The narrators of Céline's novels, from Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit to the doctor of Rigodon, share a desire to recount a journey which, as they are the first to point out, leads to no magic solution, no shining Grail. From the opening of the first novel the dominant image in Céline's fiction is black and hopeless night. It is not strictly true, however, that "nothing" shines. Night is frequently brightened by fires, sometimes to the extent that it turns into day. Beyond this, in a figurative sense, the story itself may be considered a bright spot in the writer's night.

The journey here compared to life is the aimless wandering of the picaro, the search his sustained and perilous effort to survive. The picaresque novel is a peculiar elaboration of the quest theme as we know it in Western literature, and, since its first appearance in Spain, this episodic pseudo-autobiographical form has inspired innumerable imitations and variations. Unlike the hero of myth, the picaro is no better endowed than other people, he does not cross the threshold into the other world, and the only boon he gains to pass on to his fellows is the tale of his own adventures. In this respect his "quest" is an archetypal failure. Although he lacks a sense of sacred mission, the picaro, driven by a desire to rise in society, still seems to be engaged in a search. Inasmuch as he usually rejects, in the end, the goal of wealth he has been pursuing, the only result of his journey is a need to communicate his peripatetic history to a reader. The picaro's history is varied, scatological, darkly humorous, morally ambiguous. He narrates it himself. The outcome of his quest is the writing of his novel.

A. A. Parker insists on the following four points as essential to the true picaresque: the picaro is of disreputable origin, he has a profound desire to rise and become a gentleman, instead he becomes a social delinquent, and after sinking to the depths of depravity he experiences a religious conversion. Céline's work is almost a parody of these points: his protagonist is of respectable middle-class parentage, his greatest desire is to descend to the depths of human experience, he becomes not an outlaw but a moral delinquent, and he denies the possibility of a spiritual exaltation. Step by step, Céline's narrators follow this distorted version of the picaresque, with the result that his assembled novels may be taken as the history of the inverted picaresque adventure of the future novelist. The frustrated quest forms the basis for each of Céline's novels, some of which adhere to the picaresque pattern more closely than others. The point that each novel makes, and for which the succession of novels stands as evidence, is that the protagonist gains nothing from life but a story to tell.

In the thirty years (1932–61) during which the narrator gradually becomes the doctor/novelist identified as the writer, the quest theme in its picaresque variant remains predominant. The picaro is a thief, and one of his archetypal predecessors is Prometheus. The narrators of these novels are the purveyors of a stolen flame, the work of art they have somehow seized in their travels, the story they have culled from life. Fire is a metaphor for the novel. In Céline's novels, the images related to fire reveal many of the author's ideas about creativity and the act of writing. The narrator sees himself as a fire-maker, and the light of his work fitfully illuminates a world of otherwise unrelieved blackness.

Early in Voyage au bout de la nuit, shortly after Bardamu discovers the horrors of war and the loneliness of night, he finds consolation in watching villages burn. The weather is dry, and every night some burning village can be found to brighten the darkness and provide some distraction from the constant fear Bardamu and his men feel riding about looking for their regiment: "Un village brûlait toujours du côté du canon. On en approchait pas beaucoup, pas de trop, on le regardait seulement d'assez loin le village, en spectateurs pourrait-on dire." There seem to be no people in these villages, no sense of disaster, just flames to light up the night. "Ça se remarque bien comment ça brûle un village, même à vingt kilomètres. C'était gai. Un petit hameau de rien du tout qu'on apercevait même pas pendant la journée, au fond de'une moche petite campagne, eh bien, on a pas idée la nuit, quand il brûle, de l'effet qu'il peut faire!" The men watch churches, barns, and haystacks burning and collapsing as if they were watching a movie; they fall asleep with a sense of security unique in the novel's war episodes. The fire makes the night bearable: "Mais quand on a des feux à regarder la nuit passe bien mieux, c'est plus rien à endurer, c'est plus de la solitude."

