Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Saggi, interviste, ricordi e lettere, venerdì 24 settembre a Voghera

"Shakespeare. Céline. Secrets at Bottom", by JJ Przybylski [English Text]

Shakespeare. Céline. Secrets at Bottom.

J. J. Przybylski

Editor's note: 

This essay was originally published at Counter-Currents in the USA and subsequently published by Euro-Synergies in Brussels. It basically argue that Shakespeare had the advantage of writing at the dawn of the Golden Age of Elizabethan Theater.  His work, no matter how dark, ends on a sunny note. In juxtaposition, the author suggest that Céline was writing at a kind of Spenglarian dusk when Western Civilization was entering decline.  So Céline's work carries a more muted glint of light. Much of the article, written in somewhat Célinean language, gives testimony to the decline in Philadelphia.  

Last night I ushered at the local Shakespeare Theater. I had to look the part. So I bought shoe polish at the dollar store, lathered my loafers three (3) times, and glossed my footing. Meanwhile, I discovered the secret of Chinese shoe shine exporters: mix dog shit and lard, slip it in a tin, seal it with a Royal English label. 

Dollar stores in Philadelphia must carry all brands of shudras. It’s a footnote in federal non-discrimination posters. Freedom Dollar Store more or less complied. A tall Jamaican worked and preened as a bouncer, a short Mayan-Mexican worked and worked as a stock boy, and a stout Paki in ahijab worked as the owner-overseer from a raised deck with a battery of cash-registers. Finally, a Dominican with rosy lipstick ran the main register and did the dirty-work of taking money. Ha. Ha. I mean she did the dirty-work of interfacing with every fugitive, sickling, church-lady, doped-up mumbler and cheap urban gigolo who counted pennies on the counter.

The Dominican was very nice. Authentically nice. She wasn’t some missionary White Liberal signaling her love of poor darkies for all to see. I think, speaking of trade secrets, that the Dominican girl’s strategic advantage was that she didn’t give a shit. 1) She didn’t give a shit about the backsliding American Blacks need to show, via the stink eye, a smug hatred of Whites. 2) She didn’t give a shit about the USA’s enterprising spirit and/or Judeo-Christian blather which means, for the wage earner, the freedom to work faster and faster to go deeper and deeper in debt while buying costlier and costlier crap. Because the island girl was a champion at handling the leery niggers, stumbling mongrel junkies, and freelance critics who walked in the door, the Paki overseer gave her space. She let the Dominican work at her own fresh and breezy rhythms which are most alien to Filthadelphia.

Life is rich at bottom. A White racist can learn valuable lessons from non-Whites who’ve adjusted to the truth and lies of devolving America. The brown Dominican girl will be just as free and lovely when Western Liberal Plutocracy goes down the toilet. Why? Because her womanly discipline is to be free and lovely right now, regardless of empty promises blabbed by wooly race hustlers, porked-pink politicians and blah, blah, blah. She’s a sparkling gem. Her counterpart is the Black bus driver who’s well seated. Almost like a post-volcanic island. Almost like the Rock of the Ages. But surely the well-seated Black bus driver is like Our Lord’s humble proxy, a salty apostle at the helm of the rolling boat while currents of assholes and elbows flow on the street. And trickled on and off the bus, ebbing and flowing like h-o-p-e.

If you’re a thinking bub with a mind to study a non-White who’s reconciled, within his own cultural referents, the metaphysical truth that we’re all equal in Almighty God’s eyes with the material truth that humanity is a mixed bag? Look to the African-American bus driver. My present point is that the increasingly angry Whiteman can learn from post-disappointment Blacks. Perhaps meta-mature Blacks. On a personal level, even as nailed Christians they don’t give a shit about you. They don’t care whether you’re racist or non-racist or grey in your skin. They solely care about being true to their own inner-standards of Soldier of God comportment. The very best Black bus drivers are bible driven. As Baptists, they are what Evola would call late and faded echoes of the Heroic Navigator. Very late. Very faded. Very barely tuned to the stellar pulse of Aryan lore.

