Seven
Literary Anti-Semitism: The Poetics of Race in Drumont and Céline
The most diverse races—Celtic, Gaulois, Gallo-Roman, Germanic, Frank, Norman—melted together in this harmonious totality that is the French nation. . . . Only the Jew could not enter into this amalgam.
Edouard Drumont, La France juive (1885)
Art is only Race and Fatherland! Salvation through the Arts!
Céline, Les Beaux Draps (1941)
No one today should need to be reminded that France has a long anti-Semitic tradition, which took on an ever-increasing importance as both a political and a cultural phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century. As Léon Poliakov has put it, "If one wanted to gauge the strength of anti-Semitism in a country by the amount of ink used up on the Jewish question, France would win top honors in the nineteenth century."1 What interests me especially is what could be called the literary side of this history; that is, the specific role played by literature and literary figures in the formation of a national identity that is rooted in the representation of Jews as foreign, menacing Others.
Michel Winock, in Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 1990), argues that it was the writer and journalist, Edouard Drumont, who was the first truly popular best-selling anti-Semitic author in France, and it was he who laid the foundation for the modern, political use of anti-Semitism:
In establishing anti-Semitism as the system of universal explanation, [Drumont] made the Jew the negative pole of nationalist movements: it is in relation to the Jew, against the Jew, that the nationalist will define his French or German identity, proud as he is to belong to a community and to know clearly the adversary who threatens its unity and life. (137)
The figure of the Jew in this sense became the support of and the privileged access to national identity; it was on this negative figure, this figure of absolute negativity, that the positive figure of the Frenchman would be constructed. As Winock puts it, "The Jew found his function. He is, through the effect of repulsion, the revealer of national identity. To be French, it was said then, is, par excellence, not to be Jewish" (81). The fabrication of the figure of the Jew as Other thus played an essential role in the fabrication of the figure of the Same, the image or representation of what one was not, crucial to the representation of what one imagined oneself to be. Not only could Drumont's work then be considered the foundation for the modern political use of anti-Semitism, as Winock argues; it could be considered the foundation or model for its modern literary use as well.
But as the political use of anti-Semitism increased at the end of the nineteenth century, there was nothing in the negative representation of "the Jew" in literature that differed substantially from previous representations. In fact, in general, nothing is ever really invented, said for the first time, or original to one author or group, or even to one time or place, when it comes to the representation of "the Jew." To draw a portrait of the Jew as the menacing other, because of the long tradition already supporting anti-Semitism, was to draw on a wealth of resources, images, clichés, slogans, stories, fables, "facts," and documents, all irrefutable in the mind of the anti-Semite because they were irreducible components of the national heritage. Nowhere more than here are we in the realm of the "already said" or the "already represented," the common knowledge that everyone—that is, every "true Frenchman"—is supposed to recognize as true.
The anti-Semitic writer in general could be considered the most traditional of all traditionalists when it comes to the question of Jews, and the most outlandish collections of anti-Semitic clichés were always presented as "historical," which in a sense they were, because as myths or fictional representations they already had had a long history before being brought back to life in the modern period. In fact, read in the context of the long anti-Semitic tradition, the typical anti-Semitic writer is at best a petty collector of sayings and stories, a second-rate scribe, a crass imitator of other anti-Semites, a self-proclaimed vulgarizer of supposedly scientific data and theories, and quite often an outright plagiarist.2 To make something new of this tradition, and to do something other than what had already been done many times before, turned out in almost all instances to be an impossible task. Dominated by the clichéd image or portrait of the Jew, anti-Semitic writing was generally as pathetic and clichéd as the hateful themes and portraits it conveyed.
To read the anti-Semitic literature from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s and 1940s in France is thus to be struck not only by its viciousness and crudeness but also by its horrible repetitiveness, by the way in which writer after writer repeated in a kind of litany the same clichés and myths, and the way in which the portrait of the Jew was repeatedly constructed in order to be contrasted with the "national type." To read one anti-Semitic writer is seemingly to read them all. Nowhere do the effects of ideology, the determination of all thinking by a single unifying idea, seem more evident than here; nowhere do attributes normally associated with art and literature—formal invention and experimentation, imagination and creativity, nuance and complexity—seem more absent. The anti-Semitic writer would seem to be condemnable, therefore, not only on moral and political grounds, that is, as an anti-Semite, but also on literary grounds, as a writer.
And then, along came Céline, who in his three anti-Semitic pamphlets—Bagatelles pour un massacre (Paris: Denoël, 1937), L'Ecole des cadavres (Paris: Denoël, 1938), and Les Beaux draps (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Françaises, 1941)—committed his creativity and imagination, and his "poetic genius" and original style, to the cause of anti-Semitism. In doing so, Céline not only once again confirmed that anti-Semitism was an undeniable component of an ongoing French literary tradition, but he also placed anti-Semitism at the core of his own highly "original" if not revolutionary literary-rhetorical legacy and thus made it an essential element of the modernist revolt against tradition as well. In order to understand better the "accomplishment" of Céline in this area, and his "literary" originality in terms of this issue, it will help to look first at the work of Drumont, the "founder" of modern political and, I would argue, modern literary anti-Semitism in France. Author of La France juive: Essai d'histoire contemporaine (Paris: Marpon and Flammarion, 1885) and founder of the Ligue Antisémite and the extremist, nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole (whose motto was "La France aux Français"), Drumont in a sense set the stage for Céline and made it possible for him, in his revolt against tradition, to realize the full modern literary potential of traditional anti-Semitism, which also constitutes its political potential as well.
To highlight the importance of the literary legacy of Drumont before Céline, I would point to two references among many. In 1902, Maurice Barrès dedicated his novel Leurs Figures to Drumont, his mentor in anti-Semitism, acknowledging the debt he owed to him and in this way proclaiming once again the fundamental link he himself had established between nationalism and anti-Semitism, between the images and figures of the Nation-Self and the war against the ultimate figure of uprootedness and decadence, the anti-Self: the Jew. Decades later, Georges Bernanos referred to Drumont affectionately as "my old master" and called La France juive a "magical" work.3 What Drumont had in fact accomplished in La France juive was not the development of a coherent theory of anti-Semitism that others would apply after him, or the construction of an argument on behalf of its "scientific" or historical legitimacy. Rather, he had provided an enormous literary storehouse of figures and stories for others to refer to, collecting and embellishing on the "historical evidence" linking the Jew to the decadence of modernity, to the transformation of traditional life and values, to the ever-increasing importance of capital, and to the decline of the influence of the Catholic Church—in short, to nothing less than the material destruction and spiritual decadence of France. What makes Drumont's work different from other anti-Semitic pamphlets and works is the ambitiousness of his project, the abundance of references he gives, and the diversity and apparent completeness of the tableau he draws. La France juive pretends to give nothing less than a total picture of the Jew, to constitute a kind of organized, structured encyclopedic definition of the identity of the Jew and a dramatic demonstration of the entirety of his "crimes."
