Céline and His Vision by Erika Ostrovsky

Céline and His Vision by Erika OstrovskyReview by: Glenn S. BurneComparative Literature Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), pp. 248-251Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467902 .

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248 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

theless reduced to his anthology piece "Le Cimetière marin," whereas Saint John Perse is awarded an encomium applicable to any of his long poems. Dr. Balakian implies that almost every recent movement or individual writer has gathered a spark from symbolism: Proust, Ionesco, Beckett, the New Novel, and even Fellini. None of her statements lack validity; on the contrary, many of her passing insights would deserve a lengthy chapter.

Renée Riese Hubert • University of California, Irvine

Céline and His Vision By ERIKA OSTROVSKY. New York: New York University Press, 1967. 225 pp.

Erika Ostrovsky has written a lively and challenging book, a full-length study of France's controversial "crippled giant" of modern letters. In this thoroughly researched work, Miss Ostrovsky undertakes to establish Céline as more than just an influential stylist, more than just a savage nihilist and flayer of depraved humanity: he is also a misunderstood artist of a positive and creative vision. She attempts to show that it is wrong to see Céline only in the guise of "a thundering oracle of ugliness and death." He is also a writer of high comedy, even of "lighthearted spoofing." Above all, we must not be blind to the "compassion" which underlies his diatribes, for his "virulence and insolence hide an authentic feeling of pity." In her efforts to base her arguments on solid evidence, Miss Ostrovsky relies heavily on primary material. By letting Céline speak so often for himself, she affords readers not overly familiar with the author something approaching the actual experience of reading the novels themselves. This experience usually works to support Miss Ostrovsky's view of Céline; sometimes it works against her.

She takes on the easier task first - that of showing his considerable influ- ence on contemporary "black comedy." She ranks him among the existen- tialists; asserts his impact, in matters of style especially, on writers such as Sartre, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginzberg, Aymé, and Henry Miller; and describes his work as "a juncture of existentialist thought and contemporary style, that is, the eruption of the spoken work into literature." (Compare Henri Peyre, in French Novelists of Today: "It seems likely that Celine's language will be judged the most artificial element in his novels, which themselves rank among the most deliberately contrived and the most self- conscious of the present age in France.")

Miss Ostrovsky then addresses herself with vigor to her major task - to proving that Céline is not the savage nihilist he is generally thought to be. But she grants much to the opposition when she describes, and lets Céline describe, his ferocious assault on human life - not just on human character, actions, or institutions, but on "life itself," on the very fact of human existence. This assault has elicited, as might be expected, a considerable variety of reactions and interpretations, some of which Miss Ostrovsky sketches briefly. Céline has been viewed, with considerable justice,



BOOK REVIEWS 249

as a paranoiac, a raving madman, a deranged pervert with an obsession for the "cloaca of life" and an almost pathological penchant for themes of stupidity, suffering, and cruelty. But whereas some consider Céline a fanatical hater of humanity, others see him as a Christ-figure, a super- scapegoat, trying to take all this hatred and evil upon himself. Still others see him as a modern Jeremiah or Ezekiel. What is Céline in truth? To Miss Ostrovsky, the answer "is a fairly obvious one . . . though only a very few critics seem to have arrived at it. Celine's constant involvement with a dark and wrathful universe arises from a literary choice. Simple as it is, this insight forms the basis for an understanding of the author's work." Celine's method is "to choose out of reality the evil, ugliness, and despair and to make them his themes." Further, he "chooses himself" and his own tragic life as literary raw material, thus making both "an existential and aesthetic choice."

This account is not entirely consistent with evidence she gives elsewhere, for she later describes Celine's voice as a "cry" that is "not so much the result of a reasoning attitude, or a rational comment, as the expression of deeply felt anger and disgust . . . aii authentic outburst of emotion." Is this an "existential and aesthetic choice," or is it merely the succumbing to compulsion? The force of her evidence tends to support the latter, and her argument becomes somewhat contradictory. The apparent confusion crops up later when, after fully documenting Celine's relentless "noircissement" of all humanity, she explains that he must also "se noircir." He must heap abuse upon himself and so become one with his created world. His work can be seen as a long and agonizing confession, "with a snarl." To which Miss Ostrovsky adds that "of course this snarl or 'cry' is Celine's literary voice." She asserts that one of the reasons for his self-blackening is "a desire to be completely truthful, authentic, sincere, and to probe the dark corners of one's own inner world." But again, what is the relationship between Celine's literary voice, based on "existential and aesthetic choice," and his desire for "authenticity" and "sincerity"? It is doubtful that one "chooses" to be sincere.

Miss Ostrovsky begins her study with the most negative aspects of Celine's work and gradually moves, in her later chapters, toward what she feels are

positive elements in his dark vision of the world. She argues that Céline is not merely the "great destroyer"; he is also a "creator," affirming the value of man's life. For it should be understood that he is basically a seeker after ultimate knowledge, and since suffering is one of man's deepest and most authentic feelings, it is one of the keys to the understanding of human

experience. Lucidity, even when painful, has a "tutelary function" and is the antidote to the hypocrisy, pretense, and deception of life. In a rather backhanded compliment, Céline implies that man can face and accept the truth about himself, and Miss Ostrovsky believes that this denotes a belief in the existence of some recesses of dignity, worth, and integrity in the human being. "For the ability to stand naked before a mirror without self-

pity or shame is no small virtue." When we think of the image man is

expected to see there, this is a compliment indeed.



