Celine's Heart of Darkness

...His condition only became evident after he published the anti-Semitic pamphlets and those strange accounts of his wartime experiences in Nazi Germany, of which D'un chateau l'autre was something of a masterpiece in capturing the hallucinatory quality of the last stages of the Thousand-Year Reich...

...Present-day critics are inclined-with some equanimity-to consider him in precisely this context of le roman noir, of the "night world," of incipient lunacy...

...Thiher emphasizes the mad side of Celine, examining him as a kind of prose poet of delirium...

...Louis-Ferdinand Des-touches, published his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, he assumed the feminine nom de plume of Celine in ironic deference to an already celebrated novelist who went by a given name with the same initial, Colette...

...obviously Sartre found it more appalling to believe that Celine had been gratuitously anti-Semitic...

...Celine's pathology, however, did not impress those who read his two major novels, Voyage an bout de la nuit and Mori a credit, when they originally appeared in 1932 and 1936, respectively...

...In so doing, he produces a more solid study than his predecessor...

...Yet that evidently was the case: Celine's penalty for delving so deeply and so emotionally into the mentality of the French lower middle class he came from and worked with as a doctor was that at a time of crisis, when he feared the world would be engulfed in catastrophe, he became a spokesman for its worst prejudices...

...I recognized quarters of Paris I had just come to know, and I realized also (because I had been going through something very similar in England) the accuracy with which Celine portrayed the agonies of lower-middle-class shabby gentility and the frustrated fury of young people rebelling against its shifts and pretenses...

...This choice of names provides an early hint of the sardonic diablerie characteristic of Celine: The reader who in 1932 opened Journey to the End of the Night, as we very soon came to know it in English, expecting the lilac-scented femininities he might find in the latest Colette, was rudely awakened by a first breath that seemed to be compounded of dung, gasoline and putrescent flesh-the smell of a miasmatic landscape of war and other modern horrors whose inhabitants for the most part were raucously and insanely masculine...

...Allen Thiher has probably done as much as anyone to illuminate the darker chambers of his nature, without disparaging-though without greatly elucidating either-the magnitude of his literary achievement...

...In the end, Celine remains a puzzling and disturbing figurea disconcerting and somewhat repulsive cluster of vanities and paranoiac whims who happened to be one of the great novelists of the century, and a social critic in whom monumental errors alternated with the dazzling insights of the neurotic...

...In Celine: The Novel as Delirium, Allen Thiher displays a less bright and stylish manner than Ostrovsky, but he sticks to his texts and tries to judge the author in his own right rather than by reference to current fads and fashions...

...It is only a courageous or an insensitive critic who embarks on a complete study of Celine, and the task is all the more difficult if one has ever fallen under the spell of his major works...

...Delirium" or delire occurs as the key word in no less than five out of his eight chapter titles...

...The nihilism and absurdism of much literature since World War II have created a mental atmosphere in which the extremities and aberrations of a wayward genius like Celine are far more acceptable than in the past...

...Before then, Celine's delirium seemed merely a variant of the surrealist dream technique, applied to fiction with considerable mastery, and used to throw into relief the mordant realism of his picture of life under the Third Republic...

...I think this explains why the several French and American books on Celine since 1960 have been done by people who did not experience the impact of his writing in the '30s and did not witness his headlong plunge into the cesspool of anti-Semitism before the end of that decade...

...Recognizing the strong element of social rebellion in Celine and taking his professed anarchism at face value, Andre Gide initially assumed that the anti-Semitic pamphlets were meant as satires...

...In Celine and his Vision (1967), Erika Ostrovsky evoked American writers who showed affinities with him and might have been influenced by him: Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the Beats in general...

...And it was perhaps a feeling of bitter disappointment in a man he had once accepted as a rebel of his own kind that led Jean-Paul Sartre to bring against Celine a totally unfounded accusation of being in the pay of the Nazis...

...I remember being carried away not only by the spate of language, but by the almost lurid actuality of parts of Mort a credit...

...No matter how much Celine's later works may tempt one to detect madness in these early novels, I still believe that-without denying their delirious aspects-Voyage an bout de la nuit and Mort a credit can be classed with Zola's Germinal and Balzac's Pere Goriot among the great French novels of social criticism...

...Indeed, there are passages of Zola and Balzac, like the uprising of the miners in Germinal and the arrest of Vautrin in Pere Goriot, that have the same nightmare quality evoked by Celine...

...for at that time, naive Communism or anarchism in politics combined with the ascendancy of surrealism as the modish movement in the arts...

...Today the ranting, paranoid, denunciatory manner that characterizes all of Celine's work makes it easy to conclude that the author was near madness, and to find in this an explanation-if not an excuse-for his lapses of the late '30s...

...Later his male and female given names were combined, and he became known by that curious hybrid of the real and the pseudonymous, Louis-Ferdinand Celine...

...The fact that in his last and increasingly nightmarish works he took refuge in art as incoherence was perhaps an unconscious admission of a sense of guilt he never openly avowed...

...he by no means encompasses all that can be said about Celine, yet what he focuses on has never received better treatment...

...As a result, her book is now dated by its emphasis on a literary ambience that is already passe while Celine is not...

...Whether it stemmed from sheer mental disequilibrium, artistic intent, or a kind of protective coloring (one suspects it was a combination of the three), Celine developed an extraordinary ejaculatory style of writing and an inclination to allow scenes to drift out of sordid actuality into lurid nightmare...

...Celine, apparently without any connection to the French Fascist groups of the time, was to write three anti-Semitic pamphlets: Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L'Ecole des cadavres (1938) and Les Beaux Draps (1941...

...author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour" There seems little doubt that in 1932, when that medecin malgre lui, Dr...