1. The Reader In the Factory
In an influential survey, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society, Walter B. Rideout takes just two pages to consider the literary production of anarchists, pondering “why the movement should have produced no novels”: perhaps, he speculates, this was due to “absorption in labor struggles and the task of propagandizing, the lack of an amenable publisher … or the Anarchist ‘temperament,’ which expended itself more readily in personal reminiscence, critical analyses, short poems, and long arguments.” In any case, the question is only of interest in that “the nonexistence of such novels emphasizes by contrast the domination of radical fiction at that time by the Socialist writers.”61 Subsequent scholars have allowed this judgment to stand, even as they have sought to overturn almost every other aspect of the midcentury critical establishment. Alan M. Wald, in Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics agrees: “No one … has as yet been successful in making the argument for a substantial achievement in fiction, poetry, or literary criticism on the part of social democrats and anarchists, or other types of radicals in the 1930s or thereafter.”62 Rideout’s book was republished in 1992, and a more recent survey, Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929–1941, mentions—purely in passing—only a single anarchist novel.63
This failure to find any “substantial achievement” by anarchists in the field of literature doesn’t just mean that there are not enough anarchist books to talk about; this is not just a quantitative but a qualitative judgment, one we find repeated even in scholarship focusing on anarchist cultural production. In fact, scholars who give the matter any attention often call attention to the sheer volume of anarchist cultural production (fig. 1): “During the two years 1922 and 1923,” remarks Arif Dirlik, “more than seventy anarchist publications appeared inside and outside China.” Marcello Zane remarks on the bulk of column space given to poetry in Spanish anarchist newspapers (nearly two hundred poems published in twenty-one papers between 1882 and 1910), while Serge Salaün catalogs some 8,500 anarchist poems (by around 3,400 poets) published during the Spanish Civil War alone, and María-Luisa Siguán remarks on the “rather high” print runs (10,000–50,000 copies apiece) of the six hundred popular fiction titles in the Novela Ideal series issued by the anarchist journal La Revista Blanca.64 These observations are almost always followed, however, by variously disparaging or apologetic accounts of the “weak” quality of the product—“more of a brief cry of anguish than an argued essay,” as Peter Zarrow puts it, describing a typical entry in the journal Tianyi Bao (Natural Justice, 1907–1908).65 Anarchist cultural productions are generally described as a matter of “propaganda” rather than literature, “maudlin and bombastic” in tone, “didactic” in intent, permeated by a simplistic “moral dualism” or “angry naïveté”—in short, as Siguán concludes, “quite similar to ‘party literature,’” of historical interest at best.66 Only if it is considered strictly from the standpoint of “a sociological phenomenon” can this “boring and banal manipulation of the literary code” be worthy of our interest, for Maria Eugenia Boaventura; considered in itself, all this literature presents is “a shopworn language, full of clichés”—ironically, a “conservative, moralistic and even authoritarian” discourse.67 All of this underscores what is, for David Weir, the “unfortunate but poignant paradox: that innovative, progressive art is no guarantee of social progress”—and vice versa, as Zane puts it, that revolutionary content is “unable to find really innovative words and structures.”68 In other words: if it’s anarchist (in content), it ain’t literary (in form), and if it’s literature, it can’t possibly be anarchist.
Fig. 1: A sampling of the worldwide anarchist press, ca. 1930 (Foto-Semo; image courtesy of International Institute of Social History).
Sometimes—in the apologetic version of this judgment—the supposed incompatibility of anarchist content and literary form is confined to the domain of writing. Weir, for one, asserts that “the kind of culture that practicing anarchists preferred”—lectures, performances, songs—“was insistently oral in character,” noting, for instance, “Emma Goldman’s interest in modern drama as an important cultural medium for anarchist ideology.” He goes so far as to argue that “the form of the novel itself” militates against anarchism:
The argument is often made that the novel is the cultural form par excellence for the expression of day-to-day experience in the capitalist nation-state, and it very well may be that the ideological influences that have shaped the novel into its traditional realist form make it an inappropriate medium for the cultural expression of anarchism.… The tradition of the nineteenth-century novel … requires a formal mode of narrative discourse that cannot accommodate the largely oral culture of anarchism.69
It is interesting to contrast this with Goldman’s own assessment, in her introduction to the most widely read collection of her writings, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910):
My great faith in the wonder worker, the spoken word, is no more. I have realized its inadequacy to awaken thought, or even emotion.… Oral propaganda is at best but a means of shaking people from their lethargy: it leaves no lasting impression. The very fact that most people attend meetings only if aroused by newspaper sensations, or because they expect to be amused, is proof that they really have no inner urge to learn. It is altogether different with the written mode of human expression. No one, unless intensely interested in progressive ideas, will bother with serious books.70
Here, Goldman appeals to the traditional association of the spoken word with ephemerality, as opposed to the permanence of the written word, in a way that would not surprise literary scholars who have been trained to suss out the prejudices associated with “the illusion of full and present speech.”71 This illusion, we are told, dates back to the arch-authoritarian Plato, who has Socrates inveigh against the art of writing. Relying on the oral process of dialogue as a means to discover truth, Socrates finds all written texts—presumably including those of his disciple Plato, which claim to present records of his spoken words—to be inadequate simulations of living speech.72 Writing introduces a gap between author and reader, a spatial and temporal void in which the original meaning can be lost, so that when Shelley’s “Traveler from an antique land” shows up to read King Ozymandias’s words—“look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—they have been reversed, undone, rendered irremediably ironic by the sheer passage of time (“Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away”).73 In the absence of the author, the author-ity of the written word is ruined.
We might expect, as Weir imagines, that Goldman would condemn the written word as lifeless and abstract in comparison with the immediacy of living speech; no one worries about the effects of writing “fire” in a crowded theater. Orality does take on a certain importance in anarchist resistance culture, as we shall see—partly, as Weir suggests, because it “gets round the problem of illiteracy that many anarchists faced (especially in Spain).” But this, too, is used to disqualify anarchism, once again depicted as a politics of “primitive rebels,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase—a vestige of the premodern world, without a future.74
It is true that Goldman was a public speaker, a specialist in incendiary speech; perhaps the better part of her militant life was spent in free speech fights, in physical confrontations with hecklers and police over the right to a public audience for subversion, sex, solidarity, and sedition. And yet her brief, in this introduction to her own essays, is for reading, not for hearing:
In meetings the audience is distracted by a thousand non-essentials. The speaker, though ever so eloquent, cannot escape the restlessness of the crowd, with the inevitable result that he will fail to strike root. In all probability he will not even do justice to himself.
The relation between the writer
