SOURCE: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline: An Introduction," in Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, edited by William K. Buckley, G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 100-10.

In the last twenty years, Louis-Ferdinand Céline has emerged and, in the opinion of most major critics, joined Proust as one of the two greatest novelists of the twentieth century. This change in his literary fortunes is one of the most interesting stories in modern literature, and is understandable if one remembers that Céline's work was surrounded by what amounts to a conspiracy of silence by French (mostly leftist) intellectuals from the end of World War II until about the mid-sixties. Having been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the war, it took almost twenty years for his name to be cleared. Once it became apparent that despite his vocal anti-Semitism of the late thirties he had not been a Nazi collaborator during the Occupation, there was no way to stop the frustrated and widespread desire of younger Frenchmen to read Céline and to know more about his life and work.

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was born on 27 May 1894 in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris. His father worked for an insurance company and his mother, to make ends meet, ran her own retail establishment, a soft goods store in the Passage Choiseul near the Place de l'Opéra on the Parisian Right Bank. Beginning in 1899, the family lived at the same address as Mme Destouches's store and young Louis, an only child, attended local schools before being sent by his parents in the years 1907–9 for protracted stays in both Germany and England in order to learn the languages of these two countries. In his mother's thinking, such knowledge would eventually come in handy in the lace business. This early exposure to foreign languages and cultures was unusual for a young French boy of this period, especially for one from his less than privileged petit bourgeois social class.

After his return from aboard, he took odd jobs during 1909–12, working for various small businesses in his neighborhood. Although he later claimed that the desire to study medicine had come to him early in life, he still did not attend school through these adolescent years. Not long after reaching the age of eighteen, in 1912, he joined a cavalry regiment and attained a rank equivalent to that of sergeant by the time the war began. He was seriously wounded in the arm while carrying out his duties at the front in Flanders and was operated on shortly thereafter. Fearful that army doctors would take the easy way out and remove his arm, he insisted on being treated without anesthesia. Thus he kept his arm, the loss of which would have impeded his later medical career. Awarded the Médaille Militaire for his bravery in battle, he was sent back to Paris to rest and recuperate. His disability for the arm injury and damage to his ear drums was rated at 75 percent, so there was no chance of his being sent back to the front.

A year later, in May 1915, he was assigned to the French consulate general in London, where he worked in the passport office. During the year that he spent there, he married Suzanne Nebout, a French bar girl working in one of the local nightclubs that he frequented, but he did not register the marriage with the French Consulate. When he left London a year later, having been definitively released from military service, he left his wife behind. In search of adventure and to earn a living, he spent the next year in West Africa working as a trader in the bush for a French forestry company. His stay in the Cameroons was shortened when, due to ill health caused by the harsh climate, he had to return home. Back home in France in May 1917, he seemed ready to settle down. Taking accelerated course work, he completed his baccalaureate degree in 1919. Enrolling at the medical school of the University of Rennes in that same year, he completed his medical degree in 1924 and, in the process, married Edith Follet, the daughter of the school's director. The marriage to Nebout was disregarded under French law.

With his doctoral dissertation, entitled La Vie et l'oeuvre de Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis (1818–65) (The Life and Works of Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis), published by the medical school, and good connections in the medical profession thanks to his marriage, he seemed to have a bright professional future ahead of him. But this very perspective, a bourgeois life of privilege, did not appeal to him. On the contrary, he felt restricted by it. For this reason, he left his wife and daughter in 1925 to take a job as a doctor with the League of Nations. Thanks to this new post, he was able to travel to Geneva and Liverpool, and even back to West Africa. He also made a trip to the United States, Canada, and Cuba that lasted more than two months in 1925 and that took him to a number of cities, as well as to Detroit, where he took a particular interest in the social, psychological, and medical problems of assembly line workers in the Ford plant located there. These wanderings continued until 1928 when he finally settled in Clichy, a dreary working-class suburb of Paris. Divorced in 1926, he spent the next ten years there, the first three in private practice and, beginning in 1931, as an employee of the local town clinic.

