Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), is a novel of astonishing originality. Originality in art has a curious structure. It doesn’t say, “Look at me, I’m brand-new!” Instead it proclaims: “I have always been here.” Borges, writing about Kafka, said that a truly original work “creates [its] precursors.” Céline wasn’t the first writer to use laughter to explore the abyss, but the history of dark comedy only becomes visible from the perspective established by his prose.
War, the first English translation, by Charlotte Mandell, assembled from a trove of recently discovered manuscripts, contains sequences blacker, more intense and funnier than anything else Céline wrote. This slim volume suggests a new answer to the question that has hung over discussions of dark comedy since the 1930s, in part because of Céline’s infamous anti-Semitic pamphlets. What is the relation between dark comedy and its most famous exponent’s embrace of Hitler? Does Nazism represent the inevitable terminus of the trip to the end of the night? Or is it rather a betrayal of the mysterious dynamic by which Céline mined laughter from humanity’s basest materials?
Let’s begin by clearing up a common misconception about dark comedy. The tradition lit up by Céline’s first novel remains misunderstood. People tend to confuse it with satire. Looking back at the predecessors Journey to the End of the Night gathered together, we find the same pattern. People took Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a satire on the chivalric romance. They took Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” as a satire on British rule in Ireland. They took Gogol’s Dead Souls as a satire on the tsarist regime.
But satire is just dark comedy’s alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. War is a satire on war in the same sense that getting shot is a satire on guns, or being trampled to death by a hippo is a satire on evolution, or junkies are a satire on drugs, or a piss stain is a satire on clean pants.
Satire depends on the distance between the laughing spectator and the ugly spectacle. But when you open your mouth your teeth show. You get ugly. The distance collapses. You look like a hippo when you laugh. Your laughter is the trampling hippo. Distance becomes participation. I’ve sometimes thought that any truly funny satire betrays satire, that the dark aggressive delirious laughter eats up the moral. With dark comedy, satire is something the critics only think about once they’ve stopped laughing. Maybe it’s something they think about in order to stop laughing.
Let’s provisionally define dark comedy as a comic situation where it’s too dark to see the satire. As an example of real genuine abyssal authentic dark comedy, take the nameless chapter of War that extends from pages 61 to 74. Ferdinand, Céline’s alter ego, has met another young man, Cascade, in the field hospital where they are recovering from their war wounds. Ferdinand’s petit-bourgeois parents take him, Cascade and Cascade’s wife Angèle to a luncheon at the splendid mansion of a bigwig. Ferdinand’s parents have used the excuse of Ferdinand’s war medal—awarded to him by a combination of bureaucratic mistakes and his own lies—as a pretext for improving their tenuous social ties with the bigwig.
Unknown to Ferdinand’s mother, Cascade and his wife have a somewhat unorthodox relationship. Before the war, she prostituted for him. But now that his horribly wounded, actually rotting foot has basically disabled him, Angèle’s contempt for him mounts. As they get drunk at the luncheon, Cascade starts to sing a song. The following memorable exchange then occurs:
“I’ll sing if I want to and it’s not you fish face who will make me shut up!”
“Just try,” she said. “Try and see!”
I realize she was excited with the alcohol but still there were some things she shouldn’t say, and she shouldn’t act like that.
“What’s that, what’s that, bitch? You dare defy your husband in front of people here? You’ve let yourself be plowed by all the beefeaters ever since I sent for you to come see me here… Who do you think you are? Why don’t you tell these people how I found you whoring in the streets in the Passage du Caire and how without me you’d never have earned enough to show off your first shirt. Say one more word bitch and I’ll bash in your face you whore! Fuck you you didn’t even deserve…you piece of filth!”
“Oh yes?” she says to him…
And in a lower voice, concentrating on each word which she must have prepared before she came:
“You say this Angèle kid must still be just as idiotic as she was before… That’s what you’re saying, is it? That she’ll train one, two, three extra whores and all the bitches Monsieur brings with their rotten cunts, and every month a brat in the belly we have to pluck … No sweetie, I’m fed up and you can fuck off—you’re rotting, stay rotting. Go fuck yourself all alone, everyone for himself, that’s my extra, evening edition!”
