Achievements
Hailed by many as one of the foremost French writers of the twentieth century, condemned by others for the repulsive depiction of humanity in his fictional works and for the vileness of his anti-Semitic pamphlets, Louis-Ferdinand Céline remains a controversial figure in French letters. One can place him in the French tradition of the poètes maudits (cursed poets), a lineage that begins with the medieval poet François Villon and includes such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jean Genet. Like them, Céline sought to subvert traditional writing and thereby shock the conventional reader into a new sensibility. His works, like theirs, are colored by a personal life that is equally scandalous.
Céline’s novels have contributed to modern literature a singularly somber existentialist view of human society. Unlike some characters in Sartre’s novels, Céline’s Ferdinand (all hisprotagonists are variations of the same character) is unable to transcend the disorder, pain, despair, and ugliness of life through heroic action or political commitment. A doctor as well as a writer, Céline was acutely aware of the biology of human destiny—that decay, disease, and death ultimately erase all forms of distinction and that, in a world without God, there is nothing beyond the grave.
In the course of his apprenticeship to life—his journey to the end of the night—Céline’s protagonist experiences the shattering of the common illusions and self-delusions that obscure the true nature of existence. The lucidity he thereby acquires narrows the ironic distance between his point of view and that of the older and wiser protagonist-turned-narrator. Whatever may be the inherent value of that lucidity, it does not serve as an end in itself. It must ultimately be transmitted, in the context of the journey that engendered it, to the reader in the form of anarrative. Céline’s protagonist is driven to experience life in all of its diversity, so that he may survive to tell about it. Céline doubtless had imposed upon himself a similar mission.
Unlike Sartre and other existentialist writers, Céline eschews abstract philosophical debates in favor of a style appropriate to the nature of the experiences he relates. He chooses a form of poetic delirium. Art, for Céline, is a process of transformation that intermingles reality and fantasy, dream and nightmare, the sublime and the grotesque, the personal and the cosmic. In several of his novels, he gives as the irrational cause of the narrative the aggravation of an old head wound, from which, metaphorically, the words spill forth onto the page. The particular idiom he employs—what he calls his “emotional subway”—is no less subversive of traditional French letters than the visions it translates: a carefully concerted conversational style punctuated with slang, obscenities, neologisms, and foreign words. The “rails” of his subway are his frequently used ellipsis points, which fragment his prose into staccato units, bombarding the reader with pulsations of verbal energy. Vision and style complement each other, allowing Céline’s readers no complacency as they become, grudgingly perhaps, passengers on a terrifying but exhilarating underground journey.
Biography
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie on May 27, 1894, and was reared and educated in Paris. His father worked for an insurance company; Céline’s mother owned a shop in an arcade, where she sold old lace and antiques. As a soldier during World War I, Céline was injured in the head and ear and was shot in the arm. The head and ear wounds were to leave him with a lifelong buzzing in his head and frequent bouts of insomnia; the arm wound earned for him a medal and a picture on the cover of a national magazine.
After his demobilization, Céline worked for a trading company in the Cameroons. It was during his stay in Africa that he began to write. His interest in medicine led to a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. He received his medical degree in 1918 and briefly practiced in the city of Rennes. He soon wearied of his middle-class existence, however, and, after divorcing his first wife, Edith Follet, he took a medical position with the League of Nations. He lost that post when he showed his superior, who was Jewish, a copy of his play The Church, in which there is crude satire of Jewish officials at the League of Nations. Céline wrote Journey to the End of the Night while working at a clinic, having taken as his nom de plume the surname of his maternal grandmother. The novel was greeted with enormous critical acclaim, and Céline’s literary career was launched, though he would continue to practice medicine.
In 1937, Céline published Bagatelles pour un massacre, the first of three viciously anti-Semitic pamphlets. In it, he lauds Adolf Hitler for bringing a new order to a Europe that had degenerated, according to Céline, as the result of Jewish attempts to dominate the world. During the Occupation, various letters and brief articles signed by Céline appeared in the collaborationist press.
