Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

The controversial French novelist Louis Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), who used the pen name Louis Ferdinand Céline, produced works marked by a black pessimism about humanity, violent diatribes, and an increasingly hysterical desperation.

Louis Ferdinand Céline was born on May 27, 1894, just outside Paris, where he spent his childhood in humble circumstances. He left school in 1905 but continued to study by himself for the baccalauréat (university entrance) examination while working as apprentice and office boy. In 1912 he enlisted for military service and was badly wounded and decorated during World War I. Discharged because of his injuries, Céline undertook medical studies and qualified as a doctor in 1924. Extensive travels in Europe, Africa, and North America followed until he set up his practice in a poor district of Paris in 1928.

Célinés first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night), was published in 1932, when he was 38. It brought him immediate fame. Written in ungrammatical, colloquial language, including slang and obscenities, it has had a great stylistic influence on later writers, both in France and in North America. It describes the adventures, at once implausible yet convincingly portrayed, of the semiautobiographical hero, Bardamu, in the war, in the African jungle, and in America, and finally as an unsuccessful doctor in France. Above all, the novel communicates Céline's disgust and anger at what he considered the stupidity and hypocrisy of society.

It is this aspect of Céline's work which came increasingly into evidence in a second novel, Mort à crédit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), dealing with the experiences of Céline's childhood and adolescence. A growing disillusionment and bitterness at the world around him led him to write works-shrill and hysterical pamphlets more than novels-containing incoherent political diatribes and a good deal of anti-Semitic propaganda. The paranoiac side of his personality was to dominate increasingly in the years which followed.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Céline compromised himself politically by siding with collaborators. After the liberation of France in 1944 he escaped with great difficulty through Germany to Denmark, but there he was imprisoned for over a year on charges of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1951 he was allowed to return to France; he spent the last 10 years of his life in a Paris suburb, still practicing medicine, impoverished and deeply embittered. During this time he wrote several other books based on his experiences during and after World War II. He now viewed life as a frightening nightmare, a world of hallucination and insanity, where hideous ugliness and death were the only true realities. Céline died on July 1, 1961.

Further Reading

There are four full studies of Céline in English: Milton Hindus, The Crippled Giant (1950); David Hayman, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1965); and Erika Ostravsky, Céline and His Vision (1967) and Voyeur Voyant: A Portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1972).

Additional Sources

McCarthy, Patrick, Céline, New York: Penguin Books, 1977, 1975.

Vitoux, Frederic, Céline: a biography, New York, N.Y.: Paragon House, 1992.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (pseud. of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches) (1894-1961). For the last part of his life and in the early years following his death, Céline's reputation was overshadowed by the public's perception of him as a collaborator, a fascist, and an antisemite. Similarly, as a novelist, because of his exploitation of spoken French and his establishment of a narrator bearing considerable similarities to the author, he was long regarded both as an extreme example of the survival of Naturalism in fiction and, at best, as an inspired primitive using his novels to convey a bleak moral message. Gradually it has become possible, however, to see the style and the narrative persona as careful contrivances and to see both Céline's fiction and non-fiction as complex and ambiguous, consciously operating within the framework of French modernism.

He was born in Courbevoie, that Parisian industrial suburban heartland which remains at the centre of his work, the son of an insurance clerk and a shopkeeper specializing in lace and antiques. Shortly after, the family moved to the Passage Choiseul in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, the traditional centre of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie beginning to decline with the dawn of the new technological century. After attempts at various artisanal trades, with no conspicuous success, Céline joined the cavalry in 1913 and saw service in the first months of World War I, being wounded and decorated for gallantry. After travelling in England and French West Africa, he belatedly began medical studies in Rennes and finally qualified as a doctor in 1924, with a thesis on La Vie et l'œuvre de Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis, a work which announces much of his later fiction and non-fiction. After a period in Geneva as a medical official for the League of Nations, during which he briefly visited the Ford factory at Detroit, he settled as a doctor in Paris in 1928, first in private practice and then in the municipal clinic in the industrial suburb of Clichy. At this time he wrote two plays, to be published later, L'Église (1933) and Progrès (1978), a number of medical polemics on the subject of hygiene and social medicine, and began his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit.