It is at this point, at the age of about thirty-two, that Céline began to write. He devoted most of his free time during the next four years to the composition of his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night). Its publication in 1932 was by far the major literary event of the year. As Leon Trotsky, a great admirer of the book, but much less so of Céline the man, put it: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes". The novel is a startling one to read, its bitter pessimism affecting readers in a powerful way even today, more than a half-century after publication. It is impossible to be indifferent to Voyage and, by extension, to its author.

Léon Daudet, at the time a member of the Goncourt jury and an ardent admirer of the novel, sought to have Voyage awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize. The other members of the jury were frightened, however, by the idea of awarding the prize to such a bitterly pessimistic work. Thus, as a matter of simple politics, the award went to the now totally forgotten and insignificant writer Guy Mazeline for his novel Les Loups (The Wolves). Instead, and as a kind of consolation prize, Céline's first novel was awarded the Renaudot Prize.

Voyage opens with young Ferdinand Bardamu talking with his friend and fellow medical student, Arthur Ganate. The point of view of the novel, from the beginning, is that of a first-person narrator. Bardamu sees a parade passing by and, in a fit of patriotism, decides to join the army. From here we follow him to the front and then back to Paris where he convalesces. This section of the novel contains some of the strongest antiwar passages ever written. In the process, it attacks the stupidity of professional military men, the cupidity and mendacity of politicians, the plundering and exploitation of civilians behind the front lines, and the docility with which the average citizen accepts his fate. After this, Bardamu goes off to Africa where he works in the bush for a French company. Here we see colonialism at work, with black natives being systematically exploited by the whites as well as by each other. Although the narrator clearly feels that the natives are inferior to whites, he still displays sympathy for their woes, since the white colonials are only creating more problems for them. At the end of this section, as during the previous section in France, the hero lapses into a state of delirium brought on by the stress of living. Delirium to Céline is an escape from the stressful reality of modern life, and it is only through delirium that he escapes from Africa.

When he awakens, he is in New York, and from here his travels will take him to Detroit, where he falls in love with Molly, a local whore, and works in a Ford factory. While in the United States, he comes in contact with modern, unrestrained capitalism and the worship of money and material comfort as reflected in modern American life. At the same time, he sees how people at the bottom of the social ladder live in comparison to the rich. Here, in Detroit, he meets up again with a certain Léon Robinson, his alter ego, whom he had already met in other stressful situations, at the front in France, in Paris, and even in Africa. Partly in order to get away from Robinson and partly to put his own life in order, Bardamu leaves the United States and returns to France where he decides to study medicine.

Here, about a third of the way through this 500-page novel, begins what can be called the second part of the work. Now, instead of running away from reality, he vows to attempt to meet it head on. First, his life as a doctor in the working-class suburb of Rancy is chronicled. Caring for the sickest and least educated segment of society. Bardamu descends into the lowest circles of the hell of modern life. Inevitably, he again runs into Robinson, who is living in the neighborhood. When Robinson tells him that he has been hired to assassinate a neighbor, Old Lady Henrouille, who has become a nuisance to her son and daughter-in-law, both of whom want to get rid of her, Bardamu tries to stay out of it. As Robinson is setting the bomb that he hopes will detonate later and kill the old lady, it suddenly goes off in his face, blinding him. At this point, Bardamu gets involved with the Henrouilles and helps them arrange for both the old lady and Robinson to work in the crypt of a church in Toulouse where they serve as guides for tourists interested in seeing the mummies preserved there. Finally, after the trip to Toulouse, Bardamu returns to Paris where he works in a privately run mental institution. Here, he seems to conclude at the end of the novel, he will be safe from man, the most dangerous predator in the universe. Living among the insane, he has finally found his place in the world.

This second part of the novel, which some critics have found slower to read than the first part, is highlighted by the author's strong social protest against poverty and ignorance as well as against some of the tools that, in his view, society uses to maintain the social status quo: alcohol, the press, and modern cinema.

Although this description offers only an overview of the plot of Voyage, it should be clear that the overriding concern of the novelist is to depict the conditions of modern life. The words of the great Catholic novelist of the interwar years, Georges Bernanos, still apply to Voyage: "Pour nous la question n'est pas de savoir si la peinture de M. Céline est atroce, nous demandons si elle est vraie. Elle l'est" ("For us the question is not to decide if Céline's view of life is horrible, but whether it is true. It is)".

