“The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies.
I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
Now! That’s what I call war!
Céline mixes his observations of the miseries of existence with such black humour that he makes the reader constantly feel as if they are part of some bizarre and personal private joke. While the World War I vignettes are funny and poignant, the humour winds down through the rest of the book. Nonetheless, Céline’s semi-autobiographical ‘journey’ keeps the reader comparing and contrasting everything learned in classrooms about the ‘great war’ and what he is so vividly presenting.
Céline presents himself as a ‘man of hate’ in ‘journey’ and through the eyes and emotions of Bardamu, the reader is able to competently understand Céline’s expose of the human race and all its workings as the raging, inane beast it is.
“Men are the things to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.”
Bardamu serves as the agent that illustrates Céline’s hatred for the lies and exceptions that have come to constitute modern (post 1890s for Céline) life. In a nutshell, it is his opening salvo against the placid comfort of illusion.
“The same day we witnessed another two memorable thrashings pursuant to further disconcerting reports of dowries taken back, poisonings threatened (…) men, days, things – they passed, disgustingly, in little pieces, in phrases, particles of flesh and bone, in regrets and corpuscles; demolished by the sun, they melted away in a torrent of light and colours, and taste and time went with them, everything went. Nothing remained but shimmering dread.”
Nietzsche and Conrad had already guided us towards the depths of darkness, but with Céline a completely different view is taken, there is nothing to be positive about. Indeed, according to Céline, once you have discovered truth, life is over. However, he writes without a whisper of the adolescent self-pity. His vision is bleak but large, and confers on him a freedom, which allows him moments of penetrating human sympathy as well as startling commonplace enchantment.
“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 (…). It’s a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tides go out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion and turds. Once we had passed Portugal everybody on board started unleashing his instincts, ferociously.”
Baradamu is the icon of a disenchanted generation. He forces any and everyone who reads the book to get in touch with his/her inner nihilist.
Céline’s Style
- Céline’s language is ‘popular’, ‘vulgaire’.
“A bunch of halfwits”, “I’d, We’d etc” in French even better: “J’ai pas” instead of “Je n’ai pas”, “Lying, fucking, dying”, “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex” etc.
Céline and Proust’s language are unbelievably different, and there are just less than thirty years between the two writers!
- The lexicon used is harsh, revolting.
“It was a pig, an enormous pig. He was groaning in the middle of the circle, like a man who’s being pestered, but louder. The people were tormenting him, they never stopped. They twist his ears just to hear him squeak. He’d tug at his rope and try to escape and squirm and wriggle his feet in the air. Other people would poke him and prod him, and he’d bellow even louder with pain. Everybody was laughing more and more.”
- Sentences are extremely short and fast: Expressionistic
This technique brings some rhythm into the work, also the use of concise and precipitous sentences add some tragedy to the content.
“I had nobody left. I was only twenty and all I had was a past.”
“We weren’t easy in our minds. Too many ghosts around.”
- Céline overturns traditional uses of punctuation and syntax.
Céline’s sentences do not necessarily follow traditional syntactical paths: “And that’s not new either. Words.” The sentence is not correctly structured, no subject + verb + adj. Combination. Punctuation is not correctly used either. There are question marks, exclamation marks, full stops and dots everywhere, even when not required.
“It took me (…) and plenty of other people (…) twenty years and the war.” “We certainly got an eyeful of that carnival! And a headful too! Bim bam! And bam again! We whirled around! And we’re carried away! And we scream and we yell! There we were, in the crowd with lights and noise and all the rest of it! Step up, step up! Laugh, laugh!”
- The greatest part: Humour + Tragedy = ?
Certainly, ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ has moments of appearing to be one long tirade but ultimately is saved. His view of the world makes no concessions but despite that, he makes his readers laugh out loud with nearly every page. Here are just a few of my favourite ones:
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“For some minutes she’d reel with happiness, then the full light of day would come to her and delivered, as if too heavy a cloud had just passed, she’d resume her glorious flight (…) All that can be fucked.”
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“Misery is like some horrible woman you’ve married.”
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“Hurry hurry. Don’t be to late for your death.”
Indeed, he illustrates that the complete insanity in which humanity has chosen to live can only be tolerated if seen with the eyes of delirium. There is simply nothing about the book that is conventional unless one counts the simple fact that it is printed on paper! More than sixty years after publication, it still has the power to shock.
Celine portrayed the Great War as an event of insane mutual slaughter lacking any meaning or significance, symbolising to his mind the total worthlessness of humanity. The ambivalent reactions to the cataclysm of the Great War, the perceived need to endow it with a personal, collective, or ideological meaning, and the desire to integrate the slaughter into a comprehensible scheme of universal or individual progress, is at the root of our century’s obsession with perpetrating and representing violence.
“The only arguments we could have pitted against all those wielders of power was our contemptible little wish not to die and not to be burned alive. Which didn’t amount to much, especially when you consider that you can’t come out with sentiments like that in the middle of a war.”
Through his irreverent ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, Céline adds his voice to others who feel it necessary to make a clearer statement or at least be able to bring the larger political overlay to the perspective of one person, who in this case was Bardamu.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Céline Louis-Ferdinand, Journey to the End of the Night, Calder (1997)
Hewitt H, The Life of Celine: A Critical Biography, Blackwell Critical Biographies (1999)
Journey to the End of the Night, p.205.
