Céline: The Genius and the Villain. A legal battle is raging in France over the manuscripts written by Louis-Ferdinand Céline that disappeared almost eight decades ago.

• A legal battle is raging in France over the manuscripts written by the antisemitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline that disappeared almost eight decades ago.

~2021.10.26

rl: 2005/10 Louis-Ferdinand Céline的這部小說也許已有中文譯名，

不過我目前不知道正確書名

照句型來說，所舉詞組au bout de並不適用此書名之用法，應該分析為

au bout (de la nuit)，意思是（夜）的「末尾、終點」 因此，voyage au bout de la nuit = 在深夜旅遊（或漫遊）

我們那一代的年輕人曾經流行過「夜遊」，就是這個意思。

2005/10/21, hanching chung <hcsimonl@gmail.com>:

au bout de loc. prép. …之後：

Voyage au bout de la nuit 書名 如何翻譯

--- On the disheartening conundrum of modernists and politics, Gay is at his most bewildering. He writes of “liberalism, that fundamental principle of modernism.” He seems to have momentarily forgotten that Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Céline on the right, and Picasso, Gide, Breton and the Russian modernists (barely alluded to by Gay) on the left, were about as far from liberalism as a Cubist painting is from an iPod — not to mention the toxically snobbish Woolf, who was neither right nor too much left. For Gay, reactionaries like Eliot and Hamsun were “anti-modern modernists.” But he does not try to account for the fact that reactionaries like the Italian Futurists worshipped modernity’s speed and power. Nor does he grapple with what you might call hypermodernists: the utopian Russian avant-garde, who, far from being political reactionaries, threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. ----

I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor

Céline: The Genius and the Villain

By ALAN RIDING

Published: June 29, 2011

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PARIS — Anniversaries are usually good occasions for celebrating great artists of the past. And so it seemed with the French writer known by his pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who died 50 years ago Friday. In fact, plans to mark the date were well advanced until it was pointedly recalled that Céline was a raving anti-Semite who fanned hatred of Jews before and during Germany’s wartime occupation of France.

The problem is that the French still revere Céline — not for his politics, but for the way he writes, most famously in “Journey to the End of the Night.” When this raging semi-autobiographical novel was published in 1932, five years before Céline embraced anti-Semitism as his new creed, it was promptly hailed as a masterpiece. Indeed, to this day, it enjoys a place in modern French literature comparable to that of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in English.

So can Céline the writer be separated from Céline the man?

In his case, the distinction is blurred because he also penned three non-fiction diatribes against Jews — “Trifles for a Massacre” (1937), “School of Corpses” (1938) and “The Fine Mess” (1941) — which sold well precisely because he was a famous author. For his admirers, however, all that counts is his literature.

Discomfiture over the personal behavior of acclaimed artists is of course hardly new. In fact, almost as if we needed to puncture the mystery of their gifts, we are drawn to biographies that “humanize” famous creators by highlighting their shortcomings as spouses or their neurotic insecurity or their weakness for alcohol or drugs.

But a different line is drawn when artists set out to — or, as is often the case, are expected to — influence public opinion. In such cases, they can expect to be judged for more than their art.

Myriad are the examples of artists, notably writers, who have taken political stands. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, is remembered for denouncing Soviet communism by many more people than have read his books; last year’s Nobel literature laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, ran unsuccessfully for president of Peru in 1990; and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s outspoken dissidence recently earned him a stretch in jail.

At the same time, political involvement brings the risk of ending up on the wrong side of history. And in that sense, parallels can be drawn between Céline and Richard Wagner.

In “Judaism in Music,” an essay Wagner published under a pseudonym in 1850, he wrote of “our natural repugnance against the Jewish nature.” While his animosity towards Jews was not all-consuming like that of Céline, anti-Semitism has been part of his public identity since the 1930s, when he became Hitler’s favorite composer.

So should we boycott his music? Israel has long sought to do so, although the Argentine-born Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim has challenged this informal ban. In 2001, he performed Wagner’s overture to “Tristan und Isolde” in Jerusalem. And last year, he argued that “we must one day liberate Wagner” from his association with Hitler and the Nazis.

Can the same happen to Céline? He was hardly the only French writer spewing anti-Semitism during the German occupation. But while, say, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle committed suicide and Robert Brasillach was shot after the liberation, Céline escaped to Denmark and, following an amnesty, returned to France in 1951 as a free man. Understandably, for some the desire to see him punished survived his death.

On the other hand, unlike Drieu La Rochelle and Brasillach, Céline is still widely read and, along with Proust and Camus, forms the cornerstone of 20th-century French literature. And no doubt this was why earlier this year France’s Culture Ministry considered it normal to include the anniversary of his death among the significant cultural events of 2011.

Then Serge Klarsfeld, a prominent Nazi hunter whose father died in the Holocaust, stepped in, arguing that France had no place in celebrating a man who advocated extermination of Jews. Spotting trouble, the Culture Ministry hurriedly disassociated itself from Céline and the anniversary, albeit not without provoking some complaints about censorship.

Yet the commotion has had its uses. The year has produced a major new biography of Céline along with other books analyzing different aspects of his writing. Several magazines have also published weighty literary supplements devoted to him. But at least government officials should be remaining silent today. And admirers of Céline the writer can no longer brush aside Céline the man. A genius? Probably. Evil? Certainly.

Alan Riding, a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author, most recently, of “And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.”