Masters Thesis

Le carnavalesque noir du portrait de l'Amerique chez Celine et Cendrars

During the interwar period, Blaise Cendrars and Louis-Ferdinand Céline travel to the United States and render a vitriolic portrait of the so-called New World. For their characters, travelling to and within America induces a state of delirium, to some extent similar to that of the feast of fools depicted by Rabelais, on which Bakhtine bases his theory of the carnivalesque as a temporary, grotesque reversal of social order. Through carnivalesque laughter, Céline and Cendrars question not only the myths of the United States, but also travel and literature. After the shock of a war unprecedented in its magnitude, Europe and its writers are faced with existential questions pertaining to literature as well as the future of Western civilization. Looking back to the Middle-Ages and Renaissance through the carnivalesque, Céline and Cendrars posit a similarity between these times and theirs. Their characters' travel to America after World War One resonates with the end of the Middle Ages, which was marked by the discovery of the new continent. But painting their carnival black, Cendrars and Celine assert that the new era won't mirror the renewal Rabelais envisioned and Renaissance brought about. To Céline and Cendrars, their time is that of the Apocalypse of Europe and the Western World, to which they give comparable yet opposite solutions, one looking for an escape route, the other watching it bum and fueling the fire.

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