Read for the first time in September 2012.
“Journey to the End of the Night” was a slog to get through. There is so very much scene setting and so very little story. I wish that Celine’s protagonist nihilistically ranted less and narrated more. The book seems to span around 15 years for no particularly good reason. Why flit from WWI to Africa To Detroit and back to France, constantly setting the scene at each place for thirty pages or so and then leaving without ever telling a story about it. This book should either be 2000 pages or it should be 200, as it is, it’s a bloated 430 some odd pages, most of them tedious in their unrelenting air of soliloquy.
Beside yourself, long after having given up on enjoying this meandering bloat, but driven to finish it in an eat-your-vegetables state of mind, you find yourself briefly immersed in a flash of story. The business with the old lady and Robinson and Madelon is legitimately engaging. You wish that Celine had spent 200 pages just telling this story, fleshing it out, giving us more brilliant bits like that argument in the taxi-cab. Eh, but no, we get the book Celine has given us… like life itself… amusing at times… even playful… but filled with wretchedness and misery… and ultimately unbearable… though we bear it anyway due to our own sorry vanity.
Even Celine’s dour outlook is too much, once you’ve accepted his point of view. How many pages and different ways do you need to read the man rant about the misery and suffering and out-and-out wretchedness of humanity. It gets tedious after a while. And I want to like it more than I do for purely ideological reasons, if nothing else. Americans are essentially taught to laugh at guys like Celine before we ever even encounter them, so that they’re rendered harmless lest we seriously consider their ideas. At most an adolescent gothic phase is perhaps indulged and seen as something to be grown out of before we put on a cheery costume of being a great big money-making success of material comfort. A person like me wants so very much to like Celine, but he spends the whole novel saying and not showing, to reference what is considered a maxim of good writing.
An interesting thought is that the one decent character in the story, a sergent Alcide, spends his life in sacrifice for the benefit of his niece. This is the only example of a positive view of humanity capable of generosity and compassion in the entire book. I wonder if it is a coincidence that its basically an inversion of Dostoevski’s hypothetical of making a community of people happy at the cost of torturing an innocent child. I think, either way, Celine has the better and truer to life formulation. In a world where everyone is miserable and suffering is inevitable, a selflessness to the benefit of the innocent is the only noble path available to a person. Celine says to Dostoevski that his formulation is silly. We can’t be happy, but maybe the children can be.
One can imagine how this book filled not only with fatalism and excretions might have been received upon publication. I bet well-bred people found it thoroughly unpleasant. And there must have been great value in that. Though it hasn’t aged usefully. In a similar vein, I feel as though the viciousness and the pettiness and the misery and the suffering has not translated across the decades and the culture into America in 2012 either. People are still mean and unhappy, I suspect, but “Journey to the End of the Night” does not speak to today’s miseries and pettiness and cruelty. Not in my opinion.
It’s anyway, a relief to be finished.
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