You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night.  That “end of night” is death.  The existence of death makes everything hateful and nullifies the value of anything else.  I gotta say that the ideas and satire in the novel are not exactly deep.  It’s all in the attitude, the language.

Le voyage c’est la recherche de ce rien du tout, de ce petit vertige pour couillons…  (274, 1952 Gallimard paperback, ellipses in original, how Céline loves ellipses)

The voyage is the search for this nothing at all, this little vertigo for imbeciles...  (tr., against good judgment, mine)

“Couillons” has stronger, more obscene possibilities.  The translations of this novel are feats.  It is the longest and most difficult French book I have ever attempted, 630 pages of informal, slangy French, much of it in the form of commentary or even rants.  Some earlier books, like Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends (1924), had pushed towards a less formal, less correct, literary French, but it was Céline who demolished the concept.  Surrealist semi-novels like Nadja (1928) and Paris Peasant (1926) look so well-behaved by contrast.

The influence of the novel is linguistic and formal.  Henry Miller scrapped his manuscript and rewrote The Tropic of Cancer (1934) from scratch as soon as he finished Voyage.  Jean-Paul Sartre completely rewrote Nausea (1938), not that he did anything half as radical.  Here is Céline’s narrator on Sunday mornings, a bit borrowed directly by Sartre:

An empty bus rushed towards the depot.  Ideas also end by having their Sunday; you are more stunned than normal.  You are there, empty.  You drool from it.  You are happy.  You have nothing to do, because nothing really occurs to you, you are too poor, you are disgusted with existence?  That would be the usual.  (377)

Poisonous pessimism, but from a narrator too passive to do anything about it.  The novel is structured like Candide (1759), with the narrator spending the first half of the book experiencing terrible things – the front line of World War I, colonial Central Africa, Spanish pirates (?), and the Ford Motor Company – and the second half observing terrible things happening to other people, in the role of a doctor in a working class Parisian suburb and later in a mental hospital.  Although by temperament Céline is over on Rousseau’s side of things, not Voltaire’s.

The ethos of Voyage is anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-industrial.  There is a chapter that is specifically against scientific testing of animals.  Based on nothing else, I would align Céline with the French left of the time, and my understanding is that the literary French left was fooled for a while.  But Céline was not going to be aligned with anyone, even if he had to prove it, a few years later, by becoming the most hysterical Jew hater in French literature. If there was a hint of anti-Semitism or any mention of any Jewish subject at all in Voyage I did not recognize it.

Crazy stuff.  I am glad to have finally read this missing link between Rabelais and Villon one the one end and Jean Genet and the anti-novel on the other.

Then they looked at me, he and Madelon, like they found themselves before a druggie, a victim of poison gas, a drooler, and it was not even worth the trouble of responding to me… (603)

What am I doing, I have no business translating Céline.  I do hope I will now remember his favorite vowels like baver (drool) and bafouiller (stammer).  Metaphysics, a vision of existence, expressed by verb choice.