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Posted by Francois Meursault on 21/11/2001, 6:24:11
Anyone else think Journey to the End of the NIght is the greatest novel ever written?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/11/2001, 8:28:16, in reply to "Celine and Journey"
I know that Gottfried Benn did (I'm translating this guy.) Personally I think Celine is a somewhat lukewarm rehash of Dostoyevsky - the same method of "reverse cliches" (Tolstoy) - but then I must add, that I am not too impressed by Dostoyevky either. But both Dostoyevsky and Celine are accomplished page-turners, that's for sure.
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Posted by Lale on 21/11/2001, 13:36:55, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
I do! At least I think that it was one of the best books I have ever read.
Now, Michael, I haven't read, other than "Crime and Punishment" (also one of the best books I have ever read), anything else by Dostoyevsky and other than The Journey anything else by Celine, nevertheless I will allow myself to make some statements:
1. I did not see any comparison points, stylewise or otherwise.
2. Celine is not a page-turner. In fact, The Journey's content is so tough that it is not for the faint at heart.
You might want to expound on the "reverse cliches".
Totally different topic: Michael, ever since I read your review of Ezra Pound, I was meaning to start a discussion on "authors gone anti-semite". As you have pointed out in your various previous comments and reviews, many great writers/poets have either sympathised with the Nazis or demonstrated support in various forms towards anti-semitism, racism, nationalism etc. Celine was one of them. Towards the end of his life he had started to blame everything on Jews. I think there is room here for some philosophizing on the topic.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/11/2001, 15:51:19, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
I think there are 2 points of comparison: both had a talent for drama, and if they hadn't chosen to write much too wordy, much too cliche ridden novels, they might actually have made real good dramatists. Both had these intense rants on their respective pet ideas - and it is this that can suck in a certain type of reader. The rest of us will find even Dostoyevsky at times as dry as sawdust. (As a 12 year old, I'd managed to race through "Crime and Punishment" in less than one night. After that I suddenly and inexplicably found myself unable ever to read all through another novel of the Russian. Strange.)
The "reverse" cliche refers to Tolstoy's stab at Dostoyevsky: when a person in a dime novel flushes - a Dostoyevsky character pales etc. Dostoyevsky made it a method to turn the pulp-cliches upside down, but only succeeded (in Tolstoy's opinion) to create another kind of cliche. The 2 writers didn't get along very well.
The comparison of Celine with Dostoyevsky was made by Benn (in a letter to Oelze - he was a great fan of both authors) and by Nabokov (in a letter to the critic and writer Wilson, with Nabokov's usual pompous contempt for Dostoyevsky.)
The propensity especially of poets, not just in modern ages - think of Virgil or Dante - to sell their souls to some kind of totalitarian idea is something that has always fascinated me. In each individual case I try to understand what specifically motivated such a move. I think Virgil can be safely exonerated, Dante deserves a few more studies, and Benn, who detested the Nazis on a personal level (largely probably, because they detested him), was taken in by the eugenic aspects of their political program. This was enough for him to rationalize the Nazis as late as 1949 and fully aware of the horrors of the extermination camps, as: "Even today, I am of the opinion, that the N.S. was a genuine and profound attempt to rescue the teetering Occident." Why had he to be such an ass?
As for Celine and Dostoyevsky - both were anti-Semites, and semi-fascist nationalists. If I remember correctly Celine, after the war, had to face collaboration charges.
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Posted by Lale on 22/11/2001, 9:27:50, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
Celine's Journey is neither too wordy nor cliche ridden. It is a brilliantly written book. It is very acidic, very satiric, and at times bitterly funny. It has not one single cliche in it and if it does, those must have been made into cliches after Celine had invented them. As I said, I have not read any of his other books so I can only speak for this one. Drama? What drama? Sheer misery. In ways that were not even thought of by Celine's predecessors. It was a shocking book of it times.
I have never felt the fear of a soldier in war the way I felt it reading The Journey. The Africa portion of the book was brilliant in spite of the darkness. In which Africa book the author doesn't give in to the temptation of praising the beauty of the land and its people. Celine didn't. He only talked about the misery and it was remarkably void of cliches. And then, what about his life as a doctor? A doctor, hungry, cannot pay the rent, can barely care about the patients, and he does (invisibly), he does care as much as a hungry doctor can, without any mushiness, any niceties, any pretentions, and while struggling not to let the other doctor get away with the fee. It was all too human.
As for Crime and Punishment, again, I did not see any wordiness or cliches. Nothing was annoying or too obvious. Actually, I just finished reading our reading group's book of this month (William Somerset Maugham' The Razor's Edge) and that book for instance had a lot of cliches. You don't have to look for them, they jump at you. So, I know they can be very annoying. But I didn't see any in C&P.
