The dancers. What an obsession with ballerinas! What a violent passion, the dancers… What can be done to conquer them? Is it worth throwing away an academic career, a dependent family, the possible goal of a good retirement in teaching? Certain. Of course it’s worth it, if the reward is getting closer to the dancers, being able to enjoy their grace, or rather, their graces. Here’s the idea! Write ballets. Ballets in which to stage passions, madness of love, betrayals… Works for theOpera? No, nothing to be done: those who should set the libretto to music are all Jews: “absolutely cordial… flattering at best… only that for the moment… busy… overtired… from this and then from that ultimately quite discouraging… evasive”: many compliments for the poem, but then “a bit long! … too short perhaps?… too corny?… too harsh?… too classic?”. So why not try L’Expoosition Internationale Arts et Techniques dans la Vie moderni, that Exhibition of “Arts and Techniques” that will make 1937 unforgettable? perhaps “a small ballet perfectly in tune with the glories of the Exposition” will be sufficient, says his friend and colleague Léo Gutman. And here is the masterpiece: Paul rogue Virginie courageous, an opera in three acts. But after four days Gutman returns empty-handed. Nothing to be done, the Jews don’t agree to stage it… Propol, the friend decorated for Military Valor who gave a leg up for the defense of the homeland during the great war, and who now smears canvases in Montmartre, has a tough time: fears that the writer, by turning against the Jews, is embarking on a dangerous crusade, in which he could jeopardize his own life; it is not wise to annoy those who occupy all the corners of culture, power and finance; and having a man take his life in Paris costs only 3 to 4,000 francs…
“The Jew is taboo in all the books presented to us. Gide, Citrine, Dorgelès, Serge, etc… don’t say a word about it… So they talk nonsense… They have the air of smashing everything, of destroying this and that, but they don’t make a dent in anything. They sketch, they cheat, they shy away from the essential: the Jew. They only reach the threshold of truth: the Jew […] At this moment the only serious thing for a great man, scientist, writer, filmmaker, financier, industrialist, politician (but then the thing is very serious) is to get into conflict with the Jews […] Entertainment… Talk! But don’t touch the Jewish question, or they will make you regret it…”. Ugo Leonzio in Pain and corruptiona short and intense essay that introduces the text, explains the matter with which the reader of this pamphlet is called upon to deal: “For a long time I tried to explain to myself why Bagatelles pour un massacre was the only truly infernal book produced by French literature after Choderlos de Laclos [autore de Le relazioni pericolose, 1782. NdR]. Every method used to locate or circumscribe this inhuman act of accusation and self-indictment risks appearing fatal or ridiculous: the pathological motivations (“a moment of madness”) and the aesthetic ones are ridiculous (“anti-Semitism is only a metaphor for hatred for the world”); the psychological ones are disastrous («Céline wants to cause a scandal because he is in a phase of creative impotence») and the enigmatic ones («Bagatelles it’s an anti-Semitic pamphlet but we don’t know what Jews are for Céline») […] To be intractable, that is, infernal, a book must be located in an ambiguous zone […] there is a point in which even perversion is overcome, an extreme point of suffering in which it transforms into corruption. This is where you should start reading Bagatelles”. Published five years later Journey at the end of the night (1932) and a year later Death on credit (1936), universally considered among the masterpieces of world literature, the book cost the author the formal accusation of anti-Semitism, the marginalization from French cultural circles – which will last, in practice, until his death – and his job as a doctor at the Clichy dispensary, where he mainly cared for indigent patients. This did not dissuade him from publishing two other clearly anti-Semitic texts: The school of corpses (The École des cadavres1938) e The beautiful drapes (Les Beaux Draps, 1941). At the end of the Second World War, having returned to France after supporting the collaborationist Vichy regime, and the consequent flight to Denmark, it was Céline himself who opposed the re-release of pamphlet, a desire that has marked the printing events of the work since then: even the Guanda edition of 1981 (perhaps the only existing translation of the original complete) was withdrawn from the shelves a few months after publication following the warning raised by the widow of the French writer. The writing is direct, convulsive, emotional: sentences with a very short breath in the tone of invective, broken, marked by the omnipresent suspension dots, – Celini’s stylistic signature, a “jargon that becomes written”, as defined by Luca Pakarov (https: //www.iltascabile.com/letterature/contraddizioni-celine/) – to express what appears to be a real obsession that originates from widely spread prejudices in an easily recognizable cultural and social habitat (“From the Dreyfus affair the cause is buried, France belongs to the Jews, body, soul and goods, to the international Jews.” And again: “Captain Dreyfus is much greater than Captain Bonaparte. He conquered France and kept it.” at least in part, from personal events: the fear – or precognition – of a new imminent disastrous war (Céline had participated as a volunteer in the First World War: the explosion of a grenade had caused him permanent injuries), whose will – or guilt – he accused the Jews (“The next war, one can predict, will be fought on three frontiers at a time, and what celebrations! formidable! not small! gigantic! I wish you beautiful and cheerful! children of Heroes! sons of the Gauls…. Germany! Spain! Italy! Those who know how to dig, will dig! Never have so many trenches, so deep! so wide! so long! they will have swallowed so many men at once! For the immense glory of Israel! for the Masonic Ideal! for the revenge of the little Jews displaced from the beautiful German places!… For the glory of the stock exchanges! of Values and Commerce! and Human Slaughterhouses!); the disappointment at the end of the story with Elizabeth Craig, a dancer of Californian origins with whom he had lived from 1927 to 1933, to whom he had dedicated Journey at the end of the nightand who, upon returning to the United States, had married the rich Jewish real estate criminal Ben Tankel (“the Jews, do you know?… You don’t know them yet… No… no… you don’t know them yet… Say, they don’t have you by chance blown a friend?”). Bagatelle for a massacre reveals a ferocious, structured, systematic hatred (“All the absolute masters of the world are in any case Jews!”) towards those who are seen as custodians of a hidden, omnipresent, pervasive, greedy, racist power, which plots in shadow the enslavement and massacre of non-Jews: a target that takes on the changing forms of a historically well-known ghost (and rather rooted, judging by the 75,000 copies sold by Bagatelle for a massacre, despite the sudden withdrawal from the market for a lawsuit brought for defamation against the author and publisher), testifying to the climate of anti-Jewish prejudice prevailing in French society (and not only), appropriately ridden by political classes ready to tickle the lowest instincts and to indicate the Jews as an easy target for hatred popular, on the basis of works such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the false conspiracy documentary written by Sergej Aleksandrovich Nilus aimed at spreading hatred against the Jews in Russia, which quickly spread throughout Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and which Céline does not fail to mention in the final part of the text). If on the one hand – in light of the horror of Auschwitz and the picture of the Endlosung – it is easy today to express a judgment on the pamphlet (“Bagatelle can become a rail of the Holocaust”, Pakarov always comments), the need to recognize in it the subtle and disturbing trace of those historical and anthropological mechanisms which, far from having been definitively defused by the defeat of the Third Reich and the condemnations of Nuremberg, are always at work in History, in their dramatic recurrence: spirals and destructive impulses that lead to violence, extermination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, which not even the most vivid intelligences sometimes seem unable to escape, and which always have the exact same trigger: the dehumanization of the Other.
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