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Louis Ferdinand Céline
—
An Anarcho-Nationalist
Tom Sunic
March 24, 2010
In his imaginary self-portrayal, the French novelist
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
would be the
first one to reject the assigned label of anarcho-nationalism. For that matter
he would reject any outsider’s label whatsoever regarding his prose and his
personality. He was an anticommunist, but also an anti-liberal. He was an
anti-Semite but also an anti-Christian. He despised the Left and the Right. He
rejected all dogmas and all beliefs, and worse, he submitted all academic
standards and value systems to brutal derision.
Briefly, Céline defies any scholarly or civic categorization. As a classy
trademark of the French literary life, he is still considered the finest French
author of modernity — despite the fact that his literary opus rejects any
academic classification. Even though his novels are part and parcel of the
obligatory literature in the French high school syllabus and even though he has
been the subject of dozens of doctoral dissertations, let alone thousands of
polemics denouncing him as the most virulent Jew-baiting pamphleteer of the 20th
century, he continues to be an oddity eluding any analysis, yet commanding
respect across the political and academic spectrum.
Can one offer a suggestion that those who will best grasp L.F. Céline
must also be his lookalikes — the replicas of his nihilist character, his Gallic
temperament and his unsurpassable command of the language?
Cadaverous Schools for Communist and Liberal Massacres
The trouble with L.F. Céline is that although he is widely acclaimed by
literary critics as the most unique French author of the 20th century
and despite the fact that a good dozen of his novels are readily available in
any book store in France, his two anti-Semitic pamphlets are officially off
limits there.
Firstly, the word pamphlet is false. His two books,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937)
and Ecole des cadavres (1938),
although legally and academically rebuked as “fascist anti-Semitic pamphlets,”
are more in line with the social satire of the 15th century French
Rabelaisian tradition,
full of fun and love making than modern political polemics about the Jewry.
After so many years of hibernation, the satire
Bagatelles finally appeared in an
anonymous American translation under the title of
Trifles for a massacre, and can be
accessed online.
The anonymous translator must be commended for his awesome knowledge of
French linguistic nuances and his skill in transposing French
argot into American slang. Unlike the German or the English
language, the French language is a highly contextual idiom, forbidding any
compound nouns or neologisms. Only Céline had a license to craft new words in
French. French is a language of high precision, but also of great ambiguities.
Moreover, any rendering of the difficult Céline’s slangish satire into English
requires from a translator not just the perfect knowledge of French, but also
the perfect knowledge of Céline’s world.
Certainly,
H.L. Mencken’s
temperament and his
sentence structure sometimes carry a whiff of Céline. Ezra Pound’s
toying
with English words in his radio broadcasts in fascist Italy also remind
a bit of Céline’s style. The rhythm of
Harold Covington’s
narrative and the violence of his epithets may remind one a wee
of Celine’s prose too.
But in no way can one draw a parallel between Céline and other authors —
be it in style or in substance. Céline is both politically and artistically
unique. His language and his meta-langue are unparalleled in modern literature.
To be sure Céline is very bad news for Puritan ears or for a do-good
conservative who will be instantly repelled by Céline’s vocabulary teeming as it
does with the overkill of metaphorical “Jewish dicks and pricks.”
Trifles
is not just a satire. It is the most important social treatise for the
understanding of the prewar
These weren’t Hymie jewelers, these were vicious lowlifes, they ate rats
together… They were as flat as flounders. They had just left their ghettos, from
the depths of Estonia, Croatia, Wallachia, Rumelia, and the sties of Bessarabia…
The Jews, they now frequent the guardhouse, they are no longer outside… When it
comes to crookedness, it is they who take first place… All of this takes place
under the hydrant! with hoses as thick as dicks! beside the yellow waters of the
docks… enough to sink all the ships in the world…in a décor fit for
phantoms…with a kiss that’ll cut your ass clean open…that’ll turn you inside
out.
The satire opens up with imaginary dialogue with the fictional Jew Gutman
regarding the role of artistry by the Jews in the French Third Republic,
followed by brief chapters describing Céline’s voyage to the Soviet Union.
