Journey to the End of the Night

The spine is the descent, and its outward half resists the subtractive test. The war must come first, because everything after it is the war carried into peace by other means; Africa and Detroit are required to show that the same order holds under the palm and on the assembly line. Robinson’s thread binds the halves, appearing at each station before Bardamu, so the episodic form is not merely a string. The return is where the test bites, and it is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the Rancy chapters are long, the Henrouilles’ plot to kill the old mother runs through more episodes than its matter requires, and the rants, which are the book’s voice, repeat their single argument more often than any one passage needs. Much of the Toulouse and Vigny material, and of the medical practice, could go with less loss than the book’s scale implies.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the book uncovers can be stated, and it holds. The war of 1914 seen from below as a slaughterhouse no one understands; the colonial trading company as a machine for fever and theft; the Ford plant as a body made into a part; the suburban doctor’s round as the place where poverty shows itself a disease of its own. Under all of it a social condition stated plainly: the poor are spent by those above them in war and peace alike, and fear, not courage, is the honest response. At the front Bardamu finds himself “puceau de l’Horreur”, a virgin to horror. It is held off the top because the disclosure is single, and the nihilism that delivers it also flattens it. Love is “l’infini mis à la portée des caniches”, infinity brought within the reach of poodles, and nothing in the book is allowed to contest that: the truth is stated more than tested.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The elevation is the dreadful kind, and it rises often. The colonel and the messenger blown apart on the road in the first pages, which Bardamu greets with relief. The night patrols through burning Flanders villages, the war reduced to darkness and noise. The jungle at Bikomimbo, the trading hut rotting with fever, and the delirium in which Bardamu is sold to a galley. The arrival at New York, the city standing upright. The close, the tug’s whistle on the Seine calling everything away. The crypt at Toulouse, its mummies laid out for tourists, is grotesque at a height few novels reach. There is a sublime of tenderness too, held to a few pages: Molly in Detroit, and the child Bébert, whose death Bardamu cannot prevent. Held at this figure because the Rancy and Vigny stretches run long on the level of sardonic report, and because the tone, by its own law, refuses the transport it so often approaches.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The title and the epigraph announce the myth, and the book builds it rather than evoking it: a journey through the night of the world, outward to the edge and back down into the suburb, the descent of the epics without a god or a return. Robinson is built, not alluded to. He is the double who goes ahead of Bardamu into every station: met on a night patrol trying to desert, found again as the man Bardamu replaces at the trading post, again in Detroit, again in Rancy. He does what Bardamu only wishes, and he dies for refusing to lie in love as Bardamu lies to survive. The crypt of mummies at Toulouse is a literal underworld, kept by the living for money. The particular stays particular: Bardamu has a regiment number and a fee schedule. Held at the gate because the shadow-double and the descent bear the weight but are left sketched by the satire rather than built to their fullest density.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is the French literary novel of 1932, written in the written language: Gide, Proust’s long periodic sentence, the well-turned narrative of the prize juries. The swerve is to write a serious novel of the whole world in spoken French, its popular syntax and its argot carried from the first line, “Ça a débuté comme ça”, to the last, not as the dialogue of characters seen from above but as the narration itself. Rabelais stands behind it, and the picaresque, and Zola’s popular speech; none had made the oral register the narrating instrument of a whole book of this scope. The stake was paid at once: the Goncourt jury divided and gave its prize elsewhere, and the book was received as an outrage as often as a revelation. Held below the very top because the full break with the sentence, the ellipsis as its unit, comes with Mort à crédit (1936): this book is the turn, and its successor the fullest departure.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge changes. Told in the written French of the juries, the war, the colony and the factory would become subjects; in the spoken voice of a man who was there and is still afraid, they are what was suffered and cannot be dressed up. The voice is the argument. Its sneer is the defence of a body that has learned it will be used up, and its occasional tenderness breaks through precisely because the register has no place for it. The picaresque frame, with a narrator always moving on, is the form of a man who has nowhere to stand, and Robinson’s appearance at each station turns the episodic line into a fate. Held off the top because the second half’s form slackens: the medical chapters drift back toward chronicle, and the ending, though earned, arrives by event, Madelon’s shots in the taxi, rather than by a turn of the form itself.