq ans plus tard, il publiait Voyage au bout de la nuit, salué aussitôt comme une œuvre littéraire capitale. Tout comme Léon Daudet dans L'Action française, l'intelligentsia de gauche réserva un accueil chaleureux à un auteur qui semblait lui appartenir, mais l'écrivain-médecin était rétif à tout embrigadement. La publication de Mea culpa (1936), après un voyage en u.R.S.S., montra qu'il n'avait pas été dupe du paradis soviétique. Ce livre consomma son divorce avec une gauche que dominaient les communistes.

Sentant venir une nouvelle guerre, Céline en attribua la responsabilité à une conspiration juive. Coup sur coup, il publia deux pamphlets qui le firent soudain apparaître comme un antisémite enragé : Bagatelle pour un massacre (1937) et L'École des cadavres (1938). Vitupérant la guerre et les charniers à venir, il dénonçait à sa façon «la coalition du capitalisme anglo-saxon, du stalinisme et du lobby juif» dont l'objectif (selon lui) était d'envoyer au massacre la jeunesse française en une guerre franco-allemande où elle-même n'interviendrait pas avant l'épuisement des combattants sacrifiés*.

Dans un genre assez différent, Céline publia en 1941 un nouveau pamphlet, Les Beaux Draps, sans doute la seule de ses œuvres qu'illumine un léger halo d'espérance. À côté d'une célèbre tirade sur le «communisme Labiche », il livrait une méditation poétique sur l'esprit de la France, écrite dans le style des ballades et des virelais du XVe siècle, non sans quelques coups de patte fort injustes donnés à Montaigne. Ce curieux livre, où l'antisémitisme, quoique présent, est assez estompé, délivrait cette fois un message furibard à l'encontre de la prédication chrétienne, ultime recours du régime de Vichy qu'il méprisait: «Propagée aux races viriles, aux races aryennes détestées, la religion de "Pierre et Paul" fit admirablement son œuvre, elle décatit en mandigots, en sous-hommes dès le berceau, les peuples soumis, les hordes enivrées de littérature christique, lancées éperdues imbéciles, à la conquête du Saint Suaire, des hosties magiques, délaissant à jamais leurs Dieux de sang, leurs Dieux de race ... Ainsi la triste vérité, l'aryen n'a jamais su aimer, aduler que le dieu des autres, jamais eu de religion propre de religion blanche ... Ce qu'il adore, son coeur, sa foi, lui furent fournis de toutes pièces par ses pires ennemis .. .» Dans un langage différent, Nietzsche n'avait pas dit autre chose.

L'ouvrage fut interdit par les services de Vichy en zone Sud et suscita les plus vives réserves de la Propaganda Abteilung ...

* Pierre Monnier, « Céline et les têtes molles", Bulletin célinien, Bruxelles, 1998 

I Bite Everywhere… Je mords tout ce qui se présente… Céline dans New York Times February 10, 1972, croqué par David Levine

Céline par David Levine 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, drawing by David Levine

I Bite Everywhere… Je mords tout ce qui se présente…
I Bite Everywhere par Nigel Dennis à propos de 

Guignol's Band by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Bernard Frechtman, translated by Jack T. Nile. New Directions, 288 pp. ; Voyeur Voyant by Erika Ostrovsky, Random House, 338 pp. ; Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim, Delacorte, 360 pp. ; North by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim, Delacorte, 464 pp.

