Novel find: Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Canon out of the box?

In France, the find was celebrated as a sensation: two years ago, a former theater critic from Libération, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, handed over a box containing 6,000 pages of original manuscripts by Louis-Ferdinand Céline to an archive institution. As is well known, he was a supporter of the Vichy regime and an ardent anti-Semite. He was on the run, the manuscripts remained in his Paris apartment, which in turn was occupied by a Resistance fighter. He seems to have taken the material and kept it for decades until he handed it over to Thibaudat in 2004 – with the condition that it only be published after the death of Céline’s widow Lucette. He feared that she might “clean up” this archive.

The first of these manuscripts was the novel “War,” published in France in 2022, now in a German translation. This discovery is actually sensational. Céline is a highly controversial author: Hardly anyone has ever written such disgustingly malicious anti-Semitic pamphlets as he did, including calls for murder. This includes “Bagatelles pour un massacre” (1937), which was translated into German during the Nazi era and published in a very shortened version; it is now long out of print.

However, his novels are hardly influenced by this, so that one can continue to read them and appreciate their form-breaking power, keeping in mind the problematic personality of their author. This also applies to “war”. The book is written in Céline’s usual rushed, fragmentary style, erratic, colloquial, cynical and detached, sometimes rudely formulated: “The whole person that you have been given and that you have defended, the uncertain, horrible past (…), all of that crumbles, you run after the fragments. I looked at it, life, it almost tortured me. If one day it seriously gives me agony, then I’ll spit in its face, just like that.”

Like most of Céline’s books, “War” is anchored autobiographically and illuminates a chapter that is only touched on in his first major work “Journey to the End of the Night”, namely the time after his war injury, his stay in the hospital. What he describes is bizarre and nightmarish. A volunteer auxiliary nurse from a better family takes care of the wounded, particularly dealing with Céline’s alter ego Ferdinand, but also doesn’t stop at the dead.

Everyone in the hospital is traumatized, Ferdinand himself has headaches and hallucinations and hovers between life and death for a long time. Later he feels better and hobbles into town with his friend Cascade, where they get drunk and absorb the disorganized atmosphere of this little town near the front. Marches of soldiers, French, English, Belgians: “Disgusting when you see the convoys of men and all the uniforms moving through the streets for months like sausages on the meat bank, khakis, reservists, horizon blue, apple green, on carts, the whole thing Move the minced meat to the big idiot mortar.”

Céline is not a right-winger who glorifies war. He looks at it from the frog’s perspective of the underdog, the exposed subject. His friend Cascade is shot because it turns out that he injured himself. Ferdinand is also being examined; he fears difficulties due to the facelessness of the military apparatus that takes control of the people. Instead, he is given a high award for bravery based on alleged heroic deeds he never committed. In the end he manages to escape the war legally – he accompanies Cascade’s ex-wife, a courtesan who was able to win over a British officer as her protector, to England.

The book, which is said to have been written between 1932 and 1934, is not a fully finished manuscript. Céline often mixes up the names of the people and places involved. And it is considerably more sexually revealing than Céline’s previously published works. One wonders whether such passages were perhaps toned down by the publisher at the time. Today people are less squeamish about it. Overall, however, the novel can be read fluently, it is a completely original work by Céline and it will be interesting to see what other literary treasures Thibaudat’s box might contain.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: War. A.d. French v. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Rowohlt, 188 p., hardcover, €24.