The Plight of the Common Man

Background info and links

The Guardian Journey to the End of Cutting edge Literature

New York Times Celine's Dark Journey
The New Yorker A Gentler Celine
New York Times Celine: The Genius and the Villain
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon I

Les Circonstances ou le Bonhomme se Trouve

As much as Journey to the End of the Night is a novel about the existentialist struggle to reorient an estranged post-WWI world.  The alienation and process of suffering reveals the shortcomings of modernity.  In between these experiences Celine injects clever observations framing suffering and death with a comedic sensibility that has a soothing effect on an otherwise dark but constant fact of existence.  Celine uses satire and wit to reveal the absurdities of the emerging modern world helping to create a new paradigm for humor in which existential issues are raw material for humor.  These absurdities range from old legacies of colonialism and poverty to industrialization with the Ford assembly line, along with patriotism and the emergence of modern mechanized warfare in World War I.  In all of these situations the main character Bardamu romanticizes these issues and becomes disillusioned every time.  Merlin Thomas states in his biography of Celine that, “He was always deeply preoccupied with what he was to call the only real subject for the modern novelist-‘les circonstances ou le bonhomme se trouve’ (the plight of the average man” (Thomas, 26).  Celine’s vision in Journey to the End of the Night is existential in the sense that it is all about the common man’s struggle to navigate a world of ever increasing complexity and novelty.  This fear and anxiety is no doubt a result of the apocalyptic events of World War I, a war that Celine sustained a head injury in.  Celine never resorts to sentimentality; everything instead leans toward oblivion and darkness.  Despite the dark side of existence that Celine portrays, it is done in a humorous way invoking elements of black humor by focusing on grotesque exaggerations of suffering and death.  Celine uses satire to strike out at the world not only to reveal absurdities but also to expose truth.

Celine satirizes suffering in a tone that is consistent and unforgiving but also contains a playful finality of dry wit.  In the following passage the content is profound but it’s encased in a joke.  The first part of the joke is an interior monologue of the main character, Bardamu, “Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth.  And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him?  The truth is death.  You have to choose: death or lies” (172-173).  After that setup Celine gives the punch line:  “I’ve never been able to kill myself” (173).  Celine uses humor to interrogate death, suffering, and the ills of the world.  He uses a ridiculous analogy to describe poverty, “It’s no joke being poor.  Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to clear away the world’s garbage” (187).  Celine calls attention to the humor by using the phrase, “It’s no joke being poor” as a set up alerting the reader that something humorous is about to follow.  Celine is a fan of riffing on a topic and then summing it up in a one-liner at the end like the line: “When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves” (99-100).  Celine plays with an idea until he decides to condense the idea down into one of these satiric witticisms.   These are all a part of a larger process that Celine uses to focus raw emotion.  They are almost like asides providing a caption to the scene.  Bardamu muses about his heartbreak pondering: “Maybe that’s what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die” (203).  The one-liners aren’t always humorous but they are always insightful.  The funny moments and the somber dark moments all draw from the same material.  Celine sometimes inverts the formula and uses something trivial by sometimes having a trivial setup line such as Bardamu’s hatred of the countryside being amped up even further by the fact that he is in a war in the countryside. “One thing I’d better tell you right away, I’d never been able to stomach the country, I’d always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody’s ever home, those roads that don’t go anywhere.  And if to all that you add a war, it’s completely unbearable” (8). Whereas in the other examples Celine uses a profound setup in this case his hatred of the countryside is trivial and ridiculous and further absurd by comparing that to the hatred of war.  It’s just another permutation of a joke formula that deliberately doesn’t say anything profound.

The issues that Celine chooses to write about are topical still relevant current events and abstract existential issues that philosophers and religions address.  These issues exist in a place of pain provoking a Bergsonian dictum of, “Laughter has no greater foe than emotion” (Bergson 4).  One of the features of Celine’s style is how accessible the “plight of the common man” is to the common man.  He achieves this by using not only humor but by having issues that everyone can relate to.  Celine really lets loose stylistically and criticizes with extreme sarcasm with his blasphemous poem about religion entitled The Golden Wings:  “A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig.  A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caressers, that’s him, our master.  Come, kiss me” (4).  One of the things that Bardamu does not get disillusioned with in the story is religion; Bardamu comes right out in the beginning of the story with “The Golden Wings” poem to annoy his friend.  Celine doesn’t debate about religion in Journey to the End of Night, that discussion is an afterthought.  In “The Golden Wings” Celine concentrates his rage into a witty epigram and moves on.  Other topics include colonialism where Celine uses grotesque exaggerations to describe the colonialists,  “The little energy that hadn’t been sapped by malaria, thirst, and the heat was consumed by hatred so fierce and deep seated that it wasn’t uncommon for these colonials to drop dead on the spot, poisoned by themselves like scorpions” (107).  He paints an exaggerated caricature of the colonists comparing them to seething self-imploding scorpions.  Similarly in a flashback to the hospital in the war a corporeal says to Bardamu, “’The earth is dead…‘We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons…Nothing can help us, we were born rotten…There you have it!’” (325).  This again is an extremely pessimistic view at an apocalyptic time in Europe when life was cheap.  Some of the issues Celine tackles use satire in a more muted and restrained way when Bardamu arrives in New York and is walking down Wall Street:

It’s a district filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood

            I found time to go and see them, I even went in and spoke to the employees who guard the cash.  They’re sad and underpaid. (166)

The sarcasm with the word “miracle” mocks the “crumpled” boom and bust of the American financial system following the stock market crash of 1929.  In typical Celine fashion he projects an image of blood money indirectly and then follows it with a humorous ironic twist of the “sad and underpaid” guards of the abstract financial ideas of the 20^th century.  Bardamu criticizes the nerve center of American capitalism also satirizing the powerful with the image of a “king” while Bardamu is stumbling to find his way in blue collar America: “And the king had even promised them a small pension at the age of sixty two” (160).  This alludes to the idea that though there is an arising middle class in America due to decent wages from the rise of industrialization, people still know their place.  Bardamu further satirizes the idea of an elite class:

The rich don’t have to kill to eat.  They ‘employ’ people, as they call it.  The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay.  People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy. They have beautiful women, the poor have ugly ones.  Clothing aside, they’re the product of centuries.  Easy to look at, well fed, well washed.  After all these years, life can boast no greater accomplishments. (287)

Bardamu is on the outside looking in, in this scene.  It is true that the middle class was rising in America, and then everything fell apart with the Great Depression.  Celine writes with an understanding of what it is like to be impoverished.  After criticizing the wealthy, Bardamu then makes his way to Detroit to get a job at the Ford plant and criticizes financial stability alone as an existential dead end criticizing working class Americans:

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t ever try to understand what we’re here for.  They just don’t care.  Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience. (172)

Celine comments on what he sees as a directionless void where no higher plane of consciousness is ever even considered.  This is picking up on the early 20^th century idea of consumerism brought on by the wide scale production of goods and the need of people to fulfill the role of being a consumer with the new latest and greatest product.  Celine see’s this coming early on pointing out the existential emptiness of materialism.

            All of the times Bardamu’s enthusiasm is betrayed, it all points to the larger existential acceptance of death.  Bardamu is initially patriotic and has a romanticized notion of combat that is quickly shattered.  When he comes under fire in the war he remembers, “I never felt so useless as I did amidst all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery” (8).  This estrangement continues as Celine steps back from the geopolitical concerns of why they are fighting and focuses on the brutality of the situation.  He comes to be disgusted with patriotism admiring horses employed in the war effort, “Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it” (29).  Time after time Bardamu’s enthusiasm is shattered; it happens after the war with colonialism Bardamu excitedly muses on the Dark Continent saying:

“We were heading for Africa, the real, grandiose Africa of impenetrable forests, fetid swamps, inviolate wildernesses, where black tyrants wallowed in sloth and cruelty on the banks of never-ending rivers.  I would barter a pack of ‘pilet’ razor blades for big long elephant’s tusks, gaudy-colored birds, and juvenile slaves.  Guaranteed.  That would be life!  Nothing in common with the emasculated Africa of travel agencies and monuments, of railways and candy bars.  Certainly not!  We’d be seeing Africa in the raw, the real Africa!  We the boozing passengers of the Admiral Bragueton.” (95)

This idea is quickly shattered once Bardamu is down there witnessing how things are done.  Only twelve pages later Bardamu remarks that, “The military faction…subsisted on a diet of colonial glory, washed down by quantities of quinine and miles of red tape” (107).  This estrangement quickly moves to America where after the horrible experience of French colonial Africa, Bardamu gets excited and romantic about the idea of America remarking, “What a discovery!  What an America!  What ecstasy!” (167).  The ecstasy is quickly betrayed again for Bardamu.  After arriving he seeks the refuge of a movie house to get some sleep.  Amidst this experience Bardamu finds:

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light.  What happens on the screen isn’t quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead.  Hurry hurry cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that’s waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. (174)

This is no doubt a measure of Bardamu’s desperation.  As impoverished as he is upon his arrival in America, not even entertainment can ease his mind.  He reviles the escape and then even wittily criticizes his own philosophical meanderings saying, “Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere” (177).  Ironically the one thing that does not leave Bardamu estranged is women.  He never settles down with any one woman.  The only love that is spoken of is a fleeting relationship Bardamu has in Detroit with a prostitute named Molly.  This love is mocked early on by Bardamu when he says, “Toward Molly, one of the lovely girls there, I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love” (196).  Regardless of whether it is a true or a false love, Bardamu later idealizes the fleeting relationship in the book.  Curiously this idealization is never crushed.  Bardamu holds on in this case finding solace in the short-lived companionship that can never be taken away because it never went anywhere.  All of these estranged realities point to the gradual acceptance of death and acceptance of fear by Bardamu.  Bardamu witnesses Grandma Henrouille’s outburst against death.  Originally Robinson was supposed to blow up Grandma Henrouille with fireworks but instead blinds himself when the fireworks go off in his face.  After the incident Bardamu witnesses the outburst by Grandma Henrouille when she denounces death, “My death!”  Grandma Henrouille was shrieking now.  “That’s something I want to see!  Do you hear!  I’ve still got my two eyes!  I want to get a good look at it!’  She never wanted to die!  Never!  That was definite!  She had stopped believing in her death” (279).  In this case Bardamu is witnessing the denial of death.  This is an absurd notion but an affliction of Western societies of not fully accepting or embracing death.  Bardamu eventually comes to an acceptance of death through Robinson after this incident when Bardamu dramatizes Robinson’s pain after he is blinded.  He absorbs his pain empathizing in his despair:

He, too, had come to the end.  There was nothing more we could say to him.  A time comes when you are all alone, when you’ve come to the end of everything that can happen to you.  It’s the end of the world.  Even grief, your own grief, doesn’t answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who.  You’re not choosy at times like that, because even to weep you have to go back where everything starts all over, back among people. (283)

It’s not the end for Robinson, he eventually recovers enough to go “back among people.”  Bardamu definitely understands or is at least beginning to understand what the end has in store for everyone.  Bardamu becomes less fearful as he begins to realize this.  He realizes that everyone is flawed and all people to despicable things but the great equalizer is death.  This begins to bring relief to Bardamu’s existential crises as he realizes and accepts this ultimate truth:

Maybe what makes life as terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd.  It’s the nightmare of having to represent the halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night. (359)

Bardamu tiring of being having his expectations smashed and finding fault with the world, eventually begins to accept that mankind is often “vile, ghastly” and “absurd.”  Celine could go the route of sentimentality here or be positive, but it doesn’t happen.  The furthest he ever goes in the direction of positive is melancholy.  Bardamu is with Robinson when he is shot dead by his fiancée Madelon after she freaks out about being in a love triangle with Robinson and Bardamu.  Celine doesn’t let Bardamu feel any guilt for sleeping with his fiancée; it is beside the point since Robinson is an invalid.  As Robinson is dying he has the following internal monologue:

He must have been looking for another Ferdinand, somebody much bigger than me, to help him die more easily.  He was straining to figure out if there’d been any progress in the world…Poor fellow…Drawing up an inventory in his mind…Wondering if people hadn’t changed just a little for the better during his lifetime, if maybe he had been unfair to them without meaning to…But there was only me, just me, me all alone, beside him, the genuine Ferdinand, who was short of everything that would make a man bigger than his own bare life, short of love for other people’s lives.  Of that I had none, or so little there was no use showing it.  I wasn’t as big as death.  I was a lot smaller.  I had no great opinion of humanity.  I think I’d have found it easier to grieve for a dying dog than for Robinson, because a dog isn’t tricky, and Robinson, in spite of everything, was tricky in a way.  I was tricky myself, we were all tricksters… (428)

Bardamu finally accepts everything as it is.  Equating his follies with the flaws of the world.  In grieving for Robinson, Bardamu is accepting and forgiving the world.  He comes to the end of his own grief signifying an acceptance.  Bardamu realizes he is no better than Robinson or anybody else.  The last image of the book illustrates the continuity of everything as it is with no room for any sentimentality:

Far in the distance the tugboat whistled; its call passed the bridge, one more arch, then another, the lock, another bridge, farther and farther…It was summoning all the barges on the river, every last one, and the whole city and the sky and the countryside, and ourselves, to carry us all away, the Seine too –and that would be the end of us. (435)

The end is simply the end.  Celine summons the entire physical world, projects it into eternity and then throws it down the river of time and into the black oblivion with the final line “and that would be the end of us.”  It’s a very Zen ending saying the end is simply the end. 

            Later writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut attempted to explain the absurdity of the world through dark humor.  Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five like Journey to the End of the Night is partly autobiographical.  Slaughterhouse 5 is a novel about World War II and the author understanding his participation in the firebombing of Dresden.  In the beginning of the story he mentions Celine quoting him directly: “No art is possible without a dance with death…The truth is death” (Vonnegut 19-20).  Vonnegut like Celine uses humor to address dark issues like the horrors of war.  Celine gave these later writers permission to turn their “dance with death” into higher art, while using the relieving aspects of humor.  In Catch-22 Heller borrows the premise of hiding from the war in a hospital similar to the theme of Bardamu trying to escape the battlefield and finally finding refuge in the hospital.  Celine also was influential stylistically with writers such as William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg who have cited being influenced by Celine for mixing “the diction and rhythms of actual speech” (Ostrovsky 21).  The influence is undeniable, after both World Wars writers and thinkers were forced to try to redefine and reinterpret the world after a time of unspeakable horror.  Journey to the End of the Night is a reminder that laughter is a coping mechanism for dealing with the incomprehensible absurdities and horrors of the world, and everything is fair game to make fun of.  For man is nothing if not humorously flawed beyond repair.

Bibliography

Bergson, Henri, Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred Rothwell. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Print.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, and Ralph Manheim. Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions Book, 2006. Print.

Ostrovsky, Erika. Céline and His Vision. New York: New York UP, 1967. Print.

Thomas, Merlin, and Louis Destouches. Louis-Ferdinand Céline. New York: New Directions, 1980. Print.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, Or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death. New York, NY: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1994. Print.