Death on the Installment Plan

"Celine’s novel combines immersion in the narrator’s consciousness with a thoroughgoing attack on every aspect of modern life. This negativity is an important dimension of modernist writing. Each modernist discovered their voice, discovered what they loved to write about, by first discovering what they hated. Celine pushes this tendency to its absolute limit. Critics have compared his short sentences, separated by the trademark three dots, to machine gun fire railing against bourgeois hypocrisy, the self-satisfaction and complacency of interwar Europe, the idiocy of public opinion, the vacancy of popular taste, and the grinding of urban poverty. The novel is the story of his youth and young adulthood as a child of a struggling lower-middle-class couple who never quite reach economic or social security. It opens, as does the first great European novel, Don Quixote , with a satire of chivalric romance and its idealism. For Celine, as for Cervantes, idealism contrasted with reality allows us to see the pettiness and tawdriness of real life, even as idealism itself is exposed as a pathetic attempt to escape reality and responsibility. Celine’s vast masterpiece is a machine that dissolves objective, social existence into dark laughter. Dark comedy is art’s weapon against a modern world that co-opts every ideal and turns it into some kind of cheap advertisement, or, worse, a slogan for totalitarian politics. The writer and artist respond by developing an attitude that works like a kind of inverted religiosity, exposing every aspect of social life as hollow. The modernist philosopher Henri Bergson described laughter as attacking the “encrustation of the mechanical onto the living.” The mechanical conformity and regimentation of modern life are eaten away by Celine’s dark comedy. One might even say that dark comedy attacks objective reality itself. Thus, in Death on the Installment Plan , two primary features of modernism—the focus on subjectivity or consciousness and the attack on modernity—fuse. The narrator’s consciousness is where the world comes apart. The potential risks of Celine’s intense negativity can perhaps be seen in his subsequent career, in which he became a Nazi collaborator and was declared a national disgrace at the end of WW2. Much debate has raged about the relation between his first two great novels, and the grotesque anti-Semitic writing of the later 1930s. But his case is a reminder that the revolt against modernity can take both liberal and illiberal forms."