Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  255 diabolo. A mixture of limonade (fizz water with synthetic lemon flavoring) and some sort of syrup, usually mint or grenadine.

  258 boules. Boules is the same as boccie and something like the English bowls. Played mostly by men on provincial village squares and in Paris parks.

  302 campaign of 1816 . In 1814, and not in 1816 as Céline whimsically says, Marshal Moncey (Adrien Jeannot de Moncey, due de Conegliano) defended the Clichy Barrier against the invading troops of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. There is a monument commemorating the event in the middle of the Place Clichy. The invading troops included Cossacks, who were long remembered with horror.

  303 Tarapout . The Paramount Theater.

  305 emberesina’d. A reference to the crossing of the Berezina River by Napoleon in 1812, in the course of his retreat from Moscow. More than twenty thousand French troops were lost.

  306 Porte Saint-Martin. The Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin. A theater situated on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. One of the holy places of the Romantic drama. Burned down under the Commune in 1871. Rebuilt in 1873.

  310 Pomone . From Pomona, goddess of fruit trees.

  311 Belshazzar . The wicked king of Babylon, who saw the handwriting on the wall (Daniel 5:25).

  315 Bourse . The Stock Exchange.

  316 Galeries Dufayel . A large furniture store in Montmartre. The name was regarded as symbolic of cheap luxury.

  317 La perouse . Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de la Perouse (1741-88), French navigator. Died in the course of a voyage around the world, probably massacred by the inhabitants of the island of Vanikoro. He did not have a wooden leg. The wooden leg seems to have been borrowed from Nelson.

  317 the Moulin . Le Moulin de Galette. A famous dance hall built in the nineteenth century beside a windmill so-called. Immortalized by Renoir’s painting of it.

  319 “the Cid.” The leading character in Corneille’s tragedy Le Cid (1636), inspired by the life of the Cid Campeador, an eleventh-century Spanish hero.

  332 Sainte-Eponime . From “eponym”—the mythical or historical person after whom a tribe, city, country, etc. is named. In this instance, “etc.” means “church.”

  333 Madelon . See above, note to p. 45.

  337 Cayenne . Capital of French Guiana, a penal colony up to 1942.

  342 La Bruyère. Jean de La Bruyère (1645-96). Moralist. Author of Les Caracteres, a book of maxims and portraits of contemporary figures, which gained great popularity.

  363 Seine-et-Oise . At that time the immediate suburbs of Paris belonged to the Seine Department, which in turn was surrounded by a wider belt, also regarded as suburban—the Seine-et-Oise Department.

  364 the Exposition . The Exposition Universelle (World Exhibition) held in Paris in 1900.

  374 bouchon . A game once especially popular among Beton fishermen. Coins or other valuables are placed on top of a large cork. Standing at some distance from it, the contestants toss disks; the player who first overturns the cork takes the coins.

  413 Grand-Due de Malvoison . This is a take-off on the fancy names often given to poor-quality wines.

  416 Café Miseux. Suggests miséreux , meaning “seedy.”

  Reader, fuck you! … You think I give a shit whether or not you’ve read this book? Or that Céline’s ghost does? That would be the day! And why should you have read Journey to the End of the Night? Freedom fries and to hell with the French for an American war and this nightmare criminal idiot of a President we’ve got—that’s satire as hilarious as when Robinson murdered the old lady! And it all happened HERE, in this big fat country whose standards of personal hygiene and optimistic self-delusion Céline almost admired; he adored the narcissistic sleekness of American women; this fat country of ours went around stepping on anthills, until finally, I think in 1977 or 2043, some of the ants bit back, so we killed a hundred thousand Irishmen who had nothing to do with it, but the French objected at the start, so right here in California in my hot flat hometown, somebody scrawled on the side of a building: EVEN JESUS HATES THE FRENCH. That’s true, because Jesus hates everybody. And Céline is Christlike, because he hates everybody, too. As for me, I’m not the hating type even though Homeland Security keeps tapping my phone and the FBI read my much-loved mistress’s diary, but do you think I’d put down my child porn to write this if it weren’t for my mortgage? Twelve hundred lousy bucks they’re paying me—not much more than half a mortgage payment. Well, I can scrape up the other half somehow, maybe by selling my AIDS-infected blood. Not that you care.

