Filename: L.-F. Celine The I of the Storm (French Forum Monographs) by Charles Krance

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FRENCH FORUM MONOGRAPHS

7

ditors R.C. LA CHARITE and V.A. LA CHARITE

For complete listing see page 177

Cover Photo: Etienne Hubert

L. F.

Celine

The

of the Storlll

Charles Krance

FRENCH FORUM

PUBLISHERS

L X I N G T O ~

KENTUCKY

.. _

/

sun \

{ LONIHN. l


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The volumes in this series are printed on acid-free

long-life paper and meet the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper

for Printed Materials

z

39.48-1984.

opyright 1992 by French Forum Publishers Incorporated P.O.

Box 130 Nicholasvi lle Kentucky 40430.

All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or parts

thereof in any form except for the inclusion

of

brief quotations in

reviews.

Library

of

Congress Catalog Card Number 91-73322

ISBN 0-917058-79-8

Printed

n the United States

o

merica

To the memory

of my

father

and to rr y mother


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ONTENTS

Preface

11

[

Introduction: Reading Celine

13

. .

Part I

The Transposition

of

Adventure

1

The First Leg: Celine s Letters from Africa

27

2

From Dr. Destouches to L.-F. Celine: The Articulation

of Anguish

54

3

The Metaphorical Journey and the Creation

of

Fictional Space

77

Part II

The Adventure

of

Transposition

4

Writing Uprooted: Narrative Layering in Mort a redit

1 7

5

Writing as Performative Gesture: From Guignol s

and

to F eerie

pour

une autre fois

131

6

Journey s End: he Trilogy, or Writing against

the Current

158

Bibliography

175


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CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my deep gratitude to the following persons, each o

whom in his or her own way provided invaluable assistance as I was

working on this book. My thanks thus go out

- to Germaine Bree, who first guided me through the troubled

waters

o

Celine territory years ago, and who more recently brought her

unswerving critical eye to bear upon the last stages

o

this book's

manuscript;

- to Rebecca West, who as Chair, colleague and friend, provided

the necessary support that allowed me to see this project through;

- to Rudy Chelminski, my contact man in Paris, who has kept

me abreast o current echoes related to le cas Celine over the years;

- to my daughter, Anya Hansen, who has always been my most

loyal fan;

- to John Bair and Myron Goldenberg, whose understanding,

compassion, and encouragement helped me through the more difficult

times in the course

o

the preparation o my manuscript;

- and especially to Marie-Florine Bruneau, my wife, friend, and

companion, without whose inspiration, constructive criticism, and love,

this book would not be.


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PREF CE

Three decades after his death, Celine s

oeuvre

continues to command

a significant audience. nFrance, for both historical and literary reasons,

interest

in

Celine is showing every sign

of

continual, vigorous growth,

both in breadth and depth.

On

both sides

of

the Atlantic, however, there

is a consensus that Celine is an ideological renegade, something of a

radical modernist, and essentially a disturbingly necessary presence in

the common fabric of our Western culture.

On the level of the individual reader, Celine s effect varies widely, as

can be expected, given the emotionally charged nature

of

his writings.

And yet, it is a curious fact

of

American criticism on Celine that the

reader is often taken for granted. This may explain, i n part, why efforts

to bridge the gap that separates Celine from his reader constitute, all too

often, little more than introductions to the author by way

of

redundant

plot summaries and peripheral commentaries. The dual assumption

underlying this study, then, is that a) with the numerous introductions to

Celine currently available, there is no further need to assume total

unfamiliarity on the part

of

the reader; and b) that the reader plays an

infinitely more active role in the shared experience

of

animating a

Celinian text than mos t critics have granted him or her.

My study proceeds chronologically, with a presentation

of

key texts,

while focusing on the specificity of each of these works in the develop-

ment

of

the Celinian corpus. So as to stay within prescribed limits

(practical as well as methodological), I have placed strict restrictions on

the wide range

of

episodic frames that Celine s novels and chronicles

present to the reader, preferring instead to look squarely at what i t is that

constitutes Celine's inimitable

ecriture

Celine is primarily a stylist, and his texts assume an increasingly

performative dimension, from one work to the next. Thus, while

my

study traces the evolution of his style, it does so, first, from the

perspective

of

the narrative voice's relationship to the narration, and

second, from the point of view of the reader's anticipated response to

that relationship, as they both develop in time.


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12

CELINE: THE I

OF THE

STORM

Precisely because of the importance of Celine s unique stress on the

natureof he material he works with, namely, the French language, I give

all his quotes in French. With regard to ellipses when quoting passages

from Celine s often elliptical texts, I bracket mine to distinguish them

from his. Also, I have adhered to a faithful transcription of any

irregularities

of

spelling, grammar, or punctuation that are found

in

Celine s writings; this is especially noticeable in Chapter 1

My choice

of

editions of Celine s works, when there is a choice, is

based on availability, quality or accuracy, and critical material; consul t

the bibliography for details.

Parts of this study have previously appeared in different forms.

Chapter 2 contains translated portions

of

my essay on Semmelweis,

published in L. F. Celine 2 (1976). Chapter 4 contains translated

sections of my essay on Mort a redit that appeared in the Australian

Journal

o

French Studies

13.1-2 (1976). Finally, Chapter 5 contains

translated portions

of

my essay on Guignol s Band, from French Forum

4.2 (May1979), and also sections from my essay

on

Feerie pour une

autre fois,

which appeared in the

Selected Proceedings

of the Mountain

Interstate Foreign Language Conference in 1984.

Introduction

eading

eline

Few modem writers have had as lastingly convulsive effects on

their readers as did L.-F. Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, 1894-

1961 . The firstAmerican book-length study

of

Celine, Milton Hindus s

The Crippled Giant: A Bizarre Adventure in Contemporary Letters

(1950; revised, 1986), bears strong testimony to this phenomenon. To

this date, there is continuing debate, both ideological and esthetic,

surrounding his name as a major force in contemporary literature.

Historically, Celine s name first became the subject of controversy

immediately upon the publication

of

Voyage au bout de la nuit

in

1932,

a controversy that quickly blossomed into headline news when on a

second round ofvotes the divided ur y of he GoncourtAcademy refused

him

its coveted prize in 1933.On a broader scale, Leon Trotsky who

credited the controversial author

of

Voyage with having revolutionized

the novel also warned that Celine appeared, wrongly, to be a political

revolutionary.

Celine nevertheless enjoyed, through no fault or design

of

his own, the relatively short-lived distinction of being the darling of

the left-wing community. The Comm unist poet Louis Aragon and his

equally committed novelist wife, Elsa Triolet, seized the opportunity

afforded by such an apparently leftward leaning revolutionary bomb

shell, when Triolet translated Voyage into Russian (1934).

2

By 1936,

however, the honeymoon was over, for it was in that year that Celine

published not only his second novel, Mort a credit, but also his

avowedly anti-communist pamphlet, unequivocally titled Mea culpa,

hurriedly written upon return from the U.S.S.R., where he had gone in

early autumn to spend the royalties accrued from the Triolet translation.

What followed this abrupt

turn or

at least what was viewed as such

by

those readers who wanted to see in Celine an influential leftist spokes

man was not only his discredit with the leftist intelligentsia, but, on a


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14

CELINE: THE I OF THE STORM

much graver note, the rapid-fire publication of his three unabashedly

anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, to a measured degree pro-German, and

consistently vituperative pacifist pamphlets: Bagatellespour un massa-

cre in 1937, followed by L Ecole des cadavres in 1938, and finally Les

Beaux Draps in 1941.

In

this short spanof four years, then, Celine sealed

his fate for the remaining two decades

of

his life as a marked man:

disfigured, discredited, and condemned to live out his existence as a

pariah, for having committed to print what can only mildly be called

some of the most convulsive writings ever witnessed.

Celine did not, however, let the shroud that was inevitably cast upon

his reputation silence him. On the contrary. With the publication

of

the

novel Guignol s and I just three months before D-Day, Celine dog

gedly began to pursue a painful course of self-rehabilitation as a major

literary figure. He would have to wait until 1951, however, for the

amnesty which would allow his return to France after a tumultuous

seven-year exile in Germany and Denmark.

As a writer, Celine always considered himself to be primarily,

if

not

exclusively, a stylist. The result

of

his efforts between 1944 and 1961

was indeed prodigious: eight novels, a volume of ballet scenarios, and

a fictional book-length interview in which Celine explains the major

tenets

of

his narrative art.

