Journey to the End of the Night
by , trans. by John H. P. Marks
[Little, Brown, $2.50]
M. CÉLINE’S experiment in horror, contempt, and disgust, which produced a great uproar in France, does not come off consistently through its 509 pages. Lapses from intensity were to be expected, for the pitch of the war passages, in which M. Céline (Dr. Destouches) frequently writes satire in the grand manner, could hardly be maintained over such a stretch, but it is interesting to observe in just what way the let-downs come. Journey to the End of the Night is, in form, a realistic novel, the story of a medical student who serves in the French infantry until wounded and shell-shocked, makes rather opaque journeys among the slaves of interior Africa and the poor of New York and Detroit, returns to Paris to complete his studies, and then practises among the poor of the suburbs there. When it is dealing straightforwardly with the hideous insanities of war and the even more hideous squalor of the industrial débris, the book has great power. Its assault on the nerves is continuous and it repeatedly achieves effects of cynical humor not easily forgotten.
If M. Céline had been content to stay on this plane he would, conceivably, have written something in the nature of a masterpiece. Unhappily, however, his ambition was to project satire into something cosmic. He endeavors to point his contempt of life, poverty, cowardice, and the human race by excursions into symbolism and mysticism, qualities which simply will not mix with satire. Mr. Chesterton once remarked that if symbolism misses the small mark at which it is aimed you have no meaning at all, but instead a mass of clotted nonsense. That exactly describes the appearances of Robinson, a spectral creation who wanders through Journey to the End of the Night and who either is or is n’t another self of Bardamu, the book’s protagonist. Robinson puzzles the reader for a while, giving him an uneasy feeling that his intelligence is n’t what it ought to be, and then simply collapses into absurdity. Similarly with the mystical thread. One presently decides it is n’t profound at all, but just a pretentiously obscure device that masks vagueness and vacuity.
M. Céline is not the first novelist who has tried to bolster a passage that would not carry itself by projecting it into the incomprehensible. When he is writing to the mark, his book has a terrific impact. It would have been better for us all if he had kept his eye on that mark. He says in one place that philosophy is a form of cowardice; he demonstrates that mystically philosophical interludes are a form of non-fiction. As a result, the reader must be satisfied with a succession of fragments, sometimes tremendously effective in themselves and shot through with memorable phrases. In our time, sheer horror and disgust have seldom had so ecstatic expression as some of these fragments provide, but they do not fuse together. The symbol or the mystical vision is always shoving them over the line into nonsense. Like Jeffers, M. Céline frequently mistakes for tragedy what is just police news; like Faulkner, he frequently mistakes for misanthropic insight what is just muddy thinking.
BERNARD DEVOTO