SOURCE: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Novels: From Narcissism to Sexual Connection," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 51-65.

[In the following essay, Buckley examines Céline's treatment of sexual desire and love in Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan.]

"Ah, Ferdinand … as long as you live you will always search for the secret of the universe in the loins of women!"

(L'Eglise)

… the female mystery doesn't reside between the thighs, it's on another wave-length, a much more subtle one.

(Castle to Castle).

After Freud, modern novelists grew more conscious of not only their own literary expression as a kind of narcissism, but also of the narcissism in the characters they created. Distress about narcissism, therefore, can be easily detected in modern novels. "The psychoanalytic concept of narcissism," says Russell Jacoby in his study Social Amnesia (1975), "captures the reality of the bourgeois individual; it expresses the private regression of the ego into the id under the sway of public domination … it comprehends the dialectical isolation of the bourgeois individual—dialectical in that the isolation that damns the individual to scrape along in a private world derives from a public and social one. The energy that is directed toward oneself, rather than toward others, is rooted in society, not organically in the individual…. The mechanism of this shift is not the least the society that puts a premium on the hardening of each individual—the naked will to self-preservation." This naked will to self-preservation, this hardening of oneself is an apt description of most protagonists in our modern novels. These terms are an especially good description of Céline's main character in his first two novels: the young Ferdinand.

Still creating their storm of interest and influence after fifty years, Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936) are good examples of modern novels which use a narrator who expresses his hardened feelings over both his narcissistic and crushed ego-ideals, and over his careful love choices. Ferdinand, like so many in modern fiction, is a character who has withdrawn his libido from the outer world because his contact with that world has brought mostly economic and emotional disaster; and, in defense, he has directed his libido to his ego. Major American scholarship on Céline has not explored the sexual behavior of Céline's characters as closely as it needs to do. Of course there have been important discussions of Céline's views on sex by many. McCarthy gives us a rather negative assessment of the author's views in his biography Céline (1975), as does J.H. Matthews in his book, The Inner Dream: Céline as Novelist (1978). In comparing Céline's views on sex to Baudelaire's views in Journaux intimes, McCarthy claims that Journey shows women as "predatory," that Céline suggests "women need to destroy men because there is a link between female sexuality and cruelty," and that, in the final analysis—because of the behavior of Musyne and Lola—"sex turns out to be disgusting" for Ferdinand, reflecting Céline's personal view that the male loses himself in orgasm with a woman because he is "weary" to have done "with himself." J. H. Matthews offers an equally negative view of sex in Death on the Installment Plan. He points to several episodes in the novel which support his point that sex "brings no consolation of any kind, no sense of release. It is a heightened form of terror…. Ferdinand's sexual contacts revitalize the cliche that represents sex as a form of death and likens the ecstasy of orgasm to dying." The client who early in the novel invites the young Ferdinand to engage her in oral sex; the sexual demands made upon Ferdinand by Madame Gorloge, and her theft of a jewel from the young boy's pocket; Gwendoline, the sex partner Ferdinand meets after crossing the Channel, and whom Matthews calls the vagina dentata; Nora's desperate actions with Ferdinand at Meanwell College; the astonishing scene between Antoine and his wife, to which Ferdinand and his friend Robert are voyeurs: all these scenes are examples of what Matthews calls Céline's linking of violence and eroticism. Matthews further maintains that even masturbation is "marked by terrorism" in this novel, especially when the boys at the English boarding school cruelly beat and masturbate the retarded Jongkind for getting penalties during a soccer match. Therefore since at "no time in his life has Ferdinand felt capable of trusting women enough to love any of them," masturbation becomes the "significant feature" of his early life. "It is a direct expression of his profound need to change his destiny in a world ruled by violence and predatory sexuality, where [Ferdinand] is alternately victim and pariah." I agree with Matthews that in most of these scenes "tenderness has no place," and that masturbation, sodomy, and rape become the clear but worst examples of narcissism in this novel. One could argue, for example, that Gorloge's seduction of the little Ferdinand is an example of emotional exploitation born out of the economic brutalities which exist between the classes in Paris, or that Antoine's attempt to copulate with his wife using butter, while Ferdinand and Robert look on and laugh, is an illustration of common but secret sexual hilarities. Ferdinand's laughter in this scene, and our mix of laughter and uncomfortable surprise, is to free us from pompous judgment, to suspend our surprise in humor—much as Chaucer does in his tales on sex. And yet I believe that Ferdinand's experience with Nora, as I will show, is the exception to what Mattnews and McCarthy call the predatory nature of sex in Céline's novels. In fact, his feelings over Nora are very exceptional indeed, for they begin Ferdinand's emotional education, his learning to see women as affirmations of beauty and life.

