Death on Credit

Celine Louis-Ferdinand

Description

When Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author's thoughts and actions in ways that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic - and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life - and characters that stretched the imagination.In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Celine's alter ego, is a doctor in Paris, treating the poor who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy, especially in Bardamu's sexual escapades; the style becomes deliberately rougher and sentences disintegrate to catch the flavour of the teeming world of everyday Parisian tragedies, the struggle to make a living, illness, venereal disease, the sordid stories of families whose destiny is governed by their own stupidity, malice, lust and greed. This fascinating book by one of the greatest twentieth-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780714546292
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Death on Credit
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Preface by André Derval

ALMA BOOKS




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Death on Credit first published in French as Mort à Crédit in 1936
This translation first published in Great Britain by
John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1989
A revised edition first published by Alma Classics in 2009 This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2017
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1952
English translation © Ralph Manheim 1966, 2009
Preface © André Derval, 2009
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-634-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Preface
Translator’s Introduction
Death on Credit
Notes



Preface
Death on Credit or the Oeuvre Born Again
Four years after Journey to the End of the Night , which had resoundingly marked his entry into the literary world, Louis-Ferdinand Céline published Death on Credit . In the author’s own words, “it is a monster this time”. Considering that Journey was greeted by unprecedented praise and violent polemics, and even resulted in some journalists being sued for having questioned the integrity of certain members of the Prix Goncourt jury, one might wonder about the kind of reaction Céline was expecting… A “monster”, as in monstrous labour, from which the author emerges exhausted, having lost eleven kilos. A “monster” depicting minutely and energetically a social and psychological reality about which good manners and moral order dictate that silence should be respected. A “monster” with regard to correct literary practice, the novel disobeying, in its themes and its style, all the rules of propriety and stylistic orthodoxy.
The efforts expended during the lengthy writing of this second novel should have, to Céline’s mind, helped him escape the curse of the “successful first novel”, readily considered unsurpassable by critics inclined towards facile assumptions. The intention was to start everything from the beginning, as part of a projected novelistic cycle starting with the author’s childhood in late-nineteenth-century Paris, then describing his enlistment into the army, leading to the First World War, before stopping with the young protagonist Ferdinand’s stay in London in 1916 as a disabled war veteran. It is striking to note that the novel on the War ( Cannon Fodder ) was not carried through as the author wished, the tension produced by the escalation of the perilous circumstances of the 1930s stifling any possible literary activity, something which resulted in his political writings, his anti-Semitic theses, which permanently stamped a seal of infamy on their author. Pursuing his fictional endeavours nonetheless, Céline managed to publish the first volume of his London-based novel, Guignol’s Band , in 1944… after having attempted a few ballet outlines, film and cartoon scripts and a “Nordic legend”, The Wish of King Krogold , from which several passages are provided at the beginning of Death on Credit .
On the run, shortly before the Liberation, first in Germany then in Denmark, where he was eventually arrested and detained, Céline continued writing Guignol’s Band , the second volume of which was published posthumously in 1964 under the title London Bridge . He embarked on a new cycle, which opened with the Allied bombing of Montmartre and the preparation for flight under the growing menace of the reprisals announced by the Resistants ( Fable for Another Time and Normance ) and closed with the arrival in Denmark ( Rigadoon ).
