Expressionist Mosaic
SHORTER, KINGSLEY
WRITERS WRITING Expressionist Mosaic By Kingsley Shorter Louis-Ferdinand Celine is best known in the English-speaking world for his first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, published in...
...WRITERS WRITING Expressionist Mosaic By Kingsley Shorter Louis-Ferdinand Celine is best known in the English-speaking world for his first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, published in France in 1932...
...Based on his experiences in World War I and subsequent travels to West Africa and the United States, Journey is a picaresque extravaganza, a virtuoso exercise in black humor that won immediate critical acclaim...
...When war came, the collaborators claimed him for their own, setting the seal on his personal ruin...
...He was irretrievably compromised...
...It was against this background of social disintegration and material devastation that his perverse literary genius came finally, and horrifyingly, into its own...
...He lives in seclusion with his wife Lili, the only person in the whole book for whom he has a kind word, and a houseful of animals—cats, dogs, a hedgehog, birds—on whom he lavishes his misanthropic affection...
...People say of an author: 'He forges a fine sentence.' I say: 'It's unreadable...
...I'm not making it up...
...Celine is a master of farce: a man without hope, neck-deep in quicksand and sinking fast, telling outrageous stories with a straight face until the very last gasp...
...there was no way back...
...There are also frequent outbursts of scatological abuse against all the Establishment intellectuals who managed to survive the War with fortunes intact or even enhanced—particularly those who, like Jean-Paul Sartre, attacked him personally for his anti-Semitism—and unbelievably, comically libelous tirades against his publishers...
...Waves of refugees keep arriving with horror stories about General Leclerc's army and the "chop-chop Senegalese"—the use of soldiers from Africa being regarded by Celine and his friends as a sure sign that "civilization" is on the verge of collapse...
...In the descriptions of life at Siegmaringen, Celine writes like a man possessed...
...In short, a mess of sermons...
...Yet this embittered and retiring man, who wanted "only to be left alone," found himself cast in the role of court physician and confidant to the powerful at Siegmaringen...
...the prison in Copenhagen (called Vensterfangel, the first castle of the title) where he was held for over a year after the Danish authorities caught up with him...
...It was too late for him to protest, as he tried afterward, that the Nazi approach to the "Jewish problem" was not at all what he had in mind, that he had been not collaborationist but "abstentionist...
...His innovation was not simply a matter of demotic candor and the lavish use of argot...
...For Celine, a writer of neo-medieval imagination, Siegmaringen at that time and place came to epitomize the human condition: Like Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" or William Burroughs' "In-terzone"—both modern incarnations of the Inferno?Siegmaringen is a three-ring circus of the damned, with clowns and freaks and innumerable side shows, a vast transit camp to nowhere...
...This exposition is interrupted by flashbacks in which Celine describes his life in Denmark, where he went into hiding at the end of the War...
...What I've done is to put the spoken language into writing...
...I was born, I repeat, in Courbevoie, Seine . . . I'm repeating it for the thousandth time . . ." The early chapters set the scene: He is over 60, his health is failing, and he is nearly destitute, having been picked clean by the superpatriots who crept out of the woodwork when the War was over and cashed in on the great purge of the collaborators...
...All, from the highest to the lowest, are existing on borrowed time in a constant agony of apprehension, caught between the ever-present danger of ill-treatment or worse from their increasingly reluctant German hosts and the certainty of retribution from their avenging countrymen...
...Only a story you pay for is any good...
...The initial description of the castle, bursting at the seams with 10 centuries of Imperial loot and oozina dynastic history, is a hard-hitting tour de force...
...A story you make up is worthless...
...He was privy therefore to every kind of intrigue, a helpless and fascinated voyeur of human behavior at its most inglorious—not excluding his own...
...Celine dehierarchizes the presentation of images and turns the narrative into an Expressionist mosaic...
...The reader is assaulted with a whirlwind of vivid details, historical digressions and personal asides, liberally interspersed with roars of exasperation and comic anecdotes...
...Celine's antistyle did not reach full flower overnight...
...The scenes he sets out to describe—the half-starved rabble clamoring for bread outside the castle gates...
...The tone is ancient-mariner obsessive: the sleeve-tugging monologue of a brilliant and irascible raconteur, haranguing and confidential by turns...
...If he spent the '30s recounting "little private incidents that aren't tragedy," his untimely access of anti-Semitism pushed him willy-nilly into the mainstream of history and gave him a grandstand seat from which to chronicle the eminently public tragedy of Europe at war...
