Death and the Fuss (MILAN KUNDERA)
Death and the Fuss (Louis-Ferdinand Celine: From Castle to Castle)
by Milan Kundera, Encounter
IN CELINE’S NOVEL “From Castle to Castle,” a story of a dog; she comes from the icy north of Denmark, where she would disappear for long escapades in the forests. When she arrives in France with Celine, her roaming days are over. Then one day, cancer:
“I tried to lay her down on the straw... just after dawn... she didn’t like me putting her there... she didn’t want it... she wanted to be in some other place... over by the coldest part of the house on the pebbles... She stretched out nicely there... she began to rattle... it was the end... they’d told me, I didn’t believe it... but it was true, she was facing toward what she remembered, the place she’d come from, the North, Denmark, her muzzle toward the north, pointed north,... this very faithful dog, in a way... faithful to the forests where she used to run off, Korsor, way up there... and faithful to the harsh life there,... these Meudon woods here meant nothing to her... she died with two, three small rattles... oh, very discreet... no complaints... and in this really beautiful position, like in midleap-- in flight... but on her side, helpless, finished... nose toward her getaway forests, up there where she came from, where she’d suffered... God knows!
“Oh, I’ve seen plenty of death throes, here... there... everywhere... but by far nothing so beautiful, discreet...faithful... the trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss... somehow man is always on stage... even the plainest men.”
“The trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss.” What a line! And: “somehow man is always on stage.” Don’t we all recall the ghoulish drama of those famous “last words” on the deathbed? That’s how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even “the plainest” of them, the least exhibitionist, because it’s not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn’t do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.
And that “fuss”! Death always treated as something heroic, as the finale of a play, the conclusion of a battle. I read in a newspaper: in some city thousands of red balloons are sent up in homage to people suffering or dead from AIDS. I ponder that “in homage.” “In memory,” fine; “in rememberance,” as a gesture of sorrow and of compassion, yes, that I would understand. But “in homage”? Is there anything to celebrate, to admire, in sickness? Is sickness a personal virtue? But that’s the way things are, and Celine knew it: “The trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss...”
Many great writers of Celine’s generation had, like him, known death, war, terror, torture, banishment. But they went through terrible experiences on the other side of the wall from him; on the side of the just, of the future victors, or of victims haloed with injustices suffered-- in short, on the glory side. The “fuss,” that preening self-satisfaction, was so naturally part of all their behavior that they could no longer see it, or judge it. But Celine, tried for collaboration with the Nazis, lived for twenty years among the condemned and the scorned, in history’s trash heap, guilty among the guilty. Everyone around him was reduced to silence; he alone gave voice to that extraordinary experience: the experience of life utterly devoid of fuss.
That experience allowed him to see vanity not as a vice but as a quality inherent in man, a quality that never leaves him, not even in his death throes; and against the background of that irremovable human fuss, the experience allowed him to see the sublime in a dog’s death.
by Milan Kundera, Encounter
IN CELINE’S NOVEL “From Castle to Castle,” a story of a dog; she comes from the icy north of Denmark, where she would disappear for long escapades in the forests. When she arrives in France with Celine, her roaming days are over. Then one day, cancer:
“I tried to lay her down on the straw... just after dawn... she didn’t like me putting her there... she didn’t want it... she wanted to be in some other place... over by the coldest part of the house on the pebbles... She stretched out nicely there... she began to rattle... it was the end... they’d told me, I didn’t believe it... but it was true, she was facing toward what she remembered, the place she’d come from, the North, Denmark, her muzzle toward the north, pointed north,... this very faithful dog, in a way... faithful to the forests where she used to run off, Korsor, way up there... and faithful to the harsh life there,... these Meudon woods here meant nothing to her... she died with two, three small rattles... oh, very discreet... no complaints... and in this really beautiful position, like in midleap-- in flight... but on her side, helpless, finished... nose toward her getaway forests, up there where she came from, where she’d suffered... God knows!
“Oh, I’ve seen plenty of death throes, here... there... everywhere... but by far nothing so beautiful, discreet...faithful... the trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss... somehow man is always on stage... even the plainest men.”
“The trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss.” What a line! And: “somehow man is always on stage.” Don’t we all recall the ghoulish drama of those famous “last words” on the deathbed? That’s how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even “the plainest” of them, the least exhibitionist, because it’s not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn’t do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.
And that “fuss”! Death always treated as something heroic, as the finale of a play, the conclusion of a battle. I read in a newspaper: in some city thousands of red balloons are sent up in homage to people suffering or dead from AIDS. I ponder that “in homage.” “In memory,” fine; “in rememberance,” as a gesture of sorrow and of compassion, yes, that I would understand. But “in homage”? Is there anything to celebrate, to admire, in sickness? Is sickness a personal virtue? But that’s the way things are, and Celine knew it: “The trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss...”
Many great writers of Celine’s generation had, like him, known death, war, terror, torture, banishment. But they went through terrible experiences on the other side of the wall from him; on the side of the just, of the future victors, or of victims haloed with injustices suffered-- in short, on the glory side. The “fuss,” that preening self-satisfaction, was so naturally part of all their behavior that they could no longer see it, or judge it. But Celine, tried for collaboration with the Nazis, lived for twenty years among the condemned and the scorned, in history’s trash heap, guilty among the guilty. Everyone around him was reduced to silence; he alone gave voice to that extraordinary experience: the experience of life utterly devoid of fuss.
That experience allowed him to see vanity not as a vice but as a quality inherent in man, a quality that never leaves him, not even in his death throes; and against the background of that irremovable human fuss, the experience allowed him to see the sublime in a dog’s death.