Chapter 8, Those Females Who Wreck the Infinite Summary and Analysis

Celine's novels depict a variety of different kinds of females, but, like his work in general, all of them towards the grotesque. There is, first of all, the type of the mother. Traditionally represented as a life-giver and carer, Celine's maternal figures are vengeful, violent, and even homicidal. This inversion creates an interesting rearrangement of the Oedipal circle. The mother is no longer the inviting object of desire, but an object of manipulation and hatred. Moreover, the dependency relationship is inverted; the mother is dependent on the child for her existence.

Very young girls are often idealized—sexually—in Celine's work. There, most likely, an element of pedophilia in this. It would probably be incorrect to think that Celine himself derived pedophilic pleasure from these descriptions. Rather...