Discussions with professor Y

Entretiens with professor Y is a short lampoon of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, published in 1955, which constitutes a kind of ars poetica .

Volume I of Fairyhood for another time not having received discounted success, Céline wants to accompany the exit by volume II (1955) of a maximum of publicity and to erase the wrong caused by all its years of exile in Germany and to the Denmark. He thus proposes with Gaston Gallimard to write itself his praise in the shape of a small novel close to the article of faith. These talks, which does not form any that one with final appear in the Nouvelle French Review in 1954, then in volume in 1955.

Summary

Convinced to be a writer cursed, maltreated by her own editor - what will be an old story of future works céliniennes -, Céline develops an appointment with an author of the Gallimard house to play the game of the “interviouwe”. Its imaginary interlocutor, professor Y, alias Colonel Réséda, whom it chose quite hostile and poor - since it ends by losing its means and being pissed above -, made figure of poor “interviouwor” and grotesque puppet; Celine must blow all the questions to him and harp the answers to him. This " intervouwe" is a way of criticizing its own editor and the ambient literary climate.

This parody of the literary talks conceals a poetic Art vehement. Celine criticizes the tastes of the public there, her attraction for the forgery, the unauthentic one, her preference for the novels “chromos” written by poor authors and in a momifiée academic language. To have only included/understood the urgency to evolve/move that the cinema intimates to the literature - as formerly photography it had done with painting -, he thinks of having upset the romantic kind by his “style made emotive” which he characterizes by the use of the points of suspension and the slang. This negligible but brilliant lucky find consists in restoring in the writing the emotion of the spoken language.

The metaphor of the subway whose rails are “shaped express” exposes the terrorist role that Céline is given with regard to the readers: he wants to carry them costs that costs in its “emotive oar”. Rejected for its lampoons anti-semites, it makes open conflict with the public the stone of angle of its texts. It is also that of the Talks, and the increasing tension between the two interlocutors confers a theatrical dimension to them which explains why work knew many scenic adaptations, even if it is not the most known work of Celine.

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