The Syntax of Non-Existence
Guignol’s Band.
by Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
New Directions. 287 pp. $5.00.
Though it’s a rather tall order, syntactical analysis being what it is, an examination of the way in which Guignol’s Band, Céline’s latest novel, is written may largely explain his downfall as a writer and even help account for his collaboration with the Nazis. The story, which is concerned with the adventures of his familiar Bardamu-Ferdinand picaro among thieves, pimps, prostitutes, fakers, junkies, cops, and cut-throats in London during the First World War, is told almost entirely in dots and dashes, with a forest of exclamation points standing on each page. The following passage from the opening chapter—it is supposed to represent an air raid—is fairly typical. I have placed my own elisions in parentheses.
“Everything I’m telling you’s exact . . . (. . .) But my memory’s out of breath! Too many people have walked over it . . . like the bridge . . . over the memories . . . as over the days! . . .(. . .) I’m telling it the way I’m thinking . . .(. . .) In the forge of God’s Thunder! . . .(. . .) Rraap! . . . Whah! . . . Rraango! . . . Whah! . . . Rroong! . . . That’s about the noise made by a real molten torpedo . . . the most enormous! In the heart of a black and green volcano! . . . What a burst of fire! . . . Another bomb grazing us! goes exploding right into the current . . . The blast rocks us . . . Your guts all ripped out . . . Your heart popping into your mouth! . . . palpitating like a rabbit . . .(. . .) Arms everywhere all mixed up . . . smashed, melting into jitters! into a pulp of panic-mad slugs everyone for himself! . . . Sunk, wallowing, hiccuping, you come to, tossing in the air, ripped apart, shrunk, shot the hell away! head over heels! (. . .) We scale a mountain of wounded . . . Thick groans beneath our feet! . . . They puke . . . We’re lucky! It’s a favor! . . . We emerge! groggy, smiling. . . .”
Journey to the End of the Night also began with war, but this is Armaggedon. Though the passage is from the opening of the novel, it has a full climactic force, with Céline’s customary frenzy showing to even greater advantage because of the scattering of scraps of sentences, like shrapnel burst. But since he begins here, he cannot (or feels that he must not) come down to a lower pitch, and is forced to take everything at the same level. He describes everything—faces, houses, antique shops, saloon brawls, arson, murder, London fog, Oriental robes, hospital wards—in the same monotonous screech. It is of course extremely difficult, under such circumstances, to bring a narrative to climax, and it is a credit to Céline’s stamina that he does manage it (combining narcosis, homosexuality, daisy-chain, murder, necrophilia, and arson—a bit thick, even for him) in a scene in which a wealthy, eccentric antique dealer, who dresses like a pasha, swallows a whole bagful of gold coins while on a marijuana jag, and has his brains dashed out when his confederates try to shake out the coins by turning him upside down and bouncing his head on the floor.
Such may be the necessities imposed by a supersonic style, but they are not without a number of moral consequences, dreadful to contemplate. You will notice an air of parade and celebration in the passage I have quoted, hardly appropriate to an air raid, at least at the receiving end. The tone is unabashed, full of beans, a spree. “Rraap! . . . Whah! . . . Rraango! . . . Whah! . . . Rroong!” is the onomatopoeia of a crazy joy (“kick,” as in jive terminology, puts it exactly) and “Arms everywhere all mixed up . . . smashed, melted into jitters!” is the same attitude struck in words. Now when murder is performed for kicks it does not cease to be a crime; but when it is worked into fiction because nothing short of the absolute extreme, and then some, will meet the demands of a hysterical composition, the author has boxed himself into a monstrous, idiot aestheticism, where all he has left is the pretty color of the blood he spills. This is not even sadism—the cruelty is blocked off along with all other affect; strictly speaking, it is not even perverse—it is sheer syntax, striding along, in mathematical progression, from one exclamation point to the next. The punctuation mark “!” says behold!—and the rest is silence.
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Consider how he has fallen off from Journey to the End of the Night with its range of mood and nuance, its occasional touches of compassion, its extraordinary images, now nightmarish, now tender, of African and urban jungle, developed slowly enough to take hold of the mind and involve the imagination in the process of metaphor. There the sentences were shaped, and held a little of the twist and flow. the character of reality in their rhythms: they even tended toward regularity—echt französisch Only the vocabulary was hopped up, to meet the expressive burden: the syntax was still of a man in communication. holding to forms. Not that there wasn’t an overload of firecrackers in the Journey and an even greater deadweight of aesthetic violence in Death on the Installment Plan. a proneness to a bloody chic—but in these novels Céline was in touch with a reality of his own (perhaps not very profound; already it seems dated), still in touch, and he possessed in the highest degree the ability to bring others into vivid contact with it. But by now he is entirely out of touch. The violence of the scenes and images in Gaignol’s Band is much like a schizophrenic’s in motivation—to overcome the inner deadness—and it comes through like TV with the sound turned off. He is at the extreme of conractlessness. and the louder he screams, the closer his shrilling comes to a frequency too high for the ear, the more terrible does his silence stand out, of an absolute nothing, nowhere, an annihilating nix. At last even his blood puddles turn snow-white. This is a dead man writing.
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But he is full of exuberance, and this is terrifying. He swings on the gates of bell, stokes the furnaces, dances on the coals—lay it on! The author of Gaignol’s Band may not be quite the same man who wrote Bagatelle’s for a Massacre and the rest of the authentic anti-Semitic garbage of the Nazi occupation (anti-Semitism has rarely entered his fiction), but at one point the two are identical. The sheer spectacle for kicks of Gaignol’s Band, the dotted and disjointed sentences, the narrative without connection, the screamers jiggling under a blow-top pressure of steam, are the syntax. if you please, the pure aesthetic form as such of his anti-Semitic violence. Violence is always the same in the unconscious ends it seeks; kicks are kicks, Bagatellers for a Massacre was one gone, stoned, screaming, dead still, cool production, an apocalypse of the inner anesthesia—and Gaignol’s Band is another.
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