Fires, both large and small, from candles to full-scale flaming bombardments, reappear frequently in Céline's novels, generally at night. They are not always reassuring, but they always provide light and a better look at the night. All through Voyage Céline compares life to a night-journey; fire is a positive element in this journey. Furthermore, according to Gilbert Durand, fire can be equated with the word: "le feu est très souvent assimilé à la parole." This same image appears in the opening words of John's gospel. The written word, or the novel, is the fire in Céline's night, and an analysis of fire imagery shows the role of verbal art in Céline's imaginative space. The four works from which examples are drawn here—Voyage au bout de la nuit, Guignol's Band, Normance, and Nord—span his writing life from his first novel to the last published during his lifetime.

Fire consumes garbage. This is not one of the more widely recognized functions of the work of art, but the action of fire is very similar to the act of digestion, a ready metaphor for reading, and for writing as well. Digestion is generally believed to remove the useful parts of food and eliminate the remainder as waste, whereas, as everyone knows, "fire purifies"; what is unconsumed must be "pure." If the act of writing is seen to be related to fire, the experience is presumably cleansing. If the work itself is like fire, it is apt to burn those who come in contact with it. Fire often becomes liquid in Céline's novels and flows like lava. There are also many explosive, eruptive scenes. The volcano is an important image. However, this deluge of fire is not a form of divine retribution, for it is often man-made. It is the human race's attempt at self-destruction. The third aspect of fire to be examined is its power to attract and kill, like a lantern drawing moths at night. People are drawn by the flickering light on a movie screen because it makes the night a little brighter, life a little easier. The work of art is in fact a suicide on the part of the artist, for to fix anything is to kill it, and to fix one's dreams is to kill oneself.

Bardamu in Voyage falls ill in Africa and decides to leave his post in the jungle. Before leaving, he takes a lesson from his experience at war and sets a match to his hut to light up the night. "Cela se passait après le coucher du soleil. Les flammes s'élevèrent rapides, fougueuses." Just as the fire is a form of speech and represents the written word, so the fire-maker is the writer. Jules in Normance and Borokrom in Guignol's Band are outstanding examples: Jules calls down a bombardment and Borokrom throws bombs. Through the images of fire we see the artist's view of himself; he is an incendiary, a pathfinder, a Cassandra crying on the ramparts, a prophet, a sorcerer unconsumed by his own flames. The fire-maker sees himself at least as a prophet, if not a god. He denounces the evil he sees around him and reveals what is to come. The news is not cheering.

The incendiary and the arsonist are intent on destroying by fire. The writer who sees himself in such terms—as the kindler of a destructive fire—writes to destroy something, illusion perhaps, as well as literary convention. The wandering writer, the picaro, will see much in society about which his audience must be disabused.

Fire cleanses, as Bardamu points out in Voyage: "Ma mère n'avait pas que des dictons pour l'honnêteté, elle disait aussi, je m'en souvins à point, quand elle brûlait chez nous les vieux pansements: Le feu purifie tout!" We notice at once that Bardamu's mother is not purifying anything whatsoever, unless it be a world full of soiled bandages, in which case she has a long way to go. She is in fact destroying, and might have said more aptly. "Le feu nous débarrasse des saletés." Bardamu quotes her presumably to justify his odd behavior when, in the middle of a drenching nocturnal rain, he sets fire to his hut and sets off into the forest with a raging fever:

Le moment vint. Mes silex n'étaient pas très bien choisis, mal pointus, les étincelles me restaient surtout dans les mains. Enfin, tout de même, les premières marchandises prirent feu en dépit de l'humidité. C'était un stock de chaussettes absolument trempées. Cela se passait après le coucher du soleil. Les flammes s'élevèrent rapides, fougueuses…. Le caoutchouc nature qu'avait acheté Robinson grésillait au centre et son odeur me rappelait invinciblement l'incendie célèbre de la Société de Téléphones, quai de Grenelle, qu'on avait été regarder avec mon oncle Charles, qui chantait lui si bien la romance. L'année d'avant l'Exposition ça se passait, la Grande, quand j'étais encore bien petit. Rien ne force les souvenirs à se montrer comme les odeurs et les flammes. Ma case elle sentait tout pareil. Bien que détrempée, elle a brûlé entièrement, très franchement et marchandises et tout. Les competes étaient faits. La forêt s'est tue pour une fois. Complet silence.

