Unveiling Louis Ferdinand Celine: Morbid Materialism - Part 2
This is the second part of a two part essay on the worldview of the French writer Louis Ferdinand Celine - part 1 may be found here.
The Nucleus of Celine’s Worldview: Morbid Materialism
“I know a good dozen famous authors, journalists, columnists and gossip writers boasting about having brought down the war, covered in, spattered with, soaked in, saturated in magnificent stanzas, they got rid off all the conflicts, cured all the haemorrhoids, the awful bloody vigour, all of the entrails, gone by just their writing alone! Their stylistic, amazing, majestic writing of their dialectics is like the Thunder of the Gods! Ah! These aren’t just any old sensationalist, amateur, revered, shitty writers of the literary canon: they’re part of the great uproar in the big offices! Part of the global Lévy-Blum plot! Fucking hell!”
Scholars struggle to reconcile Celine’s authorship of both ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ and his political pamphlets, the source of his infamy. That Celine was both a racialist and pacificist, an anti-semite and a literary genius, engenders confusion.
The co-existence of genius and rightist politics is not fathomable to mainstream scholars, a position unsubstantiated by the historical record, which demonstrates a litany of rightists at the fore of avant-garde artistic movements: Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Joseph Campbell, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Wyndham Lewis etc. - artists of renown and men of the right.
The failure to discern the nucleus of Celine's work stems, as is typical of scholarly failures, from a lack of imagination and the inability to obviate one’s own pre-conceived conception of ideas; specifically, how ideas relate to the left-right spectrum, and in turn how this spectrum influences our conception of ideological cross-pollination.
Moreover, it’s symptomatic of an intellectual culture wherein classical humanistic education is all but dead; its place supplanted by a pedagogy that produces overly-specialised graduates - the janus face being ignorance of all domains bar one’s speciality.
There’s been too much foreplay in this essay. Well enough of this palaver, let’s get this show on the road.
The core of my thesis: Celine's nihilism, pacificism, and racialism (of which anti-semitism is a branch) grow out of the same axial root. For Celine, this was his morbid materialism - there are political, anti-metaphysical, sexual, and racial facets that sprout from this nucleus.
Morbid materialism is tricky to define in a single sentence; even two would be a stretch. It is not a category spawned by political science, nor will one find it in the taxonomy of historians of philosophy.
Rather, due to the term appertaining to Celine particularly, it necessarily eschews general definition. In lieu of a definition, it is submitted that the following are key elements of this viewpoint:
Atheism
Anti-Humanism
Anti-Jingoism
Materialism
Hedonism
Heightened disgust reflex
Pacifism
Ethnocentrism
Morbid materialism cannot be reduced to either a mature attitude, physiological factor, or a philosophical affirmation. The biographical, physical, and intellectual combined and intertwined into a particular disposition toward phenomena ranging from sex to nationalism, from racialism to war.
Due to its definitional weakness - to re-iterate: this owes to Celine’s peculiarities, ideationally and biographically - a foray into the life and thought of Celine is integral if one seeks to verify the veracity of this essay’s central contention.
By way of background, Celine was initially a frontline infantryman on the Western Front. Despite his private letters evincing enthusiasm for France’s efforts, his literary output demonstrates contrary sentiments.
‘Journey to the End of the Night’ opens with a satire of military life. Bardamu, after discoursing with his friend regarding the stupidity of nationality and convention, reverses his beliefs, and spontaneously joins the army, to his interlocutor’s dismay - soon disillusioned by war’s inanity, he states:
“I'd never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery”
Bardamu, cognisant of man’s finiteness, is concerned chiefly with self-preservation, and thus considers the actions of his comrades to be insane:
“That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure, he was worse than a dog, he couldn't conceive of his own death. At the same time I realized that there must be plenty of brave men like him in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How many, I wondered. One or two million, say several millions in all? The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal lunacy could go on for ever. . . . Why would they stop? Never had the world seemed so implacably doomed.”
Celine volunteered to join the army prior to the breakout of World War 1. At its cusp, he had already attained the position of sergeant. For Celine, war engendered “a profound disgust for all that is bellicose”.
Following his war time service, Celine opted to become a surgeon. The surgical trade, inherently, brings the practitioner within close proximity to death, decay, pain, and misery.
