Revue Italienne d'Etudes Françaises (Nov 2019)
« Je suis un petit peu alchimiste » : la collision des genres littéraires dans la Trilogie allemande de L.-F. Céline
Abstract
L.-F. Céline’s Trilogie allemande is a work that is still difficult to define today. Following a current interpretation, the voice of the novelist has given way to the chronicler’s perspective. Another interpretative path emphasizes the predominance of the fictional dimension. If we would not question the fictional status of the Trilogie, it is more difficult to establish exactly what kind of novel we are dealing with. The separation of narrative genres, which is notoriously fleeting in Celine’s case, is definitively abolished following an architecture that conjoins novel and autobiographical memories, chronicle and commentary. This operation, though, has nothing to do with the ironic posture that will be typical of the postmodern writer : memory, testimony, digression and transposition find their true meaning in a perpetual interaction that echoes and transcends the disarticulation of the simultaneous world.
