Céline avant Céline? Guerre, Londres, Krogold : situation et statut des nouveaux manuscrits de Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Trois hypothèses

Guerre and Londres, the newly-found manuscripts by Louis-Ferdinand Céline published in 2022, are texts of very dubious status. The confusion about their situation is indeed great and several hypotheses exist. The first hypothesis for dating such manuscripts is the one proposed by Gallimard: the manuscripts were written after "Voyage au bout de la nuit". The second hypothesis is that, due to their more precarious writing than that of "Voyage", a big part of these manuscripts ("Guerre" in particular) was written before the 1932 masterpiece. The third hypothesis – ours – is that the very beginning of "Guerre" – the parts that correspond to the beginning of "Voyage"’s plot – is prior to "Voyage", while the other sequences and the whole of "Londres" are posterior to it. In any case, these manuscripts show us the essence of Céline’s writing process and are therefore fundamental to better understand the formation of Céline’s aesthetic; in other words: Céline before Céline.