...In this and the succeeding sections Celine's idiosyncratic style at last comes fully into its own, for it is perfectly suited to the subject...
...At first sight the effect is fragmented, exclamatory, nearly incoherent...
...They remember little private incidents that aren't tragedy...
...But Celine understood very clearly that "Nothing you do is free...
...he came relatively late to literature and despised the whole business of writing to the very end...
...Celine writes like a man who has stumbled across human language for the first time...
...He steadfastly maintained that he wrote only out of economic necessity and would much prefer to remain silent, despite the obvious seriousness with which he took his craft...
...They sold in enormous numbers, and Celine, who had been lionized by the Left, now found himself a de facto ally of the extreme Right...
...The book begins in medias res, like an old man walking out of a light senile sleep: "Frankly, just between you and me, I'm ending up even worse than I started . . . Yes, my beginnings weren't so hot...
...I have a gift for literature but no vocation for it," he is reported to have said...
...cumulatively it is seen to be the working of the most daring literary artifice...
...They taught us to make sentences translated from the Latin, well-balanced, with a subject, a verb, an object and a certain rhythm...
...Embittered by the critical failure of his second novel, Death on the Installment plan (1936), he turned his back on fiction and began publishing anti-Semitic pamphlets...
...By abandoning formal syntax and punctuation in favor of his famous "three dots...
...Whether palpating an anxious German officer's swollen prostate, slipping Laval a cyanide capsule against the day of reckoning (in exchange for the governorship of St...
...Most writers look for tragedy but don't find it...
...and the cancer ward of the hospital where he was sent—still in captivity—to be treated for pellagra...
...the utter confusion as hundreds of people with chronic diarrhea (caused by the staple diet of red cabbage and kohlrabi) fight to get into the only lavatory at the inn...
...You've got to pay...
...Perhaps it did all happen...
...The ministers—Marshal Petain, Pierre Laval, etc.—live in style in a Hohenzollern castle (the second of the title...
...Thus a trenchant essay by Leon Trotsky, no less, began with the now celebrated remark, "In one moment Celine entered great literature as other men enter their own homes," and went on to laud the new writer for tearing off the masks of the Third Republic and calling a spade a spade in language not previously admitted to literature...
...The knowledge of medicine that in another writer—Chekhov, for example—might elicit a wry compassion, goads Celine to a nihilistic fury in which he mocks the infirmities he is powerless to cure...
...First published in 1957, four years before Celine's death, it is unvarnished autobiography...
...He must have paid dearly for this story, for it is very good indeed...
...His publishers, too, have taken advantage of his defenselessness to swindle him, so he has to eke out a precarious existence as a doctor in a mean Parisian suburb where he mistrusts his neighbors to the point of never venturing out without a pack of savage dogs...
...or examining a pregnant woman by flashlight in the dark unheated barrack where she is about to give birth, he turns on everything a naturalist's ruthless curiosity...
...If there was a certain undirected, slack querulousness about the earlier parts of the book, it is gone now, burned away by the shocking brilliance of a prophet who sees his apocalyptic visions becoming reality...
...the railroad station where soldiers and camp followers of every nationality carouse and sing endless choruses of "Lili Marlene" in three- and four-part harmony, while raf planes circle overhead threatening imminent destruction ("Life on earth must have started in a railroad station")—inspire him to flights of comic hyperbole that make some of the funniest reading I have ever come across...
...Celine was a doctor first, last and always...
...Again and again, in the middle of some particularly grotesque episode he breaks off to exclaim, "It all happened...
...The narrator's malarial fever, the nearest approach to a literary device, launches him into the main part of the novel: an account of his experiences at Sieg-maringen, a small town on the Danube where the Vichy government and other French collaborators—numbering exactly 1,142, according to Celine—lived in exile until the liberation...
...He takes the reader with him on his rounds, pointing out objects of interest and ironically apologizing for the monstrous digressions that keep sweeping through the narrative like a force of nature...
...the rest, packed into various hostelries and other makeshift accommodations, live in squalor and chaos...
...Style is the tool of epistemology, and Celine's investigations into the nature of experience were such as to require a radical departure from existing literary conventions...
...In one of the three fascinating interviews prefaced to Ralph Man-heim's astonishingly good English translation of the latest Celine work to be published here, Castle to Castle (Delacorte, 359 pp., $7.50), he has this to say: "For centuries French education was directed by Jesuits...
...Pierre et Michelon...
...Celine describes himself as "a chronicler, a tragic chronicler...
...Castle to Castle is the bitter fruit of his and Europe's ruin, and it is a daunting piece of work...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 6