Drumont's work consists of a series of vivid images, pictures, fragments, and stories of the "evil" represented by "the Jew." As Drumont put it in his response to critics of his work, "The result of my book . . . was to bring the Jew well to the fore, to make him leave his vague and feigned humanitarianism in order to show him as he is" (La France juive devant l'opinion [Paris: Marpon and Flammarion, 1886], 11). His work is an attempt to demonstrate, through the presentation of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cases, caricatures, and stories, the single, obsessive thesis of the book: "Everything comes from the Jew; everything comes back to the Jew. There is in this a conquest... of an entire nation by a boundless but cohesive minority" (La France juive, vi). The figure of "the Jew" represents for Drumont an absolute, metaphysical force of evil, the source of everything that is destroying France, the one negative figure to which everything decadent can be traced, and the one group (in anti-Semitic terminology, the one "race") that supposedly profits from such destruction. If this is so, writes Drumont, then the only path open to the French, if they are to regain possession of their nation and themselves, is to wage a total war against the Jews in order to bring about the destruction of this vicious cycle in which they are being conquered and losing everything to the Jews, even or especially their sense of self. It is for these reasons that the picture Drumont draws must also have the appearance of being total, of encompassing every aspect of French social, economic, political, religious, and cultural life.4
In his response to critics of his work who argued that he had not gotten all his facts right—his "Essay of Contemporary History," as his subtitle reads, was anything but historical in the usual sense of the term—Drumont himself admitted that he had "undoubtedly been mistaken in several places." But this too was for him only an indication of the superior truth of anti-Semitism in which the work is rooted:
No matter what some have claimed, La France juive is a truthful book. . . . It is true, of that superior truth which, as Alfred de Vigny in his preface to Cinq Mars says quite rightly, lives on no less in spite of certain inexact details, of that truth [la vérité] which, in history as in art, is sometimes different from what is true [du vrai] of facts. (La France juive devant l'opinion, 50)
Evoking in this way the distinction Aristotle makes between history, the contingent, factual realm, on the one hand, and the higher, universal truth of poetry, on the other, Drumont roots the "truth" of anti-Semitism in the metaphysical universality of the poetic. At least in principle, everything could be historically false in the picture, but as long as the portrait of the Jews had a formal, rhetorical coherence and force, then the work could be considered more true than if it were factually accurate. As the number of editions of La France juive indicate, his anti-Semitic "art" was incredibly popular, and the work not only found the true believers it was looking for but also created a whole new and appreciative audience for anti-Semitism that had not existed before.5
The struggle against the foreign in anti-Semitic nationalist literature is inevitably portrayed as an eternal war, as if it were a question of two natural, antagonistic principles that were fated to struggle against each other for all times: "The Semite and the Aryan, these two personifications of distinct races, irremediably hostile to each other, whose antagonism filled the world in the past and will trouble it even more in the future" (5). Even more basic than the conflicts between nations and peoples, then, Drumont recounts in a pseudo-Darwinian manner, is a war in and of nature, a war of survival among antagonistic forces and species, only one of which, the "naturally" weaker force, is actually responsible for it, because it is always looking for revenge for having lost previous battles, always looking for a way to weaken and thus defeat the "naturally superior" force:
From the very first days of history, we see the Aryan in a struggle with the Semite. . . . The conflict perpetuated itself throughout the ages and almost always the Semite was the instigator before being the vanquished. . . . Today the Semite believes that victory is certain. . . . The Jew has replaced violence by ruse. (7-8)
The fittest, in the general scheme of nature, ought to survive, but the tactics of the weaker force are such that the plot, supposedly guaranteed by nature as the "true," predetermined course of history, is anything but certain.
The "natural" differences between the two "races" are of course crucial to understanding the nature of the war. Since the superiority of European culture over all others, no matter its current state of decadence, is taken as a given—there can be no anti-Semitism without it—the term Aryan, for Drumont, connotes this superiority, "the superior family of the white race, the Indo-European family" (5), while Semite connotes, term for term, trait for trait, the opposite. The lists of characteristics opposing the two terms are always long and seemingly endless; it is as if one can never say enough to ensure that the differences between the "races" will be recognized, that Aryan and Semite will be established as fundamental opposites:
The Semite is mercenary, greedy, scheming, subtle, sly; the Aryan is enthusiastic, heroic, courtly, disinterested, frank, assured, to the point of naïveté. The Semite is of the material world, seeing hardly anything beyond present life; the Aryan is a son of the heavens, ceaselessly preoccupied with superior aspirations; one lives in reality, the other in the ideal. The Semite is by instinct merchant; . . . the Aryan is farmer, poet, monk, and above all soldier. The Semite has no creative faculty, while in contrast the Aryan invents; not the slightest invention was ever made by a Semite. (9).
Anti-Semitism can be seen in such quotations as the means by which the European attempts to found and support his own ideal, heroic identity, an identity that is nothing but the fiction of his superiority, a construct or image whose shape is determined in opposition to the negative myth of the Semite. The more inflated the portrait of the evil other, the more elevated and totalized the portrait of the identity of the people formulated as the other of the other becomes.
More basic than any of the sociopolitical crimes Drumont attributes to the Jews throughout history are the cultural inadequacies ascribed to the Jews, above all their supposed lack of creativity. As we have seen for Barrès, Maurras, Brasillach, and Drieu la Rochelle, all of whom were influenced by Drumont, and as will also be the case for Céline and Rebatet, the Jews, for the literary anti-Semite, quite simply are not and cannot be poets or artists, for they supposedly lack something in their being that is necessary for the creative act. "The truth is that the Jew is incapable of going beyond a very low level. Semites have no men of genius of the stature of Dante, Shakespeare, Bossuet, Victor Hugo, Michelangelo, Newton. . . . In art, they have no original, powerful or moving figure, no major work" (26-27). This "deficiency" of Jews in art and in the creation of original work, and the resulting superiority of Europeans in this area, is the basis for all of Drumont's other claims of superiority; it is the primary sign of why Jews ultimately should not be considered Europeans, or in this instance, French. "We cannot name one Jew who is a great French writer," claims Drumont (29), a judgment that will be repeated by anti-Semitic writers in France after him as a kind of nationalist rallying cry. Once it is "established" that Jews have not made any positive cultural contributions to France, then the next step is to claim that they play a completely negative role, constantly interfering with the natural creativity of the French themselves, constituting a threat to French art and culture, which is seen as the natural expression of national identity.
Drumont argues then that it is necessary to "contemplate, study, dissect, scour, analyze [all works of art], if one really wants to see the Jew" (202), because antiaesthetic, Jewish traits are often mistakenly taken as genuinely aesthetic. The meticulous "search for the Jew" in art is thus necessary because what is Jewish is not always the most evident aspect of a work, but when found, it immediately reveals in even what are considered the highest artistic achievements some unaesthetic characteristics that limit and even destroy them as works of art. For the literary anti-Semite, this is the danger of the Jew in general: the destruction of the highest cultural achievements of Europe. This is why everyone must learn "to see the Jew" everywhere he is hiding; the future of art and the future of Europe depend on it.
