Dave's Book Blog: "Journey to the End of the Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The life journey of an Everyman teaches him to be a cynical misanthropist.

Ferdinand Bardamu joins the army at the start of the First World War; after being wounded he is invalided out although he spends some time at a psychiatric hospital to be assessed as to whether his developed reluctance to be killed is a mental disease or cowardice. He then travels to colonial Africa to become an agent. Escaping, he is shanghaied and made to work as a galley slave before finding freedom in New York. Returning to Paris he becomes a doctor in a poor suburb and becomes embroiled in a plot to murder an old lady. Throughout he does his best to avoid being killed, to earn enough money to survive, and to have sex as often as possible.

I was reminded of Voltaire's Candide in which the eponymous hero travels the world having repeatedly dreadful experiences, except that Bardamu is the very opposite of Dr Pangloss, seeming to espouse the philosophy that everything is for the worst in this the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps more obvious influences would be Rabelais and Jonathan Swift.

Incredibly this long, difficult book with its unstructured picaresque plot was a best-selling debut for the pseudonymous author (a real doctor who had been wounded and decorated in World War One and spent time in French colonial Africa). This was, perhaps, the reason why this rambling discursive style influenced later writers such as Jean Genet, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.

Here's an example of his work which captures both his negativity towards the world, his discursivity, and his gloriously original description. “Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets around about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulant advertisements. False promises. Drivelling lies.” (p 169)

At various intervals on this odyssey he encounters his alter ego, a sort of negative doppelganger, Leon Robinson, first during the First World War, as a fellow soldier, again in Africa, and again when he is working as a doctor. Robinson does what Bardamu dreams of doing.

Bardamu is haunted by death. This starts with the first world war but he is repeatedly reminded of death, of course, when he's a doctor. Death is the night at the end of the journey. Almost exactly halfway through, in New York, trying to keep up his spirits, Ferdinand thinks to himself: “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.” (p 182) This is repeated at the 75% stage: “The clock at the top of the little church started striking the hours and more hours, and on and on. We had reached the end of the world, that was becoming obvious. We couldn't go any farther, because farther on there were only dead people.” (p 297) Then, at the end: “The bar opened just before dawn for the benefit of the bargemen. As the night draws to an end, the locks open slowly. And then the whole countryside comes to life and starts to work. Slowly the banks break away from the river and rise up on both sides. Work emerges from the darkness. You begin to see it again, all very simple and hard. Over here the winches, over there the fences around the work site, and far away on the road men are coming from still farther away. In small chilled groups they move into the murky light. For a starter they splatter their faces with daylight as they walk past the dawn. All you can see of them is their pale, simple faces ... the rest still belongs to the night. They too will all have to die someday. How will they go about it?” (p 408)

Trigger warnings should include a negative attitude towards black people with the occasional use of racial slurs including the n-word although on the whole this is in the context of his damning descriptions of French colonial Africa. Celine developed far-right political views and wrote anti-Semitic polemic in occupied France during world war two.

Selected quotes:

He has some stunningly original descriptions:

“His face like a rotten peach.” (p 23)
“When he walked, it was with nervous, pigeon-toed steps, as though walking on eggs. Seeing him in his enormous greatcoat, stooped over in the rain, you'd have taken him for the phantom hindquarters of a racehorse.” (p 27)
“Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt.” (p 48)
“The rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers.” (p 80)
“People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid, smelly water.” (p 94)
“An old man crumpling under the enormous weight of the sun.” (p 117)

He doesn't like the countryside!

“One thing I'd better tell you right away, I've never been able to stomach the country, I've always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere.” (p 11)
“Nature is a frightening thing, and even when it’s solidly domesticated as in the Bois, it gives real city dwellers an eerie anxious feeling.” (p 46)

Other quotes:

“You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.” (p 12)
“That blackness ... was so dense you had the impression that if you stretched out your arm a little way from your shoulder you’d never see it again.” (p 20)
“In this business of getting killed, it's no use being picky and choosy; you've got to act as if life was going on, and that lie is the hardest part of it.” (p 29)
“Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.” (p 29
“In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable.” (p 52)
“We have got into the habit of admitting colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crime are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see ... everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious food stuffs, such as bread crusts, ham or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categorical condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonour and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offence is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community.” (p 56)
“There were several young ladies from the entertainment world - actresses and musicians - who came with more debts than clothes.” (p 64)
“She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth.” (p 80)
“That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers’ festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.” (p 94)
“When you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want to dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children and a lot more.” (p 97)
“Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot.” (p 101)
“Men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.” (p 122)
“In Topo the raw, stifling heat, so perfectly concentrated in that sandpit between the combined polished mirrors of the sea and the river, would have made you swear by your bleeding buttocks that you are being forced to sit on a chunk of sun there's a just fallen off.” (p 126)
“The war had burnt some and warmed others, same as fire tortures you or comforts you, depending on whether you're in it or in front of it. you've got to work the angles, that's all.” (p 179)
“Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunkey; by the poor, like a thief.” (p 217)
“The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they're overflowing.” (p 220)
“Well, anyway, all those sons of bitches had turned into angels without my noticing! Whole clouds full of angels, including some very far-out and disreputable ones, all over the place.” (p 298)
“‘You're a bourgeois!’ I told him finally (at that time I could think of no worse insult).” (p 319)
“He looked as if he were trying to help us live. As if he had been trying to find us pleasures to go on living for. He held us by the hands. One hand each. I kissed him. That's all you can do in a case like that without going wrong. We waited. He didn't say anything more after that. A little later, maybe an hour, the haemorrhage came, internal and profuse. It carried him off.” (p 403) Even the death bed scenes are different.