Hopefully, one (I) can be forgiven for wondering what the hell this book is actually about. Yes, there are obvious themes, and even a final tell-all raging monologue, but 440 pages is a lot of hand-wringing for what Linkin Park so eloquently summarized as “in the end, it doesn’t even matter”. Journey to the End of the Night is a chaotic, gloomy novel that often left me feeling depressed. The colloquial writing is easy to read and often beautifully prosaic. Celine has a good sense of humor, and the various historical settings make for an interesting plot. Still, it can be a slog to read a hero’s journey to discover that people are rotten and indignity is all there is.
Unreliable Narration, Negative Self-Talk, and Lust
Bardamu is Celine’s semi-autobiographical protagonist. We first meet him as a failed medical student who impulsively volunteers for duty on the Western front. He deserts and malingers to avoid the horror of combat before taking a job in a West African colony. He flees again and immigrates to America before finishing his medical studies and setting up a practice on the outskirts of Paris. With the exception of his becoming a doctor, he is mainly moved by some combination of fate and circumstance. Indeed, his choices are limited by his poverty, which in concert with his exceedingly negative attitude, seems to condemn him to a life of squalor. The only thing that motivates him, apart from self-preservation, is sex. This book is so horny. Celine gets distracted from his work to comment on the anatomical intrigues of women, especially American women, and Bardamu’s neverending quest to get laid.
Bardamu is the narrator. He hints that it is a retrospective, but it’s also written in the present tense. One thing is clear: Bardamu is unreliable! This is problematic because he has complete control over the story. He uses this control to present events, and in particular his reaction to these events, in the least flattering interpretation. He’s truly a spectacular self-demoter. This extreme humility makes Bardamu somewhat more endearing. In addition to the gloom and hopelessness he casts over his narration, Bardamu can be mentally unstable. He slips into phantasmagorical stories blurring the line between reality and nightmare. To cite a few: his experiences in Africa include being sold into slavery and working on a Spanish galley ship; his time in America involves a stint counting fleas on immigrants; he becomes catatonic and is moved only by scandalous movies before maniacally proposing to a beautiful waitress (reminiscent of Taxi Driver). While less easily characterized by a particular anecdote, his career as a lowlife doctor in Rancy has a somnambulatory, surreal vibe. This all leaves the reader wondering if any of it is real. Is Robinson real? How does he keep running into him in strange places? Is Bardamu really in a padded cell? Is he dying on the fields of the Somme as a possible version of his life flashes before him? Bardamu moves quickly between mania, delirium, and depression and it’s difficult to know why.
We Live in a Society
As I mentioned earlier, a thorough understanding of this novel is elusive. Allan Bloom, who originally pointed me to this model in The Closing of the American Mind, writes that “American students are repelled, horrified by this novel, and turn away from it in disgust. If it could be force-fed to them…” (239) Indeed, part of the difficulty with this book is that it is so dark. To me, the challenge is to discern between a one-off rant and a sustained critique among the ubiquitous social commentary.
I’ll begin with the more self-contained criticisms. Celine has the standard disillusionment message that WWI was, in fact, horrible. Given the lack of particulars about WWI and its strange European geopolitics, his commentary seems to extend to war in general. To Celine, war is both an instinct for man and, when put in to practice, his greatest nightmare. Bardamu later speculates that “the only true manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity.” Well, he tried war… how about insanity? Africa brings discussion of the cruelty of colonialism, which drips off every page. He spends most of his time complaining about the deadly climate of West Africa, but does include a number of anecdotes about the cruelty towards the colonized. The scene where an indigenous family with a basket of rubber gets abused and “compensated” with a green handkerchief encapsulates the morally hopeless and exploitative dynamic of colonialism. But it’s not all one-way. He seems to admire certain things about the Africans. For example,
The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will. 119
There is something admirable to him about the natives Rousseauian state of nature. He also makes note of their enduring similarity to the French poor:
Those blacks stink of their misery, their interminable vanities, and their repugnant resignation; actually, they’re just like our poor people, except they have more children, less dirty washing, and less red wine. 121
Celine mostly avoids paternalism and the Africans in his story wield considerable power; he speaks disparagingly of them but everyone in the story gets that treatment. Africans do get their revenge by selling him into slavery while he is reeling from some tropical disease (with the help of a priest, no less!). After the first two episodes, we see that war and colonialism are not aberrations; rather, they are representative of the multitudinous miseries that befall modern man.
We also get commentary on the loneliness that accompanies American industriousness and the horrors of the assembly line in a Ford factory. We get discursions on the intellectual currents of the time: modernism and Freudian psychology. Through the death of Bebert, we get a lamentation of the limits of medical science and again a hint at the overarching theme: we are not so technologically advanced as to cure misery and perfect human nature.