Celine was a man

of

many paradoxes: a pacifist, who as a volunteer

was one of the first French battlefield heroes

of

World War I, and was

later turned down for active duty before the Fall of France in the early

years of World War II because

of

his wounds from the Great War; a

physician whose proverbial gentleness with children and charitable

services to the poor followed him from one medical practice to another;

a voyeuristic balletomaniac and admirer

of

feminine grace; a man who

not only entertained hateful racist views at a time when such views were

epidemic throughout Europe, but who published them as well; an

ideologue who walked the tightrope between such labels as patriot

traitor, revolutionary agitator-reactionary mythomaniac, anarchistic

ranter-social reformer, messiah-oppressor, etc.

The global convulsions in which he was both participant and

witness provided him with the raw material for his writings. While it is

clear that during the crucial period of 1937-41 Celine went far beyond

the accepted boundaries

of

national conscience in his self-appointed

role

of

agent provocateur, his inventive poetics and the magical effects

INTRODUCTION

15

of his language far outshine his obsessional diatribes, for all the biting

witticisms that they so cunningly display. On the other hand, as Celine

:himself was well aware, and notwithstanding his own persecution

complex, his provocative strain provided him with the very spark that

vitalized the emotional charge of his most vituperative utterances and

ereative wordplay alike.

There are many possible approaches one can take when faced with

as compellingly problematic a figure as Celine. Most of those taken to

date have been inspired, to varying degrees, by the specter

of

the

complex-ridden man that seems to rise from behind every page he

wrote. In the case of some readers, Celine consistently arouses unmiti

gated indignation; to others, he has served as a touchstone for testing the

vulnerability

of

their own humanistic conscience and cultural con

sciousness. For both groups, however, and particularly so in the case

of

American criticism, the shadow

of

the man, with its multi-faceted

aspects, seems to loom larger, and therefore often commands a greater

attention, than the actual concrete manifestations

of

his creative genius.

This study will attempt to help correct that imbalance, by focusing on

the processes

of

correlation between the I as autobiographical partici

pant and the Eye as reflective witness in Celine s dynamically charged

narratives.

La

beaute sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.

Andre Breton,

Nadja

In 1958, Celine recorded a statement in his Meudon villa, in which

he expressed his views on literature, and particularly the novel, in these

terms:

Je crois que le role documentaire, et meme psychologique, du roman est termine, voila

mon impression. Et alors,

qu

est-ce qui lui reste? Eh bien, il ne lui reste pas grand-chose,

l ui reste le style, et puis les circonstances oil le bonhomme se trouve. [ .. ] s agit de

se placer dans la ligne ou vous place la vie, et puis de ne pas en sortir, de far ;on arecueillir

tout ce qu il y a;

et

puis de transposer en style.

3

In Celine s view the novelist could no longer, in good conscience, afford

his reader the illusory comfort of witnessing the deadly convulsions that


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16


had reigned supreme for decades now from the vicarious vantage point

of

armchair narratives: Nous sommes environnes de pays entiers

d'abruti s anaphylactiques; le moindre choc les precipite dans les con

vulsions meurtrieres an'en plus finir (CC 1: 79). Indeed, modem

literature, with Celine, was to enter the very arena of creation and

destruction,

of

life and death, with the promise that no one, author or

reader, would come out unscathed; his is a

litterature engagee

and

engageante

in the purest sense. Celine's agressive

style,

as a product of

historical and biographical circumstances that are transposed into a

communicable idiom, constitutes a dynamic process in which the

emotive charge

of

creativity, like a spark running back and forth on a

wire, affects both author and reader at the very instant of textual

contact-an instant whose perpetual renewal is provided for, however,

by Celine's subversion of linear continuity, both in terms of thematic

development and syntactical articulation.

According to at least one literary historian, the French novel which

emerged from the chaotic upheavals

of

World War II was characterized

by its brutale tendance realiste [qui] meprise toute 'transposit ion'

[ U]

acteur et auteur s'identifient plus que jamais.

4

While such a view can

undoubtedly be defended, particularly in terms of the changing func

tionsof he representational elementin the artof he novel, when applied

to Celine

it

has the unfortunate effect

of

obscuring what is a distinctive

feature

of

his writing. The two-sided panel

of

actor and author, in the

case

of

Celine, can never be completely collapsed: the eye

of

the

author as the reflective witness of historical circumstances, and the

I

of the narrator as actor-participant caught in the thick of these circum

stances, coexist in a constant state of tension. This tension is what, in

part, provides the creative spark

of

Celine's art. The Celinian panel,

in other words, is one whose two facets are precariously and simulta-

neously held together, and apart, by the creative act itself.

1

The typically Celinian narrative constitutes a textual event in which

the reflective eye, as vehicle of transposition, and the autobiographi

cal I, as constantly shifting instance of representation, vie for the

reader' s attention. Placed in this intermediary position, the reader has

the impression of participating in a spontaneous act: one in which the

articulation

of

the narrative and its readability (lisibilite) occur in the

temporally and spatially unhinged moment

of

pure, creative presen-

tation.

INTRODUCTION

7

The transpositional eye and the representational I of the Celinian

narrative, although rooted in the author's apparent intentions to commu

nicate the biographical and historical convulsions to which he was

subjected, are, in an historical sense, circumstantial to the events

themselves, while in a purely narrative sense they are circumstantial to

the effects

of

hose events. As one

of

Celine s more perspicacious critics

(himself a novelist) puts it, L'ecriture [de Celine] temoigne du reel

per


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18


With Celine, the process of fictional representation is no longer one

of simply engaging the reader's imagination so as to allow the reader to

visualize the world according to the more

or

less descriptive tidbits

which the narrator is willing to confer upon him or her. Rather, in the act

of

reading a Celinian text the reader, in concert with Celine himself, is

involved in the act

of

representing, in his mind, not an objective world,

but the narrato r's subjective reactions to that world as they are commu :-

nicated through an increasingly fragmented narrative code. With the

weft of the Celinian narrative being interlaced all askew, the reader has

his role cut out for him, as he continually "reinscribes" the text with the

fragmented elements of the first-person narrator's own subjective

perceptions. The reader, in effect, "subjectively represents" the narrator

from within the very fabric of the narrative, thus tapping what ~ l i n e

calls its "fond emotif."

In the meantime, language, charged with reviving the adventures

from which the I has emerged, bears witness to its own progressive

impregnation by the same emotive charge that

in

times past had risen at

the moment of the lived experience itself. Beginning with Voyage,

whose narrative pursues the chronological plottingof an autobiographi

cal adventure, and ending

withRigodon,

where all question

of

Time and

History is dissipated in the disjointed weft

of

the text, we witness,

together with Celine, the progressive absorption, by the language itself,

of all the chaotic jolts of a tumultuous existence. The reader who

embarks on the Celinian journey cannot help but notice that, at a certain

point, there occurs a shift in emphasis, from the transposition of an

adventure to the adventure of a transposition.

6

Along this adventurous

journey; the reader undergoes a kind

of

apprenticeship: in proportion as

he makes his way, he often needs no more than a single

word-indeed

sometimes no more than a mere gestural sign, or a purely typographic

mark-in

order to reconstitute, in his mind's eye, Celine's inimitable

narrative code

in

its entirety.

Towards the end

of

his career, Celine described his method as

follows: "Moi , je n' ai qu une methode, c est de prendre l' objet puis de

le fignoler. Ce qui compte, c est I' objet" (CC 2: 12). A short while later,

however (Winter 1960),he declared that

La

faiblesse de

l'

arteuropeen,

c e s t d ~ t r e objectif ' (ibid. 158). Behind this apparent contradiction lies

the conviction that the "object" at hand is worthy only insofar as it

allows forthe creative encounter with the subject. This encounter, which

INTRODUCTION

19

constituted the very "nerve center"

of

Celine s method, is one in which

the transpositional "Eye"

of

the author mercilessly penetrates the

"object" with the intensity of its very presence, to the point of its

absorption, by the object, and subsequently refracted re-emergence in

the form of a representational, narrative "I," subjectively imposed upon

the reader. The hyperbolic caricature

of

he world that Celinian creations

present to his reader translates nothing less than this process of defor

mation,.from within, of the object by the subject with which it, the ob

ject, becomes permeated. The reader, in the Celinian system, is thus the

ultimate object

of

the author's manipulations, for

it

is the reader's

function to represent subjectively (indeed,

give voice to)

the narrative I

as speaking from within the reader's own parameters.