This passage contains repeated references to the past—to the narrator's childhood, to his predecessor Robinson, to his fear of the forest, which dates from the war. Flames, like odors, bring back memories, says Bardamu, reducing the Proustian concept of involuntary memory to a hazy nostalgia for childhood which is just barely comforting, and which certainly does not transcend temporality. Bardamu has surrendered to a childish impulse to destroy the hut which gave him painful memories, to protest against the company which had exploited him, against Robinson who had stolen all the money and left him alone in the jungle, against the jungle which surrounded him and held him prisoner. He does not seek to regenerate the past in order to stand outside time; he destroys memory's dirty bandages, leaving a cleaner past in which little Bardamu and his uncle watch the telephone company burn down. He has recreated a childhood experience already purified by faulty memory. The action of the flames, like writing, wipes out the unpleasant present, reinstates an agreeable but inaccurate past.

Bardamu enjoys the odor of the fire because it brings back memories. But the purifying quality of fire, as Bachelard tells us, is at least partly due to its ability to deodorize. Instead of deodorizing, Bardamu is creating a voluminous quantity of malodorous smoke. In the same way Céline's writing kindles a flame which creates the unpleasant smell of vomit, defecation, war and disease. The novels themselves, the product of a picaro's observations, are full of odors.

The bombardment in Normance creates an odor of burning people mixed with gunpowder and tar—a scene from hell: "I'odeur!… Je suis assez sensible aux odeurs … c'est de la poudre là-dessous et du feu … et du reste … du goudron aussi … c'est ça les Déluges, des odeurs et puis encore d'autres … des trouvailles … oh, un relent de viande grillée!" The opening scene in Guignol's Band, also a bombardment, brings out the roasted meat image again with a baby "tout cuit à point."

In Nord we meet the prostitutes who build a fire in a hole in the plain to roast the Rittmeister's horse: "que ça sent si fort!" The scene is a grotesque caricature of the underground Reichsgesundt in which the doctor and his party took refuge earlier, with a filthy pond full of horse entrails in place of the Finnish bath, screaming prostitutes instead of smiling secretaries. The doctor's role is reversed: he is not expelled from the hole as he was from the Reichsgesundt; he invades it to save the count and the Revizor, who are being beaten. The hole is also a distorted transposition of the count's basement kitchens. The count himself is not able to join the villagers as they feast on the singed horsemeat left by the fleeing women. Formerly a hoarder, he watches his rescuers eating the remains of his own mare. The scene is one of near-cannibalism, with the horse substituted for the count, the "Rittmeister," who later dies from brutal treatment. The distribution of meat is accompanied by a parody of civilized manners, as if the action were set in an expensive restaurant: "un romani qui découpe … petites tranches? minces?… ou des épaisses?… il nous demande notre goût?"

Céline's fire departs from both of the purifying qualities noted by Bachelard (deodorizing and cooking) because his fire creates odors and the flesh that is cooked was not originally intended to be eaten. "La viande cuite représente avant tout la putréfaction vaincue." Cooking facilitates digestion and achieves a civilized victory over food's swift decay. But "la personne cuite" interrupts the natural process of putrefaction without benefiting people in any way. Fire harms people; they are not meant for burning. Céline's novels deliberately attack people, serve them up to themselves "tout cuits à point." These works are fiery, and they sear. At the same time, the novels have a purifying quality. By transforming garbage and distasteful subjects into art, Céline somehow exalts humankind's dirty linen, even if he does not destroy it. People are evil, but a novel about people is good. This is true alchemy: from such stuff to create literary flames of lasting value.

Céline's writing may have accomplished this very object on a personal level. To burn away the trash of memory, to protest against all the companies and encircling forests which have enslaved us and held us prisoner—who would not set fire to a houseful of soaked socks with that in mind? As we have seen, the flame is the word. Other writers have professed more openly the cathartic value of writing (Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir). Céline offers the cleansing experience as an excuse for pyromania.

