Céline and the Politics of Difference (review)

Abstract

L'Esprit Créateur self-portrayal as paranoid or hysteric, while Jennifer Forrest analyzes Bardamu's trip to the U.S. in search of the ideal, passive woman who would not threaten his gender fantasies and underlying misogyny. Scullion's "Choreographing Sexual Difference" asserts that the diatribes and ballets of Bagatelles, along with Celine's obsessive focus on the beautiful yet contorted moves of the ballerina, reveal the author's inability to deal with otherness except through rejection, scopophilia, or mastery. Furthermore, Celine's resurrection of ballet imagery after the war accentuates "things beautiful" while diverting attention from "authorial accountability" (142). In another vein, Pascal Ifri concentrates on Mort à crédit and its picture of France's lower middle classes, disadvantaged by industrialization. Other contributors address style and moral responsibility. Andrea Loselle examines Celine's claim that his later novels resemble the medieval and early modern chroniclers Froissart, Monluc, and the Cardinal de Retz. This aesthetic self-justification actually masks ongoing racial stereotyping after the war, when Céline vaunts his "frank speech" as a shift from decadent GaIIoRoman elements in French culture toward Germanic expressive purity (190). Charles Krance spans the prewar and postwar through a critique of Sartre who, though he gave La Nausée an epigraph from Celine's anti-Semitic play L'Eglise, hastily condemned the writer during the Purge. Philip Watts' "Postmodern Céline" aptly concludes the volume. Although Tel Quel praised the innovative, liberating aspects of Célinian style, Watts insists that the accompanying ideology cannot be so easily dismissed, given the affinity between Celine's polemical images of decimated Berlin in Nord and Maurice Bardèche's similar attempt, with reference to the civilian damage inflicted by Allied bombardments, to mitigate French collaboration and facilitate Holocaust denial. The volume, which has an excellent index, ranges impressively through Celine's works, from L'Eglise to Entretiens avec le professeur Y, from Voyage au bout de la nuit through the postwar novels, with special reference to the pamphlets. Celine's career is reevaluated comprehensively through the nexus of his race- or gender-based constructions of identity. Scullion, Solomon, and Spear's admirable and original collection emphasizes the ideology driving Celine's emotional subway and will be of interest to the broader critical community as well as to Celine's scholars. Van Kelly University of Kansas Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 1996. Pp. xxii + 258. $49.95. As a sophisticated theorist who is also a meticulous scholar, editor, and translator, JeanMichel Rabaté holds a unique position among Modernist critics. His work on Joyce and Pound alone would earn him pride of place in the academy, but Rabaté is also an authority on Samuel Beckett and Herman Brach, on Mallarmé and Thomas Bernhard, and, most recently—witness the final chapter of this book, "Uncoupling Modernism"—he has turned his attention to Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and H.D. Ghosts of Modernity is a fully revised and expanded English version of Rabaté's La Pénulti ème est morte: Spectrographies de la modernité (1993). If Spectographies and the author's related French studies have not yet won Rabaté the audience he deserves in the U.S., it is probably because his intricate Lacanian and Dcrridean analyses are highly specific; they avoid all cooptation into an "authoritative" metanarrative about the Modern (or Postmodern) condition; then too, they assume at least some knowledge of the authors to be discussed. But for the English edition , Rabaté has provided the reader with an explicit theoretical framework for "rereading modernity "—a framework that has been implicit all along. Rabaté's is basically a theory of reading, deeply informed by the writings of his masters 90 Summer 1999 Book Reviews Lacan, Derrida, and especially Barthes, to whom one of the best essays in the book is devoted. He deplores the "resistance to theory" on the part of many current cultural studies, which subordinates critical analysis to an obsession with contemporary race, class, and gender inequities. Specifically, he wants to show that the much talked about "repudiation of history" on the part of poststructuralist theory is a red herring, that indeed it is possible to be a theorist...