Unpublished Ferdinand Celine Novel “Guerra”: An Unapologetically Raw and Vulgar Take on War

Meanwhile Guerra Of Ferdinand Celine (Adelphi), absolutely unpublished of the year, is not an anti-military or anti-war pamphlet as pedantically read around even on manhole covers. Not because from reading the novel recomposed on the basis of 250 handwritten and numbered but rather illegible sheets by the French writer, who died in 1961 at the age of 67, must be spiritually its opposite. It’s just that if you analyze Guerra starting from here, one voluntarily takes the wrong path.

Celinian’s unpublished treats the theme of “war” as a mangy, deranged eventuality to unravel, as an obstacle to overcome, as an annoying hangover of blood, guts, cannons and bullets here so very Bukowskian that always echoes like background noise (“treacle full of grenades”) and in the perennial rumble inside the ears of the protagonist of the novel (“I got the war on my head”). Guerra begins right in the middle of a battlefield of the First World War in Belgium with the narrator Ferdinand (Celinian alter ego, and here corporal of the French army) who describes his devastated physical condition after a series of explosions that wiped out his company of foot soldiers. The descriptive dimension of the wounds – the ear stuck to the ground immersed in blood, the broken arm and the numb leg – is of macabre realism and ironic crudeness. There is no compassion for oneself or for anyone, but almost a mocking smile that finds its natural formal continuation in the refined terminological exasperation.

Ferdinand’s remark towards the “guts” scattered around is a Picasso painting shaded by Boschian delights. A few pages and Ferdinand finds himself wounded, believed to be dying, if not quite dead, between beds and stretchers in a hospital in Feardu-sur-la-lys and he will remain there experiencing various vicissitudes until the end of the story. In fact, if someone were to ask us for a very brief synopsis of Guerra we would say: the convalescence of soldier Ferdinand in a world populated by hookers, perennial erections, feverish masturbation, a necrophilic nurse and scoundrel fellow soldiers. In short, a novel strictly forbidden to minors which in addition to a “syntax upheaval”as the translator writes Ottavio Fatica in the afterword, it pulsates with a language free from any literary and moral modesty. Basically War, if there was still a need afterwards Journey at the end of the night e Credit death confirms Celine the writer’s libertarian, dirty, heterogeneous approach to the art of storytelling. A dynamite attack on good manners, in search of “the positive message”, on remaining within the lines of literary circles even among the most culturally insurrectional. Celine doesn’t look anyone in the eye, and nobody wants to be judged by anyone.

His writing, especially in Guerra, is a hypnotic schizoid glowing vortex of filth on his own cock, his most ferocious and deepest impulses, on the ignominies of others regarding sexuality. “I would have gobbled up her period.” “He didn’t pass his hand under my balls and yes I expected it”. “Well, taste your cum (…) he had pulled out a full handful”. A reflexivity devoid of self-censorship that the protagonist Ferdinand offers with natural lurid joviality (in certain moments he recalls the language used in certain black erotic porn comics of the seventies/eighties) in his emancipatory journey to regain strength, but above all to escape with goliardic insanity the as far as possible from hypothetical accusations of desertion or even worse of self-injury which would lead to a court-martial. In the end, Guerra is yet another example of what it meant to make literature a hundred years ago (but then this trend continued at least until the seventies of the twentieth century) in an individualistic anarchist way without posing problems of ethical marketability, of buzzwords accepted by the good market and by good ones who govern it. Then if we are to blush in front of Guerra pales Bastogne di Brizzi (and there was no need to write it, but our Enricone how much Celine has been read god only knows), but in some places it even creaks Young Holden.