The aesthetic picture conveyed by Celine’s work betrays his background as both a surgeon and a soldier.
True to his original profession, Celine’s writing playfully partakes of the aesthetic of the corpse. Bodies eroding, decaying, at the cusp of death, and a multiplicity of other images flood the reader’s imagination; those fortunate enough to subsist are witnesses to the decay that will soon corrupt and overwhelm them:
Bardamu’s description of a patient’s terminal ailment:
His heart was racing, no doubt about it; shut up behind his ribs, it ran after life in fits and starts, but run or not, it would never catch up with life. His goose was cooked. Soon, the way it was stumbling, his heart would fall in the muck, all juicy and red, gushing like a crushed pomegranate. That's how his flabby old heart would look on the marble, cut open with a knife at the autopsy that would take place in a few days. All this would end in a lovely court-ordered autopsy.
He continues:
“He was struggling as much against life as against death.”
Celine privileges the imminent and the tangible. Via Bardamu, he evinces his hostility to the spirit explicitly and in his conversant emphasis on the body:
“She kept bothering me with the soul, she was always going on about it. The soul is the body's vanity and pleasure as long as the body's in good health, but it's also the urge to escape from the body as soon as the body is sick or things are going badly. Of the two poses, you take the one that suits you best at the moment, and that's all there is to it! As long as you can choose between the two, you're all right. But I couldn't choose anymore, my die was cast! I was up to my neck in the truth; death dogged my every step, so to speak. It was very hard for me to think of anything but my suspended sentence to be murdered, a fate which everyone else regarded as just the right thing for me.”
Atypical for Atheists, especially the nouveau variety represented by Hitchens and Dawkins, Celine’s rejection of metaphysics extends beyond his disbelief in God. He’s candid enough to admit that concepts, so prized by liberals and leftists alike, such as humanity, fairness etc. are conceptual edifices built atop a metaphysical foundation. Consequently, they lack coherency shorn of a transcendent basis.
The concept of race has been assailed from various quarters, but why not humanity?
“Race is interlaced with power relations” - so is the concept of humanity.
“Race has spurred atrocity” - so has humanity.
“Race is a fuzzy concept” - all categories, humanity included, are ambiguous.
“Race is made up to divide people” - I’ll let Proudhon respond: “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.”
Race, experientially speaking, is a real category; a category men have died for, a category that engenders division and discrimination. The palpable effects of concentrically smaller categories, ethnos and tribe, is immense - said social formulations have not merely inspired martyrdom and stoked division; they have been carriers and bearers of theology (i.e the ancestral worship of the Patriarchal Greek family).
It can be said, then, that the smaller the social formulation, the more it tends to possess real properties - again, real in an experiential sense. Conversely, at the opposite end of the scale, humanity in the modern world is an abstraction; hollow rhetoric invoked by western politicians and intellectuals.
It wasn’t always this way. Underpinned by the Faith, humanity (as a concept) was engulfed by palpability and realness - the marker, and concertiser, of which is martyrdom. Humanity’s apotheosis was in the days of Rome, when Christian martyrdom was at its peak, inspired by the unsurpassable sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
Even at this time, humanity did not supplant other social forms, such as ethnos and family. It edified the latter, in fact. Rather, man conceived of his identity in concentric terms; at the most immediate level, he was a person possessing a rational intellect and an immortal soul, and, at its height, was part of a humanity created in God’s image. Betwixt, there were a variety of intermediate identities, including family, ethnos, and civilisational identity.
Protestantism, the Renaissance, and the European Enlightenment punctuated the relationship between concepts we take for granted, namely humanity and rationality, and their metaphysical foundation, God.
Christianity, by esteeming mankind as being made in the image of God, offered the concept a sine-qua-non. Modern materialism, as a worldview, lacks the ideational wherewithal to replicate this - categories, in a nominalist universe, are arbitrary.
Like Nietzsche, Celine understood this, and thus eschewed humanity in favour of a more real, concrete category: race. Contra today’s Human Biodiversity nerds, Celine did not cite studies proving that Australian Aboriginals have a higher propensity to astrally project than the North Sentinelese.
