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PARTISAN REVIEW
nearly so much as its communication of the spiritual weariness, the
waning imaginative power of a nation, a civilization at the end of its
historic role--from which Serge and his novel, as all the rest of us, are
not exempt. The book becomes a typical expression of an age gone
by and a generation destroyed, and as such has inevitable pathos and
even some nobility, whatever dissatisfaction it may arouse when consid–
ered as a novel.
One suspects that the experiences which Serge seeks to order in his
novel are still too recent and chaotic, still too traumatic to our sensibility
to admit of successful use in a novel. Too much has been seen and
heard; too much endured and suffered; the eyes which saw are weary
and the people who suffered are drained; and the books which have
come from them are largely uncontrolled responses to events unassimi–
lated by the generations which fell victim. For a novel demands a
thoroughly felt-out and densely developed structure of the imagination–
one which is unique rather than merely representational. Serge's novel,
however, is the product of a political
will,
the need to respond to a social
cataclysm by graphic representation; but graphic representation is central
not to fiction but to journalism. And that is why one feels while reading
The Long Dusk
that the materials, the potential characters, the neces–
sary attitudes which one would wish in a novel of the recent European
events, are present; but the imaginative integration and the time-granted
historical perspective to give these elements fictional status are not.
Politically, the novel is in the tradition of Jacobin
Schwiirmerei,
the indiscriminate camaraderie which gripped France for a few moments
after Paris fell. The lyrical sense of fatality which pervades the novel
is not dispelled by the revolutionary optimism of its central character,
Ardatov, a Russian exile for whom, by way of compensation, the revolu–
tion has become a sort of timeless poetry without intimate relationship
to suffering men. This heavy atmosphere of finality makes uninfectious
the revolutionary fervor which Serge occasionally tries to summon, even
if we are most eager to succumb to it. One's strongest reactions are
evoked by an excellent and terrifying portrait of a GPU agent, which
indicates the extent to which totalitarian automatism has gripped modern
politics.
It is doubtful if any but the very greatest creative imagination could
successfully integrate the materials Serge has seized. And that Serge is
not, of course. Yet, even when one feels the perception of the novel to be
stale and its organization by the imagination to be wanting, one responds
sympathetically. That a man like Serge should even wish to express
himself in a novel seems cause for gratitude. It is an indication that he,
unlike so many of the now sharply dichotomized political activists and
literary intellectuals, does not assent to the.divorce of political life from
literature and its practice. Nor can the inadequacies of the novel
be