In July, 1944, Céline fled Paris, having been denounced as a traitor by the British Broadcasting Corporation and threatened with execution by the Resistance. He sought the relative political safety of Denmark, where he had deposited money from his royalties. In the company of his second wife, Lucette Almanzor, and his cat, Bébert, he managed to make his way across war-ravaged Germany to Copenhagen. The French government instituted proceedings to extradite him so that he could be tried as a traitor. Céline was to spend some five years in Denmark, including more than one year in prison, while his case was being prepared. He maintained that his pamphlets were directed only against those Jews who were supposedly pushing France into yet another war with Germany. He also claimed that he had never written for the pro-Nazi press and that his name had been used without his consent.
On February 23, 1950, a French tribunal condemned him in absentia as a traitor to his country. Thirteen months later, he was granted amnesty as a disabled veteran of World War I. Shortly thereafter, he returned to France to resume his literary career as well as to practice medicine. On July 1, 1961, while editing his last novel, he died of a stroke.
Knowledge of Céline’s biography is crucial to a comprehension of his novels, for the events of the author’s life constitute a point of departure for his fiction. Despite the many resemblances between Céline and his protagonists, particularly in the later novels, his works are by no means thinly veiled autobiography. His art distorts, enlarges, and mythologizes the autobiographical elements in the transformational process of fiction-making.
Analysis
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novelistic production can be divided into three principal phases, which are usually linked to developments in the author’s life. Thus, one can discern an initial period consisting of the novels written before he fled to Denmark, which concludes with the publication of Guignol’s Band. The two volumes of Fable for Another Time constitute a second phase in Céline’s literary production, for they mark the resumption of his literary career after his return to France and the controversial resolution of his political difficulties. In both novels, there is an increasing confusion—literally and figuratively—among protagonist, narrator, and author, as Céline proclaims his innocence as the scapegoat for a guilt-ridden French nation. The final phase of his literary production, consisting of the wartime trilogy Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon, continues the self-justification begun in Fable for Another Time, though in far less strident terms, as the character Ferdinand describes his perilous journey to Denmark.
Céline’s novels are linked by the role and character of their respective protagonists, all of whom, except for the Bardamu of Journey to the End of the Night, are named Ferdinand and constitute variations on the same personality. The early novels emphasize the ironic interplay between the naïve protagonist being initiated into life and the protagonist as the older narrator endowed with greater insight than his younger incarnation. Protagonist and narrator approach each other in time, space, and knowledge, but they never coincide. The distance between them is considerably reduced in Fable for Another Time and the later novels as Céline’s own political difficulties shape the consciousness of his character, Ferdinand.
Although the theme of the victim assumes specific political connotations in Céline’s later fiction, all of his protagonists see themselves as caught up in a universal conspiracy. One aspect of that conspiracy is the inevitable biological degeneration to which the body falls heir; another is the natural human penchant for destruction. This tendency may assume various forms, among them pettiness, greed, malice, and exploitation of others. Its most blatant and dangerous form, however, is the aggression unleashed by war. The specter of war haunts Céline’s novels, and in the face of its menace, cowardice, fear, sickness, and insanity are positively valorized as legitimate means of evasion. War accelerates the natural disintegration of those institutions that have been erected by society as barriers to the natural chaos of existence. In his last novel, Rigadoon, Céline prophesies the submersion of the white race by yellow hordes from the East, who, in their turn, will be subject to the same decline that brought about the collapse of the civilization of their Caucasian predecessors.
Given the generally execrable nature of existence, most individuals, according to Céline, are content to indulge in self-delusion. As Céline’s protagonists discover, love, sexual fulfillment, and the pursuit of social and financial success are merely idle dreams that must eventually be shattered. In his later novels, Céline denounces the cinema, the automobile, and the French preoccupation with good food and fine wine as equally delusory. Across the otherwise bleak landscape of Céline’s novels, one finds occasional moments of love, compassion, and tenderness. Two categories of creatures that elicit particularly sympathetic treatment are animals and children. Céline views the latter, metaphorically, in terms of a reverse metamorphosis: the butterfly becoming the larva as the child turns into an adult.