Let us return to Death on Credit , which as we have mentioned is an introductory novel, starting off a cycle and presenting several characteristics of the Bildungsroman (modelled on Werther or, even more so, The Child by Jules Vallès). The reader follows the young Ferdinand through the shopkeeping intrigues of the Passage Choiseul, impressed by his grandmother’s authority, disconcerted by his mother’s claudication, exasperated by his father’s threats, and faced with the various dangers posed by trips to England and apprenticeships in the cloth and jewel trades. Finally the reader accompanies him throughout the unusual training he receives from the inventor Courtial des Pereires, first for his Génitron magazine, then in his phalanstery in Blême-le-Petit. Surprisingly, Céline derived several characteristics of this episode from his own experience: thanks to Édouard Benedictus, a peculiar individual he met in London during the war, he actually encountered an inventor called Henry de Graffigny – whose real name was Raoul Marquis – the author of a number of works of scientific popularisation. Céline published translations from these in his journal, Eurêka , and collaborated with him on a tuberculosis-prevention tour financed by the Rockefeller Foundation…
Representations of primitive scenes, of themes of transgression, even of the murder of the father, all these elements of the narrative are deliberately staged according to Freudian interpretation. From 1933 Céline and his writing had fallen under the influence of Freud, reading up widely on the subject of psychoanalysis and meeting various leading figures in the field, most notably Annie Angel and Annie Reich in Vienna.
Meeting with an embarrassed or indignant reception, Death on Credit compounds its scandalous effect by the overabundance of colloquial phrases and coarse language, knowingly woven into more formal sentences.
Céline justified this in a letter to the literary critic André Rousseau in May 1936: “I go to the trouble of rendering ‘spoken’ into ‘written’, because paper doesn’t record speech well, but that’s all. No tic! Nothing to do with genre! Condensation, that’s all. I personally find this the only possible means of expression for emotion. I do not want to narrate, I want to impart feeling . It is impossible to do so with conventional academic language – with fine style. It is the instrument of reports, discussions, letters to your cousin, but it is always a front, something fixed. I cannot read a novel in classical language. Those are all plans for novels, they are never novels themselves . All the work remains to be done . The emotional execution is not there . And that’s all that counts. That is actually so true that without camaraderie, forcing oneself, complacency, scarcity, people would have stopped reading them a long time ago ! Their language is impossible, it is dead , as unreadable (in this emotional sense) as Latin. Why do I borrow so much from speech, from “jargon”, from colloquial syntax, why do I refashion it myself if I feel the need to do so at that moment? Because, as you said, it dies quickly, this language. Which means it lived while I used it. Crucial superiority over so-called pure language, properly French, refined, which is always dead , dead from the start, dead since Voltaire, a corpse, dead as a doornail . Everyone knows it, no one says it, dares to say it. Language is like everything else, it dies all the time, it must die . We must resign ourselves to it, the language of conventional novels is dead, dead syntax, dead everything. My novels will also die, soon no doubt, but they will have had that slight superiority over so many other ones, they will have, for a year, a month, a day, lived . That is all. Everything else is nothing but coarse, idiotic, senile boastfulness.”
Nevertheless, the contents of the work, notably the obscene passages, were the object of heated discussions between Céline and his publisher at the time: Robert Denoël refused to print the most explicit passages, Céline refused to rewrite them. A compromise of sorts was found: the words, phrases, paragraphs concerned were left blank in the main edition; only 117 copies appeared, outside the market, with the complete text…
In these conditions, the launch of the book generally attracted the scorn, or at least the disapproval, of all those who mattered in the world of letters in 1936. The influential communist school of critics, via the pen of Paul Nizan, took the author to task for supposed literary shortcomings and for the abandonment of the social conscience that was to be expected after Journey to the End of the Night : “In Journey there was an unforgettable denunciation of war, of the colonies. Today Céline denounces nothing but the poor and the vanquished.” Furthermore, the literary figures who had taken up the cause of Journey were silent this time around…
Most unusually, Céline’s publisher Robert Denoël consequently had a brochure printed, entitled Apology of Death on Credit, establishing an eloquent parallel between the accusations brought against Céline’s novel and those brought against Émile Zola’s works half a century earlier… This very frosty critical reception stirred in Céline, from this point onwards, a profound and almost systematic animosity towards journalists and intellectuals, which led to the charges he brought against them in his first racist pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre . One can measure the extent of the author’s abrupt change of direction, due to Death on Credit ’s reception, from the time of the publication of Journey , when he wrote to Albert Thibaudet: “Critics seem not to want to learn anything more about mankind. The ladde