University of Oregon

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Paul A. Fortier
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring, 1969), pp. 183-185
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769956 .
Accessed: 13/05/2011 10:39

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uoregon. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Comparative Literature.

http://www.jstor.org
 BOOK REVIEWS

unjustifiable, and it reveals differences in methodology and achievements. Both

authors give an extended analysis of the twelfth-century lay Narcissus. In Dr.
Vinge's account, the anonymous French poem is continuously compared with
Ovid's verses. Similarities and divergences in the setting of the stories and in
the characterization of the participants are indicated with precision and thorough-
ness. That this is her constant proccupation is shown by the concluding remarks
of her analysis (p. 66). Professor Goldin, too, deals with the "medievalization"
of the Ovidian tale by the French poet, but, unlike Dr. Vinge, his main interest
is not in unraveling all the intertwining threads of Ovidian or non-Ovidian tra-
dition. He notes and records only those changes which for him are keys to the
new cultural climate in which the poem was written. What he wants to know is
not the number and extent of the changes, but the number of meanings and
"whether these changes of meanings follow any pattern, thus suggesting a literary
development" (p. 18). Accordingly, he focuses sharply not only on the thematic
aspects of the lay-Dr. Vinge's sole concern-but on its language ("how the
formal and traditional rhetoric imitates the movement of impassioned thought"),
its structure, its tension, etc. As a result, his analysis is more comprehensive.
Measured by the pervasiveness and excellence of Professor Goldin's critical
analyses, Dr. Vinge's book is bound to show its shortcomings. It is, in fact, de-
cidedly less literary and more schematic since, with few exceptions, we are given
no whole treatment of works and writers. A just appraisal of The Narcissus
Theme, however, requires that we keep in mind its compilatory nature, despite
Dr. Vinge's prefatory desclaimers. As such, the book deserves a hearty welcome
and the author our admiration for the courage and the skill with which she
undertook this massive investigation.
EMMANUELHATZANTONIS
University of Oregon

CPLINE AND HIS VISION. By Erika Ostrovsky. New York and London: New
York University Press and University of London Press, 1967. xiii, 225 p.
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), who used the pen name Celine, had
the dubious honor of being one of the models for Sartre's Portrait of the Anti-
Semite. Erika Ostrovsky notes Celine's antisemitism in passing and condemns it,
without hesitation and without needless rhetoric (pp. 164-166). Her interest lies
elsewhere. Choosing four novels which span the period of the author's literary
production-Voyage au boutde la nuit (1932), Mort a credit (1936), D'im Chateau
l'autre (1957) and Nord (1960)-Mrs. Ostrovsky undertakes to determine the
essential of Celine's literary vision by a close analysis of theme and structure in
these works.
A brief sketch of Celine's life introduces the study; this biography is indis-
pensable for understanding an author who put so much of himself into his works
that "it is often difficult to determine whether one is confronted by a character
wearing the author's mask or vice versa" (p. 60). After noting that critics do not
agree on Celine's importance, and that Celine himself-an individualist-dis-
claimed predecessors and had few real disciples, Mrs. Ostrovsky places the author
among the pessimists and iconoclasts of literature. She points out that his stylistic
innovations influenced the young Sartre, Ayme, Queneau, and Bernanos in France,
as well as the American writers Henry Miller, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg.

183
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The following six paragraphsare a synopsis of Mrs. Ostrovsky'sanalysis:

A considerationof Celine's point of view opens the study proper. Celine's fic-
tional world is filthy and disgusting, both physically and morally. Yet Celine is
not a social reformer. Psychological explanation or moral condemnationof his
vision are inapplicable,for "Celine'sconstantinvolvementwith a dark and wrath-
ful universe arises from a literary choice" (p. 33). This pessimism is apparent
already in Voyage au bout de la nuit-a catalogue of adult vice and cruelty;
Mort a credit besmircheschildhood,and D'un Chateaul'autre and Nord show the
disintegrationof an absurdand filthy civilization-ours.
Celine attacks man as stupid, squalid and essentially evil. Growing out of the
corruption of childhood, Celinian man, on reaching adulthood, plunges himself
and his fellow creatures into the horrors of war, or tries to forget his misery in
brutal sexual gratification. The narrators of the novels are as reprehensibleas
the rest of mankind; from one novel to the next they become more degraded,less
sympathetic,plunged ever deeper in filth and self-pity.
Celine considersnatureboth dangerousand disgusting. In imposingthis opinion
he spares none of the reader's sensitivity, and conjures up displays to shock the
senses of touch, taste, and smell, as well as sight and hearing. Man participates
in this biological horror; he is a walking, talking rot. Those who attempt to rise
above this conditionperish, inevitably.The only relief comes with violent vomiting
which combinesflight, temporarypurification,and definance.
In Semmelweiss (Celine's thesis for the M.D.) recounting the life of a Hun-
garian gynecologist, the author sets up a dichotomy between Semmelweiss' love
of life and beauty,on the one hand, and the forces of disease which he fought and
the human stupidity which brought about his ruin, on the other. In the novels
under consideration,Celine presents only the latter elements, allowing himself or
the reader no complacency.Yet this attitude does not lead to humanism.Absurd
man in an absurdworld can find no joy or solace in life, can expect nothing after
death. The horror of death is a basic theme with Celine, for death is the epitome
of the degenerationand decay which pervade the works being studied, and it is
the lot of all living things. From his gruesomeportrayalof individualdeaths in the
earlier novels, to his grotesque description of mass carnage in the later ones,
Celine constantly forces the reader to contemplatehis own mortality. But as the
terror of death increases, transforming even the landscape, buffoonery grows
apace. Like Breughel, Bosch, and Goya, Celine creates a world of ugliness, mad-
ness, fear, and grotesque humor. The only heroism possible in Celine's fictional
world is demandedof the reader-the strength to bear the black picturewhich the
author presents.
There are glimmers of light in this night world. The victims, the gentle, and
animalsare, at times, objects of pity. Some charactersshow a tendernessand gen-
erosity all the more touching because of their rarity. A few women are creatures
of great beauty.
The conclusion suggests that Celine solved the problem of living in a world
that is both unbearableand inescapableby imposing artistic order on it. Fusing
realism with poetry by means of a style which, on the surface, seems perfectly
careless, Celine has given form and a certain bleak beauty to an amorphous,de-
caying world. Mrs. Ostrovsky'sstudy of themes shows that such is the case insofar
as the broad outlines of Celine's four novels are concerned.Her research allows
her to make the startling revelation that the same holds true right down to the
details of style: "Celine filed and chiseled his phrases as carefully as any Par-

184
 BOOK REVIEWS

nassian; as obsessivelyperfectionisticas Flaubert,he wrote and rewrote,corrected,

retouched,built up, enriched,elaborated.The thousandsof pages of rough drafts
which led to a finishedwork of several hundred,the endless trials and corrections
which can be found in the manuscripts,the exhaustive bouts of revisions to which
his secretaries attest-all are proof of this" (p. 205).
Mrs. Ostrovsky's analysis of Semmelweiss throws much light on Celine's fic-
tional universe, but she does not sufficientlystress that the work is a doctoral
thesis, and she even seems to say that it is a novel (pp. 107, 163). It is shown that
quite frequently Celine associates hardness with good and softness with bad, but
the study seems to overlook those occasions when in Celine's universe hardness,
too, is bad-for example, the hard inhumancities of New York and Detroit in
Voyage au bout de la nuit. Mrs. Ostrovsky frequentlyuses split infinitives,which
this reviewer found distracting.
These minor defects do not alter the fact that this first major study of Celine in
English is a model of literary criticism. The bibliographyalone makes the book
invaluable.The study of themes, always carefully based on the texts, opens the
way to an understandingof works which on first reading fascinate, but seem
chaotic and nothing more. Many pages of Celine are crudely realistic. Mrs.
Ostrovsky does not ignore this aspect of the author, but treats it with ladylike
modesty. Neither exasperatingthe reader with circumlocutions,nor shocking him
by dwelling on Celine's earthiness, she examines and explains it as a part of the
author'svision. While analyzingthe four novels, she frequentlyalludes to previous
studies of the author,at times agreeing, at times disagreeing,always evaluatingin
the light of the text. Mrs. Ostrovsky thus provides a guide not only to the themes
of an author of growing stature, but also to the body of criticism that has grown
up aroundhim. For many years to come, Celine and his Vision will be the starting
point for any serious study of Celine.
PAUL A. FORTIER
University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus

OF TODAY.By Henri Peyre. New York: Oxford University

FRENCHNOVELISTS
Press, 1967. xii, 484 p.
French Novelists of Today reveals Henri Peyre as a man of decidedopinions,
possessedof the courageto express them,and of the ability to organize his material
in a volume soundly constructedand cogently argued. Reading this book one is
impressedby many qualities,but above all one is struck by the author's integrity.
This is a critic who believes in clearly establishing his position, in indicating the
criteria which oblige him to hold it, and in defending it consistently, with the
utmost clarity.
"The doubtwhich will often underliethe following chapters,"he warns us at the
beginning,"is whetherthe laborious,at times ponderous,critical work accumulated
in the last thirty years about the novel of the past and of the present has truly
served to understandit more or enhancethe enjoymentof it" (p. 5). So much for
those whose purposeit seems to have been to persuadeus that enjoyment should
be of secondaryconcernto the reader of novels; so much for those who proclaim
that only the most simple-mindedof novelists say what they mean. Henri Peyre
invites us to open windows which too many critics have determinedlykept closed,
and to let in some fresh air. Protesting against the efforts of structural analysts

185