In Castle to Castle, the narrator describes himself as a super-seer, as blessed with a vision that penetrates to the core of reality and beyond. That vision is inseparable from the particular style by which it is conveyed. Céline rejected traditional French writing as having become too abstract to convey the nature of the experiences he was relating or the response he wished to elicit from his readers. He developed an art that, by intermingling various modes of perception and tonal registers, would embrace the diversity of existence, reveal its essential nature, and jolt the reader into awareness through anger, revulsion, or laughter. Moreover, such an approach to the novel perforce emphasizes the writer’s claim to artistic autonomy, as opposed to his conforming to the external criteria of “proper” writing.
Céline also refused to accept the divorce between written French and spoken French. By introducing many elements of the spoken language into his novels, he believed that he could draw upon its greater directness and concreteness while at the same time maintaining the structured elaboration inherent in the written text. Indeed, although Céline’s novels often have the appearance of a spontaneous first draft, they are the product of laborious craftsmanship.
Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of the Night brought Céline immediate critical attention upon its publication, and it continues to be the best known of his novels. The journey of the young and innocent Bardamu is one of discovery and initiation. Bardamu’s illusions about human existence in general and his own possibilities in particular are progressively stripped away as he confronts the sordidness of the human condition. His limited perspective is counterbalanced by the cynicism of the novel’s narrator, an older and wiser Bardamu. The voyage ultimately becomes a conscious project—to confront the darker side of life so that, with the lucidity he acquires, he can one day transmit his knowledge to others by means of his writings.
Having enlisted in the army in a burst of patriotic fervor, Bardamu, as a soldier at the front, discovers the realities of the war. Despite their puzzlement about the politics of their situation, the men involved in the conflict have a natural penchant for killing and are generally fascinated by death. The most trenchant image of the war can be found in Bardamu’s perception of a field abattoir, where the disemboweled animals, their blood and viscera spread on the grass, mirror the slaughter of human victims that is taking place. Given the insanity of war, the asylum and the hospital become places of refuge, and fear and cowardice are positively valorized. After Bardamu is wounded in the head and arm, any means to avoid returning to the front becomes valid.
Bardamu finally succeeds in having himself demobilized. He travels to the Cameroons to run a trading post in the bush. Through Bardamu, Céline denounces the inhumanity and corruption of the French colonial administration. More important, however, is the lesson in biology that Africa furnishes Bardamu. The moral decay of the European settlers manifests itself in their physical debilitation as they disintegrate in the oppressive heat and humidity and as they succumb to poor diet and disease. The African climate “stews” the white colonialists and thereby brings forth their inherent viciousness. In more temperate regions, Céline indicates, it requires a phenomenon such as war to expose humankind so quickly for what it is. Unable to tolerate the climate or his job, Bardamu burns his trading post to the ground and, delirious with malarial fever, embarks on a ship bound for New York.
Bardamu believes that America will provide him with the opportunity for a better life. He considers his journey to the New World a sort of pilgrimage, inspired by Lola, an American girlfriend in Paris. His New York is characterized by rigid verticality and the unyielding hardness of stone and steel; it bears no resemblance to the soft, supine, compliant body that Lola had offered him. As a “pilgrim” in New York, he discovers many “shrines,” but access to them is open only to the wealthy. Bardamu is no more successful in Detroit than he was in New York. His work at a Ford motor assembly plant recalls the Charles Chaplin film Modern Times (1936). The noise of the machinery and the automatonlike motions Bardamu must perform eventually cause him to take refuge in the arms of Molly, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Molly has the legs of a dancer; Céline’s protagonists, like Céline himself, are great admirers of the dance and particularly of the female dancer, who is able to combine Apollonian form with Dionysian rhythms in movements that defy the body’s inherent corruption.