Between C&P and The Journey, the only similarity I find is that they are both great books. I do not pretend to know what a great book is (and I realize that it is subjective) but it is one of those things you recognize when you see one.
My question about Celine's, Eliot's, Ezra Pound's and numerous other authors' anti-semitism was more a "why?", to start a discussion perhaps on "what drew them there?". There is a connection with losing one's mind. None of these people were mentally very stable.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 22/11/2001, 19:22:50, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
Celine: "And then, what about his life as a doctor? A doctor, hungry, cannot pay the rent, can barely care about the patients, and he does (invisibly), he does care as much as a hungry doctor can, without any mushiness, any niceties, any pretentions, and while struggling not to let the other doctor get away with the fee. It was all too human." This is sheer Dostoyevsky, Lale - "The Idiot," "Karamasov," "Mouse Hole" etc. Btw. the passages regarding the doctor attracted the book to Benn, who himself was a doctor.
Dostoyevsky: the cliche is so pervasive that it can easily be overlooked - or have we assimilated it as standard without questioning? The book is pulp-fiction, plain and simple, and I tell you why:
1. the premise based on a supposedly unmotivated murder. Raskolnikov is presented to be a nihilist, he certainly is what a pulp reader of the period THINKS a "nihilist" must be like. If you come to think of it, a rather cheap shot.
2. Sonja - the prostitute with a golden heart, what could be more of a (typically romantic) cliche?
3. In the key-scene, Raskolnikov the murderer and Sonja the whore bending their heads over the New Testament in the same room, the Jesus connection - now the cliche comes thick and fast.
4. If you follow carefully the underlying structure (or rather the absence of it) then you will discover all the tricks of the trade in pulp-fiction (disguise confided to the reader, the all-knowing detective etc.) - Dostoyevsky did it by the book (Eugene Su·'s that is) and didn't miss a beat.
The point about the talent for drama - both, especially Dostoyevsky, had a talent to tie a scene together, and sometimes to make up a very convincing dialogue. I still remember the shock when Svedigaliev tells Raskolnikov to his face that he suspects him all along.
If you look for "great books" for comparison - well, not trying to be presumptuous, compare Celine and Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy or try Sterne's Tristram Shandy, or Dos Passos. I am not suggesting that Tolstoy or Dos Passos have not their flaws - but one thing they certainly do right: they stay miles away even from the slightest whiff of cliche. And Sterne is something else altogether.
As for the totalitarian proclivities of poets and writers, I think mental instability doesn't cut it in most cases - even Ezra Pound was remakably stabile when under presure. I think we have to stop to look for excuses and accept that these people meant what they said and take it from there. One must inquire into the individual rationale from case to case - I suspect there always is something. I mean it really helps to get things in perspective if we start to take them seriously and appreciate that views accepted by people of education and talent must have an attraction for a reason. And we (the readers and citizens of this our blessed age) simply cannot afford to ignore these reasons - or we are going to see many more towers collapsing in a cloud of dust. Cheap generalizations won't help us.
You certainly should start a debate on this. If literature comes anyway near to a serious issue - this is a good point to begin.
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Michael, I am not a good writer and I am not very good at expressing what I have absorbed from a book. I haven't done Celine justice when I tried to squeeze out of my mind what had been soaked up from the "doctor" part of The Journey. Now, reading what I have written, I realize that I have made it sound all too commonplace. Based on what I have written (he can barely care about his patients and yet almost invisible to the reader, he does), I understand how you conclude it to be insipid or "done before". Please do not judge Celine based on my defence of him (or even based on Benn's bashing).
"Undoubtedly, I was much more interested in preventing Bebert from dying than if he had been an adult. You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it's one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure."
Now, where, before or after Celine, a narrator (a doctor no less) has boldly stated that he didn't mind very much when an adult passed on?
The scenes with the young girl who had just aborted a baby bleeding to death with blood trickling down the bed... And the doctor sitting on the bed *sleeping*. "I was so comfortable sitting down and so uncomfortable standing up."
I can type many examples of the unique, reality-based-humanity of the doctor and none of these seem like pulp to me. Please read the book, if you haven't done so already, and tell me again that you disagree.
Africa: 'I preferred to lie there in a stupor, trembling and foaming at the mouth with a 104 fever, than to be lucid and forced to think of what would happen to me in Fort-Gono. I even stopped taking my quinine because I figured the fever would keep life away from me. You get drunk on what you;ve got. While I lay there sweltering, I ran out of matches. They'd been in short supply. Robinson hadn't left me a thing, only "Cassoulet à la Bordelaise." But plenty of that, I assure you. I threw up the whole tins of it. And even to arrive at that result, you had to heat them.'
If I had to defend only one of the two books in discussion here, I would choose The Journey. It is much more realistic, satiric, and at times you can't help but laugh at the hilarious presentation of the misery.
