I wuvs you, Mummy!
"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today."
—D.H. Lawrence, after failing several times in 1913 to place Sons and Lovers with a publisher
D.H. Lawrence, "Introduction to Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs"
When we think of America, and of her huge success, we never realize how many failures have gone, and still go to build up that success. It is not till you live in America, and go a little under the surface, that you begin to see how terrible and brutal it; the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars. And this is especially so in the country, and in the newer parts of the land, particularly out west. There you see how many small ranches have gone broke in despair, before the big ranches scoop them up and profit by all the backbreaking, profitless, grim labour of the pioneer. In the west you can still see the pioneer work of tough, hard first-comer, individuals, and it is astounding to see how often these individuals, pioneer first-comers who fought like devils against their difficulties, have been defeated, broken, their efforts and their amazing hard work lost, as it were, on the face of the wilderness. But it is these hard-necked failures who really broke the resistance of the stubborn, obstinate country, and made it easier for the second wave of exploiters to come in with money and reap the harvest. The real pioneer in America fought like hell and suffered till the soul was ground out of him: and then, nine times out of ten, failed, was beaten. That is why pioneer literature, which, even from the glimpses one has of it, contains the amazing Odyssey of the brute fight with savage conditions of the western continent, hardly exists, and is absolutely unpopular. Americans will not stand for the pioneer stuff, except in small, sentimentalized doses. They know too well the grimness of it, the savage fight and the savage failure which broke the back of the country but also broke something in the human soul. The spirit and the will survived: but something in the soul perished: the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness. How could it survive the sheer brutality of the fight with that American wilderness, which is so big, vast, and obdurate!
The savage America was conquered and subdued at the expense of the instinctive and intuitive sympathy of the human soul. The fight was toobrutal. It is a great pity some publisher does not undertake a series of pioneer records and novels, the genuine unsweetened stuff. The books exist. But they are shoved down into oblivion by the common will-to-forget. They show the strange brutality of the struggle, what would have been called in the old language the breaking of the heart. America was not colonized and "civilized" until the heart was broken in the American pioneers. It was a price that was paid. The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken.
By the sympathetic heart, we mean that instinctive belief which lies at the core of the human heart, that people and the universe itself is ultimately kind. This belief is fundamental, and in the old language is embodied in the doctrine: God is good. Now given an opposition too ruthless, a fight too brutal, a betrayal too bitter, this belief breaks in the heart, and is no more. Then you have either despair, bitterness, and cynicism: or you have the much braver reaction which says: God is not good, but the human will is indomitable, it cannot be broken, it will succeed against all odds. It is not God’s business to be good and kind, that is man’s business. God’s business is to be indomitable. And man’s business is essentially the same.
This is, roughly, the American position today, as it was the position of the Red Indian when the white man came, and of the Aztec and of the Peruvian. So far as we can make out, neither Redskin nor Aztec nor Inca had any conception of a "good" god. They conceived of implacable, indomitable Powers, which is very different. And that seems to me the essential American position to-day. Of course the white American believes that man should behave in a kind and benevolent manner. But this is a social belief and a social gesture, rather than an individual flow. The flow from the heart, the warmth of fellow-feeling which has animated Europe and been the best of her humanity, individual, spontaneous, flowing in thousands of little passionate currents often conflicting, this seems unable to persist on the American soil. Instead you get the social creed of benevolence and uniformity, a mass will, and an inward individual retraction, an isolation, an amorphous separateness like grains of sand, each grain isolated upon its own will, its own indomitableness, its own implacability, its own unyielding, yet heaped together with all the other grains. This makes the American mass the easiest mass in the world to rouse, to move. And probably, under a long stress, it would make it the most difficult mass in the world to hold together.
The deep psychic change which we call the breaking of the heart, the collapse of the flow of spontaneous warmth between a man and his fellows, happens of course now all over the world. It seems to have happened to Russia in one great blow. It brings a people into a much more complete social unison, for good or evil. But it throws them apart in their private individual emotions. Before, they were like cells in a complex tissue, alive and functioning diversely in a vast organism composed of family, clan, village, nation. Now, they are like grains of sand, friable, heaped together in a vast inorganic democracy.
While the old sympathetic glow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another secretly, and they develop social benevolence. They smell in each other’s nostrils. It has been said often enough of more primitive or old-world peoples, who live together in a state of blind mistrust but also of close physical connection with one another, that they have no noses. They are so close, the flow from body to body is so powerful, that they hardly smell one another, and hardly are aware at all of offensive human odours that madden the new civilizations. As it says in this novel: The American senses other people by their sweat and their kitchens. By which he means, their repulsive effluvia. And this is basically true. Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually. The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American "plumbing," American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and antiseptic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about "halitosis," or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don’t mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement.
And it is this repulsion from the physical neighhour that is now coming up in the consciousness of the great democracies, in England, America, Germany. The old flow broken, men could enlarge themselves for a while in transcendentalism, Whitmanish "adhesiveness" of the social creature, noble supermen, lifted above the baser functions. For the last hundred years man has been elevating himself above his "baser functions" and posing around as a transcendentalist, a superman, a perfect social being, a spiritual entity. And now, since the war, the collapse has come.
Man has no ultimate control of his own consciousness. If his nose doesn’t notice stinks, it just doesn’t, and there’s the end of it. If his nose is so sensitive that a stink overpowers him, then again he’s helpless. He can’t prevent his senses from transmitting and his mind from registering what it does register.
And now, man has begun to be overwhelmingly conscious of the repulsiveness of his neighbour, particularly of the physical repulsiveness. There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide, in modern Italian novels like Parigi — in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience. What the young feel intensely, and no longer so secretly, is the extreme repulsiveness of other people.
It is, perhaps, the inevitable result of the transcendental bodiless brotherliness and social "adhesiveness" of the last hundred years. People rose superior to their bodies, and soared along, till they had exhausted their energy in this performance. The energy once exhausted, they fell with a struggling plunge, not down into their bodies again, but into the cess-pools of the body.
The modern novel, the very modern novel, has passed quite away from tragedy. An American novel like Manhattan Transfer has in it still the last notes of tragedy, the sheer spirit of suicide. An English novel like Point Counter Point has gone beyond tragedy into exacerbation and continuous nervous repulsion. Man is so nervously repulsive to man, so screamingly, nerve-rackingly repulsive! This novel goes one further. Man just smells, offensively and unbearably, not to be borne. The human stink.
The inward revulsion of man away from man, which follows on the collapse of the physical sympathetic flow, has a slowly increasing momentum, a wider and wider swing. For a long time the social belief and benevolence of man towards man keeps pace with the secret physical repulsion of man away from man. But ultimately, inevitably, the one out. strips the other. The benevolence exhausts itself, the repulsion only deepens. The benevolence is external and extra-individual. But the revulsion is inward and personal. The one gains over the other. Then you get a gruesome condition, such as is displayed in this book.
The only motive power left is the sense of revulsion away from people, the sense of the repulsiveness of the neighbour. It is a condition we are rapidly coming to — a condition displayed by the intellectuals much more than by the common people. Wyndham Lewis gives a display of the utterly repulsive effect people have on him, but he retreats into the intellect to make his display. It is a question of manner and manners. The effect is the same. It is the same exclamation: They stink! My God, they stink!