In Detroit, Bardamu encounters an old acquaintance named Léon Robinson. Hitherto, Robinson had been functioning as Bardamu’s alter ego, anticipating, if not implementing, Bardamu’s desires. They first met during the war, when Robinson, disgusted by the killing, wished to surrender to the Germans. Robinson preceded Bardamu to Africa, where he served as the manager of the trading post that Bardamu would later head. When Bardamu learns that the resourceful Robinson has taken a job as a night janitor, he concludes that he, too, will not succeed in America. He decides that his only true mistress can be life itself, that he must return to France to continue his journey into the night.
Bardamu completes his medical studies and establishes his practice in a shabby Parisian suburb. Reluctant to request his fee from his impoverished patients, Bardamu is finally obliged to close his office and take a position in an asylum. Bardamu envies his patients. They have achieved an absolute form of self-delusion and are protected from life’s insanity by the walls that imprison them.
Robinson reappears in Bardamu’s life. In his desperate attempt to escape his poverty and its attendant humiliation, Robinson joins a conspiracy to murder an old woman. The plot backfires, literally, and Robinson is temporarily blinded when he receives a shotgun blast in the face. His “darkness,” however, does not bring him enlightenment; his disgust with life simply increases. Bardamu realizes that he is bearing witness to an exemplary journey that must end in death. Robinson finally dies at the hands of his irate fiancé, whom he goads into shooting him. His “suicide” terminates his own journey to the end of the night and Bardamu’s as well.
Journey to the End of the Night proffers a vision of the human condition that serves as the basis of all of Céline’s literary production. Concomitant with this vision is the elaboration of a particular style that, with certain modifications in later works, afforded, according to Céline, a means of revitalizing French literature, by freeing it from the abstractions of classical writing. The most salient stylistic effect in Journey to the End of the Night is Céline’s use of the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythms of popular speech as a vehicle for communicating the concrete, emotional impact of Bardamu’s experience.
Death on the Installment Plan
Céline’s second novel, Death on the Installment Plan, depicts the adolescence of a character resembling Bardamu but here, as in succeeding works, called Ferdinand, a name that explicitly poses the question of the relationship between the author and his protagonist. The novel begins with a pattern of opening signals that Céline would use in several other works. Once again, there is an interplay between an enlightened Ferdinand as narrator and a young Ferdinand as the naïve explorer of life. The narration of Ferdinand’s youth is effected by a return to the past by the older narrator, who appears briefly at the beginning of the novel. When the narrator falls ill from the effects of a head wound suffered during World War I, aggravated by an attack of malaria, his memory of his youth is stimulated. Lying in bed, he has visions of little boats sailing through the sky bearing stories from the past, which will be transformed into his narrative. Thus the creation of fiction, the metaphorical outpouring from his skull injury (in Journey to the End of the Night, Bardamu’s skull was trepanned), becomes an irrational, autonomous activity.
Reared in a Parisian passage (a commercial arcade), Ferdinand lives with his parents in an apartment above his mother’s old lace and antique shop. Ferdinand’s father, Auguste, holds a minor position with an insurance company.
Ferdinand’s parents attempt to instill in their young son a traditional bourgeois ethic: proper dress, good manners, cleanliness, honesty, and, above all, the belief that hard work will certainly bring success. Ironically, for both Auguste and Clémence, the ideals they preach are progressively undermined by changing economic conditions as the twentieth century begins. Machine-made lace has begun to replace the handmade luxury items Clémence sells. She is soon reduced to selling door-to-door for a department store, the very sort of enterprise that is putting the small shopkeeper out of business. Auguste, essentially a secretary, is employed for the excellence of his penmanship at a time when the typewriter is becoming standard office equipment.
Ferdinand, too, becomes a victim of the historical circumstances that affect his parents. In addition, he is a victim of the maliciousness of others, intent upon exploiting him for their own ends. Ferdinand’s failures keep his father in a constant state of rage. Auguste’s fits of wrath are enlarged to comically epic proportions: He swells with anger like a balloon and, like a balloon whose air has been suddenly released, lets forth a torrent of imprecations that cause him to bounce around the room, spilling furniture and crockery in his path.
