Da un modernismo all’altro

Costanti e varianti del paradigma modernista nella “Trilogie allemande” di L.-F. Céline

Abstract

Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Trilogie allemande stands as an emblematic instance of the survival and recalibration of Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. In the three novels that compose the work — D’un Château l’autre (1957), Nord (1960), and the posthumously published Rigodon (1969) – Céline does not abandon the principal devices of his more distinctly modernist phase – the rejection of mimetic realism, the expansion of subjective perspective, linguistic experimentation, and the marked self-reflexivity of narrative; rather, he reworks them in light of a pessimism that has become increasingly radical. Although grounded in the recollection of traumatic autobiographical experiences — the crossing of Germany between 1944 and 1945 — the narrative plane is now obsessively fractured by the hypertrophic presence of a narrating voice that gives itself over to a torrent of recriminations, accusations, and delirious digressions directed toward other times and places: a distorted image of a world which, despite having lost its certainties, continues to demand new modes of representation. Hence a form of writing that signals not so much the overcoming of Modernism as its problematic reactivation, undertaken in order to confront a private and collective horizon definitively marked by the loss of all totality and by the impossibility of any rational synthesis.