Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

First published:Mort a credit, 1936 (English translation, 1938)

Type of work: Social and psychological realism

Time of work: Mainly the first decade of the twentieth century

Locale: Principally Paris

Principal Characters:

• Ferdinand, a medical doctor who narrates the incidents of his boyhood and adolescence
• Clemence, his mother
• Auguste, his father
• Edouard, his maternal uncle
• Caroline, his maternal grandmother
• Nora Merrywin, the wife of the headmaster of Meanwell College
• Courtial des Pereires, an eccentric genius, editor, inventor, and philosopher

The Novel

Death on the Installment Plan takes the form of a review by an adult Ferdinand of his boyhood and adolescence. Ferdinand’s reminiscence reveals the harsh, cruel world in which he grew up and shows the germination of his present attitude and temperament. In the opening fifty pages, Louis-Ferdinand Céline introduces the narrator as a gloomy, disillusioned doctor who views medicine cynically and is irritated by his patients. Employed at the Linuty Foundation Clinic, he is surrounded by sickness and corruption. His cousin, a doctor at a venereal disease clinic, is dying of cirrhosis of the liver, and his typist wants to be an abortionist. Ferdinand is gravely ill when the novel begins. His mother comes to visit him, and it is a vicious quarrel with her, not warm maternal-filial feelings, which conjures up his childhood memories and initiates the flashback that constitutes the novel.

It is a grim childhood, as one after another of the numerous recalled incidents and episodes of his childhood evocatively indicate. He grew up in a filthy apartment in a glass-encased passage in Paris, to which the action turns: There is no warmth, no love in his home. Ferdinand is constantly beaten and abused by his father, Auguste, an insurance clerk who, a failure himself, belittles his son. His mother, Clemence, runs a clothing shop, and though she has aspirations for her son and is solicitous of his welfare, she provides little emotional or material comfort and constantly nags him. His grandmother, Caroline, is one of two family members who show him any affection or kindness, but she soon dies. She secretly buys for him a copy of Illustrated Adventure Stories, of which his father disapproves. In it, he discovers the story of King Krogold, which inspires him to create his own King Krogold stories, set in a fictional world into which, as a child and later as an adult, he often escapes. Uncle Edouard, whose joviality and optimism contrast sharply with the gloom of this household, displays some interest in young Ferdinand. The other uncles and aunts, a grotesque bunch, care little for him. The neighbors, generally repulsive, are no warmer than Ferdinand’s relatives, and their harsh treatment of him makes him more withdrawn. There are many instances in which his painful, negative experiences cause him to vomit, to defecate in his pants, and to masturbate. The only happy period of his childhood is a short vacation the family spends at Dieppe, but even this respite is marred by his brush with death by drowning.

A poor student, he manages to be graduated from elementary school and begins searching all over Paris for employment. When he does find work, his employers take advantage of him. He is fired from his first position as a stockboy and from his second as a clerk for a jeweler, whose wife introduces him to passionate, animal sexuality and later falsely and deliberately accuses him of theft. Unable to hold a job, he is abused and chastised by his parents. This is a period of great anguish for him. Hoping to make something of him, his parents accept a loan from Uncle Edouard which enables them to send him to learn English at Meanwell College in England.

At the college, where Ferdinand spends eight months, he refuses to speak in French or English, associating only with the retarded Jongkind. Nevertheless, life at the college is better than at home, and though Ferdinand isolates himself, he does not find his life to be unpleasant. The college, run by a strict headmaster, Merrywin, is close to financial collapse. The headmaster’s wife, Nora, seduces Ferdinand, who is entranced by her beauty. A moral but sexually frustrated woman, she feels guilty about her infidelity with Ferdinand and commits suicide. Her suicide has a profound effect on Ferdinand and marks his passage from childhood into adolescence. The school fails soon after Nora’s suicide and Merrywin goes insane. Ferdinand returns to Paris, leaving behind a world that, only slightly more pleasant than his home, is portrayed through disgusting images of filth and nausea, passion and rage, despondency and defeat.

Back in Paris, Ferdinand tries unsuccessfully to find work. Constantly abused by his father, he eventually strikes him, almost causing his death. Thrown out of the house, he is rescued by Uncle Edouard, who introduces him to Courtial des Pereires, an eccentric inventor, editor, and philosopher. For the last half of the novel, Ferdinand’s life is dominated by Courtial. When they first meet, Courtial is editor of a popular magazine, Genitron, whose subscribers are themselves quixotic minor inventors. Courtial flees Paris when some of his subscriber-inventors who were cheated by him sack his office. He acquires a farm and, with his wife and Ferdinand at his side, tries his hand at novel agricultural and educational practices: He cultivates vegetables by passing electric shocks through the soil and runs a pension for underprivileged children who, exposed to both mental and manual activities, are expected to become model citizens. Both experiments fail: The vegetables rot away, the children are delinquents, and the neighboring farmers become antagonistic. With everything crumbling around him, Courtial commits suicide.

Ferdinand is once more left on his own. Distraught and discouraged, he once again is rescued by Uncle Edouard, who provides him with a home and tries to rally his spirit. He is grateful to his uncle, but he does not want to be a burden on him or on anyone else, including his parents, who have given up on him since his fight with his father. Now about seventeen, he decides to join the army, and the novel ends where Céline’s first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934) begins.