  Why’s Céline a great writer? Because he pisses on everything. He’s got it all—plot, character, you name it! But it just keeps going right down the urinal! The café—the battlefields— Lola’s apartment (and her pretty ass)—the asylum—the Congo—New York—Detroit! These scene changes become insane, ridiculous. Just when you start to know where you are, Céline pisses you down another rathole, damn it! One seedy institution after the next, this scam and that job, who gives a fuck; who even remembers? Worse yet (and this question bears relevance with me, because I was somebody once; I even studied literature in college) how can you get to know anybody, when they keep swirling away? Ferdinand bears with us for the duration—bitterly and half-unwillingly—and then there’s Robinson, very occasionally, and Lola, twice but very briefly (self-satisfied the first time, ageing and anxiously bitchy the second), and Molly for hardly any pages, then the memory of Molly, but that’s it! The rest vanish without return, for we leave them behind as we pass deeper into the night, you see. (Speaking of which, can you offer any guesses as to what a Célinian night smells like? Oh, don’t be an imbecile!)

  Fellow citizens, this man pisses out astonishing soliloquies, less logical and classically eloquent than Sade’s but equally effective in their ghastly hilarity, more sincere in their despair. Then what? Down the toilet with them! He pulls this eviscerated rabbit out of that hat, but if you’re gullible enough to believe it’s only for fun, then I’ll be the one who’s laughing! Do you get it yet, or do you require a skeleton-hand to dig its bony fingers into your shoulder?

  Never mind that. How did we get so rapidly from A to Q, with the distinct sensation of having passed points B through P, even if we can’t remember when it happened? Because Céline is a master of narrative concision, a technique which this ranting, accusing, embellishing raconteur sometimes strangely achieves through understatement, which is why the writer whom he most resembles, unlikely as this may sound, is that great Icelandic deadpanner, Halldor Laxness. When Ferdinand gets misled by a momentary surge of jingoistic ecstasy into joining the colors (now we’d say supporting the troops, now wouldn’t we, boys and girls?), he marches in the procession through Paris. “You never saw so many patriots in your life!” he cries. “And then there were fewer patriots …” (p. 5). How impressively those two sentences express his increasing and all too justified unease! And how economically they introduce one of Céline’s favorite rants—the closer you get to actual military operations, the fewer patriots you’ll find. Rear echelon bastards! There were fewer patriots cheering for poor Ferdinand … Then it was too late. They’d slammed the door shut. Off to war with him!

  At this moment, our hero still stands, let’s say, in the dusk. He’s hardly begun to realize that “the only true manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares” (p. 359). But he will—he definitely will! And if you don’t, why, then you can just go to hell!

  For all its darkness, it’s insistent night-ness, this novel remains less furiously cynical than Céline’s later ones. Its anger is directed mainly at authorities and pieties; otherwise it is neutrally despairing, and occasionally, although it tries to hide the fact, compassionate. The repulsive wretchedness of humanity, which Céline exposes in its intellectual aspects (pretentiousness, hypocrisy, dishonesty, vicious ignorance) no less than in the ethical ones (murder for gain, colonial oppression, innumerable acts of criminal selfishness) gets reduced—and,
after all, Céline, like his protagonist, was among many other things a doctor—to medical summation: We 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 innately—I use the following word in all of its connotations and denotations— spoiled and that death is coming. “In expectation of love, the housemaids squirm and wriggle in the disgustingly melodious din of the merry-go-round. They’re kind of sick to their stomachs, but that doesn’t stop them from posing in the freezing cold, because this is the great moment…” (p. 415). And what will the great moment lead to? Lonely tears, a lethal self-induced abortion, or another rotten marriage.

  Céline is equally tormented by his hatred of obfuscation and by his knowledge that the truth is ugly. He (or Ferdinand) writes himself a Swiftian prescription: Imagine everybody naked! Since most bodies are hideous, their manifold ghastly revelations will keep us on the honest path to death. They stink and starve; they get sick on credit and don’t pay; moreover, they badmouth their own physician, who lectures us: “The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess” (p. 18). The side-splittingly disgusting description of defecation in a public bathroom in Manhattan (p. 169) makes the same point more cheerfully: Hold your nose and laugh!

