Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1894–1961
1,568 words
French translation here
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Trifles for a Massacre
Trans. anonymous
Asunción, Paraguay: Les Editions de La Reconquête, 2010
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) is my favorite writer I don’t enjoy reading, much as Vertigo is my favorite movie I don’t enjoy watching.
I started browsing through Journey to the End of the Night
Around the same time, I was reading Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions
I first heard of Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) in July of 1992 in Florence King’s With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look At Misanthropy
When Céline published Bagatelles, he was fired from his job as a doctor in a state clinic for the poor. He was invited to write for French Right-wing papers, but it is said that his contributions were rejected for being too extreme. The pamphlets were also reportedly banned by the Nazis for being too hateful. In truth, Céline’s ranting style, sweeping generalizations, questionable source material, and literary inventions betray the essential rationality of his position and play into the hands of the enemy.
Naturally, for his troubles, Céline also earned a place on the death lists of the Résistance, so when the Americans swept into Paris, he fled with the remnants of the Vichy government to Germany, where he served as the personal physician of President Pierre Laval.
When Germany fell, Céline fled to Denmark, where he was imprisoned. He was tried in absentia in France and sentenced to a year in prison, “perpetual disgrace,” a fine of 50,000 francs, and the confiscation of his worldly possessions, which hardly mattered since he was a pauper. He returned to France in 1951 after an amnesty and went back to practicing medicine and writing.
Given the trouble they caused, it is perhaps understandable that Céline’s widow has refused to allow the “pamphlets” to be reprinted or translated. But the world of literature is subject to higher laws, so the courageous publisher Les Editions de La Reconquête, operating under relative legal impunity in Paraguay (!), has reprinted all three volumes in French and brought out the first translation of Bagatelles.
Aside from the threat of a lawsuit, the greatest impediment to translating Bagatelles is the style. My French is quite good, but I found Bagatelles impossible to read in the original because it is filled with impenetrable slang, and how many virtuoso translators are willing to work on Samisdat translations of a writer condemned to “perpetual disgrace”? Finally, though, a translator has been found.
So, what is Trifles for a Massacre about? It seemed amazing to me that the secondary literature about Bagatelles never really tells us what the book is about. Having read the book, I am amazed no more.
Céline served as a soldier in the trenches of the First World War, where he was wounded and where he saw countless men killed and maimed in unimaginably terrifying ways. This gave him an abiding hatred of war. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a deafening and coordinated din of anti-German, pro-war propaganda began to issue from virtually all the presses of every Western society. Céline examined this propaganda, connected the dots, and noticed that its chief propagators were Jews who were urging non-Jews in France and England to spill their blood in another war with Germany to slake Jewish hatred of Hitler.
That is the “massacre” of the title. It is a massacre of Europeans advocated by Jews, not a massacre of Jews advocated by Céline. What then was Céline’s solution to the Jewish problem? First, he wished to relentlessly expose the roles of Jews as war-mongers as well as agents of Bolshevism and cultural decadence. Eventually, he hoped to expel all the Jews from France.
Literary commentators, of course, shake their heads and play dumb, asking what could possibly have sent Céline off on his tirade against the Jews. Could he have been crazy? Could a comely Jewish girl have broken his heart?
The answer, of course, was the overwhelming daily evidence of Jewish-instigated anti-German hate- and war-mongering. The critics deftly sidestep this problem by seizing on the fact that Céline decodes this propaganda with the aid of The Protocols and other hoary chestnuts of anti-Semitica which, we are constantly told, have been “discredited” by their shady origins even if they seem confirmed by every daily newspaper.
Céline also harms his case by accusing virtually every agent of decadence of being a Jew. Even the Bourbons, we are told, were Jews. Look at their noses! Some of this, of course, is literary playfulness. But anything you say about Jews can and will be used against you.
Any American who has paid attention to the nearly ten years of intense war-mongering since September 11, 2001, and who has connected the dots and noticed that Americans are killing and dying not for our interests, but for the interests of Israel and Jews around the globe, will find Trifles for a Massacre all too spookily . . . familiar. But that shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. It is the same people saying and doing the same sorts of things, because . . . it works. Because we fall for it again and again and again.
Imagine if America’s greatest avant-garde novelist (whoever that would be!) spent the last ten years reading Anti-War.com and decoding events with the aid of Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections. Then imagine that he tosses in the occasional ballet scenario and Mike Roykoesque Slats Grobnik common man dialogue in the most impenetrable working class argot, phonetically rendered. Then you will have a sense of Trifles for a Massacre. Or better yet, let me pick a page at random:
That which is called Communism in well-advanced circles is a great reassurance-cache, the most highly perfected system of parasitism of any age . . . admirably guaranteed by the absolute serfdom of the global proletariat . . . the Universalism of the Slaves . . . under the Bolshevik system, a super-fascist farce, an internationalist superstructure, the greatest armored strong-box that has ever been conceived, compartmentalized, riveted, and soldered together using our guts, for the greater glory of Israel, the ultimate defense of the elernal pillaging Kike, and the tyrannical apotheosis of delirious Semites! . . . Salute! . . . For that truly! . . . not for Moloch! I just don’t feel like it! . . . to enable still other mad half-niggers a thousand times as bad, as incompetent, as chattering, a thousand times as criminal as those which are going to lose! So many super-Béhanzins . . . No way! . . . Why do it? . . . But if it were a question of true communism, of the sharing of all of the world’s goods and sufferings on the basis of the strictest egalitarianism, then I would be for it more than anyone . . . I no longer need to be agitated, to be catechized . . . to be bothered. I am ready, so be on your guard . . . I am the most sharing person that you’ll ever know . . . and I’d let you share my bills, so that it wouldn’t cost so much for me to live . . . Communism such as you’d want, but without the Jews, never with the Jews. (p. 105, all ellipses in original)
Céline was serious about his egalitarianism. His misanthropy was tempered by a deep sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden. Journey to the End of the Night was so suffused with solidarity for the working man and hatred of capitalism that it was published in the USSR in 1934.