As stated, Celine’s disposition predilects him toward the concrete and tangible; studies, meta-analyses et cetera. are far too abstract. His racism, like his atheism and literary style, owes to reflex. It is not conjecture to reconstruct his racism as a violent, acerbic reflux to phenomena that offends his inner physiological constitution.
This becomes obvious when we consult his ‘Trifles for a Massacre’ - his hostility to Africans (quite tame, it should be said, relative to racists of his time and even today) is articulated as follows:
“In Africa, with the same Negroes, or their cousins in Cameroon, I lived for years alone, in one of their villages, in the middle of the forest, under the same straw hut, in the same calabash. In Africa, they were good people. Here, they bother me, they sicken me. They only became completely unbearable in Cameroon at the time of the full moon, they became torturous with their tom-tom... But the other nights, they let you doze in peace, in complete safety. I'm talking about the "pahoin" country, the most negro country of negroes. Basically, that's the only damage they cause me, aesthetic damage, I don't like the tom-tom...”
Excuse the momentary detour, but whilst perusing ‘Trifles’, I arrived at this section on the non-European mind:
“Strictly speaking, they feel nothing... They boast... Like all Afro-Asians their nervous system, atavistically, is zinc and remains so, boorish, vulgar, and very common, to tell the truth, despite so many efforts, and enormous pretensions... Precocious and crude, but without echoes. They are condemned if they frolic in our climates, to expend themselves in grimaces, in tom-toms, in imitations.... They feel nothing directly, and assimilate only a little of thing in depth... from where these infinite buggerings of flies, this multi-searching all in bluff, these didactic madnesses, these frantic analyses, all this pompous doctrinaire masturbation, instead of direct humanity, of true inspiration. They would be to be pitied, if they weren't so boring. They are more logs than fiddles, despite all this frenetic, universal dismantling, still trying to bluff us again, to show us just the opposite.”
Back to to my point (do I have one? Yes. Nada. “That’s a negative, sir”.).
Nor did Celine ingratiate himself into the nationalist haut monde of his native France. School for Corpses features Celine lampooning Charles Maurras:
“But what is Maurras up to? I don’t get any of the finer points, the various things, the random crap of his “Latinesque” doctrine. What’s he actually getting at? A perfect Latinity? An alliance with Italy? But we’re already in one! With Franco maybe? Why not! Then what? Don’t know…hold everything together? Redo everything? Latinity above all? Become Felbriges? Hurrah for Vaucluse? Long live Petrarch! And Mistral! A round of applause for Virgil! And for Horace!”
He continues:
“Can you put Europe back together? Reunite it under a love for Latin? It’s all there. But I don’t think so. You need more solid reasons, force, armies, a new faith, race.”
The culmination:
“This really annoys Maurras. He’s following the footsteps of Caesar. He doesn’t want to quit school. He enjoys it too much. He’s an enraged schoolboy. He’s willingly held himself back for forty years.”
Despite his disdain for nationalism, he was not above exploiting it to satiate carnal desire or to save his own skin.
In ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, Bardamu enters into a fling with an Old stock Americana Hardbody, Lola, whose ultra-patriotic views on France’s war time endeavours juxtapose with Bardamu’s:
“To Lola's way of thinking, France was some sort of chivalric being, not very clearly defined in space or time, but at the moment dangerously wounded and for that very reason too too exciting. When anybody mentioned France to me, I instantly thought of my guts, so I wasn't nearly so open to patriotic ardor. Each man to his fears. Nevertheless, since she was sexually accommodating, I listened and never contradicted her. But when it came to my soul, she wasn't at all satisfied with me. She'd have liked to see me bubbling and bursting with enthusiasm, whereas I couldn't see a single reason for adopting that sublime state of mind, in fact I could see a thousand, all equally irrefutable, for persevering in the exact opposite disposition.”
It’s clear that la terre et les morts of Barres et al., in vogue from the fin de siècle to the coup de grâce of Vichy France, held no appeal for Celine. In a post-religious age, the nation was transfigured in transcendent terms by the poets of the early 20th century - Celine had no time for their romantic mytho-poetics.
Bardamu’s flagrante with the fairer sex pervades ‘Journey’. Celine self-indicts via Bardamu, when the latter, reflecting on his relations with Lola, states:
“To me her body was a joy without end. I never wearied of exploring that American body. I have to admit that I was a terrible lecher. I still am.”