One of Ferdinand’s jobs involves selling jewelry. His employer’s wife, in concert with other employees, conspires to seduce him and steal a valuable ring given to him for safekeeping. With her overflowing corpulence, gigantic breasts, and cavernous vagina, Madame Gorloge is more monster than woman, and Ferdinand is engulfed by her. Céline portrays sexual relations as either an act of aggression or a mindless escape, akin to the masturbation in which Ferdinand indulges and that he later rejects as a form of delusion. Ferdinand’s stay at an English boarding school does not produce the expected result. He returns to France with barely a word of English at his command, having rejected language as an instrument of oppression, responsible for the seductions and paternal conflicts that have shaped his existence.
Ferdinand takes a job with an eccentric named Courtial des Pereires—a balloonist, the owner of a magazine for inventors, and the author of numerous self-study and do-it-yourself manuals on a great variety of subjects. Courtial, who will become a surrogate father for Ferdinand, is a windbag, employing language in a manner radically different from Auguste’s. He reorders reality through the use of a quasi-scientific rhetoric that, ultimately, does not stand the test of reality.
Courtial flees with his wife and Ferdinand to the countryside, after a fantastic project to find sunken treasure leads to the loss of his magazine. There he proposes to grow gigantic potatoes with the aid of radio-telluric waves. The disorder of reality triumphs over the specious order of Courtial’s rhetoric when the potatoes come up stunted and full of maggots. Courtial commits suicide by shooting himself in the head, the source of his grandiose schemes. His wound recalls the narrator’s and the language of the novel, in which the sort of delusion that Courtial practices is denounced. Ferdinand returns to Paris and enlists in the army. Given what he has seen and experienced, human existence appears to be, as the title suggests, little more than a process of slowly advancing toward the ultimate resolution of death.
Death on the Installment Plan is marked by an important stylistic development, which is accentuated in subsequent novels: the frequent use of ellipsis points. As Céline notes in a discussion of his writing in Conversations with Professor Y, the ellipsis are the rails that carry the emotional intensity of his text; they also have the overall effect of conveying, phonically and graphically, the fragmentary nature of existence—such as Céline describes it in his novels—as opposed to the orderly worldview inherent in the syntax of traditional French writing.
Fable for Another Time
The publication of Fable for Another Time (a second volume, in French and usually referred to by its subtitle, Normance, appeared in 1954) marked Céline’s return to public view as a novelist, still stigmatized by his indictment as an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Céline used this novel in particular as a device for self-exculpation. He portrayed himself, through his protagonist, as an innocent victim of persecution, denying all the charges made against him. Moreover, Ferdinand states that his “problems” began with the publication of Journey to the End of the Night, for it was then that he was perceived as a subversive element of French society. One narrative strategy that Céline adopts as a means of maintaining his innocence is the use of a “narratee”—the designation of a reader who, convinced of the author’s guilt, cries out for Céline’s punishment. Ferdinand thus elaborates various scenarios of crime and punishment and, ultimately, proclaims his innocence.
The novel is narrated from the perspective of a prisoner incarcerated in a jail in Copenhagen while awaiting extradition to France to stand trial as a Nazi sympathizer. As a “political prisoner,” he places himself in a long line of similar victims of societal oppression, ranging from the Gaulish chieftain Vercingétorix to Oscar Wilde. By putting himself in this illustrious company, Ferdinand seeks to undermine the specificity of the charges brought against him. Having failed to outrun history, Ferdinand finds himself not only behind bars but also glued to his chair by sores from pellagra. The noises made by other prisoners exacerbate his confinement and, in particular, the sounds made by a prisoner called the Skunk as he hits his head against the wall, apparently trying to commit suicide. Ferdinand compares the Skunk’s head wound to the one he suffered during World War I. The comparison recalls the metaphorical function of Ferdinand’s head wound in Death on the Installment Plan as the cause of his fiction-making. Ferdinand’s narrative will permit him to escape from his cell by encompassing a variety of times and places.
