Celine Follow Up #1

This my first follow up to Finished Celine.

The following quotes come from The New Republic's The Ghosts of Céline:

There was something about the anti-writerliness of Céline that attracted many readers at the end of one horrible world war and well into the next. He never tried to elevate himself over his audience as an authority on anything, especially not art or literature; he never went to university or used academic jargon; and he professed to have read few of his fellow living novelists. A G.P. by profession, he suggested that while literature might be good at diagnosing society’s problems, if you wanted to do real good, you should focus on ameliorating the individual ailments of one patient at a time.

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...For Céline, the only “progress” any individual could hope to make in a solitary lifetime was just getting through it.

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 Mostly it was Céline’s prose style that energized his admirers: a relentless crackle of observations and condemnations that assaulted the reader’s sense of apartness from words on a page; it upset the literary convention that prose provided fairness, balance, and carefully phrased consideration. Céline raged against his world in almost every sentence; he was robust, untiring, and hilarious in his attacks on everything from fashionable window displays to the wealthy, well-positioned men who directed poorer men to fight wars on their behalf.

 I agree with all that from my reading but I feel I do not agree with this criticism:

"Céline often claimed that he wasn’t writing novels so much as communicating raw emotions to his readers. As he told a friend: “What interests me is a direct message to the nervous system … I can’t stand idle chattering.” But of course “idle chattering” is a big part of what most conversations are all about: Hi. How are you. Where you been? What’s that on your shirt? Have you seen Betty? And whatever readers decide about Céline’s worthiness or his politics, he no longer reads as well as he once did. Nor does he provide very good company.

sch 3/23/22