Céline's love for the ocean, boats, harbors, and rivers has been noted: Danièle Racelle-Latin sees the boat as the dominant image in Voyage; Gilbert Schilling considers water the dominant element. "He who dreams water cannot dream fire," says Bachelard, and it must be admitted that in Céline's water-ruled world fire behaves much like water. Even taking into consideration that certain metaphorical combinations of fire and water are literary conventions (a flood of light, a rain of fire, sunset over the ocean), Céline's novels include an unusually large number of fire/water couplings and, in Normance, repeated references to the bombardment as a modern-day Deluge. The flames cascade, inundate, splash, surge. The sky melts, the Seine boils, molten cataracts pour down at Jules's command. "C'est une inondation de feu," "des vraies cataractes de lumière!" "les cascades du ciel!" "de vrais torrents," "un fleuve," "tout Paris en mer de feu!"

The doctor hypothesizes in Nord that Berlin is under heavy attack, and the underground Reichsgesundt has probably been destroyed: "Grünwald doit être un lac de feu." The lake of fire reminds us of the Finnish baths which formerly occupied the same place and contributed to a womblike atmosphere; by now they have been transformed into their antithesis, a volcano: "le cratère des bains finlandais" All of Berlin, the doctor supposes, has become a volcano: "l'impression … que Berlin est tourné volcan."

The flood from the sky in Normance resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption, Céline does not hesitate to say so: "au moins quatre immeubles qui sautent!… qui rejaillit! une lave, des torrents de lave qui fusent! haut! haut! éclaboussent autour! tout le quartier!… et le métro! submergés!… il doit faire chaud sous le tunnel!… ils y sont tous!… toute la Place bouillonne de «Bengale» … un volcan d'éclaboussures!" These repetitions of the words volcano, lava, crater show this latest flood to be one of fire, for Céline's world is not destroyed by a long hard rain. The rain is of fire, the flood of molten rock. War images are fire images. War is essential to his fictional universe. War erupts, spreads out, devastates like a volcano.

The first hint of the importance of the volcano image is the dedication of Normance: à Pline l'Ancien. Frédéric Vitoux points out that the dedication makes a flattering comparison between Céline and Pliny the Elder, emphasizing the author's innocence as a dedicated chronicler. As the doctor explains, "Saquez pas le probe chroniqueur!… regardez un peu Pline l'Ancien, il a fallu des années qu'il se décide à son grand moment … qu'il aille renifler le Vésuve!" Pliny's curiosity led him to examine Vesuvius, and when he warned the people of their danger, he himself died asphyxiated by the fumes. That the doctor should cite him as an example implies that he sees himself as a latter-day martyr, a chronicler of disaster—specifically, of a volcanic eruption—who has suffered from his devotion to scientific observation. One of the problems, of course—and one that he recognizes fully when he insists that he is inventing nothing, simply reporting—is whether the chronicler only observed the eruption, as he claims, or whether, like Jules, he actually provoked it. The problem is a crucial one for Céline, repeatedly accused of collaborating. The doctor may place the responsibility for the cataclysm on a perfectly unadmirable character—Jules—still, it is not only clear that Jules is performing the work of the artist (as is the doctor), but it is also obvious that the doctor identifies with him: "C'est pas une petite histoire de faire raffluer les Déluges, de nous faire foncer dessus charges sur charges des quatre horizons! au doigt!… zessayez! zessayez un peu! Vous allez dire que je me régale, que je suis un cataclyste aussi." The entire novel justifies the label. To mitigate his condemnation and enhance the role of "cataclyste," the doctor compares Jules to Noah, pointing out that the Flood was nothing next to this inundation of fire. Noah is a savior; we can only hope the artist is too.

