by Victor Serge
When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Serge, his son Vlady and his lover Laurette Séjourné made their way on foot to Marseille, where they shared a villa with Varian Fry of the American anti-fascist Rescue Committee and the surrealist André Breton while waiting for visas and a ship to escape from Vichy France. Serge and his artist son Vlady eventually found their way, after various arrests en route, to exile in Mexico where Serge continued to agitate for ‘Socialism and Freedom’ (the name of the group he formed with exiled comrades from Spain, France, and Germany). Isolated, calumnied, and physically attacked by the Mexican Stalinists on orders from Moscow, he soon found the pages of Mexican publications closed to him.
In 1947, Serge died in poverty and obscurity at the untimely age of fifty-seven. His rugged constitution had been undermined by ten years of harsh imprisonment and the altitude in Mexico City was terrible for his heart. Among the last things he wrote were a letter to the far-left French journal, protesting the publication of an anti-Communist article by an American,28 and an essay called “30 Years after the Russian Revolution” (generally considered his ‘Political Testament’) once again vindicating the historical rightness of the 1917 Russian Revolution, however much it may have degenerated later. Despite this ‘deathbed evidence’ to the contrary, critics keep speculating that if Serge had lived, the lifelong revolutionary would have become a (posthumous!) pro-Western Cold Warrior.29
Be that as it may, Serge will be best remembered as the novelist who best incarnated the tragedy of the twentieth-century revolution movements that were his life. He died leaving three masterpieces in his desk drawer—considered unpublishable at the time—Memoirs of a Revolutionary and two novels, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years (the latter remaining unpublished until 1972). Serge’s comrades chipped in for a cheap funeral, only to find that his lack of nationality made it illegal to bury him in a Mexican cemetery! Eventually, they put him down as a citizen of the ‘Spanish Republic’—a nationality that, after Franco’s victory, no longer existed. Serge would have been pleased.
French novelist and leftist publisher François Maspero, who revived Serge’s books (all but forgotten in post-war France) during the rebellious ‘60s, remarks: “There exists a sort of secret international, perpetuating itself from one generation to the next, of admirers who read, reread [Serge’s] books and know a lot about him.” As Adam Hochschild notes in his foreword to Serge’s Memoirs, “It is rare when a writer inspires instant brotherhood among strangers.” As one of Serge’s translators, it has long been my pleasure (and revolutionary duty!) to welcome new readers into the ‘English-language section’ of this Invisible International.
Men in Prison as Literature
After such a spectacular career as an activist and historical witness, it is not altogether surprising that Serge-the-revolutionary has overshadowed Serge-the-novelist. Ever a maverick, Serge remains totally ignored in French academia, and his name does not even appear in voluminous dictionaries of French Literature. In any case, as a Belgian-born, Francophone Soviet-Russian writer, he falls through the cracks between academic literature departments. Moreover, along with the hostility of fellow-traveling critics, Serge’s standing as a novelist has suffered from the bourgeois prejudice (‘art for art’s sake’) against politics in literature, indeed against the very notion that a committed Marxist militant could also be a serious literary artist.30
On the other hand, back in 1968, when this translation of Men in Prison was first published, British and American book reviewers immediately recognized its value as literature:
It is a stream of exquisite and refined consciousness undergoing man’s most barbaric experience. Not even in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is there such a penetrating and disturbing account of what prison means to the body and soul. (John Riley, Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1968)
This novel, properly so called by its author, being truth worked up as art, is strongly recommended both as a document and as a powerful work of literature. (Robert Garioch, Listener, August 24, 1970)
[Serge] was one of those rare political activists who was also an artist, and his book is poetic and ironic, the account of a spiritual experience rather than a factual record…. Serge is almost unique (not quite—one remembers Dostoevsky and Koestler) in turning all this into art. (Julian Symons, London Sunday Times, July 19, 1970)
Novel or autobiography, the book is literature, for Serge was a wonderful writer. (New Yorker, March 1, 1970)
Serge [is] the model upon whom George Orwell fashioned himself in his descriptive essays and in Homage to Catalonia. … Serge is not merely a political writer; he is also a novelist, a wonderfully lyrical writer…. He is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not…. He does not tell us what we should feel; instead, he makes us feel it. (Stanley Reynolds, New Statesman, July 17, 1970)
Few other professional writers have ever endured the experience if prison’s living hell, among them Dostoyevsky, sentenced to four years at hard labor in 1849 for his participation in a liberal discussion circle, Oscar Wilde, persecuted for his sexual preference, and of course Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There is no doubt about the authenticity of Serge’s witness. But how, as a novelist working in the 1920s, did he raise it to literature in Men in Prison? His techniques are curiously modern.