As the first part of the novel is characterized by flight and a search for self and for meaning to existence, the second part is static and shows the hero willing to stay in place, to compromise if necessary, while awaiting death and attempting to find out what meaning he should eventually assign to that event. Living and working among the poor, Bardamu, like Céline himself, comes to the realization that life for most people in our modern consumer societies is humdrum and boring. The major difference between the rich and poor is that the former have the means to buy forgetfulness, while the poor, whom Céline knew all too well, do not have any such opportunity. Much has also been written about the Bardamu/Robinson relationship, but Merlin Thomas's assessment is probably the most sensible. To him, each of these characters represents a different view of death. Bardamu, who has a role to play in life, is still struggling to go on living. Robinson, however, who has no role to play, is happy to have his life ended. Murdered by Madelon, he "had decided upon his own death: he could have avoided it … it all amounts to a question of ultimate acceptance of the lot of humanity." As the novel ends, Bardamu has clearly decided to go on living. He knows that death is what awaits him at the end of the night, but his time has not yet come. Céline showed that his knack for inventing catchy titles was no accident when his next book, Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), appeared in 1936. Like Voyage—and all the novels that would follow—this book is adapted from the author's own experiences. It goes back in time to the period that precedes the action recounted in Voyage, to Céline's childhood and adolescence.

Although he enjoyed publicly poking fun at Proust, Céline nonetheless admired his ability to fashion an imposing multivolume novel out of the stuff of memory. As if to mimic Proust, Céline begins Mort à crédit by showing us the mature Ferdinand at work as both a doctor and a writer. But when he lapses into a state of delirium brought on by both an attack of malaria contracted in Africa and a recurrence of dizziness caused by war wounds, we cannot help thinking of Proust and of the privileged moments, like the one provoked by the dipping of a butter cookie, the famous madeleine, that brought back understanding of past events through the process of involuntary memory. Here though, Céline, who was always proud of his war record and, through the darkest days of exile after World War II would always consider himself to be a true patriot, stresses his difference from Proust. Whereas the latter always wrote in long, highly stylized periodic sentences about upper bourgeois and aristocratic characters, Céline used this fit of delirium to summon up recollections of his working-class past and express them in a slang that is even more daring than the one experimented with in Voyage. Furthermore, the style relied more and more on what he later called his "style télégraphique," little bits of sentences, divided and punctuated by three or more dots. The reason for this technique, he claimed, was that in order to achieve the emotional effect that he sought, he had to write the way people talk, adapting oral speech slightly so that the reader, even though reading, would still have the impression of being in the presence of genuine working-class speech. Beginning with his childhood in the fictional Passage des Bérésinas, the transposed Passage Choiseul of his youth, where the family lives and his mother works, the first-person narrator, Ferdinand, paints a bleak picture. His father, a loser stuck in a dead-end job, takes out his frustrations by beating his son. His mother, unfortunately, is not much better, and the family eats only noodles for most of their meals because his mother is afraid that anything else will leave odors in the lacework that she has for sale. The relatives are just as bad, with the exception of his grandmother, Caroline, who dies in due course, and his uncle, Edouard, who understands, helps, and consoles him.

Leaving school in his early teens, long before finishing his baccalauréat degree, he works at two different jobs and is fired from each one. His Uncle Edouard luckily intervenes and suggests that the boy be sent to England for language study. Enrolling for a year in Meanwell College in England, Ferdinand eventually has an affair with the headmaster's young wife, Nora, and returns home. Like Molly of Voyage, Nora is treated with sensitivity and warmth and stands out in Céline's fiction for this reason. Back home, Uncle Edouard once again comes to the rescue and introduces Ferdinand to an inventor and con man, Courtial des Pereires. Just as Robinson had slowly assumed more and more importance in the earlier work, now Courtial, with his quacky experiments and projects, becomes a major character as the novel progresses. But when he finally commits suicide near the end of the work because his idealistic vision cannot be achieved (just as Robinson had been killed off by his creator because there was no place for him in life), Ferdinand realizes that, like Bardamu in Voyage, he will have to go ahead on his own and make sense out of life.