After this exchange Cascade starts singing again. The fancy people, some of whom have heard the exchange, and some of whom haven’t (this disparity is itself a brilliant comic touch), react in various awkward, horrified, or smiling and pleasant ways. At one point Angèle breaks into his song to tell Cascade that she has the letter in which he’s confessed to her that he shot himself in the foot to escape the front lines and that she’s sent it to his colonel.
While this is happening, literally right outside the dining room’s large windows, endless rows of parading soldiers are marching to the front. The sound of artillery occasionally shakes the expensively furnished table. At last Ferdinand, seized by a fit due to his head injury, yells out, “Long live France!” and collapses. A few days later Cascade is shot by a firing squad.
In this chapter Céline has brought together five signature themes from Journey to the End of the Night: a lower-middle-class family not entirely sure how to behave in the presence of their betters; a low-life imbrication of sex, money and naked selfishness, straight out The Beggar’s Opera; an ostensibly civilized interaction in immediate proximity to trench warfare; a social situation no one sees in the same way, and which no one completely understands; and the delirium of alcohol or brain damage (in this case both).
The way Céline presented these five elements in Journey made it possible—difficult, but still possible—to extract a satirical message from the work. It’s a satire of war. Or of the petit bourgeois. Or of civilization. But the way they are combined here—and I know my summary and quotes can’t convey this, you just have to read it for yourself—makes this procedure absolutely impossible. In War, he sets these elements swirling around each other, each interacting on each, to produce in the reader—me, at least—an absolute convulsion of hippopotamic laughter without any parallel in my experience, and which caused my wife and daughter to literally recoil in shock and disgust as I sat there in the corner reading.
I don’t think these reflections on satire are particularly original, but it’s simply necessary to dispense with the whole idea of satire before we can focus on the actual problems Céline’s new novel raises. And it is new. It’s newer than any other book I’ve read this year. Except maybe for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, which I finally got around to reading in January. And that book learned a lot from Céline.
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Perhaps the most original aspect of War—when compared both with Céline’s classic published novels of the 1930s, Death on the Installment Plan and Journey, as well as with most other great examples of dark comedy—is its liberation from the Quixotic model. Of course Don Quixote’s influence as the greatest and arguably the first Western novel extends far beyond dark comedy. But Céline’s example sensitized us to a special branch of Cervantes’s progeny—call it dark comic quixotism. Quixote provides the template for virtually all literary dark comedy that succeeded it, ranging from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to George Schuyler’s Black No More to Nabokov’s Lolita to Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote.
Central to all these works is what I will call the Unidirectional Downward Comparison (UDC). Cervantes’s novel is organized around the comparison between the idealized images of chivalric romance and the quotidian images of daily life. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, roadside taverns as castles. This constant comparison between the real and ideal takes a form so strange and even perverse in its logic that it’s very difficult to find analogues for it outside Don Quixote and its progeny. To explain it, I often draw on a photograph that a friend drew my attention to 25 years ago.
The photograph shows the rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe standing next to each other in a space without other visible objects. I think they were in an alley, with walls to either side of them. Perhaps the photo can still be found somewhere on the internet. At any rate, the feature that my friend pointed out to me was that, in setting up a comparison between Fat Joe and Big Pun, each made the other one look thinner.
Big Pun, when placed next to Fat Joe, looks fat, but much thinner than his actual seven hundred pounds. This is because Fat Joe was himself, when this picture was taken—he has since, as I understand it, taken Ozempic to dramatically reduce his weight—very seriously overweight. But given that in the photo he serves as the only reference point for Big Pun, and Big Pun serves as the only reference point for him, the eye essentially registers him as of an ordinary size. So Fat Joe looks thinner.
But Big Pun also looks thinner. The eye judges him as fatter than a basically ordinary person, which, when compared only to Big Pun, Fat Joe has become. Pun looks nowhere near as obese as he would appear if placed next to a person of truly ordinary weight range, or a nonhuman reference object like a motorcycle or a fire hydrant.
The point is that this photograph is an example of a Unidirectional Downward Comparison, a comparison in which both terms travel in the same direction. Stop for a moment and reflect how contrary this dynamic is to our usual experience. Our thin friend will make us look fat, while we will accentuate their slenderness. Or our fat friend will make us look thin, while we will enhance observers’ sense of their girth.
