De l’horreur de la guerre à la fièvre de l’écriture

transposition littéraire et images de la guerre dans l’écriture de Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Abstract

Starting from the notion of literary transposition as a central procedure of Céline’s poetics, that is, the conversion of lived experiences into literary matter, the article examines how the First World War becomes a thematic and stylistic matrix in Louis-Ferdinand Céline. First, drawing on letters addressed to Joseph Garcin and on the writer’s statements, it describes a method of writing that articulates memory, delirium, and féerie, privileging a narrative truth at the expense of historical truth. It then confronts images of war and death in texts of different status, namely: the letters the young cuirassier Louis-Ferdinand Destouches sent to his parents from the front between August and October 1914, and the opening sequences of Journey to the End of the Night (1932), a novel with a strong autofictional tenor. The comparison shows, in the letters, the oscillation between patriotic enthusiasm and an attempt to reassure the family, without concealing the record of mechanized massacre, the smell of destroyed villages, and the fatigue that anesthetizes perception, whereas, in the novel, such experiences are reconfigured by irony and pessimism, so that mobilization appears as a collective trap, war as a machine that consumes bodies, and death as an ever-imminent truth. It concludes that literary elaboration does not erase the trauma, but converts it into formal force, making war a founding element of Céline’s imaginary and style.