Returning to Paris from the experimental farm that Courtial had organized, he decides that he will have to get away from his family and seek true independence. Ironically, he seizes upon the army as the place to find this fresh start in life, and it is with this intention in mind—joining the army—that we leave him at the end of the novel.

Mort, although a successful novel by any criterion, did not achieve the same overwhelming success as Voyage. It did, however, solidify Céline's reputation as a pessimistic writer with a generally negative view of family and social relationships. Despite the warm feelings that the narrator expresses for his Uncle Edouard (and some of the warmest pages that Céline ever wrote concern this character), it is difficult to disagree with this assessment. Like Voyage, Mort was immediately translated into all the major European languages and kept Céline's name alive as an important author (seemingly, but not really, of the Left) in a world about to go to war.

Céline's royalties from the publication of Voyage, in France and around the world, were substantial. He used them to buy a house in Saint-Malo, but he still continued to live in his shabby Paris apartment and never stopped working among the poor and dispossessed. The translation of his work into Russian resulted in the accumulation of a vast sum of money held in his account in the Soviet Union. Since the Soviets would not send him the money, he accepted an invitation in 1936 to visit what the French Left held as an article of faith to be the workers' paradise and to spend his money there. As a result of that trip, Céline published the first of four political pamphlets that appeared during 1936–41. Mea Culpa (Through my fault), the first of them, attacked Russia as a brutal dictatorship organized on the philosophical basis of materialism. Its citizens he announced, live in filth and depravation and are exploited by a new ruling class—the Party. The title of the work is obvious: Céline repented for having allowed people to believe that he was sympathetic to the organized political Left in France.

His next pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a massacre), exploded on the political landscape. In this work, Céline's political consciousness, comparatively subdued in his two novels, where he makes extensive use of understatement, and only beginning to show itself in Mea Culpa, now directs itself in a frontal assault on international Jewry. Claiming that the Jews in France, with their brothers in London and New York, are planning another war in which they intend to wipe out the Aryans, he calls for the neutralizing of Jewish power in France. Reaction to the work, which runs on for over 400 pages, was mixed in France, and in fact many intellectuals, including André Gide, the reigning pontiff of French letters, thought that he was kidding, that the anti-Semitic tone was so exaggerated that it could not be sincere and must be ironic. But when, in the following year, 1938, Céline published another pamphlet, entitled Ecole des cadavres (School for cadavres), that picked up where the first one left off, going so far as to propose a Franco-German alliance against Russia and the Jews as the only way for Europe's Aryans to survive, there could be no doubt about his intentions. As a result of these pamphlets, Céline found himself politically isolated from both the Left and the Right, and he remained in this state for the rest of his life. The last of the four pamphlets, Les Beaux Draps (A nice mess), was published during the Occupation in 1941 and castigates the French army for running away from the Germans. The basic proposition of the work is that France ought to institute what Céline thought would be a true form of communism in which everyone would receive the same salary no matter what form of work he did. In this book he drops the anti-Semitism of the years 1937–38 and presents himself as a true patriot and a decorated hero of the Great War. In fact, after the outbreak of hostilities, Céline served on board a French vessel in the Mediterranean that was shelled by the German Navy. Although he openly called for a Franco-German alliance in 1938 to counter what he took to be Soviet, British, and Jewish attempts to start a new war, he rallied to the defense of his country once the Germans attacked.

Céline's major literary projects during the Occupation were his two-part novel Guignol's Band, and the fragments of what may have been a large novel entitled Casse-Pipe (Kick the Bucket).

The word "guignol" in French usually refers to a kind of marionnette show, the "Grand Guignol," that inspires deep emotion in children because of the extremes of human behavior that it can depict. The word can also be used to refer figuratively to a human being who is comic and ridiculous, and it is this meaning that Céline presumably wanted to give to the novel. The old narrator, who is in fact none other than Ferdinand himself, gazes back over the course of the next 900 pages and reflects on the foolish and laughable youth that he once was and of the "band" of characters that he came to know while residing in London for a year during World War I.

