The Long Voyage by Jorge Semprun

First published:Le Grand Voyage, 1963 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: From 1936 to 1945

Locale: A train carrying prisoners across France to a German concentration camp; the French countryside; and the camp itself

Principal Character:

• Manuel (Gérard), the narrator, a twenty-year-old Spanish exile, now a philosophy student working for the Maquis

The Novel

The opening of The Long Voyage compels total attention, as the narrator begins speaking about a nightmare journey in progress. From his first words, “There is the cramming of the bodies into the boxcar, the throbbing pain in the right knee. The days, the nights. I force myself and try to count the days, to count the nights,” a mood of extraordinary psychological intensity is set. The narrator—his name, background, personality, and occupation a mystery—reports that he is confined among 120 men “stacked in on top of one another” in a freight car moving across occupied France in 1943. It is apparent from his description and the terse tone of his speech that the conditions of physical stress and psychological horror which he is experiencing will require an exceptional effort of mind and body for survival. At first, the details that he presents force the reader to concentrate on the purely physical demands of the situation; then, as the narrator begins to demonstrate the ways in which he uses the powers of his mind and imagination to combat these pressures, it becomes apparent that even the strongest body will not have sufficient strength without a complementary mental fitness. In a further widening of scope, the narrator employs associative images from the unfolding present, the long inland voyage of the title, to provide connections to the past and projections into the future beyond the completion of the journey.

During the five days that the German prison train carrying members of the Maquis (the legendary French underground) moves toward its destination, the narrator, a so-called Spanish Red who has fled from the Basque country into exile in France, describes his life in the Resistance, his capture and transportation to the camp, some fragments about his existence in the camp, his reflections upon his liberation at the end of the war, and his reasons for waiting sixteen years to write about his experiences. The surging core of the narrative is the journey, so intense and desperate, so completely absorbing, that sporadic relief is necessary for the reader as well as for the narrator. Consequently, like a motif in a musical composition that recurs as a point of departure and return, the dreadful trip continues, interrupted strategically by related episodes that progressively reveal more about the narrator and his life.

Driven from his home in Barcelona when he was thirteen years old by Francisco Franco’s Fascist forces, the narrator, Manuel (who is known to his colleagues by his nom de guerre, Gérard), was studying philosophy in France when that country was conquered by the Germans. Choosing to become a member of the Resistance, he was active in partisan operations until betrayal led to his capture. He begins the journey to the concentration camp in Weimar with the same attitude with which he approaches every new situation. He has consciously trained himself, in accordance with his vocation as a scholar-philosopher, to attune very closely the responses of his mind to any occurrence. He has already prepared a basic series of precepts and principles for any course of action. In addition, although he seems very focused on the self, he maintains a sympathetic curiosity about his colleagues’ behavior and is prepared to work with them for the welfare of all. These characteristics serve him well in the chaos of the boxcar, in which survival depends on attention to detail (where one stands, how one drinks, whom one trusts), and Manuel, although only twenty years old, has had considerable experience with conditions demanding rapid action, physical endurance, and quick wit.

As the voyage continues, Manuel is reminded of incidents in his life previous to his capture. His commitment to freedom is shown in its formative stages as he enthusiastically tests his ideas against those of his fellow students; then his faith is given actuality in the emerging practical strength that enables him to maintain his sanity while other men crumble. His belief that he fights not as a “patriot” but to maintain his (and the world’s) essential humanity is tested by the bestial acts of the SS but is reinforced by contact with German conscripts. The understated heroism of his colleagues in the Maquis lives in his mind as an inspiration, but each individual death is a unique, surprising, and unsettling experience, sometimes so bizarre that a kind of gallows humor must be used to alleviate his rage at the Nazis, which might further threaten any rational action.

On the fourth night of the voyage, the story unfolds into the future, as Manuel introduces events following the war, which, as they occur, lead him back to the trip itself. The entire sequence of events following his liberation in April, 1945, is an example of the disjunction of differing perceptions. He cannot share in the banter of the liberating soldiers, nor can he adjust to the “normal” routine of official procedures. He carries his awareness of the camp with him into the world; he remains distant (thus, paradoxically, more attractive) when his mates are flirting with women; he has become intensely interested in others on the “inside,” especially the Jews who have known suffering beyond his own. This interlude, even though it is rife with uncertainty, is nevertheless a relief from the trip, which becomes more harrowing with each digression.

As the men are tested with increasing severity, the interludes become less a leavening of tension and more a complement to it, changing its magnitude, but not its awful persistence. During this period, instead of imagining a positive existence to counterbalance the present, Manuel, in writing about it, makes the trip somewhat more bearable by juxtaposing its worst moments to even more terrible visions of evil. The story of the arrival and subsequent slaughter of a group of Jewish children and the story of the disappearance of his friend Hans (a German Jew known as “Phillipe”) are attempts to confront the worst obscenity with its only antidote, the most unusual and purest heroism. The journey moves to its conclusion with the death of “the guy from Semur,” Manuel’s soul mate for the five days which have become a lifetime. The last moments of the trip are described while a rush of imagery streams through the narrator’s mind, the focus narrowed again to the physical trial of the men now at or beyond the limits of sanity, at the threshold of death.