To begin with, Men in Prison has is no ‘plot,’ no ‘hero’ in the conventional sense. Although the novel begins with ‘Arrest’ and ends with the narrator’s release, its internal structure deliberately undercuts this outer appearance of a kind of fictional ‘memoir’ through a process of abstraction, irony, and distanciation.
Despite the author’s “convenient use of the first person singular,” Serge’s ‘I’ is a slippery subject, which the postmodern reader will have no problem identifying as an ‘unreliable narrator.’ For example, the first chapter, “Arrest,” begins with a blanket affirmation: “All men who have truly know prison know …” followed by a series of generalizations in which the narrator’s ‘I’ alternates with the more general pronoun ‘one’ or the passive voice—interrupting the facile identification between the reader and the ‘narrator-hero’ to the point where we don’t really know who the latter is and why he is in jail. Indeed, under the heading ‘Arrest,’ Serge gives us not one, but three accounts of that ‘icy moment.’
Similarly, the second chapter, “The Lockup,” although logically and chronologically the next stage in the processing of all prisoners, opens with the same device of distancing by generalization: “A man imprisoned differs from man in general even in his outward appearance,” and continues: “He feels as if he has been stripped of part of himself, reduced to an impotence inconceivable an hour before.” The nameless prisoner’s effects are confiscated by anonymous “jailer’s hands— fat, hairy, soiled, accustomed to handling these cast-off objects. From now on, they are only Number 30’s ‘bundle.’” But who is ‘Number 30’? The gritty details (“fat, hairy, soiled,”) embed the reader in the physicality of the situation and satisfy her legitimate expectations for novelistic atmosphere, without inviting identification with the elusive narrator. These modernist stylistic devices, no doubt deliberate, reflect Serge’s literary project:
Individual existences—beginning with my own—are only of interest to me in relation to the vast collective life of which we are only parcels, more or less endowed with consciousness. Thus the form of the classic novel seemed impoverished and dated. The banal French novel in particular, with its dramas of love and ambition, centered at most around a family, seemed to me a model not to follow in any case. My first novel had no central character. It is not about me or about a few, but about men and about prison.31
Serge handles the problem of presenting general truths while satisfying our novelistic expectations by alternating ironic first-person meditations on topics like “Capital Punishment,” “The Guards,” and “Architecture,” with author omniscient chapters filled with character, dramatic and
stream of consciousness. For example, in one such scene, Serge enters the mind of a prisoner named Moure, interiorizing his crude and strangely poetic homoerotic obsessions, rather daring for 1929. As New Statesman book critic Stanley Reynolds remarked, “Here, too, I think, must be the original spring of Jean Genet. Consider the homosexual Moure, alone in his cell, dreaming of boy friends called Georgette, Lucienne and Antionette. Moure links the most brutally obscene, obscene to the point of cruelty, with love words and coquettish diminutives.”32
In 2013, political prisoner David Gilbert had another response to this passage: “I don’t think I can see the passage on Moure (who is also a sex offender and had sex with ‘corrupted adolescent[s]’) as affirming gay desire. The ‘unctuous’ Moure is introduced as the one who snitched on Duclos, a man of ‘integrity,’ who loved reading and did favors in violation of the rules, and got him sent to the hole. Then Moor got his job. Maybe I’m too much of a hardened con, but I can’t see a snitch as a positive figure.” Gilbert concludes that Serge, although a man of universal sympathies, was to an extent a captive of the homophobic prejudices of his times.