In her Céline and His Vision (1967), Erika Ostrovsky sees Céline as debunking sex, but for a very special reason: "Céline tends to blacken most descriptions" of sexual gratification, but in a "spirit of mockery," because the author "finds this business of 'I lo-o-ve you' vulgar, heavy-handed, and cheaply sentimental." As a result, she says, Céline intends to show us that eroticism is also "quite frequently linked to violence": witness Hilda, the sixteen-year-old, who waits for troop trains in Castle to Castle, Frau Frucht, addicted to sexual perversion, in Castle to Castle, Ferdinand's escape from a brawl with women on board the Bragueton in Journey, or Céline's comment in North that the more cities burn the more crazy for sex women become. Ostrovsky is quick to point out, however, that Céline can also be quite positive about sex, can even see sex as regenerative. She points to the author's descriptions of Lola, Molly, Madelon, and Sophie in Journey, Nora in Death on the Installment Plan, and Virginia in Pont de Londres—all characters reflecting, perhaps, Céline's comment in a letter to Eveline Pollet: "I love the physical perfections of women almost to the point of madness. It's a truth I reveal to you. It governs all the others." Moreover, Ostrovsky comments on Céline's astonishingly positive description of Sophie in Journey, that "if anywhere in Céline's work there is a glimpse of hope and beauty, of sun and joy, it is in the sight of such women … only the physical perfection of a woman, an animal, a gesture, can offer affirmation or a momentary respite from horror."

Wayne Burns and Gerald Butler go even further in their positive estimations of Céline's treatment of sex. In his essay "Journey to the End of the Night: A Primer to the Novel," (from the recently published anthology of essays edited by James Flynn entitled Understanding Céline [1984]), Burns says that "Through loving the woman's body—Sophie's, Tania's, Molly's, even Madelon's—[Ferdinand] comes to love the woman herself. Much as Céline would have disliked having Ferdinand compared with Mellors (Céline once described Lady Chatterley's Lover as 'a gamekeeper's miserable prick for six hundred and fifty pages') Ferdinand's attitude towards women is essentially Lawrentian in that he comes to the woman herself through her body." Burns also reminds us of Céline's long "lyrical description" of Sophie in Journey. In his essay "The Feeling for Women in Céline and His American Counterparts," (also from Understanding Céline), Gerald Butler not only maintains that Céline's view of women is one of adoration when compared to the way women are seen in Miller and Kerouac, but also "that it is not true," as Julia Kristeva claims (in her chapter on Céline entitled "Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite," from her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) that Céline's fiction "shows all women as of only two kinds: desexualized and delightful on the one hand and sexual and terrifying on the other, so that beauty is what wards off the sexual." "Sophie," Butler says, "is both sexual and, in her sexuality, a miracle of delight for Ferdinand." Her "presence and Ferdinand's reaction to it is enough to give the lie to the 'heroism' of Robinson that is the epitome of that bitterness and 'sense of superiority' and 'heaviness' that the world … teaches." And in his essay "The Meaning of the Presence of Lili in Céline's Final Trilogy," he says that Lili is "put forth in the novels as a guiding light for humanity," that even "her animal qualities, in the positive sense that Céline gives to 'animal'" (and here Butler means Lili is on the same "wave-length" as animals—she tunes in only those who are helpless) "do not detract from her comparison to a heroine from Dickens, for Lili's 'heart' does not exclude the 'animal' but seems to be profoundly connected with it. If that is so, then all the sexuality of human beings that Céline does not at all present in these novels in a favorable light is not an expression of animality in the sense that Lili is like an animal. Rather, the implication, the message for human beings is that they should have real animality above all by having hearts, as Lili does."