Cascade, proxénète, raconte à Ferdinand et Borokrom que ses souteneurs (Jojo, l'Allumeur, la Poigne) ont été mobilisés et qu'ils sont partis sur le front en lui laissant leurs filles. Cascade raconte également qu'une rixe l'a opposé au sergent Matthew au sujet de Ferdinand et Borokrom. Ferdinand évoque ses souvenirs de guerre et explique pourquoi il est désormais réformé. Rapidement, naissent des querelles entre les filles confiées à Cascade. Durant une bagarre, Angèle, femme légitime de Cascade, plante une fourchette dans les fesses de La Joconde. Ferdinand et Boro emmènent la blessée au London Hospital. Elle sera opérée par le docteur Clodowitz, et Ferdinand fera ses débuts en qualité d'infirmier.Uproar in the whorehouse! Angèle has accused Joconde of wearing a wig. “And then, hup! Without time to say oof!” she’s pulled a knife and plunged it into Joconde’s fanny. Screams ring through the room as Joconde, “squeezing her ass in her two hands,” races from pillar to post yelling “Help!” Moved by feminine curiosity, all the other whores dash after her trying to see the wound; Angèle starts feeling guilty and begins to snivel; Cascade, the great ponce, sees that he must intervene;
“Where’d she stick you, tell me, Mimine?”
“There, sweet darling, there!…Ow!”
One quick glance at her ass is enough. Joconde must go to the hospital. But she hears the dreaded word. She screams:
“I want to die here!”
“You won’t die here, you slut!”
He tries to cheer her up. “Look! You’re not the only one with a nice ass.”
He whips off his pants, presents his own behind. It’s tattooed all over! On the right buttock, a rose. On the left, a wolf’s face with long teeth. Over the wolf is written in green letters: “I bite everywhere.”
Even Joconde smiles when she sees that. She lets the other whores stuff towels and oilcloth up her ass, roll her up in a tablecloth, and rush her to the street door. Cascade can’t help take her to the hospital because a police inspector has happened by at this difficult moment and must be persuaded that the situation is normal:
“I’m sure that in your family, Inspector, you’ve got trouble, too!…Ah, I bet! …It’s a subject that makes me terribly sad…. And how unhappy everyone is! …And how that kind of thing ages you…!”
Now Joconde is in the cab—and it’s off to the London Hospital. A long way, but no other hospital will do. At the London is Dr. Clodovitz, the French refugee with no papers. The British let “Clodo” work there because there’s a war on and he’s ready to do the dirty jobs—face up to
…the cockney housewives and the drunken bullies…the peglegs, the whisky cirrhoses, the fistulas, the broken heads, the dyspeptics, the lumbagoes cut in two who squalled about everything, the albuminous, their little bottles, the finical bellyachers, the anti-everythings, the death dodgers, the people with little pensions, the choking asthmatics, all of them corralled, roped in, pushing one another, squeezed against the door….
And down on all this comes the yellow fog, drifting into the public wards—and “Clodo” drifting with it, a kerosene carriage lamp (to see the patients with) held high in one hand, a kindly hypodermic in the other. “Soon be over…. Soon be over,” he murmurs in each ear. And the beds with the dead in them are wheeled into the street, and the fog on the Thames Embankment covers them forever like an eternal pall. “I can’t help saying that when I die I’d like to be left on the sidewalk…just like that, all alone…you wouldn’t see anything…carried off gently…faith in the gloom.” Except that life must go on, and the fundamentals of life are very different—particularly to Cascade:
“And how’s her ass coming along?”
“That part’s all right!” [said “Clodo.”]
“When the ass is all right, everything’s all right,” he answers.

Illustration figurant dans l'édition originale de Guignol's Band

So happily ends a scene in Céline’s novel Guignol’s Band. What a combination it is—the rude realities of knife, ass, and choking asthmatics all melting into a dream world of fog and eternal sleep! It is only a point of minor interest that a Frenchman should be the greatest novelist of London since Dickens: it is the genius, not the locality, that is the point of astonishment. Céline set his scenes in many places, including Africa and North America, and only New York and Detroit were too much for his recreative eyes. There, and there alone, do we find the stereotyped responses, the accepted picture of an automatic, soulless city: perhaps we must assume that his business was never with the New World, only with the decays and diseases of the old.
The so-called seminal writers are often ones who do not achieve a great deal themselves, but plant the seeds that are needed by their greater successors. But Céline was a seminal writer of another sort. In the first place, no successor has managed to take over his seeds and grow greater works than his own from them. In the second place, he is a sower of seeds that germinate not only within their own setting but in the minds of his readers—some little sentence, some passing phrase that sticks in the mind and grows with such vigor that one is astonished, after years of living and growing with it, to refer back to its origins and find that what one has expanded into a vision occupying pages is in fact only a little suggestion sketched in two or three lines.
In this manner, all the seed he sows seems to expand within his own works, which become bigger and more extensive in their visions the longer one carries them around in the imagination. Not much space, really, is used in Guignol’s Band to describe the burial of the poor in eternal fog. But after ten or twenty years of carrying that image in the mind, a huge vision has been blown up in the memory—the vast hospital in the huge city, the broad Embankment, the invisible dead lying on their wheeled beds in their endless rows, covered by fog until the day of judgment.
In the same novel, two of these wild Frenchmen go to work on an old pawnbroker in his Greenwich bedroom. They heave him up, throw him in the air, turn him upside down, shake him like mad. Out of his pockets, out of hidey-holes all over his body, sovereigns and half-sovereigns shoot out and fly through the air; the more the gold flies, the more the excited Frenchmen shake and wrestle. And over the years, the fantastic scene swells in the reader’s memory until it expands into the sphere of Greek myth—the dirty room fills with showers of gold and covers the struggling little figures, like Zeus descending on Danaë. One scrubby little incident flowers into a spectacular legend.
And so it happens with hundreds of little scenes, with dozens of tiny episodes. That famous moment on the cross-Channel packet boat in Death on the Installment Planwhen the seasick Frenchman, watched with fascination by his fellow travelers, strains for what seems like hours to empty his stomach over the side—and at last succeeds in vomiting out one raspberry: it takes Céline a dozen lines, but in the mind, that retching runs on forever. So does the absurd walk by the French father, mother, and child along the cliffs from the landing place to Brighton, the father striding adamantly toward the goal, the mother dragging behind him on her lame leg, the little boy crying his eyes out in the rear—with here again the fog falling like a blanket on the ridiculous figures and rising only occasionally to reveal the pointing finger of a signpost, marked “To Brighton.” And on and on they march “To Brighton” in the imagination, never pausing but never arriving, three struggling figures that are never forgotten. This is what Henry Miller means when he says simply: “Céline lives within me. He always will.”
Any man who has lived with Céline’s visions growing in his mind perpetually over the years must feel a vast admiration for their original creator. The huge expenditure of physical energy that lies behind them, the intensity of the concentration—these repeat both the abandon that killed Dickens as well as the theatrical demonstrativeness that was also the great mark of Dickens. But one must make a small correction in the use of the word “theatrical.”