Maybe it’s more like the best Black bus drivers have taken the Hippocratic Oath: First do no wrong. Which reminds me of the trade-secret of Philadelphia’s 5 Star Hospitals. At the pinnacle of tech and brainpower, you get a variation of the same muffled bullshit that passes for harmony on the street. The working truth is that it’s the bosomy White nurses, the modestly high-IQ and pathologically caring goy women, who interface with the human wreckage. They wipe hurt butts, clean pus from fetid wounds, and handle blood and urine samples. If they’re to be trusted with intellectual labor, then they translate aching and garbled complaints into medical terms for the international elite doctors who enter the treatment room like NWO super-stars. The Indians, Asians, Israelis, and shellacked Iranians who ultimately make the call: emergency surgery or modulated therapy or pasty white placebo. A Caucasian Male MD, hired into the hospital on 30-year probation as a congenital but dormant racist, would say that I’m exaggerating the truth. Ha. Ha. A fey diagnosis. I’m exploding the truth.

As for prophetic telling? As for the future of poor White pawns when we’re a minority in America? It’s foretold in Philly if you can read the bumps on the heads of backsliding and dazed Catholics. It’s a trade-secret of serene immigrants to hire a Christianized naif to handle the irate Blacks who enter the door. Preferable, a poor White girl from the depleted Irish Catholic neighborhoods who’s a single mom and reconciled to low-grade abuse. When you see a NE Asian-owned cleaners, with a monkish Asian doing the tailoring and banking, and a rag-faced goy answering complaints about chemical stains and lost pants, you’ve found foreign newbies who’ve aced the New America. They’ve solved the mean streets. It’s up to the native-born White, the face of punch-drunk sympathy, to deliver the law to homeless dregs, “I told you yesterday that you can’t use the toilet. It’s still for employees only. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

That’s today’s Philadelphia in the public and semi-public commons where Whites are irrelevant. Reduced to fear and piety or jailhouse bravado. It’s better if you have can afford valet parking. In any case, last night I went back to 1600 and saw a Shakespeare play. I’ve ushered at the theater about 25 times, and that’s my most venal trade-secret as a cheap-ass writer who’s often too lazy to read. It’s said that Shakespeare was a closet-Catholic. Judging by the bewitching hoo-doo in Macbeth, he was also a closet Pagan. It’s a weakness in Christian lore that Mary Magdalene isn’t too appealing as sin’s female agent. But Lady Macbeth has dark feminine wiles that are almost equal to Cleopatra, who Shakespeare renders most lustily. For a while, in the black heart of the play, Shakespeare doesn’t give a shit about the need to present the noble, regal and queenly female ideal. He flies the devil’s kite. He creates stormy fun. But in the end, proper moral order is restored with the thrust of an avenging sword. The good guys win, and social harmony returns to The Realm.

Shakespeare has given me a considerable trade-secret: be irresistibly nasty and politically obscene in my script until the very last moment. Then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, produce a warm ’n fuzzy ending. In shoe-shine terms, produce a nicely polished finish and don’t worry about the thin gloss. In 101 textbook terms, produce a plot resolution wherein public order and Divine Order are restored as One. Be wholesome as an afterthought. Take it to the bank.

Thanks Bill. You’re the greatest! But I’m a follower in hard times. I’ve got my own trade-secret to sculptify as a writer. I’ve got my own deep personal resolution to chisel into a plot resolution upon the public stage. Too bad that my ends are as time-specific to the Leaden Age of Western Liberal Plutocracy as Shakespeare’s ends were time-specific the Golden Age of Elizabethan Theater. I’m living at the bottom, maybe beneath the bottom, of a World Historical Cycle if not the Kali Yuga. The point? Regardless of my powers as a cheat, I just can’t pretend to think that the Public Order, the Moral Order, the Natural Order and the Divine Order can be reconciled as One in Philly. Neither can a redeeming spin be synched to the roundly vacant USA and the flickering Globalist Hairball. So much for climactic catharsis with a familial denouement. Shakespeare’s advantage was that he had a knowing race of Englishmen to honor as a loyal and loving prick. He lived at the golden dawn of the British Empire wherein even a vicious pirate like Sir Francis Drake could sincerely drop to his knees and praise The Island Throne. The crowning Spirit of England with its guarded line of aristo-buccaneers. Maybe Sir Richard Burton, as epic writers go, was the last of the breed. Dr. Albert Schweitzer called him “a moral idiot.” But Burton was a heroic navigator of Olympian stature nevertheless. In body and spirit, he was a jealous pedigree with a blinding light.