These are the important discussions of Céline's view of sexual feeling. My intention here is not to further discuss Dr. Destouches' views on sex and love, interesting and shadowy as this topic is turning out to be. (See, for example, Céline's own definition of love and sex in Marc Hanrez's Céline [1961].) Rather, my intention is two-fold: first, to describe how the young Ferdinand came to feel that women are regenerative, worthy of trust, and beautiful (how he learned about what Ostrovsky, Burns, and Butler are calling the positive aspects of sexual experience); and second, how the older Ferdinand came to realize that the sheer naked force of his will and the hardening of his heart would not help him be less narcissistic, would not help him gain sexual satisfaction. My goal is to open a more detailed investigation into those scenes of Céline's novels which describe modern sexual behavior, to look more closely at the sexual needs, desires, and secrets of Céline's characters.

In Death on the Installment Plan, young Ferdinand, already hardened to real connection from his brutal experiences in Paris as the son of a mother and father who want him to be a success, retains an erotic fantasy for Nora, the wife of an English school master. He has been sent by his parents to Meanwell College, in England, in order to learn English for business purposes so that when he returns to Paris he will start his business career off on the right foot. Badgered by an embittered and humiliated father, watching his mother work herself to death in their lace and furniture shop, and seduced by their female customers, Ferdinand is a tight-lipped adolescent, unable to connect with anyone, and full of childhood memories that are violent and sad. He is a classic self-preservative personality. And in this novel his masturbation preserves gratification in fantasy. He compliments his fantasies for Nora this way: "I can still see her…. I can bring back her image whenever I please. At the shoulders her silk blouse forms lines, curves, miracles of flesh, agonizing visions, soft and sweet and crushing…. The kid that came around to lap me up had his money's worth on Sunday night … But I wasn't satisfied, it was her I wanted…. Beauty comes back at you in the night … it attacks you, it carries you away … it's unbearable … I was soft in the head, from jerking off on visions … The less we had for meals, the more I masturbated…." Ego regresses into id under the power of parental domination, fantasy masturbation, and the sheer weight of poverty at the bankrupt English boarding school. Ferdinand's ego-libido creates Nora as his "object-choice." In one scene he masturbates with a school friend, while thinking of Nora, and, as the angry narcissist, fuels his mild sadism with attacks on sentimentality in love. At the same time, however, his attack on sentiment exhibits a deep desire for real connection, and this is what gives this novel a complexity rarely found even in our best modern British and American fiction.

"We did each other up brown … I was ruthless, I couldn't stop, my imagination kept winding me up … I devoured Nora in all her beauty…. I'd have taken all her blood, every drop … Still it suited me better to ravage the bed, to chew up the sheets … than to let Nora or any other skirt take me for a ride…. To hell with all that stinking mush!… Yak! yak! I love you. I adore you! Sure, sure!… Why worry, it's a party. Bottoms up! It's so lovely! It's so innocent!… I'd wised up when I was a kid! Sentiment, hell! Balls!…. I clutched my oil can…. You won't catch me dying like a sucker … with a poem on my lips."

When Nora does, at last, come to Ferdinand's room, out of her own mad loneliness and lack of connection to her husband, and abruptly flattens him out with her caresses, giving him, as Céline says, "an avalanche of tenderness," young Ferdinand does surprisingly well in responding. In bed with her he is beginning to reject, I believe, his narcissism—if only for a moment:

I try to soothe her pain, to make her control herself … I caulk wherever I can … I knock myself out … I try my best … I try the subtlest tricks … But she's too much for me … She gives me some wicked holds … The whole bed is shaking … She flails around like crazy … I fight like a lion … My hands are swollen from clutching her ass! I want to anchor her, to make her stop moving. There. That's it. She's stopped talking. Christ almighty! I plunge, I slip in like a breeze! I'm petrified with love … I'm one with her beauty … I'm in ecstacy … I wriggle…. On her face I go looking for the exact spot next to her nose … the one that tortures me, the magic of her smile."

