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.