Max Pozel

Writing About Arts and Culture

March 26, 2008

1,500-word Book Review

Voyage au bout de la nuit, par Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Voyage begins on a terrace in a Parisian restaurant during the first years of the First World War. Two men speak about the passers-by and their dreadful routines. When the weather is nice, the French walk around and appear to be going in and out of stores and walking quickly. When the weather is bad, nobody goes outside.

A conversation erupts between Ferdinand Bardamu (Céline’s alter ego; “bard-” translates to “gear” or “baggage” and “mu” is past tense and translates to “driven”) and his friend Arthur Ganate (translation: ganache, or “blockhead”). They witness the French army marching down the street to which Bardamu remarks that the more they watch, the less there is to see. Céline and his friend join in the parade, but when it starts to rain the crowd dies down. They march and the rain gets heavier. “And then there were fewer patriots … It started to rain, and then there were still fewer and fewer, and not a single cheer, not one” (p. 6). The parade ends and the music stops.

“Come to think of it,’ I said to myself, when I saw what was what,

‘this is no fun anymore! I’d better try something else!’ I was about to clear out. Too late! They’d quietly shut the gate behind us civilians. We were caught like rats.”

page 6

This scene in the first section begins la Voyage for Bardamu. He is overcome with a willingness to join when he sees the parade, but thus begins la nuit - the journey through the disgusting world which Céline describes in people and places, which he blames on himself and rampant patriotism.

The English translation of the title is Journey to the End of the Night and was translated by Ralph Manheim, who “captures the savage energy of Céline’s original French” (back cover). Manheim has translated many of Céline’s books, and includes a glossary of people and places which are muddled by Céline’s “cavalier treatment of history” (p. 438).

Each character’s name is a meaningful, yet often disgusting, interpretation of their personality (without the glossary of terms, however, these would be unnoticed or pass with littler interest). Céline briefly mentions the pilgrims landing in Boston in 1677 on page 42:

“That, I recall, is when she told me that her great-great uncle had been a member of the crew of the eternally glorious Mayflower which landed in Boston in 1677, and that in view of such past she couldn’t dream of shirking her fritter duty, which may have been humble but nevertheless a sacred trust.”

Céline is well aware that the Mayflower neither landed in Boston nor in 1677. His treatment of geography was as free and easy as his history, though he knew Paris like the back of his hand (p. 439). He misplaces and renames locations in his morphed view of Paris, his hometown, on page 61, “Their

neighborhoods adjoin and coalesce, so as to form a wedge of urban cake, the tip of which touches the Louvre and the rounded outer edge is bounded by the trees between the Pont d’Auteuil and the Porte des Ternes. That’s the good part of the city. All the rest is shit and misery.”

Like Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, the author’s birth name, Bardamu is drawn to medicine. Bardamu goes to medical school after leaving Detroit and the grotesque language he uses to describe the cruel and disgusting world seems to be taken from medical books. Céline is comfortable inspecting a very poor young girl’s bleeding uterus and is thus comfortable naming his fictitious section of Paris, in which he sets up a virtually free clinic, La Garenne-Rancy or “rancid rabbit warren.”

Ferdinand Bardamu’s troubles begin at the start of World War I when he walks up to General des Entrayes (“entrails”) on the front lines in Flanders the first day after the parade. A messenger has just told des Entrayes that Sergeant Barousse had been killed. Then a shell exploded next to the three men. The General and the messenger both died and as a result of the factual experience (the author lived with partial hearing loss and headaches for the rest of his life).

“When you have no imagination, dying is small beer; when you do have an imagination, dying is too much. That’s my opinion. My understanding has never taken in so many things at once…”

page 12

Bardamu returns to Paris and meets Lola. While in the hospital, the army gives Bardamu the Medaille Militaire. With Lola, he goes to a restaurant in the Hotel Paritz (mixture of “Paris” and “Ritz”) where he explodes with agony on page 49:

“We finally made it to Duval’s. But we’d hardly sat down when the place struck me as monstrous. I got the idea that these people sitting in rows around us were waiting for bullets to be fired at them from all sides while they were eating.”

Finally, Céline loses Lola and finds solace at Madame Herote’s (from “herote” meaning “erotic”) sex shop. Here he meets Musyne and speaks of young women, “For us the automatism of biology transforms the whole world into a joyous spectacle, into pure joy! Our health demands it!” (p. 73). Céline speaks of “poor soldier boys” who are shuffled to war and to death.

Céline’s own nihilism makes this ironic because he speaks of depression and that the world is nothing but waste. He, however, never finds anything worth dying for. In his travels he longs for attachment, but he always finds sorrow. He says sorrow exists everywhere in the world.

Céline’s next journey led him to Bamboula-Fort-Gono (From bamboula, meaning roughly “whoopee,” and “gonococcus” [p.441]), Togo, in Africa, a place which had never had a visitor. On the boat-ride, he finds that all of the passengers on board secretly want to thrown him overboard. He is approached by the ship’s captain who asks him to meet him on the deck. Bardamu is scared, but ends up complimenting the captain and they have a drink with the other crewmen. The women onboard watch Bardamu cautiously as he drinks and laughs – albeit sheepishly – with the crew.

He arrives in Africa where he speaks of the heat, nothing to eat but canned tomatoes and a chicken which follows him around for three months. In pure boredom and suffering in the hot heat, he eats the chicken and immediately falls ill. Céline describes his last days he spent in Fort-Gono with literary and medical exactness:

“I preferred to lie there in a stupor, trembling and foaming at the mouth with a 104° fever, than to be lucid and forced to think of what would happen to me in Fort-Gono. I even stopped taking my

quinine because I figured the fever would keep life away from me. You get drunk on what you’ve got.”

page 149

After months afloat on the Infanta Combitta (from con = the female sex organ and bite = the male sex organ [p.156]), Bardamu ends up in New York City where he earned a job counting fleas. Here he meets Lola again and spends his time with the poor and berates Americans for their looks and interests. His job as a flea-counter relates to his description of Americans:

“So-and-so many Polish … Yugoslavian … Spanish fleas … Crimean crabs … Peruvian chiggers … every furtive, biting thing that travels on human derelicts ended under my fingernails.”

page 163

Bardamu’s poverty causes him to move to Detroit where he gets a job at an automobile plant. He is told that he is unhealthy but could work and that he does not have to think while at work. He ages quickly. In Detroit, he meets Molly, who works at a brothel and at nights he sees her. With his money Bardamu buys a suit and begins to treat Molly better than how he has treated other women in the novel. Bardamu tells Molly that he must leave, but Molly does not believe him. Bardamu is finally faced with a decision to choose between being happy and staying in America, or leaving to go back to Paris and to work as a poor doctor.

Bardamu regrets leaving Molly in the end.

“To leave her I certainly had to be mad, and in a cold, disgusting way. Still, I’ve kept my soul in one place up to now, and if death were to come and take me tomorrow, I’m sure I wouldn’t be quite

as cold, as ugly, as heavy as other men, and it’s thanks to the kindness and the dream that Molly gave me during my few months in America.

page 203

Ferdinand Bardamu’s particular brand of pessimism – his view of the world as triumphing evil – never changes. It is his medical knowledge that keeps him good and the random catastrophes in which he discovers himself that keep him independent. He seeks fortune, but is embarrassed to ask for money from rich patients, and too humble to ask for payment from the poorest of his patients. La Voyage is the most monstrous and grotesque of classic French novels and influenced writers and artists Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. Louis-Ferdinand Céline is the truest misanthropic traveler among the loudest prisoners.