Bardamu's burning of his jungle hut is a reply to a deluge, and he compares himself to Noah. The combination of the drenching rain and Bardamu's fever makes everything appear to be melting. Everything is losing its shape, its rigidity, its solidity. Everything is returning to the state of primal chaos: "Tout fondait en bouillie de camelotes, d'espérances et de comptes et dans la fièvre aussi, moite elle aussi. Cette pluie tellement dense qu'on en avait la bouche fermée quand elle vous agressait comme par un bâillon tiéde. Ce déluge n'empêchait pas les animaux de se rechercher, les rossignols se mirent à faire autant de bruit que les chacals. L'anarchie partout et dans l'arche, moi Noé, gâteux. Le moment d'en finir me parut arrivé." Feverish, Bardamu finds it hard to distinguish between things; the fire in his body shows everything about him in its chaotic state, although the hut still forms an artificial barrier between him and the rain. Taking the situation into his own hands, this false Noah burns the ark, the partition between him and anarchy. By burning the hut, he burns the rain's "bâillon tiède," and his fire is a form of speech. His message is that nothing but illusion separates us from chaos. The night rain is life, the fire a flicker illuminating the flood, which otherwise might not be seen. The novel is the fire, really a torch in the darkness. Céline writes with a purpose: to show us that the world does not conform to the structure we conventionally give it, that we are in fact surrounded by anarchy. In any case this is the structure of his fictional space, the imaginary landscape through which his picaro journeys and from which he gathers the material for the fire in the night his books represent.

"Pendant que nous parlions des nègres, les mouches et les insectes, si gros, en si grand nombre, vinrent s'abattre autour de la lanterne, en rafales si denses qu'il fallut bien éteindre," we read in Voyage. One insect fluttering around a lamp at night is a nuisance, but a cloud of them, drawn by the light and falling dead in droves, is more than inconvenient; eventually the light must be put out. People, too, are drawn to fire, even when it means their own death. Bardamu admits that it was a suicidal attraction to fire that made him join the army: "A présent, j'étais pris dans cette fuite en masse, vers le meurtre en commun, vers le feu…." Inevitably, fire attracts large numbers of insects seemingly bent on self-destruction. War has the same effect on humans. People are often compared to insects in Voyage, but never more appropriately than in the description of their mindless rush to war. It is not the fire alone that attracts people; they are actually drawn to death-their own or someone else's. Friends and relatives gather to watch a man die, and their swarms under the lights remind one of flies: "Et comme il y en avait des parents! Des gros et des fluets agglomérés en grappes somnolentes sous les lumières des «suspensions»." The fascination of fire is at least partially the fascination of death.

The fundamental image of Voyage au bout de la nuit is that life is a journey through night; the secondary image of art as a flame reinforces the idea that the work gives another perspective, illuminates the night in at least a limited way. This does indeed bestow a certain conventional immortality on the work: it is a torch that can be rekindled long after the death of the author. In this respect the fascination with the work of art is also linked to death.

Céline's remarks on the cinema reveal a tendency to regard it as escapist, but he has much more respect for the illusions of the movie theater than for the commonly accepted illusions of love. As Bardamu watches a film, he feels again the fatal attraction of the moth to the lantern: "Alors les rêves montent dans la nuit pour aller s'embraser au mirage de la lumière qui bouge." The film, like a novel, is the fire that sets the dream ablaze. It is not like life. The well-lighted theater is compared to a cake, the people pressing about it to larva. "C'était comme tout le contraire de la nuit." The movie is illusion, but it sheds some light on reality. "Ce n'est pas tout à fait vivant ce qui se passe sur les écrans, il reste dedans une grande place trouble, pour les pauvres, pour les rêves et pour les morts." The cinema is unquestionably a positive dream-producer. It gives courage to face the darkness outside. It is the part of the film that is "not quite alive" that makes these dreams possible.

For its creator as well, the work has the fascination of death. Writing is like dying. The writer is spearing something within himself and fixing it at the end of his pen. Showing it to a reader has some of the morbid quality of exhibiting the corpse of a suicide to the public. Not only does the writer feel himself bleeding as he writes; he feels that every phrase, once set down, destroys the possibilities for growth in another direction; the possibilities become fewer and fewer until the whole work is pinned down, no longer palpitating, to become what each reader chooses to make of it. The reward for the grisly business is that the work has the power to light up the night.

