Triumph of Style
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Triumph of Style Louis-Ferdinand Celine By Merlin Thomas New Directions. 249pp. $16.50. Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," and "The Canadians" This is...
...He begins by briefly relating Ceiine's work to his life, a necessary task in view of the fact that the novels consist so largely of reshaped personal experience-though, as Thomas repeatedly cautions us, we should never confuse this with autobiography...
...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," and "The Canadians" This is not, as the publisher chooses to call it, a critical biography...
...Thomas is convincing in his argument that despite Celine's dark presentation of human existence, he was a man of great compassion and a lover of the fortuitous joys and beauties of life...
...The reader who is interested in Celine's life and the controversies surrounding it will be much better served by the one really good biography of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches in English, Patrick McCarthy's Ciline, which I reviewed in these columns three years ago...
...It is because Celine celebrates the glory as well as the horror of existence that an initial encounter with him even at his most pessimistic is an exhilarating experience for many readers...
...and he makes much of that simple but habitual Celinian form of punctuation, the ellipsis, as a means of escape from conventional structures...
...His efforts to trace the roots of Celine's prose in military and working-class slang, and in medical jargon, tend to flatten out into dull lists of words and phrases, and all he actually proves is that Celine took the language as well as the episodes of his books from the world he immediately experienced...
...third, the assertion that it is in his use of language that Celine is at once most original and most securely in the Great Tradition (French version...
...a chapter treating the political pamphlets he produced between 1936-41 that earned him so much obloquy...
...he claims that Celine's use of language was essentially emotional...
...This time pattern is interrupted twice...
...The great fact about Celine, of course, is that he was a self-conscious stylist (he called himself a stylist, rather than a man of ideas), and his passionate works, out of which the phrases seemed to pour with abandon, were in fact the products of dedicated toil...
...second, a reconsideration of the "political reasons" for the critical neglect of Celine which, as Thomas rightly stresses, "are less important than the positive artistic reasons for considering him to be one of the very few great and original writers in 20th-century France...
...His mixture of compassion and detachment is rarely encountered in the West in our century, but was common in medieval Europe as well as in Asian societies...
...Fascism or Nazism...
...And anyone who wants a thorough critical survey would be well-advised to look at Allan Thiher's Celine: The Novel as Delirium, published in 1972...
...The chapter on Mort a cridit is followed by one on "Language" covering the entire output, and the two parts of Guignol's Band (one published in 1944, the other posthumously in 1964) are appropriately considered together...
...Thomas' book does have the virtue of telling you where to start and what to look for...
...Not guilty...
...Thomas adds usefully to our knowledge of Celine's political errors and misdemeanors by paraphrasing four of his pamphlets that have never been reprinted or translated: Mea Culpa (1936) , Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) , L'Ecole des cadavres (1938) and Les Beaux Draps (1941...
...The last is reinforced by a study of his approach to style and of the origins of his dynamic vocabulary...
...I found Thomas' analysis of Celine's language and stylistic tactics by comparison rather humdrum...
...Merlin Thomas' Louis-Ferdinand Celine belongs among those elegant introductions to the great international figures of modern literature that New Directions has specialized in...
...This also explains how, for all his seeming to see life in tragic terms, he could create such splendid comic characters as the great charlatan, Courtial des Pereires, in Mort a credit...
...It is useful, rather than important, and most useful to those who know little about Ceiine or have had difficulty finding the less accessible of his many works...
...He then proceeds more or less chronologically to consider Celine's various writings, with separate chapters for the two great early novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort a credit...
...This helps us to understand the apparent contradiction between Celine's seeming philosophic despair and his dedication in pursuing his two vocations-writing and medicine...
...Since in addition Celine was accused, among other things, of collaborating with and accepting money from the German occupiers of France, Thomas' exposition is extremely helpful in recording what he really said and did...
...It is impossible to excuse Celine's anti-Semitism, yet one should bear in mind, by way of understanding, that it lasted for only a brief period when Western Europe was in a state of hysterical fear, and that Celine, like such other men of strong prejudices as Pierre Joseph Proudhon and William Cobbett, came from the socially insecure lower middle class and therefore was prone to irrational prejudice...
...In Celine's character, a narrow-minded petit com-mercant wrestled with the Literary genius...
...it is why neither his political folly nor the malice of his enemies could prevent the re-establishment of his fame...
...Guilty...
...It now appears that Celine, too, will win Stendhal's lottery and be read a hundred years hence unless mankind suffers the disaster he thought it richly deserved...
...Although not published as one of ND's Makers of Modern Literature series????which includes such fine volumes as Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster and Martin Tur-nell's Baudelaire-it follows in that tradition, combining the necessary amount of biography with an exposition of the subject's works, a modicum of explicatory criticism, and a general assessment of the writer's relative position in world literature...
...Not guilty...
...Thomas' book, however, lacks the critical vision and stylistic distinction of the very best in that series...
...In these Celine attacked the Left (both Russian and French), proposed that an arrangement with Nazi Germany might be the best way out of the crisis that engulfed Europe, and expressed a violent but temporary anti-Semitism...
...Collaboration...
...On the evidence presented, one can only agree with Thomas' verdict: "Anti-Semitism...
...Profiteering...
...The distinctive features of Thomas' book are, first, a reassessment of Celine's philosophical outlook that seeks correct the common assumption that he was an antivitalist nihilist...
...and four chapters on the works published after 1944, during the period of Celine's eclipse and re-emergence into critical recognition...
...He shows how Celine melded literary form and colloquial speech...
...Not guilty...
...This consummate craftsmanship is the secret of his durability...
Vol. 63 • April 1980 • No. 7