Like the Big Pun/Fat Joe photo, the Don Quixote comparison pushes each term in the same direction: down. Each becomes lesser in the presence of the other. Each term of the comparison—the ideal and reality—makes the other one look worse. The idealized images, gestures and phraseology of the chivalric romance make the images, gestures and speech patterns of contemporary Spain look like crap. No, that’s not a palace, it’s a shitty inn. No, that’s not a princess, it’s a prostitute.
Yet, at the same time, reality makes the fantasy look bad. Chivalric romance appears delusional, idiotic. Sometimes the capacity to see the world through the lens of the ideal seems like selfish, willful escapism, leading directly to material harm for the unfortunates whose paths cross Don Quixote’s. Sometimes it simply seems insane.
The fictional world established by the UDC—a world structured by a real/ideal opposition which makes each term look worse, and where each shift between the real and the ideal deepens the worseness of both, as they sail, to borrow a phrase from Beckett, “worstward ho”—this kind of fiction is incompatible with satire. Because satire depends on some actual or implied term of comparison which is not degraded, corrupt, insane or vile.
For centuries the Unidirectional Downward Comparison has served as the central organizing principle for dark-comic imagery, even as the Quixotic faux-quest has often served as the organizing principle for the plot, as in novels from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Beckett’s Molloy. Céline adopts the Quixotic UDC at the very outset of both his thirties masterpieces. Journey opens with the contact between patriotic idealism and the reality of war, while Death actually opens with a citation of Quixote, when the narrator, Ferdinand, imagines a detailed chivalric fantasy of knights and princesses, through which the reality of his world breaks through.
Perhaps my all-time favorite example of the UDC is the moment in Dead Souls when the landowner Manilov drifts into a reverie, imagining that he and Chichikov—a man about whom he knows almost nothing—become such close friends that the tsar gives them a special award. The puerile insanity of this flight of idealism is brought into focus when one considers Chichikov’s identity as a low-level conman, on a mad quest to be recognized as a landowner by buying up the deeds of deceased serfs. Manilov’s gentle dream highlights the impossible degradation of the actual world, even as reality exposes in him a cluelessness amounting almost to a new kind of depravity. Like Céline’s thirties novels, Dead Souls constantly stages the confrontation between ideal and real to accelerate the degradation of both terms.
But War is different. Although Ferdinand on several occasions refers to characters from the same imaginary chivalric romance that the Ferdinand of Death uses, here these images are inert, epiphenomenal. The chivalric names “King Krogold … Wanda … Joad” spool out of him in a kind of stutter of the imagination. They are never brought into significant contact with the scenes and images of reality. Nor is the chivalric replaced by some other version of the ideal, as in Journey. In fact, there is no trace of idealism of any kind in this book, beyond instances like the purely farcical, automatic shout “Long live France!” that Ferdinand utters before passing out.
This novel offers us not Céline’s perspective on war but war’s perspective on the world. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:
I must have been lying there for part of the following night as well. My whole left ear was stuck to the ground with blood, my mouth too. Between the two there was an immense noise. I slept in the noise and then it rained, hard. Kersuzon next to me was stretched out heavy under the water. I moved one arm toward his body. Touched it. The other one I couldn’t. I didn’t know where my other arm was. It had flown into the air, twisted in space, then fallen back down and jabbed into my shoulder, in the raw part of the meat. It made me scream at the top of my lungs every time and then it got worse. Afterwards, though still shouting, I managed to make less noise than the horrific din bashing my head in, on the inside, like a train. It didn’t do any good to resist. This was the first time in that whole nightmare full of shells whistling by that I slept, in all the noise that was possible, without entirely losing consciousness—that is, in horror. Except for a few hours when they operated on me, I never completely lost consciousness. Since December ’14, I’ve always slept like that—in excruciating noise. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked up inside my head.
War is unique in the literature of warfare by presenting war not as an object but as a subject. It is the source of Ferdinand’s, and Céline’s, creative power. And its structure essentially replicates the classic image of poetic inspiration, the kind Plato’s Socrates frequently takes as the object of his satire or disapproval. The source of literary power is simultaneously creative and destructive. War is a Dionysian frenzy, an internal delirium, a state of possession that takes hold of its human host, granting him inhuman vision.