For Drumont and literary anti-Semitism in general, Jews have not achieved greatness as writers in France and cannot ever become great French writers because, quite simply, they supposedly cannot speak the French language "properly" or write in a natural, spontaneous, "essentially poetic" way: "Speaking French is something else," claims Drumont. "To speak a language, you first have to think in that language." And what this ultimately means for him is not the ability to speak grammatically correct French with a proper accent, a skill that of course can be acquired even if one is not born in France, but something that supposedly cannot be learned or appropriated, something the truly native French have as a birthright. Speaking and thinking "like a native" in this sense is the essence of the question of national identity. "Your discourse has a taste of its native land drawn from a common source of feelings and ideas" (30), Drumont says, in directly addressing his audience, the true French natives. Nonnatives are always deficient in such "taste" and therefore cannot share the deepest feelings and ideas of the native French that history has buried not only in the depths of the land but also in the nuances, accents, tones, and rhythms—the poetry—of the native language. Literary anti-Semitism has as one of its principal didactic goals to teach the French how to see and hear the foreign; that is, how to develop the faculty of taste they are said to be born with, and by doing so, distinguish themselves from the Jews. The cultural politics of anti-Semitism is thus in Drumont first and foremost a politics and policing of language and culture.
In terms of the ideal of an indigenous national culture, diseases of the nervous system of a people are even more dangerous than imperfections or diseases of the blood. For example, neurosis, which Drumont calls "the implacable disease of Jews," and which he claims has been prevalent for so many years among the Jews that their "nervous system ended up being altered" (105), also risks corrupting the French psyche and thus radically changing the relation of the French people to their past, to their culture, and to themselves. "It pleased the Jews, this perpetually agitated people," asserts Drumont in his discussion of the disastrous effects of the French Revolution, "to destroy the bases of ancient society" (136) and in doing so threaten French culture in its entirety. The real threat of "Jewish neurosis" (105), for him, is that when this intellectual, commercial, political agitation spread to the French themselves, they would continue the work of destruction against themselves and their culture begun by the Jews: "This neurosis, the Jew ended up, and this is strange, communicating it to our entire generation" (108). No drug or operation can cure such a disease, for it is not in its essence physiological; political action alone is not sufficient either. Rather a total psychological and metaphysical cure is necessary, one in which literature, art, and philosophy all have a large role to play in bringing the French back to themselves and reuniting them with traditional culture and society. Cure the mind and the spirit, and the rest will follow; if not, Drumont claims, all of France will soon become neurotic and "Jewified" [enjuivé], un-French.
Long before Céline, Drumont thus painted a picture of modern France and modern French history dominated by the negative influence of Jews. Because his anti-Semitism was not, strictly speaking, biologically determined, it could be directed anywhere and at anyone, at all of history and all "negative" or "decadent" aspects of culture and society. For "the Jew," freed from the restrictions imposed by a strictly racist definition, can be anywhere and in everyone, and no individual, group, class, or religious community, no matter how "pure" their blood, can be considered before-the-fact to be resistant to the Jewish neurosis. Everyone is at risk, and in fact, it is a relatively small step to assert, as Céline will, that almost everyone has already been "Jewified," and has become in his values and means of expression a "foreigner," a "Jew."
Anti-Semitic "history" is in this way, of course, written in terms of these determining factors: whether Jews were defeated or victorious, and whether the Jewish neurosis was contained or had its way and exploded onto the historical scene as a kind of madness. Wars, internal political conflicts, and revolts and revolutions, regardless of the particular individuals, groups, or classes explicitly involved in them, all dramatically reveal the same struggle of the nation against the Jews, even within revolutionary forces themselves: "The Commune thus had two sides: the first, unreasonable, impulsive, but courageous: the French side. The other, mercenary, greedy, thieving, basely calculating: the Jewish side" (401). Underneath events, therefore, lies constant political plotting and the manipulation of power that will result in victory or defeat of the Jews, and in the health or sickness of the nation. The unique law determining history for anti-Semitism is unambiguous and totally determining: "When the Jew is rising, France is falling; when the Jew is falling, France is rising" (515). To make France rise up again, the message is clear: the Jew must be made to fall.
By succeeding in raising the myth of the Jew to the "level of an ideology and a political method," as Michel Winock claims (132), but also, I would argue, to the level of a "total art," Drumont in La France juive laid the groundwork for generations of anti-Semitic nationalists after him. In his own words, however, as he defended La France juive against his critics, Drumont stressed another side of his discourse, one that led even more directly to modern literature and to the anti-Semitic and fascist writers that will take up his legacy: the particular function he gives himself as author in this work. He presents himself as a simple spokesman, a vehicle through which popular sentiment can directly express itself: "I was the spokesman for all sufferings that did not have a voice, for all muted sorrows, for all passive victims, all the resigned, all the exploited, and all the duped who do not have it in them to fight and who don't even dare cry: 'Stop thief!'" (La France juive devant l'opinion, 6). The rage of the populist anti-Semite, no matter how personal, is the rage of all those who can be led to believe they have suffered at the hands of the Jews; all those unwilling, unable, or supposedly kept from testifying on their own behalf to the injustices they imagine have been inflicted on them by the evil forces associated with Jews, who are of course also accused of controlling newspapers, the publishing and culture industries, and the universities. Anti-Semitism always gives this nationalist anger a place, a name, and a figure against which to direct itself.
Drumont's anti-Semitism, then, presents itself as nothing less than the collective expression of a suffering people, a people whose country and identity are being stolen or destroyed. In this way, Drumont defends his work as being deeply populist and "nationalist," an authentic, spontaneous expression of strong feelings of the people, an unmeditated, unreflective (anti-intellectual) popular art that at the same time maintains its formal integrity and poetic consistency: a spontaneous, popular outburst that is at the same time the highest form of art. Built into literary anti-Semitism is the internal necessity to strive for "poetic" (and political) totalization; that is, the formation, exposition, and demonstration of a single idea or image, and its exhaustive, dogmatic application to every aspect of life. Moderation, compromises, and half measures are in fact antithetical to anti-Semitism; a little anti-Semitism, a moderate form of anti-Semitism, is already the basis for absolute, unbounded, generalized anti-Semitism. Cultural or literary anti-Semitism can even be applied more extensively than biologically determined, strictly racist anti-Semitism, which is ultimately limited by the restriction of having to bring everything in the last instance back to "blood." Literary anti-Semites are limited only by the capacities of their imagination.
