Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2024

The publication of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s debut novel Voyage au bout de la nuit in October 1932 caused a shock, both in France and abroad. Journalists and critics were confronted with a book that broke with literary and linguistic conventions, and provoked the bourgeois order through a fundamental and uneasy nihilism. This article explores the reception of Céline’s first novel in the French and Dutch press between October 1932 and the end of 1934 on the basis of four themes that dominated the reception: the literary genre to which the book was assigned; the vision of life and the social criticism expressed in the novel; the style; and the worldview of the book and its author. Additionally, the reception in both countries is literary-historically contextualized. What characterized the climate in which this novel appeared? Which aspects of the two literary fields can be made visible through research on the reception of this controversial novel?

In the first decade of the twentieth century two Flemish authors visited Paris. The Catholic, lower middle class, countryside-based and unexperienced traveler Stijn Streuvels did so in 1903, the liberal, urban, well-traveled son of a wealthy industrial Cyriel Buysse in 1910. In this contribution the travelogues they published are analyzed and compared by making use of notions and insights from tourism studies: the tourist gaze on the one hand, and identity politics informed by the opposition between travelers and tourists on the other. The comparison between the two authors makes clear that their travelogues share several characteristics: they both embrace the identity of the traveler in various ways and their authenticity-seeking tourist gazes are similar. There is, however, a clear difference between them as well, more specifically in their evaluation of the act of traveling itself, which can be connected to the very different backgrounds of these writers. To Buysse and his class going abroad is something evident, whereas Streuvels extensively needs to legitimize his trip. Nevertheless, there are signs that Streuvels aspires Buysse’s position and that his case forebodes the drastic changes in traveling behaviour of the interwar period.