Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Guerre and Londres. For a Contemporary Rereading of Céline?

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2023

Abstract

During 2022, Gallimard released two of Céline's "unpublished novels", recounting Brigadier Ferdinand's convalescence after suffering serious wounds on the Flanders front (Guerre), and the same hero's subsequent wanderings through the capital of the United Kingdom, where Ferdinand lives among French pimps (Londres). After examining the circumstances surrounding the publication of both texts, we will focus on the direct and indirect representation of the war, which functions here as a kind of "original sin" from which all subsequent evil results, but also as a radical paradigm shift in relationships between men and women, written language and spoken language, etc.