[Following the publication of Death on Credit.] Céline felt particularly aggrieved at André Rousseaux’s remark in Le Figaro that his ‘prodigious verbal genius’ was in danger of becoming ‘prisoner of its own artifices’ through his excessive use of argot. Céline countered in his published response that argot was necessary to inject ‘spoken emotion’ into the written word, that ‘the only mode of expression possible for emotion’ is to ‘render the spoken in writing’. His new style seeks to break with the traditional academic prose of the novel: ‘I don’t want to narrate, I want to evoke feeling. It is impossible to do this with the usual academic language – the beautiful style’. The problem with this langage classique (classical language) is that ‘emotive rendering is not there’; it is, therefore, a ‘dead’ language, in the emotive sense, as illegible as Latin. Argot, by contrast, gives language, if only temporarily, a new lease of life, owing to its critical superiority over so-called pure language, very French, refined, always dead, dead from the beginning, dead since Voltaire, a corpse, dead as a door nail. Everybody feels it, nobody says it, or dares to say it. A language is like everything else, it is always dying, it is destined to die.

Céline further vented his spleen in a letter to Daudet, a few weeks after the novel’s publication, hoping for his support. He defends his ‘spoken emotion’ as the manifestation of his northern, rather than southern, background and temperament. Thus, if his style is not ‘Latin, classic, southern’, this is because ‘I am not from the south. I am Parisian. Of Breton and Flemish descent. I write as I feel.’ If people accuse him of being ‘foul-mouthed, talking slang’, then the same thing must surely apply to other canonical writers and artists such as Rabelais, Villon and Bruegel.

Damian Catani’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journeys to the Extreme