In feeling "love," and in "looking for the exact spot" which tortures him, Ferdinand replaces his fantasy of Nora with her reality. Unfortunately Nora "breaks loose" from Ferdinand, and runs from the school to make her way to a bridge, where she will jump into a river to her death, a "nightgown fluttering in the wind." This whole scene is charged with the helpless desperation of human behavior. "I knew it," says Ferdinand, "she's "off her rocker!… Dammit to hell … Could I catch her?… But it's none of my business … There's nothing I can do … The whole thing is beyond me … I listen … I look out through the hall door … to see if I can see her on the waterfront … She must be down by now … There she is again … still screaming … 'Ferdinand! Ferdinand!'… her screams cut through the sky…." It is Céline's intention, as Wayne Burns has pointed out in Understanding Céline, "to make the reader hear cries he has never heard before; to make him realize that there is no end to these cries (in either time or circumstance), for they are cries which cannot be remedied by religion or philosophy or morality—much less by the paltry palliatives of social reform or even social revolution."

Ferdinand does go after her, but feels helpless and endangered as he stands on the bridge with the retarded boy both he and Nora had been taking care of at the school. We hear more of her pleas as she "flits" like a "butterfly" from one street lamp to the next. Sirens and whistles blow, rescue squads arrive, but nothing has helped. She is a "little white square in the waves … caught in the eddies … passing the breakwater!" It is Céline's intention, as he later has Ferdinand say in Journey to the End of the Night, "to go deeper and hear other cries that I had not heard yet or which I had not been able to understand before, because there seems always to be some cries beyond those which one has heard." This need to hear the "cries" of humanity is not the impulse of a narcissist, for he is not, as Freud says in "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914), "plainly seeking" himself "as a love-object." Nor is Ferdinand seeking a Nora as males would seek women to "save," those who would fulfill the male's desire to believe that "without him she would lose all hold on respectability." Even though Nora's behavior could trigger the narcissistic impulse in Ferdinand to rescue her, "justified by her untrustworthy temperament sexually and by the danger to her social position" (as Ferdinand might say it), it does not do so, neither in fantasy nor in reality. For there has been no "skill in argument" to win Nora, to save her from Meanwell College, no real seduction on Ferdinand's part. In fact, his self-preservative impulse remains defiant and hostile after her death, for he fears he will take the rap for it. Freud has it that "the attitude of defiance in the 'saving' phantasy far outweighs the tender feeling in it, the latter being usually directed towards the mother … in the rescue phantasy, that is, he identifies himself completely with the father. All the instincts, the loving, the grateful, the sensual, the defiant, the self-assertive and independent—all are gratified in the wish to be the father of himself…. When in a dream a man rescues a woman from the water, it means that he makes her a mother … his own mother." Yet Nora is not rescued. The drowning is no phantasy. And Ferdinand, after hearing Nora's cries and feeling he was sure to get caught and blamed, runs back to the school to wake Nora's old husband out of his own torpor. The scene we see then is painful: the old man, drunk on the floor, making masturbatory gestures with the flesh on his stomach; and Ferdinand, observing, and finally giving up, leaving to pack his bags for Paris "at the crack of dawn."

Despite the suicide, both Nora and Ferdinand had freed themselves, momentarily, from their environments, fixed as they were to their economic realities: Ferdinand to his petit-bourgeois Paris background and Nora to her bankrupt English middle-class. Without moralizing or sentimentalizing their encounter, Céline shows us Nora and Ferdinand achieving a moment of difficult tenderness. "It seems very evident," Freud says in "On Narcissism," that "one person's narcissism has a great attraction for those others who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are seeking after object-love." As an adult, Nora has rejected part of her narcissism, and a kind of vulnerable, nervous, but tender compassion remains. She is no Madame Gorloge, who, as the wife of Ferdinand's boss, orders Ferdinand to take his clothes off and make love to her. "She grabs me by the ears … She pulls me down to mother nature … She bends me with all her might…. 'Bite me, sweet little puppy … Bite into it!'"