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The evidence is more than ninety years of reading that has not exhausted it: Trotsky’s essay of 1933; the work of Henri Godard, the book’s editor in the Pléiade; Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980); and the continuing argument over how the novel stands to the antisemitic pamphlets Céline wrote from 1937. The questions remain open. Is Bardamu’s nihilism the book’s verdict, or a stance the book exposes? Is Robinson’s death a punishment, or the one act of truth? Is the misery of the poor denounced, or enjoyed? The form yields on return too: the relation of the oral surface to the written construction beneath it, drafted and redrafted at great length, is still studied. Held a step down because its questions turn on one axis, the voice and its nihilism, and return there; the book yields less on structure than on tone.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the French novel of the twentieth century and, through translation, the Western novel after 1932. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what narrative French could be made of, showing that the spoken language could carry a full novel of the world without condescension, and it set the tone of the modern anti-war and anti-colonial novel, the victim who refuses heroism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Queneau’s project of a spoken French; Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), whose epigraph is drawn from Céline’s play L’Église; Henry Miller, who acknowledged him; the Beats, Kerouac and Burroughs among them; Joseph Heller, who credited the book behind Catch-22; Bukowski; and later French writers down to Houellebecq. Held a step below the highest figures because part of the influence passes through Céline’s later prose rather than this book alone, and because the author’s politics have shadowed the reception.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed on form first. The text is whole: nothing that makes the work is lost. It entered the Pléiade, with Mort à crédit, in 1962. On presence, it has been read continuously in France for ninety-four years, a fixture of the paperback canon, translated widely, and taught, though the teaching is uneasy. That is the charge here, and it is small: the author’s antisemitic pamphlets and his conduct in the war have kept the book from the full ease of the school syllabus and from the public honour given to its peers, and in some quarters it is read under protest. Its surfaces, the 1914 front, the colonial company, the Ford line of the 1920s, are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon, not for the surfaces. A survival of near a century, without the widest presence.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Céline’s French. The command is real and load-bearing: the oral sentence is a made thing, with its displaced subjects, its doubled pronouns and its abrupt colloquial drops, timed for comedy and for horror alike. “Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit. Rien.” (Me, I’d never said anything. Nothing.) The set pieces are built: the shelling on the road, the passengers of the Amiral Bragueton turning on Bardamu at sea, the quarantine on Ellis Island, the Ford shop floor, the mummies. The aphorisms land with the force of proverb. Charged because the construction is weaker than the sentence. The second half’s sequence of Rancy cases, the Henrouille intrigue and the Vigny asylum is managed as chronicle, its timing loose, its figures, Parapine and Baryton among them, more sketch than scene; and the rant, the book’s great instrument, is also its crutch.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Flanders night at the start, with the colonel’s body on the road, and the asylum director Baryton at Vigny, who abandons his clinic to learn English and goes off to England. One law governs both. The world uses up the body, and every institution, army, company, factory, hospital, asylum, is a device for doing it with good conscience; the only freedom is flight, and the only truth is death. War and peace, Africa and Detroit, a child dying and a crypt for tourists obey that law and speak in one voice. The range is wide and held: farce, horror, social report, a love story, a murder plot. Held at this figure because the law is so uniform that it is at times imposed rather than found, and the tenderness of the Molly and Bébert passages stands a little outside it, admitted by the voice without being reconciled to its verdict.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Held, and wide. Consciousness: one narrating mind, fearful, mocking and at moments tender, across twenty years. The state: the army, the recruiting, the hospitals for the shell-shocked, where patriotism is prescribed as a cure. Labour: the colonial company, the assembly line, the suburban practice and its unpaid fees. History: the Great War, the empire in Africa, American industrial modernity, the French suburb between the wars. The family: the Henrouilles’ plot against their mother, Bébert and his aunt, the households of the poor seen from the doctor’s side. Love and the body: Lola, Musyne, Molly, Madelon. Death throughout, and the natural order as the jungle and the river. Held below the top because the sacred is present only as its absence, and because these orders are seen almost entirely from one vantage, below, through one voice, so that they are held together but seldom set against each other.

Score: 8.6 / 10