Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline (/seɪˈliːn/ say-LEEN, French: [lwi fɛʁdinɑ̃ selin] ), was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech.[1] In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."[2]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches
27 May 1894
Courbevoie, France
1 July 1961 (aged 67)
Meudon, France
Novelist, pamphleteer, physician
- Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
- Death on Credit (1936)
- Castle to Castle (1957)
- North (1960)
From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author. Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century but remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.[3][4]
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
The only child of Fernand Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine). The family came originally from Normandy on his father's side and Brittany on his mother's side. His father was a middle manager in an insurance company and his mother owned a boutique where she sold antique lace.[5][6] In 1905, he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades.[6]
Between 1908 and 1910, his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment.[6] From the time he left school until the age of eighteen Céline worked in various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time. He often found himself working for jewellers, first, at eleven, as an errand boy, and later as a salesperson for a local goldsmith. Although he was no longer being formally educated, he bought schoolbooks with the money he earned, and studied by himself. It was around this time that Céline started to want to become a doctor.[7]
World War I and Africa[edit]
In 1912, Céline volunteered for the French army (in what he described as an act of rebellion against his parents)[8] and began a three-year enlistment in the 12th Cuirassier Regiment stationed in Rambouillet.[6] At first he was unhappy with military life, and considered deserting. However, he adapted, and eventually attained the rank of Sergeant.[9] The beginning of the First World War brought action to Céline's unit. On 25 October 1914, he volunteered to deliver a message, when others were reluctant to do so because of heavy German fire. Near Ypres, during his attempt to deliver the message, he was wounded in his right arm. (Although he was not wounded in the head, as he later claimed, he did suffer severe headaches and tinnitus for the rest of his life.)[10][11] For his bravery, he was awarded the médaille militaire in November, and appeared one year later in the weekly l'Illustré National (November 1915).[6] He later wrote that his wartime experience left him with "a profound disgust for all that is bellicose."[12]
In March 1915, he was sent to London to work in the French passport office. He spent his nights visiting music halls and the haunts of the London underworld, and claimed to have met Mata Hari.[13] He later drew on his experiences in the city for his novel Guignol's Band (1944). In September, he was declared unfit for military duty and was discharged from the army. Before returning to France, he married Suzanne Nebout, a French dancer, but the marriage wasn't registered with the French Consulate and they soon separated.[14]
In 1916, Céline went to French-administered Cameroon as an employee of the Forestry Company of Sangha-Oubangui. He worked as an overseer on a plantation and a trading post, and ran a pharmacy for the local inhabitants, procuring essential medical supplies from his parents in France. He left Africa in April 1917 due to ill health. His experiences in Africa left him with a distaste for colonialism and an increasing passion for medicine as a vocation.[15]
Becoming a doctor (1918–1924)[edit]
In March 1918, Céline was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a team travelling around Brittany delivering information sessions on tuberculosis and hygiene.[16] He met Dr Athanase Follet of the Medical Faculty of the University of Rennes, and soon became close to Follet's daughter Édith. Dr Follet encouraged him to pursue medicine and Céline studied for his baccalaureate part-time, passing his examinations in July 1919. He married Édith in August.[17]
Céline enrolled in the Medical Faculty at Rennes in April 1920 and in June Édith gave birth to a daughter, Collette Destouches. In 1923 he transferred to the University of Paris and in May 1924 defended his dissertation The Life and Work of Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis (1818–1865), which has been called, "a Célinian novel in miniature".[18][19]
Antisemitism, fascism and collaboration[edit]
Céline's first two novels contained no overt antisemitism.[48] However, his polemical books Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937) and L'École des cadavres (The School of Corpses) (1938) are characterised by antisemitism, and also Céline's attachment to many of the same ideas that French fascists had been propagating since 1924.[49] While Céline's antisemitism was generally welcomed by the French far Right, some, such as Brasillach, were concerned that its crudity might be counterproductive.[50] Nevertheless, biographer Frédéric Vitoux concludes that: "through the ferocity of his voice and the respect in which it was held, Céline had made himself the most popular and most resounding spokesman of pre-war antisemitism."[51]
Céline's public antisemitism continued after the defeat of France in June 1940. In 1941 he published Les beaux draps (A Fine Mess) in which he lamented that: "France is Jewish and Masonic, once and for all." He also contributed over thirty letters, interviews and responses to questionnaires to the collaborationist press, including many antisemitic statements.[52] The German officer and writer Ernst Jünger stated in his Paris war diaries that Céline told him on 7 December 1941 "of his consternation, his astonishment" that the Germans did not "exterminate" the French Jews.[53][54] Some Nazis thought Céline's antisemitic pronouncements were so extreme as to be counter-productive. Bernhard Payr, the German superintendent of propaganda in France, considered that Céline "started from correct racial notions" but his "savage, filthy slang" and "brutal obscenities" spoiled his "good intentions" with "hysterical wailing".[55][56]
Céline's attitude towards fascism was ambiguous. In 1937 and 1938 he advocated a Franco-German military alliance to save France from war and Jewish hegemony. However, Vitoux argues that Céline's main motive was a desire for peace at any cost, rather than enthusiasm for Hitler. Following the election victory of the French Popular Front in May 1936, Céline saw the socialist leader Léon Blum and the communists led by Maurice Thorez as greater threats to France than Hitler: "…I'd prefer a dozen Hitlers to one all-powerful Blum."[57]
While Céline claimed he was not a fascist and never joined any fascist organisation, in December 1941 he publicly supported the formation of a single party to unite the French far right.[58] When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he expressed his support for Jacques Doriot's Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF).[59] However, according to Merlin Thomas, Céline didn't "subscribe to any recognisable fascist ideology other than the attack on Jewry."[60]
