The Escape from History. Wandering, exile and exodus in the L.-F. Céline’s ‘Trilogie allemande’

Abstract

The Trilogie allemande by L.-F. Céline traces the writer’s own troubled wanderings towards Denmark, carried out between 1944 and 1945, thus through a Germany caught in the grip of the imminent collapse of the Reich. The memorialist nature of the work is, however, balanced by a visionary tension which, in addition to a strong digressive tendency, ends up questioning the linear and orderly reconstruction of the events. Starting from these general premises, the article proposes to reflect upon the diverse implications that characterize the theme of wandering in the Trilogie allemande, where the investigation of space is no longer a rational and intentional movement, but rather a hallucinated peregrination through which the fate of the Célinian narrator overlaps with that of an entire population on the run. The crisis of the journey, an instrument that is ultimately incapable of providing the self with a solid intellectual contribution, is reflected in the crafting of the novels, which are deliberately deprived of linearity and, instead, caught in a centrifugal movement. By alternating accounts, memoir, fiction and controversial digressions, Céline disrupts the narrative’s referentiality in order to record, and eventually communicate, that disintegration of collective paradigms which the exploration of the world has unveiled to the narrator. In this way, the flight to northern Europe becomes, above all, an escape from History, understood as a logical-causal concatenation of events, thus as the only promise of truth. At the very moment in which it aspires to provide a deeper interpretation of reality, the imagery of the exile underpinning the Trilogie is, however, inseparable from a paranoid return to the writer’s own personal circumstances, as he exploits the metaphorical potential related to the semantic field of the journey in order to present himself as the spokesperson of a humanity unjustly destined to oppression.