SOURCE: "Céline and Anarchist Culture," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 321-31.

In the following essay, Pagès examines right-wing extremism and libertarian discourse in Céline's writing. According to Pagès, "the momentum of anarchic subversion that surfaces in Céline's fiction almost imperceptibly valorizes certain ethical or existential perspectives that are by nature antiauthoritarian."

It is important to remember one's first impressions of a book. When I first read Voyage au bout de la nuit at the age of sixteen, I felt as though I were entering into an uncensored language, one that bypasses the usual split between the spoken and the written; above all, I felt as though I had encountered a work whose rebellious nature and resistance to social norms had more confused the boundaries between poetry and politics. Soon after, I learned that the author, who had described Voyage as...