After all, fire is not always fatal; it also warms, like the war in Voyage "La guerre avait brûlé les uns, réchauffé les autres, comme le feu torture ou conforte, selon qu'on est placé dedans ou devant." The author is inside, the reader happily toasting himself in front of the fire. It is significant that although the work burns, it is not consumed. One of the few things not damaged by the thorough bombing in Normance is the doctor's book. The apartment building is a shambles, fire is everywhere, but his papers did not burn: "et que ça avait pas brûlé!… le plus drôle!" The concierge gathers together the papers which are blowing in the street: chapters from various books mixed in with old bills and letters. This is Céline's final comment on the book; it is a disconnected and intensely personal mixture of odd papers blowing down the street for anyone to catch hold of. We may discard them or use them to light a fire (literally or spiritually), as we choose.

Almost by definition, the picaro is an apprentice. Bardamu had prepared for the hut-burning in Voyage by an apprenticeship in the art of fire-making, just as any artist practices his craft. "Malgré que je fusse maladroit naturellement, après une semaine d'application je savais moi aussi, tout comme un nègre, faire prendre mon petit feu entre deux pierres aigües." He lacked the time to become adept at striking the stones: "Beaucoup d'étincelles me sautaient encore dans les yeux." With sparks in his eyes, Bardamu is building a fire, as if the coruscating eyes themselves made the fire eatch. The fire-maker is in a position of great power; the writer who sees himself as a fire-maker is not belittling his role.

Jules, in Normance, has more than shining eyes; his entire body gleams: "le moulin brille à présent, luit!… Jules aussi luit sur sa plate-forme! reluit!" Jules looks as if he is on fire. He sends off sparks; he has caused the conflagration. "Regardez-le done! ses doigts! les bouts! vous voyez pas les étincelles?" Jules appears to be a sorcerer cursing the city. Jules "empereur des flammes," Jules pointing a flaming finger at the clouds and calling down a rain of fire shows us an imposing picture of the artist-prophet. The doctor-narrator also sees himself as a prophet, one of the denouncing variety. "Y a des dénonceurs de périls! je suis de ceux!"

The doctor's excuse for his flamboyant, jerky, repetitive style is that the nature of his material—catastrophe—and his role as universal scapegoat require just such an emotional style. "J'ai pas de cinéma personnel pour vous faire voir le tout assis … confortable … ou comme dans un rêve … ni de «bruitage» non plus … ni de critiques rémunérés aptes à me vous tartiner mille louanges du tonnerre de Dieu de mes génies!… j'ai que l'hostilité du monde et la catastrophe!… je perds la catastrophe je suis perdu!" Without cinematic effects or critics to persuade the public to like him, the writer must rely on showmanship, and disaster makes a good show. In any case, his message of denunciation is perfectly sincere. He does not need Jules's power to summon disaster to be able to see catastrophe in Europe's future. He believes that his fire enables him to foresee what is to come, particularly the consequences of war.

The writer's clairvoyance makes him an excellent leader and pathfinder. Such is the position of the doctor in the last novels, as he wanders through Germany in search of refuge. He organizes the journey and protects his little band (wife, friend, cat) from the sometimes contained, sometimes savage hostility surrounding them. His expression of the loneliness and uncertainty of his position in Nord can be poignant: "Vous diriez de l'encre notre sousbois … y a làhaut les nuages qui sont illuminés, brillants … des pinceaux des cent projecteurs et des reflects d'autres explosions … nord … est … mais dans notre pare nous, rien … l'encre … deux pas … trois pas … vous vous sentez devenir tout ouate, tout nuit, vous-même … un moment vous êtes étonné de chercher encore, quoi?… vous ne savez plus…." The use of the second-person pronoun and the sense of dissolving into the night universalize the experience described and include the reader, even though the repeated "encre" implies that Céline is describing the loneliness of the writer. We are all seekers. Although he recognizes that he is not the only one looking for something—a path, an answer, Céline nevertheless remains convinced that of all those seeking, he alone knows in which direction to go. In this he is descended from a long line of poets and writers who sincerely believed the role of the artist is to point the way. Victor Hugo's radiant poet in "Fonction du poète" is just one example. His luminous brow is the only bright spot in a night of total darkness. "Il rayonne! il jette sa flamme / sur l'éternelle vérité!" Flooding with his light the entire world, he leads the people to God. Céline's purpose is not to reveal God, but to force people to recognize the reality and finality of death. His position as Cassandra ("dénonceur de périls") is not likely to win him great popularity, but he is upheld by the certainly that he is right. For Hugo, poet, message, and medium all cast light, illuminate the future, point the way. For Céline too the writer is a pathfinder, flamethrower, seer, and wizard.