And in this process of recoil and revulsion, the affective consciousness withers with amazing rapidity. Nothing I have ever read has astonished me more than the "Orphanage" chapters of this book. There I realized with amazement how rapidly the human psyche can strip itself of its awareness and its emotional contacts, and reduce itself to a subbrutal condition of simple gross persistence. It is not animality — far from it. Those boys are much less than animals. They are cold wills functioning with a minimum of consciousness. The amount that they are not aware of is perhaps the most amazing aspect of their character. They are brutally and deliberately unaware. They have no hopes, no desires even. They have even no will-to-exist, for existence even is too high a term. They have a strange, stony will-topersist, that is all. And they persist by reaction, because they still feel the repulsiveness of each other, of everything, even of themselves.
Of course the author exaggerates. The boy Lorry "Always had his nose in a book" — and he must have got things out of the books. If he had taken the intellectual line, like Mr. Huxley or Mr. Wyndham Lewis, he would have harped on the intellectual themes, the essential feeling being the same. But he takes the non-intellectual line, is in revulsion against the intellect too, so we have the stark reduction to a persistent minimum of the human consciousness. It is a minimum lower than the savage, lower than the African Bushman. Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousnessexcept that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest. It is a phenomenon, and pre-eminently an American phenomenon. But the flow of repulsion, inward physical revulsion of man away from man, is passing over all the world. It is only perhaps in America, and in a book such as this, that we see it most starkly revealed.
After the orphanage, the essential theme is repeated over a wider field. The state of revulsion continues. The young Lorry is indomitable. You can’t destroy him. And at the same time, you can’t catch him. He will recoil from everything, and nothing on earth will make him have a positive feeling, of affection or sympathy, or connection.
The tragedian, like Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, still dramatizes his defeat and is in love with himself in his defeated rôle. But the Lorry Lewis is in too deep a state of revulsion to dramatize himself. He almost deliberately finds himself repulsive too. And he goes on, just to see if he can hit the world without destroying himself. Hit the world not to destroy it, but to experience in himself how repulsive it is.
Kansas City, Beatrice, Nebraska, Omaha, Salt Lake City, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, he finds them all alike, nothing, if not repulsive. He covers the great tracts of prairie, mountain, forest, coast-range, without seeing anything but a certain desert scaliness. His consciousness is resistant, shuts things out, and reduces itself to a minimum.
In the Y.M.C.A. it is the same. He has his gang. But the last word about them is that they stink, their effluvia is offensive. He goes with women, but the thought of women is inseparable from the thought of sexual disease and infection. He thrills to the repulsiveness of it, in a terrified, perverted way. His associates — which means himself also — read Zarathustra and Spinoza, Darwin and Hegel. But it is with a strange, external superficial mind that has no connection with the affective and effective self. One last desire he has — to write, to put down his condition in words. His will-to-persist is intellectual also. Beyond this, nothing.
It is a genuine book, as far as it goes, even if it is an objectionable one. It is, in psychic disintegration, a good many stages ahead of Point Counter Point. It reveals a condition that not many of us have reached, but towards which the trend of consciousness is taking us, all of us, especially the young. It is, let us hope, a ne plus ultra. The next step is legal insanity, or just crime. The book is perfectly sane: yet two more strides and it is criminal insanity. The style seems to me excellent, fitting the matter. It is sheer bottom-dog style, the bottom-dog mind expressing itself direct, almost as if it barked. That directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness of setting down the under-dog mind surpasses anything I know. I don’t want to read any more books like this. But I am glad to have read this one, just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness, consciousness in a state of repulsion. It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being.
D. H. Lawrence
Bandol, 1929
Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life"
Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco
Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997)
To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill- formed or the incomplete, as Witold Gombrowicz said as well as practiced. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to each other by a particular line, as in J. M. G. Le Clézio’s novels; or they may coexist at every level, following the doorways, thresh- olds, and zones that make up the entire universe, as in H. P. Lovecraft’s powerful oeuvre. Becoming does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man, insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all matter, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization. The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write? Even when it is a woman who is becoming, she has to become-woman, and this becoming has nothing to do with a state she could claim as her own. To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and non-preexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form. One can institute a zone of proximity with anything, on the condition that one creates the literary means for doing so. André Dhôtel, for instance, makes use of the aster: something passes between the sexes, the genera, or the kingdoms.1 Becoming is always "between" or "among": a woman between women, or an animal among others. But the power of the indefinite article is effected only if the term in becoming is stripped of the formal characteristics that make it say the ("the animal in front of you .. ."). When Le Clézio becomes-Indian, it is always as an incomplete Indian who does not know "how to cultivate corn, or carve a dugout canoe"; rather than acquiring formal characteristics, he enters a zone of proximity.2 It is the same, in Kafka, with the swimming champion who does not know how to swim. All writing involves an athleticism, but far from reconciling literature with sports or turning writing into an Olympic event, this athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the organic body—an athlete in bed, as Henri Michaux put it. One becomes animal all the more when the animal dies; and contrary to the spiritualist prejudice, it is the animal who knows how to die, who has a sense or premonition of death. Literature begins with a porcupine’s death according to Lawrence or with the death of a mole in Kafka: "our poor little red feet outstretched for tender sympathy."3 As Karl-Philipp Moritz (1756-1793) said, one writes for dying calves.4 Language must devote itself to reaching these feminine, animal, molecular detours, and every detour is a becoming mortal. There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things.
To write is not to recount one’s memories and voyages, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and phantasms. It is the same thing to sin through an excess of reality as through an excess of the imagination. In both cases it is the eternal daddy-mommy, an Oedipal structure that is projected onto the real or introjected into the imaginary. In this infantile conception of literature, what we seek at the end of the voyage, or at the heart of a dream, is a father. One writes for one’s father-mother. Marthe Robert has pushed this infantilization or "psychoanalization" of literature to an extreme, leaving the novelist no other choice than that of the Bastard or the Foundling.5 Even becoming-animal is not safe from an Oedipal reduction of the type "my cat, my dog." As Lawrence says, "if I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me … are nice, well-behaved dogs, there it is, the animals are different…. The animal I am you instinctively dislike."6 As a general rule, fantasies simply treat the indefinite as a mask for a personal or a possessive: "a child is being beaten" is quickly transformed into "my father beat me." But literature takes the opposite path and exists only when it discovers beneath appar- ent persons the power of an impersonal-which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a woman, a beast, a stomach, a child…. It is not the first two persons that function as the condition for literary enunciation; literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say "I" (Blanchot’s "neuter").7 Of course, literary characters are perfectly individuated and are neither vague nor general, but all their individual traits elevate them to a vision that carries them off in an indefinite, like a becoming that is too powerful for them: Ahab and the vision of Moby Dick. The Miser is not a type, but on the contrary his individual traits (to love a young woman, and so on) make him accede to a vision: he sees gold in such a way that he is sent racing along a witch’s line where he gains the power of the indefinite—a miser…, some gold, more gold…. There is no literature without fabulation, but, as Henri Bergson was able to see, fabulation—the fabulating function—does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.
