La subversión del discurso científico en Voyage au bout de la nuit, de Louis-Ferdinand Céline

This paper analyses the underlying interdiscoursive structure of Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) by Louis Ferdinand Destouches, ‘Céline’. This structure consists of a series of parodic ‘loans’ from all kinds of social and cultural discourses. This specific arrangement is typical of the picaresque novel and consequently, the methods used to study this type of works can also be applied in the analysis of Voyage au Bout de la nuit. The discourse of the medical sciences (especially the psychiatric discourse of the Great War) is one of the most prominent parodic discourses in this novel. Our aim is to develop a ‘discourse archeology’ using reading materials from the Great War in order to establish the boundaries in which the parodic interplay of similarities and differences takes place.