bukowski and celine (1 Viewer)

[jordan]

i studied celine in grad school and had parts of a dissertation about him written before i dropped out. i'm really interested in the bukowski-celine collection, so can anyone point out points where bukowski mentions celine specifically? i've stumbled across his name in bukowski's work tons of times, but i can't remember where. thanks!

i wish there was an english-language celine forum somewhere... the crosstalk between here and there would be really neat.

 

[puke]

I can't remember where I read it, but Bukowski said somewhere that Celine "only wrote one good book (Journey), but what a book!"

I'd be interested to hear some more of Buk on Celine. I know he mentions him a lot but I can't remember any other specifics.

 

[the only good poet]

there's CELINE WITH CANE AND BASKET (p242) in THE LAST NIGHT OF THE EARTH POEMS. i also remember b remarking that the effort of writing JOURNEY turned celine into a "hopscotch oddball."

 

[brickbybrick79]

"The first time I read Celine, I went to bed with a big box of Ritz crackers. I started reading him and eating these Ritz crackers, and laughing, and eating the Ritz crackers. I read the whole novel straight through. And the box of Ritz was empty, man. And I got up and drank water, man. You should've seen me. I couldn't move. That's what a good writer will do to you. He'll damn near kill you...a bad writer will too. "

From the interview with Sean Penn
Interview magazine, September 1987

 

[poptop]

Just as an aside, I had an interesting reaction to Celine when I read him. I found Celine to be a man who could accurately portray the seemingly futile, dark side of life in high relief and yet be without solutions, at least for himself"”not that everything in life has an easy answer, if an answer at all. Nevertheless, I consider his "Journey..." a great work, and I'm glad I read it. But one book like this was enough, and he never topped himself, at least to my satisfaction.

Celine also led himself into some bad political solutions (including Nazism) that were probably the outcome of his book. So I felt that I needed to look past Celine to other writers who saw just as much exasperating human misery but managed to keep their sanity and find more good in life. That was partly what motivated my interest in Bukowski. I believe that Bukowski liked to refer to "the gods" because he somehow became convinced of their reality: "the gods will offer you chances; know them...take them," and I see that as his affirmation of life itself, not the abject futility of it all, it's pointlessness, like Celine appeared to have: the futility that destroyed him. "”Poptop.

i studied celine in grad school and had parts of a dissertation about him written before i dropped out. i'm really interested in the bukowski-celine collection, so can anyone point out points where bukowski mentions celine specifically? i've stumbled across his name in bukowski's work tons of times, but i can't remember where. thanks!

i wish there was an english-language celine forum somewhere... the crosstalk between here and there would be really neat.

From Wikipedia:

Bukowski once said that "Journey to the End of the Night was the best book written in the last two thousand years." [source unknown.]

 

[jordan]

having done a lot of research on celine, i'm pretty steadfast in my opinion that journey was not a portent of things to come (such as nazism) for celine... in fact, if you read his nazi material (which hasn't been translated into english), it is so off the wall and ridiculous that its hard to trace it back to the general human condition he describes in journey. in fact, it's hard to see where his sudden turn toward fascism came from unless you just accept that he was totally insane.

what i find most interesting about journey is that it concludes with the author declaring that there's nothing more to be said... clearly, bukowski never reached this point. i think the two authors together are really interesting, especially given how they both came to writing from other careers.

for fun, i'm working on an essay called "Bukowski at the end of the Night", that i will post on my website when it's done. that's mostly why i wanted to track down his references to celine. but your point about the affirmation of life in both authors work is a thought-provoking one.

 

[number5]

he mentions celine in pulp