One does not write with one’s neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a stopping of the process, as in the "Nietzsche case." Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health; not that the writer would necessarily be in good health (there would be the same ambiguity here as with athleticism), but he possesses irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him while nonetheless giving him the becomings that dominant and substantial health would render impossible.8 The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums. What health would be sufficient to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera? It is like Spinoza’s delicate health, while it lasted, bearing witness until the end to a new vision whose passage it remains open to.
Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people that is missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. American literature has an exceptional power to produce writers who can recount their own memories, but as those of a universal people composed of immigrants from all countries. Thomas Wolfe "inscribes all of America in writing insofar as it can be found in the experience of a single man."9 This is not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-revolutionary. Perhaps it only exists in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete. Bastard no longer designates a familial state, but the process or drift of the races. I am a beast, a Negro of an inferior race for all eternity. This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer.10 Though it always refers to singular agents [agents], literature is a collective assemblage [agencement] of enunciation. Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair; there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world historical, "a displacement of races and continents."11 Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant. But it is the measure of health when it invokes this oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons, a race that is outlined in relief in literature as process. Here again, there is always the risk that a diseased state will interrupt the process or becoming; health and athleticism both confront the same ambiguity, the constant risk that a delirium of domination will be mixed with a bastard delirium, pushing literature toward a larval fascism, the disease against which it fights—even if this means diagnosing the fascism within itself and fighting against itself. The ultimate aim of literature is to release this creation of a health or this invention of a people—that is, a possibility of life-in the delirium. To write for this people that is missing … (for means less "in the place of" than "for the benefit of").
We can see more clearly the effect of literature on language: as Proust says, it opens up a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois but a becoming-other of language, a "minorization" of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system. Kafka makes the swimming champion say, I speak the same language as you, and yet I don’t understand a single word you’re saying. Syntactic creation or style—this is the becoming of language. The creation of words or neologisms is worth nothing apart from the effects of syntax in which they are developed. So literature already presents two aspects: through the creation of syntax, it not only brings about a decomposition or destruction of the maternal language but also the invention of a new language within language. "The only way to defend language is to attack it." "Every writer is obliged to create his or her own language."12 Language seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows. As for the third aspect, it stems from the fact that a foreign language cannot be hollowed outin one language without language as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals. They are not interruptions of the process but breaks that form part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming, or a landscape that only appears in movement. They are not outside language, but the outside of language. The writer as seer and hearer, the aim of literature: it is the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas.
These three aspects, which are in perpetual movement, can be seen clearly in Antonin Artaud: the fall of letters in the decomposition of the maternal language (R, T, . . .); their incorporation into a new syntax or in new names with a syntactic import, creators of a language ("eTReTé"); and, finally, breath words, the asyntactical limit toward which all language tends.13 And even in Céline—we cannot avoid saying it, so acutely do we feel it: Journey to the End of the Night, or the decomposition of the maternal language; Death on the Installment Plan, with its new syntax as a language within language; and Guignol’s Band, with its suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities. In order to write, it may perhaps be necessary for the maternal language to be odious, but only so that a syntactic creation can open up a kind of foreign language in it, and language as a whole can reveal its outside, beyond all syntax. We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know that they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having attained the limit they set for themselves, which ceaselessly slips away from them. To write is also to become something other than a writer. To those who ask what literature is, Virginia Woolf responds, To whom are you speaking of writing? The writer does not speak about it, but is concerned with something else.
If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s influence on North American writers makes for a fascinating case study in literary influence. Is Céline a "strong poet" whose anxiety of influence has been felt on this side of the Atlantic for several generations? Have many of our best writers been "misprisioned" by the sinister Frenchman via the Freudian dynamics of Harold Bloom’s theory of literary progeniture? Do Céline’s populist sympathies for the poor and the sick and the outcast account for at least part of his attraction?
Or does his searing contempt for that Dostoevskyean antheap, modern society (a contempt that many mistake for fascism), make him the exemplar of the truly authentic artist, the one who stands apart from the rest—and therefore markes him as a writer of highest possible integrity?
I think the real attraction of Céline is his frenetic style of wised-up street talk and caustic social observation. It’s a style that seems to survive in part the harrows of translation.
To be more precise: Céline’s voice, ably rendered by Ralph Manheim for the benefit of non-Francophones, plus the circumstances of his life, as captured and refined in his fiction, exerts such a seductive, siren-like lure for the safe and well-fed North American writer.
It is ironic Céline that remains so alluring for the North American writer, for that writer, no matter what degree of aliention he or she may feel, has never known the horrors and hardships of Vichy—occupation, resistance, treason—or had to endure the fugitive status of being allied with the wrong side, the losing side, indeed, quite clearly the criminal side in a global conflict, and, further, of being personally selected by the highest-ranking officals of your country as a most-wanted criminal, worthy of the death penalty, and even further again of being on the run in the Europe of 1945, with the continent itself now being rebooted by the victorious Allies to start again at Year Zero, with the determination to remove all vestiges of the Nazis and their accomodators very much on the agenda … to find one’s self alone, hunted and destitute, your country and continent in ruins…
Céline’s circumstances for a major portion of his writing life make Charles Bukowski’s call to "run with the hunted" seem like an invitation to a Japanese tea ceremony… everything Céline did seems marked with the stamp of the true isolate, and I often hear somewhere in my mind D.H. Lawrence’s dictum that "the essential Ameriucan character is cold, hard, stoic, isolate—and a killer." And Céline was at least the first four of those things when he had to be, and he may indeed have been a killer, too, what with his political pamphlets and his countrymen’s propinquity for betraying even to certain death the stigmatized and isolated among them, something that within a decade of his noxious political writings Céline came to know all too well.
Now here’s one academic’s take on the matter of Céline’s influence on North American writers (Alice Kaplan is the author of a fascinating study of an anti-Semitic writer in Vichy France, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach):
Alice Kaplan, "The Céline Effect: A 1992 Survey of Contemporary American Writers." From Modernism/modernity. Volume 3, Number 1, January 1996, pp. 117-136.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline confounds the paradigm for fascist writers. A doctor for the poor with clear populist tendencies who emerged on the literary scene from out of nowhere, he produced a runaway best-seller, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) (1932), then a misunderstood bildungsroman, Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan) (1936), that revolutionized the look of written French and exploded narrative convention. In the late 1930s he published two anti-Semitic pamphlets (Bagatelles pour un massacre [Trifles for a massacre] and L’École des cadavres [School for corpses]), both wildly successful, that pushed back the envelope of acceptable hate speech. In occupied France, he wrote letters to the editors of collaborationist newspapers and was identified with the racial policies of Vichy, but he was inconsistent and fairly useless as a polemicist for the "new order," since his spleen turned against Vichy as well its enemies. Nonetheless his camp was chosen: he was the writer who had passionately demanded the extermination of the Jews. At the end of the war he fled, following the Vichy government to the castle town of Sigmaringen, then to Denmark, where he was imprisoned by the Danes and released into exile. He was not extradited back to France during the early days of the purge, when collaborators such as Robert Brasillach were being condemned to death. By the time Céline stood trial, in absentia, the fury days of the purge had ended. Amnestied in 1951 as a veteran of World War I, he returned to a semireclusive life in the Paris suburb of Meudon, where he penned a trilogy of novels about the immediate postwar moment, featuring a shattered Europe and a paranoid, misunderstood, and wildly comic narrator. His novels (but obviously not his complete works) have been edited in the prestigious "Pléiade Collection"; his work appears on the French state agrégation examination, which certifies teachers of literature at the highest level. He is generally acknowledged, along with Marcel Proust (perhaps as an anti-Proust, in terms of class and syntax), as the great literary innovator of the century. Céline’s pamphlets, according to the wishes of his widow, have not been reedited since the war; pirate versions have been seized by his estate. There is currently a debate in France about whether or not his pamphlets should be reedited; whether, on the one hand, there is enough "Céline" in them to make them valuable as literary objects, or, on the other hand, whether it isn’t dangerous, in a current French climate of escalating racism and electoral successes by Le Pen’s Front National, to make this writer’s hate speech available to a public who reads him as great literature.
