SOURCE: "Céline in Cross-Cultural Perspective," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 513-22.

In the following essay, Scullion discusses Céline's depiction of American capitalist society, his literary influence on American writers, and his often problematic critical interpretation.

Reminiscing on his world travels in postwar conversations with Robert Poulet, Louis Ferdinand Céline derided the boundless "commercial optimism" he found animating life in the United States during his visits in the 1920s and 1930s: Americans "tend not to revel in the morose…. When they realize they're no longer perky, they check their pulse and temperature." One might think that the moroseness in which Céline typically wallowed and the irksome cheeriness with which he saw early twentieth-century America engaging in its mercantile endeavors would have made the encounter between two such incompatible temperaments necessarily brief and therefore inconsequential. But Voyage au bout de la nuit's...