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Louis_Ferdinand Destouches as Céline (May 27, 1894 - July 1, 1961) was a French writer, physician and nihilist.
Life
Born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches at Courbevoie in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine) on May 27, 1894 into a poor family, Céline received only a basic education before he joined the French cavalry. He fought in World War I and was decorated for his actions in a battle where he was gravely wounded in the head. The subsequent physical and mental suffering had lifelong effects on him.
Discharged from the Army, after the war he studied to obtain a medical degree. He worked in France as a doctor, then travelled to the United States where he became the staff surgeon at the Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit, Michigan. Next he worked in Africa and for the new League of Nations before taking up a permanent position as a doctor to the poor in Paris. He then started to write in his spare time.
His best-known work is also his first: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) (1932, translated into English most recently and successfully by Ralph Manheim). It broke many literary conventions of the time, using the rhythms and, to a certain extent, the vocabulary of slang and vulgar speech. The book became a public success, but Céline was not awarded the Prix Goncourt, although the voting was controversial enough to become the subject of a book (Goncourt 32 by Eugène Saccomano, 1999).
In 1936 he wrote Mort à credit ("Death on the Installment Plan"), giving innovative, chaotic, and antiheroic visions of human suffering.
Openly anti-semitic before and during World War II, he was identified by the public with the Nazi occupation, despite his consistent contempt for their ideology (and all others). He escaped judgment by fleeing to Germany (Sigmaringen, 1944) along with the Vichy government and later to Denmark (1945). Branded a collaborator, he was condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace. Amnestied, he returned to France in 1951; unable to earn a living through medicine, and facing difficulty returning his books to print, he lived in poverty, working himself to death on his writing.
Fame came back to him in later life with a trilogy telling of his exile: D'un château l'autre, Nord and Rigodon. Céline died on July 1, 1961 of a ruptured aneurysm and was interred in a small cemetery at Bas Meudon (part of Meudon in the Hauts-de-Seine département).
Work Analysis Céline's reputation as a writer has been overshadowed by his anti_semitism, although his importance as an innovative author has been recognized.
Pessimism pervades Céline's fiction as his characters sense failure, anxiety, nihilism, and inertia. Céline was unable to communicate with others, and during his life sank more deeply into a hate_filled world of madness and rage. However if one wishes to say this then it must be qualified by the narrative of betrayal and exploitation, both real and imagined that punctauted his life. For his two true loves, his cat and wife, in life are mentioned with nothing other than kindness and warmth.
A progressive disintegration of personality appears in the stylistic incoherence of his books based on his life during the war: Guignol's Band, D'un château l'autre and Nord.
His writings are examples of black comedy, where misfortunate and often terrible things are described humourously. Celine's writing is often hyper_real and its polemic qualities can often be startling, however his main strength lies in his ability to discredit almost everything and yet not lose a sense of enraged humanity.
Bibliography - Voyage au bout de la nuit , 1932 (Journey to the End of the Night, 1943)
- Mort a credit, 1936 (Death on the Instalment Plan, 1938)
- Bagatelle pour un massacre, 1937
- Guignol's Band, 1944 (English translation 1954)
- Casse_pipe 1949
- Féerie pour une autre fois 1952
- Normance (Féerie II) 1954
- D'un château l'autre, 1957 (Castle to Castle, 1968)
- Nord, 1960(North, 1972)
- Guignol's band II (Le pont de Londres) 1964
- Rigodon, published posthumously in 1969
Reference
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