Celine's "Bagatelles pour un massacre": An Example of Failure

Abstract

When Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) first appeared, it was praised by some critics as a work espousing socialist principles in that it could be read to sympathize with ce grand ramassis de miteux (this great heap of the wretched) evoked in its first pages. The fact that Celine also cited Eugene Dabit and Henri Barbusse (representatives of, respectively, populist and proletarian literature) as his literary predecessors1 and that Cline was on friendly terms with both Dabit and Barbusse led to the assumption that Celine was writing from the left. The publication of Mea Culpa in December 1936, however, rendered this assumption either false or no longer valid. Ostensibly an account of the author's brief visit to Leningrad in September 1936, Mea Culpa seemed to announce a sudden preference for the right by employing the right's derogatory terms, Popu, Prolo and Prolovitch, for the proletarian.2 This opuscule also marked C61ine's temporary break with fiction writing. The three anti-Semitic pamphlets following it form retrospectively the author's middle period, a period much discussed for the compromising effect it has had on Celine's literary work. Even if we now read Mea Culpa as Celine's entry into pamphlet writing, it still remains that, when it appeared, no one could have foreseen the explosive Bagatelles pour un massacre, C61ine's first anti-Semitic pamphlet