Life is funny at bottom. It’s amusing to belong to the nadir of Western Man. I’m perfectly cozy here and now. I merge effortlessly, as a natural, with Filthadelphia and its soiled joys and catastrophes. The problem? The trade-secret that’s caught in my throat? The truth that inflames my neck? As a writer and voice, I segregate! I segregate my own frail creative germ from the filthy pedestrian soul-bath regardless of lost profit. I just don’t give a shit about the poor and wailing demos that I know too well. To make matters worse, I don’t give a shit about my financial betters who control the purse-strings, the puppet-strings and the heart-strings of public theater. Neither do I favor their actors in reserve, primed like bombs for the 6 o’clock news: anti-White revolutionaries, volatile immigrants and nihilistic rioters with red-hair, freckles, and dog breath. All that cheap shoe-shine, all that cheap moral or editorial gloss, all that crap lathered over power politics. Really, racial politics.

From the bottom of the Kali Yuga, the grease-pit of the Aryan roller-coaster, my job is to error on the side the Higher Orders. To come clean, as a privileged species of dirty White voyeur who has glimpsed the summit. Revealed in it’s clear majesty by Shakespeare at the top of the ride. Concealed in its gloom by degenerate carriers at bottom. Céline, a man amongst lethal cry-babies and cussed goyim, took it upon himself to grasp the low light. I know some, not all, of his trade secrets. First Céline recognized the luminous germ in the rhapsodic tripe of belly-aching Celt rustics in Paris. Then he recognized the lyrical germ in himself. That was a fateful day. A heroic prick, Céline made his noted lingo, his ripped ditties of genius, untranslatable even into languages like German and Italian that have a kinship with French. It was Céline’s take on low-down fun. It was also Céline’s take on the sport of kings.

A backstreet metaphysician, Céline took the Left Hand Path to the Olympian Heights of Immortal Fame. To cover his tracks in plain sight, he sputtered an asinine ferment of giddy yet scorched-earth prose. There’s do-or-die conviction in his funny steps. The man put himself to the test! And whatever Céline’s ultimate trade-secret, it can’t be severed from his core muse to leave French literature, maybe Western literature, in a vacuum after his death. He refused to be followed.

This explains, at bottom, his anti-Semitic rants. Céline’s paranoia in the face of shysters who’d make a global prole, a pan-humanist, an embalmed ambassador for Colored Revolutions in Africa and Slavonia out of his corpus. Céline: a self-immolating genius. Too hot to touch and leaving friends and foes majestically incensed. Maybe he over-reacted. But maybe he didn’t.

"Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Saggi, interviste, ricordi e lettere" sul Bulletin Célinien di settembre!

Il mensile "Le bulletin célinien" è da ben 35 anni la più importante pubblicazione céliniana, grazie alla passione di Marc Laudelout. Nel numero di questo mese, ben tre pagine sono dedicate al libro "Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Saggi, interviste, ricordi e lettere", il titolo della recensione che riporto in calce al post, "Andrea Lombardi erige un monumento a Céline", dà veramente la cifra di un impegno non tanto a "glorificare" uno dei romanzieri e rivoluzionari della letteratura maggiori al mondo, quanto alla mia passione nel "costruire" mese dopo mese e anno dopo anno (come citato nell'articolo, il mio blog di inediti e novità céliniane nel 2017 compie dieci anni... e per l'occasione è in preparazione una nuova edizione, ampliata negli scritti céliniani, del libro - questa attuale, limitata a 200 copie e in esaurimento, diverrà quindi "da collezione") una sempre più sfaccettata visione del geniale "Profeta dell'Apocalisse" di Meudon.

