ABSTRACT
Louis-Ferdinand Celine remains today an outsize bone of contention in French culture, because of his alleged, and real, collaboration during the Second World War. In Celine, heaving with laughter and eructating because of excess intake or traumatic anxiety are coterminous. Virtually the only relief for Celine's agonist from verbal diarrhoea, diarrhetoric, is elective mutism. The spirit in which Celine wrote his Bagatelles pour un massacre, and it's very title, go back directly to a diary entry by Charles Baudelaire: 'A fine conspiracy could be organised for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race.' Both Jules Valles and Celine were rebels, in their non-conformist ideas, in their destabilized structures, and in their humour. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that a communist could not write a novel proper, because, believing in the inevitability of the historical process; he could only underplay the freedom, of character and of narrative, essential to the novel.