This essential facet of Celine's genius as a writer df imaginative

literature is also the trait that ethically condemns him.An appraisal such

as the following, "[Celine 's] politics were atrocious, but his writing was

magnificent,"

7

tends to obscure the connecting thread which not only

makes Celine's "politi cs" and "writing" accountable to each other, but

also constitutes oneof he fundamental principlesofhis esthetic system,

namely, its essential subversiveness. A double irony presents it self here.

On the one hand, it was not until the publication of Guignol s and in

1944, three years after Celine's l ast polemical pamphlet, that the full

extentof his subversive style and rhetoric could begin to be dispassion

ately measured. On the other hand, the genesis of Celine's style

conditioned, in part, by the convulsions that characterized the historical

and ideological circumstances

of

his generation, and influenced by the

deeply rooted passions and convictions that were festering

in m-

cannot be fully appreciated without having access to his pamphlets. This

is particularly so

in

the case

of

Guignol s Band, the transitional novel

in

which, as already mentioned, Celine turned his back on polemics to

devote himself entirely to the perfectibility

of

his idiom. Without

experiencing the brunt of the convulsed rhetoric which permeates

Celine s pamphlets, the reader might indeed be put of f by a prologue that

begins by pitting him against the author in a frenetic give and take:

Lecteurs runis, moins amis, ennemis, Critiques me voila encore des histoires avec ce

Guignol s livre I

[ ..

Oh il fait bien de nous prevenir nous n'acheterons jamais

cette suite Quel voleur Quel livre rate Quel raseur Quel guignol Quel grossier Quel

traitre Quel Juif (Guignol s

and

373)


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20

CELINE:

THE

I

OF THE

STORM

The "politics"

of

such writing is subversively aggressive: Celine is

challenging--even

daring-the

readers to return to the author's fold

while resounding echoes

of

the pamphleteer's vituperative assaults

against Jews, Communists, and other "anti-pacifi sts" were still ringing

in

their ears. The success

of

this venture depended, however, on the

degree to which he could redirect his readers into a covenant, dispensing

with any further ideological preoccupations, and plunging headlong

in

a newly charged lyrical flight.

Je raconte ce que j'ai vu, c'est tout.

"La Demiere Interview de Celine"

As Celine reminds us

in

one form or another throughout his

writings, in "true" literature, emotion and impulse take precedence over

logocentricity.

In

the words

of

his most dedicated bibliographer, with

the advent

of

Celine "ecrire ne sera jamais touta ait de la litterature. "

8

By

way

of

llustrating what his unique genre of writing might rightfully

be called, Celine offers us his metaphor

of

the "metro emotif,"

an

important leitmotif in his Entretiens avec le Professeur Y As he vividly

demonstrates

in

this creed

of

1955, when

we

travel on the surface

of

things, whether topographical or typographical, most

of

the jolts and

convulsions t hat normally accompany

our

trajectory go unattended: the

reader as traveler is simply too distracted

by

the passing landscape to

take any heed. The real "adventure"

in

any narrative literature worth the

salt expended by its creator, Celine countered, takes place not on the

signified landscape

in

relation to which the mode

of

ransport is more

or

less incidental, a landscape whose panorama the reader's eye can

selectively scan at its own leisure an d its

own

pace. Rather, he pursued,

the true "adventure" in his own literary act occurs

on

the intimate level

f

painstaking articulations, that roadbed

of

the narrator's subway

Joumey to the end

of

the night, with the affective memory of past

experiences as his only baggage. n the midst

of

the clashing and

clanging

of

seemingly disjointed signifiers, the events, accidents, and

traumatisms

of

journeys past are transposed and made intrinsic to the

sy,bversive

articulation

of

the text,

in

which they appear as so many

textual aftershocks.

t

s at such moments, when the Celinian narrative

INTRODUCTION

2

becomes absorbed

in

its

own

emotive charge while narrating "what the

eye has seen," that the autobiographical and representational I can be

said to enjoy the sensation, even

if

only instantaneously,

of

meeting the

reflective eye: "Assez de souvenirs

...

tout de suite

la,

ce qui se

passe

...

" (Rigodon 762-63).

The degree to which Celine s revolutionary style helped pave the

way for the nouveau roman, which by the time

of

Celine's death was

already, firmly entrenched in the panth eon of the French literary estab

lishment, can be readily appreciated when, for example, one encoun

ters analytic statements such as the following (in order to highlight the

point, I will substitute an X for the name

of

the novelist and Y for

references to his works):

Y does not lend itself to a linear reading. Typographical devices invite the reader to

pursue a variety of rajets de lecture, and this atmosphere of discontinuity is disturbing

to one who wants to board la longue machine qui vous emporte," to lose himself n the

action that is

en

train de s'accomplir," en train de continuer," en train de se faire."

X orients the reader's adaptive impulses Maintaining this constant effort to

forestall a misreading while continuing to respect the reader's freedom creates a ten

sion which is central to X's artistic endeavor [T]he major themes ofY: le voyage,

l aventure, la lecture.

9

Celine's "circumstantial" reader is subject to

no

less a degree

of

disorientation, particularly

in

the third and most extensive period

of

his

writing beginning withGuignol s Band, than is the case when tracing the

narrative meanders

of

the nouveau roman The main

difference-and

it

is a significant

one-between

Celine s theory and practice

of

writing, on

the one hand, and that

of

the post-World War

II

avant-garde novelists,

on the other, lies in Celine

.s

emphasis on

emotion

as the core

of

his

dynamic style. Keeping

in

mind that

emotion

and

motion

share the same

etymological root, and that artistic distortion is essentially an emotive

use

of

form, we can make several rapid observations in order to high

light this important difference.

n

the texts

of

such established avant-gardists as Michel Butor,

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Oilier, and Jean Ricardou,

narrative discourse is overtly and self-consciously denotative

of

ts

own

referential process as generative agent. Oilier, in reference to his

own

work, for example, emphasizes the fact that:


12/92

22

CELINE:

THE

I

OF THE

STORM

A la source de ce principe est le MIMEIISME: les formes fictionnelles elementaires de

premierniveau MODELENT les vicissitudes de la demarchedu heros. La narration, loin

d' epouser le discontinu de l'aventure,figure

elle-meme directement ce discontinu

a

la lettre, noir sur blanc.

10

The

text-and

we use this term to refer to the locus

of

he temporal and

spatial activity which occurs when the reader confronts and is con

fronted by

language-denotes

itself as text (albeit a fiction-producing

one), and nothing else; that is to say that nothing which is not denotable

can appear

in

the text as

textual material

(hence, Ollier's dual emphasis

on mimetism , which he capitalizes and italicizes).

Post-modem narratives, such as Ollier's, engage the reader in a

movement which, despite its geometrically inspired deviations from the

linearity

of

traditional narratives, describes a fundamentally

progres

sive

circuit, towards the representation

of

what can perhaps be described

as a totalizing and irreducible logocentric system.

For

Celine, rational

order in the domain

of

the literary narrative is as

ana-thematic

as is

emotion for the new novelists: his revolutionary

ecriture,

his emotive

rhetoric, and his essentially

regressive

journey through narrative typol

ogy represent a radically divergent path from that taken by most avant

garde modernists.

Celine's situation is admittedly paradoxical:

an

avant-garde writer

who while being acknowledged for having been a prime mover

in

the

genesis

of

contemporary literary experimentati on can at the same time

represent a regressive direction.

11

For

Celine, a step taken

in

the produc

tion

of

written texts represents a step removed from pre-Verbal emotion.

Hence the creative tensions, the indefatigable resolve to find the right

form, to strike the proper note, to effect the provocative gesture, to

achieve the

pur

trace sensible,

12

with which to represent emotion

in

all

of

its pre-vocal, prearticulated vibrancy. Hence, also, the indelible

impression of a spontaneously shared emotion, voiced at the very

instant that the reader' s eye makes contact with the author's word.

NOTES

1

Leon Trotsky, Novelist and Politician: Celine and Poincare, Atlantic Monthly, no. 156

(1935): 413-20; see also Celine, Romans I 1265-66.

2

SeeAlbum Celine 122, 124-25.

INTRODUCTION

3 Expose enregistre: 'L.-F. Celine vous parle, ' CC 2: 85.

4R.-M. Alberes, Histoire du roman moderne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1962) 299.

sFrederic Vitoux,

L.-F.

Celine, misere et parole (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 84.