Céline has figured in the American literary context at least since the early 1930s; the story of his American reception runs along not quite parallel tracks to the French story, with some fascinating differences. This essay concentrates on one part of the American picture: Céline’s reception among writers.
The Miller Paradigm
Georges Brassaï, in a memoir entitled Henry Miller: grandeur nature (Henry Miller: lifesize), tells the following, now famous story: Henry Miller was living in Paris in 1932 and struggling with the manuscript of Tropic of Cancer, which had already been rejected by publishers. 1 An agent connected with the French publishing firm of Denoël and Steele gave Miller galley proofs of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. This was Frank Dobo, also of the Winkler International Literary Agency, the agent who would help sell and promote the English version of Céline’s first novel with Little, Brown and Company, and who was soon after to become deeply involved in Miller’s literary career. According to Brassaï, reading Céline so affected Miller that he rewrote Tropic of Cancer. 2 Miller told Brassaï that "no writer had ever given him such a shock"; Brassaï went so far as to claim that Miller moved to the working-class suburb of Clichy to be near Céline—a strange claim, since Céline never lived in Clichy, although he consulted at the medical clinic there.
It is no coincidence that Brassaï, who with novelist Pierre MacOrlan was identified with 1930s Montmartre-Montparnasse bohemianism, and who prowled Paris by night with Henry Miller as he prepared his famous photo essay Paris by Night, should be fascinated by Miller’s attraction to the author of Voyage au bout de la nuit. Whether or not the story, as Brassaï told it, is literally true, we know that Miller sent Tropic to Céline, that he championed Céline throughout his career, calling him his "brother" and a "great man," and that he signed an American petition in his defense when Céline was threatened with extradition on charges of collaboration.3 The "shock" that Miller is said to have felt upon reading Céline had a positive and long-lasting effect. Samuel Putnam, a translator of Rabelais who was also closely linked to Miller through their shared Paris expatriate scene (Putnam would employ Miller at his literary magazine, The New Review ) used the word "shock" in a different register in his 1934 review of the American edition of the English translation of Journey to the End of the Night: "It is safe to wager that nine out of ten non-French French teachers in America would be unable to make head or tail out of the original, while the French-born ones would be terribly shocked, linguistically as well as morally."4 The difference between the academic and the artistic response is clearly marked here: Henry Miller’s discovery of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, as related by Georges Brassaï, establishes a distinct relationship to Céline on the part of American authors, showing Céline en route to becoming a writer for writers.
The fact that Miller first read Céline in the original French is not to be overestimated in accounting for the impact Céline had on him. Many critics, including Putnam, acknowledged in the 1930s that John Marks’s translations of Céline were inferior to the original in tone, in addition to being expurgated. At Little, Brown, the telegram that editor Herbert Jenkins sent to the Boston branch, listing the phrases that Marks had cut, was hung on the wall as a reminder of the scandal that Journey constituted for the American reading public in 1934.5 It is astonishing that we had to wait until 1983for Ralph Manheim’s translation of Journey. By then, Céline’s American reputation had waned considerably.
American Moments
Under the impetus of the New Directions 1947 reprint of Death on the Installment Plan, Journey to the End of the Night in 1949, and the 1954 publication of Guignol’s Band in English, the circle of American-based writers interested in Céline expanded. For understanding the constellation of references and positions that accompanied the American taste for Céline during the 1950s, there is no more representative figure than Kenneth Rexroth, the New Directions author and critic who, in a series of articles on poetry, the Beat Generation, and literary rebellion, consistently used Céline as a counterpoint to the "polite" American writers, critics, and poets he dubbed the "Reactionary Generation." The paradox is that a writer like Céline, in the American context, shows up as an aesthetic alternative to writers who, like him, in the European context are situated on the reactionary Right. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound represented for the anarchist Rexroth the very essence of orthodoxy, crowned by a New Critical formalism for which he reserved his wittiest contempt: "there was growing up in Vanderbilt University, one of the few institutions of learning in the American South, a little coterie of political reactionaries, under the leadership of their English professor, John Crowe Ransom. . . . Their idol was T. S. Eliot, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic, Royalist. . . . They approved of Ezra Pound but wished he paid more attention to the rules of verse."6 At the other end of Rexroth’s spectrum was Allen Ginsberg, with his "denunciatory" jeremiad Howl, representing "an almost perfect fulfillment of the long, [Walt] Whitman, Populist, social revolutionary tradition in American poetry."7
Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs set out to visit Céline in Meudon in 1958. (It is generally thought that Burroughs learned of Céline through Miller as early as 1944 and transmitted his knowledge to the younger Beats, Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.) In the volume of poems that Ginsberg began writing in Paris that same year—entitled Kaddish, after the Jewish mourner’s prayer—Céline appears with a host of other writers—Whitman, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Charles Dickens, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud (Céline and Rimbaud are the only French writers mentioned)—in a poem called "Ignu." He is portrayed in his decrepit Meudon persona, administering morphine:
Céline himself an old ignu over prose
I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk
with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck
brown mould under historic fingernails
pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship
"because they were all getting emotional"8
The physical description corresponds to the person Ginsberg and Burroughs must have seen at Meudon—decrepit, ill, covered in sweaters in an unheated house. The elements of Céline’s first two novels are suggested as well: the gathering of crowds, the ship, Céline’s medical practice. The gift of morphine in "Ignu" is much closer to a Burroughs fantasy (Burroughs had published Junkie in 1953, and he presented a copy of the book to Céline) than to any dominant aspect of Céline’s prose, and shows how Céline’s aura could be appropriated. In the mid-1960s, Ginsberg would acknowledge the influence of Céline on his poetry in technical, rather than thematic, terms: "the rapidity of transitions and shiftings made possible by the 3-dot syntax . . . that’s what impresses us in US who are interested in the use of aural speech patterns transferred to written language."9
That the Céline celebrated by the Beats was a sentence-level writer was no doubt part of the decision made by New Directions to underwrite a new translation of one of the French writer’s previously translated novels during the 1960s. In 1966, they published Ralph Manheim’s translation of Mort à crédit, Death on the Installment Plan, which rendered Céline in a style that was more syntactically interesting, and more American in terms of vocabulary than the earlier, British-idiom translations by John Marks. Manheim’s work is more attuned to the qualities that Ginsberg valued in Céline’s writing: the odd speech patterns and the three dots, which were often ignored or "corrected" in Marks’s translations. This was the first of the decade’s several major publishing events in the American career of Céline: in 1968, Manheim’s translation of D’un chateau l’autre, Castle to Castle, won a National Book Award for translation, boosting the visibility and prestige of Céline’s post-World War II historical fiction.
