Keywords:
art - history of neurology - traumatic brain injury - World War I - peripheral neuropathy
Palavras-chave:
arte - história da neurologia - lesões encefálicas traumáticas - primeira guerra mundial
- neuropatia periférica
A unique association joins Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Louis Ferdinand
Céline. All of them were French, played a crucial role in literature in Paris and
were neurologically injured in world wars. Surprisingly, they also changed their artistic
production due to acquired neurological conditions.
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918)
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918)
Guillaume Apollinaire is considered one of the most important literary figures of
the early twentieth century. Apollinaire was born in Rome but by the age of eighteen,
he had settled in Paris. In 1914 he joined the French army, volunteering to defend
his adopted country in World War I. In spite of goodwill, a sad event would ironically
mark his life and career. Apollinaire was hit with a shrapnel fragment in the right
temporal region just after receiving the acceptance of his naturalization ([Figure 1]). Fortunately, trauma was rather superficial and required only minor interventions.
After 2 weeks, he presented progressive headaches, balance problems, and fatigue.
An episode of loss of consciousness followed by left hemiplegia made him undergo neurosurgery
which probably revealed a chronic subdural hematoma[1].
Figure 1 Guillaume Apollinaire in 1916 with head bandaged after traumatism.Source: Wikimedia
Commons.
After discharge, the sequels were not obvious, but in the eyes of close friends like
Andre Breton, Apollinaire was not the same. His personality changed and his emotions
were unstable. The joyful, extraverted, witty Apollinaire seemed to have been replaced
by someone sad, embittered, angry and distrustful. The author of Le Pont Mirabeau
became emotionally indifferent and with marked affective flattening. Apollinaire himself
was aware that his brain had changed[1],[2]: "I am not anymore who I was, in any way, and if I listened to myself, I would now
become a priest of a religious person". Perhaps the most dramatic change in his behavior
involved his relationship with Madeleine: while he had written passionate letters
to her before the wound, after the trauma he wrote short, nonemotional notes asking
her not to visit him anymore[1],[2]. This fascinating change in the life of the French poet would give rise to the eponym
‘Apollinaire syndrome' to designate neurobehavioral changes with preserved cognition
and no other neurological dysfunction after right lateral temporal lobe damage[2].
Apollinaire's artistic output did not show less poetic quality from poems written
before the war. Nevertheless, some specialists argue that Apollinaire's creativity
was influenced somehow by brain damage. After the trauma, he painted several watercolors
depicting personal scenes, still lives, war activities, and poetic topics[3]. This shift towards a new form of artistic creativity has already been reported
in certain cases of neurological disorders occurring in artists[4],[5].
BLAISE CENDRARS (1887-1961)
BLAISE CENDRARS (1887-1961)
Frédéric Sauser, who used the pseudonym Blaise Cendrars, was born in Switzerland and
settled definitively in France before World War I, where he gained prominence in the
European modernist movement. At the beginning of the war, he registered the Légion
étrangere and soon he became a French citizen as well as Apollinaire. In 1915, during
a conflict in Champagne, Cendrars was shot in the right forearm and doctors decided
to amputate the limb[6] ([Figure 2]). From that moment, the author of Prose du Transsibérien would be tormented "day
and night" by a severe stump pain all his life. At that time, he compared his bandaged
missing limb to a ‘big baby' or a ‘foreign thing'. A painful phantom arm could not
be better described by him: ‘A phantom can be seen but does not exist, while a phantom
limb exists but cannot be seen.' Cendrars compared the pain as a sharp needle or a
knife being introduced into his flesh. Curiously, in his pre-war texts, Cendrars had
made several allusions to missing hands and amputations, which later would sound like
a premonition[1],[6].
Figure 2 Blaise Cendrars in 1916 after his amputation.Source: Swiss Literary Archives, Berne.
If the impact on his artistic production is difficult to be measured, for Cendrars,
the phantom hand indeed had mutated poetry into a phantom. After the amputation, Frédéric
dramatically stopped writing poetry and began a new career as a novelist[7]. Interestingly, after his wound, Cendrars would write one of his most famous fictional
stories, La main coupée, which was published twenty years later. While he had been
perhaps the most revolutionary of the pre-war avant-garde poets, his new style and
image after the war completely changed his image as a writer, both in the public and
among other writers. His interest in poetry left him together with his right limb[3],[6].
LOUIS FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894-1961)
LOUIS FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894-1961)
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, whose pen name was Louis Ferdinand Céline, is one of the
most famous French-speaking writers of the twentieth century. He developed a personal
style of writing that changed French literature. Céline was enlisted in a cavalry
regiment in 1912 and fought for France in the Great War. In 1914, while he was out
of a trench to transmit an order to an infantry colonel, he was severely wounded by
a bullet in the right arm leading to radial nerve paralysis. Céline also started to
complain of hyperesthesia in the radial nerve sensitive territory: "The bullet shattered
the bone on 4 to 5 centimeters. However, the nerves have been painfully affected".
Neurosurgery was indicated but no further improvement was observed. Céline needed
electrical treatment to stimulate the recovery of his right radial nerve. In 1939,
a medical report confirmed the persistence of neuropathy and would grant him an invalidity
pension: "Radial paralysis. Long intervention scar on the dorsal side of the arm.
Paralyzed extensors. Dropping hand. Severe pain reactions in the sensitive radial
nerve territory triggered by hand movements"[8].
It is reasonable to speculate that war and neurological damage could have influenced
Céline's work. He used his personal experience with electrotherapy to write Voyage
au bout de la nuit. In the novel, the war hero Bardamu received electric therapy:
"That, Bardamu, is how I mean to treat my patients, electricity for the body, […]!".
After the war, Céline´s personal history in the World War also become part of his
texts, including many descriptions of "war neurosis" and shell-shocked soldiers[9].
The examples of Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Louis-Ferdinand Céline
reveal the surprising (and fascinating) intimacy Neurology can share with art and
history.