Then, there is the more sustained criticism of human nature, which is implicit in many of the one-off criticisms. Bardamu sees that it’s rotten. He is mugged by the reality of the war and, despite a valiant effort, cannot find a place where people are generally decent. He doesn’t blame the individuals for this poor behavior or hold it against them. Contrary to the views of other class-conscious contemporaries, Celine sees no virtue among the poor: they are thieving scoundrels like anyone else. His mistrust of other people is best captured in the trip to Africa aboard the Admiral Bragueton. The combination of boredom and hot tropical temperatures leads his passengers to conspire to kill him… because he is weird and an outsider. He suavely escapes his death, in large part by appealing to patriotism and the war! Distract the horrible crowd and remember the scapegoat for the continent-wide lynchmob! He is routinely taken advantage by his patients in Rancy, who don’t pay him and only call on him for dirty jobs, like botched abortions, surreptitious births gone wrong, and bungled murders. He is spineless and does not demand better treatment. Instead, he accepts this mistreatment as an embittering fact of life.
While he mostly lives among the poor and alludes to a better life for the rich, the wealthy characters we meet seem no better. At the beginning of the book, we meet war profiteers of various stripes. We meet Lola, the promiscuous American warmonger with whom he has a fling. She epitomizes the bellicose cheers of a class that would never be directly impacted by the war. While thousands of boys are sent to their death on the front, she laments gaining two pounds during her cushy war job: taste-testing pastries. When we check back in with Lola in Manhattan, we find her rich, lonely, and superficially interested in motherhood. The petite bourgeoise Henrouilles in Rancy own a nice home and even have a pension! But they are tortured by an inborn financial insecurity that drives them towards scheming to murder their elderly mother. Dr. Baryton, a successful physician and wealthy operator of a premium looney bin, has a midlife crisis spurred by learning english and reading about the history of England. Instead of buying a red Corvette, he feels an emptiness that can only be addressed by foreign travel and, relatedly, abandoning his young daughter. The poor, it seems, are doomed by lack of opportunity. The rich have no excuse – squeezing satisfaction out of life is simply hard.
Exceptions to the Rule
While life in Journey is mostly bleak, it’s important to make note of the rare exceptions. And I mean rare: there are 2.5 such exceptions. Sergeant Alcide, a soldier in colonial Africa, draws Bardamu’s admiration by sending his money to a distant relative. Alcide is enduring this miserable existence to provide for a young niece he has never met. This unmistakeable altruistic self-sacrifice is so foreign to Bardamu’s experience that he is thrown into an uncharacteristic sentimentality:
With hardly a thought of what he was doing, he had consented to years of torture, to the crushing of his life in this torrid monotony for the sake of a little girl to whom he was vaguely related. Motivated by nothing but his good heart, he had set no conditions and asked nothing in return… After a while I got up to look at his face. He slept like everybody else. He looked quite ordinary. There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad. 137-138
Bardamu is disturbed that the few good can walk among the many bad and you wouldn’t even know it.
The second exception is Molly, a prostitute he meets in Detroit. He starts a relationship with her. In fact, he inverts the traditional mechanism of prostitution and she actually gives him money! This is the closest he comes to loving someone in the book, though he does not admit it. He breaks things off because he knows it is too late for him. He has already been poisoned against the world, and even Molly cannot undo the wear.
If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. 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. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we’re never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it’s too late to change. You’re a hundred-percent restless, and it’s set that way for good.
The last place for hope in Bardamu’s world is with the youth. He has a tenderness for children, particularly Bebert, who he is subtly devastated by not being able to save. The following passage demonstrates his feelings towards children, along with his uncanny ability to understate his nice thoughts and maximize his nasty ones:
Undoubtedly, I was much more interested in preventing Bebert from dying than if he had been an adult. You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There’s always the future. 243
And that’s it. That is the positive in the book. Now, enter an unlikely hero.
Robinson, Fiendish Hero
Robinson is Celine’s hero. It may be tough to imagine a profoundly selfish, repulsive brigand who murders old ladies – with limited success, I might add – can be a hero, but in Celine’s hopeless world he is. While Bardamu alternates between searching for and trying to get rid of Robinson, there is something about Robinson that he admires in the end. Robinson sees the illegitimacy in social conventions and traditional morality and discards them. He simply does what he wants whenever he wants. Robinson makes choices and then flees when they work out poorly. He cares only for money, not in a greedy way but as a means of survival. If he gets bored, he leaves. For Robinson, romance doesn’t exist; his engagement to Madelon is merely a transaction. She takes care of him while he’s blind, tells her “I love you as much as I love my eyes” (350) and when he can finally see again, he leaves her. There is no commitment beyond what supplies personal benefit. Robinson also has a heroic independent streak. He despises authority and will not be compelled to do anything. It’s no conicidence that we first meet him deserting the war and gloating about his indifference to his commander’s painful death. Bardamu envies Robinson’s great “idea” and his approach to life. He is adamantly committed to his self-interest and he is indifferent to consequences, personal or societal. He believes in something wholeheartedly, which Bardamu cannot manage. Predictably, Robinson’s approach leads to his demise.