Céline and his vision / Céline Le voyeur voyant
by/par Erika Ostrovsky

In her study Céline and His Vision (1968) Erika Ostrovsky noted the fact that there is a Céline who travels and a Céline who stays at home—a translated Céline who captures his American and British readers with his visions, and an original Céline whose literary style is what has mattered most to his fellow countrymen. This is a good observation. The reader who has digested Joyce is not particularly impressed by the famous “three dots” with which Céline broke the orthodox French sentence into pieces and stood French syntax on its head. But it is also possible that the American reader has been attuned in advance to those “three dots” and the rhythm they impose on the movement of a sentence. This rhythm is not of any prose, nor is it of any theatrical dialogue. It belongs to the world of the silent film and the earliest comedies of the American cinema.
Each broken fragment of a few words is one of those little frames jerking its way through the projector and deriving a good part of its humor from its stuttering progress from one absurdity to another. When Joconde is rushed to the hospital, when Cascade and his gang are chased through the streets of London by furious dockers, we relive the fantastic chases and rushes of the cinema as it was in Céline’s boyhood. One wonders now: was it mere coincidence that two of Céline’s earliest American worshippers, James Agee and Otis Ferguson, were not only wild men who loved Céline’s anarchy, but men who never escaped from the tutelage of the film?
Céline, whose life was a perpetual pretense and self-invention, never paid tribute either to Dickens or to the early film. Nor does Dr. Ostrovsky have anything to say of either in her disastrous new book on Céline, Voyeur Voyant. There are so many rude things to say about this supposed biography that the quicker they are said, and the more briefly, the better for everyone except the biographer.
First, her book is not ordered chronologically. It is ordered by theme and by whim—any given moment in Céline’s life, from childhood to death, may pop up wherever the author decides to pop it up, e.g., Chapter 1 begins with Céline’s funeral in 1961, Chapter 2 kicks off with his life in London in 1915, shoots back to 1911, on to his spell in the Cameroons (1917), forward again to his first marriage (1919), and finally to Detroit (1927) and Paris (1928). As there is no index, the only way to discover any one thing is to check through the whole book.
But the whole book is so abominably written that it is torture to have to read it at all. The little seeds that have been mentioned—the seeds that sprouted in Miller, Sartre, Agee, Kerouac, Burroughs, and God knows how many other receptive novelists—have landed smack inside Dr. Ostrovsky and have grown into a sort of bedlam of orchids. Her syntax is so bizarre that, just as one can never follow Céline’s life chronologically, so one can often not know whether the doctor is starting a sentence, ending a sentence, or just burbling in the middle of a sentence. That the spirit of Paris should be evoked by (among other things) “the deep fragrance of ripening chestnuts; the trickle of urinals” is good at least for a hearty laugh, just as a maternal demise described as “Decomposed, the mother’s teats…” is singular enough to wake one up. But here, so that the reader may judge for himself, are two longer passages from this distracted work. The first is on the subject of Céline’s doctoral thesis, a biography of Ignace Semmelweiss, the great Hungarian accoucheur:
The story of a life (distant from his, yet so strongly similar) was taking life within him. Feeding upon his body. Flesh of his flesh. It clamored for birth. With threat of anomaly or destruction; promise of delivery and joy. Child of his pain. Slowly forming within male entrails. Fruit of parthenogenesis which swelled a womb made fecund by its own powers—mingling male and female in creation. Hidden hermaphroditic joining in the night. The ancient story of the making of the world.
The second passage describes the mixed elements that are found in all poets—and understood only by poets
…because they know that opposites are the stuff that art is made from; that individual mutiny must reign; and extravagant incompatibility marks the man who creates it.
(Which has been true for other sacred monstrosities—sphinx, chimera, basilisk, Garuda, Melusine, hippogriff, Ganesha, sea monk, naga, harpy, Anubis, Sekmet, Isis, Thoth, Hathor, gryphon, werewolf, minotaur, and the seven-headed, ten-horned, red dragon of the Apocalypse.)
