Voyage au bout de la blessure — a traumatic re-reading of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night

Abstract

The conceptualisation of traumatic experiences has been subjected to controversial opinions from the first systematic medical explorations in the 1860s to the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed.) in 1980. Although trauma emerged as a psychopathological concept, throughout the years it increasingly acquired political, social and moral significance, considerably influenced by the historical events of the twentieth century. After the formal medical recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder, the notion of trauma permeated into a variety of fields and discourses, including the humanities and the social sciences. The psychiatric normalisation of trauma, in conjunction with the human necessity to communicate the vehemence of dreadful experiences, laid the cornerstone for an interdisciplinary debate that sought to investigate the ethical, cultural and linguistic implications of trauma in contemporary society. In recent years, the trauma paradigm has progressively garnered academic interest, thus becoming a prominent interpretative category in cultural and literary criticism. This thesis aims to explore the social, political and historical context that favoured the conceptualisation of trauma as a psychoanalytic, cultural and literary paradigm, furthermore addressing the literary symptoms of trauma in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night.