Fable for Another Time: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Tuesday, April 29,2003
Celine's missing chapter.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline has always presented a number of challenges for translators, publishers and readers. His attempts to capture the immediacy of spoken French led to a prose that was splintered and sometimes barely coherent—often little more than sentence fragments or words or syllables connected by ellipses and exclamation points. Conveying his heavy use of then-contemporary slang to now-contemporary English speakers also proved to be more than daunting.

Then there's the problem of Céline's politics that, to this day, still make people itchy. He never made it easy for folks.

As a result, much of Céline's work has remained untranslated. It wasn't until the mid-90s that we saw the first English publication of London Bridge and the relatively benign Ballets Without Music, Without Dancers, Without Anything. Fable for Another Time is the last of his eight major novels to be translated into English.

During the German occupation of France, Céline was living in Montmartre, where he was a collaborator who produced dozens of vitriolic anti-Semitic pamphlets. After Allied bombing destroyed his home in 1944 (and knowing he would be arrested if captured), he fled to Germany with his wife and cat. They soon moved on to Copenhagen, where he was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months, as arrangements were made for his extradition back to France to stand trial for high treason.

It's these two incidents—the Allied bombing and his imprisonment—that form the two parts of Fable. In fact, he wrote the first draft while in prison and, as translator Mary Hudson points out in her extremely helpful introduction, it shows. Unlike his other, more picaresque novels, Fable is, in its own way, tightly focused. Though it wanders into memory, rant and fantasy, it always returns to the Allied bombing—and it reveals the isolation, paranoia and plain stir-craziness Céline felt while caged.

Céline's novels had always been—despite certain exaggerations and fever dreams—clearly autobiographical. Although the protagonist of Journey to the End of the Night was named Bardamu, Céline dropped that name immediately and, from his second novel onward, began calling all of his protagonists "Ferdinand." In Fable, however, the narrator is known alternately as "Ferdinand," "Louis," "Céline" and even "Destouches"—Céline's real name. It's a telling gesture on his part, given that he's describing what would become the most significant (and traumatizing) events of his life.

It's here, in Fable, that Céline's rage, all his life-long hatreds, all his bile and disgust and contempt really explode. Some have argued that it was while writing this book that he finally went over the edge. An interesting idea—but I don't believe he ever went over the edge completely. Sitting in that cell awaiting trial, he felt betrayed by everyone and everything. Who wouldn't be pissed? Still, there are points in the book in which he writes with great tenderness (well, you know—for him) about his home, his friends (some of them) and the France that used to be (not the treacherous France that stabbed him in the back).

Mostly, though, he's just pissed.

He decides at one point that he's being persecuted because he had a nice view from his house:

Looking out over everything, the view all over Paris, that's what you'll never forgive me for!

The arch traitor! It's not even worth trying him! The ultimate, overwhelming evidence! A view like that! He deprives himself of nothing! To think they didn't hang the bastard!

He levels attacks at the Jews, the Danish, the French, the Germans, other writers, the literary scene and especially his readers. Céline had been the most celebrated French writer of the 20th century until the "high treason" business came up. After that, and despite his pardon, he never regained the popularity and critical esteem he once had. As a result, he grew even angrier.

In Fable, he swings between the blackest self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. He loves his friends and accuses them of betrayals. He blames the Jews for all of his (and the world's) problems, while at the same time identifying with them. Everything else in the world is lower than shit. It's hilarious and confounding and repulsive and beautiful in the way a huge apartment complex fire can be beautiful. Even if you can't find a "narrative" or a "story" for the life of you, it's always a hell of a ride.  

On the surface, it might look and sound like many of his other works, especially the later novels. Hudson argues that it's much more subtle than that, but I think the similarity is important. I've long felt that Céline only wrote one novel, but that it was several thousand pages long and doled out in small portions.

That's why the publication of Fable for Another Time is so important for those of us who can't read French. Until now, it's been the chapter that was missing—the link, the footbridge that connects everything else. Short as it is, it might be the most important novel he ever wrote.

Fable for Another Time
By Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Mary Hudson
University of Nebraska Press, 239 pages, $25

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferd ... %C3%A9line