A careful historical investigation reveals the freedoms that the author of Journey to the end of the night took from his war experience. These flattering inventions would have ensured the distribution of pamphlets in the 1930s and cleared customs at the time of the Purge.
Odile Roynette’s remarkably documented work is not, strictly speaking, a new biography of Céline, nor even, undoubtedly, a biography of a writer. Deliberately selective in its subject matter, as its title indicates, it is structured around a fundamental hypothesis: if the pages devoted to the war, in Journey to the end of the nightplayed a determining role in his consecration as a leading novelist, the experience actually lived in 1914 by Louis Destouches would not live up to his aura as a patriotic and heroic fighter, and would register very quickly, and in a manner deliberate, in a strategy of self-affirmation.
The references to his glorious past as a veteran would above all have made it possible to ensure the best possible dissemination of the nauseating ideas of the pamphlets of the 1930s and 1940s, before being exhibited in the defense of the outlaw at the time of the Purge. We therefore quickly understand that this text, very coherent, written with an alert pen, is a text against the individual Destouches, who would have carefully constructed an excessively flattering legend.
Demythologization
The documents added to the file by Odile Roynette are numerous. Not all of them are new, but the historian relies on military and medical archives often neglected to scrupulously retrace the journey of the young enlisted man, first, then his entry into the war, the first engagements, up to the wound of the 25 October 1914 – of which she corrects the date, incorrect in the reference biographies.
The archives are cross-referenced with various published correspondence as well as a private notebook of the enlisted man, and compared to the stories, Pipe breaker And Journey to the end of the night especially. A specialist in military experiences, both in the barracks and during the First World War, the author thus highlights the singularity of Destouches’ career. He would have initially benefited from preferential treatment until the war, thanks to the efforts of his parents – far from the dark world of Pipe breaker – then belonged to a regiment rather less affected than others by the terrible losses of the first months.
If the historian does not question his courage in the fire, the careful examination of the elements of his medical file leads her to considerably minimize the injuries and after-effects of the veteran. She particularly refutes any damage to the head and any form of psychological trauma. ; apart from his arm injury, which was not serious despite the risk of amputation being quickly avoided, Destouches emerged from the Great War unscathed.
The question then arises of his reform, the stages of which are, again, carefully reconstructed: he benefits from reform no. 2, normally reserved for those whose incapacity is not caused by the war, which makes him certainly deprives him of a pension, initially, but guarantees him to be permanently protected from any return to the front. It will therefore be “ ambushed » in London, first in an administrative office, then freed from all commitments.
His departure for Africa would then have been facilitated by his status as a seriously wounded war veteran and by his military medal, the conditions for obtaining which also seemed suspicious to Odile Roynette (a recognition which, “ as legitimate as it was, was exceptional in view of the benign nature of his injury » she writes on p. 123). There, Destouches once again behaved like an opportunist, profiting without scruple from the colonialist system, and bitterly dwelling on his experience of the war.
It would therefore be this experience of war, of which the author invites us to strongly relativize the darkness in relation to the common experience, as well as this posture of a heroic veteran, also very questionable, which would ultimately establish the success of the Journey , which meets the expectations of a society still in mourning, falling into pacifism and even complacent “ in a victim tropism on the verge of becoming dominant » (p. 81). This connivance would also have played a decisive role in the reception of the pamphlets.
But it is above all as a defense, even as an alibi during the Purge, that the reference to the veteran’s past is decisive: “ His career in the First World War was the cornerstone of a defense which was based on a flattering rewriting of the services rendered to the homeland » (p. 208).
We see, the “ demythologization of biography » Célinienne is radical to say the least, and it recalls what another historian had done, in 2004, with the family and political career of Jean Genet. Beyond the rather unpleasant aspects of Céline’s personality thus highlighted, the investigation reveals the essential place of the Great War in the writer’s career, not so much as a founding trauma and as a dark source of the writing, but, quite the contrary, as a device widely manipulated to ensure one’s position in the literary field: entering it, with a bang ; disseminate his anti-Semitic theses ; to remain there, despite the proscription and symbolic relegation after 1945.
Manipulations or fiction ?
As informed and convincing as it may be, this demonstration nevertheless raises some reservations. This is firstly due to a few incidental remarks which reveal somewhat hasty judgments, which are at the very least questionable. Can we thus minimize the experience of the extreme violence faced by Destouches, in the fall of 1914, on the grounds that the “ loss rate » of his unit would have amounted to “ only » 7%, when others show 10%, even 30% ? Can we so quickly evacuate the trauma of an injury involving the risk of mutilation, arguing from the frequent and socially accepted nature of the latter? ? Can we refute any psychological trauma in the veteran, just by reading his correspondence, which “ testifies to a rapid regaining of psychic control, which allows him from mid-November to control his destiny in all conscience » (p. 113) ?
The careful dismantling of Céline’s proven manipulations of her military past seems to lead the author to deny her any authority to write about the war. It is the work itself which would thus be discredited, as being untrue – a very questionable vision, once again, of fiction writing… Ironically about the advertising reference, for the pamphlets, to trenches that Céline will not have “ not known » (p. 187), is undoubtedly not the most effective challenge to these texts.
But the desire to dismantle a hagiographical discourse on the hero of the Great War reflects on the reading of Journey to the end of the night. Certainly, we can recognize a “ almost complete disjunction between the transposition of Céline’s personal experience in a work of which one of the major characteristics is to play with autobiography and what they (the readers of 1932) could know of this past » (p. 70), but how would the reduction of the experience lived by Céline allow us to better understand this disjunction ? Certainly, the photographic archives showing Destouches and his companions in misfortune in the hospital undoubtedly bear witness to their physical sacrifice, assumed with strength and dignity. But how does this inform the romantic episode devoted to Bardamu’s hospitalization, moreover quite far from being reduced to a satire emphasizing “ the ridicule of diminished and grotesque men » (p. 122) ? How could there be an insoluble contradiction here, which only the hypothesis of manipulation could resolve? ?
The texts are the place and the issue of literary consecration and the definition of an associated ethos or writer’s posture, particularly in the case of Céline. But we cannot simply consider the literary work as a “ story object » (p. 20). Assume “ complicate the historical narrative by constantly playing on different temporalities – that linked to the biographical facts themselves, that specific to the time of their enunciation by the writer and that linked to the time of their reception » by placing “ constantly looking at these different temporal registers » (p. 23), is to take the risk of neglecting the radical singularity of literary enunciation, of its relationship to the subject, to experience and to time. This is to risk missing the essence of what is in question about Céline, and to downplay the burning issue of the debates attached to her name for around twenty years.
The work, however, has the great merit of re-inscribing Céline’s journey into the collective experience of the barracks and then the Great War, to better understand its singularity and thus radically dispel any hagiographic temptation in this regard. It brings out the sociality of trauma under the overly stifling image of psychological trauma and emphasizes the forms of individual reappropriation of the collective catastrophe. Whether we call it opportunism, manipulation, lies or dangerous perversion of military-virile honor, this reappropriation has allowed, in Céline, the affirmation of a singular writerly posture, first meeting the expectations of all a society in mourning and then trying to restore its damaged image.
An infinite place of rehashing, in the work, the Great War also made it possible to consecrate the writer, at the cost of doubtful ambivalences that Odile Roynette is the first to formulate so clearly.