Dance steps and pickpocketing on the very verge of the abyss

November 22, 2024 12:40 AM

Satire is just dark comedy’s alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. War is a satire on war in the same sense that getting shot is a satire on guns, or being trampled to death by a hippo is a satire on evolution, or junkies are a satire on drugs, or a piss stain is a satire on clean pants. from Céline's War [The Point; ungated] [CW: problematic writer]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

Your laughter is the trampling hippo

lol
posted by HearHere at 1:21 AM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

It seems likely to me, after skimming it—I defy anyone to read this book all the way through—that Trifles might be the most revolting document ever produced by a great writer.

This was a great essay: and their insights into the disparity between Céline's fiction and his screeds/pamphlets is illuminating. Also, spares me having to read the latter. (Though I wonder if there isn't an equivalence with those comedians/writers who flipped out after 9/11 and went rabidly, universally anti-muslim. If the psychological mechanism isn't similar - because I never did understand that (I'm thinking of C.Hitchens and Dennis Miller here.))
posted by From Bklyn at 3:21 AM on November 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

This paragraph stopped me in my tracks, and I have to think about it a lot more: "I think the best way to understand the relation of texts like Trifles to Céline’s dark-comic works is to suggest that in the former the attitude tries to work itself up into a state of delirium on its own, without reliance on the dark and uncontrollable energies of the inhuman source of delirium—a source revealed most distinctly and terrifyingly in War."
posted by mittens at 9:54 AM on November 22, 2024 [4 favorites]

@Bklyn David Mamet is the one that really bothered me.
posted by Orthodox Humanoid at 8:51 PM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]