Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is the first novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work follows the adventures of Ferdinand Bardamu in World War I, colonial Africa, the United States and the poor suburbs of Paris where he works as a doctor.
The novel won the Prix Renaudot in 1932 but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his innovative writing style based on working class speech, slang and neologisms. It is now widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Contents
Background
Céline began writing Journey to the End of the Night, his first novel, in 1929 while he was working as a doctor in a public clinic in the working class Paris suburb of Clichy. The novel draws on his experience in the French cavalry during World War One, his time in colonial Africa as an employee of a French forestry company, his 1925 visit to the United States as a health officer with the League of Nations, and his experiences as a doctor in Paris. He completed the novel in late 1931 and submitted it to two small publishers and the major publisher Gallimard, before it was accepted by a fourth publisher, Denoël et Steele, which had recently had a success with Eugène Dabit's L'Hôtel du Nord. Journey to the End of the Night was published in October 1932.
The title stems from the first stanza of the "Beresinalied", a song attributed by the author to the "Swiss Guards (1793)", and whose French translation is the epigraph of Céline's book: «Notre vie est un voyage / Dans l'Hiver et dans la Nuit / Nous cherchons notre passage / Dans le Ciel où rien ne luit» (Our life is a journey / Through Winter and Night; / We look for our way / In a sky without light). (In reality, the Swiss Guards were abolished in France in 1792. The text is from the poem "Die Nachtreise" (1792) by Ludwig Giseke. The poem was later set to music by various composers, and was associated with the French invasion of Russia, in which some Swiss regiments were deployed.)
Plot summary
Ferdinand Bardamu is a young Parisian medical student who, in a fit of enthusiasm, voluntarily enlists in the French army on the outbreak of World War One. During his first engagement with the enemy he decides that the war doesn’t make any sense and he needs to clear out. Alone on a nocturnal reconnaissance mission, he meets a French reservist named Léon Robinson who wants to be captured by the Germans so he can sit out the war in the relative safety of a prisoner of war camp. Bardamu and Robinson make their way to a French town but there are no Germans there to surrender to. Disappointed, they go their separate ways.
Bardamu is wounded in action and receives the médaille militaire. On convalescent leave in Paris, he meets an American volunteer nurse named Lola with whom he has an affair. They visit an amusement park where Bardamu suffers a nervous breakdown at the shooting gallery. He tells Lola that he rejects the war because he doesn't want to die for nothing. Lola tells him he is a coward and leaves him.
Bardamu begins a relationship with Musyne, a violinist. However, she soon leaves him for a succession of rich Argentinians who have profited from the war. He is transferred to a hospital which specialises in electrical therapy and patriotic psychiatry. He is eventually pronounced psychologically unfit for service and discharged from the military.
Bardamu travels to French colonial Africa where he is put in charge of a trading post in the jungle interior. Here he becomes friends with Alcide, his colleague in the French administration. Bardamu finds that the trading post is only a dilapidated hut, and the man he is relieving is Robinson. Robinson tells him that the company cheats its employees and the natives so it is sensible to cheat the company. Robinson sneaks away during the night. After a few weeks, Bardamu catches a fever and sets fire to the trading post in his delirium.
Fearing punishment for defrauding the company, Bardamu decides to flee to the coast. Natives from the nearby village carry Bardamu, who is still delirious, to a Spanish colony where a priest sells him to a ship owner as a galley slave.
The ship sails to New York where Bardamu is put into quarantine until his fever subsides. He talks his way into a job with the quarantine authority and is sent into Manhattan on an errand. He goes in search of Lola and eventually tracks her down. She is now rich and eager to be rid of him. She gives him a hundred dollars and he leaves for Detroit in search of work.
Major themes
Journey to the End of the Night reflects a pessimistic view of the human condition in which suffering, old age and death are the only eternal truths. Life is miserable for the poor, futile for the rich, and hopes for human progress and happiness are illusory.