Ferdinand frequently depicts himself as the quarry in a medieval hunt or threatened with horrible forms of torture and execution. In equally hallucinatory scenes, he is used as garden fertilizer by writers who flourished during the Occupation. One writer who reappears several times is Jean-Paul Sartre. In his “Portrait d’un antisémite” (in Les Temps moderne, 1945; republished in Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946; Portrait of the Anti-Semite, 1946; also known as Anti-Semite and Jew, 1948) Sartre accused Céline of having been paid by the Germans to promote anti-Semitism. In Céline’s novel, Ferdinand the doctor will avenge the insults made against Ferdinand the writer by taking consolation in the knowledge that illness, decay, and death will ultimately triumph over both persecutor and persecuted.
Ferdinand introduces yet another adversary. His name is Jules, and he bears certain crucial resemblances to Ferdinand. He, too, is an artist, primarily a painter but a sculptor as well. Like Ferdinand, he is a wounded veteran of World War I: Having lost both of his legs, he pushes himself about on a little cart that he maneuvers with two short canes. These shared attributes become the point of departure for a return to the Montmartre period of Ferdinand’s life and for a complex portrait of Jules as the embodiment of the evil potential lurking within the artist. Jules’s physical deformity and his ugliness are the external manifestations of a perverted character. Jules’s studio, in the subbasement of the building in which Ferdinand has an apartment, becomes a symbolic netherworld in which Jules displays his chthonic powers.
Unlike Ferdinand, who considers himself a martyr for having sought in his novels to reveal the true nature of the human condition, Jules creates art for financial and sexual profit. It is the latter that particularly concerns Ferdinand, for both he and Jules have a predilection for the attractive young dance students that frequent the courses offered by Ferdinand’s wife, Lili. Unlike Ferdinand, Jules has no appreciation for the dance as an aesthetic triumph over the flesh. He seeks to lure the young women into his studio so that he can fondle them. Lili accepts Jules’s invitation to model for him, and Ferdinand acquiesces to the arrangement, fascinated, as is Lili, by Jules’s demoniac energy. Jules caresses the naked Lili in the murky light of his studio, and, as he does, Lili is changed from an elegant, graceful dancer into a garishly multicolored mass of flesh, a work of art deformed by the twisted mind of the artist.
For Ferdinand, the “seduction” of Lili also marks the conclusion of a tranquil existence and the beginning of a period of torment that eventually leads to confinement in a Danish prison. Jules, he believes, has furthered the persecution incited by BBC broadcasts denouncing him as a traitor and by the miniature coffins sent to him by the Resistance as a sign that he has been marked for execution. Standing outside Jules’s studio, he becomes subject to hallucinations, during the course of which he begins to hear air-raid sirens. Because of the noises in his head that were caused by his war injury, one cannot be absolutely sure whether these sirens are real or imagined. Whatever may be their status, the explicit confusion of external and internal landscapes poses once again the artist’s freedom to intermingle reality and imagination. This confusion will be reinforced by another—between Ferdinand’s personal calamities and those of a Europe ravaged by World War II.
Castle to Castle
Castle to Castle is the first volume of a trilogy of novels that trace Ferdinand’s flight from Montmartre to Copenhagen. The novel begins with an incident in which Ferdinand, now practicing medicine in the Parisian suburb of Meudon after having received amnesty from the French government, discovers a ship, tied up at one of the area’s piers, that is being attended by mysterious hooded figures. Upon closer inspection, Ferdinand discovers among them a friend from the Occupation days, Robert Le Vigan, a film actor and pro-Nazi radio broadcaster. Le Vigan had accompanied Ferdinand, his wife Lili, and their cat Bébert during part of their journey from Paris to Denmark. Another one of the hooded figures is a man whom Ferdinand knows was killed in the war. The ambiguous status of these individuals anticipates the “play” between the real and the imaginary that will characterize the narrative soon to be initiated. That play is subsequently reinforced by the aggravation of Ferdinand’s head wound, compounded by an attack of malaria. Forced to take to his bed, the narrator, his memory of the past stimulated by his encounter with Le Vigan and revived by his affliction, begins to transcribe his wartime experiences.