Ferdinand plays "the ardent lover," and charges into her, as he had seen her husband Antoine do when he and Robert were spying on them, "but much more gently." "She squashed me against her tits! She was having a hell of a good time … It was stifling…. She wanted me to work harder … to be more brutal … 'you're ripping me apart, you big thug! Oh rip me'…." Ferdinand did not have to play the "ardent lover" with Nora; nor could their lovemaking be called "ripping." She was not, as he characterized Gorloge, a "vampire." She was a "mirage of charm." Neither was Nora a Gwendoline, Ferdinand's "Greasy Jone," the English fish and chips girl he meets on the docks before finding Meanwell College. "She kept repeating her name. She tapped on her chest … Gwendoline! Gwendoline!… I heard her all right, I massaged her tits, but I didn't get the words … To hell with tenderness … sentiment! That stuff is like a family…. She took advantage of the dark corners to smother me with caresses…. We could have done our business, we'd certainly have had a good time … But once we'd had our sleep out, then what?" "Anyway I was too tired … And besides, it was impossible … It stirred up my gall … it cramped my cock to think of it … of all the treachery of things … as soon as you let anybody wrap you up…. That's all I had on my mind in the little side streets while my cutie was unbuttoning me … She had the grip of a working girl, rough as a grater, and not at all bashful. Everybody was screwing me. O well…."

Rather, when Ferdinand sees Nora for the first time, he is astonished at his reaction to the gentleness in her face: "the special charm she had, that lit up on her face when she was speaking…. It intimidated me … I saw stars, I couldn't move." Ferdinand's narcissism is under attack by such powerful gentleness, tenderness, and charm because it is responding to it, needing it, and weakened by it in its self-preservative inner life. For all through the Meanwell College scene, Nora will be tending to the needs of a helpless retarded boy. And even though Ferdinand's young narcissism is interested in the idealized Nora—the Nora of his dreams, the picture of her which helps him adjust to his bitterness—he still responds, physically to her, and not to her manipulations, as he did with Gorloge and Greasy Jone. This is especially remarkable when you consider Ferdinand's characterization of himself earlier in the novel: "you'll never know what obsessive hatred really smells like … the hatred that goes through your guts, all the way to your heart … Real hatred comes from deep down, from a defenseless childhood crushed with work. That's the hatred that kills you." Even more remarkably, it may be said that Ferdinand gets a bit of compassion from Nora, learns from her, as he too walks with the retarded boy Jongkind, who "whines like a dog" after Nora's death.

I got to get the brat home … I give him a poke in the ass…. He's worn out from running … I push him … I throw him … He can't see a thing without his glasses … He can't even see the lamp posts. He starts bumping into everything … He whines like a dog … I grab him and pick him up, I carry him up the hill … I toss him into his bed … I run to the old man's door…. He blinks a little, his eyelids flutter … He don't know from nothing … 'She's drowning! She's drowning!' I yell at him. I repeat it even louder … I shout my lungs out … I make motions … I imitate the glug-glug … I point down … into the valley … out the window!

Ferdinand's heart and naked self-will are now less hardened to women, and to those who are victims of biology.