In 1965, Céline made a significant appearance in Bruce Jay Friedman’s anthology of short stories, Black Humor. Céline is represented in the volume by the Admiral Bragueton episode from Journey to the End of the Night. He is the only French writer, appearing alongside Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, John Barth, Terry Southern, and J. P. Donleavy. The essay in which Friedman introduces the black humor genre is political and aesthetic in focus; black humor, Friedman argues, is the only possible literary response to the mad reality of the Vietnam war, and Céline was the precursor of this angry, hallucinatory genre: "There is Thomas Pynchon appearing out of nowhere with a vision so contemporary it makes your nose bleed and there is Céline who reminds you that he thought all your thoughts, worked the same beat, was dumbfounded as many times a day as you are, long before you were born."10
It was in the 1960s that Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five; John Clellon Holmes, the chronicler of the Beat Generation who became a teacher of fiction writing; and Philip Roth, the young Jewish author of the infamous Portnoy’s Complaint, all taught Céline in fiction courses at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.11 The appearance of Céline as an antiwar writer in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the dominant theme of which is a critique of the bombing of Dresden and whose success was overdetermined by protests against the American bombings of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, presented the French writer to a mass of American readers as an antiwar figure at a time when opposition to the Vietnam War was becoming a mass movement. If the 1950s was the decade when Céline’s reputation was expanding among writers and critics connected to the Beat Generation, the 1960s—with Céline’s canonization as a black humorist, the impact of the new Manheim translations, and the interest in his work shown by such mainstream novelists as Vonnegut and Roth—was the decade when Céline came closest to reaching a mass American audience—when Céline was reinvented as an antiwar novelist.
The Survey
In 1991, I undertook a survey of contemporary American writers. It was an attempt to document an afterlife for Céline—a life after the oppositional cultural movements of the 1960s, after the waning of avant-garde writing. The angry young men have been replaced as the most celebrated figures on the literary scene by women and minorities, and first-person narrative has attained a decidedly more confessional, less hallucinatory quality than it had thirty years ago. I wanted to know: Is Céline remembered? Is he still a writer’s writer? Who is reading him today?
The idea of asking a group of contemporary writers about a literary figure is an almost shockingly simple approach to questions of intertextuality and influence that have received sophisticated theoretical treatment. A survey cannot capture effects that are unconscious, repressed, or even indirect, but it can provide writers with a chance to give testimony—to create a text of their own. It is this "text"—the collective written responses to my questions on Céline—that I analyzed for patterns, repetitions, and surprises.
The empiricism of a survey was bound to antagonize a group of people who define themselves by their creativity. Asking writers to respond to yes-or-no questions is a bit like asking artists to complete a paint-by-numbers landscape. As I compiled the list of writers and later grappled with their answers, more often than not the survey came to seem rather like one of the experiments carried out by French writers of the twentieth-century OuLiPo school, which wants to formulate elaborate rules and mathematical structures as the bases for literary creation. My survey was a constraint, a mold, an opening into literary history that the writers could follow, resist, or ignore, as they pleased.
Among the thousands of writers producing in the United States today, I chose to survey novelists, poets, and translators. I included editors who have shaped some of the most interesting writing of the past twenty years and essayists who, in my opinion, have left the scholarly domain to reach an audience outside the university through large-circulation literary magazines such as The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. I chose individual writers for a variety of reasons: some had written or had spoken about Céline in interviews; others wrote in a genre or style favored by Céline; some writers were surveyed simplybecause I thought they would respond vehemently. At the same time, I aimed for a representative sample from various schools and tendencies in American writing: New Directions writers, Language poets, mainstream Knopf and Random House writers, writers born after 1950, and writers closely identified by their race, ethnicity, or sexual politics. The oldest writer to whom I sent the survey was born in 1897; the youngest, in 1964. The majority of writers who responded were born between 1927 and 1951, although there was a cluster of responses from writers born between 1909 and 1917, who came of age during the 1930s, when Céline’s American star first rose (fig. 1). My basic source for writers’ addresses was The Writers Directory, 1990-1992, although finding the right address was still not easy, and ten surveys never reached their destination.12
What do I mean by "writer"? The distinctions between writers and critics, between producers and analysts of literature, are not always clear, especially today when for economic and institutional reasons American writers often make a living by teaching criticism and creative writing in university English departments and in writing programs. This is a characteristic of American writers today that distinguishes them both from Céline, who always defined himself against literary and academic communities, and from contemporary French writers who are not institutionally linked to the French university system. Even Ginsberg, who was indicted on obscenity charges in 1957 for Howl, today teaches writing at Brooklyn College; Maxine Hong Kingston, the best-known Asian-American novelist in the United States, is a distinguished professor at Berkeley; and John Barth, known for his metafiction, holds an endowed professorship at Johns Hopkins. Very few of the writers surveyed are [fig. 1] completely independent of the academic world: either they teach, write criticism for academic journals, or depend on income from speaking engagements at universities.
I sent the survey to 163 writers.13 I received 65 responses, including completed surveys, letters, and one postcard, which constituted a response rate of 40 percent—unusually high for this kind of survey (10 percent is considered a very good response rate to any kind of direct mailing). I was struck by the generosity of the respondents, both in answering my questions and in suggesting more complex ones than I had asked.
Of the 65 respondents, 55 had heard of Céline, of whom 43 had read him; 12 people who hadn’t read Céline took the trouble to return the survey. Fourteen respondents asked to be quoted anonymously.
What Texts Have You Read?
I asked writers to check off the works by Céline they had read; these included the French editions of his novels and anti-Semitic/political pamphlets, and the English translations of his novels by John Marks and by Ralph Manheim.
An equal number of writers (17) had read Death on the Installment Plan in the Marks and Manheim translations. The figures, however, tilted toward Marks for Journey (34 people had read his translation, while 13 had read Manheim’s). More writers, that is, had read Journey before 1983, when the Manheim translation was first published.
The Céline work most frequently read by the American writers surveyed was Marks’s translation of Voyage au bout de la nuit, the only translation available from 1934 to 1983. The same number of people who had read the Manheim translation (13) read Voyage in the original French. The fact that Manheim’s translation appeared so long after the publication of Voyage is an important factor here. The ages of the Voyage readers ranged from 52 to 81, indicating that an older generation of American writers was more likely to have read novels in French than those born after 1945. One surprising result was that 9 of the 13 readers who read Voyage in French also read it in English as Journey: either they read the book twice, once in French and once in English, or they used one of the English translations as a guide in reading the French—an indication not only of their dedication as readers, but also of the specific appeal, and difficulty, of Céline’s French.
