War and the Death of Innocence (original) (raw)

Abstract

HENEVER I think of war, the names Peguy and Celine immediately spring to mind. Peguy is famous for linking war with the glory of Christian sacrifice. In the run-up to 1914, thanks in no small measure to the writings of people like himself and Claude!, there was a noticeable rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the Republic in France. Thousands of priests fought side by side and died with other French men in the trenches, a place where Peguy would eventually meet his own end in September 1914. Celine's classic account of the degradation and horror of war, Voyage au bout de la nuit, published in 1932, has been described by Tom Quinn as a 'revolutionary novel', which is 'an unforgettable account of a doomed world, crushed by one war, and waiting to be crushed by another one.' 1 Celine had first-hand experience of the Grande Guerre, an incident from which he would never fully recover, and I mention him here because Jean Sulivan, one of the writers with whom I am dealing, was an admirer of his writings and admitted to bringing two books with him wherever he went-Rilke's Duino Elegies and Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit. We will see that this fascination with Celine was not in any way coincidental. Camus and Sulivan were born in the same year, 1913, and their experience of the First World War was inextricably linked to the fact that it claimed the lives of their fathers and thus transformed their own lives completely. Both speak of the event in terms that leave no doubt as to the trauma caused by the fact that they never came to know their fathers, who both died on the Western front-they were just two of some three million men who met the same fate on this front. It is impossible to im

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.