COMMITMENTLESS AGE
a review
---
Todd Dills

The Russians might not exactly occupy the heights of cool on the literary stage in the American mind today, but I know of few texts that might serve our current cultural moment better than Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, out this year in English translation for the first time. The novel, written in Serge's final years in Mexico (1945-'46 -- Serge's heart gave out at the age of 56 in '47), interrogates the problem of individual consciousness in a post-historical age, in which the human sense of acting, living, as part of the flow of something greater than self-preservation is obliterated. The pull for us is both in the before and the after, the full example of Serge's tale as a dramatization of the individual consciousness in flux.

Serge, oft-described as a "precocious anarchist firebrand," was born to Russian anti-czarist ex-pats in Belgium in the last decade of the 19th century and came of age as a writer during the flourishing of Russian modernity during the culturally free period of the 1920s. But where the figures cut by his contemporaries Blok and, to a greater extent, Mayakovksy, among others, were as the new establishment in Russian letters, Serge remained in large part on the fringe. After Stalin's purge of his enemies among the new Russian intelligentsia, which Serge famously dramatized in part in the novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, he lived in France and, finally, in Mexico. During his life and shortly thereafter, he was well-known not as a literary writer so much as a political historian, whose commitment to communist internationalism presaged the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s. But his literary work is underappreciated for its basic literary qualities, as well as the story it has to tell about both style and politics.

Unforgiving Years is a politically-minded link between the moderns and postmoderns. Told in four stylistically daring parts -- the first in Paris with Comintern agent D just before World War II breaks out and he goes into hiding, the second following D's former colleague and lover Daria through Kazakhstan and back to Russia as she works as an agent of the party in wartime, the third in destroyed Germany as the Allies advance on a small town, and the fourth back with D and Daria reunited in Mexico, exiled and paranoid for ultimately good reason. Serge at times takes the hard-boiled approach to psychological narrative of Joyce's Ulysses, while at other points taking the ultimately more reader-friendly approach to the mind of free-indirect discourse as, for example, D riffs on certain of the book's primary themes in the first section while contemplating his imminent flight from his superiors: "...since the structure of the atom is probably the only problem left in the universe and they will solve it; then the age of despair will begin. Such mental exercises calmed him but failed to relax him. There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world … lurching from one cataclysm to the next."

This sort of mixed literary diction presages writers like Thomas Pynchon, Malcolm Lowry and others coming along in the English and American traditions in the decade following the book's writing, and Serge is every bit as dynamic as those writers as well. While the scattering of plot lines over the fourth section is a little confusing, the multiplicity of assumed identities taken on by the agents provocateur at the book's heart give the confusion full literary import, particularly in the section set in Germany, where Daria plies a battlefield nurse's trade under an assumed name and D's former fellow agent in France tries to find his way out of Germany and back to Paris. Unforgiving Years holds a fascinating window into a time when, for troopers of the left, history and the commitment to acting within it was ceasing to exist as a viable option to get one through the days. As D establishes a rural plantation in Mexico (seen in the last section) and Daria, fleeing the coming post-war purge from within the Soviet ranks, makes her way to join him, both have ample time to contemplate the proper place for their commitment in the new world.

It's clear that Serge, writing the book in Mexico just before he died, just after the mass destruction that was World War II, was contemplating much the same. His death leaves the question open, as does the book: D's and Daria's past rushes in to silence all possibility of answer: in the face of the atomization, the compartmentalization of the individual, in the face of death, what human consciousness wants or needs to attach meaning to is irrelevant, after all. As Daria thinks upon arriving in America on her way to Mexico in that last section: "This giant civilization, these vertical cities where the pedestrian feels insignificant, sees himself numberless, suddenly realizes that the real world is his and that nothing is his since he himself is nothing… An atom is all and nothing in the universe; these crowds, so well dressed, so busy, so cheerful, so callous… Atoms are unaware of themselves and unaware of each other, even in the densest steel."

071208

Todd Dills is the editor and publisher of THE2NDHAND, which brings you this neat sort of "editor's corner" or "letter from the..." or what have you, winged mightily by Mr. Dills -- who most certainly loves you, and love being the product of communication, maybe... -- and launched every other week, we hope, for your reading pleasure. E-mail Dills at will by clicking on that word, yes, back there. He loves to hear from you: e-mail.

Books by Todd Dills:
***Sons of the Rapture, a novel, Featherproof Books, 2006. Order via the publisher or via Amazon.
***In Chicago Noir, the third in Akashic Books' acclaimed series of noir anthologies, Dills's "Arcadia" is featured.
***ALL HANDS ON: A THE2NDHAND READER
edited by Todd Dills
w/ an Introduction by Jim Munroe
$12

Or buy now using any major credit card via PayPal (allow a few weeks for delivery):

PAST WING & FLY:
*NOVEL WRITING IN DISGUISE: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN PRETNAR
*THE PASSION OF LARRY LANGFORD
*CONDO LITIGATION: BOURGEOIS SUFFERING: An interview with Doug Milam
*PARLIAMENT HOUSE IMPLOSION
*MEMORIAL, TWO
*THIS IS LIT: BEST OF 2006
*MEMORIAL
*WEEK OF HANKS
*CITY MAN
*STENCIL PIRATES
*FUCK ME
*HARVEY WASSERMAN AND THE STOLEN ELECTION
*DAVE ZIRIN'S EDGE OF SPORTS
*RIVERBEND
*TOTH
*WHALE
*X
*Z
*SMOKE
*NEXIUM
*EUREKA
*MENO
*HAMMOND
*PILSEN
*CANADA
*DAYTONA
*WESTERN AVENUE
*ZOO