  Meanwhile, our would-be nihilist retains an affection for children, who hold the hope, however remote, of not becoming quite as “crummy” as we; and for true love, exemplified by that American prostitute Molly, who was unselfishly good to him and whose memory cheers him up. Well, then why did he leave her in the first place? Because he wanted to save himself “for something magnificent, something sublime … not for Molly and this particular, kiss. As if life would carry away everything I longed to know about it, about life in the thick of the night, and hide it from me, while I was expending my passion in kissing Molly … Life, the true mistress of all real men—would have tricked me, as it tricks everyone else” (p. 199).

  But if any one character is the secret key to this novel, it’s obviously not Molly, who’s with us for not much longer than it takes a glowing cigarette butt to die out in a urinal, but the ambiguous Robinson, who pops up here and there to entice Ferdinand on his journey to the end of the night, coaxing him deeper and deeper, first into the very rational, almost noble cowardice which inspires his attempts to desert the nightmare madness of World War I, then into desertion again, this time from a position of so-called trust in a colonial outpost in the Congo whose administration is as brutally corrupt as the army itself, and the journey wears on and on, each way station more degraded, until suddenly here is Robinson, engaging in murder for gain, dragging unwilling yet ethically and spiritually somnambulistic Ferdinand along as his accomplice. We’re now getting closer to where we belong. By the time we arrive in deepest reeking darkness, Robinson has betrayed Madelon, the woman he loves, who meanwhile betrays him with Ferdinand, whom Robinson and Madelon betray together in word and attempted deed. If Robinson is for Ferdinand some eerie irrepressible archetype or other, a Pied Piper, let’s say, what is Ferdinand to Robinson? Quite simply, a friend. Robinson impels Ferdinand closer to death; Ferdinand by virtue of his very naiveté delays Robinson’s descent, reminding him that there really is such a thing as honor among thieves. What’s left for Robinson to do after turning on Ferdinand (no matter that he’s forgiven) but to goad Madelon into shooting him? “I kissed him,” says Ferdinand. “That’s all you can do in cases like this without going wrong … He died in a choking fit… Then Robinson was like a stranger in the room, someone who had come from a horrible country and you wouldn’t have dared speak to” (p. 429). That country lies at the end of the night, the place where we all go. Ferdinand isn’t quite ready to become its citizen yet; he won’t follow Robinson until his liver or colon gives out. But where can he go in the meantime? The rich are lucky because they get a good rest and can pay people to lie to them, so that their night can be illuminated with the paid fluorescence of false consciousness, but Ferdinand will never be rich, and so what illumination will comfort him? Sex, of course …

  Once upon a time, a colonial officer in the Congo sacrificed himself for the sake of a little niece whom he hardly knew. “There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad,” opines Ferdinand (p. 138). But there isn’t. And Ferdinand himself, who would happier if there were no good whatsoever in the universe, no morning beyond the night he’s lost in, comes to remind us of his own description of the assembly line workers at Ford in Detroit, who keep “moving, but hardly moving, as if they were struggling against something impossible” (p. 192).

  Death on the Installment Plan

  translated by Ralph Manheim

  Guignol ’s Band

  translated by Bernard Frechtman

  and Jack T. Nile

  Copyright 1934, 1952 by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  Translation copyright © 1983 by Ralph Manheim.

  Afterword copyright © 2006 by William T. Vollmann

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  An edition of Céline ’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit translated by John H. P. Marks was first published in a clothbound edition by New Directions in 1949, and as New Directions Paperbook 84 in 1960.

  This translation of Voyage au bout de la Nuit was first published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 542 in 1983, and was reissued with an afterword by William T. Vollmann as New Directions Paperbook 1036 in 2006.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 1894-1961.

  [Voyage au bout de la nuit. English]

  Journey to the end of the night / by Louis-Ferdinand Céline; translated from the French by Ralph Manheim; afterword by William T. Vollmann.

  cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-8112-1654-8 pbk.

  ISBN: 978-0-811-22361-4 (e-book)

  1. Manheim, Ralph, 1907- II. Title.

  PQ2607.E834V613 2006

  843′ 9l2-dc22

  2005036494

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011