Rigadoon begins with a renewal of the narrative impulse that initiated the trilogy. The narrator’s illness constitutes another variation on the head wound that appears so frequently in Céline’s novels. The myth that Céline himself was trepanned (an opening made in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain) as treatment for a head wound suffered in World War I reinforces the image of the narration as an outpouring from that wound, as an obligatory creative delirium that exposes the chaos lurking beneath the surface of everyday reality. During the course of his voyage, Ferdinand is struck twice on the head—a reminder of the novel’s opening signals and an obvious link between the protagonist and the narrator as suffering, creative selves.

Whereas the narrator’s delirium is creative, resulting in a heightened perception of reality, other forms of delirium serve to mask reality. Céline uses the term delirium to refer to any obsession or mania which permits one to escape from the disorder of contingent reality or, indeed, from the madness of the world in general. Insanity is the extreme form of delirium, an ultimate refuge, for the insane individual imprisoned within an aberrant psyche is shielded from external reality and abdicates all responsibility. In this context, Le Vigan’s descent into madness can be positively valorized and serve as a temptation against which the protagonist must struggle.

It is the theme of the voyage north that links the three volumes of the trilogy, and that particular direction is emphasized by the title of the second volume. Copenhagen does indeed lie to the north, but the direction has connotations in Céline’s previous works that transcend geographical referentiality and are relevant to the reading of the trilogy. Céline liked to think of himself as a Breton, that is to say, a Northerner, physically and mentally superior to the ordinary Frenchman. In his anti-Semitic “pamphlets”—they are, in fact, book-length volumes—North is opposed to South, to the Mediterranean Basin. As the homeland of the Jews, the latter becomes a source of contagion infecting Europe. In Céline’s first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934), northern climates are deemed healthier, less likely to encourage the emergence of the conjoined physical and moral decay to which humankind is heir. In the trilogy, the France from which Ferdinand is fleeing is, analogously, an unhealthy climate, a locus of contagion, of a vengeful justice bent on persecuting a writer who, although he espoused the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Nazis, claimed that he was directing his vituperations against only those Jews who were forcing France into yet another disastrous war with Germany.

Two of the trilogy’s most salient images can be found in Castle to Castle . One of these is the immense Hohenzollern castle in which the high officials of the Vichy government are housed and which, topographically, dominates the town. With its numerous portraits of previous occupants and the gradual erosion of its foundations by the waters of the Danube, the castle conveys a sense of the flux of human history, the impermanence of human structures of all kinds, not the least of which is the Third Reich. The interior architecture of the castle is consonant with the mental state of most of its inhabitants. The castle is divided into a multiplicity of separate apartments, linked to one another by a labyrinthine structure of corridors and staircases. That Ferdinand and Lili should be the only ones able to find their way through this maze reflects the artist’s ability to penetrate reality and link its otherwise disparate elements. The...