Journey to the End of the Night
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| Journey to the End of the Night | |
| Author | Louis-Ferdinand Céline |
|---|---|
| Original title | Voyage au bout de la nuit |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Publication date | 1932 |
Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work follows antihero Ferdinand Bardamu through his involvement in World War I, colonial Africa, and post-WWI America (where he works for the Ford Motor Company), returning in the second half of the work to France, where he becomes a medical doctor and sets up a practice in a poor Paris suburb, the fictional La Garenne-Rancy. The novel also satirizes the medical profession and the vocation of scientific research. The disparate elements of the work are linked together by recurrent encounters with Léon Robinson, a hapless character whose experiences parallel, to some extent, those of Bardamu.
As its title suggests, Voyage au bout de la nuit is a dark, nihilistic novel of savage, exultant misanthropy, leavened, however, with an ebulliently cynical humour. Céline expresses an almost unrelieved pessimism with regard to human nature, human institutions, society, and life in general. Towards the end of the book, the narrator Bardamu, who is working at an insane asylum, remarks:
…I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare,"
("…je ne peux m'empêcher de mettre en doute qu'il existe d'autres véritables réalisations de nos profonds tempéraments que la guerre et la maladie, ces deux infinis du cauchemar,"
Bardamu's philosophy of almost universal egotism and hypocrisy is expressed in such maxims on nearly every page of the novel.[original research?]
[edit] Literary style
Céline's first novel is perhaps most remarkable for its style. Céline makes extensive use of ellipsis and hyperbole. He also writes with the flow of natural speech patterns and writes in vernacular, while also employing more erudite elements. This influenced French literature considerably. The novel enjoyed popular success and a fair amount of critical acclaim when it was published in October 1932. Albert Thibaudet, perhaps the greatest of the entre-deux-guerres critics, said that in January 1933 it was still a common topic of conversation at dinner parties in Paris (Henri Godard, "Notice," in Céline, Romans, vol. 1 [Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1981], p. 1262).
[edit] Influence and legacy
Kurt Vonnegut cited Journey as one of his influences in Palm Sunday, and Bardamu's misadventures appear to have influenced Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Charles Bukowski makes reference to Journey in a number of his novels and short stories, and employs prose techniques borrowed from Céline. Bukowski once said that "Journey to the End of the Night was the best book written in the last two thousand years." The Doors song "End of the Night" references Céline's work.
[edit] Publication history
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Jacques Tardi illustrated a 1988 edition with 130 drawings.
- Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Manheim, Ralph (translator) (1983). Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions. ISBN 9780811208475.
- Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Manheim, Ralph (translator) (1988). Journey to the End of the Night. London: Calder. ISBN 9780714541396.
- Sturrock, John (1990). Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521378540.
- Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Vollman, William T. (afterword); Manheim, Ralph (translator) (2006). Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions. ISBN 9780811216548.
