By LEDA TENÓRIO DA MOTTA*
Louis-Ferdinand Céline came to write the French language from the margins of society, under the moral collapse of the pre-Vichy period, to the most aggressive blows of the parigot, Parisian slang
If it is true that some of the most important epistemological ruptures in the modern history of ideas come from Jewish thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Einstein, just as modern literature owes almost everything to the novel about the novel by the also Jewish Marcel Proust, in all these cases, it is the secular Jew that we are talking about.
From the verification that the commodity stands before us with theological tricks to the Einsteinian homologation of Spinoza's God-Nature, passing through the psychoanalytic conjecture of an Egyptian Moses as the founder of monotheism, elegant Jewish secularity multiplies stunning glimpses. Consider also things like the Barenboinian celebration of Wagner in the middle of Jerusalem or the Harendtian projection of the supposedly absolute Nazi evil onto the relativity of the baseness of the banal…
It would be because, as Amos Oz writes, in this unmissable little treatise on semiotics that is The Jews and the Words, placed between exile and memorial transmission, for twenty-five centuries, the Jews have depended on words, and not on any words, but on those contained in books? Or is it because, as can be gathered from the best nonsense of Jokes and their relationship with the unconscious, which Freud takes from a repertoire of inside jokes, does the Jew know how to laugh at himself?
To remain only in the field of criticism, to a large extent, it is also to Jewish minds, all the more formidable and free from identity closure, that we owe the recognition of what comes to the French novel after the great Proustian scene, with the more than problematic irruption of this unavoidable figure of a new prose writer, at the same time an obsessive persecutor of Jews, who is Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Among other reasons, because they are not unaware of the irony that the certainly abject author of four angry pamphlets from the years of the rise of Nazism, two of which frantically implicate Jews in the plots of the Second World War, never stopped wanting to stand shoulder to shoulder with Marcel Proust. Coming to the field to explain, notably in Liberation, when he returned from the exile to which the same diatribes had driven him, that everything he wrote was in line with the great wars exactly as In search of lost time… for the salon line.
For if Marcel Proust was the stylist who recorded the final fall of the French aristocracy, in the already petty-bourgeois context of the Third Republic, going so far as to collect the smallest nuances of the language of the last nobility to close themselves defensively in the hotels of the right bank, he, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, came to write the speech of the French from the margins of society, under the moral collapse of the pre-Vichy period, to the most aggressive blows of the parigot, Parisian slang.
Hidden in a section of Flights which is not generally accessed, the most impressive intellectual gesture, in this sense, is that of a Walter Benjamin who dares not only mention Louis-Ferdinand Céline but also place him in the direct line or “in the line” of Charles Baudelaire. It would be because, as a Proustian that he was, the philosopher was in a good position to perceive that the Celinian imaginary of history in reverse brought together all the poetic values of testimony , Proust, starting with the enunciative vertigo of the author-narrator-actor emerging ex abrupto to multiply points of view?
The fact is that, among the notes of this unfinished and unfinished work that is the Passage-Werkand, which was developed in the midst of the Parisian years of the rise of Nazism and in the midst of the Celinian pamphlet fever, we find a surprising association between the poet's conspiracies and those of the novelist. Thus equated, to our astonishment, as analogous flowers of evil.
In fact, the philosopher collects and reveals, in this fragment of his dossier for a future book on Charles Baudelaire, ultimately never published in his lifetime, planned to be titled A lyricist at the height of capitalism, more than delicate confidences of My heart is naked, the anti-Semitic tone of the Celinian pamphlets. He cuts an excerpt from Baudelaire's famous diary that is as quick as it is fulminating commentary on the street riots of 1848, in which the poet is known to have participated.
In this confidential piece, he highlights his memories of the war cries that were then uttered and his way of congratulating himself on the anti-Semitic insinuations that he suddenly sees mixed in with the rebellious voices. He emphasizes how Baudelaire attributes them to the “jocular murderers”. He transcribes his cruel meditation on the subject: “A beautiful conspiracy to be organized for the extermination of the Jewish Race”.
And he dares to launch this conclusive critical note: “Céline continued this line”. The “beautiful conspiracy”, in fact, would continue, in Trivia for a massacre, the second of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's pamphlets of the 1930s, and the one in which the subject of the Jew declares itself, along with the topic of Jewish scholarship and, in Céline's persecutory terms, its detestable supremacy. In Origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt will say that there are French anticipations of European anti-Semitism in the plots of the 1848 revolution.
It is clear that such an approximation can and should also be explained by Baudelaire's defenses of the absolute comic, as can be found, for example, in Baudelaire's also generally little-accessed essay From the essence of laughter. And in this case, the bridge thus unexpectedly built between a poetry that reveres itself and a literature that abhors itself can and should be understood in the wake of the dissolution of the violent into the derisory, characteristic of the duplicity of the one who defined modernity as perfectly cut in two. Hence the murderous jocularity.
Still, it is impossible not to distinguish in the haughtiness of the Jewish critic who does not hesitate to interpret Celin's insult to the Jew as a refiguration of the Baudelairean shock what the Jewish-American or Jewish-American Judith Butler, especially because she is at war with gender paradigms, will call a “vision of Jewish exceptionality,” alluding to the political use of genocide that leads to the construction by Zionism of an “ecstatic type of Jew.” That is, the stereotypical Jew, the unique or only example of his species, for Butler incompatible with the multiplicity of experiences of the diasporic Jew, as she argues in Divergent paths.
