On the unreadable and the Jesuits – Jacques Darribehaude & Jean Geunot in The Paris Review, interviewing Louis-Ferdinand Céline:

‘INTERVIEWER A fashion that caused a scandal with the appearance of Journey. Your style shook a lot of habits.

CÉLINE They call that inventing. Take the impressionists. They took their painting one fine day and went to paint outside. They saw how you really lunch on the grass. The musicians worked at it too. From Bach to Debussy there’s a big difference. They’ve caused some revolutions. They’ve stirred the colors, the sounds. For me it’s words, the positions of words. Where French literature’s concerned, there I’m going to be the wise man, make no mistake. We’re pupils of the religions—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish … Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short—here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, “He knits a nice sentence!” Me, I say, “It’s unreadable.” They say, “What magnificent theatrical language!” I look, I listen. It’s flat, it’s nothing, it’s nil. Me, I’ve slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.’

Interview conducted in 1960.

Read the interview here.

Yes, ‘here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon!’

Céline of course gave in to the attraction of sermonizing as well, albeit for a different cause.

The spoken word and the grudge. For Céline they are almost the same. The fury is always there. The belief that there is only one true victim, the one who is speaking. Céline was talented and he knew what war was, but there is a Trump inside him. Or one could say, he saw the coming of the new man, unhinged, completely convinced that he is the one who has been shortchanged, standing up against the powers that rule this world, at least in theory.