Although the voyage is concluded, the novel continues in a brief second book, almost a coda, in which the narrative perspective shifts to the third person, gradually increasing the distance that the narrator maintains from the experience and placing the story into the context of history. As Manuel enters the camp where he will spend the remainder of the war, his thoughts turn to his greatest fear and his most significant motivation to survive and record his exploits: “Gérard tries to engrave all this in his memory, meanwhile vaguely thinking that it is well within the realm of possibility that the impending death of all the spectators may efface forever the memory of this spectacle.” As “the certainty of this idea takes hold of him,” his resolve to persevere, after the horror of the long voyage, is very strong. The thought that he is about to “leave the world of the living” pulses like a throbbing image of the monstrous reality he must face. The novel itself is his testament to the effects of the awful experience and the possibilities of enduring to continue the fight against Fascism.

The Characters

Not only is Manuel the one character of any dimension in the book; it is actually his mind that is the novel’s focal point, the novel’s primary character. Some of the other people whom Manuel meets are momentarily striking in his description of them (particularly the man he rides literally pressed against for the entire train trip, called “the guy from Semur”), but none of them has any real existence beyond those moments when that person is in the narrator’s presence. These characters are not reduced to caricature or type—Jorge Semprun is particularly adept at capturing character with a short remark and at suggesting complex psychological dimensions in a brief conversation—but their primary function is to reflect or react to Manuel’s mood. Manuel’s mental processes are so important because Semprun has written The Long Voyage to demonstrate that the mind is the source of a person’s strength and to show that the inner working of a person’s mind is the best way to know his spirit and soul.

Semprun believes that integrity of character comes from clarity of thought and openness to the challenge of contradictory ideas. His commitment to the absolute freedom of expression stems from his hatred of the enclosures that any totalitarian system places over the minds of its subjects. Manuel is a warrior whose weapon is his mental agility, which permits him to act effectively in situations that present no easy solution and to endure situations in which effective action is not possible.

Manuel’s derision for SS methodology is separate from his hatred for their butchery. He sees the SS as the ultimate expression of a state that cannot adjust to spontaneity and that hates and fears the unexpected and the uncontrollable—precisely those qualities of life which Manuel regards as essential to the democratic society he defends. Manuel’s refusal to hate Germans is part of his struggle to see people as individuals, not as abstractions, and to forge a world in which a man’s existence is determined by an inner sense of continuing discovery.

Manuel’s ability to dissociate himself temporarily from unpleasant surroundings and to live in a created realm enables him to handle stress well, and his facility for reconstructing the sensory impact of a vital, life-enhancing scene supports him by revivifying the best elements of the life that he is struggling to preserve. The closing pages of the novel, written in the form of an extended paragraph to evoke the rush of sensations in his mind as the long journey concludes, are like a final fusion of mental assessment and physical reaction. The simultaneous assimilation of data and expression of intent affirms Manuel’s methods and the possibility of his survival. Much too intelligent and experienced to have any illusions of romantic heroism, Manuel is an archetype of the existential hero made popular by Albert Camus—a hard man in a hard world whose heart and soul are still humanity’s best hope.

Critical Context

Jorge Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, has committed his life and his art to the building of a world in which such atrocities can never happen again. The Long Voyage belongs with the works of such writers as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel as a record of what the Holocaust was actually like, and as an account of the effect of that terrible moment in history on the minds and souls of those who lived through it. In collaboration with Alain Resnais, Semprun wrote the screenplay for La Guerre est finie (1966) a film which shows a man returning to Spain to continue the struggle against Franco; Semprun also helped Constantin Costa-Gavras to adapt the novel Z (1966; English translation, 1968) into the film of the same title which was released in 1969. Under the pseudonym Federico Sanchez, he published Autobiografia de Federico Sanchez (1978; The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez, 1979), a history of the Communist underground in Spain, which continues to demonstrate that a man of the Left in Europe can also be, like George Orwell, against all forms of totalitarianism.

Bibliography

Boyers, Robert. “The Voyage of Jorge Semprun,” in Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, 1985.

Butor, Michel. Passing Time, 1960.

Genies, Bernard. “L’Experience de J. Semprun a Buchenwald,” in La Quinzaine Litteraire. CCCXXI (March, 1980), pp. 24-25.

Schmigalle, Gunther. “Jorge Semprun’s Kritik des Kommunismes,” in Iberoamerica. XII (1984), pp. 3-21.

Sinnegen, J. Narrative and Ideology, 1982.