At the end of the book, Robinson flees his fiancee, Madelon. She cared for him and coerced a marital commitment out of him. She even conspired with him to murder Mrs. Henrouille. She is obsessively devoted to him and tracks him down to the lunatic asylum in Paris. But Robinson doesn’t want to marry her. He won’t tell her he loves her. He won’t give an inch! Madelon cannot square her traditional approach to life with Robinson’s nihilism and it drives her insane. After much provocation, Robinson delivers a final monologue about how everything in life disgusts him. He dwells on “love.” He thinks it’s shallow and fake. That its a mere social invention, as empty as buying chocolate hearts for a lover on Valentines’ Day. He tells her she’s “satisfied repeating the rubbish other people say… [she] thinks it makes sense.” Madelon, raving mad, shoots him three times once he finishes.
Oddly enough, Bardamu wishes he could behave that way. He admires Robinson’s courage. For all Bardamu’s flaws, he feels pressure to conform and is tortured by the cognitive dissonance associated with abiding by the societal rules that he knows make no sense. Alternatively put, he is too horny to abandon social conventions entirely; Bardamu’s sex drive forces him to behave somewhat nicely to get laid. The asexual Robinson has no such impulse tying him to society and may do as he please. Robinson martyrs himself in the name of this great idea.
True Vision
Midway through the novel, blind Robinson is on his way to the straight-and-narrow life. He has a successful albeit weird business in the crypt in Toulouse. He is set to be married to a nice enough woman. But then he gets his vision back. And he can see the world again as it is.
Vision comes up a few times. Mandamour, a jovial police officer, plays cards with Bardamu and his gang. He’s great to have around, but he always loses because he can’t see his cards. Bardamu gives him glasses, and he quickly becomes insufferable:
Since he played better with his glasses, he didn’t lose as often as before, and then he took it into his head to stop losing altogether. That was impossible, so he cheated. And when, as sometimes happened, he lost in spite of his cheating, he sulked for hours. In short, he became impossible.
This brings us to the overarching theme. Nothing matters and life is miserable. There’s this idea that vision makes you want things, and wanting things makes you bad. Relatedly, vision allows you to see the miserable world as it really is: you can actually win a card game! And you can avoid losing altogether by cheating! And if you still lose, you just make a scene and insult everyone. Robinson and Bardamu are not at fault for the way they feel; rather, those who feel otherwise can’t see or lack a certain education. Towards the end of the book, Bardamu gets the idea to visit his old friend Madame Henrouille (the daughter-in-law, not the murdered old woman). But he stops at her doorstep and turns around because he realizes it’s pointless.
Madame Henrouille hadn’t had enough education to follow me any further… she couldn’t understand me anymore… you need a heart and a certain amount of knowledge to go further than other people… she couldn’t get down to where I was… There was too much night around me.”
Fun Quotes
On the madness of those responsible for war:
That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure he was worse than a dog, he couldn’t conceive of his own death… With such people this infernal lunacy could go on forever. 9
On man:
Because I didn’t know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else. 10
On human nature:
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. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. 18
An ugly scene from war:
They looted to take their minds off their troubles, to make it look as if they had years before them. Everybody likes that feeling… Even with a bullet in their gut, they’d go on picking up old shoes that ‘might come in handy.’ The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. 28
A humorous indicator of war a brewin’:
I tell you, little man, life’s fall guys, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they’re going to grind you up into battle sausage… that’s the sign… it’s infallible… There’s no rest, I tell you, for the little man, except in the contempt of the great, whose only motive for thinking of the common people is self-interest, when it isn’t sadism. 56
A timeless quote about intellectuals:
He had the same trouble as all intellectuals — he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him. He needed all sorts of gimmicks to steam him up, help him make up his mind. 58
On the determinacy of class:
People waste a large part of their youth in stupid mistakes. It was obvious that my darling was going to leave me, flat and soon. I hadn’t found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me and plenty of other people twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them. 67
On the peasant mentality:
She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth, and that if things had been going so badly of late, the cumulative faults of the poor must have a good deal to do with it. 80
I felt this one:
There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care.” 172
A broken man’s regrets in a single aphorism:
Courage doesn’t consist in forgiveness, we always forgive too much. 183
Some more light reading:
Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you’re having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again. 184
No comment:
You extricate yourself from your daily humiliations by trying, like Robinson, to put yourself on a level with the rich by means of lies, the currency of the poor. 349