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 sit in peaceful composure of the body, a transfigured beauty and serenity appears on our faces, our muscles relax and our widened eyes gaze out over the land. We think of Ibsen: our foreheads wrinkle, our eyes look sharper and as if in evil doubt, our mouths twitch, our heads sway in uncertainty, and we touch our noses with one finger. But those who have beheld this wild man Tolstoy become his completely: we swing our arms forcefully, throw them up and back, thrust our heads and necks forward; the agitation of our soul has turned into turmoil, into an inability to stand still, a trembling, a rearing up, and a striding forth.91
When reading, then, an anarchist is not (only) engaged in abstract, silent, immobile cognition; reading becomes something concrete, physical, bodily, kinetic. The relation of reader to author is also imagined in terms of a kind of visceral, immediate presence that resists the anomie and isolation O’Connor identifies as the defining features of modern, urban, industrial life.
Anarchist readers, even when they are not really listeners to a lector or lectora, sometimes seem to be trying to create or recreate communal conditions through the practice of reading, in part because they are so often “geographically, economically, and intellectually marginalized,” as Joanne Ellen Passet puts it.92
Geographically, first: they are often prisoners, deportees, immigrants, hobos, refugees, and other people in transit: displaced Andalusian peasants in Barcelona; Catalans in the Brazilian port city of Santos; Puerto Ricans and Germans in New York; Jews and Italians in Buenos Aires or Rosario; Spanish exiles in London or Mexicans in St. Louis; Koreans in China; Chinese in Tokyo or Paris; and so on.
Economically, in the second place: anarchist readers are generally working-class, often in precarious positions; many are (or, having been displaced, were) artisans, practicing trades threatened by the advance of industrial capitalism (e.g., shoemakers, weavers, tanners, cabinetmakers), although many, particularly with the rise of revolutionary syndicalism, are also to be found among the industrial working class (e.g., miners, garment workers, longshoremen, sailors); before the Second World War, a minority are