Céline's dark, raging vision of the horrors of the twentieth century exploded on to the French literary scene with Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit), his first novel, in 1932. Céline (the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, 1894–1961) never stopped raging, in a voice – derisive, savage, funny, immensely eloquent – that broke with all the canons of French narrative prose and pointed the novel in radically new directions. Just as Proust liberated the French novel from the restrictions of linear plot and consistent characterization, Céline freed it from the confines of formal artistic language and conventional grammar, creating a powerfully original prose style based on the expressive resources of popular speech.

Elements of a life

Céline was the product of the petit-bourgeois Paris of the small shopkeeper – the nation of thrift, hard work, patriotism and anti-Dreyfus inclinations. The son of an insurance clerk and a lacemaker, he was born in Courbevoie, in the western suburbs of Paris. His mother ran a shop for many years in the Passage Choiseul, specializing in old lace. In September 1912, after leaving school and holding various short-term jobs, he volunteered for military service, serving in a cavalry regiment. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, he was badly wounded in his right arm, and suffered a concussion as the result of a bursting German shell; he was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Médaille Militaire. Deeply affected by his experience of the war, he was invalided out of the army in 1915. After convalescing in Paris he worked for a while at the French Consulate in London. In 1916 he set sail for the recently acquired colony of the Cameroons in West Africa, where he stayed for almost a year as manager of a cocoa plantation. After the war, he studied privately to obtain his Baccalauréat, undertook medical studies at the University of Rennes and, in 1924, qualified as a doctor.