What is there to say of a book that is written like that from start to finish? One can express regret, of course. Or one can burn the book. But Dr. Ostrovsky has rather got one by the…by the short hairs. She knows more about Céline than anyone else in the world. Her artless passion, her red-hot, ten-horned fecundity, arises out of the very fact that she has built her nest in Céline’s very entrails, and that the heat of the situation has gone to her head. What’s more, she has managed to spot many important things about him, and although these things land her up in a state of total confusion, we are obliged to turn to her if we want to know of them. That we end up at last as totally confused as she is is not only because her writing ensures our doing so, it is also because Céline spent his whole life conducting a mammoth theatrical pretense—a sort of deliberate defiance of human understanding.
Most writers leave at least a few major trails behind them to help us follow their ways and their development; but Céline covered the ground with thousands of trails, not one of which can be trusted. Poor Dr. Ostrovsky has suffered terribly from this, however gallantly she may refer us to Anubis, Sekmet, Isis, Thoth, or preach mysteriously of hermaphroditic wombs bubbling away to make books for Denoël and Gallimard. She has been obliged—and who can blame her?—to plump for one aspect of Céline that will do duty for the rest of him, and, as her title shows, she has put forward Céline the voyeur as the Céline of first importance.
It seems a bad choice. She has heard somewhere that though Céline liked going to bed with women, what he liked best was to go to bed with two women, so that one of the three of them played the part of onlooker. Would one call such a man a voyeur? Surely, half the fun of being a voyeur is that of not being seen on the job—of being bent double in the passage, peering through the keyhole? To enjoy watching other people doing it is not an uncommon pleasure, but it does not provide the exciting sense of secret power felt by the voyeur, who is forever seeing while being unseen. But this is only a statement of opinion; one admits readily that it takes all sorts to make a world.
Noisy, brash, cantankerous, dishonest, boastful, utterly irresponsible—Céline was all these, and even the most gifted of his French contemporaries have failed to agree on why he behaved as he did, or what character lay behind his worst peculiarities. It would be easy to say, for instance, that his principal aim was always to insult accepted opinion to a degree where he was made an outcast—that to be reviled as a monster was the fate he desired most. There is no doubt that this was the distinction he achieved when, in the late 1930s, he hailed the fate of the Jews of Europe with enthusiasm and urged the extinction of the half-breeds, mulattoes, Chinese, and blacks, whom he supposed to threaten the purity of Europe and to hold the money bags that financed its wars.
But one has no feeling, when reading Bagatelles Pour Une Massacre, the most famous of these inflammatory works, that Céline had any real convictions whatever on the subject. The book is corrupt not because of what it says but because it is prepared to say anything, however childish or brainless, that will horrify a civilized person. Nothing in the long story of Céline’s life suggests that he hated Jews, or held them responsible for any of the world’s wickedness. His aim, he said, was to be regarded as “the biggest bastard alive” and to suffer, in consequence, precisely the ostracism and the terrible sufferings that he demanded for the Jews.
His last works (they should not be called novels), Castle to Castle and North, describe this fate in detail—the wanderings through Germany with his wife and cat, the long months of internment with other French collaborators in a Danubian castle, the march toward a dreadful exile in Denmark with long spells of prison and a frozen exile in a Baltic hut. Amnestied and back in France, he passed his last ten years despised and rejected of men and went to his grave ignored and unlamented. And when we set these degraded years side by side with the years of fame and success, we find only one characteristic that is common to both—an insistence on being the “biggest” and “greatest.” The noun that follows—bastard, genius, coward, victim, hater, seer, pioneer—is only a variable of the moment: the uniqueness of the magnitude is the only constant and the only satisfaction.
We can follow certain broken lines through his life if we please—if we are prepared to drop them when they drop us. That grubby petit-bourgeois childhood in the arcade of the Rue de Choiseul—perhaps it was as loathsome and humiliating as Céline insists it was, perhaps his childhood decision to become a doctor was made because when a doctor stepped into this “unbelievable pesthole,” he seemed like a visitor from another world—“a miracle man…absolutely, a magician.” Humiliated vanity has made many storytellers—Dickens, Trollope, Shaw, for example—and, in a lower-class, city setting, it has often bred a hatred for those who rank even lower in the social scale—“phenomenally filthy bastards” such as Jews, blacks, “Arabic parasites,” and the like. There was a measure of truth in Gorki’s saying of Céline as early as 1934: “Céline is indifferent to all crime, and since he has found no way of committing himself to the proletariat or understanding their revolt, he is ripe for Fascism.”