Much separates the more expository, syntactically orthodox, classical language of Drumont from the wild, seemingly unstructured, often vulgar, popular language of Céline. But in many respects, it is as if Céline were simply taking up where Drumont left off, giving a new language and style to anti-Semitism and thus fulfilling, and taking to a more extreme limit, a process begun in Drumont's La France juive and dictated by its logic. In his pamphlets, Céline readily admitted his debt to all previous anti-Semitic literature, acknowledging that there was nothing original in what he had written in his pamphlets: "All that is written down. I discovered nothing. Absolutely no pretension at all. Simple, virulent, stylized vulgarization" (L'Ecole des cadavres, 33). Céline thus saw himself as a vulgarizer of what he called the "science of Judeology," and yet the stylistic "nothing" that constituted his discovery and his chief contribution to the history of anti-Semitism ended up being everything. For Céline's "stylized vulgarization" of anti-Semitism was not just incredibly successful in its turn, but it also raised even more directly than La France juive the question of the literary-aesthetic dimension both of Céline's particular form of anti-Semitism and of French anti-Semitism in general. It made his style an important part of the controversy surrounding the publication of his pamphlets, and it has made his poetic theory a problem that had to be analyzed in order to understand the ideological implications of his work.
Because of the controversial and yet elevated position held by Céline's novels in the history of twentieth-century literature, especially his early novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Denoël, 1932) and Mort à crédit (Paris: Denoël, 1936), the problem of the relation between his novels and his pamphlets—that is, to put it starkly, his "art" and his anti-Semitism—has been much debated. It has often meant that his novels are treated as being radically different in style, form, and effect from his anti-Semitic pamphlets, that literature and anti-Semitism, poetics and politics, are treated as separate and distinct issues in dealing with his works, as if his anti-Semitism ended where his art began, even in the pamphlets themselves. And the question of style has almost always been considered the key to understanding what separates his racist ideology and politics from his "revolutionary" poetic and narrative innovations.
After the war, Céline's insistence on the problem of style was clearly a way of obfuscating his anti-Semitism and his fascist political preferences. In numerous letters to Milton Hindus, and in interviews and texts in which he defended his activities before and during the war by casting them in the best light possible, Céline argued that he was never really an ideologue but rather "a stylist," a writer not a political militant. In a letter from Copenhagen (April 16, 1947), which summarizes all of the statements he made at various times on this subject, Céline describes his own rhetoric and style in the following way:6
The fact that you consider me a stylist makes me happy—I am that above all—in no way a thinker, God forbid! nor gr writer but stylist I believe I am—my gr—father was a professor of rhetoric at Le Havre—I take from him without a doubt this skill in emotive "rendering." [. . .] I follow emotion closely with words I don't give it time to dress itself in sentences . . . I seize it totally raw or rather totally poetic—because the core of man in spite of everything is poetic[. . . .] Still it's a trick [true] for making spoken language pass into the written—the trick I'm the one who found it no one else—all in all it's impressionism—To make spoken language pass into literature—it's not stenography—It is necessary to imprint on sentences, on intervals a certain deformation an artifice so that when you read the book, it seems as if someone is speaking in your ear—That is accomplished by the transposition of each word[. . . .] To render on the flat page the effect of spoken spontaneous life it is necessary to twist all of language, rhythm, cadence, words and it's a kind of poetry which provides the best spell [sortilège]—the impression, the bewitchment, the dynamism. (Cahier de l'Herne: Céline, 383-84)
No matter how "spontaneous" his writing might seem, no matter how much it might seem as if he wrote without literary pretensions or style, Céline always insisted that his writing was rhetorical and poetic in the strongest sense, a working on language to produce powerful effects. He was especially interested in the rhetorical effect of spontaneous, unreflective—that is, for him—purely poetic language and authentic, unmediated emotion. And his stylistic goal, he repeatedly claimed, was nothing less than the expression of the being of man, what he called man's "poetic core."
Céline made no hard and fast distinction between his pamphlets and his novels, for he considered his style and rhetoric to be the same in each. He was especially proud of his rhetorical skills in the pamphlets, stressing already in Bagatelles pour un massacre the difficulties involved in pulling off the "trick of style":
Nothing is more difficult than to direct, dominate, transpose spoken language, emotive language, the only sincere language, usual language, into written language, to fix it without killing it. . . . Try. . . . It's the terrible "technique" in which most writers collapse, a thousand times more difficult than what is called "artistic" writing. (Bagatelles, 218)
In this way, Céline, and by no means inaccurately, defined himself as a master of the "trick" of making the written come alive, as a master rhetorician whose goal was to twist written language and turn it against itself in order to destroy its conventions and make it better cast its poetic spell. In other words, all of his work, his pamphlets, his novels, and his plays, in his own terms, could be considered a "simple, virulent, stylized vulgarization"—a vulgarization, however, that reveals certain fundamental truths obscured or destroyed by conventional language and rhetoric and what he called "artistic writing." Céline's is an antipoetic poetics, a poetics that assigns itself the total metaphysical project of capturing the essence of the poetic itself, which is also the essence of the political.
In the same letter from Copenhagen to Hindus, Céline admitted that his rhetoric or style was not appropriate for all subjects, or rather that all subjects were not appropriate for it: "It is also necessary to choose one's subject—Everything is not transposable—subjects 'with life' are needed—hence the terrible risks—in order to read all the secrets" (384). A radical form of rhetorical work on the appropriate subjects, then, would supposedly reveal "the poetic core" of man, the secrets of life itself. As a vehicle for revealing profound secrets, secrets that are deemed essential to the survival of European ("Aryan") man and his poetry, the war against the foreign, which is most fully realized in anti-Semitism, must be considered to be the primary subject at the very foundation of Céline's poetic ideology in general, even when it is not explicitly present as a dominant, obsessive theme or a determining component of an extremist political ideology.
In this sense, given the way it is linked to the question of style in his work and construed as the principal support for his poetics in general, anti-Semitism must be considered not a momentary aberration in his thinking but a logical direction for his writing to have taken. Céline's "stylized" anti-Semitism is ultimately rooted in and dependent on the metaphysical poetics he constantly evoked to justify his writing in general, for he not only made race the determining element of his poetics, but at the same time he proposed the realization of a poetic ideal as the ultimate purpose of his racism.