23

6 Ainsi un roman est-il pour nous moins l'ecriture d'une aventure que l'aventure d'une

ecriture. Jean Ricardou, Problemes

du

nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 111.

7Phillip Corwin, The Faces

of

Delirium, The Nation 215, no. 13 (Oct. 30, 1972): 409-10.

s Jean-Pierre Dauphin, in

CC

4: 9.

9The novelist alluded to in these excerpts (427) is Michel Butor, the subject

of

an essay by

Mary Lydon: Michel Butor: Monstre

de

lecture, French Review 52 (1979): 423-31.

10c1aude Oilier, Vingt ans apres , 208-0 9, inNouveauRoman:hier aujourd' hui, vol. 2, eds.

J. Ricardou and F van Rossum-Guyon (Paris: U.G.E. 10/18, 1972).

11

See F Vitoux's Celine (1978) for a lively discussion

of

this central paradox in Celine's

situation as an avant-garde writer beset with a fundamental nostalgia for the preceding century (22-

25). More recently, Nicholas Hewitt invites a provocative re-reading of the Celinian opus from

precisely this dualistic perspective, in his

The

Golden Ageo Louis-Ferdinand Celine (New York:

Betg Publishers/St. Martin's Press, 1987).

12

Henri Godard, inL.-F. Celine 114.


13/92

Part I

The Transposition o dventure


14/92

Chapter

The First Leg:

Celine' s Letters from Africa

The first point

of

juncture where a lived experience found itself

inscribed, for posterity, by the hand of the man who was later to become

known as L.-F. Celine, was the Carnet du Cuirassier Destouches,

dated 1913. In this brief journal the nineteen-year-old brigadier of the

12th Regiment

of

the Rambouillet Cuirassiers jotted down his thoughts

and afterthoughts, his impressions and presentiments, his hope and his

despair, fourteen months after his enlistment in 1912, and ten months

before he was wounded on the front lines near Ypres (October 27, 1914 ,

during a heroic feat as a mounted messenger which was to bring him

military honors and eventual discharge. At about the same time and

place a young dispatch runner in the First Company

of

the 16th

Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, one Adolf Hitler, was reported to

be among the lucky survivors of the first battle

of

Ypres.

1

While Destouches's Carnet (see in L Herne 5: 9-11) offers many

interesting insights with regard to the intellectual, spiritual, and emo

tional pulse

of

the young cavalryman, its chief interest for us, is largely

twofold. First, it posits a definitive (though not always irreversible )

correlation between the potentialities

of

experience and those

of

inven

tion, opening with: Jene saurais dire ce qui m'inci te aporter en ecrit

ce que je pense, and closing with: si je traverse de grandes crises que

la vie me reserve peut-etre je serai moins malheureux

qu'un

autre

( Carnet, entries #1; 69). Secondly, while ostensibly inscribed as a

private record, the cuirassier's ecriture already reveals that it has set its

sights on other eyes as well:

A

celui qui lira ces pages. Ces notes qui

sont comme on peut en juger d'une paleur diaphane ne sont que

purernent personnelles (#2; 9). The author

of

hese lines is intentionally


15/92

28


positioning himself behind the transluscent screen that separates the

autobiographical, confessional

I

from the analytic, critical

Eye.

A

notation midpoint in the Carnet is especially noteworthy in this

regard:

j'

ai senti que j etais vide[,] que mon energie etait de la gueule,

an admission of ideological insufficiency that Celine will reiterate

decades later, in his pretensions that he was not a message bearer, but

rather a stylist.

In the interim, however, between his Carnet of 1913 and his first

literary success with Voyage au bout de la nuit in 1932, a good deal of

water had passed under Celine's bridge. I offer here a biographical

summary of these momentous years (from Romans I, lv-lxxxix):

1915-

after three months ofconvalescence in various hospitals, he

is assigned to the Passport Bureau of the French Consulate in London

where he fulfills the remaining months of his three-year military

commitment. This London episode, as well as the one two years later,

will provide much

of

the raw material for Guignol s

and

I and II.

1916-Shortlyafter his discharge, he secretively marries a young

French woman of somewhat questionable morals, only to return alone

to Paris two months later, where he signs a two-year contract as a

plantation overseer in Cameroon for the Compagnie Forestiere

Sangha

Oubangui (the same colonial enterprise thatAndre Gide was to stigma

tize ten years later in his social diatribes,Le

Voyage au Congo,

andLe

Retour du Tchad).

1917 - Forced to leave Cameroon after ten months because of

illness, Celine returns to London, via Liverpool: on the return journey

he writes a short story entitled Des vagues (which fifteen years later

will be transposed, with substantial modifications, into one

of

the key

episodesof Voyage). After several months in London, he returns to Paris

where he joins the staff of Eureka, a type

of

Popular Science maga

zine edited by the fanciful inventor of lost causes Raoul Marquis, alias

Henri de Graffigny (later to become the famous Courtial des Pereires in

Mort credit).

1918-Together with Marquis, Celine is engaged by the Rockefeller

Foundation to participate in a series of public information conferences

on the prevention

of

tuberculosis. The opening conference is held in

Rennes, where it is hosted by Dr. A Pollet, whose daughter, Edith,

Celine will marry the following year.

THE FIRST LEG

29

9 9

During a half-year leave of absence from the Rockefeller

mission, Celine passes his baccalaureat exams; then, after six more

months of conferences, he enrolls in a pre-med program at Rennes,

where together with his wife he lives in the house of his in-laws.

1920-23 - Celine studies at the Medical School of Rennes, where

his daughter, Colette Destouches, is born June 15, 1920; further studies

and internships take him to Paris.

1924-Celinedefends his dissertation for the M.D. degree; its title

is

La ie et l (Euvre de Philippe lgnace Semmelweis,

and is awarded a

bronze medal; shortly afterward, he signs up for a three-year period as

technical officer with the Rockefeller Foundation, and is assigned to the

Hygiene Section of the League of Nations in Geneva.

1925 - In his new capacities, he travels widely, in the United States,

Canada, Cuba, and in Europe.

1926-His wife Edith (whom he had left behind in Rennes) files for

divorce; Celine goes on a three-month mission to Africa, then repeats J

the European circuit

of

the previous year. Upon returning to Geneva, he

meets Elizabeth Craig, the young American student ofdance with whom

he will have an intense and stormy love affair for the next six years, and

to whom he will dedicate Voyage.

1927 - Celine returns to France with Elizabeth Craig, and opens a

medical clinic in Clichy (outside

of

Paris). His first serious literary

venture-the five-act satirical comedy L Eglise, written during the last

year of his commission at the League of Nations, and containing many

elements which will find their way into his first novel, including its

protagonist, Docteur

Bardamu -is

turned down by Gallimard. Dur

ing the s ame period, he works on a dramatic farce in four tableaux, titled

Progres, which although submitted to Denoel

in

1933 will be published

only posthumously, by Mercure de France/Gallimard, in 1978.

1928 - His fictionalized biography of Semmelweis is turned down

by Gallimard; in the face of this second rejection by France's most

prestigious publishing house, Celine limits his writing to various

medical and pharmaceutical tracts.

1929-31-Celine's

medical responsibilities and activities increase,

and he vacates his Clichy apartment to move to Montmartre, across the

street from the Moulin de la Galette. Here, Celine frequents a wide

circle of colorful, artistic figures (the most famous members of his

intimate group being the writer Marcel Ayme and the painter Maurice


16/92

,1

i

1

i

.

p

i

30

CELINE:

THE

I

OF

THE STORM

de Vlaminck), and begins work on his first novel. Towards the end of

1929, the League

of

Nations sends him on a two-month mission to

Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and in mid-1930 for three

weeks to Central Europe. The rest

of

his time is spent largely in the Paris

area, fulfilling a variety of medical tasks.

1932 - Voyage is accepted for publication by the young publisher

Robert Denoel; failing to receive the coveted Goncourt prize in Decem

ber during a second-round vote (this was to be known

as

the Scandale

Goncourt ), Voyage is awarded the P rix Renaudot.

The period with which we are immediately concerned here covers

twelve months, from May 1916 to April 1917. It is from this period that

we have the first written record, after his Carnet, ofCeline s activities,

impressions, and reactions, as he set off on the first truly exotic stageof

his adventurous career. Published for the first time in the

Cahiers Celine

no. 4 (1978),

2

the available material includes eighty-two letters that

Celine had written to a selective audience: his parents, Simone Saintu

(a childhood friend, who was to die in 1939), and Albert Milon, a

comrade-in-arms whom the wounded cuirassier had met in the hospital

of

Val-de-Grace in December

of

1914.

