Dark, Twilight, terrifying, like the world and the time he describes, this "Journey to the End of the Night" is also a solar book, epiphanic because he invented a new language, freed of all shackles, freed from all academicism. It creates the smoking ruins of the Great War furious prose, truculent, iconoclast, who unbuttons grammar, sits on the beautiful style and break and enter orality in the literature. The "Voyage" is the last of the great picaresque novels, much like Don Quixote, in his time, was the last great chivalric romance. There is also the Quixote Bardamu derisory figure wandering in a world where he struggles to find his place. A few years earlier, Proust buried the grandest ways the 19th century. With this book, Celine, he lays the foundations of a new century that rhymes with war and misery.
Is that sad or neurasthenic as a novel? Curiously, no. I find instead that emanates from the kind of joy that is found in some paintings by Brueghel or Ensor, a carnival gaiety, carnival, that of the little people who oppose the great misfortunes of existence the petty joys of everyday life. Céline well be a pessimist madman, he is pessimistic with this banter banter and feeds his prose of extraordinary energy. But beware, this is not an ordinary banter, trivial and banal suburban. No, it's a wonderfully sophisticated banter, which interweaves in an unexpected copulation archaisms and neologisms, which coexist shamelessly slang words and precious, the most scholarly style figures and volunteers blunders. This is the banter of a man who perfectly masters the subtleties of the French language and that subverts them knowingly to bring forth a unique idiom.
Proust said subtly subtle things. Céline, he said mightily powerful things. To each his greatness.