Borokrom, the piano player of Guignol's Band, got his name from his ability to make bombs: "Enfin on l'appelait Borokrom à cause de son savoir chimique, des bombes qu'il avait fabriquées, paraît-il, au temps de sa jeunesse." His propensity to throw them is another matter. The first incident takes place in a bar, where Joconde is responsible for a brawl, "C'est elle qu'incendiait." She inflames the dockers gathered there; under the impression she is being mistreated, they attack Cascade and begin to destroy the bar. Boro starts the barrel organ to add to the din, then throws a grenade. "Wrroung!… le tonnerre de Dieu! La tôle qu'explose! Quelque chose alors! et ces flammes!… Ah! merde! J'ai vu! Merde! C'est lui!… Dans les flammes là!… Dans le feu jailli! Il a jeté le truc!" The explosion effectively breaks up the fight and all escape.

Boro turns on the organ and throws the grenade at the same time because he uses them to the same effect: to create a diversion, and the key word is create. Borokrom makes music and bombs; both inspire an intense emotional reaction in his companions. His task, as a performing artist, like the writer's, is to create an emotional response. Céline himself insisted that conveying emotion was the main purpose of his writing. Borokrom is an incendiary—so is Céline, in his way.

The second bomb also permits Boro to escape, and especially to destroy the evidence of Claben's murder. He shuts Delphine and Ferdinand in the basement with the dead body. Just as Ferdinand forces the trap-door open, an object is thrown inside and explodes: "Au moment pflof!… plein dans la pêche!… je prends un caillou … en pleine gueule! pflam!!! je dingue!… je culbute!… à la renverse!… Brrouum!!… Un tonnerre qu'éclate dans le noir!… là en pleine cave!… en même temps!… en plein bazar!… Ah! c'est féerique!… plein la gueule!… Je suis écroulé sous les décombres … C'est lui qu'a jeté le truc! Maudit chien … une explosion formidable!… Encore lui!"

We are struck by the parallel between Borokrom, the bomb-throwing piano player, and Jules, the bombardment-provoking painter of Normance. Borokrom obviously used bombs to help him escape, but one wonders why Jules chose to make a holocaust of Montmartre. The doctor suggests that Jules is a frustrated ceramicist looking for a kiln: "lui qui parlait toujours de son four! qui souffrait de pas avoir un four … un four «grand-feu»! je le trouvais servi!… qu'il nous montre un peu sa maîtrise s'il était si artiste au four!"

Jules is, in fact, displaying his artistry with a colossal flameshow—the light beams sweeping across the sky are, after all, "pinceaux." The doctor himself exercises his artistry in describing the light show. Page after page is filled with colors; the lights are compared to jewels, flowers, and delicate lace. At this point the creative arts of the painter and writer fuse: the bombardment is their masterpiece. The doctor tells us, "faudrait être artiste pour vous faire voir les couleurs … la palette…." Modestly, the narrator professes to be a simple "chroniqueur," unequal to the task of rendering the "féerie" in the sky. Any of a number of brilliant quotations would give him the lie:

Le ciel crève à gauche, là juste!… brrac! au Sud!… une cataracte d'or d'en haut … un fleuve des nuages … jaune … et puis vert … c'est pas commun comme masse de feu ce qui cascade, rejaillit, inonde … je vous ai raconté pourtant … mais là vraiment c'est le ciel entier qu'on dirait qui fond … et puis d'en bas on voit des rues qui s'élèvent … s'enlèvent … moment en serpents de flammes … tourbillonnent … tordent d'un nuage à l'autre … une église entière qui part, se renverse, tout son clocher pointu, brulant, en espèce de pouce!… c'est extraordinaire! renversé sur nous!… l'Église d'Auteuil … je vous l'ai raconté … à l'envers … mais elle, pas si flambante tout de même … plutôt en reflects … ah vous voyez c'est pas semblable … vogue! s'envole … c'est que je suis pas artiste peintre, je vous rends mal l'effet…. j'ai que du petit don de chroniqueur….

The writer writing about the painter painting produces an extraordinary work of art. At one point the doctor compares Jules's real painting unfavorably to his sky painting; as an ironic condemnation of surrealistic painting, the intent—and the effect—is to form a highly laudatory word-picture couched in derogatory language: "Je l'avais vu vernisser ses toiles … moi parfait plouc, aucune autorité d'art, je m'étais dit à moi-même: il le fait exprès! il bluffe le bourgeois! il leur peint des autobus sur la mer de Glace … et les Alpes elles-mêmes en neiges mauve, orange, carmin, et les vaches paissant des couteaux!… des lames d'acier! des poignards en fait d'herbe tendre!… maintenant il nous sorcelait autre chose!… c'était plus terrible que ses gouaches! c'était un petit peu plus osé!" The sky-painting is indeed bolder, but not significantly different in style. The upside-down church, the sky melting into a golden cataract, the streets mounting in serpentine flames to the clouds, are the living, moving, colorful offspring of the bus on the sea of ice and the cows grazing on steel blades. The difference in medium is, however, significant. By substituting fire for paint, the artist attributes divine qualities to himself, especially when he uses fire to paint the heavens, where only the sun or Zeus' lightning bolts should provide color. Since fire can be equated with the word, the sky-painting is essentially a linguistic image, and we have not merely a writer describing a painting, but a writer describing the artistic scope of language. The visual effects alone are spectacular. When the writer becomes incendiary, his novel will have an explosive effect.

Jules's work of art is not just a display of fireworks for people to gape at on the fourteenth of July; it is an air attack, part of a war. The bombing is a form of expression. Jules, the idfigure, creates a very beautiful work of art expressing anger, aggression, and the urge to destroy. Certainly Céline does nothing less with his novel. He sees himself as a painter of destruction. Not only does he depict the destructive forces already existing (war, poverty, death); he sees creation as stemming from destruction; he is Jules calling the bombers, directing them, setting the fire. Fire consumes; destruction is the subject and, in a sense, the work of the artist. Céline's novels directly attacked French literary conventions of vocabulary, syntax, and, of course, punctuation. He did not see the writer as the staid guardian of the purity of French letters, but rather as a bomb-thrower.

The novelist's journey takes place in the metaphorical darkness of nihilism, but the written word is a kind of fire lighting up the night. The functions of the work of art and the roles of the artist are implicit in the images related to fire and the fire-maker. Fire cleanses by consuming garbage. It flows like lava, and Céline's version of the apocalypse is a deluge of fire. Fire draws insects to their own destruction. The fire-maker is an incendiary or a prophet; inasmuch as the prophet uses fiery language and flings bomb-like prophecies, the two roles are perhaps indistinguishable. Céline's picaro, as represented in his successive narrators, wants to keep moving and light fires. His final gesture, the summing up of his life and experience, is the novel which he casts like a bomb in the face of his public. This is the endpoint of the journey, the final twist he gives to the picaresque form, his distorted version of a version of the quest. From heroes seeking the Holy Grail, through little boys stealing grapes from blind men, we have come to the artist hurling his brimstone-filled prophecies at the reader. In its journey, the quest itself has been transformed.