“Reader, fuck you!”
--William T. Vollman,
in the afterword to the
novel
I'd high hopes for Celine's Journey
to the End of the Night. All the
cool cats had read Celine long ago (the coolest of them in the
original French) and Henry Miller had it on his list of personal
faves. And for the first two-hundred pages I was right there with
Celine's misanthropic misadventures-- in fact, reading the novel I
could not help but think that Henry Miller would not have existed
without Celine-- here was an anti-hero, Ferdinand Bardamu, who was as
funny, horny, and charismatic as Miller's starving artists. The
free-flowing prose, the dirty old man vibe, the profane nuance, this
was proto-Miller, which does not diminish Tropic of Cancer
in my eye-- in fact, it elevates his work, as if Miller stole a page
from Celine's dirty canvas and made it actually likable. If your
protagonist is going to be an absolute dick, then it's best if he is
at least someone worth breaking bread with. To be honest, I am too much of an optimist and I
don't quite hate myself enough to love Celine's most famous novel.
But
what a start. Celine's surrogate “hero,” Bardamu, a ne'er-do-well
with no career prospects or money is swept along early 20th
century France in a tide of social upheaval. An infantryman in World
War I and horrified by the idea of being cannon fodder, Bardamu
attempts desertion, then fakes lunacy to escape the trenches.
Released from the asylum, he winds up on a boat to the Congo in
colonial Africa, where everyone is drunk and disorderly and where he
is stationed alone in the bush with nearly nothing to live on. He
escapes this scenario as well and winds up on a ship to America where he
is hungry in New York and later, after a brief tenure on Ford Motor
Car's assembly lines, finds the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold to
sugar mommy his habits until the need to move on seizes him again.
The changing scenery, often capricious and episodic, is nevertheless
exciting, and Bardamu reminds the reader of a latter-day Job or
Candide, though Bardamu is never under the Panglossian impression
this is the best of all possible worlds. All he wants to do is get
laid and have a little food in his belly and a place to sleep.
Self-preservation is the priority. Fraternal brotherhood or such
utopian “flapdoodle” never enters his febrile mind: “Each man
for himself, the earth for us all.”
Though
this is not necessarily a most sympathetic sentiment, Bardamu is
just likable enough, and Celine's portrayal of mankind's hypocritical
foolishness compensates for the narrative leaps, until we skip five
years ahead and Bardamu is a penurious doctor. The remainder of the
novel takes place in France, and lacks the propulsion of the first
half-- what was a philosophical adventure has evolved into a bitter
misanthropic tirade against life itself and it goes on for at least a
hundred pages too long. Bardamu is an unrelenting head case of
negativity. There are no “genuine realizations of our deepest
character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.”
No one can nail one-liners about the futility of living quite like
Celine.
The
titular “end of the night” is death (and I don't need to tell you
there is any sort of glorious afterlife to be expected in
Celine/Bardamu's world view), and everything before that is
suffering. As William T. Vollman paraphrases Celine in the novel's
afterword, this void might be a relief for creatures that are “no
more than decaying, flatulent assemblages of phlegm and fecal matter,
animated by lechery and self-delusion to commit acts of increasingly
futile denial of the grisly fact that existence is spoiled.” This
adequately summarizes the characters's motives and world views. If
you're not cool passing a long novel reminded of the meaninglessness
of your existence and your indignation only exemplifies what a
presumptuous asshole you really are, Celine might not be the right
author for you at the moment. Myself, I've flirted with nihilism, but
never courted her. I'm only glad that I managed to finish the book
with most of my idealism intact.
