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Louis-Ferdinand CELINE

Voyage au bout de la nuit

Denoël & Steele, Paris 1932, 12x19cm, broché.

First edition, one of the review copies service.
The copy which seems to have accompanied Bardamu through these violent wanderings has been very skillfully restored, and certain sheets, too damaged, have been changed, which was necessary to preserve this unique witness of an exceptional and unexpected meeting between the Sun and the Night .
Rare and precious autograph shipment signed by Louis-Ferdinand Céline: "Homage of the author to Mr. Georges Bernanos. Louis Céline."

When Doctor Destouches, a convinced and convincing atheist, sent the famous Catholic writer a copy of the press service for his first novel, he could not hope that the author of Sous le Soleil de Satan would appreciate his nihilistic exploration of the human soul. And it is probably more to his taste for provocation that we owe this laconic and deferential tribute from "Louis Céline" to "Monsieur Georges Bernanos". Perhaps he even hoped in secret, through an offended reaction from the writer and literary critic of Le Figaro, some media outburst from the Catholic community. What better opportunity could the young writer have hoped to confront his Night in the Sun with his illustrious peer, and thus impose his novel as a response to the tragic inertia of Father Donissan through the infernal journey of the furry Ferdinand?
But it was André Rousseaux who initially reported on Le Voyage dans les pages littéraires du Figaro and who curled up "the six hundred pages of this horrible book" (it is to this same wise critic that a few years later we will another fine analysis: "nothing more heartbreaking than L'Étranger by M. Albert Camus."). In his defense, the critic only screamed with the wolves since despite the enthusiasm of some, even the future friends of the sulfurous writer were still far from having boundless admiration for him. While Charles Maurras augured Celine an ephemeral glory: "nothing more seasonal than this kind of reputation", Lucien Rebatet admitted "detecting lengths", Robert Poulet only appreciated "the hilarious virtues" and Robert Brasillach saw Le Voyage that as "a sort of epic of catastrophe and insult", to be dismissed with disdain in the department of novel-rivers. And, despite Celine's hopes, on December 7, the Goncourt Academy, shaken by a rare controversy, will cautiously refuse to celebrate a work so dark and anarchist.
However in this media and moral chaos which was especially pretext for ideological fights, an unexpected voice will be raised in favor of the novel, that of Georges Bernanos who, three days after the long and sterile diatribe of his collaborator, will write in the same columns du Figaro, one of the most beautiful and early analyzes of Céline's masterpiece and her "incredible language, the height of naturalness and artifice".
“Mr. Céline missed the Goncourt prize. So much the better for Mr. Céline. (…)
For me, I have a duty to fulfill, not certainly towards Mr. Céline who seems to me capable of coping with any conjuncture on my own, but towards an audience that is likely to be caught off guard by a book of which no sensible man will only recommend reading to his wife and even less to his daughter. We will say another day, or we will leave it to more qualified than us to say what the artist thinks of an extraordinary work, comparable to the unfolding of the flow in the dark night, when constantly appears and disappears, each simultaneous palpitation of the wind and the sea, the livid fringe of foam. Whether or not this great movement of poetry goes unnoticed by my contemporaries, it matters little to me, either, I suppose, than to Mr. Céline. I'm just trying to calculate its power and range, already measurable by some underground rumbles and the shaking of several usurped glories.
Mr. Céline scandalizes. Nothing to say about this, since God obviously did it for that. Because there is scandal and scandal. The most formidable of all, the one that still costs the most blood and tears to our species, is to hide its misery. Never has this misery been more pressing, more effective, more skilfully homicidal, with such a character of diabolical necessity, but never also it was so underestimated. (…)
For us the question is not to know if the painting of Mr. Céline is atrocious, we ask if it is true. She is. And even truer than painting, this incredible language, the height of naturalness and artifice, invented, created from scratch from the example of that of tragedy, as far as possible from a servile reproduction of the language of the wretched, but done precisely to express what the language of the wretched can never express, their childish and somber soul, the somber childhood of the wretched. Yes, that is the cursed part, the shameful part, the reprobate part of our people. And certainly, we will readily agree that there are more reassuring images of modern society, and for example the military image: on the right the Good Poor, rewarded with a stripe of first soldier, on the other side the Bad, that one stuffs with the block ... Only any old priest of the Zone, to which it happens to confess sometimes the heroes of Mr. Céline, will tell you that Mr. Céline is right. "
(Georges Bernanos, in Le Figaro of December 13, 1932)



 

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