Céline's biographer Patrick McCarthy argues that hate is a central theme of the novel. The Célinian man suffers from an original sin of malicious hatred, but there is no God to redeem him. Hate gives the characters "a concrete, if illusory, reason for their unhappiness." Moreover: "The characteristic trait of Célinian hatred is that it is gratuitous: one does not dislike because the object of dislike has harmed one; one hates because one has to."
War is another major theme. According to Merlin Thomas, Céline presents the horror and stupidity of war as an implacable force which "turns the ordinary individual into an animal intent only on survival". It is the poor who always suffer most. Bardamu sees war as simply a means for the rich to cull the poor.
Céline also explores the theme of survival in a hostile world. Although the Célinian man can't escape his fate, according to McCarthy: "he has some control over his death. He need not be arbitrarily slaughtered in battle and he need not blind himself with divertissements. He can choose to face death, a more painful but more dignified process."
Thomas points out that Bardamu learns that although the poor and weak cannot avoid their fate, they can choose defiance. "If you are weak, then you will derive strength from stripping those you fear of all the prestige they pretend to possess...[T]he attitude of defiance just outlined is an element of hope and personal salvation."
Bardamu also finds some consolation in contemplating human beauty and rare instances of human kindness. Bardamu admires Molly not just for her physical beauty but for her simple generosity. When Alcide volunteers for another stint in colonial Africa in order to pay for the education of his orphaned niece, Bardamu thinks he is acting foolishly, but admires his good intentions.
Style
In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline developed a unique literary language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld. Reviewing the novel in 1932, a critic for Les Nouvelles littéraires praised its "extraordinary language, the height of the natural and the artificial" while the critic for Le Populaire de Paris condemned it as mere vulgarity and obscenity.
The novel is a first-person narrative. Thomas describes the narrative voice as clinical and detached – the voice of the experienced doctor observing the world through the eyes of his youthful alter ego Bardamu. The clinical tone is frequently associated with sardonic commentary and black humour derived from the futile efforts of characters to control their environment and escape their fate. As McCarthy notes: "It is not just that all men must die, but that each moment of their lives is rendered futile. Everything they do is ridiculous."
The clinical and detached narrative voice occasionally gives way to an hallucinatory delirium. Sometimes this is associated with a fever or psychological stress, sometimes it occurs without apparent cause. Vitoux states: "Delirium is the second state of existence that distances dull, prosaic reality, and an excess of which makes the writer (like his hero) incomparably clear-sighted in the very depths of his misery, enabling him to distinguish the true poetic and convulsive realities contained in life and death."
Reception and critical reputation
Journey to the End of the Night was published in October 1932 to widespread critical attention. The novel attracted admirers and detractors across the political spectrum, with some praising its anarchist, anticolonialist and antimilitarist themes while one critic condemned it as "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility". The novel was the favourite for the Prix Goncourt of 1932. When the prize was awarded to Guy Mazeline's Les Loups, the resulting scandal increased publicity for Céline's novel, which sold 50,000 copies in the following two months. The novel was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1932.
Journey to the End of the Night is now considered to be one of the great works of European literature. In 2003 the novel appeared on The Guardian's list of "100 Greatest Novels of All Time". In 1999 it was ranked sixth on Le Monde's list of 100 novels of the twentieth century.
Publication history
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1932). Voyage au bout de la nuit, Paris, Denöel et Steele.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1934). Journey to the End of the Night. Translated by Marks, J. H. P. London: Chatto and Windus.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1950). Journey to the End of the Night. Translated by Marks, J. H. P. London: Vision.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1983). Journey to the End of the Night. Manheim, Ralph (trans.). New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-0847-5.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1988). Journey to the End of the Night. Manheim, Ralph (trans.). London: Calder. ISBN 978-0-7145-4139-6.
Sturrock, John (1990). Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37854-0.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (2006). Vollmann, William T. (afterword) (ed.). Journey to the End of the Night. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1654-8.