The narrator’s recollection of the past has as its focal point the Castle of Sigmaringen in the Bavarian village of the same name. Ferdinand calls the castle Siegmaringen, ironically playing on the German word Sieg, meaning “victory.” Ferdinand has been sent there with his companions from Berlin, for their safety and for the purpose of administering to the medical needs of the town’s French colony. It was to Sigmaringen that the Germans in September of 1944 had transferred many officials of the collaborationist Vichy government, including its head, Marshal Philippe Pétain. All of them share with Ferdinand a condemnation as traitors and the fear that they will be summarily executed should they fall into the hands of the Resistance or the Free French Forces. Indeed, the entire town is filled to overflowing by Nazi sympathizers who have come to Sigmaringen as their final place of refuge in the wake of the collapse of the German armies.
The castle itself, built by the Hohenzollern dynasty, is more than a luxurious place of exile. Céline transforms it into a symbolic structure that reflects the spirit of its inhabitants, the ruling clique of the Vichy government. For those officials who persist in believing that Germany will miraculously reverse its losses and win the war, the castle is no more real than a Hollywood set. At the base of the castle flows the Danube, gradually eroding the building’s foundations. Céline suggests that, despite the castle’s apparent durability, it will eventually disintegrate, as will all of those structures and institutions that serve as bulwarks against the inherent chaos of existence. For those who believed that the Third Reich would last a thousand years, the moment of collapse is at hand.
The interior design of the castle also functions symbolically. Its apartments are separated from one another by a complex network of passages and stairways that tend to isolate each living space and thus reinforce their occupants’ delusions about returning to power. One can also interpret the isolation of the castle’s apartments as a metaphor for the novel’s plot structure—a series of relatively discontinuous vignettes.
Amid the delusions and the meaningless ceremonies that characterize life in the castle, Ferdinand attempts to address the realities of Sigmaringen. Despite a lack of medical supplies, Ferdinand conscientiously attempts to ease the suffering of the refugees. The central images of the novel, insofar as life outside the castle is concerned, are the overflowing toilets at the Löwen Hotel, where Ferdinand’s small room serves as residence and office, and the railway station. The overabundant use of the toilets, on an epic scale, reveals the overcrowding, poor diet, and disease that afflict the refugees. In a larger sense, for Céline at least, the war has transformed Europe into an immense cesspool. At the railway station, one finds yet another manifestation of the disorder that has overtaken European society. There, confusion and despair have replaced political and social hierarchies, and, because of the uselessness of train schedules at this point in the war, the platforms and waiting rooms serve as points of exchange—for food, sexual favors, disease, and rumors.
Ferdinand performs his functions as a doctor while hoping that he can eventually find a train that will permit him to leave Sigmaringen and head north to Denmark. Ferdinand’s concern with his own escape cannot help but recall those other train trips, to stations named Treblinka and Auschwitz, that deportees all over Europe were taking as the Nazis sought to achieve their so-called final solution.
Castle to Castle ends with a return to the narrator in Meudon, the circularity of the novel’s narrative counterbalancing its episodic discontinuity. Once again, the narrator is a survivor, a witness to the most calamitous period in the history of France. Céline claims in these later novels, beginning with Fable for Another Time, this his fiction gives the reader a more penetrating insight into the period than historical documents can provide. Many of his readers may wonder, however, if Céline did not, in these works, choose obfuscation rather than lucidity to elaborate what might be considered a self-serving mythology that transforms the journey begun in Journey to the End of the Night into the very sort of delusion that the author had once sought to denounce.