In fact, it was lust for Lola that impelled Bardamu to take a voyage to the states:
“And I formed the pleasant and fortifying conviction that a country capable of producing bodies so daringly graceful, so tempting in their spiritual flights, must have countless other vital revelations to offer, of a biological nature, it goes without saying….So it was in the immediate vicinity of Lola's rear end that I received the message of a new world.”
Celine views human sexuality as a primal and strictly-biological affair; eros is not expressed here in flowery terms, chivalry is dispatched with, and the union of man and woman before God may as well be Cantonese for our Parisian lecher.
His hedonistic approach to sexuality compliments his atheism and pacifism. All idols are smashed, and per Keynes “in the long run we’re all dead”, so why not plough starry-eyed American cooze? Or a little rasper of a mot - what!
Celine’s sexual objectification of women reaches its apotheosis in his fetishism. Celine is fixated, as numerous scholars have noted, with legs, thighs, and gams.
Celine exemplifies his obsession in his tribute to Molly, a working denizen of a New York brothel:
“Toward Molly, one of the lovely girls there, I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love. I remember her kindness as if it were yesterday, and her long, blond, magnificently strong, lithe legs, noble legs. Say what you like, the mark of true aristocracy in humankind is the legs.”
Sexuality is perhaps the exception for Celine’s anti-transcendent tendency. Whilst a consistent opponent of metaphysics, the rare expression of love in ‘Journey’ transcends Celine’s otherwise imminent approach to the world.
Molly, a prostitute, is the ironic recipient of Celine’s love; tragically, he quashes his expression of commitment toward her.
“‘Yes, I'll finish medical school in France, and then I'll come back,’ I had the gall to assure her.
’No, Ferdinand, you won't be back . . . And I won't be here either . . .’
She was nobody's fool.”
Reflecting on their relationship, Celine ponders their love:
“The train pulled in. I wasn't so sure of my plans once I saw the engine. I kissed Molly with all the spirit I had left ... I was sad for once, really sad, for everybody, for myself, for her, for everybody.
Maybe that's what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.
Years have passed since I left her, years and more years . . . I wrote many times to Detroit and all the other addresses I remembered, where I thought she might be known. I never received an answer.
The house is closed now. That's all I've been able to find out. Good, admirable Molly, if ever she reads these lines in some place I never heard of, I want her to know that my feelings for her haven't changed, that I still love her and always will in my own way, that she can come here any time she pleases and share my bread and furtive destiny. If she's no longer beautiful, hell, that's all right too! We'll manage. I've kept so much of her beauty in me, so living and so warm, that I've plenty for both of us, to last at least twenty years, the rest of our lives.
To leave her I certainly had to be mad, and in a cold, disgusting way. Still, I've kept my soul in one place up to now, and if death were to come and take me tomorrow, I'm sure I wouldn't be quite as cold, as ugly, as heavy as other men, and it's thanks to the kindness and the dream that Molly gave me during my few months in America.”
Although Bardamu briefly succumbs to love pangs, overall this work conveys a picture of human sexuality that is ultimately bestial, instinctive, and objectifying; for Celine, love bears no prospect of salvation for those seeking to transcend their immediate, singular, and myopic existence.
“She was determined to put me out into the night as soon as possible. The usual thing. Always getting shoved out into the night like this, I said to myself, I'm bound to end up somewhere. That's some consolation. ‘Chin up, Ferdinand,’ I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. ‘What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.’”
Whether the domain be sexuality or warfare, Louis Ferdinand Celine’s views are expressive of a common denominator; a nucleus, downstream from manifold influences, which engenders a peculiar and consistent attitude.
A disposition that privileges the concrete over the abstract; the tribe above humanity; fatalism above conjectural metaphysics and the hope it inspires; hedonsitic sexuality above conventional married life and the fantasy of love it’s built upon; self-interested pacificism above jingoism; the instinctive above rationalism.
The immediacy and physiological reactiveness common to Celine’s actions and thoughts defies language’s boundaries; even if a definition of ‘morbid materialism’ was possible, would it be fitting?
Before I depart to the End of the Night, I leave you with a parting gift - meditate on it:
“I was very fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vice, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority.”