In Journey to the End of the Night, Ferdinand, as an adult, is the eloquent spokesman of revulsion from European colonialism and modern warfare, the voice of revulsion from our traditional beliefs in brotherhood, marriage, and love. He does not believe in our modern love, which is, for him, a "poodle's chance of attaining the infinite." His travels in the novel from the front lines of World War I, to Paris, to New York City and Detroit, to Africa, and back to Paris, have given him an anti-idealistic view of human behavior. "The great weariness of life," he says near the end of the novel, "is maybe nothing but the vast trouble we take to remain always for twenty or forty or more years at a time reasonable beings—so as not to be merely and profoundly oneself, that is to say, obscene, ghastly, and absurd." His first relationship with a woman in this novel is with Lola, an American nurse who believes in the existence of the soul and in patriotism, and it is a relationship characterized by a weariness because Ferdinand believes only in survival after coming home from the war. The understanding between them is of the body not the heart because the hardened heart cannot be trusted during war time. At first he accepts Lola for what she is, and this is even more of a step forward for his self-preservative personality, even less narcissistic than his relationship with Nora, for he no longer needs to see the female body in idealized images: "If I had told Lola what I thought of the war, she would only have taken me for a depraved freak and she'd deny me all intimate pleasures. So I took good care not to confess these things to her … she hadn't only a fine body, my Lola,—let us get that quite clear at once; she was graced also with a piquant little face and grey-blue eyes, which gave her a slightly cruel look, because they were set a wee bit on the upward slant, like those of a wildcat." When Ferdinand does admit that he is not going back to the front, Lola leaves him, furious at his lack of ideals, and returns to New York. But when Ferdinand arrives in New York, he meets Lola again.

she inquired after my genital lapses and wanted to know if I hadn't somewhere on my wanderings produced some little child she could adopt. It was a curious notion of hers. The idea of adopting a child was an obsession with her … what she wanted was to sacrifice herself entirely to some "little thing." I myself was out of luck. I had nothing to offer her but my own large person, which she found utterly repulsive.

"Really, it's a pity, Ferdinand," Lola says, "that you haven't a little girl somewhere…. Your dreamy temperament would go very well in a woman, whereas it doesn't seem at all fitting in a man…." This is an interesting description of female narcissism, to which Ferdinand responds with some of his own. Lola's attitude toward Ferdinand is cool, but now she has found a way to object-love: through a child she could possess the ideal of what she thinks Ferdinand should be. The desire Lola has for Ferdinand is not based on a need to tend him, nor is the desire Ferdinand has for Lola based on a need to protect her. There is, therefore, no anaclitic object-choice here. Rather, Lola looks at Ferdinand as a lover who should be what she wants him to be. And Ferdinand looks at Lola as a source for adventure in America. Her body to him was a endless source of joy because of its "American contours"; she is "a type" that appeals to him. Only when Lola gives him money and he takes off for Detroit to work in the Ford plant, do we see a strong and more radical change in Ferdinand's desires for women. The mechanisms involved in his new object-choice—Molly, the Detroit prostitute—are now more anaclitic than narcissistic, more dependent than independent, and not so much concerned about being with an "American type." And although Ferdinand's relationship with Molly shows remarkable similarities with Freud's description of male love for the grande amoureuse (especially when Freud describes the childhood experiences, the mother-complex, and youthful masturbatory practices of those who have "love for a harlot"), I believe that the following remarks show Ferdinand freeing himself of narcissistic self-absorption, and combining, if only for a time, his feelings of sex and tenderness, despite the fact that he is eventually fonder of his longing to "run away from everywhere in search of something."

I soon felt for Molly, one of the young women in this place, an emotion of exceptional trust, which in timid people takes the place of love. I can remember, as if I'd seen her yesterday, her gentleness and her long white legs, marvellously lithe and muscular and noble … (emphasis added)

"Don't go back to the works!" Molly urged me, making it worse. "Find some small job in an office instead…. Translating, for example; that's really your line … you like books…." She was very sweet giving me this advice; she wanted me to be happy … if only I'd met Molly…. Before I lost my enthusiasm over that slut of a Musyne and that horrid little bitch Lola!"

At the end of the Detroit chapter, we begin to understand the causes of Ferdinand's narcissism, and his possible solutions for his troubles:

Molly had been right. I was beginning to understand what she meant. Studies change you, they make a man proud. Before, one was only hovering around life. You think you are a free man, but you get nowhere. Too much of your time's spent dreaming. You slither along on words. That's not the real thing at all. Only intentions and appearances. You need something else. With my medicine, though I wasn't very good at it, I had come into closer contact with men, beasts, and creation. Now it was a question of pushing right ahead, foursquare, into the heart of things.