Serge’s strategy of alternating such narrative scenes with extended generalizing meditations, also serves to slow down the pacing of his novel. This alternation gives the reader the impression of the slow passage of time—time being of the essence in a story about ‘doing time’ in a place where essentially nothing is allowed to happen to mark time’s progress. After each intellectual flight, we land right back in the daily brutalizing regime of prison, where time has stood still—perhaps for a day, perhaps for a year.
When embedded more directly in the narrative, Serge’s ironic and generalizing ‘digressions’ provoke a proto-Brechtian ‘distancing’ or alienation effect. For example as the narrator is being led up a stone spiral staircase to be fingerprinted, he suddenly realizes that he is inside the tower of Paris’s medieval Conciergerie and ironically remarks, “They used to question suspects on the rack in the cellars of this very tower. Today they apply Bertillon’s scientific fingerprinting upstairs. This is the stairway of progress.” Much of Foucault could be deduced from a thorough unpacking of this ironic definition of progress.
Although Serge’s narrator tells us nothing about his history, personal life and relations outside the prison, he does allow us into his spiritual world. He recounts the struggle to maintain his spirit, symbolized by the “crystal sphere” (sphère de cristal) of the philosopher Taine and the “Azure!” of the poet Mallarmé. It is a constant struggle against the encroachment of madness and obsession, symbolized by “le cafard” (the cockroach, French slang for depression). “The image fits. The ugly black bug zigzags around under the vault of your skull” (p.48).
Serge’s narrator also evokes the religious retreats of earlier times. There are meditations on the joys provoked by the sight of a patch of color, by the passage of a thin ray of sunlight across the ceiling of a cell. There is the fierce ironic joy of the narrator, who as a prisoner is forbidden to know any news of the Great War taking place on the Marne, when he hears the German bombardments approach his prison and reads the panic in the face of the guards as the old world crumbles about their ears.
Yet for Serge’s narrator, (as for Stendhal’s heroes Fabrice and Julien) imprisonment is also a privileged situation. The world may be crumbling, but the insane prison-machine grinds implacably on as if nothing had changed. The guards themselves are trembling, for the German advance on the Marne has come almost within artillery range of the prison. But the deadly routine must continue. Serge’s narrator derives a fierce satisfaction from the idea that his prison—that microcosm of a brutal society—may soon be destroyed by the cannon, the ultimate symbol of that society in its most inhuman, and therefore most natural, incarnation. Far from sharing his captors’ terror, he experiences an apocalyptic sense of release, a savage joy:
Our church steeple seemed to us a perfect landmark for artillery. Poule, [an inmate] asked me, terrified: “Do you really think they’ll shell us?” “Naturally,” I replied. I lived alone, feeling the fear spread from one man to the next. I felt a sort of exaltation which gave birth to a great serenity. The old world was being smashed by the cannon. The Mill would be crushed by the cannon. The law of kill-and-be-killed- was reaffirmed for my generation … There was profound joy in thinking about this resurrection of the world through the cannon, which had at last interrupted our round …
We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war; but, though we read nothing and could only glimpse, through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity, the general outline of events, some few of us were blessed with exceptional clear-sightedness. I knew enough about the inner decay of the Russian Empire to foresee, at a time when the Cossacks still incarnated the hope of several old Western countries, its inevitable fall. Long before Europe ever dreamt it, we were discussing, in whispers, the coming Russian Revolution. We knew in what part of the globe the long-awaited flame would be born. And in it we found a new reason for living …
The bell gave the signal for lights out. Squadrons of airplanes flew over the prison on the way to Paris. The sky was golden.
The tone is at once ironical, lyrical, apocalyptic. The bitter irony of being “privileged” through loss of liberty, of being forbidden to know war; the paradox of feeling joy and serenity in the face of catastrophe, the lyricism of the final image of bombers against a golden sky. And yet politics informs and organizes this vision of the totality of a world organized for repression and finding its ultimate expression (and its own negation) in the brutalities of prison and war. Without this savage irony there would be no exaltation, no apocalyptic vision. And the image of the Russian Revolution, that dim candle flickering at the end of a long, dark corridor, evokes the ironic theme of the whole passage, indeed of the whole novel: victory-in-defeat.33 As literature, it is a powerful and compelling vision; as politics, a kind of poetic equivalent of Lenin’s 1917 “revolutionary defeatism.”