In

addition, we also have from

this period evidence

of

Celine' s first attempts at purely literary creation:

the short

story-or

what might be more aptly described as an episodic

sketch-titled Des vagues, and two poems: Gnomographie and

Le Grand Chene.

Obviously, what interests us most in Celine's earliest body

of

correspondence is not so much its factual information as the autobio

graphical insights it can provide with regard to the main featuresofwhat

will later develop into a truly unique blend

of

style and temper, vision

and tone, character and accent-in a word, an inimitable ecriture

In

paging through this personal material, it is manifestly impossible not to

keep in mind that this very ecriture bears the imprint

of

a singular

personality as it struggles to reorder the profusion

of

impressions

brought about by conflicting discoveries, whether these be in the realm

of

the exterior world

or

in the private domain of the budding writer's

conscio-nsness and sensitivity.

A typical example of one such document (though an unusually rich

one, this being the longest of these letters) is a lette r dated July 31, 1916

(two months after his arrival in Western Africa), addressed to S. Saintu

THE

FIRST

LEG

3

(CC

:

60-67), in which Celine shares with his correspondent the

significance that this day has for him: Voici aujourd'hui deux ans que

je quittai Rambouillet pour la grande aventure, a reference to the fact

that

it

was

on

July 31, 1914, exactly three days before the declaration

of

war, that Celine s regiment was dispatched to the Lorraine region where

the eager cavalryman was to discover the horrors

of

armed conflict.

With the ineffaceable image

of

carnal destruction imprinted upon his

retina, he reflects on his experiences as a haunted and disillusioned

participant-spectator

qui

[a]

vu

de pres [

..

] les fibres intimes

tremblottantes (61), in the absurd drama that continues to occupy the

world's stage. Throughout this letter (and

in

others as well), where he

speaks

of

war, metaphorically, as an ignoble t ragedy and pitiful perfor

mance, Celine posits hims elf as both actor and acted-upon:

Tenant

a

a vie, tous,

a

n degre egal, et ne se pretant

a

on sacrifice, que pour trois causes

- le feu sacre, qui se rapproche beaucoup d'une phobie quelconque; par manque

d imagination qui confine a a misere psychique,et enfin pour une troisieme et demiere

raison, un grand amour-propre - (62)

Of these three causes, the first, le feu sacre, can be eradicated with

relative ease, once the fires

of

the holocaust are doused with the

irresistible fluids

of

the instinct for survival and debunked

of

their

expiatory mythology. However, before t he entrapped actor can effec

tively accomplish this, he must counteract the first lesson taught to him

as an actor, restricting his individual responses to the stimuli around him

within the limits

of

his prescribed role. Only

if he

succeeds

in

breaking

the circle

in

which the spotlight enshrouds him will his imagination

allow him to

join

hands with the eminent presence ofDeath that directs

the entire performance from the wings.

Clearly a subversive strategy, such a response on the part

of

the

individual actor requires nothing less than a total commitment (an

ironic one, to be sure) to the protection and preservation of life-his

own as well as that

of

others who are willing and able to exercise a

vigilant imagination, keeping constantly present before their eyes the

image

of

their own

undoing-for

as long a period as Death will allow.

The survivors in such a performance, then, are those who, while

ostensibly fixed in their respective roles as perpetrators

of

the dramatic

illusion, are in actuality inspired by their desire to dispel that illusion

itself:


17/92

32


C'est pourquoi, je parcours et parcourrai encore le monde, dans des occupations

fantaisistes, c'est pourquoi aussi beaucoup d'autres qui ont

v

nous joindront. C'est

pourquoi le regiment des devoyes et des "errants," se renforcera de nombreuses unites,

transfert fatal de la desillusion, bouee de 'amour propre, rempart contre la servitude

qui avilit et degrade, mais contre qui personne ne proteste, parce qu'elle

n'a

que notre

cerveau comme spectateur

-

(63-64; latter stress mine)

The "third and final reason" for the state

of

human affairs as Celine

ruminates on them in his letter to S. Saintu is the most common, and

therefore most difficult to correct: un grand amour-propre." For, as

Celine ironically suggests, it is in the final analysis the embellished self

image which the individual nurtures and projects before him that leads

him to the slaughter, all the while infusing him with the fantastic notion

of

his own immortality . Call it by any other name, argues Celine, it is the

vice of vanity that governs the first two causes, and together with them

combines to form a triad of almost irresistible vigor (62).

Speaking, or rather writing with the authority that only the realiza

tion

of

his own experience can provide, Celine warns his reader that in

order to maintain a proper perspective, two principles must be rigor

ously adhered to: first, the humanistic notion

of

egocentricity must be

vigorously challenged; secondly, a minimum degreeof distance must be

kept between the self and others, without which all would revert to din

and chaos. Together, these principles, which he will later call his double

edged weapon

of

noircir et se noircir will in effect constitute the theory

and practice of much of Celine's writing in the years to come: writing

presented as endless conflict between what the

Eye sees and what the I

must do to protect itself.

Recalling the beleaguered Poet who in Musset's La Nuit de mai"

is absorbed by the pains

of

his own discoveries and is repeatedly

admonished by his Muse to take up his lute,

3

it is with the Poet's reply

in the last three lines

of

the poem, that Celine, the wanderer

a

la

recherche

d'un

repos et d'un oubli, que l 'onne trouve plus" (61), closes

the third section of his letter to Simone

..

but not before putting his

personal stamp on Musset 's plaint:

La verite n'estjamais bonne

a

dire surtout maintenant, meme

en vers

Et le moins que j

en

pourrais dire

Sije l'essayais sur ma lyre (oh ouaoh )

La briserait comme un roseau - (65)

THE FIRST LEG

33

Two points of clarification are in order here. First, the exclamatory"(oh

ouaoh )" which Celine attaches to the penultimate line, shattering the

octosyllabic rhythm

of

the Poet's lyre, expresses Celine's own premo

nitions concerning the enormity

of

the charges that lie within him.

Secondly, while the pronoun en, in the first quoted verse, is made to refer

to

La

verite" in Celine's prophetic warning,

in

the full body

of

the

Poet's closing reply to his Muse in Musset's poem t refers to the Poet's

suffering, or martyrdom, as is clear from the line which immediately

precedes this excerpt: "Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre." Taken

together, these two warnings already cast a prophetic light on the spirit

and nature

of

Celine s later vituperations and the persecution complex

which they embody.

In the fourth and final section

of

this letter, Celine brings to a close

his meditations on his situation in a most revealing fashion. A textual

unit in the overall structure

of

the letter, his conclusion itself constitutes

two moments. The first

of

these begins with an anecdote, introduced in

these terms: "Comme

je

suis stationnaire pendant quelques jours les

indigenes d'ici

m'ont

montre, quelque chose qui

m'a

enormement

surpris, etm' a f ait une profonde impression - ."

4

The visual experience,

described in detail in the following paragraph, relates to a rite

of

death,

with an unsuspecting scorpion as its victim:

Vous faites un cercle avec des lianes, d'environ 50 centimetres de diametre vous posez

ce cercle sur le sol vous posez au milieu de ce cercle un scorpion - et vous mettez le feu

aux lianes, le scorpion se trouve done environne, circonscrit par le feu,

l

cherche

immediatement

a

ortir mais en vain - toume retoume, va et vient mais ne peut sortir il

s'immobilise alors

a

'interieur du cercle, et se piquant lui-meme, et longuement au

dessus du corselet, s'empoisonne et meurt presque aussitot - (66)

Although Celine himself, as the writer

of

this letter, does not draw a

direct analogy between the scorpion's situation and his own, the

parallel, with all its immediacy, makes its imprint: Comme je suis

stationnaire/il s immobilise. As Eye-witness to this ritual, Celine, in

effect, occasions an emphatic transfer of his I in the very process of

transcribing his

impression upon

the entrapped beast. The scorpion,

circumscribed within the circle

of

fire, becomes the correlative object

of the restless wanderer's ego, searching in vain for a way out

of

the

triadic death-trap: "le feu sacre [ .. ],[le] manque d'imagination [ .. ] et

enfin [

..

] un grand amour-propre."