Guignol's Band I, published in Paris in 1944, deals with the underworld characters—pimps, prostitutes, and the like—that Céline knew during his year in London. Various adventures in the first volume culminate in a flight to the French consulate where Ferdinand demands to be reintegrated into the French Army, since he has concluded that service at the front could not be more dangerous than life in the London underworld. It is here, however, that he meets Sosthéne de Rodiencourt, a would-be magus who seeks access to the fourth dimension of existence. Ferdinand falls under his spell, much like the earlier Ferdinand of Mort had been bemused by Courtial. As part 1 ends, we find them going off together in search of adventure. In the second part of the novel, which was not published until 1964, two years after Céline's secretary had accidentally come upon it, the quack inventor, Colonel J.F.C. O'Calloghan, who is working on a new type of gas mask, and his lovely niece Virginia, become major characters. The same type of unbelievable and farfetched events take place throughout this second part, which culminates, once again, with Ferdinand's symbolic crossing of London Bridge in order to leave these characters behind and seek more adventures elsewhere. The plot line of the two parts is generally incoherent, and most critics have found that the novel fails for this reason. However, J. H. Matthews contends that this failure of narrative was a deliberate strategy on the part of Céline. In this novel, "plot is downgraded," he claims, "so that readers will not concentrate upon narrative incident so much as on the manner in which Ferdinand gives an account of events." This might well be the case; but it does not make this tedious novel any easier to read.

Casse-Pipe, preserved in a few fragments that constitute less than 200 pages of text, is centered on barracks life in the cavalry during the period of 1912–14. Chronologically, it fits into Céline's life between Mort and Voyage, just as the two parts of Guignol's Band may be read as an insert in Voyage between the episode in Paris after Bardamu is wounded and his trip to West Africa. The sections of the novel that remain are all that survived the plunder of Céline's Paris apartment after his departure in May 1944. Remaining fragments of it may be rediscovered at a future date.

Féerie pour une autre fois (Fairy tale for another time), which appeared in two volumes in 1952–54, is generally considered to be Céline's weakest work of fiction. It must be admitted, however, that in comparison to the critical attention devoted to his other novels it has not yet been closely studied. Ostensibly written during his exile in Denmark, where he fled in 1945 and remained until 1951, when he was granted amnesty and allowed to return to France, this book is best considered as a transitional work that shows Céline moving from the transformation of his lived experiences into the form of a novel, as in Voyage, Mort and Guignol's Band, to what will become, in his last three books, chronicles that do not seek to fool the reader any more, and where the first-person narrator is Céline himself. In the opening pages of Féerie, part 1, we find the embittered narrator in Paris, but throughout most of the book he is in prison in Copenhagen lamenting his fate, pointing out, among other things, that there are many real collaborators freely walking the streets of Paris, while he is in prison and in exile. The action of Féerie, part 2, written before the first part but published after it, is set in Paris and revolves around an Allied air raid on the French capital. The word "féerie," which denotes a form of entertainment that includes an element of magic and supernatural, is essentially Céline's ironic fantasy about himself. It fails as a novel, if that is what it is supposed to be, but is perhaps redeemed by the fact that it points the way to Céline's last three works, generally hailed by critics as masterpieces.

Once the Allies had landed in France, Céline realized that it was only a question of time until Paris would be liberated and he would be called to account for his prewar writings. Convinced that he stood virtually no chance of receiving a fair trial from the Communist-dominated Resistance, he decided to flee. In July 1944, he left Paris with his wife Lucette, the former ballet-dancer whom he had married the year before, his friend the actor Le Vigan, and his now-famous cat, Bébert. After a short stay in Baden-Baden, he made a trip to Berlin to visit hospitals and then remained for several months in Kränzlin, in Brandenburg, northwest of Berlin. When the Vichy government, by now in exile, retreated to Sigmaringen, Céline moved there and joined the French colony in November 1944. He stayed on with them as a kind of house physician until March 1945. At that time, and allegedly to recover money he had hidden in a friend's back yard in Copenhagen before the war, he left for Denmark. He arrived there safely three weeks later.