Yet this creative/destructive frenzy isn’t continuous—it isn’t in sole possession of the narrative. Rather, it breaks in, both at the level of plot—when Ferdinand becomes delirious, hallucinates or passes out—and at the level of imagery and style. The scenes when the narrative departs the realistic mode, and we discover a necrophiliac nurse, for instance, or when the paragraphs decay into the rapid fire of staccato phrases—here war speaks, its intoxicated and intoxicating demonic vision breaks through, and we see War looking at a nurse, War listening to a man speak to his wife, War visiting a hospital. Here’s how War sees a town square:
Then the regiments would stream in to the Place Majeure like flows of lava, from top to bottom, right to left. They would roll toward the arcades around the market square, would cling to the bistros and flow by the fountain, would drink up entire troughs among the big clusters of lamps wavering through the axles. Everything would have finally melted together so to speak on the Place Majeure if they’d pulverized things and bodies a little. That ended up happening, they told me, one time when the Bavarians crushed everything on the night of the bombing on November 24th.
The hallucinatory intensity of this scene issues directly from the war which has occupied Ferdinand/Céline’s “head.” There’s also an element of prophecy—another of the ancient properties of the muse or god who takes possession of the poet—in the vision of the scene in terms of a catastrophe that hasn’t yet occurred. Just as a landscape painter sees an aesthetic potential in a scene which might be brought out with a sunset, Ferdinand sees the square on the verge of melting together, as just requiring a “little” pulverizing to bring out its potential. War gazes at the scene, reflecting that it needs just a touch more war to make it really perfect.
Stringing these episodes of delirium or dark inspiration together is Ferdinand’s attitude. Faced with images of sublime chaos, we see him constantly, with unvarying cynicism, trying to grab any meager advantage, any fleeting pleasure, trying to survive a few minutes, a few days longer. When lying in the hospital, he tries to get the perverted—and ultimately necrophiliac—nurse to give him a hand job. He uses the horrific discovery of her dark work among the coffins to get her to give him a pass to go get drunk in town.
Much of the comedy derives from the contact between this persona—this self-serving, grasping attitude—with the surreal intensities of the vision granted him by the war possessing his head. It’s as if the narrator of Paradise Lost inserted himself into the action, as a charlatan trying to cop a quick feel from Eve or trying to get Satan to cosign a loan. It’s as if Homer wrote himself into the Iliad, as a beggar pretending to be blind, then stealing the bronze decorations from Achilles’s sandals while he looks the other way.
This relation between sublime vision and low attitude isn’t entirely unlike the Quixotic Unidirectional Downward Comparison. The reader’s experience is organized around negotiations between two essentially unsavory entities. Ferdinand’s attitude perhaps resembles that of Sancho Panza in Quixote, calculating how to profit from his master’s crazy visions. But there’s something unstable, unnamable, uncanny about the source of Ferdinand’s vision, which has no real parallel in the classic images of dark-comic idealism.
Journey and Death both feature Ferdinand’s attitude—the aspect of the novels that perhaps exerted the greatest influence on the initial wave of English-speaking Céline imitators—like Philip Roth or Kurt Vonnegut. But there’s no parallel in Céline’s previously published fiction to the proximity between this attitude and the surreal intensities of the vision of War. Between the delirium and the attitude, the published novels insert the ideal, which from the perspective of War now feels like a buffer, an avoidance mechanism. In Céline’s new novel, his attitude performs its dance steps and pickpocketing on the very verge of the abyss.
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In 1937 Céline fell into that abyss, publishing the first of his book-length anti-Semitic pamphlets, Trifles for a Massacre. This political and literary turn paved the way for his eventual position as a Nazi collaborator during the occupation. It also made a certain kind of question about dark comedy unavoidable, at least for those who wanted to write about Céline. When I laugh with Céline, is my open mouth a gate to the Holocaust?
It would be libelous to say that dark comedy’s practitioners are all proto-fascists. Beckett fought for the resistance; Acker and Bernhard were anti-fascists. At the most, one might say that dark comedy, as a genre, betrays a slight tendency to political conservatism. Michael Oakeshott’s reflection that the conservative writer “prefers present laughter to utopian bliss” aptly describes the orientation of dark-comic writers from Swift to Austen to Gogol to Waugh. But of course there are many exceptions; for example Breton, who published an influential anthology of dark-comic writing in 1940 and was a communist.
