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Céline's oeuvre, like those of numerous other twentieth-century writers, is strongly marked by the problematic status of the writer's fiction visà-vis his politics. For some critics, Celine's anti-semitism and his avowed fascism raise questions about the "quality" of his writings, these overtly ideological works of the late thirties being viewed as the point towards which the works before the fascist "period" move and as the position from which his post-war work emerges. While these questions are of course important, their significance depends entirely on the way they are posed. On the one hand, they can drastically oversimplify the connection between the text and the writer's reactions to the configuration of political forces that surround him and in which his life is embedded. They can imply the kind of uninterrupted continuity of the author's consciousness over time that much recent critical work problematizes. On the other hand, such inquiries can open avenues of investigation into the development of ideological positions and the complex interrelationship of narrative, history, and ideology.
Céline's first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), does not reveal any direct connection to the fascist writings of the late thirties; in fact, the book's abject humor, as well as the reader's consistent and enduring sympathy for Bardamu, seem to undercut the kinds of violence one might expect in the text of such a controversial writer. This obviously does not mean that questions of ideology are not relevant to a critical reading of the novel; it has been demonstrated that protofascist ideology permeates the novel in ways that, although they operate quietly, are nonetheless significant for scholars of Céline, as well as for historians studying the rise of fascism in France in the 1930s.1 The novel's central ideological tension lies in Bardamu's alienation from the ways of life and structures of feeling of bourgeois France during the Third Republic. This alienation is played out in a number of spheres (in the alienation of the wage laborer, in the terrifying loneliness of the agent of imperial commerce) whose cumulative momentum takes Bardamu on a kind of quest that gives the novel its title. I have shown elsewhere that this alienation occurs not only on a thematic level, but, more significantly, on a discursive one as...