It is this same secularity that Philip Roth is thinking about, in the chapter “Writing about Jews” of Why write, pointing out “the crude myth of the warlike, belligerent patriot Jew” that is forged in American mass culture from things like the best sellers by Leon Uris, Exodus, and the award-winning film of the same name, and thrives throughout the century. And by still attributing to the myth of the good Jew the narrowing of the “regions of consciousness and feeling” of the particular Israelite subject pressured by the “general oratory of self-esteem and self-pity”. And above all by rejecting the stigma of execrator of his own brothers that has always been his for daring to portray the Jews as he does, implicating them in the ugliness of life, without fearing to expose them to the danger of his betrayal.
It can always be conceded to those who wish to think so, as is the case of Hannah Arendt, for whom Louis-Ferdinand Céline falls into a discourse of the time, that having privileged the Jew, as the writer did, in his ruminations on the war, compromises him all the more, as a man of letters, one day hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre, for Journey to the End of the Night (1932), as such discourse is in the vulgar air of the time.
Living as a refugee in France, like Walter Benjamin, when he left Trivia for a massacre (1937) and The School of Corpses (1938), she then follows the events, precisely recovered in Origins of totalitarianism, where we read his reflections on the two texts above: “Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s thesis was simple, ingenious and had everything that was needed in terms of ideological imagination to complete the rationalist anti-Semitism of the French. He claimed that the Jews had frustrated the evolution of Europe as a political entity, causing all the European wars and planning the ruin of France.” Even considering the direction that the genocidal final solution took in France, who could disagree?
Owner of unheard-of refinements in her approach to the Jewish question, in this case, however, Hannah Arendt seems to be held hostage by the literalness of the material she examines, dwelling on the fascist enunciator and ignoring the transvaluation of style, seeing reason in the nonsense. Let us not charge you for any service in the poetic domain. But let us emphasize that even a great Jewish-French or French-Jewish literary critic with international connections like George Steiner, also because he is interested in the revolutions of modern poetic language, will make you uncomfortable.
First, by agreeing that there is indeed in Bagatelles a call for the eradication of the Jews from Europe, and that this is part of a general conspiracy, just as the hygienism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was a doctor by profession, is typical of the scientism that is also in the air of the times. But, secondly, and now giving relevance to literature, that, looking at things from another perspective, there is “the problem of the meaning to be given to this paroxysmal language”.
Hence I do not agree, in Territorial, with the bargain consisting of putting the novels on one shelf and the pamphlets on another, which would be equivalent to projecting all the ambiguity of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, this “great macabre”, as he calls him, outside of language.
There is now a consensus among scholars, notably among those who deal with the metamorphoses of the writer's style during the interwar period, and the debts of the great final Celinian style to the exclamatory-reticent regime of pamphlets, that, in addition to the comic shock, this final format begins to contain the author's own poetic thought, which mixes without permission with political reasoning or unreasoning.
It is inseparable from these conjectures to remember that the pamphlet genre is comic, in its ancient source, hence the surrealists used the procedure, for example, to demolish a master of the old guard of French literature called Anatole France, celebrating his death in the most pamphlet-like manner, in 1924, in a corrosive attack piece called The corpse, in which Louis-Ferdinand Céline is visibly inspired.
Roland Barthes would be appropriate – he doesn’t hesitate to quote Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in The zero degree of writing, regarding the assassinations of classical literature by modern literature – that the content cannot be fascist if the form is not. Didn't he say, in the middle of the entrance rite into the France secondary school, which is the language that is fascist, not because it forbids us to say it, but because it forces us to say it? This is what lay readers of the Baudelairean-Proustian writer rely on to face his massive attacks against everything and everyone, like this one who emerged from his manic dissociations in The School of Corpses: “the shameless Masonic republic, called French, is entirely at the mercy of secret societies and Jewish banks…”
From Barthes to Kristeva, via Philippe Sollers, new criticism The Frenchwoman excelled in putting all this down to a lacerated laughter that neither Baudelaire in his essay on laughter, in which he defends caricaturists, nor Proust, who spreads jokes about Jews throughout the salons, could resist. old France de in search of lost time never backed down.
At a time when France is divided over the interest in launching Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the consecrated Pléiade collection by the publisher Gallimard, it is worth remembering what this immense non-practicing Jewish writer, Philip Roth, says in the aforementioned book Why write, on the insistence on Jewish peculiarity, as he himself faced it, like Zuckerman in chains, in front of the Jewish community of New Jersey: “For the Nazi ideology and dream, the Jews were at the same time intolerable and useful for their purposes”. He means: the Jews sheltered under the oppression of the nomenklatura, always equal to themselves.
*Leda Tenório da Motta She is a professor at the Postgraduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of One hundred years of Modern Art Week: The São Paulo cabinet and the conjuration of the avant-gardes (Perspective). [https://amzn.to/4eRXrur]
References
ARENDT, Hannah. Origins of totalitarianism. Translated by Roberto Raposo. New York, New York: Routledge, 1998.
BARTHES, Roland. Lesson in Oeuvres Complètes. Books, Texts, Entertainment. New edition revue, corrected and presented by Éric Marty. Paris, Seuil, 2002.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Flights. Brazilian edition by Willi Bole, with collaboration by Olgaria Chain Feres Matos. Translated by Irene Aron. Translated from French by Patricia de Freitas Camargo. Belo Horizonte, UFMG Publishing House, São Paulo, Official State Press, 2006.
BUTLER, Judith. Divergent paths. Jewishness and Critique of Zionism. Translated by Rogério Betoni. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2017
ROTH, Philip. Why write. Conversations and essays on literature. 1960-2013. Translated by Jorio Dauster. New York, New York: Routledge, 2022
STEINER, Georges. Extraterritorial. Literature and the Revolution of Language. Translated by Julio Castañon Guimarães. New York, New York: Routledge, 1990.
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