The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
James Sallis

Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything. Trans. Thomas and Carol Christensen. Green Integer, 1999. 187 pp. Paper: $10.95.

Céline is the great bad boy of literature, the original gangsta, complete with rap. And there is much of the adolescent about his work: fascination with bodily functions and scatology, ill-undirected fury, abundant energy, the preen of alienation. Unbearably bleak, clotted with polemics and obscenities, his texts virtually assured rejection. Yet in many ways style and manner, like the persona behind them, were a careful construct, far more complex and ambiguous than generally perceived. Céline was a man of the past, lamenting the loss of his Europe; his portraits raveled out the rag ends of a world in which beauty was no longer possible, “thick black dreams.” He wrote in a delirium, febrile prose dropping to the page as from a sausage grinder, his work a head-on assault upon all our self-delusions. “Everything we are taught is false,” Rimbaud wrote. As is everything we believe and hope for, Céline might add. “It’s all dance and music—always at the edge of death, don’t fall into it,” Céline inscribed in a presentation copy of Voyage au bout de la nuit.

Fascinated by dance all his life, repeatedly he attempted to have ballets staged, publishing with Gallimard in 1959 a collection of scenarios for same, now translated here for the first time, wonderfully, by Thomas and Carol Christensen. Just as music and all certainties of the time dissolve in Ravel’s La Valse, so do language and civilization in the fence posts of Céline’s exclamation points and the barbed wire of his ellipses. Behind those exclamations lurk the arresting, transformative events of the first half of the twentieth century, and, in those ellipses, the terminal discontinuities of our time: those places where the very foundation and support beams of our world have been torn away. [James Sallis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything by Louis-Ferdinand Céline James Sallis Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything. Trans. Thomas and Carol Christensen. Green Integer, 1999. 187 pp. Paper: $10.95. Céline is the great bad boy of literature, the original gangsta, complete with rap. And there is much of the adolescent about his work: fascination with bodily functions and scatology, ill-undirected fury, abundant energy, the preen of alienation. Unbearably bleak, clotted with polemics and obscenities, his texts virtually assured rejection. Yet in many ways style and manner, like the persona behind them, were a careful construct, far more complex and ambiguous than generally perceived. Céline was a man of the past, lamenting the loss of his Europe; his portraits raveled out the rag ends of a world in which beauty was no longer possible, “thick black dreams.” He wrote in a delirium, febrile prose dropping to the page as from a sausage grinder, his work a head-on assault upon all our self-delusions. “Everything we are taught is false,” Rimbaud wrote. As is everything we believe and hope for, Céline might add. “It’s all dance and music—always at the edge of death, don’t fall into it,” Céline inscribed in a presentation copy of Voyage au bout de la nuit. Fascinated by dance all his life, repeatedly he attempted to have ballets staged, publishing with Gallimard in 1959 a collection of scenarios for same, now translated here for the first time, wonderfully, by Thomas and Carol Christensen. Just as music and all certainties of the time dissolve in Ravel’s La Valse, so do language and civilization in the fence posts of Céline’s exclamation points and the barbed wire of his ellipses. Behind those exclamations lurk the arresting, transformative events of the first half of the twentieth century, and, in those ellipses, the terminal discontinuities of our time: those places where the very foundation and support beams of our world have been torn away. [James Sallis]

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