Céline, a Catastrophic Vision of the Universe
By Christian Morisot
A few letters ago, I wanted to share with you the authors who have influenced my reading. Antoine said, "I'm waiting for you with 'Céline,'" and the result was immediate, in a completely foolish way. I was confronted with an impure feeling, that of a player who accepts a friendly challenge from my friend. Here, then, in succinct words, is the strong and troubled expression of my intellectual unease.
I must confess that the character disturbs me, so closely does he relate to fear, shame, and literature. “We are virgins to horror as we are to pleasure,” that is indeed Céline’s cry in “Journey to the End of the Night.” This young writer emerged from the pains of “human hell,” making his own the wounded body of the pathetic hero of his book and even awarding himself his military medal… Disgusted more than revolted, he unleashed the words like one unleashes dogs. It is true that Céline’s world is running out of steam.
Céline offered me a new “vision,” a desperate song set to an unfamiliar melody: “the obscenity of disgust.”
Sartre would not have been himself without this intimate enemy.
For my curious young mind, Céline was made for abjection as others are for honors. True talent has no excuse; it needs none.
In a portrait, Roger Nimier describes the writer he most admired: “A traitor, an enemy of humanity, whose conscience stinks. A decrepit wolf.”
How can one understand that creative power can accommodate monstrosity? Defecation, considered one of the fine arts, is merely a consequence of this teaching of horror: Céline was born to blaspheme; he possessed an art of the “inappropriate” word, the pleasure of disrupting proper usage: “That’s called inventing. Take the Impressionists: they brought their paintings into the light. They made colors move. For me, it’s words, the place of words.”
For Céline, the essential thing is to remain ambiguous; truth is the most subtle of masks: “Total contempt for humanity is extremely pleasing to me.” From reading his books, I learned the exacting standards and the rule of the most severe incineration of words: “Forcing sentences to come off their hinges.” A controlled skid? Every creator chooses their path to make their mark. Céline debases, cripples, and will defile the entire universe; he screams his delirium. The reality of human stupidity caught up with Céline; the world, driven mad by criminality, perfectly reflected his books. For Céline, the impudent prophet, it was an opportunity, while awaiting the mass graves, the rivers of blood, the racial extermination, the degradation and torture; the vile farce was in full swing.
He was not, however, unaware of the danger: “Words seem harmless… We don’t suspect them, and then misfortune strikes.” For me, suddenly, after reading, it's not certain that Céline ever existed, so much did he appear to me like a phantom, always hiding, even from the very beginning of his writing career, using his mother's first name as a pseudonym to avoid being discovered: an author is born ashamed, he dies an outcast.
Sartre wrote in a portrait of him: "this man who is afraid of the human condition!" There you have it, the genius who soils himself.
"I'm even worse off than when I started," this character will say, "as composed as he is decomposed."
In 1961, the curtain had barely fallen when we could still hear the refrain: "an immense hatred keeps me alive, I would live a thousand years if I were sure of seeing the world die."
Céline, an error whose secret humanity holds, an antimatter, a catastrophic vision of the universe. For him, the Jew is everywhere, the land is lost, and for the Aryan, it's a matter of not compromising himself, of never making a pact.
What I remember most about this larger-than-life character is his unconditional support for the Nazis' socialist ideology; for him, there is no other solution than collective suicide, non-procreation, death… One may not like the man, but the writer remains exceptional. Would the world be different if Céline hadn't existed? I prefer to stick with my previous interpretation: for me, he's a ghost, born with shame and dying an outcast.