C&R of course is more of a romantic book with, as you mention, the golden hearted whore. The good friend who marries the sister etc. But I evaluate that book on its own merits, on its own times. I simply cannot compare the two.
The murder had a very solid motive. Take the money of the loose and distribute it amongst the needy (whom the money, in fact, was stolen from).
I agree that the ending was very lame.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 23/11/2001, 16:53:02, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
Benn doesn't bash, but ok - let's not compare. But Lale - the worst thing a writer can do is developing a character on an abstract idea. Now have a good look at this Raskolnikov and what is supposed to make him tick. Turgenyev once poked gentle fun on Tolstoy when he parodied one of his manirisms as: "From the way he turned his thighs as he walked to the kitchen, it became apparent that he was planning to travel to Astrakhan tomorrow." A joke - but it parodies in Tolstoy what Dostoyevsky never was capable to do - to create a credible outside to the inside of a character. You have plenty of inner life in Dostoyevsky's books - but once you consider them walking in the streets of Moskow, you begin to wonder.
Raskolnikov acts supposedly out of a conviction to prove a point that it doesn't matter for the course of the world whether the old pawn-broker dies or not. All the same he commits a solid robbery on top of it - to make it look like a hold-up. I don't know what Dostoyevsky had in mind (probably he had to jerk up another 800-pager to pay his debts) but this is the most artificial thing I have ever come across in a crime story (and it is really very little more than a crime story) of a by and large talented writer - apart from pulp fiction.
Not so long ago I have read the diaries of a real mass murderer: of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. Now here you had a matter of fact person (writing a very neat hand) who, based on an abstract idea, was convinced that his deeds served a purpose. But even he would never have devalued the death of his victims as completely worthless, in fact if he had, it would have taken out the very rationale behind his actions and reasoning. Here in the States on the other hand, we know of contract killers and gang killings in the streets of Los Angeles - in both cases the perpetrators had and have absolutely no feeling for the victim and no compunctions to pull the trigger without any second thought. Try to explain to THEM Rascolnikov - they would think you and he are nuts, and that's the end of it - they wouldn't be able to recognize any kind of motive in this case, or rationalize it in a way that would make sense to them. "No hate, no commitment to the "bros in the hood," no money? What on earth is this?"
Alright, so maybe Dostoyevsky just didn't know better? Well he actually did, he had enough experinces with criminals in the penal colonies. He had been a convict himself. But he apparently was listening more to their bragging (and only with one ear) and too much encapsulated in his inner shell, to actually observe what these people do, when they stop bragging.
So in Dostoyevsky's case, his own totalitarian phantasies and political opinions are partly a reflection on what he had picked up from his fellow inmates in Siberia. He and Tolstoy had one thing in common - both shared the conviction that the man of the people was in possession of superior wisdom. Tolstoy looked at his peasants and had difficulties to hold on to this illusion. Eventually it killed the artist in him, but he never became a jingoist. Dostoyevsky on the other hand just had to outdo him on this score - he went straight to the dregs of society, he wholeheartedly assimilated the latent and open anti-Semitism, apparently rampant among Russia's organized criminals to this day, and embraced the pan-Slavic nationalism of his days. A potent mixture.
I found, that every writer I looked at, before he came out of the closet with his totalitarian proclivities, showed already telltale signs for it in his previous work. Only nobody noticed because nobody suspected.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 24/11/2001, 8:46:05, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
A second look on Celine: not to antagonize you Lale, but I am glad you pulled these quotes:
"Undoubtedly, I was much more interested in preventing Bebert from dying than if he had been an adult. You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it's one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure."
Now, where, before or after Celine, a narrator (a doctor no less) has boldly stated that he didn't mind very much when an adult passed on?
The scenes with the young girl who had just aborted a baby bleeding to death with blood trickling down the bed... And the doctor sitting on the bed *sleeping*. "I was so comfortable sitting down and so uncomfortable standing up."
Lale - doesn't it strike you as typical reverse cliches? The author gives the exact opposite to what a reader should expect to happen. Which gives it an appearance of narrative power and originality, when it is just a trick of the trade.
"Africa: 'I preferred to lie there in a stupor, trembling and foaming at the mouth with a 104 fever, than to be lucid and forced to think of what would happen to me in Fort-Gono. I even stopped taking my quinine because I figured the fever would keep life away from me. You get drunk on what you;ve got. While I lay there sweltering, I ran out of matches. They'd been in short supply. Robinson hadn't left me a thing, only "Cassoulet à la Bordelaise." But plenty of that, I assure you. I threw up the whole tins of it. And even to arrive at that result, you had to heat them.'"
... I have the perhaps wrong feeling - that Celine's doctor travelled not so much to Africa but to Rimbauds work.
(Which is ok - just an observation.)
