Luke Warde
War and Peace?
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War, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, trans. Charlotte Mandell, New Directions, 2024, 144 pages, £11.99.
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France has never lacked for novelists with deplorable opinions. A classic example in the twentieth century is Louis-Ferdinand Céline. To describe Céline as ‘problematic’, a term many these days are wont to apply to writers whose opinions they find distasteful, would be an understatement: beside his full-throated antisemitism and racism, the transgressions for which some contemporary writers have been upbraided will seem relatively benign.
Take Michel Houellebecq. Odious as his views are on, say, Islam, and disingenuous as his defence of these can be, one could at least plausibly interpret his jibes as aimed at ideas, not a whole group of people. In Céline’s case, this is impossible: his antisemitism was a manifestation of racism, plain and simple. At the same time, comparing Houellebecq to Céline on a literary level risks flattering the former excessively. Revealing as his portraits of neoliberal anomie can be, Houellebecq’s impact on French letters is likely to pale in comparison to Céline’s. The latter’s debut novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), was truly paradigm-shifting, both thematically – few had dared to paint as relentlessly black a portrait of humanity – and stylistically: the oral texture of his prose, which drew heavily on the Parisian demotic with which he was so familiar, was extraordinarily influential, anticipating Genet and others, not to mention the American Beats; Jack Kerouac called him ‘a giant’.
While not quite universal – his Journey was famously denied the French equivalent of the Booker, the Goncourt Prize, which went to Guy Mazeline’s now largely forgotten Les Loups (‘The Wolves’) – acclaim for Céline’s early work was widespread, and leftists were particularly enthusiastic; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were champions, and Trotsky himself wrote: ‘Céline walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes.’ Of course, this was before the career of this ‘anti-patriot’ and ‘semi-anarchist’, as Trotsky called him, took its startlingly dark turn.
Following France’s defeat and occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940, a catastrophe that Céline welcomed enthusiastically, he penned a series of antisemitic pamphlets of such relentless violence that even his Nazi cheerleaders doubted his sincerity. Could Céline really believe the nonsense he had written? That, for instance, Pope Pius XII, Charles Maurras – leader of the proto-fascist and, by any reasonable standard, antisemitic, Action Française movement – and the painter Cézanne, among others, were all part of a conspiracy to ‘jewify’ the world? Some suspected that Céline had lost his mind, while others, like Nobel laureate André Gide, sought to explain it all away as an instance of his ‘anarchism’ run amok, or as an outrageous joke – a sort of proto-trolling.
Nobody has ever quite figured it out, but these texts have cast a permanent shadow over Céline’s reputation. While Trotsky was sure that Journey would guarantee his canonical status – ‘Céline has written a book which will survive, independently of whether he writes other books, and whether they attain to the level of his first’, he wrote – others have argued that so unforgivable were Céline’s antisemitic screeds, he ought to be wiped from the pages of literary history entirely. In today’s parlance: he should be ‘cancelled’.
Several years ago, Oliver Kamm argued so much in The Jewish Chronicle, concluding that ‘it is impossible to disentangle [Céline’s] literary work from his noisome politics’, and he should therefore be ‘forgotten’. In making his case, Kamm suggested that Céline’s bigotry was not ‘incidental to his writing but explicit within it’. But in which texts precisely? Kamm failed to point this out, instead conflating the pamphlets with the novels. Such a critical move is understandable: the notion that artists with objectionable opinions will produce aesthetically deficient art is certainly comforting. Whether it is intellectually or critically tenable is another matter. Few would argue that Journey, or Céline’s second novel, Death on Credit (1936), are antisemitic. Besides, artistic brilliance and moral turpitude can surely coexist, and it is in incumbent on us to confront, rather than elide, this troubling reality.
Responses such as Kamm’s go some way towards conveying the depth of feeling that Céline inspires, particularly in his native France. This was recently illustrated in the wildly circuitous backstory behind the discovery of a trove of some six thousand pages of his writing, which included drafts of abandoned projects and significant portions of works already published in part or in what was hitherto understood to be their entirety. The existence of the texts was only made known in 2021 by Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, a former theatre critic at the left-wing daily, Libération. He claimed that he was given the manuscripts on the condition that they would not be handed over to Céline’s widow, Lucette Almanzor, who might profit from them. Moreover, he agreed that he would only make public their existence after her death. According to his own account, the texts were passed to him in 1982 by the daughter of the well-known résistantand trade unionist Yvon Morandat, who reportedly came upon them in Céline’s apartment in Montmartre shortly after he had fled Paris, fearing arrest and potential execution by his enemies. Lucette Almanzor died in 2019, aged one hundred and seven.
