Between 1926 and 1932, Elizabeth Craig, an American dancer, was the lover and confidante of Louis Destouches, a medical doctor working for the League of Nations. Neither of them could have known that he would eventually become the infamous Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Years later, Craig recalled an unsettling incident from their time together in Holland.
One evening, Louis took her to a street where young women were allegedly selling access to their children. The mothers would walk along the street with their children, hand them over to men, receive a dollar, and disappear inside with them.
Craig was horrified.
She asked him why he didn't do something about it if he found it so terrible. His answer was essentially that it was already illegal, but the police simply looked the other way.
She couldn't understand why he would show her something so horrible without trying to intervene.
His response stayed with me:
«“I just wanted you to know. You who think that everybody is so beautiful and nice, that life is so simple, that all you have to do is have a happy attitude and life will be a beautiful journey.”»
That feels like a very Céline-like sentiment.
For him, human existence wasn't a beautiful journey waiting to be appreciated. It was a journey into the night, through suffering, cruelty, absurdity and degradation. His novels seem almost obsessed with stripping away the comforting illusions we create about ourselves and society.
And perhaps that's where Céline becomes interesting beyond his reputation as a provocateur.
The ugliness isn't necessarily the point. It's the confrontation with the ugliness.
One of his biographers described the shock of his novels as a means of awakening our social conscience by forcing us to confront human injustice and the uncomfortable realization that we are often powerless in the face of suffering.
But I wonder if Céline went even further than that.
There is something profoundly nihilistic in his worldview: the suspicion that beneath our moral systems and ideals there is simply chaos, desire, suffering and death. If there is no objective meaning or morality, what ultimately separates justice from injustice?
That brings to mind the old maxim associated with Hassan-i Sabbah:
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”
And perhaps this is where Céline overlaps with Schopenhauer and Leopardi. Not necessarily because they all arrive at exactly the same philosophical conclusions, but because they refuse to look away from suffering.
Schopenhauer wrote of Leopardi that he was completely absorbed by “the mockery and wretchedness of this existence,” yet somehow transformed that pessimism into something compelling and even stimulating.
I think Céline does something similar, although in a much more violent and disturbing way. Maybe that's what makes writers like him so difficult to dismiss.
