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The Language of Suffering: The Place of Pain in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Féerie pour une autre fois I
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 2005
- pp. 18-28
- 10.1353/esp.2010.0339
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The Language of Suffering: The Place of Pain in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Féerie pour une autre fois I Greg Hainge OVER HALF OF THE FIRST VOLUME of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Féerie pour une autrefois provides an account of the time its author spent in a Copenhagen prison awaiting extradition to France to be tried for suspected collaboration. It is filled with graphic, almost lurid descriptions of the physical afflictions that the author/narrator's incarceration brings about: his weeping anal sores that stick him to his stool, his pellagra and scabies , the boiling hot enemas guards administer to him to relieve his constipation , the pain caused by constant noise in his head... Céline is, it seems, at such pains to catalogue in Féerie pour une autre fois I the full extent of his own suffering that it would be easy to conclude that this was a book written solely to appeal to the pity of the reader and thus to attenuate the severity of the latter's condemnation of him, to show that his dues have been paid tenfold . To establish such an unequivocal link between the content of Celine's book and the historical reality in which le Docteur Destouches (Celine's real name) lived and to attempt to draw up strict relations of cause and effect between these two contexts, however, is to tie this work to the kind of stable referents that Céline would fight against throughout his entire literary career. Indeed, the epigraph to Voyage au bout de la nuit, his very first foray into the world of literature, adamantly states that the novelistic enterprise is merely a journey of the imagination, "rien qu'une histoire fictive."' The inscription to Féerie is perhaps even more forceful in its insistence on the fictional and ahistorical nature of the work that it prefaces, stating: L'horreur des réalités! Tous les lieux, noms, personnages, situations, présentés dans ce roman, sont imaginaires! Absolument imaginaires! Aucun rapport avec aucune réalité! Ce n'est là qu'une «Féerie»... et encore!... pour une autre fois!2 And yet in spite of this blatant pronouncement, which could hardly be any more unequivocal, time and time again critics of Céline have insisted on establishing the very kind of equivalence between history and fiction that these statements vehemently reject. Indeed, Yannic Mancel suggests that Féerie is nothing more than a deliberate ploy to attain leniency, claiming that. 18 Fall 2005 Greg Hainge to this end, Céline simulates a schizophrenic discourse and constructs "une écriture à caractère psychotique."3 Whilst Christine Sautermeister recognises the division between fiction and reality in Féerie, this very aspect of the work enables her to find in it similar ulterior motives that tie the fictional work to the historical realm. Indeed for her, Féerie is always at pains to stress the hardships suffered by the individual Destouches, hardships which are the result of the actions of and recriminations against the writer Céline, the work being intended solely to salvage the reputation of its author.4 It is, of course, easy to understand why critics oftentimes seem unable to read Féerie and the rest of Celine's post-1936 output as purely fictional works, abstracted from the historical realm from which they borrow a great deal of their content and subject matter. As Frédéric Grover has noted in this journal: Le nom de Céline, qu'on le veuille ou non, qu'on essaye de l'en disculper ou qu'on l'en accable, est associé à un crime incontestable, enregistré par l'Histoire, le grand Massacre des Innocents de notre siècle: la liquidation de millions de Juifs. Ce massacre, ces millions de cadavres ont donné rétroactivement aux titres des deux pamphlets antisémites de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre et L'École des cadavres, un sens terriblement accusateur. On ne badine pas avec l'Histoire.5 To trifle with history, however, is perhaps all that Céline does, for in all of his creative works (amongst which we can count much of his correspondence) he...