Harry´s Blog

Herbert Kuhner

It’s mainly women who consult doctors. Woman is very troubled,
because clearly she has every kind of known weakness.
She needs… she wants to stay young. She has her menopause,
her periods, the whole genital business, which is very delicate;
it makes a martyr out of her, doesn’t it?
So this martyr lives anyway, she bleeds, she doesn’t bleed,
she goes and gets the doctor, she has operations,
she doesn’t have operations, she gets re-operated,
then in between she gives birth, she loses her shape, all that’s important.
She wants to stay young, keep, her figure ….
It’s an immense problem …. It supports the beauty parlors, the quacks
and the druggists. But it doesn’t present an interesting medical problem,
woman’s decline. It’s obviously a fading rose.
You can’t say it’s a medical problem, or an agricultural problem.
In a garden, when you see a rose fade,
you accept it.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, The Paris Review, No. 31, 1964

Don’t get me wrong. I love women. I just thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born female. Being born is bad enough, but being born a woman takes the cake.

Céline got shot in the head in World War I, and he certainly was an odd bird. He was a medical doctor who treated the poor in Parisian slums, as well as being an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator. He wrote autobiographical novels in which he used the French argot of the time, integrating it into language and transposing it into literature, which was a great innovation.

What he writes about women is put-down, as well as a tract in compassion.

Céline doesn’t mention the high heels and the complexity of the underwear and outer garments that women wear, and all the things that women do to appeal to men in their four walls, as well as in beauty parlors and other commercial and medical establishments geared to make them more attractive and desirable.

A man just puts his skivvies on, and then a shirt, trousers and a jacket, and he’s set to go.

Don’t get me wrong. I love women. I just thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born female. Being born is bad enough, but being born a woman takes the cake.

God, I think, how very unfortunate woman are for having to deal with men and their most precious appendage, as well having to go through all the tribulations described by Céline. Not to speak of gestation, parturition, kitchen and kindergarten.

Well in this liberated day and age with all the aspects of feminism, women are finally getting their own back at men. I may not always like that, but I can’t really hold it against them. Is it any wonder, after all that has happened and is still happening?