Céline was invited to visit the USSR in 1936. He was horrified by what he saw. Upon his return, he published Mea Culpa (1936), a short book about his experiences where he noted in passing the overwhelmingly Jewish nature of Bolshevism and rejected the very idea of progress and the perfectibility of man.
But clearly he also believed that a non-utopian socialism was possible, but that this possibility had been aborted in Russia and that Communism had been turned into a means by which Jews expropriated the wealth of Russia and killed the best of the gentiles.
You can purchase Trifles for a Massacre from the publisher’s website: http://editionsdelareconquete.com/ It was published in paperback only, in a limited edition of 5,010 copies (of which I have number ten). Unfortunately, it is very expensive: 68 Euros plus 12 Euros postage. But considering the risks and costs the publisher has shouldered, as well as the service he is rendering to world literature and historical truth, it is an expense worth bearing.
8 comments
“Israel, the ultimate defense of the elernal pillaging Kike, and the tyrannical apotheosis of delirious Semites! ”
Best description of Israel ever.
Elsewhere, he had the best description of Our Situation, from 1960: “”Stalingrad. There’s a catharsis for you. The fall of Stalingrad was the end of Europe. There’s been a cataclysm. It’s epicenter was Stalingrad. After that you can say that white civilization was finished, really washed up.”
“Communism such as you’d want, but without the Jews, never with the Jews.”
As I’ve frequently blogged, socialism, not Anglo-Judaic capitalism [‘the “free” market’], is the telos of Euro-Man; Yockey’s Ethical Socialism, Spengler’s Prussian Socialism. Hence, most recently, the hate campaign against the Euro-PIIGS and in general, the myth of Euro-Decline. Here’s Michael Hoffman II on “Celine’s Aryan Communism” :
http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/letters/40304letters.htm
“Imagine if America’s greatest avant-garde novelist (whoever that would be!) spent the last ten years reading Anti-War.com and decoding events with the aid of Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections. ”
Hence, the calls for internet “licensing” and bemoaning the “decline of civility and journalistic standards.” Whenever I here about “standards” I recall the New York Times and its front-page stories, day after day, detailing Iraq’s WMD program.
“Céline decodes this propaganda with the aid of The Protocols and other hoary chestnuts of anti-Semitica which, we are constantly told, have been “discredited” by their shady origins even if they seem confirmed by every daily newspaper.”
Evola responded to such notions by dismissing the question of “authenticity” as a red herring, and pointing out that the Protocols effectively WORK: that it, anyone using them as a guide would have been better informed about the XXth century than someone reading, say, the Times.
Thank you.
This is a fascinating and enlightening article. I first learned of Celine, apart from a throwaway reference to him by Orson Welles, at the Skadi forum. This article confirms that the high regard in which the members there hold him is well justified.
I particularly appreciate this passage:
We would do well to have more Celines today. As the article points out, today’s political events situate white Western man in a kind of eternal recurrence. We have been sent to die for these people throughout our history, and for the sake of our race and culture, it has to end.
I don’t mean to send the thread off on a tangent, but I’m curious about this:
Interesting way to put it. If you mean what I think you mean, which is that watching Vertigo is painful because it is so heart-rendingly tragic, particularly the ending, I agree. But I love the movie — one of my top five films — and find it a rare instance where a product of popular culture deserves its high standing. It is just about the purest, truest depiction of obsessive human love even put on screen, laying bare the nature in which men love women when they are at their most enthralled (to use the word in the sense of “thrall”). Kim Novak’s Madeleine character is the most archetypally desirable depiction of femininity in film, short of La Dolce Vita, and comes closer to embodying Nordic beauty (yes, though she had a Slavonic background) than nearly any other actress to emerge from Hollywood, where such an appearance has always been suppressed. When I first saw the film, ages ago, it tore out my heart, and I’ve always been under its spell.
Well said, yes Vertigo is one of my favorite movies, but it is painful to watch. And yes, Kim Novak’s Madeleine is breathtaking.
Upon reading this article a staunch Célinian posted the following comment to the publishing house’s mailbox : “Absolument parfait.”
It’s amazing, and rather depressing, how this lengthy tradition of speaking against Jewish power has been suppressed. Europeans in every age have denounced the Jews as trouble-makers and agitators. Unfortunately, most of these works are only known to us by the fragments denounced by the Jews, such as passages quoted by Josephus. It’s good to see these authors being rescued from obscurity.
Greg,
How do I actually order this book? I have wanted to read this for years.
Greg,
I see now that this was posted about 5 years ago. I tried the link but maybe they are out of copies. I am very disappointed.
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