dogmatika
Dirty magic realism
11 September 2006
"Céline’s war is not the familiar, muddy charnel house sketched by Remarque or the British war poets but a free-form affair, characterized by delirious mobility, the garish illumination of burning villages and chance encounters between renegade and cowardly combatants. It is a Goya etching animated in the style of a Tom and Jerry cartoon."
Will Self on Céline:
What else is there in “Journey” to relieve the succession of taunts, jibes and foul-mouthed insults Céline flings against the world? A great deal. There are so many aphorisms — at least one per page — that the whole reads like La Rochefoucauld on LSD. (“Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment.”) Céline offers devastating critiques of Christianity, capitalism, socialism — all the kleptocratic belief systems devised to keep the poor in their place, and the bourgeoisie in theirs as well. But liberationists of all stripes — including William T. Vollmann, who supplies an afterword for the new edition in the style of le maître — are mistaken in claiming Céline as one of their own. Despite a critique of imperialism that reads like a scrambled “Heart of Darkness,” passages set in the United States that recall a crazed reworking of Kafka’s “Amerika,” and even the war sections, with their echoes of “The Good Soldier Schweik,” “Journey” is no political picaresque. Rather, the novel is a furious attempt to place one man’s consciousness at the epicenter of a world that is exploding under the centripetal influences of capitalism, imperialism, consumerism and licentiousness. In this, Céline anticipates the essentially apolitical rodomontades of the American Beats, quite as much as he belongs with the excruciating Marxian posturing of the interwar French existentialists and Surrealists.
“Journey,” published in 1932, burst like a bombshell on the Parisian literary scene, garnering huge sales and almost winning the Prix Goncourt. Yet no accolades could assuage Céline’s survivor guilt, or the bitterness it had engendered — a bitterness that curdled, becoming specific and prosaic, rather than universal and poetic.
Perhaps it’s wrong to read back into the text the events that later befell its author, but the facts remain that after writing two vilely anti-Semitic pamphlets in the late 1930’s, following the Liberation he went into exile, first in Germany and then in Denmark. He was tried for collaboration and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in his absence, and — a particularly Gallic touch this — declared “a disgrace” to la patrie. It wasn’t until the late 1950’s that he had any kind of rehabilitation in France. When those tyro American emeticists William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg went to visit him in Paris, they found a crazy old man who was terrified that his neighbors were trying to poison his numerous cats.
[via 3 Quarks Daily]
“Journey,” published in 1932, burst like a bombshell on the Parisian literary scene, garnering huge sales and almost winning the Prix Goncourt. Yet no accolades could assuage Céline’s survivor guilt, or the bitterness it had engendered — a bitterness that curdled, becoming specific and prosaic, rather than universal and poetic.
Perhaps it’s wrong to read back into the text the events that later befell its author, but the facts remain that after writing two vilely anti-Semitic pamphlets in the late 1930’s, following the Liberation he went into exile, first in Germany and then in Denmark. He was tried for collaboration and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in his absence, and — a particularly Gallic touch this — declared “a disgrace” to la patrie. It wasn’t until the late 1950’s that he had any kind of rehabilitation in France. When those tyro American emeticists William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg went to visit him in Paris, they found a crazy old man who was terrified that his neighbors were trying to poison his numerous cats.
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