SOURCE: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Novels: From Narcissism to Sexual Connection," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 51-65.

In the following essay, Buckley examines Céline's treatment of sexual desire and love in Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan.

"Ah, Ferdinand … as long as you live you will always search for the secret of the universe in the loins of women!"

(L'Eglise)

… the female mystery doesn't reside between the thighs, it's on another wave-length, a much more subtle one.

(Castle to Castle).

After Freud, modern novelists grew more conscious of not only their own literary expression as a kind of narcissism, but also of the narcissism in the characters they created. Distress about narcissism, therefore, can be easily detected in modern novels. "The psychoanalytic concept of narcissism," says Russell Jacoby in his study Social Amnesia (1975), "captures the reality...