am not sanguine enough to hope that my readers will be as numerous as those who have heard me. But I prefer to reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused.75
Goldman was not alone in this conception of the possibilities of writing. A writer for Barcelona’s Tierra Libre, for example, argues that anarchist newspapers are “the strongest, most universal, most effective action for propaganda” precisely because of this “intimate” quality:
The printed word works more and better within the consciousness of the individual; it suggests his own thoughts to him, intimate commentaries that increase the value of the concepts he reads about, and in this periodic conversation between him and the printed page, expanded concepts and new horizons emerge. The suggestion exerted by the press goes so far as to overcome the reader’s indifference or prejudice; then sooner or later, the newspaper becomes his inseparable companion, whom he soon presents to his friends of the workshop, the factory, or the soil, and with whom he identifies like the flesh of his flesh.76
It is important to note the difference, here, between these aspirations and those of, say, Lenin’s conception of vanguard leadership. While Lenin, too, speaks of the desirability of the revolutionary leaders and the led “becom[ing] intimate,” it is only this leadership that occupies the epistemological high ground of “correct revolutionary theory”;77 in effect, it stands out over against the proletariat, surveying it as if from above and outside. The masses cannot see themselves accurately (at best, they can achieve “trade-union consciousness”); they do not possess theoretical truth.78 Like empty vessels waiting to be filled, they must receive this theory from the vanguard. By contrast, the desire to suggest the reader’s own thoughts, to constitute an “intimate commentary,” is a desire not to instruct, to direct, to lead from above, but to form an internal bond. To read, on this account, is, as Daniel Colson puts it, a matter of writers and readers “establishing relations from the interior of that which constitutes them,” of “finding oneself in the other and finding the other within oneself as already there.”79
This appeal to the “intimate,” to a kind of identification and active partnership with the reader, is, according to Caroline Granier, precisely what the variety of novels written by anarchists have in common: they “try to establish a particular relationship with the reader, a relation that is not founded on authority.”80 Goldman’s hope for this non-authoritarian, personal relationship with the reader is great enough to override her fear that her written words, too, will be misunderstood, that they will not penetrate the veil of received ideas and prejudices mediating between the reader and the page. She is all too aware of the “disheartening tendency common among readers … to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality.” Specifically, she anticipates that she will be vilified both by socialists and by communist anarchists for excoriating, in the essay “Minorities versus Majorities,” the alleged passivity and conformity of the “mass,” endorsing instead the heroic individualism of Nietzsche and Stirner. The popular perception of these thinkers as antisocial elitists, which she regards as the work of “shallow interpreters,” obscures the “social possibilities” she takes to be implicit within their individualism. “No doubt,” she laments, despite these efforts to forestall or blunt these misreadings—efforts that were, as she foresaw, not entirely successful81—“I shall be excommunicated as an enemy of the people”; nonetheless, she is determined to stake her wager on the power of writing: “For the rest, my book must speak for itself.”82 As for this book, it will attempt not only to demonstrate that a written anarchist literature exists, but to treat its supposed paradoxes or impossibilities as questions to be investigated.
In his famous study, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor divorces the modern fiction of Maupassant, Hemingway, and Joyce from its folkloric antecedent, the oral tale. Where the folktale was told in the presence of hearers with a shared experience, within a community,
Almost from its beginnings the short story, like the novel, abandoned the devices of a public art in which the storyteller assumed the mass assent of an audience to his wildest improvisations—“and a queer thing happened him late one night.” It began, and continues to function, as a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader.
To both of these images of reading—“public” or “private,” “mass” or “solitary”—we could contrast another: that of the workers in a cigar factory, say, in Florida, Puerto Rico, or Cuba, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, listening to el lector—or, in some cases, la lectora—reading aloud from a raised platform called la tribuna. The selection—on the previous shift, a novel by Zola in Spanish translation; on this shift, a selection from Elisée Reclus’s scientific tract, the Nueva Geografia Universal; next time, the new edition of the anarchist newspaper La Voz del Esclavo—has been made, after deliberation, by a vote of the workers on the shop floor; they have chipped in perhaps a quarter each to pay for this performance, which is indeed something of a dramatic act (it is no easy thing to project one’s voice with enough amplitude to carry over the noise of three hundred workers in a single room, and it demands a certain stage presence).83 Is this a form of mass entertainment? A project of collective self-improvement? Propaganda? Popular education? It is all of the above; and it is simultaneously oral and literate, communal and modern.
One of these lectores, Luisa Capetillo (1879–1922), who became an important anarchist labor organizer and propagandist for women’s equality, author of numerous essays and manifestos, also wrote poems and plays. Her three-act drama, La Influencia de las Ideas Modernas (1907), in fact, opens on a scene of reading: a young woman, Angelina, daughter of the patrón, Don Juan, is reading Tolstoy’s The Slavery of Our Times. At the beginning of the second act, Don Juan nervously observes her reading Zola’s Fecundity (“I already read Truth,” she tells him), and a few scenes later, he has been converted by her to Tolstoy’s gospel: “Yes, now I see that you have won me over,” he sighs, giving in to the strikers’ demands. Her friends Ernestina and Marieta are tougher to reach, as their devout mother only lets them read Christian tracts; “Don’t either of you read Malato or Kropotkin or Zola?” Angelina hectors them. “Do not buy finery or jewels, because books are worth more than they are,” she admonishes them, quoting from one of her books; “Adorn your understanding with their precious ideas, because there is no luxury that dazzles like the luxury of science.”84 Even if Capetillo, a dabbler in spiritism, has more optimism about the efficacy of reading than do her more materialist comrades, her fervor for reading, the urgency she lends to practices of self-education, are unmistakably anarchist traits. And if Javier Navarro Navarro is right, this faith was not entirely misplaced: a highly typical “life trajectory” for anarchists did begin with “a fellow worker, a relative, or an acquaintance lend[ing] a book, pamphlet, newspaper or magazine to a child or adolescent.”85 A recent study suggests that more continue to arrive at anarchism via the written word—albeit now often in electronic form—than orally (e.g., via social contacts or song lyrics). A surprisingly typical response: “Emma Goldman set me on fire.”86
Anarchists don’t regard ideas as pale reflections of material life; “the idea,” for Paul Brousse (1844–1912), can and should go “in flesh and blood.”87 Sometimes this is put into practice rather literally by anarchist authors such as Alberto Ghiraldo (1875–1946), José de Maturana (1884–1917) and Florencio Sánchez (1875–1910), who would actually go to read their own works aloud to worker audiences.88 At other times, the embodiment of ideas takes on an inward dimension: Alexander Berkman wrote rapturously of imaginings in which, “in transports of ecstasy, we kissed the image of the Social Revolution,” and Emma Goldman spoke of “my Ideal” as her “one Great Love.”89 Daniel Colson clarifies: “The anarchist Idea … is neither an ideal, nor a utopia, nor an abstraction; neither a program, nor a catalogue of regulations or prohibitions”; rather, “it is a living force … which, under certain circumstances, takes us outside of ourselves.”90 Accordingly, anarchists conceive of reading as an active, embodied practice, as Gustav Landauer describes it:
We think of the total effect that Goethe has had: we
