Lost manuscripts of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, reappeared in mysterious circumstances, are exhibited in Paris and give rise to the publication today Thursday of an unpublished, War, which inspires literary criticism. These 6,000 unpublished sheets had been abandoned by the writer and doctor, considered a monument of literature, but also known for his violent anti-Semitism, when he fled France for Germany in June 1944.
Recovered by resistance fighters whose names remain secret, they fell in the 2000s to a former journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat. The latter, however, had to hand them over to the police and the writer’s heirs, who revealed their existence in the summer of 2021.
Céline’s publisher, the prestigious Gallimard house, publishes this novel of some 150 pages, plus illustrations and appendices.
The press is unanimous in hailing the event. “The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text”, according to Le Point. “A brief, lively, tragic and lustful text, to be placed alongside the writer’s masterpieces” and “a miracle”, according to Le Monde. “Breathtaking,” says Le Journal du dimanche.
In the purest tradition of the Céline novel, dark, nervous and raw, Guerre opens with the awakening of Brigadier Ferdinand, 20, miraculously alive on a battlefield, in Poelkappelle (Belgium), one night in 1915.
An extract from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “War” manuscript exhibited in Paris. Christophe Archambault/AFP
« Divine surprise »
The writer tells how an English soldier saves him, then his convalescence not far from the front at Peurdu-sur-la-Lys (in reality Hazebrouck, in France), and finally a hasty departure for England. The stay across the Channel will be the subject of another unpublished, longer, London, to be published in the fall.
War was probably written in 1934, shortly following the scandal of Céline’s first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932).
The anti-Semitic turning point, of which the writer will never repent, dates from 1937, with the publication of the pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre.
At the end of 2017, Gallimard announced the publication of this pamphlet and its siblings, with critical apparatus. The project fizzled out, for lack of “methodological and memory conditions (…) to consider it calmly”, according to CEO Antoine Gallimard.
Now that this controversy has died down, the reappearance of War and London makes it possible to celebrate a major work of 20th century French literature.
“These manuscripts come at the right time or by a divine surprise, as you want, so that Céline becomes a writer once more: the one who matters, from 1932-1936”, estimates Philippe Roussin, researcher specializing in Céline interviewed by AFP.
“Scenes from anthology”
The pamphleteer is unanimous once morest him. But the novelist, whether we like his popular verve or not, occupies a place of choice in the history of the genre, for having shattered bourgeois literature, conventional narration and style, by translating the anguish of the ‘between two wars.
Showing his trauma as a “hairy” (combatant soldier of the First World War), seriously injured, and his creative frenzy of the 1930s is the bias of the exhibition which opens Thursday at the Gallimard gallery, Céline, the found manuscripts .
Sheets are framed, including the first of War, which ends with what should become a cult quote from Céline, emblematic of the obsessive hammering of the cannon in the story: “I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head. »
“There are anthological scenes and this constant presence of death, of the horror of the fighting that the war in Ukraine reminds us of today, but also of sex… For a first draft, the text is extremely strong, ”says historian Pascal Fouché, who established the edition, to AFP.
Another quotation, engraved on a wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the devastating vigilante purifiers! This one, of a Céline who was enraged at having lost the fruit of his work, distorts reality. The good state of conservation of the manuscripts in the following century proves it.
Hugues HONORÉ/AFP
Lost manuscripts of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, reappeared in mysterious circumstances, are exhibited in Paris and give rise to the publication today Thursday of an unpublished, War, which inspires literary criticism. These 6,000 sheets never published had been abandoned by the writer and doctor, considered a monument to…