What’s between penis and mathematics? (by L.F. Céline)

For his anti-Semitic pamphlets, the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline fell out of favour after World War II; he went into exile in Denmark, was convicted in absentia of collaborating with the Nazis, and was eventually pardoned. Nevertheless, his first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, published in 1932, remained hugely influential, and not only in French literature. It is a bitter, nihilistic work, with strong autobiographical overtones, written in a very expressive language, very close to popular speech and free of academic formalities. The protagonist, after deserting in the First World War, travels through French colonies in Africa, then North America, before finally returning to France. On his return, a former mentor of his, Serge Parapine, finds him a job in an insane asylum. In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline puts into the mouth of this Parapine one of the most mysterious sentences ever written about mathematics:

Between the penis and mathematics there is nothing! Nothing! The void!

One can only wonder whether Céline realised the profound significance of the empty set in modern mathematics. (Cantor’s Paradise).