In order to save Céline from himself and to defend the originality and force of his subversive literary practice or style, some of the best-known readers of Céline have attempted nevertheless to make the anti-Semitism of his pamphlets insignificant or irrelevant to his "art" by treating his rhetoric and style, abstracted not just from politics but even from the poetic ideology supporting them, as the only questions worthy of consideration.7 In sharp contrast to approaches that separate the poetic from the ideological stands Julia Kristeva's analysis of Céline, which attempts to explain the profound connection between Céline's anti-Semitism and his commitment to fascism, on the one hand, and his radical form of writing, on the other—how the worst forms of totalitarian ideology and anti-Semitic and racist diatribes are linked to what, for her, is a revolutionary and radically antitotalitarian poetic practice.8 Kristeva's basic argument seems difficult to dispute on both poetic and political grounds: that the pamphlets should not be isolated from the rest of Céline's work because they have the same style of writing as the novels:
[Céline's pamphlets], in spite of their stereotyped themes, carry on the savage beauty of his style. Isolating them from the totality of his texts is a defensive or accusatory act of the left or the right; it is at any rate an ideological stance, not an analytical or literary procedure. The pamphlets provide the phantasmatic substratum on which, otherwise and elsewhere, the novelistic works were built. (Powers of Horror, 174, trans. modified)
Whatever questions one might want to raise concerning Kristeva's reading, her analysis of the way in which Céline's entire literary-aesthetic project is rooted in the recurring phantasms explicitly revealed by the pamphlets is crucial for an understanding of the "political" effects of style and of the poetic or aesthetic nature and function of anti-Semitism in Céline.9
Quite simply, Kristeva considers Céline's "politics" to be an internal rather than an external problem for all of his writing:
His adherence to Nazism, as ambivalent and derisive as that action was, is not one that can be explained. It becomes integrated into the whole as an internal necessity. . . . His hateful fascination with Jews, which he maintained to the end of his life, and the simple-minded anti-Semitism that intoxicates the tumultuous pages of the pamphlets are no accident. (136, trans, modified)
This may very well still be, as Alice Kaplan claims, a complicated way of saving Céline "from fascism without having to deny his fascism or apologize for it" (Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 109), a way of being able to deplore his fascism and still "love" the Céline "whose style might liberate us from the dangerous rigidity of empirical thinking" (108). For Kristeva does "save" Céline and a certain modern literature from falling completely into the abyss opened by his and its fascination with the primal and the mythical (rhythms, music, and the presemantic, which Kristeva associates with the mother), what she calls after Bataille "the abject," whose political manifestations, she argues, are fundamentally totalitarian.10
Kristeva's analysis leads us repeatedly back to what could be called the art of the primal in Céline: the presemantic murmurings, rhythms, songs, dances, obscenities that are for her also presymbolic (actually metasym-bolic or "ur"-symbolic), antitranscendent manifestations of a libidinal energy in its purest, freest form; that is, under the sign and protection of the maternal, in the uninterrupted, undifferentiated (I would add, illusory) proximity if not presence of the mother. This original site, the site of all sites, is at the same time the best and worst of sites. It is the site of total freedom, beauty, and pleasure (read, the poetic), and the site of absolute enslavement, repulsiveness, and horror (read, totalitarian politics). The former meets its limit in and necessarily reverses itself into the latter in this site:
[Céline's style] persuades us that the pleasure [jouissance] of so-called primary narcissism's immanence can be sublimated in a signifier that has been recast and desemanticized to the point of music. Furthermore, it is impossible not to hear the liberating truth of such a call to rhythm and joy. . . . And yet, both the enchantment of the style and libertarian spontaneity do not exist without carrying along with them their own limit: at the very moment they seek to escape from the oppression of thinking, from ethical or legislating Unity, they prove to be tied to the deadliest of phantasms. (179-80, trans, modified)
Led on by the promise of jouissance, the pleasure of "natural" rhythm and unbounded joy, Céline pushed to the limit his pursuit of "liberating truth" and was willing to take the risks involved in such a total poetic/political endeavor, explicitly assuming the hatred against difference and the Other that such an endeavor ultimately implies. Unrestrained, the poetic pleasure principle leads to death.11
The primal, therefore, for Kristeva, could be seen as the ultimate form of the poetic sublime, the irresolvably conflictual realm of love and hatred, beauty and horror, freedom and enslavement. In a sense, all "poetry" is inevitably drawn back to this site if it attempts to realize itself fully as poetry. For, as Kristeva acknowledges, "all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, in the fragile border ('borderline') where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, blurred, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject" (207). This means that Céline for her is just "one possible example among others of the abject" (207), and the real subject of her study is what his writing exemplifies: literature, "the privileged signifier" of the horror of being, as well as of the poetic sense and power of this horror (208).
The chief problem with Kristeva's analysis lies with the metaphysics of poetry that supports it, an (in large part negative) idealization of the poetic as rooted in and equivalent to the primal. Her powerful analysis of Céline's anti-Semitism and fascism and their intimate links with the primal phantasms buried in all his writing, and which orient his style, is thus limited by the privilege she assigns to literature and to the poetic language she claims defines literature. The privilege of the poetic consists in it being considered the original and ultimate form of revolution, of the resistance to transcendence. For this reason, poetry for her always approximates both psychosis and totalitarian ideology: "Poetic language, the only language that consumes transcendence and theology to support itself, poetic language, knowingly the enemy of religion, by its very economy borders on psychosis (as for the subject) and totalitarianism or fascism (as for the institutions it implies or evokes)" (Desire in Language, 125). For Kristeva, fascism and psychosis, then, haunt all literature, and it is certainly not the least gifted writers who give in to either or both of them, but rather those who risk the most. Kristeva's own fascination with the poetic as the original, presemantic language, which has become in her work equivalent to an insistence on the libidinal, maternal, pre-Oedipal characteristics of the ambivalent (read "poetic") subject, leads her with Céline back to the primal. The issue for me is how she and he are led back to this primitive, original site, and what concept of the poetic occupies or constitutes the origin.
Kristeva is certainly not wrong to focus on how Céline's radical attempt to make written language (and literature) more "emotive" is implicated in his hallucinatory diatribes against the Jews, or on how the return to a more "primitive," presemantic poetic level of language mirrors the attempt to return to an impossible, original social site, with the goal of destroying the Symbolic and the transcendent, but at the expense of the figure to which all forms of otherness have been assigned. My question is whether it is sufficient to analyze critically the link between anti-Semitism and literature (the poetic) in Céline's work, if the ultimate goal is to point out the dangers of the one while defending the privileges of the other and "saving it," even if it is in its ultimate form or in the last instance, from fascist contamination.
If a critic fails to challenge the privilege Céline grants to the ideal of an original "native" poetic language as the model for his radical notion of style, if the critic fails to question and undermine the ideal of "literary primitivism" and the immediacy to which his style aspires as fundamental and determining elements of his anti-Semitism, it can legitimately be asked whether the critic has really succeeded in the crucial task of analyzing the interconnection of poetics and politics in Céline's work. Kristeva certainly avoids the most common pitfalls of Céline criticism, which come from initially and totally separating Céline's novels from his pamphlets, and his poetics from his politics. But she reintroduces a similar separation on another, deeper level, when she continues in her own approach, in the name of a critique of fascism and anti-Semitism, to give a very risky, unstable, but still privileged position to poetic language and literature in general, as the alternatives to and the enemies of the transcendent, the Symbolic, and the religious.12
If in Céline the poetic is destructive of what Kristeva calls the Symbolic, and of all forms of religious and political transcendence, it is precisely because true poetry constitutes in its own right the only genuine alternative not only to politics and religion but also to all existing forms of literature and art. Poetry is for Céline the only authentic and total form of transcendence. To understand Céline's anti-Semitism and his politics, therefore, it is necessary to concentrate not just on his "writing as such" but also on his poetic theory, the way in which his proposals for what I would call a total poetics serves as the foundation on which his particular form of hallucinatory, totalitarian politics of race was built. His totalitarian political views and anti-Semitism, in this sense, should not be seen as representing a retreat from his poetic principles or as a result of his crossing the border supposedly existing between the poetic and the political, but rather as constituting the most extreme political manifestation of those poetics.