Since her death, three ‘new’ works, Guerre (‘War’), Londres (‘London’) and La Volonté du Roi Krogold (‘The Will of King Krogold’) have been published by Gallimard. Predictably, their appearance has sparked heated debate. Some, including Thibaudat and other well-known scholars, have raised suspicions of editorial sleight of hand; the manuscript of War, for example, begins curiously in media res, on a page numbered 10, and there is consensus among leading Céline specialists that the text is a draft of some kind. As Thibaudat points out in his own account of the affair, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, le trésor retrouvé, the prospect of material gain likely played a role in the marketing of War as a standalone work, not an abandoned sketch of dubious provenance, and we should therefore treat its editorial decisions with a certain degree of scepticism.
War is the first of the three narratives to appear in English (two versions by widely respected translators are available, one by Charlotte Mandell, under review here, and another by Sander Berg). The text begins as it means to continue, in a torrent of violence. The narrator, Ferdinand, wakes up injured on the battlefield, dazed and confused, his head half-submerged in mud, his arm bloodied and broken. Such has been the intensity of the bombardment, the sound of shelling has infiltrated his very consciousness; ‘I caught the war in my head. It’s locked up inside my head’, as he puts it. From now on, noise will be something he not only registers, but produces: ‘It almost made me afraid to hear myself. I thought I was going to wake up the battle, I was making so much noise inside. I was making more noise in my head than a battle.’ Here, the term ‘noise’ seems to describe more than an acoustic phenomenon, denoting, rather, the narrator’s henceforth deranged relationship to his wider perceptual field; it affects his vision – he starts to hallucinate – and other faculties: ‘When it came to memory, there was nothing but a jumble.’
The rest of the roughly novella-length text concerns Ferdinand’s evacuation and convalescence at the rear. We are introduced to a wider cast of characters, which include the narrator’s grovelling petit bourgeois parents; Aline L’Espinasse, a necrophiliac nurse with whom he hooks up during his stay; and Angèle, prostitute and wife of Cascade, a fellow soldier, pimp and wife beater whom he befriends in the hospital. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Ferdinand and Cascade’s illicit ramblings (they are not entitled to leave the makeshift hospital unaccompanied) about town. The text’s climacteric comes when the latter is taken out and shot for alleged cowardice. Ferdinand, meanwhile, is informed that he is to be decorated for valour based on actions of which he, of course, has no memory. With Cascade off the scene, he and Angèle shack up and soon find themselves on a boat to London, at which point the narrative ends.
There are aspects of War that warrant considerable interest, if not appreciation, most notably, Céline’s verbal flare, whether for capturing the punishing soundscape of war or lamenting life’s general crumminess: ‘It’s fucked up, the past, it dissolves into daydreams. It picks up little melodies on the way that you didn’t ask for […] It’s a bastard, always drunk with forgetfulness.’ Yet the text also bears the hallmarks of a draft, and what makes it worth reading has perhaps as much to do with the light it sheds on the genesis of his other, more accomplished works as it does with its own essential qualities. Indeed, the reader can sense Céline honing, but not yet quite mastering, the vituperative prose whose fullest realisations we find elsewhere, in Journey and later works. To her credit, Mandell refrains from papering over those moments where the writing is simply weak. Take the following: ‘As for the pain and noise, the whistling and the whole racket, it had all come back the moment I was conscious again, but it was bearable. Though I still preferred the complete dilapidation from before, when I was almost dead, except for this shitload of pain, music and ideas.’ Reading such passages and their awkward redundancies, one begins to see why Céline, a stylist notorious for his pedantry, never gave the manuscript to his imprimatur.
On a more thematic level, there is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview. This was, in short, that human relations are governed by violence, and that violence is present even where it seems absent. This is intimated in War’s very narrative structure: through taking the reader from the front to the rear, and thus seemingly from war towards peace, we are invited to ponder whether this is in fact the case. The narrator, after all, has internalised the battlefield’s violence to the point that its sounds now accompany him everywhere, and violence continues to be meted out, most notably to women. Though Angèle is no damsel in distress – on the contrary, she is perhaps the book’s only true agent, hatching the scheme, for example, that will get her and Ferdinand to London – the beatings to which she is subjected, casually reported by her husband-cum-boss, portend the more sustained misogyny found in London, War’s sequel.
In fact, there are moments where the narrator appears to hint at his creator’s own troubling trajectory. Given what we know about Céline’s future, what would otherwise seem fairly innocuous riffs consistent with the text’s misanthropic tone – ‘I too should find a nice lunatic thing to make up for all the misery of being locked up forever in my head’; ‘I owed nothing to humanity anymore […]’ – instead take on a distinctly ominous ring. As history tells us, Céline was never just a hard-nosed realist describing the violence he saw as endemic to humanity, just as he was never really a pacifist, despite his claims otherwise. War doesn’t get us any closer to explaining the mystery of his subsequent malevolence, but it does help to illuminate the context that produced him and the development of the prose style for which he remains renowned.
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Luke Warde is a writer based in London. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Stinging Fly. He also regularly reviews fiction and non-fiction for the Irish Independent. He holds a doctorate in French from the University of Cambridge.
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