Ambivalence and opportunism concerning the great war in céline’s novel casse-pipe

Abstract

Considering his alternating patriotic/bellicist and antimilitaristic/pacifistic speech in military carnets and correspondence between 1912 and 1916, ambivalence already seems to have characterized Louis-Ferdinand Destouches’ attitude towards the military during his service years. These uncertainties will be shown to be a catalyst for Céline’s ambiguous depictions of the Great War in his successive and opportunistic writings. This article will focus on Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Casse-pipe [Cannon Fodder], examining the rewriting of the period preceding the Great War. It will explore how Céline, in this 1936 novel, reassesses his uncertainties as a soldier in the barracks. Instead of approaching the use of the subject of the Great War as an autobiographical acknowledgement of his past, this will be a study of the opportunistic search for literary recognition, which announces the much more ambiguous rhetoric that would dominate Céline’s pamphlets between 1936 and 1941.