novel La Victoria (billed as a “story of the moral problems faced by a woman of modern ideas”) sparked a heated debate in the pages of La Revista Blanca, with male readers such as Cirilo Viñolas complaining of the seemingly anti-romantic decision taken by the romantic heroine, Clara Delval: was it in keeping with the expectations of the genre? With her character? With femininity? Other anarchist women writers weighed in with reasoned and impassioned “Defense[s] of Clara.”107
Periodicals played a key role in sustaining this global print culture, to be sure, but so did books. Works of popular science by anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Elisée Reclus’s L’Homme et la Terre (1905–1908), and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol’s Problemas Transcendentales: Estudios de Sociología y Ciencia Moderna (1908) helped to establish a sense of the entire universe as seen from an anarchist perspective—a view codified and monumentalized by Sébastien Faure’s four-volume Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934); so did literary works published in book form such as Adrián del Valle’s Fin de la Fiesta: Cuadro Dramático (1898), Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s The Poet in the Desert (1915), Miyajima Sukeo’s The Miner (Kōfu, 1916), and Federica Montseny’s El Hijo de Clara (1927).
Anarchist book culture and the world of libertarian periodicals overlapped considerably and worked to reinforce one another. Frequently, book-length plays and novels would be reviewed, advertised, and serialized in the anarchist newspapers and magazines, then discussed and debated in the same pages. In this sense, as we shall see further, the anarchist universe of reading forms an extension of anarchist pedagogy. During the Spanish Civil War, pamphlets created by the anarchist women’s association, the Agrupación Mujeres Libres, advised women against “buy[ing] just ‘any old books’ … The book you read must affirm your ideological position, enrich your intelligence, and improve your sensibility” (fig. 4); another anarchist propaganda poster illustrated by the artist Cimine urged passersby to “Read anarchist books and become a man.”108 In spite of Cimine’s masculinist tone, both campaigns were invested with the same hope and the same anxiety: if the right books could fortify you for the fight against fascism, then this implied that there were also such things as the wrong books—what Domingos Ribeiro Filho (1875–1942), author of several anarchist novels, called “literary poison.”109 Indeed, as early as the very first period of the development of anarchism, we find Proudhonian militants such as Henri Tolain (1828–1897), writing in La Tribune Ouvrière (1865), fretting about the taste of newly literate workers for romans-feuilletons, serialized novels, featuring lurid crime stories (featuring “at least two corpses per episode”) and—worse!—stories that took the police for their heroes or invited workers to live vicariously in the “elegant and delicate world” of the trysting aristocrats who still populate romance novels.110 Around the same time, the journalist Jules Vallès (1832–1885), writing for Le Figaro (1862), bemoans the “influence” of popular novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Last of the Mohicans, or Ivanhoe, escapist fantasies that set up false ideals of romance or heroism for us to compare ourselves with.111 Well into the second period, Tolain’s arguments are reiterated by anarchists such as Liu Shifu (1884–1915), attacking the popular fiction of the late Qing as “inducive to wantonness,” “cater[ing] to the tastes of the times,” or E. Statio, writing in Le Libertaire under the title “L’Art et le Peuple” (1905):
Melodramas with grand, sentimental, tearjerking tirades, sputterings of artifice, the Eiffel Tower, fountains of light, this is what suits and distracts the people. As long as they laugh or cry, they do not think. [This is] the morphine that anesthetizes minds and numbs intellects. The serial novel, in which characters whose emotional faculties know no expression short of paroxysm go through endless convulsions, is an excellent educator, very conducive to making the People stupid.… [Popular novelists such as] Montépin, Ponson du Terrail, Sardou, Ennery, Richebourg, Déroulède, Sarcey, etc., are true pillars of society.112