Sartre also seems to have hit on a certain truth when he stressed the sense of personal fear that runs through the fiction and marks the anti-Semitism. If one doubts the existence of such fear it is not because Céline was capable of extraordinary courage but because he loved to boast of his cowardice and begged to be regarded as the world’s greatest asslicker. Dr. Ostrovsky finds, and pursues with energy, the interest in women’s bodies that made him choose Semmelweiss, the discoverer of the cause of puerperal fever, not only as his hero and double but as a prime example of the pioneer who believes that he will be honored if he helps mankind and who finds, instead, that he is hated and driven insane by ingratitude. The moral of this is: hate and mistrust mankind, if you want to get on in life.
Many fragments of this sort can be fitted together reasonably well to provide a portrait that is always partial, always dependent on the whim of the person who is painting it, and always liable to be smashed to pieces again at any moment. Much, for instance, was excused Céline on account of madness—the result of his being wounded in the head and trepanned in World War I. Only in the last two years has it emerged that these terrible experiences never happened. They were simply invented by Céline and built into the fiction of his life. So was his mother’s leg—that horrible, diseased limb that drags itself through both his fiction and his descriptions of his childhood. It is a leg that lives within us so strongly and virulently that we are quite vexed to hear that in fact the good lady was hale and spry throughout most of her life.
The only statements we can depend on, then, are those which seem to stand the test of firm supporting evidence. One such statement was made by Céline at the end of the last interview he ever gave, only a few months before his death. He said then: “I was through a long time ago. After Death on the Installment Plan I’d said everything I had to say, which wasn’t much.”
This would seem to be undeniably true. Céline never had much to say: his visionary power had little in the way of intellect behind it. When that power left him, he was left with nothing. Even his racist writings are commonplace street sweepings—noisy repetitions of the rubbish poured out by brainless propagandists. Castle to Castle andNorth are very interesting as personal history and well worth reading by any student of the last days of the German Reich; but they are records rather than fiction, which is indicated by the fact that both books require (though only Castle to Castle receives) a glossary giving short biographies of the principal characters and explanations of the period terms used by Céline.
The use of the “three dots” is also of a certain interest. Like the other seeds that grow in the mind, we suppose them to have loomed large in all Céline’s work. But we find, when we check up on the matter, that they are used very little in Journey to the End of the Night. In Death on the Installment Plan and Guignol’s Band they appear more frequently, while in Castle to Castle and North they are the main feature of almost every sentence. The author, one feels, no longer has anything to “say” but is using his famous trade-mark as a furious hammer with which to remind the world of his existence.
Of Guignol’s Band and its sequel, Le Pont de Londres (which has not been translated yet), it is also true to say that they add nothing to what Céline had “said” before. But they must be regarded as major works just the same, because they are genuine pieces of fiction and excite, just as their predecessors did, a visionary elation in the reader. We find in them, moreover, a simpler, racier, happier humor than is present anywhere else in Céline, and we only spoil our appreciation of this if we impose on his laughter our own dark notions of labyrinthine horrors and apocalyptic depths.

Dr. Ostrovsky can only see Céline wading through the floods of the abyss and riding the cataclysms of the age. Though she will admit something of Rabelais and Swift in his character, she would think it degrading to admit Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton too. The curious conviction that a book cannot be really serious if it is really funny is one of the worst aesthetic fallacies of modern criticism. It leads inevitably to the unnatural conclusion that though there is always room at the inn for the basilisk and the hippogriff, there is never an inch to spare for Joconde’s ass.