Editing Louis-Ferdinand Céline (section)

=== Style ===
Céline was critical of the French "academic" literary style which privileged elegance, clarity and exactitude.<ref>{{Harvp|Thomas|1980|p=80}}</ref> He advocated a new style aimed at directly conveying emotional intensity:<ref>{{Harvp|Thomas|1980|p=81|ps=. Céline quoted by Merlin Thomas}}</ref><blockquote>"It seemed to me that there were two ways of telling stories. The classic, normal, academic way which consists of creeping along from one incident to the next...the way cars go along in the street...and then, the other way, which means descending into the intimacy of things, into the fibre, the nerves, the feelings of things, the flesh, and going straight on to the end, to its end, in intimacy, in maintained poetic tension, in inner life, like the ''métro'' through an inner city, straight to the end...[.]" </blockquote>Céline was a major innovator in French literary language.<ref name="auto">{{Harvp|Vitoux|1992|p=531}}</ref> In his first two novels,''Journey to the End of the Night'' and ''Death on the Installment Plan'', Céline shocked many critics by his use of a unique language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld.<ref>{{Harvp|Vitoux|1992|pp=214, 291-292}}</ref><ref>{{Harvp|Thomas|1980|pp=94-97}}</ref> He also developed an idiosyncratic system of punctuation based on extensive use of [[Ellipsis|ellipses]] and exclamation marks. Thomas sees Céline's three dots as: "almost comparable to the pointing of a psalm: they divide the text into rhythmical rather than syntactical units, permit extreme variations of pace and make possible to a great extent the hallucinatory lyricism of his style."<ref>{{Harvp|Thomas|1980|p=89}}</ref>

Céline called his increasingly rhythmic, syncopated writing style his "little music."<ref>{{Harvp|Vitoux|1992|p=552}}</ref> McCarthy writes that in ''Fables for Another Time'': "Celine's fury drives him beyond prose and into a new tongue – part poetry and part music – to express what he has to say."<ref>{{Harvp|McCarthy|1976|pp=242-243}}</ref> Céline's style evolved to reflect the themes of his novels. According to McCarthy, in Céline's final war trilogy, ''Castle to Castle'', ''North'' and ''Rigadoon'': "all worlds disappear into an eternal nothingness (...) the trilogy is written in short, bare phrases: language dissolves as reality does."<ref>{{Harvp|McCarthy|1976|p=9}}</ref>