This reactionary, lower-middle-class sensibility probably has a lot to do with my fondness for Celine — more than I’d be comfortable acknowledging, perhaps. My love for Celine started from the fact that he, alone among “great” 20th century writers, never showed off, never played the pedant or wrote to impress the annotators.
Sly? Celine invented sly. “The Church” was staged in 1933, immediately after Journey to the End of Night, which made him instantly famous. “The Church” is a commercial for Celine, a quick preview of his cheerful, slobby nihilism: Celine Lite, dumbed down and sped up for a glitzy Parisian audience.
The first two acts are what theatre critics would call “a jolly romp” through familiar Celinian landscapes: a Central-African colony and a New York theatre office. The jollity is peculiarly Celinian; in the Hellish African outpost, colonial bureaucrats cover up an epidemic and squabble over the body of a visiting doctor who’s died while they chatted, and in the New York office starlets casually screw any man or woman who might help their careers — but it’s all very lively and cheery.
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