He Only Laughs When It Hurts
SHORTER, KINGSLEY
He Only Laughs When It Hurts North By Louis-Ferdinand Celine Delacorte. 454 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Kingsley Shorter Wait! . . . I'll tell you all about it . . . This book they unloaded on me,...
...It is the excremen-tal vision...
...It's Celine...
...On this level he is as scurrilously entertaining as anything in Burroughs or Giinter Grass or Terry Southern...
...Good for a mirthless guffaw, right enough, but hardly in the same league as Job or Ecclesiastes...
...He wanted to put his own mind on the internal screen that is his idea of a book...
...cackle through these formless pages...
...It is not just that one feels he relishes the abominations he recounts...
...It is a shift from full orchestra to string quartet, from nihilism on the grand scale to chamber-music griping...
...or from the bickering of aging aristocrats over the inheritance of titles that will very soon cease to exist...
...That wasn't even the beginning...
...An astute critic recently noted about William Burroughs that "He wanted...
...cries Celine, at the beginning of North . . . But he goes on blathering about it, old and gray and persecuted though he be, because he must . . . Why...
...And don't forget Bebert the cat, Bebert who covered Europe from end to end with his errant master . . . "Put Bebert in his bag . . . and we're off...
...There'll be more, you say, just wait until the atomic shindig gets under way . . . Agreed...
...There I go again...
...All Europe in flames, from Paris to the Urals, now that was more like it...
...Allied forces triumphantly converging under the thunder of guns, the sky lit up from horizon to horizon, Nazi grotesquerie in its last convulsions...
...Over...
...It is that satire depends for its force on an implicit contrast with the good, the true, the beautiful, and one is finally far from convinced that Celine has any such vision of the way things could be or should be...
...honest-to-God death rattles") he puts the reader in a ringside seat and gives him the works...
...Brutish...
...Where were they in 1940, when all France turned tail and ran, pissing in its pants...
...this, after all, is what he sees as the principal activity of the human race...
...I kept being reminded of a bit of English bawdy, a popular ballad improbably sung to the tune of Deutschland Deulschland iiber A lies: Life presents a dismal picture From the cradle to the tomb...
...the stridency palls, the incessant jeremiads weary the eye and ear...
...the biggest asses, the biggest bellies, the most imposing bowel movements . . . there's the authority...
...Life is nasty...
...With the charm of a jaguar, fanged smiles, cronies of Nasser, Laval, Mendes, Youssef . . . Tomorrow you'll see the same people in the bazaars of the Kremlin, Russia, or the White House, USA, in the middle of another war...
...Guts all over the arena...
...To scrape a pittance from those jackal publishers in Paris...
...Tattered refugees from the four corners of Europe, motley remnants of six, seven armies...
...And, would you believe it, long...
...Unfortunately, North does not stand extensive comparison with Celine's earlier work...
...More than a tic, it's a way of life...
...And his friend, the screen actor Le Vigan . .. You saw him in Quai des Brumes . . . Maybe . . . He cracks up toward the end, can't take the pounding any more...
...Given the right kind of raw material ????a castle full of grotesques, say, besieged by the calamities of war?he rarely falters...
...In vain does he attempt to get satirical mileage out of the Bibelfor-schers (a group roughly equivalent to Jehovah's Witnesses) indefatig-ably throwing up log cabins while the whole social edifice tumbles about their ears...
...Who cares as long as Mercury gets his own...
...There are still grotesques aplenty, but on this small stage, where the writer must deal with individuals rather than types, Celine's comic hyperbole falls flat...
...Wheelbarrows full of eyes...
...Off to savor fresh disasters, no time to lose...
...Everyone flapping and squawking in the dirt like headless chickens, obeying orders to the end . . . And the good Doctor Destouches . . . Louis-Ferdinand Celine to you . . . Crouched in the Pomeranian mud, trembling at every straw in the burning wind, thrown on the mercy of epileptic hunchbacks, psychotic SS men, vengeful compatriots . . . Nowhere else for the French "col-labos" to flee . . . Pitiful . . . Here they are, I'll show you them...
...I'll tell you all about it . . . This book they unloaded on me, a novel I suppose you'd call it . . . An extravaganza...
...Wide-screen ! . . . Two three epics a page...
...Yes folks, you've guessed...
...This being so, it's not surprising that there is something craven in his misanthropic bombast...
...you'll say I'm making it all up," protests Celine, "not atall...
...Nearly as long as this book...
...Robbed of a historical dimension, Celine's misanthropy becomes mere personal bloody-mindedness...
...satirists have always done that...
...Crumbling chateaux stuffed with decaying Prussian nobility, Berlin ablaze under the pounding of British bombs...
...You've won...
...That's what counts...
...Celine, the tender-hearted misanthrope...
...Titles, insignia, ranks mean nothing, the real social distinctions are measured by how well men eat...
...And out...
...Has luck frowned on you...
...Lilylivered punks...
...Or is there not special pleading in Celine's ferocious portrayal of men and women more bestial than any beast...
...But undignified by any hint of tragedy, black humor ultimately sags under its own weight...