18/92

34


Celine's interpretation

5

of the condemned scorpion's response to his

plight is equally revealing: Ce suicide, chez un animal est

je

crois une

chose peu connue, grosse de consequences, quant aux luttes entre

'intelligence et 'instinct." With the image of the desperate beast still

burning in his mind 's eye, Celine, as spectatorof this privileged drama

which had been seemingly performed for his consumption alone, sees

in it

the microcosmic reflection

of

the human dilemma itself, defined as

a struggle between instinct and intellect. According to this scenario, it

is instinct that apparently provides the ironic antidote to the unjustifiable

suffering of the circumscribed man/beast, thereby implicating the

intellect as the agent responsible for his entrapment ("la servitude[

..

]

n'a que notre cerveau comme spectateur"). This will have grave

consequences in the framing of Celine's ideology in the next two

decades. Butmore to the point at this stage of development of he young

adventurer, as he meditates on the ground covered thus far, is the

implicit, dual (and mutually contradictory) correlation between, on the

one hand, unmovable egocentricity and its consequential self-implica

tion in the sad performance staged and directed by the muse Thanatos,

and, on the other hand, the constantly adjustable and shifting points

of

view available to the critical observer. The latter, through his imagina

tion, is able to see through the deceptive screen that separates actor from

spectator; and, in the process, he transforms the discredited distinctions

between stage and audience into the more immediate arena

of

a type

of

theater-in-the-round, where, in a mutual confusion, actor and acted

upon (or action and reaction) collaborate to decentralize the point of

impact of the drama. For the drama unfolding here is no longer

ensconsed in a metaphysical "no man's land" separating stage from

audience, but is now situated everywhere and nowhere, in the timeless

space of its own delirious performance.

n the second moment of his last section bringing his letter to a close,

Celine describes the setting in which he is actually writing the letter:

Je vous ecris d'une case abandonnee dont le toit est peu hermetique

je

pense aune

phrase de J. Renard

Le

soleil enfilait les trous du toit et rempait ses rayons dans l' ombre

fraiche"

Devant moi surgit du sol - un gros massif de fleurs rouges - (etc., 66-67)

THE FIRST LEG

35

Two details here merit our attention. First, the abandoned hut, with its

perforatedroof-the site, ortopos

of

he

writing-sets

off an immediate

association (or so it seems, judging from the manifest absence

of

any

internal punctuation) with an image from Renard's immensely popular

episodic tale of an impish adolescent, Poil de Carotte, which was

published just five months after Celine was born,

in

1894. The sentence

that Celine obviously has in mind reads: "Le soleildes siestes enfile les

trous des tuiles et trempe le bout de ses rayons dans l'ombre fraiche."

7

I have italicized those words that are either omitted or altered in Celine s

recollection. In the process

of

recuperating this sentence from his

adolescence, Celine changes the verb tenses from present to past, which,

paradoxically, stresses the present of his writing ("Je vous ecds") that

overshadows the fictional time-frame

of

his less-than-perfectly remem

bered source material.

Secondly, the lines of his letter that immediately follow the Renard

quotation, where Celine seems to be simply describing what he sees

outside

of

his window-opening, offer another, revealing emergence

upon the surface of his writing: "Devant moi surgit du sol - un gros

massifdefleurs rouges- [ .. ] monstrueux,

a

eine joli." We witness here

the metamorphosis,

by

way

of

transposition,

of

the scorpion within the

circle of burning liana, into the monstrous mass of red flowers outside

Celine's window, while the burning rays of the sun (Renard's

soleil

circumscribe the writer

of

he letter within the charmed circle

of

his own

ecriture

"aux luttes entre 'intelligence et 'instinct."

J'ai

vu, etudie, malaxe de mes yeux, la

figure de

l'homme

qui va se faire tuer.

Celine, to S. Saintu, Sept. 27, 1916

Another letter to Simone (120-24), written two and a hal f months

later (October 15, 1916), echoes some

of

the strains discussed above,

although these are rendered in a graver tone and a more focused

emphasis.

t

s in the first two sections

of

his letter that Celine develops,

in a most peculiar way, the metaphorical correlation between war seen

as an unspeakable tragedy (60) and the struggle between intellect and

instinct.


19/92

36 CELINE:

THE

I

OF THE

STORM

War, as Celine fatalistically reflects on it, is

an

"episode sanglante

[sic] d'une evolution du genre humain" (120),

an

episode as old as

humankind itself, renewed from one generation to the next by

an

interminable permutation

of

alliances against equally permutable en

emies:

Cette incoherence meme du jeu des alliances et les pretentions a un droit de justice que

ne manquent pas de revendiquer a la fois les deux adversaires

den

importe quelle guerre

ne manque pas de me divertir. Chaque tournant d histoire affinne et confinne cette

eternelle incoherence. (121)

War, i n other words,

is

the human condition, reduced to the blinding

truth

of

ts immutable incoherence; its undying, cacophonous blast is

of

such magnitude and fury that it drowns and absorbs all the voices and

sounds that are uttered in protest. The only possible solution is a

paradoxical one:

Aussi paradoxal que cela puisse nous sembler,

je

pense que le plus sage serait de subir

la guerre jusqu a ce qu

on

ait trouve mieux - mais

je

desirerais que I' elite intelligente

des nations s'occupe pendant ce temps-la d'autre chose - et que

l'on

assiste point au

spectacle lamentable de reniements de convictions precedemment acquises et defen

dues, et ceci chez les intellectuels, qui n'ont point eux comme les nations 'excuse

d'etre composite et de ne posseder aucun libre arbitre. (ibid.)

By letting the seemingly endless drama play itself out, and

by

barring

involvement on the part

of

the intellectual elite, history would purge

itself of the nefarious and politicizing influences

of

free will (one can

only speculate how such an attitude, had it been known

by

them, would

have been received by the French Stalinists

of

the thirties ..

.

Celine

describes the effects

of

free will as follows:

comme elle [" 'episode sanglante"] agite l'espece humaine qui est pourvu d'une

intelligence qui per\:oit et critique to us les mouvements de ses individualites s' ensuit

naturellement qu elle a branche sur l a guerre des sentiments de haine, de colere, de

cruaute, de fierte etc. etc. - qui primitivement ne figuraient nullement "dans le texte" -

(120)

Emerging

in

the guise

of

a disabused Romantic who would still,

nevertheless, like to nurture the illusion of the noble savage, Celine

attributes the ravages

of

the war to the "critical intelligence"

of

the

"human

species -an intelligence

which, in the syntax

of

his sentence,

THE

FIRST

LEG

37

is interchangeable with the

episode sang/ant e)

itself, and whose

flames, therefore,

it

continuously fans. What does Cel ine offer by way

of

antidote to this self-inflicting punishment that his fellow

man

obstinately indulges in? By what strategy can the slate

of

the script (or

"text") be wiped clean

of

hatred, rage, cruelty, pride .. those venomous

products

of

ntelligence?

The

solution, again, is disarmingly simple, and

again paradoxical as well, for it requires little more than a strong dose

of representation

(the core ingredient whose lack Celine laments

in

the

opening

of

his letter), curiously construed as an essentially ego-logical,

mental

process by means

of

which to counteract and defuse what are

essentially collective,

emotional

complexes, which,

in

tum, are nur

tured by a particularizing and selective process of

intellection.

The distinction which Celine stressfully implies in his letters to

Saintu between imagination and representation suggests several paral

lels (fraught with inevitable paradox) with the distinctions he makes

between intellect and instinct. Beginning with the assumption that

imagination is the one human quality which, although universally

shared, exists in varying degrees from one individual to the next, Celine

pinpoints its one specific manifestation, which, when it is sufficiently

lacking, as

in

the case

of

heroic action, leads directly into the jaws

of

Death. Unprotected by a sufficient ability to project mentally (and thus

give visible form to) the "idea

of

death," the hapless individual falls

victim to his

own

blind will to self-destruct,

in

the name

of an

ideal

whose very indeterminateness overshadows, indeed "sublimates" those

qualities

of

individuation by which his heroic act, professedly, is

inspired. It is the ability to

visualize

the real consequences

of

his

"sublime" act of

self

sacrifice," however, that distinguishes man from

beast. Only by a concer ted effort to keep the image

of

one's own demise

constantly present at every

tum

can the individual sustain his "con

sciousness" and "conceptual abilities" as a bulwark against a "total

abandonment

of

he instinct

of

self-preservation," reflected in the blank,

atonic gaze

of

the faceless mass, collective ly transformed into cannon

fodder (104-05).

