Céline on the attack, by Xavier Bru de Sala


Great cultural event in France! This May 5, the first 200 pages of the more than 5,000 unpublished pages of Celine bizarrely discovered not yet a year ago. It’s about the novel ‘War, described by the few who have read it as a literary treasure of the highest order, a new masterpiece by the author of ‘Voyage au but de la nuit’ (‘Journey to the end of the night’) and ‘Mort à crèdit’ (‘Death on credit’), which is situated in time between these two monuments. 80,000 copies in the first edition, avalanche of presales. All in order. Or not, if it had been Proust perhaps the print run would have reached 800,000.

Not only among the readers of the summits of literature but among the writers themselves, there is a problem with the recognition and reception of Célinedoctor’s pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Destouchesneighborhood doctor, implacable anti-Semite, decorated as a hero of France in the First Great War, imprisoned and sentenced for Nazi collaborator in the Second. Apparently the problem is this. How to exhibit such a malignant biography and be part at the same time, with Proust and Joyce, of the trilogy of great geniuses of the 20th century? Céline’s unquestionable genius has been unanimously ratified by the first in line. Sartre himself proclaimed, from the ideological antipodes, that “of all of us, only Celine will remain & rdquor ;. If it is true that, in addition to a perdulario, Caravaggio was a murderer, that does not diminish her singular genius. Proust himself is described at the center of his magnum opus as Albertine’s abductor and heinous psychological manipulator, a victim of her suffocating web. No need to continue.

According to Céline himself, disgustedly away from any literary circle, “hate & rdquor; they had him was not due to his anti-patriotism but to his style, so away from “Jesuit-smeared” prose & rdquor; of French literature. The grandson and son of petulant professors, Céline is a consistent anti-intellectual and a relentless ‘destroyer’ of tradition itself. Rabelais, to whom many have compared him, disqualifies himself according to him because he spends the work arguing with priests and it is only “readable in the prose passages”. With Céline you can’t hide. When he is grotesque, It does not try to be funny but to show the bottom so beast of human nature. Vico’s ‘horribili bestioni’ stripped of the veneer of civilization. In vain have her commentators tried to explain that behind Céline’s relentless virulence and insolence lurks a depth of desperate piety. No, Céline’s diagnosis and verdict on humanity is this: execrable without escape and without remission.

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Why should we read him and venerate him as one of the great geniuses? Leave us alone with his inconsolable pessimism! Because the difference between everyone else and Céline is that he doesn’t bother to sweeten it with brushstrokes of false hope the bitterest of pills to hide one’s own cruelty in the eyes of readers who know they are scared by the image provided by their mirror. It is like this, to the point that whoever does not share it should choose between two unflattering options: either the author does not belong to the highest category or the reader is not capable of penetrating into the true nature of the text by reading it. who is facing

Even more than in ‘Voyage’, ‘Mort à crédit’, with a staccato, spasmodic and flashing prose, widens and deepens the limits of imagination and experience. The problem for those who cannot read it in French is the extreme difficulty of translation. They say that ‘War it goes further. It appears in a very timely manner, 80 years after it was written, at this time when the noise and horror of war are once again deafening Europe, when the trumpets of nuclear apocalypse or climate catastrophe are once again sounding and all this house of cards where we are so well installed, some more than others, begins to shake and threatens to collapse. Let’s see if we have time to savor with delight and without too much bitterness the other thousands of unpublished pages of that extreme virtuoso who cursed us like a prophet.


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