The Characters

Céline draws heavily on his own life in his portrait of Ferdinand. Despite the many similarities in their temperaments and experiences, however, it must be remembered that Death on the Installment Plan is a work of fiction; the distinction between author and protagonist must be maintained. As a doctor, the adult Ferdinand is cranky, disillusioned, and embittered. There is a mutual disgust between him and his patients and neighbors. He suffers from insomnia, paranoia, and frequent bouts of hallucinations and delirium, the consequence of a wartime wound, of malaria contracted in Africa, and of his traumatic, unhappy childhood. He is also a poet and storyteller, who is preparing a mock medieval romance, The Legend of King Krogold, a work that tells of violence and death but is romantic enough to offer him some measure of escape from his drab and dismal life. As a child, Ferdinand devises similar stories of King Krogold. King Krogold is a medieval warrior; he defeats his enemy, Gwendor the Magnificent, and indiscriminately wreaks havoc on Gwendor’s subjects.

Young Ferdinand is tough, resilient, and filled with curiosity and a lust for life. These qualities help him survive the jungle in which he finds himself. He defends and protects himself with an ingrained hostility. As a boy, he beats his dog, treating it the way his father treats him. As an adolescent, he almost kills his father in a fight. He defecates in his pants to defy his parents and repel them. They perceive him as a total failure, stupid and obnoxious, when in fact he is lonely and in desperate need of comfort and encouragement. Though stubborn, violent, and filthy, he elicits sympathy in the reader, which is augmented by an awareness of his sensitivity and creative imagination. The adult Ferdinand’s review of his life shows how, in many instances, the child is father of the man—though it is difficult to see how the slovenly, barely educated boy will evolve into a physician.

The other important and absorbing character in the novel—and the most important in young Ferdinand’s life—is Courtial des Pereires, the eccentric self-styled genius. Céline depicts him comically and sympathetically as a lovable rogue. Courtial is an idealist who, forced to live in a practical world, is not above using chicanery. He is Ferdinand’s mentor and Ferdinand is his willing disciple. Ferdinand recognizes that he is a clarlatan but is responsive to his infectious zest, ingenuity, and enthusiasm, his dislike of systems, and his striving after truth. While Ferdinand’s parents and friends belittle him, Courtial teaches him to believe in himself and makes him recognize and accept that the price of living is death.

The novel has a full gallery of rich secondary and minor characters, some significant in Céline’s scintillating portrayal of the protagonist’s development, others in his brilliant evocation of the life and times. Ferdinand’s parents are the most important figures in his early life. His father, ironically named Auguste, has little dignity. He wants to be a merchant navy officer but must settle for a post as an insurance clerk with no prospect of advancement. He perceives his son as a burden and is convinced that he will be a thief. Clemence, Ferdinand’s mother, spends her time eking out a living in her shop. Hers is a miserable life. Though her robust husband constantly rebukes her, she admires him and allows him to abuse her puny, unpromising son. She comes to realize that she has inadvertently nurtured her son’s hatred for his father. When Ferdinand leaves home because of the rift with his father, she blames herself. Guilty and depressed, she loses interest in life.

The two figures who exert a positive influence on Ferdinand are Grandmother Caroline and Uncle Edouard. Caroline is understanding, warm, and considerate. After her death, Uncle Edouard takes her place in Ferdinand’s life as the only positive familial influence. He is an optimistic, understanding man, a foil to Ferdinand’s father. Outside the family, Nora Merrywin is one of the more significant characters. She is a moral, affectionate woman. Ferdinand is enthralled by her beauty, perceiving her as a phantasmagoria. She represents a feminine warmth and beauty to which he never was and never again will be exposed.

Critical Context

Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Céline’s first two novels, are considered his most significant works and two of the greatest novels in any language. Critics are divided on which of the two is the more impressive, but they all agree that both have had a significant impact on the modern novel. Alain Robbe-Grillet has called Céline the greatest writer of the period between the wars and a major influence on le nouveau roman, the New Novel. Céline was admired by Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet as well. Several North American writers have been influenced by him, including William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Mordecai Richler, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When Death on the Installment Plan was first published, its obscene images, vulgar diction, and bleak picture of lower-class life in Paris evoked a hostile response from many reviewers. There were, however, several who recognized Céline’s novel as a work of genius. Céline was neglected after World War II because of his anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi stance during the war. Contemporary writers and critics, however, have come to see him as one of the few innovative writers of the twentieth century. In his first two novels, particularly Death on the Installment Plan, he forced readers to open their eyes to the darkest aspects of society. He gave currency to the telegraphic, elliptical style (les trois points) as a means of conveying his characters’ urgency and intensity of feelings, their emotional agitation, and their disturbed thought processes. He emphasized the effectiveness of everyday speech and slang (in his case, Parisian argot) in evoking the common life powerfully and authentically. He made the obscene poetic. He probed the subconscious, using the hallucinatory, delirious point of view. And he sought to free the novel from the traditional, linear, cause-and-effect narrative pattern by employing a loose, unconstrained, digressive, and rambling structure.

Bibliography

Flynn, James, ed. Understanding Céline, 1984.

Hanrez, Marc. Céline, 1961.

McCarthy, Patrick. Céline: A Critical Biography, 1975.

Nettlebeck, Colin W. “Journey to the End of Art: The Evolution of the Novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline,” in PMLA. LXXXVII (January, 1972),pp. 80-89.

O’Connell, David. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1976.

Solomon, Philip. “Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan: The Intoxication of Delirium,” in Yale French Studies. L (1974), pp. 191-203.

Thiher, Allen. Céline: The Novel as Delirium, 1972.

Woodcock, George. “Céline Revived,” in Tamarack Review. XLIV (1967), pp. 94-99.