In trying to situate Céline's "racist politics," traditional political categories are not completely adequate. Unlike the majority of French fascists and anti-Semites with whom he is usually associated, Céline, like Drieu la Rochelle, was not strictly speaking a nationalist and had little sympathy for even radical nationalist movements. In L'Ecole des cadavres (1938), Céline denounced even French extremist, anti-Semitic nationalist movements for not being anti-Semitic enough, for not making anti-Semitism their first and only principle: "Our national rectifiers, men like La Rocque, like Doriot, Maurras, [. . .] they rectify nothing at all, because they never speak first and foremost of getting rid of the Jews. [. . .] They are all in all accomplices of the Jews, poisoners, traitors. [. . .] The Jew is the flesh of their flesh. [. . .] They don't want them to be smashed" (174). Later in the same text, he attacks nationalism in general for being "still another Jewish gimmick [. . .] to get us better to kill each other" (223) through the wars waged in its name. Throughout this pamphlet, Céline argues for the solidarity of the "Aryan race" against the Jews, for an anti-Semitism and racism that would put an end to the divisions and wars among European nations and, above all, make an alliance with Hitler possible and necessary. As a politics, anti-Semitism represented for him the possibility of achieving a unity more basic than any form of political unity based on nationalist principles, the possibility of returning to the origin and the mythical unity of the "Aryan race."
Céline even boasts in the preface to the réédition of L'Ecole des cadavres that was published during the Occupation (1942), that "the Ecole was the only text from the period (in a journal or book) to be at one and the same time anti-Semitic, racist, collaborationist (before the fact) up to the point of an immediate military alliance [with Germany], anti-English, anti-freemason, and predicting an absolute catastrophe in the case of conflict" (in Cahiers Céline, no. 7, "Céline et l'actualité [1933-1961]" [Paris: Gallimard, 1986], 174). His political ideology, founded firmly in anti-Semitism, seems, at least explicitly, to have had little to do with defending the French nation per se and more to do with collaborating with the Germans in the name of an international "Aryan alliance" and a total war against the Jews and "their allies." In terms of most definitions of what it is to be a nationalist, Céline certainly would not qualify.
But such definitions are much too narrow when it comes to someone like Céline. For if Céline was against nationalism as a narrow political ideology, it was because he claimed it did not go far enough in its defense of the nation, nor penetrate deeply enough into the essence of the French people, but ultimately led to their destruction. In his pamphlets, Céline took the position of what could be called a primary nationalism or an ultranationalism, elaborating the mythical project of reviving and saving the French in their very being as a people, prior to any specific political expression of that identity. His "nation" is a nation before the State, an original identity of the people in nature, one that can be revived not by political doctrine but through a return to a primary, spontaneous emotional "poetic" state, which, though lost, would still be possible to evoke or reproduce through a particular practice of art and literature.
Through arguments stressing the original poetic nature of the French people, Céline explicitly linked the question of the form and style of his own writing to the political project of saving the French people from being completely "Jewified," their poetic essence lost in the unnatural and superficial jargon and rhythms he associated with the Jews: "Rediscover a confidence, a rhythm, a music for this people, a lyricism that takes it out of Jewish gibberish" (L'Ecole, 93). Even if it were true, as Céline claimed once again after the war in his fictitious interview with Professor Y, that he was never a political man, never a man of ideas—"I never had any ideas, not me! not one! and I think that nothing is more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas!" (Entretiens avec le Professeur Y [Paris: Gallimard, 1983-; originally published in 1955], 19)—the political implications of his poetics would still have to be analyzed. For even if we accept that he was primarily a "poet," a man of language, of the rhythm and lyricism of popular, "spoken" language, it must also be acknowledged that this lyricism itself was governed by a poetic ideal that was inseparable from a political idea of the people, of a purely poetic, musical people, a people of art.
Céline's ultranationalist poetic ideal—an ideal he defended in his pamphlets, as well as after the war, when he was attempting to dismiss or explain away his fascist and anti-Semitic ideas—is that of the unity and identity of an original people. Rhythm, music, and lyricism represent the essential elements of this primary poetic reality. "In reality, it's the return to the spontaneous poetry of the savage. The savage doesn't express himself without poetry, he can't" (Letter to Milton Hindus [March 15, 1947], in Cahier de l'Herne: Céline, 386). Céline's "primitivism," as a style and as an idea, is in this way intimately linked to the anti-Semitism in terms of which it was explicitly articulated and defended in his pamphlets. For to evoke a state of being before "Jewish gibberish" has had the chance to interfere with the spontaneous, musical poetry of original, "savage man" is to make the Jew not just the historical enemy of the French but also the aesthetic-metaphysical enemy, the antipoetic force that destroyed the original state of being and that interferes with the possible return to that state—the force outside of history that inaugurated history as the struggle for survival between poetic and antipoetic forces, between the Aryan and the Jew.
This characterization of the evil ascribed to the Jews as an absolute, metaphysical evil—an aesthetic evil—one that threatens the very souls and being of the French, makes it necessary to bring every political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic question ultimately back to this original site and to this figure. Wherever there is no rhythm and lyricism, there is the Jew; wherever there is rhythm and lyricism, that is, poetry, there the Jew and his gibberish are absent or have been eliminated, and there the "savage," the original and authentic form of the Frenchman, can be himself and can spontaneously express himself in his native music and tongue. The law governing the ultranationalism of Céline is, as he acknowledged in Bagatelles pour un massacre, that of the jungle: "The great secret of the jungle, of all jungles, the only truth of men and beasts and things. 'Be conquered or conquer,' the only dilemma, the ultimate truth" (60). In politics and in literature, as in the original, mythical jungle, Céline demanded nothing less than that the war between poetic and antipoetic principles and "races" be explicit, that the enemy be known and openly fought and destroyed. The racial-poetic law of survival was thus presented by Céline as being absolute and uncompromising: "It is necessary for us, humans, to yield to this law, to this tendency or disappear. No compromises at all. 'Develop or Disappear,' the natural law of biological 'development' "—which of course must lead to the conclusion that "the Jew must disappear" (L'Ecole des cadavres, 109).