Andrea Lombardi érige un monument à Céline

Cet ouvrage, formellement très élégant, est dû au céliniste italien Andrea Lombardi. Il regroupe une vaste production éditoriale faite de témoignages, lettres et écrits –majoritairement inédits pour le public italien – de et sur Céline. La matière du volume rappelle celle des Cahiers de l’Herne réalisés par Dominique de Roux auquel il est d’ailleurs dédié. (En hommage à ce précurseur, rappelons l’édition, dirigée par le même Lombardi, de la traduction italienne de son essai La mort de L.-F. Céline). Les cinq volets qui composent cet ouvrage (essais, commentaires, souvenirs, entretiens, lettres) sont judicieusement entrecoupés d’une série de photos à haute résolution en noir et blanc ou en couleurs, dont certaines rares ou inédites, comme celle de Céline en compagnie d’Abel Gance. La deuxième partie, qui va des entretiens aux lettres, est passionnante, tout comme la partie consacrée aux essais et commentaires, parfois fulgurants, de ceux qui ont lu ou côtoyé Céline : Kurt Vonnegut, Ezra Pound, William S. Burroughs, le prix Nobel Saul Bellow (“Céline ? Un incroyable casse-tête”) et Charles Bukowski (lequel, après avoir mangé des tonnes de crackers en lisant Voyage d'un seul trait, affirme être le deuxième plus grand écrivain du monde après Céline !). 

Ce recueil n’est pas organisé autour d’un thème précis et le contenu de chaque section est riche et varié. Au-delà des réflexions sur le style révolutionnaire, l'argot, le rôle de médecin, l’exil enduré au Danemark, les longs débats suscités par les pamphlets et le refus d’être inclus dans toute chapelle littéraire ou politique, ce qui émerge de ces pages est une surprenante – voire constante – contradiction entre l’homme et l’écrivain, la même qui suscite vif éloge chez certains (Maud de Belleroche, Éliane Bonabel, Gerhard Heller) et implacable critique chez d’autres (le témoignage du compagnon de nombreuses réunions montmartroises Gen Paul étant, à cet égard, exemplaire). 

En ce qui concerne le rayonnement de l’œuvre célinienne via les traductions, Gianni Celati se souvient qu’à son époque, il était fréquent – mais vain – d’atténuer l’impact de l’écriture de Céline avec de frileuses préfaces opérant une distinction entre le pour et le contre et en ne mettant l’accent que sur le génie maudit en soulignant le prétendu état d’inconscience de ce qu’il faisait ou disait pour conclure en affirmant que décidément il était à prendre avec des pincettes. L’impression étant qu’il n’y a guère de place pour Céline là où les frontières de l’officialité culturelle sont érigées, aujourd’hui comme hier. Cesare Cases, Leonello Rimbotti, Pol Vandromme et Pierre Duverger nous parlent d’un Céline incarnant la « lucidité de notre horreur » ou traitent de sa puissance prophétique sur plusieurs thèmes (guerres, colonialisme, société américaine, banlieues parisiennes, vanité et hypocrisie des grands sentiments humanitaires), quelque chose d’encore plus inquiétant si nous l’appliquons à ce qui est en train de se dérouler en Europe sous plusieurs aspects depuis très longtemps. 

La traduction inédite de Girolamo Melis de l’entretien de Céline à Robert Sadoul en 1955 (“Au début était l’émotion”) rend hommage au premier entretien donné après son retour du Danemark, texte précurseur car il anticipe toutes les idées que Céline reprendra dans ses conversations ultérieures avec les journalistes. 

