I’m still thinking about my reading group four days later. I guess it’s a measure of how little there is in my life. It was my last social event, after all. Here’s what’s bothering me.
Another topic to come up more than once is Céline. I seem to fall out on this topic as well. Whenever Céline comes up in conversation the accusation of anti-Semitism is soon to follow. I say, ‘Céline wasn’t an anti-Semitic. He hated all races equally.’ W. sniggers. She’s heard it before. The thing is, getting too trigger-happy with accusations of anti-Semitism has become a way of stifling conversation. Instead of letting the topic drop, I play the “Bukowski defence”: some guys, like Céline and Hamsun and Pound have just got to take the opposing side to the popular view. There seems to be some agreement with this when it comes to Pound. No one appears to have heard of Hamsun – they should read Hunger then they won’t forget him – and Céline, well, he’s simply beyond the pale. ‘Have you actually read Bagatelles?’ I ask. No one has read it. None of us can read French. Anyway, almost impossible to get hold of is Bagatelles. There’s a reply nonetheless: ‘I’ve read quotations from it. I’ve read enough.’
They’re always read enough – that’s the trouble. I haven’t. I want to read more. I don’t want to pass judgment, not because of some sort of moral stance but because it gets in the way. All reading should be a physiognomy – constructing the writer from his self-portrait in his books. And there’s also something about the prose you can’t ignore. Take the following sample from Guignol’s Band:
‘Boom! Zoom! . . . It’s the big smashup! …The whole street caving in at the water front! ... It’s Orléans crumbling and thunder in the Grand Café! … A table sails by and splits the air! … Marble bird! … spins round, shatters a window to splinters! … A houseful of furniture rocks, spurts from the casements, scatters in a rain of fire! … The proud bridge, twelve arches, staggers, topples smack into the mud. The slime of the river splatters! … mashes, splashes the mob yelling choking overflowing at the parapet! … It's pretty bad…
Our jalopy balks, shivers, squeezed diagonally on the sidewalk between three trucks, drifts, hiccups, it’s dead! Fagged engine! Been warning us since Colombes that she can’t hold out! with a hundred asthmatic wheezes … She was born for normal service … not for a hell-hunt! … The whole mob fuming at our heels because we’re not moving … That we’re a lousy calamity! … That’s an idea! … The two hundred eighteen thousand trucks, tanks and handcarts massed and melted in the horror, straddling one another to get by first, ass over heels, the bridge crumbling, are tangled up, ripping each other, squashing wildly … Only a bicycle gets away and without the handle bar…
Things are bad! … The world’s collapsing!…
“Stop blocking the way you lousy pigs! Go take a crap you slimy lice!”’
That’s page 6, the first page in my copy. The last scene in the second volume of this story (London Bridge) also takes place on a bridge and, as Bonnefis (Recall Of The Birds) points out, bridges are places of great danger in Céline’s books, straddling the abyss, and on the bridge are all the classes of society, or all the déclassés of society, as they actually are, not as they exist in someone’s honey-dripping socialist theory, as they really are. ‘Go take a crap you slimy lice.’ Get out of my way. I don’t want to plunge into the abyss.
If we imagine that Bataille is on the bridge, that he’s been trapped there for months, so long in fact that he’s managed to carve out a little space in the whirlwind where he can crouch and scrape while he waits with the rest of humanity for the eye of the storm, then we begin to get on idea of the circumstances in which the writing of On Nietzsche took place. Céline is focused on the sliding around on the bridge; Bataille is staring over the edge.