Men in Prison Today
As David Gilbert’s foreword indicates, inmates in times and places far from Serge’s own context continue to appreciate Men in Prison. As an inmate in a Minnesota prison wrote in 1970: “My prison is separated from Victor Serge’s by half a century, half a continent and an ocean and yet we have shared the same experience … Nothing changes. Absolutely nothing changes.”34 Indeed, if anything, things have gotten worse as the number of human beings in captivity has increased incrementally, resulting in overcrowding, increased brutality, and deteriorating conditions.
The construction and populating of prisons is apparently dying capitalism’s answer to massive youth unemployment, and Serge would certainly have seen today’s so-called war on drugs as a war against the poor. Nearly half of America’s two million prisoners are ‘guilty’ of non-violent crimes, mostly low-level marijuana and coke dealing—the principal occupations open to Black and immigrant youth, nearly half of whom have ‘done time’ by age thirty-five. The United States, once a model of liberal democracy, has now surpassed Russia and China in percentage of its population behind bars, with about two million men and women trapped in the criminal justice system. Mandatory long-term sentences, which Serge correctly termed ‘slow death sentences,’ have created a whole population of wheelchair-ridden inmates, while undocumented immigrants and small children are increasingly being confined under unnecessarily brutal prison-like conditions.
Indeed, privatized prisons have become vastly profitable, and the building of new high-tech maximum-security and ‘supermax’ prisons where inmates are kept in solitary twenty-three hours a day and allowed zero contact with other prisoners, is one of the few remaining growth industries. If history is likely to remember the twentieth century for Hitler’s Auschwitz and Stalin’s Gulag, the young twenty-first is already marked by Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the U.S. ‘supermax’ penitentiaries on which they were modeled.35
As Serge wrote in his Memoirs: “The fact that nobody in more
than a century has considered the problem of criminality and prisons; the fact that since Victor Hugo, nobody has really raised the issue reveals the power of inertia in our society. This machine whose function is to turn out felons and human refuse is expensive without fulfilling any useful purpose.” Serge said it all eighty years ago: “Modern prisons are imperfectible. Being perfect, there is nothing left to do but destroy them.”
I ended my original 1968 introduction to this translation of Men in Prison with the sentence: “If this book doesn’t make you angry, nothing will.” I was twenty-eight and fresh from the barricades of the Columbia University student strike. A New York Times critic archly described my introduction as “somewhat overwrought.” Meanwhile, prisons have grown exponentially, conditions worsened drastically, and I have waxed ever more overwrought. The recent prolonged hunger strikes at Guantá
Meanwhile, as the saying goes, “If you’re not overwrought, you’re not paying attention.”
Richard Greeman
November 2013
1 See Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1905–1941, the first complete English translation of which was published in 2012 by NYRB Classics, with a translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick, a foreword by Adam Hochschild, and a glossary by Richard Greeman.
2 De Boe and Serge were reunited in Brussels in 1936, when Serge was freed by the Russians. De Boe was by then a respected leader in the printers’ union.
3 Curiously, the only serious, reliable, and politically astute book on the gang was written by an Englishman, Richard Parry. Malcolm Menzies has written an excellent novel about the tragedy, En Exil chez les hommes, which sticks close to the facts and brings to life the characters and atmosphere.
4 For Serge’s articles as Le Rétif, see Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938 (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).
5 Bonnot and Garnier, the two most hardened killers in the gang, each sent an open letter to the press and police proclaiming Dieudonné’s innocence, then fought it out to the death, surrounded by police and army units. At the trial, Raymond pretended to have nothing to do with the robbers and so waited until after the verdict—when it was too late—to shout out Dieudonné’s innocence. The bandit’s ‘innocence’ pleas contrasted with the 1905 trial of the anarchist burglar Marius Jacob, who proudly admitted: “I have burned down several townhouses, defended my freedom against the aggression of the agents of power. I am a rebel, living off the product of his thefts … I beg no indulgence from those I hate and scorn,” and reportedly “took over the trial,” expounding his anarchist principles.