The events of this nine-month period were to become the subject matter of Céline's last three works: D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle), published in 1957, Nord (North), which he brought out in 1960, and Rigodon (Rigadoon), which he completed the morning of the day he died, 1 July 1961. This last text was not published, however, until 1969.

The events of Céline's life during this period of flight are not recounted in order in the trilogy. Nor does he seek strict verisimilitude, as would a professional historian. The subject matter, while based on the author's personal experience, includes a certain amount of fiction and fantasy. The end result, however, is that we have over a thousand pages that describe life in the closing days of the Third Reich. The Allied bombardments, the reactions of the French puppets to their inevitable fate, and the growing awareness of the general population that their cities will soon be overrun by the enemy are all vividly recounted.

These three books are also remarkable in that they reflect Céline's contempt for the Germans. The same man who had sought a Franco-German alliance in 1938 now scoffs at them and their leaders. Another recurrent theme is that of the corruption of leadership, for the masters in the Third Reich never seem to lack any of the creature comforts so absent from the lives of ordinary citizens. A third continuing theme is that of the collapse of Germany itself, the confusion and disintegration of a whole society. Finally, what is perhaps the most important theme of the three works, and which links up with Voyage in this regard, is that of sheer survival. Céline will do anything, flatter any person, do whatever is asked, merely to go on living, to survive until another day when the conditions of normalcy will finally be at hand. Both the fright and desperation that he experienced, and the cunning required to overcome them, are recounted by Céline in his usual self-deprecating way. Convinced of his own political innocence, for which he argues throughout these pages, he also strikes a note for the poor and dispossessed, with whom now more than ever he identifies. These three volumes, properly called chronicles rather than novels, are the last works of Céline's literary career.

In April 1945, a French court issued a warrant for Céline's arrest as a collaborator, but it was only eight months later that French officials in Copenhagen demanded his immediate extradition. The Danes responded by imprisoning both Céline (for fourteen months) and his wife (for two months). In February 1947, Céline's declining health caused him to be hospitalized. After another four months, his health restored, he was allowed to go free on condition that he not leave Denmark. He thus remained in that country until his amnesty in France was declared in April 1951. The last ten years of his life were lived in quiet and seclusion on the outskirts of Paris where he earned his living, as always, by practicing medicine. As mentioned above, his last three books, the chronicles, were composed during this period.

In the United States, the number of writers clearly influenced by Céline is greater than for any other European writer, living or dead. Henry Miller for years was fond of telling anyone who would listen how much he owed to Céline. Jack Kerouac, in the frenzied, breathless flight of On the Road (1957) and in the analysis of the effect of drugs on his heroes, took his cue from Céline's famous delirium scenes in which his hero, overcome by the pain of living, escapes from reality into a kind of therapeutic dreamworld. Joseph Heller, in Catch-22 (1961), took the whole idea for his novel from the first part of Céline's Journey. As Bardamu learns in the opening pages of the novel, while serving at the front in the late summer of 1914, there is nothing more insane than war between two civilized nations. Wounded and rehabilitated in Paris, Bardamu decides that the only way to avoid returning to the combat zone is to act crazy. But French doctors know that anyone insane enough not to want to do his patriotic duty is really sane, and this is precisely the "catch" that Heller places at the heart of his own novel. Ken Kesey, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), expanded on the theme of the man who voluntarily decides to live in a madhouse. In this, too, he follows Céline, for if Bardamu is forcefully interned in an asylum early in Journey, by the end of the novel he is a doctor in charge of one. Finally, the most interesting Céliniste to surface in recent years has been Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Céline's influence in him, however, does not grow out of Journey, but rather from the later novels, mentioned above, that chronicle among other things the Allied destruction of a large part of Germany's civilian population in 1944–45. As Céline's prestige grows, more American disciples will no doubt emerge.

Céline's future reputation as one of the two great novelists of twentieth-century France seems secure. Although the linguistic fireworks found in his novels obviously suggest a comparison with James Joyce in English, scholars are only now analyzing his prose to discover the secrets that make it work. As no great novelist or school of fiction has arisen in France in the quarter century that has elapsed since the death of Camus, Céline and his work have to a large extent filled the vacuum.