Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos (for it is a cosmos, a perineum cosmos, hermetically sealed and stinking of the latrine), into the benthic zone of the body-soul: that detritivorous communist fauna of expulsion, of shitting fornicating agonistic half-life whose only thought is not to think, to avoid the one thought that is impossible anyway, the thought that would save us, the thought on the other side of death, the beatitude of the body-soul’s recognition of itself. One must endure this nekyia, this asymptotic journey to the end of the night, because it is only in this kind of travel that we will be spared the pain of platitudes and of stagnation, of subterfuges that conceal nothing, of hysterical moloch mother-love that kills the squirming object of its insatiable affection—spared, too, the pain of mere pity, which is the pain of separation from suffering. Bardamu, unlike Ivan Karamazov, does not pity the ten year-old girl across the courtyard, whose only reason for existence is to be bound and flogged by her parents every evening as a prelude to their frenzied scatological lovemaking (a sinister harmony in itself, a through-a-glass-darkly image of familial bliss); he does not pity her because he does not believe in God, nor a fortiori in the resurrection, so that what is called for is not the futile animism of pathos, nor the posturing anti-theodicy of moralistic despair, but the impersonal eucharist of identification: God will not heal this mutilation of creation into anguished parts, but the good doctor can, by denying the reality of individuation: not by suffering alongside the little girl in the Nacheinander of an egoistic spatialized grid, but by denying the existence of anything but suffering, by collapsing himself into the qualia of another’s humiliation, which is all humiliations, outside of space and time, sub specie aeternitatis. His predicament, his geometrical solution, is in this sense the very opposite of Ivan Karamazov’s: Ivan believes in God and the resurrection, but cannot accept the euclidean dimensions of a child’s suffering and thus cannot accept its sublation in eternity; Celine, wanting nothing to do with the prolongation of a nightmare into another dimension (theology), accepts all suffering in its eidetic purity, because this world is shit, is nightmare, is insomnia, but “there ain’t no other world but this one.” Celine does not avenge himself against the world; such vengeance would only add to the world, to its cornucopia of loathing and time. Better to sit quietly with Pascal in a room, in sterile contemplation, in sterile love, amid the screams of horror. To sterilize is all, to ensure that no animalcule of horror is capable of breeding another, at least in the intellect. Celine, in his own way, was also a savior of mothers, a savior from mothers. He did to mothers (a pious euthanasia) what Joyce did to fathers.
From December, 2012