AT THE FOOT OF THE PAGE
287
"We are already there. Bardamu, the cynical and psychotic
deserter of Celine's novel, according to his own description 'venom–
ous yet docile, outraged, robbed, without guts and without spirit'
is, like Thersites, Apemantus, and Dostoevsky's clerk, a man from
underground. Bardamu travels. But there is only one possible
destination for a traveller underground.... The end of the night.
"Bardamu is a Frenchman but does not regard himself as
French. He has an intuitive feeling that he must be classified in
dramatic terms. Listen to his notions about race:
" 'What you call race,' he says, 'is only that great heap of
worm-eaten drunks like me, bleary, lousy, shivering, who, coming
from the four corners of the world defeated, have ended up here
escaping from hunger, pestilence and cold.' He belongs to the
defeated, that is his race. He speaks French, but with a Thersites
accent. Over his head, without ·respect for his desires, the work of
the world is performed. He, naturally, has only contempt for the
performance. 'There is no rest for the humble,' Bardamu says,
'except in despising the great.' "
"How true!" breathed Smertenko.
"But Bardamu despises the lowly as well as the great. And
himself too. Nothing and no one can escape his disgust. There is
hardly a word of praise in his vocabulary. He has only to men–
tion something casually to make you feel it must be worthless.
The invidious is always in context. Such, I take it, Smerkamu, is
Bartenko's metaphysic...."
It was a slip. My wife laughed. Smertenko looked at us
suspiciously.
"All right," he said, "I follow you so far. I understand that
Celine has created a type. Right. So the book is profound. But
why do you say that it is unsatisfactory?"
"Artistically unsatisfactory in that Celine cannot see the
dramatic limits or present the proper outline of his character.
Celine
agrees
with Bardamu. Bardamu's opinions are important
because of the profundity of his predicament, they are not, strictly
speaking, true. They correspond to his experience, ·but other expe–
riences, thank God, are possible. Bardamu does not even exhaust
the possibilities of contempt. There is a contempt from above as
well as from below. And since Celine agrees with him we find, as
the novel develops, that the hero's mephitic opinions are invariably
