for living; not only how it reflects the way of life it emerges from, but what modes of living it demonstrates and proposes.148
Nor was criticism reserved for critics. Rather, according to Ramón Flecha, anarchist educational practices aimed “to make every worker an intellectual.”149 This was pursued by establishing dialogues among working-class adult readers, not only through the mediation of print, important as that was, but face to face. Among the institutions created for this purpose were the círculos culturales and centros de estudios in Argentina, the universités populaires in France and Brazil, and in Spain, the storefront ateneos (workers’ atheneums) and tertulias.150
Tertulias, literally “gatherings,” began as an entirely informal practice of socializing among friends in cafés, but acquired a more formal dimension in the 1880s, as certain regular gatherings started to give themselves names like “Avant [Forward],” “Los Afines [The Like-Minded],” or “Ni Rey, Ni Patria [Neither King Nor Country].”151 Emerging during the period of propaganda by the deed, these more formalized tertulias at first functioned as places where grupitos (“little groups,” later known as grupos de afinidad or “affinity groups”) formed for the purposes of action rather than education, planning violent strikes against the régime; by staging prolonged, focused conversations about anarchist texts and ideas, the tertulia could produce a collective with strong ideological agreement, capable of acting in a concerted, harmonious fashion.152 However, that very ability to sustain continuous, open conversation among equals turned out to be valuable beyond the waning of the attentat as a tactic; it proved ideally suited for an egalitarian mode of education, the tertulia literaria.
Pepita Carpeña, a member of the Mujeres Libres during the Spanish Civil War, recollects the tertulias literarias promoted by the group:
We all would read the same book, and then you cannot imagine the change of views that takes place in a general meeting … maybe what you haven’t perceived before, you realize when you say it to someone else, and the other person realizes what you have perceived. It was a great education. It taught me a lot; this is all the education I have, I have no more. I left school at age 11 and that was it.153
This kind of open-ended, critical dialogue is well-situated to evoke what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called “collective reason”: allowing each individual ego, each one a little “absolute” unto itself, both to express itself and to modify itself with the aid of all the other absolutes, in order to produce a new thought that is neither the average nor the sum of all the participants.154
Another form of collective reason is perhaps at work in another common anarchist practice: the practice of rereading through rewriting. This goes for songwriting, too—anarchist poets and songwriters, as we shall see in Part II, freely rewrite hymns and anthems to suit their own purposes—and even for images, which anarchist artists subject to caricature, deformation, and détournement (Part IV). But it is perhaps most notable in the field of writing. B. Traven rewrites tales from the Brothers Grimm (“Macario”) and the folk legend of the men who went hunting for Death (Treasure of the Sierra Madre); in his strange, unclassifiable book Die Sechs (1928; translated as The Six, 1938), Rudolf Rocker rewrites the stories of Faust, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Don Quixote; Federico Urales serializes his own versions of Don Quixote (El Último Don Quijote, 1925) and Don Juan (Mi Don Juan, 1935–1936); Bernard Lazare also rewrites the story of Don Juan (“La Confession de Don Juan”), as well as that of Shakespeare’s Prospero (“La Fuite de Prospero”), Bluebeard (“Barbe-Bleu”), Moses (“L’Illusion”), Samson and Delilah (“Dalila”), Ahasuerus (“L’Attente Éternelle”)…
At this point, I seem to hear the voice of Karl Marx thundering against “the tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs heavy on the brains of the living”: after all, wasn’t the reproduction of antique Roman forms and symbols a sign of the French Revolution’s inability to bring forth the “poetry of the future”? Could all these obsessive-seeming rewritings, on the part of the anarchists, constitute evidence of a slavish lack of originality—or, on the contrary, of a juvenile impulse to tear everything down by cheap parody? Either way, anarchists would seem to be disqualified once again from entry into the study of literature, that consecrated space inhabited only by an élite of “isolate[d] individual[s],” “strong misreader[s]” who anxiously disguise their Oedipal obligations to their “precursors,” as Harold Bloom tells us, giving their creations what Walter Benjamin might call the “unique aura,” the appearance of special value.155 But originality per se is a propertarian concern, whereas spontaneity—the surprises that emerge when old signs are encountered in new contexts, which is a feature of their repetition156—is an anarchist concern, and while many anarchist works parody conventional or traditional texts in a spirit of hostile criticism, this is by no means always the case (Don Quixote, for instance, is a figure sincerely beloved by anarchists, who recognize this knight as one of our own).157 Rather, anarchist revision, the delight in turning consumption into production and readers into writers, “repeats the meaning and revives the spirit of past makings, so they are not a dead weight,” as Paul Goodman says—having written his own Don Juan: Or, the Continuum of the Libido (1942)—“by using them again in a making that is occurring now.”158
This is the spirit in which anarchists read.
61 Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in America, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (NY: Hill & Wang, 1956), 90–91.
62 Alan M. Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (London: Verso, 1994), 19.
63 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 89, 96.
64 Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 154; Marcello Zane, “Vivir entre las nubes,” Belphégor 6.2 (June 2007); Salaün cited in Joseph Steinbeiß, “‘Meine Verse sollen Bomben sein…’,” grazwurzelrevolution 265 (Jan. 2002); María-Luisa Siguán, “‘La Novela Ideal’,” Anuario de filologia 4 (1978): 419. Likewise, Gonzalo Santonja notes the volume and vigor of the Novela Proletaria series, which sustained print runs of 30,000 copies apiece (17).
65 Gonzalo Santonja, La Novela proletaria (1932–1933) (Madrid:Ayuso, 1979), 17; Peter G. Zarrow, “He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 47.4 (Nov. 1988): 807.
66 Brigitte Magnien, “La novela del pueblo: analyses d’une collection de nouvelles publiée sous la dictature de Primo de Rivera,” in L’Infra-littérature en Espagne au XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Victor Carrillo (Grenoble: PUG, 1977), 250, 256; Serge Salaün, Romancero libertario (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1971), 35–36; Zarrow, “He Zhen,” 802; Siguán, “La novela Ideal,” 419.
67 Maria Eugenia Boaventura, “A Ficção Anarquista Classe Média,” Remate de Males 1.4 (Jan. 1983): 80–81, 92. Ana Lozano de la Pola calls this rhetorical maneuver, after Patricia V. Greene, “the ethico-aesthetic paradox”: how can a truly radical content be conveyed by a conservative form? The presupposition, Lozano de la Pola notes, is that we can neatly distinguish, in advance, between “radical genres” and “conservative genres,” as if all the ideological consequences were already spelled out at that level, regardless of how particular authors set those inherited materials to work, regardless of how particular readers encounter it, in what contexts, etc. See Ana Lozano de la Pola “Re-visitando a Federica Montseny. Una lectura de La Victoria
