Spliced from a 1984 interview published in French in LaQuinzaine Littéraire, Roth's approbation reads differently in its original, unbowdlerized form:
To tell you the truth, in France, my Proust is Céline! There's a very great writer. Even if his anti- Semitism made him an abject, intolerable person. To read him, I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it, because anti-Semitism isn't at the heart of his books, even Castle to Castle. Céline is a great liberator. I feel called by his voice.
Just as Roth's "Jewish conscience" was itself silently suspended by editorial sleight of hand, a no less misleading elision of Céline's posterity has been made. Henri Godard, editor of the Pléiade edition of Céline's novels, has argued that, taken together, the eight novels possess a "dynamic unity" without which "it is not possible to get the true measure of Céline." This does not go far enough. Once one extends the reach of Godard's claim to include the anti-Semitic trilogy, the congruence of Céline's wink-wink misanthropy with his unblinking sociopathy becomes apparent. It is not that we shouldn't read Céline because he was, at a profound level, contemptible. It is rather that, to understand Céline, we must be ready to, and permitted to, read all that he wrote. Only in this way can we begin to understand what we are saying when we might think to class him as—of all things—a humorist.
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