The publication of this novel in 1932 and the award of the Prix Renaudot established Céline as a major author instantly. Its depiction of a picaresque journey through World War I, the colonies, America, and the industrial suburbs, conveyed a philosophical and social pessimism which attracted Left and Right alike. The publication of his second novel, Mort à crédit, in 1936, alienated much of this support, on account of the bleakness of its depiction of the family, its stylistic lack of compromise, and its calculated obscenity. This alienation was compounded, in so far as the Left was concerned, by his denunciation of Soviet Russia, following a journey there, in Mea culpa (1936), and by the publication of a violent antisemitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). This was followed by two further pamphlets, L'École des cadavres (1938) and Les Beaux Draps (1941). Whilst their antisemitic content undoubtedly situated Céline on the extreme Right, the ambiguity and complexity of the pamphlets were barely perceived. In fact, they manipulate consciously an entire tradition of polemic, from Swift and Defoe to Bloy and Bernanos, and contrive to parody conventional antisemitic polemic whilst conveying a more insidious form of antisemitism. It is likely that their stylistic virtuosity provided a release from the block in which Céline found himself with his third novel, Casse-pipe (1949).

During the Occupation, he frequented collaborationist circles without becoming heavily implicated, and concentrated on a two-novel evocation of London during World War I, Guignol's Band I (1944) and Guignol's Band II (1964), in which the stylistic experimentation of Mort à crédit and the pamphlets is continued to create a consciously Shakespearian atmosphere. In 1944 he left France with the Vichy government for Sigmaringen and from there fled to Denmark, where he was interned pending extradition by the Liberation authorities. In spite of French attempts, he was not returned to France and remained under house arrest in considerable hardship until he was finally allowed back in 1951, settling in his last house in the suburb of Meudon.

The last ten years of Céline's life were his most productive. A further two-novel cycle, Féerie pour une autre fois I (1952) and Féerie pour une autre fois II: Normance (1954), weaves a complex operatic fantasy around Montmartre Bohemia and the bombing of the Butte in 1944. The Entretiens avec le professeur Y (1955) constitute his major art poétique, emphasizing the necessity of ‘la petite musique’ to his style, the directness of which he defines as a ‘metro émotif’. Finally, the trilogy evoking his experiences in Germany at the end of the war, D'un château l'autre (1957), Nord (1960), and Rigodon (1969), is a culmination of his fictional experimentation.

Early critics of Céline identified his originality in the bleakness of his moral vision. In fact, it lies both in the precision and complexity of that vision itself and in the stylistic and textual sophistication with which the vision is conveyed. Céline's general despair at humanity is forged from a precise awareness of social and economic processes which have cut him and his class off from their past. The psychological tension generated by such a loss is the basis both for Céline's pessimism and for the linguistic form in which it is couched. His language, which consciously, like that of Queneau, attempts to reinvigorate literature with the vibrancy of spoken French, is a careful compound of popular French and varying layers of argot, given a jazz-like musicality through the use of exclamations separated by three dots. Similarly, the Célinian text is not the direct reflection of a moral or social reality which it was once thought to be, but the product of layer upon layer of cultural and literary references, of which Proust is one of the most important. In this perspective, Céline stands as one of the foremost French modernist novelists.

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Bibliography

• F. Vitoux, Céline (1978)
• H. Godard, Poétique de Céline (1985)
• I. Noble, Language and Narration in Céline's Novels (1986)
• N. Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1987)

Quotes:

"Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence."

"Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren't so many of them left. Think it over... no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid... antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine."

"Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it."

"One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult; one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's obvious."

"The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so."

"We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it."

See more famous quotes by Louis-Ferdinand Celine