Celine s summation

of

the global quagmire, based on his

own

observations, constitutes not only

an

indictment

of

the conflagration;

more importantly, for us, it also highlights the distinctly personal

synapses which result from his early attempts to com e to terms with the

conflicting responses to the human

condition-that

"eternal incoher-


20/92

38


ence of a seemingly no-win struggle between intellect, which, when it

prevails, subjugates the individual imagination, and instinct, which

without the support

of

mental projection (i.e., representation) leads only

to death.

The second section of the letter of October 5 (121-23) relates an

anecdote, which Celine offers his reader by way

of

explaining his

manque d enthousiasme in the face of such irresolvable paradoxes.

As a boy

of

thirteen, Celine had spent a year in Germany where his

parents had sent him to learn the language. While enrolled at the

Mittelschule

in Diepholz (Hanover),

8

he had one day inadvertently

strayed into the wrong classroom, where instead of literature, it was

metaphysics that was being discussed.

9

Acknowledging that Ce que

'ecoutais, me modifia profondement et pour toujours, Celine gives his

transcription, en substance epuree, of the lesson in experimental

metaphysics to which he had been privy. Boiled down to its essentials,

the lesson is simply this: if one day, with no forewarning, you

suddenly start walking about with a monocle that bears a non-magnify

ing 0 lens, you will witness, among the circle of your intimate friends,

two reactions: first a remark, made in jest, concerning your new look,

followed, upon close examination

of your monocle, by a grimace of

minor disdain, coupled with praise for your having chosen a lens that

does not deform your vision. Momentarily bewildered (or so we would

like to think) by the benefits to be theoretically derived from such an

experience, the young Celine pricked his ears for the peroration, which,

obligingly, followed immediately:

Si vous voulez voir la vie faites attention a votre vision, elle court apres les illusions,

drape la verite, de mensonges mais pretend au realisme de ce qu 'elle a vu. Il y a ainsi

en nous un besoin indelebile d'ideal, d'extravagant de chimerique de travesti. Nous

preferons envisager meme une souffrance que nous aurons imaginee - qu'une realite

mome que nous avons vue

-

to which Celine chimes his approval: Tout est

la, ma

chere Simone, j

ai

depuis porte une soigneuse attention sur tous les problemes qui se

presentaient ames yeux - and adds, by way

of

clarification:

Invariablement,j aiperi;;udeux choses, ce

qu inconsciemment

evoudrais voir, et ce que

j

dois voir A force, de rejeter ce qu'on doit voir on finit par ne voir que ce que l on

voudrait voir voila pourquoi tant de gens s'imaginent plonger dans le realisme, sans

realiser que ce n' est la quc l' llusion realistc.

THE FIRST

LEG

39

While it is clear, in retrospect, that Celine, in his more mature years,

had not uniformly taken heed of the precautions with which the German

metaphysicist concluded his lesson-at least insofar

as

the focus

of

Celine's ideological writings is

concerned-what

he gleans from this

lesson, in terms

of

the very problems with which he is struggling as

he is writing his friend, is in i tself revealing.

It

shows, for example, that

the conflict between intellect and instinct, already internalized within

the writer' s creative imagination (as witnessed in the July 3 letter), has

by now reached the innermost layers of his consciousness, filtered, as

it were, through the 0 lens of the metaphysics lesson. With the

metaphysical lens now trained on the spectrum

of

he ignoble tragedie

being played out on the European continent, Celine, in the illuminated

darkness of his African retreat, penetrates the very plexus of his own

transformation (a process which had already been set i n motion in 1913,

when he began to transcribe his first thoughts and impressions as a

cavalryman). Recognizing the fact that the moral bankruptcy of those

who choose to see in the face of a man who is destined for slaughter the

reflection

of

a transformation from the commonplace to the sublime is

nothing else than the reflection

of

their own will to deform (indeed, to

denature) the irrefutable Truth, thereby abnegating their own humanity,

Celine lays to rest the last remaining vestiges of the romantic urge to

recuperate the clean slate of man's lost innocence.

It quite normally follows, therefore, that in his own peroration (the

third and final moment

of

his letter) Celine once again evokes Musset.

This time, it is the sonnet Tristesse, that Celine introduces in these

terms: Cette petite aventure (a reference, by way of analogy, to

Celine's own self-relevation)

est arrivee a des hommes fort celebres, on retrouve dans leurs ecrits une petite tache

d'amertume que leurs lecteurs habituels mettent sur le compte d'une neurasthenie

passagere. [C]omme de Musset

Quandj'ai

connu la Verite

J'ai cru que c'etait une amie

Quand je I

ai

comprise et sentie

J'en etais deja degoutee -

Et pourtant elle est etemelle

Et ceux qui se sont passes d elle

lei-bas ont tout ignore - (123)


21/92

40


Two observations can be made at this point. First, the adventure that

serves as the analogizing link between Celine s revelations and those

of

Musset enjoys ambivalent status. The adventure attributed to Musset

(and by implication, to Celine himself) is both positive and negative:

positive,

if

seen as equivalent to the revelation itself; negative

if

seen as

equivalent to having pursued, in vain, the illusion realiste. In the light

of the former interpretation, the little blotch

of

resentment mistaken

by the casual reader for a passing attack of neurasthenia is seen, instead,

as the very sign of he poet's ecriture. In light of he latter interpretation,

it is tantamount to an incurable disorder, perpetuated by an insurmount

able besoin indelebile d ideal,

d'

extravagant, de chimerique, de travesti.

n light

of

the whole sonnet,

of

which the seven lines quoted by Celine

constitute the two middle strophes, the ambivalent aventure and its

symbolic stain are emblematic of the poet's life-work, as made evident

in the refrain of the opening strophe ( J'ai perdu

ma

force et

ma

vie [ .. ]

J'ai perdu

jusqu'a

la fierte Qui faisait croire a mon genie ) and as

reiterated in the last two lines of the poem: - Le seul bien qui me reste

au monde Est d'avoir quelquefois pleure.

The fact that Celine, at this first stage

of

what was only years later

to become a unique literary career, lighted upon a poem that anticipates

a farewell to poetic creation as his analogue is in itself striking. He

himself must have been made aware of this in the very act of selectively

transcribing Musset's verse (written when the poet was but twenty-five

years of age), for

he

immediately follows his excerpted quote with this

observation: Les hommes celebres

n'ont

pointjuge bon de poursuivre

ce dangereux sentiers [sic] qui fait perdre les illusions necessaires aux

enfantements -artistiques. By his reflection, Celine seems to neutralize

the mutually exclusive distinction between reality and illusion, for the

sole purpose of keeping alive the germ

of

artistic creation that he felt

stirring within himself.

The ambivalence with which the young Celine eyed his own

potential, as a creative writer who was threatened, at every tum, by his

own clairvoyance, is manifest even in the most subtle of details, as for

example in the grammatical oversight which makes

of the dangerous

path both a singular and plural noun:

ce

dangereux

sentiers.

Another

example occurs at the end

of

he fourth quoted line, where the gender of

Musset's past participle, degoftte, changes, in Celine's hand, from

THE FIRST LEG

4

masculine to feminine. t would be easy (and quite natural) to dismiss

this as another instance of grammatical carelessness .. and perhaps

indeed that is all i t is.

10

And yet, even

if

t is no more than an unconscious

slip--indeed, especially if it is

unconscious-it

can tell us something

about the unique synapses at play, when the aspiring (yet hesitant)

author's

pen

inscribes its own petite[

s

tache[s]. t s interesting, in this

light, to regard the feminized I of the excerpted verse as engendering

the artistic birth, with its attendant necessary illusions. Following

through in this same vein, the indelible need of travesty, with all its

ambivalence, manifests itself in the self-deprecating, mock-threnodial

close of Celine's letter:

Les cancres dans mon genre n'ont rien y perdre c'est pourquoi

je

ne saurais vous

conseiller ma methode - avous qui etes vierge d'abord, ce que

je

ne suis plus depuis

presque autant que vous l etes, qui etes femme ce que je regrette de ne point ctre, et qui

ctes artiste surtout, ce que je ne serai jamais vu que dans n'importe quelle branche

artistique mes efforts et mes succes n'ontjamais surpasses la penible execution d'une

Toute petite soiree - (124)

Celine's self-exclusion from the class of famous men (with

Musset as their standard-bearer), based

on

the generic distinction

between male and female, gives one pause. Is this a veiled mockery of

the fabled Musset-George Sand relationship? And does this implied

allusion explain the generic alteration that Musset'sje is subjected to in

Celine's hand? There is no way, of course, to know whether or not such

associations were consciously present in the mind

of

Louis Destouches

as he was writing his letter.

