Celine: The Success of the Monstre Sacre in Postwar France

Abstract

In his excellent study of the way in which Louis-Ferdinand Celine is portrayed in French school textbooks, Alain Cresciucci refers to the author's classicisation remarquable (220), by which, and in spite of une contre riception pugnace, Ctline moved from the near-oblivion of the Pariah in the 1950s and 1960s to canonical status by the end of the twentieth century, becoming a mod6le de l'auteur devenu classique (221). In fact, the case of Cline is highly instructive, not least because of the extremes between which his reputation lurches, providing valuable insight into the process and effectiveness of the Epuration following the Liberation, and into the workings of literary history itself. Most accounts of Celine's life depict his career as a classic tale of riches to rags, by which a highly talented writer throws away his literary reputation through inexplicable and unjustifiable political decisions that lead him to exile and imprisonment and to long-term critical and popular neglect. It is certainly true that the major events in Celine's life after 1932 would appear to support such an interpretation. The success of Voyage au bout de la nuit propelled the hitherto unknown Celine to the forefront of the French literary stage and, in spite of his constant complaints to his publisher, Denoel, made him a wealthy man, able to indulge his taste for travel, staying in Europe's finest hotels and crossing the Atlantic by luxury liner. This lionization, astutely stage-managed by Denoil, included the prestigious annual Zola address in Medan in 1934, and lasted up until the end of 1936, when Celine, apparently emulating the hero of his medical doctoral thesis, Semmelweis, wilfully sabotaged the Left-wing foundations of his literary support, first through his denunciation of Soviet Marxism in Mea culpa, and, more seriously, through the anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L'Ecole des cadavres (1938), and Les Beaux draps, published at the height of the Occupation in 1941. The writer's widow, Lucette Destouches, has always maintained (most recently in her conversations with V6ronique Robert), that C1line's aim in publishing his anti-Semitic writing was purely pacifistic: