Literature on the Journey to Paris - Essay Example

Paris au Pluriel 2008 Voyage au but de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), written by Louis Ferdinand Celine (pseudonym of Louis Ferdinand Destouches), first published in 1932, was an outrageous and revolutionary fiction that redefined the art of the novel with its bleak comedy in the nihilistic and mocking style. Celine was a controversial French author and medical doctor whose novels are antiheroic views of human agony. He was indicted of joining the Nazis, escaped from France in 1944,was accused by default in 1950 and was declared a national shame. Celine returned to France after he was pardoned in 1951. In the Journey to the End of the Night, Paris has been depicted from the point of view of the marginalized, working class and slum dwellers of the early 1930's, that is between the wars, a time when, in the language of the narrator-protagonist Ferdinand Bardamu, the world was busy with "killing or adoring, or both together. 'I hate you! I adore you!''." The story, narrated in argotic language, almost echoed Celine's life from1913 to 1932, with some changes needed for fictions. Cline pursues Bardamu through World War I trenches in Africa, the a nightmarish work in a Ford factory in the United states, and his return to postwar Paris, starting medical practice in a Paris suburb area. Celine himself was a Doctor in pitiable Parisian districts, the misery of whose residents gave him a cynical view of humanity that he translated into his fictions - side-splitting besides being scary and ostensibly vulgar. The fictional La Garenne-Rancy where he painfully observed the appalling condition of the workers "bent over their machines, calibrating bolts and more bolts, vapor that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their head. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end." (from Journey to the End of the Night, as cited in Celine, kirjasto.sci.fi ) With 'Journey, Celine liberated the French novel from the synthetically styled prose of Gide and Proust and gave it a plain passion and gnaw it never came across after Rabelais. It is a picaresque novel with the rogue protagonist, or antihero Ferdinand like Don Quixote, fighting "against all", yet whereas Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote, lamented for the death of courtliness, Celine talked mockingly about the death of civility. As a slum doctor in Paris, he had heard every sort of howls-- of pain, rage and misery; mixed with his own typical French humor and changed by a style of high revulsion. This 450-page account of anger, acrimony, despair, disappointment, and acquiescence depicts a Paris of conflict, spinelessness, lies, sleaze, treachery, exploitation, perversion, bullying, cheating, gluttony, illness, isolation, insanity, lust, tittle-tattle, abortion, reprisal, and murder in a narrated in a way in which rarely any cheery word could be traced. From a literary stance, The Journey possibly could be ranked as havinng brought a strikingly new style, a chatty language that also includes many cultured elements wielding significant influence on later-day French literature. Albert Thinaudet, renowned French essayist and a major literary critic between-the- wars said that in January 1933 Journey was still a widespead topic at dinner parties in Paris (Godard, "Notice," in Cline). Journey was an instant success making Celine as a major literary figure. An broken up, hallucinatory and dreary novel heavy in slang, it followed Ferdinand Bardamu from the trenches of the First World War, to Africa, to America, ending back in Paris, where Bardamu started medical practice. The split, self-exiled narrative portraying a disintegrated world without loveliness, decorum or possible salvation was something awful to French readers: The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, only to convince you that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows (Journey, as cited in Knipfel, centerforbookculture.org) Journey opens in Paris, around World War I, in 1914. Enclosed by the music of a armed pageant, Ferdinand Bardamu, a young Frenchman, decides, in a heroic mood, to join in the army to fight against the Germans, yet at the front, faced with the shocks and meaninglessness of war rapidly loses his interest. Unable to comprehend why he is there to shoot at the Germans, who have never in person harmed him. Bardamu realizes that he is, thus becoming a coward to his countrymen. Given a reconnaissance job, where he meets Robinson, a colleague also seeking a way to leave the army, the two made a failed attempt to escape. Injured and shocked by the war, Bardamu returns to Paris for medication and is awarded a military decoration. Once cured, Bardamu leaves for Africa, but the intolerable heat and monotony of life there in addition to the brutal again exploitation of the natives repulses him. Here, he comes across Robinson again and takes over his rank as manager of a colonial rubber trading post, a lone and dilapidated shed where he is taken ill being so restless with fever that he abandons the post it, aboard a Spanish ship, as an oarsman. The novel is an allegorical journey into the bleak and gloomy aspect of humanity. The terror and madness of his war experiences leave Bardamu shell-shocked to spend the rest of the war recuperating in a hospital, avoiding the war. After the war, he longs to flee, finally ending in Detroit, where he works at the Ford factory and falls in love with a prostitute subsequently leaving her and returning to France to complete his medical studies, and starts practicing enduring dismal poverty for several years in a slum area. He leaves his practice in revulsion ending up working in a private mental hospital in Paris. All through the story, and at each main halt of his journey, Ferdinand faces Robinson, another nihilist tempting the reluctant Ferdinand into a series of disasters, making him travel more "into the night." In Paris the two of them live a wretched existence in the rotten Parisian suburb of Rancy (reminding us of the word 'rancid') Bardamu as a doctor for the destitutes, Robinson working hard in a factory. It is terrible dark side of Parisen life here that they face. Accompanying Robinson home one night, Bardamu explains his friend of why he would like to be a hospital assistant: "I'll tell you ... because people with nothing wrong with them, you can't get around it, are frightening ... Especially since the war ... I know what they're thinking ... They don't always know it themselves ... but I know what they're thinking ... As long as they're up, they think about killing you." It's this mistrust that rules "Journey," gloom falling over the face of the world, over Paris where the only way out is not sunup but death (Self, 2006). In Journey, Celine shows a dystopic vision of Western civilization, like in most of his other works, drawing the grimmest possible side of the cities and urban have-nots. His portraits of Parisian life are no better. Bardamu maintains that the banlieue (suburb) Rancy where he works is a hell where he would certainly not like to go back: "J'aurais t content de ne jamais avoir retourner Rancy"(page 287) [I'd have been glad if I'd never have had to go back to Rancy, Manheim trans.247]. Celin's characters drift around Bardamu winding up in Rancy, however. In this slum area Celine observes the most depraved side of French urban "petites-gens" as demonstrated by certain people, like "La vieille Henrouille (The old Henrouille), an exceptionally feisty and paranoid woman fixated by the idea that her son and daughter-in-law wan to kill her for her property. The old Henrouille characterizes the haughty yet bungling bourgeoisie of the Paris of the early nineteen thirties-"celinian" characters full of aggression, paranoia, ruthlessness-characters that stand opposed to human empathy (Exoticism in the 1930's, etd.lsu.edu/docs). The Paris that Celine describes in Journey with cynical sense of humor is a dark cityscape where general distrust or hatred prevails, a penchant to dislike other people. Cline scoffs with unrelented hopelessness the French bourgeoise and their institutions, society, and Parisan lifeon the whole . Near the end, Bardamu, now working at a mental clinic remarks: I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare," As he starts doing his new job at the mental clinic Bardamu once again encounters Robinson who asks for a refuge at the clinic. Robinson has recuperated his eyesight and left his girlfriend Madelon, who has been pressuring to hand him over to police unless he marries her. In an attempt to bring together the three, one of the nurses at the clinic offers a night at the fte that Madelon declines to join. While going back to home in a taxi n Robinson continues to rebuff her avowals of love as hollow, so much so, that a fuming Madelon shoots and kills him. Seeing his friend die, Bardamu doubts if Robinson had in fact wanted Madelon to shoot him right from the start, since Robinson, in spite of everything had sought an escape from the war by giving in. Perhaps he was only searching an easy escape, which, to Bardamu, finally is just a street party awash with, cheap and hollow delights seen in Paris. Cline, as we know today from more unbiased, was, until quite lately, the sufferer of a "conspiracy of silence" in the Parisian literary circles partly owing to a series of spiteful, intensely provocative anti-Semitic pamphlets he published in France between 1937 and 1941, and to a degree because his dreary, angry depictions of the cityscapes terrorizing our ideas about literature and our make believe notions about humanity. Most intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher-novelist with a deep passion to depict urban decadence, the cowardice in Parisian bourgeoisie life between the wars, chose to pay no attention to