Discovering Céline
Céline is an antiacademic figure who nonetheless requires an educated taste. His work is transmitted in this country mainly through schools. Eleven writers had read Céline for the first time in college, either in a course or because friends had recommended his work. Five respondents precociously read him in high school or as teenagers, 1 in a graduate seminar, and 1 in a writer’s workshop—only 2 of the writers surveyed had first encountered him as book reviewers.
There were a number of writers who reported reading Céline as their first intense brush with literature (the experience that readers often recall with respect to J. D. Salinger or Rimbaud). The poet and translator Richard Howard, who has read a great deal of Céline, discovered him in high school—in Cleveland, where "a sort of diabolic aureole surrounded this antisemitic figure." 14 Novelist Jim Harrison also first read Céline "in high school, a rural agricultural school where my teacher subscribed to the Nation and Saturday Review so I found out early about Céline." Gary Indiana "first read Céline precociously, at age 13 or 14, because his books were available in paperback at the local news store: I liked the titles." If we date these high-school encounters to 1945, 1953, and 1963 respectively, we have evidence of a Céline influence on young people extending over three decades, from the period of his greatest infamy—the immediate aftermath of the war—to the decade of his most obvious influence, yet before the appearance of the first Manheim translation in 1966.
In addition to these high-school readers, the following writers (fig. 2) reported specific years for their first "awareness" of Céline (they are listed by order of birth year). Norman O. Brown (b. 1913) wrote a particularly interesting response to this question in a letter describing two different discoveries of Céline, fifty years apart.His initial encounter occurred
in my first Marxist incarnation in the late 1930s . . . as a "muck-raker," with ambiguous proletarian affinities. [Then] in the past year [1990] I discovered as more relevant to my post-Marxist tendencies Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur [Powers of horror]. . . . the material was so fascinating I went to the French edition and read it bilingually, paying special attention to the quotations from Céline. Thus through Kristeva in bilingual translation I got some access to Céline in the original.
Only 2 writers (not counting Brown) mention French sources—either personal or literary—for their first encounter with Céline: overwhelmingly, then, his reputation seems to have depended on word of mouth within an American network.
Placing Céline
I asked, "Where do you place Céline (list other comparable authors, give a value judgment or a description): (a) in terms of French Literature; (b) in terms of American literature; (c) along with other translated European authors?" The results were eclectic; some writers placed Céline among the timeless classics, others with nineteenth-century novelists, with his contemporaries in the 1930s, or with writers working today. There was no discernible pattern of generational affinity in these comparisons: Jay McInerney (b. 1955), sees Céline as someone who "made the Beat Movement possible," while Ted Morgan (b. 1932), compares him to Eric Bogosian, the 1990s performance artist. Céline is poet Philip Levine’s "favorite French writer of this century," whom he prefers to André Gide, Proust, and André Malraux. Richard Howard calls Céline one of the "three greatest prose writers of the Second World War period," along with André Breton and Maurice Blanchot.
In terms of American placement, Henry Miller was the most frequently cited in comparison with Céline (6 times); Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and the Beats were each cited 3 times, while John Hawkes, Ray Federman, Vonnegut, Pound, Harold Brodkey, and John Dos Passos were each mentioned twice. Clark Blaise defined Céline as a "proletarian lyric writer," along with Henry Roth, Edward Dahlberg, early James Farrell, Dos Passos, and William Saroyan (Nathaniel West was also mentioned). A number of writers chose to respond to this question in the "not as good as" mode—that is, evaluatively. According to Ron Sukenick, "Céline doesn’t rank with Faulkner or Melville but beats the Hemingway-Fitzgerald bunch by a longshot."
It was surprising that Norman Mailer responded to the survey by specifying that only one of his responses could be quoted—the response to this comparative question. He claimed that Céline is "significantly less valuable than Henry Miller." The remark is consistent with Mailer’s having championed Henry Miller in The Prisoner of Sex, after Miller had been famously attacked by feminist essayist Kate Millett in her Sexual Politics. Céline is an occasion for Mailer to continue championing Miller15
Titles
Céline’s English-language titles attracted attention. Gary Indiana, as noted above, saw Céline’s paperbacks at the newsstand when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, and "liked the titles." Tom Wolfe thinks that Death on the Installment Plan is the "greatest book title ever devised—better in English than it is in French."16 Greil Marcus, music critic and historian of punk rock, confessed to never having read Céline—"I haven’t gotten around to it (also haven’t read Woolf, Forster, etc); afraid I might like it too much (not kidding)"—yet he responded to several of the questions on the basis of his received ideas about Céline. Marcus has clearly absorbed Céline, in English, at the level of the titles: in Dead Elvis, published the year of the survey, he entitled a chapter "Ten Years After: Death on the Installment Plan."17 There is already a strong trickle-down effect of Céliniana in the culture, available to a knowledgeable critic like Marcus. Céline’s English titles are recyclable as slogans; the writer himself is known, even by someone who hasn’t read him, as forbidden and dangerous.
Voice and Freedom
Céline’s effect on a writer’s own practice was often connected by the respondents to the category of voice, although what "voice" means varied widely:18 Jay McInerny, for example, spoke of "a freeing up of the inner voice, a license to say whatever you feel," while for Andrei Codrescu, Céline’s writing is characterized by "the closeness of the speaking mouth: you can taste the spittle." Clark Blaise in a follow-up interview referred to Céline as promoting a "singularity of voice": "voice" in this case is akin to originality, or "signature," and for Blaise this is the key element in Céline. Like Samuel Beckett, Blaise contends, Céline is "entirely a ‘voice writer.’"19
Several writers acknowledged the effect of Céline as one of "freedom." Again, what liberation meant varied. For the Rumanian-born Codrescu, Céline represented a freedom from institutions: "He has given me license to practice medicine regardless of what authorities are watching." For Maxine Hong Kingston, he endorsed a freer speech, an end to secrets: "Perhaps I am assured by Céline that it’s all right to say anything I want." In Jim Harrison’s response, this freedom is physical and spiritual, linked to speed and range, power and godliness: "a strong early influence along with Faulkner etc., in terms of digression, freedom, how to accelerate fiction as if you were a god." Even 2 of the anonymous respondents, who were otherwise hostile to Céline, used the word "freedom," though grudgingly: "he freed [my writing] up—slightly"; "perhaps a certain freedom." In a 1984 interview in the Quinzaine Littéraire, Philip Roth combined these notions of voice and freedom in a provocative tribute to Céline, calling him "my Proust": "Céline," Roth concluded, "is a great liberator; I feel called by his voice."20 It is difficult to tell from his phrasing, translated here from the French, to what purpose Roth feels called. Céline’s "call," I suspect, is nothing other than the call to read Céline and to write.
The Pamphlets
Céline’s political affinities, his targets, and the passionate debates over what purpose his hate language served in its original context wither, or are suspended by many passionate American readers, in the interests of his writerly, emancipating effects. This may be both because he is not an American writer—and is therefore exempt from more local political passions—and because the full-blown expression of his racism takes place only in the pamphlets, which (with the exception of Mea Culpa [1936], an anticommunist polemic) are not available in English translation and so tend not to cloud his American reception.
Nevertheless, many more people (13, the number of Voyage readers) claim to have read one or more of the pamphlets (Mea Culpa, Bagatelles pour un massacre [1937], L’École des cadavres [1938], and Les Beaux Draps [1941]) than have read the playful postwar send-up of the world of journalists and editors, Entretiens avec le Professeur Y (1955), which was translated and published as Conversations with Professor Y in the United States in a 1986 bilingual edition.21 Saul Bellow read Les Beaux Draps in Paris in 1948, and responded to the survey with the following pun: "I still remember the hackles those fine sheets raised" ("fine sheets" being the transposition of the reference to bedsheets in "beaux draps," by which Céline is referring to the "fine fix" that the French have gotten themselves into during the Occupation).22
Overwhelmingly, the pamphlet readers have closer connections to France and to the French language than do the writers who have read only the novels. Saul Bellow was born in Montreal and has lived in France. Clark Blaise is of Quebecois origins. Raymond Federman, an American writer born in France in 1928, was the only survey respondent to have read every Céline text, French and English. Richard Howard is the foremost American translator of French literature. The writer and former journalist Sanche de Gramont came to the United States from France as an adult and changed his name to Ted Morgan. The poets Michael Palmer and Keith Waldrop also translate from the French and have close intellectual ties to France. Gary Indiana read the pamphlets while living in France.
Age is significant: of the 13pamphlet readers, 9 were born between 1911 and 1932, and only 3 were born after 1940—the youngest, Gary Indiana, in 1950. While he was living in France in 1980, Indiana read copies of Bagatelles pour un massacre, L’École des cadavres, and Les Beaux Draps borrowed from Jean-Jacques Schuhl, an experimental French novelist with an affinity for the Beats. No respondent under forty-two years of age had read the pamphlets. This is a provocative result, for it implies that the memory of Céline’s anti-Semitic writing is fading among his readers today. One might argue about whether that is good or bad, from both an ethical and an aesthetic point of view.
The responses I want to juxtapose with the surprising number of readers of the pamphlets—20 percent of those who responded to the survey—are to the question "Are you aware of the controversy over Céline’s political views?" and to the follow-up question "What effect has that awareness had on your appreciation of his work?" Forty-two writers responded that they were aware of the controversy, while only 1 writer wasn’t. What interests me here is the way American writers deal with a figure who is morally compromised, how they factor politics and formal considerations in reading Céline.
Politics versus Form
Thirteen people said that Céline’s political views had no effect on their reading; they answered with such startling one-liners as "none," "little or none," "little," "almost none," "not much," and "absolutely no effect." Of these 13 readers, 1 had read all four pamphlets, while another had read only Bagatelles pour un massacre. The "none at all" group included Adrian Piper, a professor of philosophy and performance artist who has taken strong political positions against American racism in her own art, most recently in an installation on the Rodney King incident.
At the other end of the spectrum were the people who refused to read Céline. For example, Paul Bowles declared, "I have avoided him for 5 decades," while Richard Selzer said, "I prefer not to read bigots and fascists. Life is too short. Art is too long." The anonymous respondents had harsher things to say, for example, "don’t you dare associate me with Céline." Or, in response to the question "Are you aware of the controversy over Céline’s political views?" one respondent asked in turn if the evil of Nazism could be construed as controversial, i.e., debatable. Jim Harrison offered up his own split between politics and aesthetics in the form of self-criticism: "Writers tend to be politically naive, self included. Have to stick to the work itself."
Another group of respondents considered politics and form as inseparable issues (this is one of the few groupings where none of the respondents asked for anonymity). Charles Bernstein described the effects of Céline’s politics as "part of the complexity of his work," whereas for Clark Blaise, "it provokes a sharper scrutiny of the good work and helps explain the bad." With regard to the effect of his awareness of the Céline controversy, Michael Palmer commented that "an awareness comes through the work, not apart from it." For Gary Indiana, "Céline’s vision is so deranging and raucous that his political views—which are impossible to take seriously—become a source of humor." Andrei Codrescu expressed it more figuratively: "the writing is generative: the views are to the writing what shit is to flowers, unfortunately." Céline, for Bob Perelman, is "an intensely interesting problem." Maxine Hong Kingston, however, reported a negative effect. She "liked the energy, the language . . . the idea that one must do anything—including go to jail—rather than join the army"; she saw Céline as a "wild hare, like Ezra Pound in American literature" but stopped reading Céline after hearing about his "weird views." Lydia Davis responded to this question with questions of her own:
To raise the very difficult question of morality and literature—i.e., how immoral can a piece of writing be and still be given highest honors and esteem—more broadly, how much, if anything, can or should be sacrificed for the sake of a piece of art. It forces me to judge author as man separately from work as work, despise a moral failing while admiring a consummate work of art.
Again, in the 1984 Quinzaine Littéraire interview, Philip Roth, perhaps the best-known American Jewish writer in France, gives this dichotomy between ideology and literature a poetic form, describing an art that transcends his own subject position. "To read him," Roth says about Céline, "I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it, because anti-Semitism is not at the heart of his books, even D’un chateau l’autre. "23
Historically Céline has always been positioned differently in the United States than in France. Thus Roth’s bracketing of Céline’s anti-Semitism can be understood as part of an American tradition and as the long-range consequence of an editorial decision made by an American publisher during the 1930s. In 1938, the year Bagatelles was selling briskly in France, Céline proposed the anti-Semitic pamphlet to Little, Brown. His American editor, Herbert Jenkins, rejected it definitively:
As you indicated in your letter, this is a four-hundred page attack on the Jews written with your usual vigor and violence. It does not appear to contain any narrative or personal experiences except in the last forty pages. We feel that you have made statements which are unsupported by evidence and that its publication here will seriously damage your reputation as an outstanding author.24
It was a rejection that would have long-term consequences for Céline’s American reputation. It looks, in retrospect, as if the rejection of Bagatelles in 1938—and the fact that all of the anti-Semitic material of the 1930s and 1940s would remain untranslated and therefore unavailable to American readers—helped create a situation in which Céline could maintain his identity for American readers of the late 1940s and beyond solely as the author of Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan. When Kenneth Rexroth, in a 1959 essay, "forgives" Céline on the very point that he can’t forgive Eliot and Pound, he does so by purposefully limiting the Céline corpus to the novels: "We can, if we confine ourselves to the two great novels, forgive Céline for being an anti-Semite, but when, as the Communists used to say, ‘Art is a weapon,’ then we cannot forgive. We cannot forgive the direct, depraved political tendentiousness of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or [Eugène] Guillevic."25 Whether or not, in their French context, the pamphlets functioned as "weapons" is not an issue Rexroth explores.
