Mort à crédit

Mort à crédit [Death on Credit]
First edition, one of 47 numbered copies on Imperial Japan, the tirage de tête. Copy presented in the publisher's chemise and slipcase, at first glance reserved for the copies on Japan, in half red shagreen and marbled paper boards.

“At the publisher's request, L.-F. Céline removed several phrases from the book; the phrases have not been replaced. They appear in blank in the book“ explains a note on the back of the dedication page.
Our copy contains, as do all except for the hors commerce copies, some blank spaces scattered throughout the text. The deletion of a word, a phrase or a few lines is thus accentuated by the vacant spaces in the body of the text.
Far from an official censorship, these "holes" are the work of Céline himself who, seeing himself reproached by Denoël for certain passages that are too salacious, had the genius idea of replacing the mundane details of certain frolicking with much more eloquent marks, which give free reign to the reader's imagination.
A true pornographic reinterpretation of Diderot's address to Sophie Volland: “everywhere there will be nothing read only I love you”, Céline's silent invitation to his readers is much more powerful that the literary witticism that it replaces. Thus, from one of the first cuts: "One evening on the wall there was a scandal. Un sidi monté








He was finished! Yes, that was certainly Vitruvius. Commenting on this", mysterious and suggestive veil posed on what is, in reality, the description of a paedophile rape, of which readers will only become aware in 1981, in the second edition of the Pléiade, when the cut passages will be finally restored.
With simple and fair editorial caution, Céline has produced a real work within the work, since the main subject of the deleted passages is precisely "voyeurism", the key theme of Célinienne work, and it is exacerbated with this self-censorship. We can even doubt that Robert Denoël was really responsible for this censorship, as media-efficient as it is semantically relevant, and which Céline himself promoted: “With the full text of the novel, it is simple: we were going straight to proceedings for offenses against good morals. We had missed the Goncourt. We would not miss the penalty.” (Note the skillful parallel between recognition and justice).
But it is no doubt at the heart of the work itself that we find a subliminal evocation of the complicity of the two whipped companions:
“The two of us, Robert and I, it was time to climb on the kitchen stove to attend the show... It was well chosen as a perch... We were plunging right onto the page...” What happens on the so-called “page” [slang for “bed”], remains in the void of the book's page, but the reader hears Louis-Ferdinand's laughter in echo because, like the silence that follows Mozart, the “blanks” that are sprinkled throughout Mort à Crédit are still Céline's.

Extremely rare and very beautiful copy of the tirage de tête.