Celine. This has unsurprisingly added to the already tempting "forbidden" air encircling Celine helping to bolster the idea that Cline has been rejected because his bold works say the most defying and the most unthinkable, i.e. "God is dead" and human effort is everything that matters.. In Journey to the End of the Night, Cline reaches the pinnacle n through an almost brilliant sense of responsibility. His "misanthropy", he asserts, is deep and authentic since it is rooted in self-knowledge;" I have looked into myself and this is what I've discovered," he says with the force, rage and anguish like an innocent child encountering the almost incredible facts of damage and death. His observes the Parisian cityscapes with desolate yet wondering eyes, and gives himself a freedom letting him to have moments of human sympathy in addition to amazing prosaic deft (Solomita, 1995). Journey, is one of the first novels in France to be written entirely in the street language of Paris, rather than using slang and other quirks as quaint color. The English translations unsurprisingly lose some of these tastes, bubbling still with the cynical wits that happen only in the city of Paris and from its people. Celine was not a hero of the literary left whispering positively about Hitler and then, only a few years later, scandalizing his leftist supporters by publishing "pamphlets", full of anti-Semitism. During the Occupation, he wrote often condemning the Jews, Freemasons and the English as agents of sleaze. The war had taught him little even after so much condemnation and punishment. The trouble with the Germans, he wrote in 1951, was that they had been too gentle to the "Yids". Celine's "pamphlets" have the power to provoke Today, they can be found only in Paris, at exaggerated prices in corrupt bookshops, The appeal of Celine - the most vicious, mistrustful and fanatical of writers - is not always exactly literary. Yet a million miles from the decaying streets of northern Paris where Celine once lived and worked, he is still remembered as a favorite author and as a muse. Even in Paris, where Celine's ghost is creates problem, Journey is incessantly mentioned as one of the great fictions s in French literature (Hussey, 2002). "Journey to the End of the Night" is first and foremost a World War I novel. Cline (born in 1894), was himself seriously injured in the war. He had enlisted in the cavalry after a nominal education and serving with merit. Most of Bardamu's growth reflects Cline's own journey of life. After the war, Cline trained as a doctor worked for the budding League of Nations in the French African colonies. He lived for a short time in America before coming back to tattered anonymity treating the ill and sick poor Parisians, with their bedbugs and chancres, all depicted intensely in Journey. But if this life story implies a sympathetic understanding of the world, it was done with grim, gloomy viewpoint when Celine started writing in the late 1920's from his Paris banlieue. It aimed against all classes and races of people with random recklessness. Indeed, if "Ulysses" by Joyce is the great modernist novel enthused by a longing for humanistic values, then "Journey" is its direct opposite: it could rather be branded as a stream of distrustful consciousness, uninterrupted by any cordiality or fellow-feeling. Yet could be called loveless portrayal Cline does have some weak spots, particularly for children. As Bardamu puts it, when in Paris his concierge's nephew is dying: "You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it's one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There's always the future." (Journey, as cited in Self, 2006) Works Cited Celine, Louis Ferdinand, Journey to the End of the Night, New York: New Directions Books, 1983, Louis Ferdinand Celine (1894-19610), retrieved from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lfceline.htm Godard,Henri, "Notice," in Cline, Romans, vol. 1 [Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1981], p. 1262 Knipfel, Jim, A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture, retrieved fromhttp://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no8/knipfel.html Self, Will, Celine's Dark Journey, September 10, 2006, The New York Times, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/books/review/Self.t.htmlpagewanted=print Exoticism in the 1930's, retrieved from http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-06092004-172114/unrestricted/ChapIII.pdf Solomita , Alec, Review, 1995, London Bridge, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi, Dalkey Archive, retrieved from http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/fiction/london-bridge.html Hussey, Andrew, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, New Statesman, 02 December 2002, retrieved from http://www.google.com/searchq=%22Journey+to+the+end+of+the+night%22,+Celine,+Parisian+life&hl=en&start=40&sa=N Read More