Conclusion: The Céline Effect
The most important finding to emerge from the survey is that while Céline’s novels may sell under 5,000 copies a year in the United States, he apparently endures as a writer for writers in a specific tradition: Céline as anarchist, liberator, anti-James/anti-Eliot figure in twentieth-century American letters, pitted against a whole tradition of polite, subtle psychological fiction and poetry. This dominant Céline effect was what I wished to explore.
Peter Glassgold, who succeeded James Laughlin as editor-in-chief of New Directions, wrote in response to the survey that Céline "had an interesting impact in the ’60s, helping to dynamite the Jamesian dominance of what a real novel ought to be. But I’m afraid this has degenerated and been watered down by creative writing programs." I asked Clark Blaise to tell me, therefore, as an educator of writers at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and director of its International Writing Program, what he thought "being a Jamesian" meant.
Rigorous attention to unity of point of view, tone, elevation of psychological realism, stifling expression; everything disguised—out of that comes Eliot, the aged eagle spreading his wings at age twenty. In the U. S., the clichés of writing are "politics are ruinous for good writing/dreams and allegories are cheap devices; write what you know; show, don’t tell." Céline, who breaks all the rules, "expands the perimeter of the permissible." The New Yorker, with its tailored tone, would detest Céline. . . . I learned through Céline that an unevenness of tone is not a flaw; spleen can be bracing.26
Blaise uses Céline in the classroom to dismantle received ideas about American writing. He is highly critical of the idea that you must write from your own experience; he thinks it culturally impoverishes young American writers, making them anti-intellectual. It is paradoxical to use Céline against the write-what-you-know rule, given that Céline himself was an autobiographical writer, but for American students both the experiences described by Céline and his mode of description are radically unfamiliar.Céline’s work provides alternative forms and demonstrates that a writer can rave and lose control, to "tell" as well as to "show."
The Céline effect is also marked for Blaise by a class difference. As a writer of the lower crust, again the opposite of James and Eliot, Céline is an emblematic figure for writers of French-Canadian descent (including Blaise and Kerouac before him), whose French identity is tied to the marginalized working classes rather than a more aristocratic sense of literariness connoted by "Frenchness" in the United States. Paradoxically, the French writer gives Americans license to reject the worship of Europe that is part of our cultural baggage: "I’m not a francophile in terms of French," Blaise explained. "Céline tells you that the French are a low, vermin-encrusted culture; highfalutin phrases come down to shit." According to Blaise, Céline’s portraits of the disenfranchised have situated his writing in a register that is subliterary, "stinking of the world and of everything impolite, authentic, and dangerous"—what Blaise referred to as an "aim of artlessness" in Célinian poetics.27
The picture that finally emerges of the American Céline—in terms of published, acknowledged influences (as opposed to my survey)—is West Coast, not East Coast; Beat and City Lights, not The New Yorker; New Directions, not New Critical. New Directions is certainly an East Coast institution, so the East/West American split is not literally true. But it is evocative: Céline as westerner—roving, the bad boy. He is a scandalous figure who can be celebrated by people who hate the system.28
Bob Perelman, a Language poet who spent many years in the San Francisco area, acknowledges the flavor of this American Céline when he says, as noted above, that he did not come to Céline through the usual "leftist-nihilist-anarchist enthusiasm." That this enthusiasm should be occasioned by a foreign writer whose deeply felt ideas are unacceptable in this culture is perhaps no accident, and it remains a subject for further analysis. How would American writers describe the effect of Pound’s or Eliot’s anti-Semitism on the appreciation of these poets? How would French writers come to terms with Céline’s ideology in response to a similar survey?
There is something specific in our culture that gives American writers the freedom to love Céline, or—to put it another way—that might account for the fact that the United States was the only country where writers organized a petition in favor of Céline in 1946, when he was threatened with extradition from Denmark to France.29 Certainly the American First Amendment tradition is consistent with a libertarian defense of Céline, regardless of his views. The First Amendment is tacitly present in several of the responses to the question about the effect Céline’s politics on an appreciation of his writing ("none at all," "absolutely none").
Along with our First Amendment culture, there is a specific New Critical tradition of close reading, which separates politics from aesthetic appreciation. The Beats were not New Critics—anything but—yet the impulse toward art that aims to be formally transcendent, canonical because disinterested, runs deep. James Laughlin explained this position in his introduction to the 1946 New Directions annual. Although he is defending Paul Eluard and Pound, his explanation could just as easily apply to his defense of Céline, that same year, when he signed the petition in his favor:
I have been severely criticized for publishing Eluard because he is said to be a Stalinist. He is a killer, they tell me; he killed Germans with his poems. Very well: I have two answers to that. Much as I am opposed to the whole business of war and legal killing I would probably have done, or tried to do, exactly what Eluard did under similar circumstances. And secondly, I don’t care whether he is a Stalinist or what he is; the man can write. He is a poet and no mistake. That’s enough for me. I am one who still thinks Ezra Pound’s poetry is good—very good—not withstanding his political folly. These people who changed their minds about the merits of Pound’s poetry the day he was indicted for treason make me sick and angry. A poem is a thing in itself. You judge it by itself, for itself and of itself—not by the politics of the man who wrote it.30 The gist of this defense is pacifist and libertarian, but appeals most of all to the integrity of the art object and the talent of the artist: "the man can write." In 1942, Henry Miller articulated the same position, in his case specifically in reference to Céline: "I don’t care whether he is a Fascist or a Democrat or a shit-house cleaner. He can write. "31 This can-do/separatist defense of the politically compromised writer informs the 1946 petition and remains a familiar stance in all subsequent American discussions of Céline.
The other side of the coin is the refusal to read Céline. This rejectionist position is the same one often taken with respect to Martin Heidegger or Paul de Man. Political flaws or ideologically unacceptable positions in the text or in the author’s life become a kind of obscenity, and the work is censured. This, too, is distinctly American.
A third position that comes out of the survey is an integrationist one. This position would read Céline in many layers, many contexts, and recontextualizations, measuring the energy of the work in its passage through time and space. Often the most nuanced and conflicted positions boil down to this attempt to make the work make sense on both an ideological and poetic level, without reducing it to either one. Michael Palmer, who objected to the either/or quality of my questions about Céline’s politics versus his writing, explained in a follow-up postcard: "It really comes down to the reasons, at a fairly early stage, for my ‘refusal’ of the work. Certainly the fascism, but something else as well, perhaps a reductive bitterness which permeated it and (for me) ‘automatized’ the process of composition."32 For poet Charles Bernstein, who, unlike Palmer, is "very excited by the style, the urgency, the ‘. . .’ as poetic fragmentation, stream of tirade," Céline’s politics "deepens an appreciation of the dystopian and repulsive character of this work."
As a counter to the well-made novel or poem, as a figure of resistance and liberation from literary authority as historically constituted by the New Criticism, even as the occasion for moral conflict, Céline still signifies a vital critical function within the American institutions of literature.
[Please see post immediately below for text of footnotes.]
Alice Kaplan is Professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University. Her previous work on Céline includes Sources et citations dans "Bagatelles pour un massacre" (1987) and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, coedited with Philippe Roussin, "Céline, USA" (1994).
the evening redness in the west 