There is a brief text that, as far as I know, remains unpublished by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and that accompanied, as an epilogue, the 100th or 150th French edition, I don’t remember, of Journey to the End of the Night. It is a text titled Qu’on s’explain and in it, indeed, Célice “explains” what her work is. But that is unimportant. Céline’s text is a response to a reader of Journey to the End of the Night who tells in detail what his reading method is. This man confesses that he reads a lot, always wielding scissors in his right hand, cutting out from what he reads everything that seems superfluous or that he simply does not like. In this way, there are books that in the end only contain two or three pages, and in this way the resulting small book is always excellent. He confesses that only a dozen pages of The Journey to the End of the Night remained unscathed, that about two hundred verses were saved from Baudelaire, and a little less from Victor Hugo; In The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère only the chapter on the heart was saved from the scissors, and of all of Proust only the dinner with the Duchess of Guermantes and the description of the morning in Paris in The Prisoner. Such a way of reading surprised Céline – in fact he would continue to surprise him, in fact he would surprise anyone at any time – and if it surprises it is precisely because he is tempting for what is just.
Perhaps it was the reading of that epilogue by Céline alluding to that letter from the reader skilled in the exercise of literary weeding that led Jean-Luc Godard at some point to exercise the same habit, which I always envied and continue to envy: taking a Book only what is worth it, and get rid of all the rest. It is an unsurpassed hygiene and therapeutic exercise, because it avoids many uncomfortable things, such as hoarding books that we will never read again, taking up space, etc., but it also avoids one of the most exemplary virtues of the book, which consists of its ability to reproduce itself. at will, passing from hand to hand.
That must be why Godard at one point abandons that custom to adopt another, which consists of taking note of the saving phrase or page and giving the book to the first person in front of him. Or in the absence of people, throwing the book out of the car window or the moving train: if it doesn’t fall into a ditch, someone will find it.
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a fundamental pillar of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe they are the owners of the truth.
But I recognize that the intervention of scissors in reading practice is disturbing. There are those who underline, mark, draw, fold and fold the pages, but it is not easy to find someone who, with scissors in hand, frees the read book of everything that is left over. For example, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Sad Tropics cut out everything except the description of the sunset on board the ship, in the middle of the Atlantic; from Flashfire by Richard Stark that phrase that Parker says: “Everyone is dead, some don’t know it yet”; from Hopscotch, chapter 68, the one that begins by saying: “As soon as he loved her noema, she was overwhelmed by the clemiso”; from Borges’ The Book of Sand those two sentences that say: “His whole appearance was one of decent poverty. He was dressed in gray and had a gray suitcase in his hand.”… All in all, it would be a moving exercise, and it would considerably reduce the number of books I have that I would like not to have.
If an intellectual, according to George Steiner’s risky definition, is someone who writes things in the margins of a book, someone who reaches for scissors, what would that be? Céline calls that reader who saved ten pages of Journey to the End of the Night a “literary critic.” As a definition it’s not bad, after all.