...A nd the maid has just aborted For the forty-second time...
...And again cut...
...what people want and the elite too is Circuses...
...Almost lost you . . . I'll get you back...
...Ten twenty Hiroshimas a day, boom boom, sound and fury, that's all...
...the gory kill...
...Scum of the Universe...
...By their turds shall ye know them...
...Lili, his monosyllabic wife . . . She loves animals, that's all he ever tells us about her...
...and the mystique...
...Does the breakdown of civilized behavior in a particular set of historical circumstances really typify the Human Condition in general...
...The world is yours . . . The streets bear your name...
...The messenger from the front, incoherent with exhaustion, stammers out his fateful communique: Despair...
...Father has an anal stricture Mother has a fallen womb...
...with a brutal grasp of showbiz psychology ("the right time to have been born is 100 B.C...
...Under the trappings of civilization, Celine insists, man is incorrigibly barbaric: cruel, greedy, treacherous, self-important, both knave and fool...
...Cut...
...again take temporary refuge, this time under the patronage of a highly placed Nazi colleague...
...The question one begins to ask oneself, after a hundred or so pages of Celine's exclamatory telegraphese, is whether or not there is artifice in this outpouring????or is it simply the unmediated contents of the old boy's consciousness, a garbage can upended over the reader...
...No end to that night...
...Denied the innocence of animals, their admirable self-regulation in the state of nature, man has ever raged against the bondage of his flesh: So Celine lampoons the physiology of human existence, presenting Homo sapiens as little more than an alimentary canal with absurd pretensions?pithecanthropus with a degree"????that gluts itself only to strut and shit and glut itself again...
...he is an abomination, a scourge to himself and his fellows, a blot on creation...
...to make the fullest possible inventory and rearrangement of all the stuff natural to him...
...or even from the multitudes of geese that, like poorly martialed extras (a rustic equivalent of the Greek chorus...
...faithful chronicler...
...He's dead 10 years, now they acclaim him...
...Uncle John has been deported For a homosexual crime...
...This seems to me a good description of Celine's work, especially in the last years...
...When all is said and done, the same goes for Celine...
...His days, too, are reduced to the unremitting search for food, the no less unremitting effort to ingratiate himself with the authorities to buy at least a little time...
...If this is an unflattering view of the HC, you can't accuse Celine of sparing himself...
...As it is, only a sort of gruff tenderness, certainly no more than the raw material of compassion, underlies the nihilistic satisfaction Celine so plainly feels at the collapse of all hierarchies, the promiscuous intermingling of nationalities, loyalties, fates????the degradation of everything and everybody...
...he ceases to entertain...
...Those jerk-off critics, hanging's too good for you while you're alive, now they're all over you . . . "Celine is one of the great revolutionaries of prose of our century" it says on the dust jacket . . . Revolutionaries be buggered .. . Look at his contemporaries . . . Legion d'honneur, two three Prix Goncourts apiece . . . Same old story...
...or from the gypsy entertainers unaccountably (given the philosophy of the Third Reich) equipped with papers in perfect order, who put on a Kraft durch Freude song-and-dance show under cover of which two of the most hated members of the community are done to death, one of them being dumped in a silo of liquid manure...
...The man who brought you Castle to Castle . . . Death on the Installment Plan . . . Not to mention those Jew-baiting pamphlets before the War . . . And Journey to the End of the Night I . . . The end, indeed...
...But there are more serious objections to North and, looking back, to much of the rest of Celine's work...
...or from the antics of a rabble of prostitutes sent to the country for forcible rehabilitation...
...And just think...
...Supreme irony...
...For a while????a long while????celine's narrative is sustained by the sheer energy of his disgust...
...Celine's strength is as a producer of black-humor spectaculars...
...All too soon the scene moves away from Baden-Baden, with its set pieces of late-Roman decadence, to Berlin, to picaresque wanderings amid ruins, and finally to a country backwater where Celine & Co...
...As one staggers away, festooned with orange peel, tea leaves and used condoms, one has one's doubts . . . Celine himself more than once remarks that "man sees only what he looks at, and looks only at what he already has in mind...
...But they didn't do badly in 1945, you must admit...
...Whores...
...His only crime: "Not running to the right place at the right time," not getting on the bandwagon with the others...
...I left you with Celine, his wife, his friend, and his cat . . . On the lam in Nazi-occupied Europe, hated by the French, mistrusted by the Germans, despised by everyone else . . . Here they are, holed up at the Hotel Sim-plon, Baden-Baden, July 1944 . . . "The Simplon only took people from the very best families, former reigning princes or Ruhr magnates . . . Slightly wounded generals from every front . . ." Flunkeys doubling as spies and vice versa . . . "the finest flower of the espionage elite . . ." And at the Casino, Boche war widows stuffing themselves with pastry . . . croupiers "with voices like velvet guillotines . . ." The whole place a vast bazaar . . . "Genuine merchants...
...Hence those three dots . . . Action...
...We have seen enough...
Vol. 55 • April 1972 • No. 7