Yet Céline became a fascist. And not only a fascist, but the exponent of a form of anti-Semitism that is even too much for the collaborationist introducer of the 1943 edition of Trifles for a Massacre. In preparing this essay, and for the first time, I decided to read Trifles in order to try to answer the question of the relation of Céline’s dark comedy to his fascism. An anonymous English translation is available online and from various shady publishers, the kind whose list includes new editions of Mein Kampf along with questionable treatises on banking and world finance with suspicious cover art.
I wondered whether this text would present what we might call the “hard problem” of dark comedy. Would it confront me with a work of genuine dark comedy that was too dark to enable me to assent to its aesthetic achievement? Would laughter be wrung from me at the cost of all of my self-respect? When I broke into my hippo’s grin, would I develop a hunger for… Jews?
But I soon discovered that Trifles does not pose this hard problem. The book is totally devoid of any trace of the Célinian dark-comic magic that one finds in Death or Journey, or now War, or even in postwar masterpieces like Castle to Castle. It seems likely to me, after skimming it—I defy anyone to read this book all the way through—that Trifles might be the most revolting document ever produced by a great writer.
It begins with a confusing and boring ballet, and continues with hundreds of pages of violent, pogrom-inciting, almost insane anti-Semitic ranting, concluding with another confusing and boring ballet scene. (I don’t use the phrase “almost insane” lightly. The Jews of the art world Céline singles out for special scorn include such unlikely names as Racine and Cézanne.) Upon reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that so virulent an anti-Semitic work should be incompatible with dark comedy. Anti-Semitism, in Nietzsche’s astute analysis, is ultimately an expression of resentment. As such, it conceals a kind of idealism of the oppressed, of the dispossessed good folk who’ve mixed their blood with the soil of their native lands, only to be betrayed by the global Jewish conspiracy. The anti-Semite pours his bile upon the Jews from an ultimately idealizing position. He speaks for the virtuous victims of the Jews. The latter may have become degraded under Jewish rule—and Céline frequently inveighs against the weakness and idiocy of European gentiles—but the logic of anti-Semitism requires the idealization of the victim who will regain all his lost virtue and strength once the Jewish problem has received its final solution.
All of this runs counter to the logic of Céline’s great dark-comic works in which the ideal is either exposed to unlimited ridicule—as in Death and Journey—or in which the ideal is entirely absent and, indeed, unimaginable, as in War. What one discovers in the anti-Semitic writings is the apotheosis of the Célinian attitude. There is more than a touch of petit-bourgeois resentment in that attitude, after all. But in the magic of the great writings the attitude is only one element. The Unidirectional Downward Comparison is missing from Trifles, as is Céline’s uncanny delirious inspiration.
I think the best way to understand the relation of texts like Trifles to Céline’s dark-comic works is to suggest that in the former the attitude tries to work itself up into a state of delirium on its own, without reliance on the dark and uncontrollable energies of the inhuman source of delirium—a source revealed most distinctly and terrifyingly in War.
Trifles is delirious without being uncanny. It is simply, to borrow another Nietzschean term, all too human. Shorn of its vital, fraught relation to the authentic source of his creative inspiration, the Célinean attitude simply becomes contemptible. This seems to me to explain why those Célinian imitators who primarily modeled their writing on the attitude—such as Charles Bukowski—seem so badly dated, while the Céline of War remains shockingly new, inaugurating a literary genealogy which has yet to unfold. This origin has already begun, for me, to gather its contemporary precursors: the first third of Blake Butler’s 300,000,000; the final movement of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season; certain passages in Madeline Cash’s first story collection; Thomas Ligotti’s “The Red Tower,” the DMT sequence of Tao Lin’s Trip… These works discover—in murder, in witchcraft, in childhood, in evolution, in drugs—new subjects of abyssal laughter, new perspectives from which to look down on life.
Art credit: Kirsty Whiten, Vanguard, 2008. Oil on canvas, 120 × 150cm. Courtesy of the artist.
