It was in Paris, going through a stroll when I came across the seductively red bookshop, Comme un Roman. I have been hunting for French books, to improve my French, and I could not avoid coming across Céline’s Guerre in every bookshop. I had no familiarity with the author’s previous work, or know anything about The Journey to the End of the Night, his famous work. But for a lack of better option, I picked up the book anyway.
In French, Céline is tricky, as François Gibault, who wrote the introduction to the Folio edition warned the reader. He forewarned that Guerre may be an even trickier read than his Journey, but I’ve already bought the book home, so I started reading. And he was right, Guerre is a damn hard novel to read for someone with an intermediate knowledge of the French language. I had to scan through my Google Translate camera every two or three pages, at times to verify my understanding of the meaning, but oftentimes because I was completely lost.
There are words here that have been outdated for decades, and I probably should have checked if there was a glossary in the back, which I found out they had right after I finished the novel. I struggled through the meaning of the word lazaret, which even Google Translate have nothing for (it means the isolation ward for infectious or dead patients). Without this knowledge, I thought that the lazaret was some sort of medication with nefarious side effects. Close. But not close enough.
Ferdinand at war, with everybody and everything
It’s a pretty rough start. Ferdinand is up in the trenches, all beat up and not knowing whether he had lost a limb or whether he would’ve croaked in the next five minutes. His eyes and mouth are glued to the ground by mud, and he had left it like this he probably would have become part of the scenery. The atmosphere is suppressive, chaotic, but there is a sense of ennui to all this, as there is throughout the book.
Hi eventual rescue brought him to a train full of the injured, mixed with the dead, before eventually finishing up in a hospital in Peurdu-de-la-Lys. He ended next to a mate, a bloke called Bébért who later on was also called Cascade, he has a romantic tussle with the nurse who’d jerk him off at any time of day. He gets a visit from his parents, who went from easy to hard on him once they found that he was under the oppressive weight of debt.
Somehow, he managed to escape from the scalpel of an incompetent surgeon, getting awarded a medal for bravery and go for a stroll to enjoy the scenery outside the hospital every once in a while. Add to this the complication of Cascade’s prostitute wife, Angèle who visited but still on the clock, the war has shifted from the trenches to the mental landscapes of its characters.
War writing has never been so spiteful
We never see the Germans at all in this novel called war. Like other great war novels that had come before or after, the battle takes place in the social fabric between the soldiers, those who make the calls and within their own heads. Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Barker’s Regeneration were all of a similar vein, and it would only be rightful that Guerre will belong in the present company at some point.
The prose, coming from Ferdinand’s point of view, is chockful of vitriol, spite and a sense that things just ain’t right. Nobody wanted to be in a hospital to convalesce from their injuries, in a war that they have no choice to but fight and against enemies that are more tangible when they’re unseen: from the sounds and vibrations of artillery and canons, the infection of the injuries on their skins and their comrade’s skins, and the the incompetence of the military leadership. Again, ennui is ever present. Yet, each sentence is filled with the necessity of survival — to think pragmatically and logically, to observe important facts and to sway situations to one’s own fortune.
However, like a Turgenev character trying to escape the force of nature, Ferdinand fails to escape the presence of war, from a physical plane but also from the mental plane. The shells outside is ambient noise, a conversation that never lets up even in the quietest and most intimate moments. Ferdinand is also plagued by this “bourdonnement” — a buzzing, humming sound, perhaps tinnitus. For Ferdinand’s physiology, the war has been injected into his life-blood.
In another aspect of the war, the battle between the genders rage on. Most of the female characters in the novel are sexualised, and the conquest of these characters by the men, either by Ferdinand, Cascade or other soldiers are often taken for granted or happens violently. That is not to say that the women don’t hold any power over men: Angèle uses her sexuality to undermine Cascade and render him useless. The meaningless and explicit intercourse between Angèle and the Scottish soldier, all being watched under the eyes of Ferdinand reflect the savagery of this sexual battle in a physical field.
Céline was also a convalesce in Northern France before he was moved to London, thus we can assume that some of Ferdinand’s experiences also mirror that of the author, though we cannot assume that he’d been receiving handjobs by the nurses while on recovery. It is important to note that Céline was a Nazi collaborator and infamous for his anti-semitism. There is no speck of patriotism in Guerre, and much of Ferdinand’s position was combative to the authorities at hand, in all levels.
It is thus difficult to separate the author from the moral doctrine of the story, that he had also a jaded past with the First World War and the fact that Guerre was written during the occupation. We didn’t hear about this novel until a few years ago though, when the manuscripts suddenly materialised out of thin air after sixty years of absence. The Folio edition also included photographs of Céline’s barely legible manuscripts to prove its authenticity. The work is inedited, but I wouldn’t know the difference if you’d tell me.
And we should separate the man from his works sometimes. As readers we should be forgiving. Guerre is poignant, and even through my imperfect lens of the French language, the absurdity of war is clear, especially amongs the characters who sustain the war in its theatre: the patient and doctors, the parents of soldiers, the women around the soldiers and everybody else at large. Céline tried to make sense of it sixty years ago, as had many authors before and after his time and so far we had been fruitless. Though we acknowledge the absurdity of war, it continues to haunt us on a daily basis.
