Céline

Finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of Night last night. I first became aware of this book, and its quasi-sequel, Death on the Installment Plan, many years ago in college. I don't remember how I first learned about them, but I was reading a lot of existentialism then, and someone claimed at some point that Celine would fit into that mold.

The books are widely available, and had I really wanted to read them then, I could have simply bought copies or, failing that, some library somewhere would have had them. But for some reason, I decided to find them used. They just seemed to be the sort of books that you buy in a dusty used bookshop in a dying downtown of a small city. They defied me for over fifteen years, but last year I finally found both in rapid succession. Going in chronological order, I started with Journey.

Whoever pegged Céline as an existentialist didn't know what he was talking about. Existentialist literature, at its best, is about the necessity of making tough decisions and the consequences of not facing up to those decisions. Though frequently dark in tone, I find that it is ultimately uplifting, or at least educational. Journey was neither, at least not directly. I suppose someone could try to interpret the protagonist Bardamu's lack of ambition and failure to see the good in anyone as one giant case of existential paralysis, but for me it didn't work that way. It is also true that existential fiction deals with the lack of inherent meaning in the world, but inseparable from that is the necessity to create our own meaning. For Bradamu, the world is full of meaning, clear and unambiguous, and that meaning is misery and spite. Journey oozes nihilism. The closest equivalent I could think of in terms of overall emotional exoskeleton was Henry Miller, but the similarity only goes so far. Miller writes with anger, Céline – with resignation.

The story has four identifiable sections – World War I, colonial Africa, U.S. and the slums of Parisian suburbs. The last is the longest, and also the lightest on conventional adventure. In fact, I briefly doubted my ability to get through the rest of the book when I started on it. “Can I really handle two hundred more pages of such relentless negativity?” I asked myself. But I am glad I persevered. As events in Bardamu's life become more mundane in terms of what actually happens on a daily basis, the emotional content becomes richer and more nuanced. I didn't learn certain things about Bardamu until well into the second half of the book, and it is there that I found the greatest variety of characters.

Robinson, in particular, really comes alive towards the end. I was puzzled by Robinson through a big chunk of the book, and to some extent I still am. There must be some symbolism to him that I am missing. In the early sections, he appears, unexpectedly, at key moments to help Bardamu along his steady slide into irrelevance, only to disappear just as unexpectedly. For a moment, I pegged him as a Mephistopheles. But he ends, improbably, by succeeding at doing the one noble deed that Bardamu knows he could never do.

Céline's descriptions, too, become a little more subtle, and that makes them more powerful to me. Part of this is cultural, I think. Bardamu's experience of the war, and colonial Africa, wallop you straight in the face with their graphic intensity, but I had little but Céline's own imagination and language to go on. The working-class outskirts of Paris, on the other hand, are familiar enough from countless books and movies that I didn't have to focus on their novelty and could see below the surface a bit better. The carnival scene at the end, in particular, is chilling in its detail, and, stoked by the simmering conflict of the main characters that is about to explode in the novel's denouement, infinitely absorbing. Carnivals in general, especially mid-century ones (this part of the story is set roughly in the early 1930s) are fascinatingly creepy, and Céline captures it, and Bardamu's helplessness in its face, perfectly.

I am glad I read Joruney now, and not fifteen years ago. I know I didn't have the maturity then to see Bardamu pitiful existence for what it was. Even today, though he is the quintessential anti-hero, I did not see him as a villain. He frustrates, and sometimes disgusts, but occasionaly, for me at least, he also endears, and makes you think. Fifteen years ago, I would have run the risk of embracing the book in earnest. Today, I can usually muster some much-needed detachment, though I must admit that even now, or perhaps especially now, I find a dangerous amount of appeal in passages like this:

But it was too late to start being young again. I didn't believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what's more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. (p. 197)