Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The beginning of the 20th century marks a critical time in the history of Europe. As countries like Germany, France and Great Britain fuelled their industrial and colonial growth as dominant imperial powers in the world, Europe eventually found itself at internal conflict over the resources and power available. When the First World War broke out in 1914, the West rapidly changed from a positivist and progressive civilization, to a sinister and absurd battlefield, devoid of the grand humanist values previously espoused. In the center was the cruelty and horror no one thought humanity would be capable of. The art of the time, during and after the World War, naturally came to reflect this apocalyptic zeitgeist, revealing a dark, feral unconscious wide-awake in the minds of soldiers, businessmen and political leaders. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the artists in Europe who responded to the madness around him, and Journey to the End of the Night attempts to illustrate what he experienced and felt during this period.

The novel is a half-fictional, half-biographic work, starting out in an increasingly nervous France, where the main character Bardamu lives. Living a quiet university life, indifferent to the world around him, Bardamu one day sits at a café with his friend Arthur, joking about and demeaning the every day life in France, when the two gentlemen suddenly hear the sound of a military parade outside. Bardamu, excited and stoked from the lively conversation, decides to join the parade in an attempt to mock its pretentiousness. The absurdity of the situation appears when Bardamu finds himself caught in the event, not able to escape. The next thing he knows, he's standing at the frontline of war, crouching under gunfire from angry Germans. Suddenly Bardamu is at the very center of a World War.

Bardamu experiences the horrors of war and simultaneously spits out his angry, violent misanthropy against a humanity gone mad and a world completely incomprehensible. Reality melts together with the confused and dark psyche of the soldier, alienated from the patriotic slogans and the voices of pain and death. Bardamu eventually manages to escape the intense battle and stumbles across Robinson, a character he will meet time and time again throughout his journey. Together they find mutual agreement on avoiding a patriotic but safe death. After they split up in opposite directions, Bardamu is incarcerated at a French hospital for war soldiers, where he finds himself switching between avoiding the death punishment for deserting his war duties, and maintaining a sexual romance with a lady in town.

The relationship between the two lovers eventually reveals itself to be just as hollow as the outside world, and Bardamu leaves his romance like he once left the battlefield: always running away from falsehood and danger. As soon as he can, Bardamu leaves France on a boat to the colonial parts of Africa. During this trip, he is yet again faced with hate and violence from the people around him. Nothing makes sense anymore; people either stab each other as a product of feral emotional reactions, or praise each other's social image for the sake of keeping the war circus alive. By participating in the false community of patriots, Bardamu's cowardliness saves his life once again, leaving him stranded in a hot, corrupt and violent French colonial area in West Africa. Through a transportation firm, he is immediately sent off to a remote part in the middle of nowhere, previously operated by his alter-ego friend Robinson, where bloodsucking mosquitoes, parasitic natives and a confusing environment almost manage to block out his will to survive.

After having escaped the darkness, hypocrisy and exploitation of colonial Africa, Bardamu makes a trip over to New York. No rest in peace is to be found here either; the industrial and commercial landscape of modern America disgusts him. He continues to live a bohemian, deviant, perverse life, set in the erotic cinemas, fancy hotels, cheap whorehouses and industrial factories. Through his lifestyle, he eventually meets a character that for the first time distinguishes itself from the plague of loud machines and hollow people, by showing an honest and compassionate understanding for him as a person. But the love to a prostitute, the lending of money from an old and bitter lover, and the third meeting with the strange Robinson, lead Bardamu back to France and the city of Rancy. It is in France that the journey ends, culminating in Bardamu's successive insight into the heart of madness. The war is over, but for the decaying West, the conflict of overcoming its own disease has yet begun.

Céline, together with Marcel Proust and André Gide, played a key role in the renaissance of the French novel, and Journey to the End of the Night is seen as one of the masterpieces in 20th century literature. Céline's language is characterized by the subjectivist, perverse, foul, violently intense and introspective bursts of prose. He broke from all linguistic traditions at the time by giving voice to the French spoken language and dissolved the barriers between the mind of the individual and the collective mind of the world. Bardamu's monologues fluctuate between internal conjectures and metaphoric descriptions of the outside world, which mirrors the soul of a barren Western landscape. It's often very humorous and emotionally engaging, but never without the dark edge of absurdity, that without it, people like Sartre wouldn't later have become famous. It's a challenging read to dwell into the mind of Céline's cowardly self-centered and indifferent protagonist Bardamu and his neurotic acquaintances. Still, without necessarily sympathizing with Bardamu, we slowly come to recognize that his social discourse and deviant worldview are the sick products of a declining civilization.

Beyond the violent misanthropy and the bohemian hedonism lies what the title suggests is the goal of the journey: the endless, unexplored night. There we seek peace and strength to go on living in a world that's declared war on itself for the sake of profit and lost dreams. This book, written in 1932, is maybe more current today than ever before. With the Cold War tendencies seen in the conflict between growing super powers in the East and the declining Anglo-American empire in the West, Journey to the End of the Night is a peace ritual; a psychological rebirth which strives to survive the lies and the hypocrisy distilled in the social world. It throws us mercilessly back unto the battlefield by asserting that great values and the will to live life passionately are gone. The gateway to reconstruct and pile together whatever's left of the human soul and the society in which it is confined, is to stare the cruel and the absurd straight in the face and dare to continue the journey for the sake of being present. Hopelessly disturbing but at the same time compassionately relieving, this is a fresh blow of societal and cultural analysis at the height of French modernistic literature. You'd be lost without reading it.

Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline