SOURCE: "The Way Down to Wisdom of Louis-Ferdinand Céline," in Minnesota Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1968, pp. 85-91.

In the following essay, Widmer offers analysis of Céline's misanthropy and pessimism in Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan. According to Widmer, "Those who see nothing but humor and rancor in Céline miss the existential wisdom."

Céline's writings have a special relevance to contemporary American literature. While that should not be, given the usual adumbrations of our culture as arising from optimistic innocence and pragmatism and affluence, we may now be more willing to revise the bright theories than deny the dark facts of the American psyche. From the start of his literary career, with Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Céline appealed to the yearning for extremity so basic to American writers. Henry Miller, for example, was...