Céline, like Drumont and the other literary anti-Semites, represented "the Jew" as being unpoetic or unaesthetic in his very being, without the gift of aesthetic creation and reduced to the lowliest state of mimeticism: "[The Jew] sings any song you want, dances to all types of music, wriggling with monkeys, howling with the lowly wolves,.. . imitating all animals, all races. . . . He's a mimetic [un mimétique], a whore" (Les Beaux draps, 142). To compensate for his lack of creativity, according to Céline, the Jew is forced not only to mime but also to reason rather than feel. The passage that follows summarizes all of the anti-Semitic clichés of the non-original, parasitic, antiaesthetic characteristics projected onto the Jews in order to contrast them point by point with the people endowed with the capacity to feel and create, the people of art:
Jews are rather poorly gifted for the arts, biologically, at the very foundation of their nature. They try in Europe to create art, nevertheless they manage it badly and at cross purposes. . . It is necessary for them to supplement this lack, to cheat, to ceaselessly plunder, to suck out the life of their neighbors, the natives, to sustain themselves. . . Jews disastrously lack direct, spontaneous emotion. .. They speak instead of experiencing. . . They reason before feeling.. . Strictly speaking, they experience nothing. [. . .] They are condemned if they inhabit our climate to waste their energy on grimaces, tom-toms, in imitations, like Negroes and like all monkeys. . . They feel nothing directly and assimilate very few things profoundly . . . from which comes [. . .] all this pompous, doctrinaire masturbatory material, instead of direct humanity, true inspiration. (Bagatelles, 69)
"The Jew," without the gift of art, produces critical treatises and servile imitations of art and in this way acts as an aesthetic and political parasite, threatening true art and authentic artists by sucking out their life and force.
Céline's pretense of being a "man of style," a writer who worked to "render the emotive" in written language, to twist written language so that the spontaneity of feeling came through it, and the related admission that he had never had any ideas, can both be seen, then, not just as statements of poetic principle but also as ways of continuing to claim: I am not a Jew. I am a genuine, poetic Frenchman. I give a true, unmediated, authentic picture of "direct humanity" of which I and my work are representative. This evocation of the primal, emotive force of an original, spontaneous poetic language and the figure of a poetic people cannot be separated in Céline's work from the force and figure to which they are opposed: the apoetic or antipoetic force of servile mimesis and the figure of the Jew as the unfeeling, uninspired mime.13
For Céline, the danger represented by the Jews for art and culture in general was not just that they constituted the inauthentic, the nonoriginal, the mimetic—that is, the antiaesthetic extreme—but also that they had succeeded in corrupting the taste of the "Aryan masses," who, because of their influence, could no longer distinguish between the authentic and the false, the original and the copy:
The immense astuteness of the Jews consists of progressively removing from the standardized masses all taste for the authentic, and then from all indigenous artists every possibility of expressing, communicating their sensitivity to their racial brothers, to reawake in them any authentic emotion. The Jews, the revenge of the Abyssinians! have inverted the taste of Whites so deeply, to the point that the French prefer in the present the false to the authentic, the grimace to sensitivity, imbecile mimetism to direct emotion. (187)
The danger of mimesis is that it is difficult to contain, and if left unchecked it contaminates everything. The revolution in art, like the revolution in society and politics, therefore had to be total in order to counter the corrupting effects of this "inversion of tastes." The capacity to feel, the basic taste for the authentic and the direct, had to be restored, and centuries of the corruption and inversion of the emotive and the aesthetic had to be reversed. Nothing less than the identity of the French (of all Europeans) as "Aryans," which was postulated as being rooted in their capacity to feel and create, was argued to be at stake.
This meant that the "Aryan" had to rediscover his native poetic rhythm in order to fend off the alien rhythms of the "tom-toms" that had been imposed on him and that imprisoned him, making him radically other than he originally was or should be, a robot following the directions of foreign forces, languages, and rhythms:
The only defense, the only recourse of the White man against robotism, and undoubtedly against war, [. . .] is the return to his proper, emotional rhythm. The circumcised Jews are in the process of castrating the Aryan of his natural emotional rhythm. The Negro Jew is in the process of making the Aryan tumble into Communism and robot art, into the objectivist mentality of perfect slaves for Jews. (191)14
Céline considered political enslavement to be inevitable unless an effective resistance to the corrupting poetics of the unnatural could be found. To castrate the Aryan of his natural rhythm is to castrate him of his poetic being, to reduce him to the state of a poetic and political mime or robot; in other words, to make him a Jew.
Not to have the gift of art, of inspiration and feeling, was ultimately not to be totally human, and Céline's anti-Semitism and racism—of both the prewar and the postwar periods—were rooted in the presumption that the "non-Aryan" lacked these gifts.15 For there was always a poetic purpose behind such racial hatred and ideological "madness." Because "the Jew" was defined as being entirely mimetic rather than original, authentic, or creative, the obsessive, hallucinatory representation of the Jew in Céline's pamphlets could be considered to be his attempt to represent mimesis in itself; that is, to represent the unrestrained process of mimeticism when it is cut off from any original source or referent. It constituted Céline's poetic-political effort to neutralize and overcome the mimetic in its most extreme form. This explains the exaggerated, unrestrained characteristics of such representations, their tendency to take over the entire field of representation, given that they were ungrounded, cut off from any specific reality or referent, and at least in principle infinitely variable. What is consistent in Céline's work, therefore, is not the form given to the Jew (to the mime or mimetic process), but rather the will to overcome all forms of mimeticism and return to the immediacy of pure poetic expression and rhythms. Anti-Semitism, in this context, thus has the form of a radical, primitive poeticism; the total negative representation of the Jew serves as the means for (re)instituting the poetic being of "Aryan man."
Céline's apparent shifts of opinion about whether particular individuals or groups should be characterized as being Jewish or "Jewified" have presented problems for readers looking for a logic or coherence on the referential level of his anti-Semitism. Such apparent contradictions are resolved, however, if they are analyzed in the light of the extreme, antimimetic, poeticist logic at the foundation of Céline's anti-Semitism, for there are no passages in any of Céline's works that contradict specific anti-Semitic passages, and certainly none that contradicts his anti-Semitism as a whole. Racine, the pope, or whomever else he called a Jew may not consistently and in all places be presented and denounced as a Jew, but the representation and denunciation of Jews and the "Jewified" as being responsible for the corruption of "Aryans," and the characterization of the entire process of "Jewification" as one in which mimeticism destroys "native" art and the spontaneity of authentic poetic rhythms, are invariable constants of his work. Céline's unrelenting, terrifying, but nonetheless logical poetic and political project was always to reverse this process and overcome mimesis, and in doing so to put an end once and for all to the "Jewification" of the French people and their art.16
There is thus an underlying logic to the contradictions of Céline's anti-Semitism, for he presents both the Jews and the literary and political groups with which he associates them as manifesting the same lack of spontaneous feeling and creativity and representing the same threat to the poetic being of the "Aryan":
Sur-realism. Nothing more to fear from it! No emotionalism necessary. Take refuge in it, proclaim oneself a genius in it, anyone who wants. Any eunuch whatsoever, any sticky kike in a frenzy of deceptiveness can place himself at the pinnacle. All that is necessary is a little understanding, very easy to achieve, with the critics, that is, among Jews. [. . .] The Jews [. . .] are accomplishing at present, under the same banner, their conquest of the world, the monstrous crushing, the degradation, the systematic and total annihilation of our most natural emotions of all our essential arts, instincts, music, painting, poetry, theater. . . . 'Replace Aryan emotion with the Negro tom-tom.' Sur-realism, the prolongation of naturalism, art for hateful robots, instrument of despotism, of swindling, of Jewish deception. [. . .] It's the cadaster of our emotive degeneration. (Bagatelles, 170-71)
The Jew is being represented and identified by Céline in this and other passages as the supreme anti-poetic figure who is capable of taking on an infinite number of diverse forms and identities because he lacks an authentic poetic origin and the national-emotive identity of the "Aryan."17
The reason the Jew is everywhere is that he is everything the "poetic savage," the natural Frenchman ("Aryan"), is not, everything that is unnatural in the state of nature and after and outside of nature. Of course the Jew has an endless number of diverse, though not (at least not on the level of the poetic logic at work here) contradictory forms—he would not be as dangerous a parasite, as corrupting a mime, as inhibiting a cerebral force, as powerful an enemy, if he were not so heterogeneous in form. This is the most dogmatically ideological and the most ruthlessly logical and least contradictory of positions. It constitutes an excellent example of what Hannah Arendt has called "the tyranny of logicality" (The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973], 473), the determination and evaluation of everything in terms of the same poeticist-racist principle.