Following the war, Céline was found guilty of activities potentially harmful to national defence, due to his membership of the collaborationist Cercle Européen (which Céline denied) and his letters to collaborationist journals.[61] According to Vitoux: "Céline became a member of no committee and no administration (…). He never provided any assistance, either by report, advice, or information, to the German ambassador, let alone the Gestapo or the Central Jewish Office." Nevertheless: "Céline's writings had permanently marked French ideology, furthered and supported its antisemitism and consequently its complacency toward the Germans. That cannot be denied."[62]
Literary themes and style[edit]
Themes[edit]
Céline's novels reflect a pessimistic view of the human condition in which human suffering is inevitable, death is final, and hopes for human progress and happiness are illusory. He depicts a world where there is no moral order and where the rich and powerful will always oppress the poor and weak.[63] According to Céline's biographer Patrick McCarthy, Célinian man suffers from an original sin of malicious hatred, but there is no God to redeem him. "The characteristic trait of Célinian hatred is that it is gratuitous: one does not dislike because the object of dislike has harmed one; one hates because one has to."[64]
Literary critic Merlin Thomas notes that the experience of war marked Céline for life and it is a theme in all his novels except Death on the Installment Plan. In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline presents the horror and stupidity of war as an implacable force which "turns the ordinary individual into an animal intent only on survival".[65] McCarthy contends that for Céline war is "the most striking manifestation of the evil present in the human condition."[66]
The individual's struggle for survival in a hostile world is a recurring theme in Céline's novels.[65] Although Célinian man can't escape his fate, according to McCarthy: "he has some control over his death. He need not be arbitrarily slaughtered in battle and he need not blind himself with divertissements. He can choose to face death, a more painful but more dignified process."[67]
Merlin Thomas points out that the Célinian anti-hero also typically chooses defiance. "If you are weak, then you will derive strength from stripping those you fear of all the prestige they pretend to possess (…) [T]he attitude of defiance just outlined is an element of hope and personal salvation."[68]
Thomas notes that the Célinian narrator finds some consolation in beauty and creativity. The narrator is "always touched by human physical beauty, by the contemplation of a splendidly formed human body which moves with grace." For Céline ballet and the ballerina are exemplars of artistic and human beauty.[69] McCarthy points out that Céline habitually depicts the movement of people and objects as a dance and attempts to capture the rhythms of dance and music in language. "Yet the dance is always the danse macabre and things disintegrate because death strikes them."[70]
Céline was a major innovator in French literary language.[2] In his first two novels, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Céline shocked many critics by his use of a unique language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld.[73][74] He also developed an idiosyncratic system of punctuation based on extensive use of ellipses and exclamation marks. Thomas sees Céline's three dots as: "almost comparable to the pointing of a psalm: they divide the text into rhythmical rather than syntactical units, permit extreme variations of pace and make possible to a great extent the hallucinatory lyricism of his style."[75]
Céline called his increasingly rhythmic, syncopated writing style his "little music."[76] McCarthy writes that in Fables for Another Time: "Celine's fury drives him beyond prose and into a new tongue – part poetry and part music – to express what he has to say."[77] Céline's style evolved to reflect the themes of his novels. According to McCarthy, in Céline's final war trilogy, Castle to Castle, North and Rigadoon: "all worlds disappear into an eternal nothingness (…) the trilogy is written in short, bare phrases: language dissolves as reality does."[78]
Legacy[edit]
Céline is widely considered to be one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century.[4] According to George Steiner: "[T]wo bodies of work lead into the idiom and sensibility of twentieth-century narrative: that of Céline and that of Proust."[79]
Although many writers have admired and have been influenced by Céline's fiction, McCarthy argues that he holds a unique place in modern writing due to his pessimistic vision of the human condition and idiosyncratic writing style.[80] Writers of the absurd, such as Sartre and Camus, were influenced by Céline, but didn't share his extreme pessimism or politics.[81] Alain Robbe-Grillet cites Céline as a major influence on the nouveau-roman and Günter Grass also shows a debt to Céline's writing style.[80] Patrick Modiano admires Céline as a stylist, and produced a parody of his style in his debut novel La place de l'étoile.[82] McCarthy and O'Connell include Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut and others as American writers influenced by Céline.[83][84]
Céline remains a controversial figure in France. In 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of Céline's death, the writer had initially appeared on an official list of 500 people and events associated with French culture which were to be celebrated nationally that year. Following protests, Frédéric Mitterrand, then French Minister of Culture and Communication, announced that Céline would be removed from the list because of his antisemitic writings.[85]
In December 2017, the French government and Jewish leaders expressed concern over plans by the publisher Gallimard to republish Céline's antisemitic books.[86] In January 2018 Gallimard announced that it was suspending publication.[4] In March Gallimard clarified that it still intended to publish a critical edition of the books with scholarly introductions.[87]
A collection of Céline's unpublished manuscripts including La Volonté du roi Krogold,[88] Londres, and 6,000 unpublished pages of already published works (Casse-pipe, Mort à crédit, Journey to the End of the Night), were handed over by a Libération journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, to the Nanterre police in March 2020, and revealed in August 2021. The manuscripts had been missing since Céline fled Paris in 1944.[89][90] French writer and Céline expert David Alliot maintains that it will take many years for these writings to be completely appreciated and published.[91] Writing in The Jewish Chronicle in September 2021, Oliver Kamm described Céline as a "French literary hero [who] needs to be forgotten".[92] The lost manuscripts of Céline have been described as "one of the greatest literary discoveries of the past century, but also one of the most troubling".[93]
In May 2022, Céline's Guerre (War) was published by Gallimard,[94] and Londres (London) followed in October 2022.[95] The latter novel was probably written in 1934 and includes a key character who is a Jewish doctor.[96]
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