2

There is, however, something to be said of

the fact that the sexual ambivalence which characterizes the closing

sectionof his letter, particularly in the conjunction

illusions-enfantements

artistiques-femme-artiste,

no doubt will have had some bearing on

Destouches's own choice of nom-de-plume, when in 1932 he will

submit the bulky manuscript of his first novel under the name of

Celine.

3

Apart from these ambivalences, moreover, Celine seems to be

placing an irreversible interdict on himself. Judging himself unworthy

of the creative accomplishments of famous men (Musset among

them), whose imaginative efforts

express-and

at the same time con

ceal-theirresolve

to transpose the truths they have learned as represen

tations of their own creative will, Celine s admission that fools of his


22/92

42

CELINE:

THE

I OF THE STORM

type have nothing to lose" puts him outside

of

the sacred temple of Art:

a cultural pariah, whose sole consolation for being deprived of the

sacraments practised inside is his ability to admire, from a distance, the

game

of

illusions that constitute the rite. Disfranchised from the privi-.

lege

of

sublimation, whereby transitory presence is perpetuated along

an illusory, asymptotic course, Celine, in effect, is already setting his

sights on a more singular (if not altogether straightaway) path.

The "nothing" wh ich Celine claims he has to lose, as he alludes, in

a revealing ambivalence, to his "method," not only dismisses (in

cavalier fashion) his barely formulated hopes for a literary career, bu t in

addition encompasses both "the illusions necessary for artistic cre

ations," and their attendant "enthusiasm," the loss of which he traces, in

the opening section

of

his letter (121), to the revelations

of

the 0 lens

metaphor. Twenty-seven years after L. Destouches wrote this letter, L.

F

Celine, a writer

of

ambivalent, world-wide notoriety and in full

command

of

his skills, will recapitulate the ground covered thus far:

On est sorti comme on a pu de ces conflagrations funestes, plut6 t de traviole, tout cr abe

baveux,

a

eculons, pattes en moins. On s est bien marre quelques fois, faut etre juste,

meme avec la merde, mais toujours en proie d'inquietudes que les vacheries

recommenceraient. .. Et toujours elles ont recommence

..

Rappelons-nous On parle

souvent des illusions, qu'elles perdent la jeunesse. On

l'a

perdue sans illusions la

jeunesse . .. Encore des histoires

... (Guignol s

and 23)

[M]on discours aura deux caracteres. D'abord,

il

sera plein de banalites, plein de nai'vetes

etd'

evidences

comme l histoire elle-meme. Et puis, il sera discontinu,

mobile, fluent et peut-etre anarchique,

a

'image du

temps.

J.-P. Peter, "Temps de l'histoire et temps de

l historien."

t

was already in a letter to S. Saintu (134-39), written

on

October

25, 1916, that Celine most prophetically charted the tortuous course

of

the extraordinary writing career that lay ahead.

t

begins, unceremoni

ously, with a quoted opinion by Urbain Gohier, a mona rchist and anti

Semitic polemicist whose columns regularly appeared in the newspaper

Le Journal, and who in 1924 was to publish the notorious "P rotoco ls

of

the Elders

of

Zion."

4

Gohier, writes Celine, offers this "petite sentence

THE FIRST LEG

43

incisive," for him, and his reader, to ponder: ' La litterature fran9aise de

demain devrait etre purement fran9aise c est-a-dire vive, saine, gaie,

reconfortante -

['], to

which Celine retorts, tit for tat, in the next line:

"Elle sera plus juive que jamais, c'est-a-dire morbide, mercantile,

hysteriquement patriotique pour exploiter le dernier filon." While the

general tenor

of

this letter echoes the pessimistic forecast vis-a-vis the

future of post-World War I Europe (and, in particular, France) which

Celine expounds upon in several of his letters, it is here that for the first

time he articulates his ideological premonitions wi th an equally fatalis

tic pronouncement

on

the fate of literature.

The irony underlying the juxtaposition

of

the threat

of

a "hysteri

cally patriotic" Jewish influence with an equally determined plea for a

revived nationalism and xenophobia is highlighted by the noticeable

absence

of

an end-quote in Celine s letter, following Gohier s opinion.

To

let literature take either course, as Celine seems to imply, is unaccept

able; for

if

literature

were

to pursue the line proposed by Gohier-a

light-hearted, gallic form

of

escapism-it

would inevitably lead to an

even more pervasive form

of

exploitation than currently exists. The only

option that would seem left for the aspiring author, with regard to either

posture, is to focus his 0 lens on the imposture of each. Indeed, writing,

for Celine, will constitute a life-long process of

demythification-not,

however, without the attendant, paradoxical process of fostering his

own brand

of

mythomania.

As Karl Epting, the director

of

the Deutsche Institut in occupied

Paris, observed (in La Chronique de Paris no. 6,April 1944), 'Celine

a l'reil qui voit par-dessus

et

par-derriere, le deuxieme visage qui sait a

travers le masque de l apparence exterieure decouvrir la tete de gorgogne

de la verite.' "

5

However questionable the accuracy

of

Epting s descrip

tion

of

Celine s visionary powers may be, the conferring

of

a Janus-like

"two-faced"mask upon Celine is interesting (and all the more ironic as

well, inasmuch as this is also one

of

the traits that in his diatribes Celine

attributes to the Jews); for its basic, undeclared premise is that the

visionary, mythoclastic powers attributed to the "second face" co-exist,

in a tensional relationship, with the mythogenetic propensitie s of a more

primeval "first face." This fundamentally paranoid-schizophrenic strain

in Destouches/CCline can go a long way in explaining not only his

unquestionable anti-Semitism, but also the inimitable forms that this

obsessional motif acquired, when transposed in his three major pam-


23/92

44


phlets. Here, however, we shall focus on the way that Celine s provoca

tive retort, in the beginning

of

his letter to Saintu, was to branch out into

two distinct, yet intimately related, forms

of

expression.

In

his commen

tary on Epting's appraisal

of

Celine's unique-and, at the same time,

split-vision,

Philip Day offers the following reflection on the whole

Celinian opus: Celine . . . est tout

a

la fois celui qui voit . . . le

personnage qui reagit et le commentateur qui . . . nterprete (Day 219).

According to Julia Kristeva, it is this multiple duplicity of Celine s

otherness that obfuscates the authenticity of authorial intention:

Celine nous fait croire qu ii est vrai, qu

ii

est le seul authentique,

et

nous sommes prets

a e suivre, enfonces dans ce bout de nuit oii ii vient nous chercher, et oubliant que s il

nous le montre, c'est qu'il se tient, lui, ailleurs: dans l'ecrit. Comedien

ou

martyr? Ni

l'un n

l'autre, OU les deux a a fois, comme Uil veritable ecrivain qui croit a a ruse.

Pouvoirs de

l

horreur 158)

The opening

of

Celine's letter that we are discussing here already

constitutes just such a ruse. For the tit for tat reaction to Gohier s rosy

hued pronouncementcannot-any more than what sets

it

off-be taken

at face value Celine's retort is not the simple commentary that, at first

glance, it might seem to be; rather, it posits the triple voice of an Other,

one who at the same time visualizes, reacts, and interprets (Day)

any one of which activities constitutes, at the same time, a mythoclastic

and mythogenetic function.

The complex duplicity involved in this early example of the Celinian

ecrit will have many repercussions in the years to come for the young

adventurer-cum-physician-cum-literary stylist-cum-polemical ideo

logue. In a very general sense, this fundamental duplicity will serve as

the matrix from which the two main roads of Celine s activities as a

novelist/polemist will take him, once he will have crossed the initial

threshold of a veritable writer who believes in his ruse, when seven

years later (towards the end ofl923) he sets out to write his fictionalized

biography of Semmelweis. The duplicity with which Celine opens his

letter of 1916 also informs the very structure of Bagatelles, in which

Celine's anti-Semitic, anti-Establishment, anti-belleletristic diatribes

are sandwiched in between the two ballet scenarios at the beginning

( La Naissance d'une Fee, 17-26; Voyou Paul. Brave Virginie, 30-

40), and the one which closes the volume ( Van Bagaden, 375-

7 9 -

THE FIRST LEG 45

all composed in the very same spirit that Gohier s urgings called for, and

presented by Celine himself

Filename: L.-F. Celine The I of the Storm (French Forum Monographs) by Charles Krance

Documents

Transcript of Filename: L.-F. Celine The I of the Storm (French Forum Monographs) by Charles Krance