No longer do we have a character at the mercy of narcissism—like the young Ferdinand—because the narcissist would never want to plunge "into the heart of things." Rather, the adult Ferdinand sees conventional love (i.e. egocentric romantic love) as doomed to fail in a world where so many people have to scrape and crawl just to get by, in a world where Nature's lessons are hard to swallow, where "sex is the poor man's pocket gold mine."

To love is nothing, it's hanging together that's so hard…. All our unhappiness is due to having to remain Tom, Dick, and Harry, cost what it may, throughout a whole series of years.

And near the end of Journey, when Ferdinand visits a bistro for some cheap fun, living, as he says, a "capitalist's existence without capital," we hear him comment with irony and compassion on a female singing group from England, who are bawling out their little songs of love: "They were singing the defeat of life and they didn't see it. They thought it was only love, nothing but love; they hadn't been taught the rest of it, little dears…." Ferdinand finally realizes that conventional love, the kind we see today everywhere in American culture, richly narcissistic as it is, fails to help anyone—especially him.

What would help he tries to describe for us at the end of the novel, after seeing the death of his friend Robinson at the hands of a romantic lover. Ferdinand says about himself that he is just "a quite real Ferdinand who lacked what might make a man greater than his own trivial life, a love for the life of others." This "love for the life of others" is not at all narcissistic, and it is the kind of love which the young Ferdinand began to achieve when he took Jongkind back to the school the night Nora died, and when he banged on the door to tell Nora's old, drunken husband that she was dying. It is the kind of love which would allow death to be

imprisoned in love along with joy, and so comfortable would it be inside there, so warm, that Death, the bitch, would be given some sensation at last and would end up by having as much fun with love as every one else. Wouldn't that be pretty? Ah, wouldn't that be fine? I laughed about it, standing there alone on the river bank, as I though of all the dodges and all the tricks I'd have to pull off to stuff myself like that full of all-powerful resolves…. A toad swollen out with ideals!

But Ferdinand dismisses even these ideas as hopelessly idealistic for a man like him.

What does help him are not resolves, but what he finds in Sophie, the Slovak nurse who works at the lunatic asylum with him. In his relationship with Sophie, I believe, we see a man nearly free of narcissism. For Sophie is a woman

who still from time to time caught me to her, her whole body strong with the strength of her concern for me and tenderness and a heart full also and overflowing and lovely. I felt the directness of it myself, the directness of her tender strength. (emphasis added)

Male narcissism could never feel the directness of tender strength in a woman's body, the kind of strength Ferdinand now finds that he desires to have not only for himself, but also for women. It is this tender strength in a woman's body, this sex-tenderness and a full heart, which can ease the hardened heart and cruel naked self-will of a man.

I have been looking at scenes which show Ferdinand as an individual seeking meaning and sexual fulfillment. Yet there are other kinds of scenes in Céline's novels which do not emphasize individual sexual action, but rather mass sexual action. These scenes are astonishing in their impact, and they need further study—for they show Céline as a keen observer of herd psychology. Questions, therefore, remain to be answered.

For example, what is the function of Céline's délire and exaggeration in the episode from Death on the Installment Plan, where, in the Bois de Boulogne, Ferdinand and Mireille make love in public, and an orgy of sexual chaos moves and surges a crowd up to the Arc de Triomphe, where they are routed by "twenty-five thousand" policemen? Or what is the meaning of that scene in Guignol's Band, where Virginia and Ferdinand are swept up in a chaos of orgy, violence, and delight in the night club, where people are copulating in a jumble of arms and legs? There are similar scenes of mass, violent delight in North and Castle to Castle. Are these "little narcissistic eccentricities," as Céline labels his writing in Guignol's Band? Or are they scenes which tell us to: "Palpitate, damn it! That's where the fun is!… Wake up! Come on, hello! You robot crap!… Shit!… Transpose or it's death! I can't do any more for you. Kiss any girl you please! If there's still time!" Perhaps these mass scenes expose the flimsiness of even our most sophisticated ideas about love, or perhaps they speak of what Céline thought to be some ancient longing in sex, the "quite bestial act" of it, as he said. Ferdinand (and later Céline himself in his World War II trilogy) are both swept up by such sights and crowds in every one of the novels—as if this author, as a physician, wants us to understand that he sees impulses which repeat themselves on a huge scale, as if all of human life is joyously trapped into having such feelings out of the sheer biological surgings of the species, as well as out of our small motivations, brutalized as they are by war and stupid economies. Witness this description from Castle to Castle, where in a railway station, Céline's favorite locale for the mob's sexual délire, we see that:

sadness, idleness, and female heat go together … and not just kids!… grown women and grandmothers! obviously the hottest ones, with fire in their twats, in those moments when the page turns, when History brings all the nuts together and opens its Epic Dance Halls!… you've got to have phosphorus and hunger so they'll rut and sperm and get with it without paying attention! pure happiness! no more hunger, cancer, or clap!… the station packed with eternity!

Are these scenes of mass erotic action in direct conflict with Ferdinand's lessons about tenderness? Or do they, then, in their juxtaposition with Ferdinand's raptures, for example, over Sophie, show us the value of individual, sexual tenderness in the face of "History"?

More comment is also needed on the intriguing relationship between what Ferdinand enjoys about women (their astonishing bodies, their compassion and intelligence, their ability to have orgasms, and their "wave-lengths"), and what Céline says about sex for men ("it allows a guy a few seconds delirium which permits him to communicate with her"). How do we square Céline's striking portraits of what women have to offer men with this statement from Rigadoon (1961):

all our theater and literature revolve around coitus, deadly repetition!… the orgasm is boring, the giants of the pen and silver screen with all the ballyhoo and the millions spent on advertising … have never succeeded in putting it across … two three shakes of the ass, and there it is … the sperm does its work much too quietly, too intimately, the whole thing escapes us … but childbirth, that's worth looking at!… examining!… to the millimeter! fucking … God knows I've wasted hours!… for two three wiggles of the ass!

And lastly, careful analysis is needed on the relationship between what we see as the positive aspects of sexuality in Céline, what Burns calls "the essentially Lawrentian attitude" Ferdinand gains in coming to the woman, and Céline's personal comment that "(coitus is delirium): to rationalize that delirium with precise verbal maneouvers seems to me silly." Perhaps Céline sees deeper than my critical phrase "positive aspects of sexuality"—a "precise verbal maneouver" if ever I could invent one. Just how deeply and broadly Céline sees can be detected as early as 1916, the date he wrote a poem for his parents in his early twenties, while traveling to Africa. Even at this early date we see that Céline's vision of sexuality is much like the "town crier's," who remains perched in a minaret:

     Stamboul est endormi sous la lune blafarde
     Le Bosphore miroite de mille feux argentés
     Seul dans la grande ville mahométane
     Le vieux crieur des heures n'est pas encore couché—
 
     Sa voix que I'écho répète avec ampleur
     Announce à la ville qu'il est déjà dix heures
     Mais par une fenêtre, de son haut minaret
     Il plonge dans une chambre, son regard indiscret
 
     II reste un moment, muet, cloué par la surprise
     Et caresse nerveux, sa grande barbe grise
     Mais fidèle au devoir, il assure sa voix

This indiscreet glance, which plunges into a bedroom, and yet remains mute, frozen with surprise, is a remarkable description of not only our reaction to the sexual scenes we see in Céline's works, but it also characterizes the young Ferdinand's sights of sex behavior in Death on the Installment Plan, as well as the eventual mature view of sexual behavior in the later novels. For as an author, Céline continues to sing that our odd sun rises, despite what he has seen either in or out of his délire, and no matter how many times "History brings all the nuts together and opens its Epic Dance Halls." At every reading of his novels, Céline continues to plunge us "into the heart of things."