Between noon and midnight, I was accompanied everywhere by an interpreter
(connected with the police). I paid for the whole deal… Her name was Natalie,
and she was by the way very well mannered, and by my faith a very pretty blonde,
a completely vibrant devotee of Communism, proselytizing you to death, should
that be necessary… Completely serious moreover…try not to think of things! …and
of being spied upon! nom de Dieu!…
…The misery that I saw in Russia is scarcely to be imagined, Asiatic,
Dostoevskiian, a Gehenna of mildew, pickled herring, cucumbers, and informants…
The Judaized Russian is a natural-born jailer, a Chinaman who has missed his
calling, a torturer, the perfect master of lackeys. The rejects of Asia, the
rejects of Africa… They were just made to marry one another… It’s the most
excellent coupling to be sent out to us from the Hells.
When the satire was first published in 1937, rare were European
intellectuals who had not already fallen under the spell of communist lullabies.
Céline, as an endless heretic and a good observer refused to be taken for a ride
by communist commissars. He is a master of discourse in depicting communist
phenotypes, and in his capacity of a medical doctor he delves constantly into
Jewish self-perception of their physique... and their genitalia.
The peculiar feature of Céline narrative is the flood of slang
expressions and his extraordinary gift for cracking jokes full of obscene
humors, which suddenly veer off in academic passages full of empirical data on
Jews, liberals, communists, nationalists, Hitlerites and the whole panoply of
famed European characters.
But here we accept this, the boogie-woogie of the doctors, of the worst
hallucinogenic negrito Jews, as being worth good money!… Incredible! The very
least diploma, the very least new magic charm, makes the negroid delirious, and
makes all of the negroid Jews flush with pride! This is something that everybody
knows… It has been the same way with our own Kikes ever since their Buddha Freud
delivered unto them the keys to the soul!
Mortal Voyage to Endtimes
In the modern academic establishment Céline is still widely discussed and
his first novels
Journey to the End of the
Night and
Death on the Installment
Plan are still used as
Bildungsroman for the modern
culture of youth rebellion. When these two novels were first published in the
early 30’s of the twentieth century, the European leftist cultural establishment
made a quick move to recuperate Céline as of one of its own. Céline balked. More
than any other author his abhorrence of the European high bourgeoisie could not
eclipse his profound hatred of leftist mimicry.
Neither does he spare leftists scribes, nor does he show mercy for the
spirit of “Parisianism.”
Unsurpassable in style and graphics are Céline’s savaging caricatures of aged
Parisian bourgeois bimbos posturing with false teeth and fake tits in quest of a
rich man’s ride. Had Céline pandered to the leftists, he would have become very
rich; he would have been awarded a Nobel Prize long ago.
In the late 50’s the bourgeoning hippie movement on the American West
Coast also tried to lump him together with its godfather
Jack Kerouac,
who was himself enthralled with Céline’s work. However, any modest reference to
his Bagatelles or
Ecole des Cadavres has always
carefully been skipped over or never mentioned. Equally hushed up is Céline’s
last year of WWII when, unlike hundreds of European nationalist scholars,
artists and novelists, he miraculously escaped French communist firing squads or
the Allied gallows.
His endless journey to the end of the night envisioned no beams of
sunshine on the European horizon. In fact, his endless trip took a nasty turn in
the late 1944 and early 1945, when Céline, along with thousands of European
nationalist intellectuals, including the remnants of the French pro-German
collaborationist government fled to southern Germany, a country still holding
firm in face of the oncoming disaster. The whole of Europe had been already set
ablaze by death-spitting American B17’s from above and raping Soviet soldiers
emerging in the East. These judgment day scenes are depicted in his postwar
novels
D’un château l’autre (Castle
to Castle) and
Rigodoon.
Céline’s sentences are now more elliptic and the action in his novels
becomes more dynamic and more revealing of the unfolding European drama. His
novels offer us a surreal gallery of characters running and hiding in the ruins
of
But Céline’s inveterate pessimism is always couched in self-derision and
always stung with black humor. Even when sentenced in absentia during his exile
in
Upon his return to France in 1951, the remaining years of Céline’s life
were marred by legal harassment, literary ostracism, and poverty. Along with
hundreds of thousands Frenchmen he was subjected to public rebuke that still
continues to shape the intellectual scene in
Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Sunic-Celine.html
