Skip to main content

Journey to the end of the night...and then what?

Louis Ferdinand Celine is considered one of the classic writers of the early part of the 20th century - at least outside of the United States. A noted influence for writers from Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Burroughs to Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Joseph Heller, Celine captured his rambling, dark recollections of life serving in World War I, searching provincial opportunity in West Africa, bridling ambition in New York and jazz-age, auto-crazed Detroit, and finally aspiring to medicine on the outskirts of Paris in the classic, "Journey to the End of the Night". This novel is his whopping story, cloaked in black humor and obscured idealism - one might not sense his anticipation for life under the sardonic disregard for common morals and values.
Celine writes about these exaggerated experiences while trying to fiddle with the riddle of living. What do people really want? Why do we subject ourselves to the passive pretensions that subvert our true desires? Who do people think they really are and who do they think they are fooling? He was "enlightened" by the Great War, bludgeoned by African malaise and disease, discarded by American capitalism, and blased by post-war Parisian peculiarities; mindful of his social state - self-inflicted poverty - Celine dishevels his surroundings in a sundry of perversities, nihilistic and womanizing.
Still, Celine admirably questions our head-long dive into pathos, our inevitable maturation (ironic, he would label it) and its unintended consequences, and ultimately our disregard and acceptance of the plights we face. We are self-interested and distracted, in some ways imprisoned by the contents of our minds. We pretend to care, but we don't, and then it is finished, as the character Robinson lethargically faces with his love, Madelon.
I found the disregard enlightening for the freedom of thought it reveals. Yet Celine has difficulty understanding the ultimate result of this self-possessing trap. When we get to the end of the night and find the hope vanished, why do we care to continue? And who would care anyway if we decided to proceed with our petty, little lives? Most do - which Celine and his embodied character, Bardamu, do too - and therein lies the discrepancy. When we reach the end of the night, all warts and pettiness accepted, what happens next? Perhaps there is hope yet.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...