250 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

In her discussion of the comic element in Celine's work, Miss Ostrovsky traces the development of his portraits of death from the intensely individual death of the early novels to the mass death scenes of the later works, and she shows how he frequently tries to deprive death of its traditional awe-inspiring force. She quotes him as saying, "My danse macabre amuses me as much as an enormous farce . . . the world is comical, death is comic/' and she acknowledges his "black humor." But despite her efforts to grant him this quality, it is evident that she is not amused. She feels that as the buffoonery surrounding death increases, the terror also mounts, especially in the last works where the comedy of death and suffering "reaches such dimensions that it breaks the bounds of its initial form." It overwhelms and inundates the reader, the necessary detachment is lost, the grotesque play- acting becomes terrifying. It becomes tragedy rather than comedy.

Other critics have been more appreciative of Celine's efforts at comedy. David Heyman, in his Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1965), finds that the comic spirit is maintained throughout Celine's works. He enjoys, for example, the "hilarious antics" of Jules, a legless cripple, even while recognizing that they "suggest true evil." But to Miss Ostrovsky the maimed Jules remains a horrifying monstrosity. Heyman sees Céline as "unmatched as a comic genius, the father of verbal slapstick." Miss Ostrovsky sees him as the master of "truncated tragedy," who can "evoke the terror which is a necessary part of the tragic experience," but without the ennobling vision which traditionally follows, without the redeeming sense of human dignity.

Miss Ostrovsky touches rather briefly on one of the more notorious and unpleasant aspects of Celine's work - that of "der Sündenbock," the scapegoat figure that plays a prominent role in his writing from Dr. Semmelweiss to Ferdine of Nord. The sense of guilt is deeply ingrained in Celine's characters (and in himself), and Miss Ostrovsky shows how he moves from speaking sympathetically for the underdog, in the early works, to joining the oppressors in persecuting scapegoats - the Jews, especially - in some of his wilder diatribes (Ecole des cadavres, Bagatelles pour un massacre, Les Beaux Draps). She points out that, oddly enough, Céline saw the Jews, whom he attacked so viciously, not as weak, nor as victims, but as strong, as a "power group." This attitude is further complicated by the fact that Céline, the great "destroyer" and here the great persecutor, always con- sidered himself a victim, a scapegoat, one of the persecuted.

Miss Ostrovsky, in the course of giving us a fascinating study of a com- plex and contradictory writer, remains undismayed by, or tends to explain away, the gross unpleasantness of the man and of most of his ideas - characteristics which have provoked Henri Peyre into an untempered denunciation of both the author and his work, and Dennis Donoghue into a flat dismissal of Céline as a "man without art" (New York Review of Books, 15 June 1967). Yet Miss Ostrovsky's case is presented with intelli- gence and erudition. She brings to bear an impressive amount of evidence in support of her views; and although it must be said that some of that evidence may serve to support judgments contrary to her own, the reader is indebted to her for a richness of material, an interesting and readable style, and the occasion to reconsider the achievement of a highly disturb-



BOOK REVIEWS 251

ing artist. She also provides her reader a good index and a full bibliography of works in French and English.

Glenn S. Burne • Kent State University

Manuel Machado: A Revaluation

By GORDON BROTHERSTON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. 162 pp.

The subtitle of this book is significant. The revaluation of Manuel Machado's poetry was timely, perhaps overdue. Northrop Frye has com- pared literary fame to the ups and downs of the stock market. Manuel Machado's prestige, once as great or perhaps greater than his brother Antonio's, had suffered an eclipse since his death in 1947. The author of two or three of the greatest poems in the Spanish language (consider, for example, his sonnet to Philip IV and his evocation of El Cid in "Castilla") was being "sold short" by critics and readers. It was time for a careful reexamination.

There is indeed nothing hasty or opportunistic about Brotherston's monograph. His painstaking research helps to establish correctly several dates in Manuel Machado's life and in the history of his works which, because of the carelessness of the author himself and of Spanish editors and critics, had been accepted erroneously. New details and insights about the Machados and their ancestors give us a clearer picture of this gifted family. They were essentially mavericks, with more than just a few drops of the "Jacobine blood" mentioned by Antonio Machado in a famous poem. Manuel Machado's enthusiastic support of Franco's regime from 1936 on was perhaps an aberration due either to senility or to a climate of fear and

hysteria - or again, perhaps the result of a religious conversion. In any case, this support was one of the causes of Manuel Machado's lowered

prestige among Liberal critics and the general reading public outside

Spain, and most probably inside Spain too. Politics and literature are Siamese brothers in Spanish-speaking countries.

There are yet other reasons why Manuel Machado was so long neglected. His "folk poetry" in the Andalusian vein is second-rate, as Brotherston himself recognizes. Some of his best poems are Parnassian in spirit. Heredia and Leconte de Lisle are his masters, not Baudelaire or Mallarmé. This is a second strike against him: by now the superiority of symbolism over Par- nassianism is acknowledged by every critic, in France and elsewhere. Yet, there are perhaps two Manuel Machados, the folk poet and the modernist

poet. Although the first one seldom reaches greatness, he may have paved the way for Lorca and Alberti: "At its best his Andalusian poetry was original and prepared the way for the poets who came after him. But he

exaggerated a tendency when he posed as a spontaneous, 'popular* poet, and on occasion gave himself away with his exotic refrains. ... If Manuel Machado has suffered as a superficial Andalusian, in the view of those who have never read or wish to ignore his best poetry, it is his own fault. He



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