Qu'on s'explique

Céline begins with the supposedly unsophisticated reader. The controversy provides him with a useful contrast between professional literary opinion and the reaction of someone who simply reads according to personal need.

He then turns toward his own book. Rather than apologise for Journey's violence, slang, pessimism or ugliness, he argues that these effects follow from the material being represented.

For Céline, literature has to seize life in all its contradictory physical and emotional force and then reshape it. The language readers complain about is therefore not accidental vulgarity. He presents it as part of the method.

First comes the dispute about reading. Who decides what a book is worth — literary professionals or an ordinary reader who feels perfectly entitled to keep only what matters to him? Céline sides, provocatively, with the reader.

Then he shifts from reading to writing. He describes life as something the writer must seize and work over rather than politely reproduce.

Violence in the material produces violence in language.

The writer stretches, reshapes and reconstructs lived experience chapter by chapter.

He therefore refuses the distinction between "beautiful literary language" and the ugly realities supposedly beneath it. The argument becomes a small manifesto for the aesthetics that Journey has already demonstrated.