Some sixty years later, we still find militants like Charles Hotz (a.k.a. Edouard Rothen, 1874–1937) denouncing, in a pamphlet titled, once again, L’Art et le Peuple (1924), the “merchants of evil literature” who peddle “the worst adventure stories, police stories, crime stories, the exploits of the most unlikely romantic heroes,” while Shin Chae-ho (a.k.a. Tanjae, 1880–1936) attacks “pretty operas and novels” focused on the lives of “the rich privileged class” (1925), and Camillo Berneri (1897–1937) concludes that “the readership of the serial novel is conservative,” preferring dated “clichés” to the complexities of modern life (1928).113 And if contemporary anarchists reserve their scorn for mass-market movies and TV,114 it is still possible to find Peter Lamborn Wilson attacking popular novelists such as Stephen King for their “saliromaniac” fiction, a symptom, if not a cause, of “decadence” (1991).115
Nor is the mistrust of anarchists reserved for mass literature and the “low” culture manufactured by capitalism. Stuart Christie writes of growing up alienated from the “imperialist culture of the victor” represented, for him, by Shakespeare.116 This sentiment is often echoed by East Asian anarchists, for whom a fixed body of literary “classics” is often associated with the dead hand of tradition and hierarchy; thus, Shin Chae-ho names “literature” and “the fine arts,” along with “religion,” “customs,” and “public morals,” as one of the means by which “servile cultural thoughts” are perpetuated among the people.117 This classical literary culture formed the foundation for the French educational system parodied by Vallès in his quasi-autobiographical “Jacques Vingtras” trilogy—a system designed to teach respect for and rote imitation of the official canon of “Great Writers.”118 The class composition of these canons also renders them suspect in the eyes of anarchists: thus, in his entry on “Literature” for the Encyclopédie anarchiste, Rothen regards the rise of a body of erudite writing by and for the ruling classes, increasingly detached from the wellsprings of popular creativity, as a real loss for culture.119 Many anarchists cottoned to Tolstoy’s argument, in What Is Art?, that literature should be “accessible to all.”120
At the same time, anarchists often see the corpus of “high” literature as part of a wider cultural patrimony that properly belongs to the people, and therefore as something to which access must be demanded and obtained. Indeed, we can find among anarchists a surprising reverence for “great” works. Gustav Landauer authors an entire book’s worth of lectures on Shakespeare, while Bernard Lazare praises Dante and Rabelais as models for modern practitioners of l’art social.121 “On the advice of Longinus,” Paul Goodman remarked, “I ‘write it for Homer, for Demosthenes,’ and other pleasant company who somehow are more alive to me than most of my contemporaries.”122 Unlike the ephemeral clamor produced by a bomb, Pierre Quillard observes, a great poem can constitute a “permanent” disruption of the mediocre order: “the terrible irony flies across the centuries, and it will strike all the governors, the pharisees, the money-changers, today, tomorrow, and forever.” Thus, “just as infallibly as the braver anarchist comrades, Shakespeare and Aeschylus pave the way to the collapse of the old world.”123 A 1937 editorial in the Spanish antifascist journal Documentos Históricos voices a very similar sentiment, this time in reaction to the famous Nazi quip, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver”: “When we hear culture spoken badly of, we have to reach, not for the revolver—because we think that the pistol has a very limited physical field of action in relation to the infinite domain of the spirit—but for our force of persuasion, to convince the vacillating that doing cultural labor and working for a dignified and humanist culture means performing a revolutionary task for the cause of the working class.”124 Neither was this attitude confined to intellectuals from privileged backgrounds such as Quillard, a product of the élite Lycée Fontanes and habitué of the Symbolist circles, or the correspondent for Documentos Históricos (about whom we shall hear more later); Emma Goldman, for instance, treasured literature in Russian, English, and especially German, which she regarded as languages of high culture, rather than the demotic Yiddish of her upbringing, which she associated with religious strictures and parochialism, and spent a surprising amount of time on the stump speaking on topics such as “Russian Literature—The Voice of Revolt” and “Walt Whitman, the Liberator of Sex.”125
What we can see at work,