Nous avons beaucoup apprécié le témoignage touchant – et juste – de l'artiste et poète Emilio Tadini sur la figure de Lucette, présence silencieuse et dévouée, à la fois docile et forte qui a toujours parfaitement contrebalancé les extravagances céliniennes ; elle représente vraiment ce que recouvre l’expression “se mettre dans la peau de quelqu'un”. Nous signalons également l’entretien donné à Jacques Chancel sur le rôle de la télévision dans nos vies (“C'est un prodigieux moyen de propagande […] un élément d'abêtissement en ce sens que les gens se fient à ce qu'on leur montre. Ils n'imaginent plus. Ils voient. Ils perdent la notion de jugement et ils se prêtent gentiment à la fainéantise” et encore “Tout comme la littérature, la télévision a besoin d'un style”) et l’extrait d’un long entretien d’Éric Mazet où il aborde à contre-courant les aspects « brûlants » de la vie et de l’œuvre de Céline (notamment, l’importance capitale de Mea culpa qui représente un tournant littéraire, stylistique et existentiel chez Céline ) pour nous faire voir que du Destouches, l’homme et l’écrivain, nous n’en avons pas fini de faire le tour.

Ne pouvait pas manquer une sélection des lettres que Céline a écrites à la presse collaborationniste française – dont Lombardi a dirigé les traductions inédites dans un recueil paru en Italie en 2011 – où il tient à préciser le fait que certaines études récemment publiées en Italie ont tenté de peindre un Céline complètement étranger aux milieux collabos, ou, pire, un Céline communiste, lorsqu’il est évident que dans ses lettres il reprend – de façon plus patriotique que dictée par une orthodoxie national-socialiste – les arguments des pamphlets ; de la France enjuivée aux critiques des politiciens français de l’époque, en passant par une division « raciale » entre le Nord de la France, celte et actif, et le Sud, provençal et oisif. Même les échanges épistoliers de Céline avec le docteur Alexandre Gentil, dont nous retrouvons un exemple traduit ici, révèlent des détails précieux sur la vie quotidienne avec Lucette pendant l’exil danois, leur odyssée en Allemagne à la fin de la deuxième Guerre Mondiale, ainsi que la réapparition de ces fantômes maintes fois ressassés avec une virulence extrême dans Bagatelles pour un massacre et dans les autres pamphlets. 

Toutes ces considérations faites, nous sommes tentés de dire qu'il s’agit de la suite – sans doute plus aboutie – d'un volume précédent dirigé par Lombardi dont le titre est L.-F. Céline in foto, comprenant les articles des quatre premières années de son blog, le premier à être consacré à Céline en Italie et qui fêtera ses dix ans d'activité en 2017 (http://lf-celine.blogspot.be) Selon l'avis de plusieurs journaux italiens (régionaux et nationaux), ce vaste aperçu de témoignages comble une lacune éditoriale peu compréhensible pour un pays ayant une longue tradition d'études sur l'écrivain français et son œuvre. Une œuvre ouverte, in fieri, celle d’Andrea Lombardi, qui s’adresse aussi bien à des néophytes qu’à des céliniens patentés ; un fleuve qui par moments « étourdit », comme une légère ivresse ou l’écoute d’une séance de free jazz, tellement se superposent les images d’un seul personnage. Lequel, encore aujourd’hui, rugit contre tout et tous et que les voix – une centaine ici recueillies – connues et moins connues, étrangères et italiennes, l’éclairent ou le noircissent. 

En guise de conclusion, nous souhaitons reprendre les mots que l’artiste protéiforme Gian Ruggero Manzoni a dédiés à Céline : (nous traduisons) « Nous sommes tous dignes l’un de l'autre ; entre les murs du désespoir, demeure notre orgueil ; la fonction des intellectuels est de sortir de la masse et d’aller là où personne n’a mis le pied ; quoi qu’il en soit, nous aurons essayé ; nous n’avons pas d'autres droits que celui de creuser ce qu’une minorité a pressenti, afin que tout le peuple puisse en tirer profit. »

Valeria FERRETTI

• Andrea LOMBARDI (avec la collaboration de Gilberto Tura), Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Saggi, interviste, ricordi e lettere, Italia Storica, 2016, 324 pp.gg. 

Contact : A. Lombardi, Via Onorato 9/18, 16144 Genova, Italie. Adresse électronique : ars_italia@hotmail.com