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, in the global anarchist movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, is the formation of something like an anarchist canon of non-anarchist writers. This is not to be confused with what is often referred to as “literary anarchism”—i.e., the broad swathe of avant-garde writers, from Apollinaire to Artaud, influenced by and expressing sympathies for anarchism.126 With a few exceptions, these names almost never appear in the anarchist press during the period of their ascendancy (a couple of decades on either side of 1910, that year Virginia Woolf arbitrarily selects as the one in which “everything changed”)—except as occasional objects of derision. However, a survey of the worldwide anarchist press during the same period would find the names of a number of non-anarchist literary figures repeated disproportionately: especially Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola, but also Leonid Andreyev, Anatole France, Maxim Gorky, Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, William Morris, Ada Negri, Friedrich Nietzsche, Romain Rolland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, August Strindberg, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. What do these writers have in common? Obviously, all but one are male, though this is not unlike other canonical selections then or since.127 Some are classified as Naturalists (Hauptmann, Zola; and more problematically, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Rolland), or as representatives of some brand of Realism (Andreyev, France, Gorky, Negri, Tolstoy); others are in the line of Romanticism (Heine, Hugo, Morris, Poe, Shelley, Whitman) or Aestheticism (Nietzsche, Wilde)—tendencies commonly seen as diametrically opposite to one another. Indeed, this embrace of opposites signals something important about anarchist tastes in literature, as we shall see. We might further observe that each of these writers is valued by anarchist critics for qualities usually associated with writers in the opposite camp: e.g., Zola for his ability to stir passion, Wilde for the concrete protest of his Song of Reading Gaol. In any case, the works of all of these writers have been, to some extent, adopted, appropriated, or, to borrow Sandra Jeppesen’s terms, “consecrated” as anarchist, despite their refusal of anarchist commitments, by repeated inclusion in anarchist “spaces.”128
A similar process of “consecration” takes place in Asia, where translations of many of the same Euro-American writers take the same place, but where there are also efforts to develop a native corpus of classics untainted by the authoritarian aura. We can see such a project under