Writing and Resistance in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Féerie pour une autre fois I

Writing and Resistance in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Féerie pour une autrefois I Rosemarie Scullion FÉERIE POUR UNE AUTRE FOIS I, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's first novel of the post-World War II period, deviates significantly from the narrative mode the author adopted in his prewar novels. Féerie I is the first of five novels (including Féerie pour une autre fois II [Normance (1954)], D'un château l'autre [1957], Nord [1961] and Rigodon [1969]), in which the first-person narrator and protagonist share the same identity, that of Céline the writer. Henri Godard points out that "Féerie pour une autre fois établit définitivement l'identité du héros-narrateur sous ses noms successifs et de Céline."1 Godard considers Féerie to be a pivotal work in Celine's œuvre since it is the first novel in which the boundaries between fact and fiction, the textual and the referential, give way as the narrator assumes the proper name "Céline." Despite an epigraphic disclaimer stating that the circumstances represented bear no resemblance to "real" life, Féerie'% autobiographical inflections are readily discernible to readers familiar with the personal, political and legal saga Céline found himself facing in the aftermath of World War IL The author nonetheless insists upon the irreal character of the story he is about to tell, proclaiming: L'horreur des réalités! Tous les lieux, noms, personnages, situations présentés dans ce roman, sont imaginaires! Absolument imaginaires! Aucun rapport avec aucune réalité! Ce n'est là qu'une "Féerie"...et encore!... pour une autre fois!2 In the pages that follow, Céline takes up his "petit style subversif (82) and sets about spinning a fantasmagorie tale of ideological crime and punishment he is intent on foisting upon a postwar readership he plainly despises. The "féerie" he fashions becomes an anarchic signifying terrain in which temporal and spatial order is ruthlessly shattered and sentences are hacked into sometimes unintelligible morsels of fiercely oppositional meaning. It is in this thicket of historical, literary and political signs that Céline the author seeks refuge from the juridical gaze France's post-Liberation purge courts trained on his person and his writing in the six-year period that followed his April 1945 indictment on charges of high treason, a capital offense that carried the death penalty. In Féerie, writing becomes a gesture of revolt and the blank 28 Fall 1998 Scullion page a site of resistance from which Céline would vigorously contest the charges levelled against him and fight a demand for extradition that, in 1946, Henri Godard avers, "avait toutes les chances de lui être fatale d'une manière ou d'une autre."3 Throughout Féerie, Céline addresses his reader, relating his tormented existence as a political pariah on the vanquished side of history. The novel opens with a scene in wartime Paris in which Céline, "le notoire vendu traître felon qu'on va assassiner demain" (12), decries the death threats of which he has become the object in the final months of the Nazi Occupation of France. The wife and son of a Gaullist acquaintance are paying Céline a visit in his Montmartre apartment and he is highly suspicious of their intentions toward his person and possessions. Are they plotting to take over his apartment and to make off with his belongings once he has been assassinated by Allied agents or the Resistance? From the Montmartre apartment, the site of narration shifts abruptly to a postwar Danish prison cell, no doubt similar to the ones in which Céline himself was held in Copenhagen's Vester Faengsel prison between December 1945 and February 1947. The circumstances leading to Celine's arrest have a direct bearing on the discourse of victimization his imprisoned narrator enunciates in Féerie and, as such, merit recollection. Having produced three anti-semitic and anti-democratic political pamphlets (Bagatelles pour un massacre [1937], L'Ecole des cadavres, [1938], and Les Beaux Draps [1941]) on the eve and in the first year of the war, Céline was widely seen after...