Céline's pamphlets are also performances in anti-Semitic rhetoric and representation, as well as teaching devices to aid precisely in recognizing and identifying the Jew, wherever he is, whatever form he takes on, whatever antipoetic practice he uses:
It is necessary to learn [. . .] to recognize the mark, the trace, the grip, the initiative of the Jews in all the upheavals of the world, there where they are carried out. [. . .] It is necessary to learn to decipher in daily practice the color and the tone, the chatter of Jewish imperialism, of Jewish (or freemason) propaganda, it is necessary to learn to pierce through, to determine at the base of all the shadows, [. . .] behind all the grimaces, the universal lie, the implacable conquering Jewish megalomania. (124)
If the Jew is everywhere because he is nothing in himself and has no natural origin to which he can be linked, then nothing and no one is exempt from his influence and from the possibility of being "Jewified," and no hint or trace of Jewish influence is too obscure to identify, no manifestation too insignificant to denounce.
So when Céline rants and raves that wars are Jewish, that the high rate of alcoholism among workers is the fault of the Jews, that democracy, communism, royalism, and nationalism, newspapers of the right and left, all politics, all business, film, theater, and literature, the Catholic Church, the pope, and the Apostles are all Jewish or "Jewified," he must be taken seriously, not just as a dangerous racist and ideologue, but also as a radical, extremist theoretician of the poetic. Which means that his theory of poetics and its totalizing logic must be understood not exclusively in poetic terms but in connection with his hallucinatory political and racist ideas as well. For the only force that remains uncorrupted, outside of the destructive effects of mimesis, is the authentic poetic voice itself, the voice of Céline-poet crying out and denouncing all forms of antipoetic "Jewification" before it is too late, giving to this cry a style and a force it never had before, and refusing to limit it in any way in order to make it less contradictory or more "realistic" in its aims or representations.
Thus, Céline's "revolution in poetic language" can never be taken as simply "liberating," even on poetic grounds alone. For the war he waged against grammar, syntax, and lexical restrictions, against the state of French language in modernity, the dead language French had become in the hands of bourgeois and "Jewified" professors, journalists, and writers, was the same war he waged against the Jews. It was a war fought on behalf of another, more primitive, more authentically French, emotive, poetic language, a war to make French literature and the French language truly French again or perhaps even for the first time.
To defend the natural poeticity of "native French," he therefore has to denounce all formal, rhetorical, and grammatical limitations imposed on the French language, everything that transformed authentic, emotive French into the falsely "literary" French of the bourgeoisie, of professors, robots, and Jews:
The delicately French, "stripped down" French language, adapts itself marvelously to this design. [. . .] The "French" of the lycée, decanted "French," filtered French, stripped-down rigid French, scrubbed (modernized, naturalist) French, muzzled French, Montaigne, Racine French, Jewish French for baccalaureates, the French of Anatole the Jewified, Goncourt French, the disgusting French of elegance, molded, Oriental, unctuous, slimy as shit, it's the very epitaph of the French race [....] It's the ideal French for Robots. (166-67)
Céline wrote against this French and against the "Jewification" or depoeticization of his people; he proposed another "purely poetic" form of French and another way of being French that were in themselves the sign that all was not lost, that the "savage poetry" of the original French had not been totally destroyed and could be restored or recreated once again. Winning the battle against mimesis and the Jews ultimately meant, then, restoring to the French language its original, purely poetic qualities. And even after the war, when he ceased his anti-Semitic diatribes, Céline never gave up this totalitarian poetics of language.18
Whatever the inconsistencies of Céline's explicit political positions, whatever the absurdities, exaggerations, and contradictions of his racist claims, this poetic ideal remained consistent and unchallenged throughout his work. To claim that Céline, after Drumont, Barrès, Maurras, and many others, but in a very different style and context, made of anti-Semitism a profoundly aesthetic, literary phenomenon, is not to say that his pamphlets had no political effects. Quite the contrary. It is to claim, rather, that their political effects were rooted in and inseparable from their poetic premises and rhetorical strategies. Céline could be considered the writer who most completely realized the anti-Semitic literary project, who through his unrestrained representation of the Jew as the original mimetic, antipoetic force demonstrated how anti-Semitism was not just rooted in an ideological principle or racist idea, but was also the product of a radical poetic theory and in this way was also a problem of style and rhetoric. Céline's pamphlets reveal that the mad but brilliant "humorous" lyricism of this poet of popular language, and the poetic theory developed to describe and justify it, are inseparable from his anti-Semitism and are the foundation of his totalitarian political vision.
I am certainly not suggesting that all radically antimimetic theories of literature are essentially totalitarian or that an insistence on poetic rhythm leads inevitably to anti-Semitism. I am arguing, however, that in Céline's case his antimimetic poetics and anti-Semitism, and his poetic and political visions, were inextricably linked together and that no critic can afford to ignore the one in order either to praise or condemn the other. It seems to me important for both poetics and politics to understand how Céline's absolute form of anti-Semitism was in fact profoundly poetic or literary in form, and how a revolutionary theory and practice of narrative gave form and style to a racist and totalitarian politics.
This does not mean that all of Céline, every line of every novel he wrote, must be considered racist and therefore condemned or censored. On the contrary, it means rather that the fundamental poetic problems raised by his work, such as the impact of his "revolutionary style," the nature of his poetic theory and practice, and the implications of his break with narrative conventions and lexical restrictions, can never be treated completely in themselves as exclusively poetic problems. Rather, the questions of anti-Semitism and totalitarian politics must always be raised in connection with his poetics and as poetic problems, even when they are not present as explicit themes in the works being treated. A critical understanding of his poetics cannot afford to ignore or deemphasize in any way the monstrous forms his poetic principles took in his pamphlets and the specific destiny the pamphlets gave to the style Céline practiced and defended. In his case, the totalization of the poetic and the political, which is typical of literary fascism in general, is pushed to its extreme limits, revealing in this way the terrifying implications of the absolute poetics of race.