I read Celine - long ago, because Benn had mentioned him. To me it was something of a disappointment. But then I didn't read Celine for Celine's sake.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 25/11/2001, 20:43:45, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
Before you have your last word Lale, allow me to add something that doesn't really belong into a literary critique, where the only aspect should be the quality of writing. I followed your advise and looked again into Celine. And again I felt the same way as the first time. Lashing out is not the answer. And by answer I don't mean anything remotely, like a "solution." Just attitude. I mean it is hard to look with sympathy at your surrounding from the conveyor-belt on a factory-floor. I had been there and I know what in the Detroit episode he is talking about. It is hard to be surrounded by determined illiterates (often from one's own family) and not to be tempted to think of them as worthless garbage, human cattle with barely a right to exist, perhaps apart from feeding some sort of invisible elite. (Now where did this come from?)
If you are there, it is the place you absolutely don't want to be. A steelworker or coal miner with pride in his work? Completely incomprehensible. He must be deluding himself, because he has no choice or never been confronted with a glimpse on something better. - Well, actually he has. He too went to school at some point in his life. He could have paid attention. He does have choices. It is only harder for him to grab and hold on to his choices, because of the demoralizing circumstances. It is one of our society's dark little secrets. The most hallowed, most cherished values, designed to keep up moral in social dead-end situations, as a matter of fact, actually demoralize the underprivileged into a situation of obliging stupor. It's just too hard to go through so many sleepless nights and work a second job.
Now I almost sound like Nietzsche, that little professor in his Swiss chalet with a view, who had an open road to academic clout and perks; a golden boy, who decided to leave it all, and instead clench his fists and squawk from the top of his lungs - - with a cushy pension under his feet. Ohhh - BIG move! Obviously it is easy to be angry, or let slip the reigns on one's sarcasm. Aristocracy has many meanings, and the snobbery is not the part, I am looking at right now. A true aristocrat can be sent through hell and he will come out of it virtually intact. How is he doing this? He never loses distance and perspective. A view admittedly easier acquired when you sit on the top of the hub and the old boys from the network support you, than in the trenches. But there you are.
I really think, a society that has lost a working aristocracy, has lost perspective. Whether as a model for values and customs or as an object of hate, it forms the outlook and expectations of those who are not part of it. Life has become a lot less colorful, the demeanor a lot more degrading; expectations have deteriorated to the meanest common denominator of completely pointless fluff. I am not a socialist, and I am not a conservative - but even I can see, that something must be fundamentally wrong, if the figure of the stock-broker - that is: a compulsive gambler in disguise - suddenly finds himself riding the crest as a model for our highest social ambitions. This is the best we can do?
It is true, self-pity leaves me singularly unimpressed, even if it comes in the disguise of gritty epigrams or in litanies laced with vocabulary from the gutter. How could it ever have become so popular? Reading Celine again - I find myself confirmed in my first impression of a twisted individual with an attitude problem, of a whiner finding fault with everybody before he dares looking into a mirror - and I am not amused. Celine is pissed about a lot of things, and he says so, exercising his first amendment. And being pissed is also supposed to make the model for Henry Miller and Bukowski. But the two Americans are much less of a whiner than Celine. Not that Miller is exactly awe inspiring - but there is more honesty, especially with Bukowski; more awareness of being responsible for their own choices. (And where is the justice in this set-up? Who says the Universe is build on justice?)
In the end, everybody has opinions. Opinions are cheap. On a planet populated by six billion opinionated beings, there should be something for everybody in the haversack. In other words, where it matters, opinions really shouldn't matter. What I do miss in Celine, and what apparently draws the line, is a sense of tragedy. Perhaps, it is beyond his powers to deliver (which is to be expected from a person with his prejudices) or rather, in this our blessed time and age, a foundation has been lost. Shakespeare is already a wee bit shaky, but from some time on in the early eighteen hundreds, all we manage to produce, are sad stories, but no more tragedies. Same applies to comedies - these days we are funny because we are ridiculous or cynical. That's why our soaps are rightly called "sit-coms." It seems we are even losing the ability to tie together a story which is funny as a story. (I was brought up on a premise that true comedy can turn to tragedy and vice versa.)
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Posted by Francois Meursault on 27/11/2001, 1:39:28, in reply to "Re: Celine and Journey"
First of all, Celine hated humanity, there's no denying that and at the same time helped the downtrodden and poor. Those "anti-semitic" charges were obviously to parade the guilt that the French nation had felt after the war. Most people in France either did not revolt under the Germans or just lived life as it was, including Jean Paul Sartre who wrote a scathing attack against Celine, calling him a "collaborator" and offering no evidence. People had to become scapegoats for French collaboration and Celine was as infamous as anyone who should be held responsible. Celine was like dynamite, he wanted to blow up everything about himself, so he wrote the 3 pamplets against the Jews, anyone taking him seriously didn't understand his subtlty. Celine is in no way similar to Dostoyevsky, they are completely opposite, but brilliant writers.
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