In addition, then, to works consecrated by inclusion in anarchist spaces, written by
a) committed writers from the middle classes (Octave Mirbeau, Bernard Lazare, Florencio Sánchez, Avelino Fóscolo, etc.) and
b) non-committed writers adopted or appropriated by anarchists (Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Henrik Ibsen, etc.), we find circulating in the same media
c) works written by working-class anarchist militants without literary training or credentials (e.g, Luisa Capetillo or Gigi Damiani, but especially anonymous works, often signed in ways that signal this identity—e.g., “anonymous hatter”).
We might further distinguish between anarchist works directed partially or primarily at non-militants and those written by and for militants—a truly self-directed literature. Of the works produced for non-militant audiences, there is often a palpable difference between those intended for working-class readers (urban and rural manual workers) and those intended for a middle-class readership (urban intellectual workers). This difference is sometimes manifested in terms of genre: thus, the forms of the dialogue story and the serial novel may have more often been directed toward manual workers, while the novel written for publication in book form, as Flávio Luizetto notes, was often meant “to attract followers to the anarchist cause among public servants, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers and students—people who form part of what are called, for lack of a more precise term, the urban middle classes.”131 It is possible that these genres were at times also gendered: in a study of the anticlerical journal A Lanterna, Walter da Silva Oliveira suggests that “there was, in the period studied [1909–1916], a strong link between short stories and novels [published in its pages] and an audience of female readers,” whom the editors considered to be those most harmed by religious discourse.132
Michel Ragon reminds us, too, that there are differences between, on the one hand, an “anarchist literature” written in a spirit of commitment by credentialed intellectuals, and on the other hand, “proletarian literature” without a clearly signaled sectarian identity as anarchist, destined for working-class readers without further qualification, written by workers without any credentials (e.g., Henri Poulaille [1896–1980] or Albert Soulilou [1905–1967]):
The worker-writers are often possessed of a libertarian spirit; some are even anarchist militants. But anarchist literature per se merits its own study. If its themes are frequently evoked in the course of these pages, it nonetheless expresses a particular vision of the world that is not always of a proletarian spirit. It is more philosophical than descriptive, more rebellious than constructive. It counts in its ranks more essayists than novelists, more journalists than poets.133
Works of pure “proletarian literature,” too, are to be found in the anarchist world, from Japan (where puroretaria bungaku was one of the more lasting legacies of an anarchist movement largely crushed in the 1920s) to France (where Poulaille becomes one of its first champions).
To all of these complications in the authorship and readership of anarchist literature, we must add another: at several points in the history of anarchism, conditions are hostile enough to incur serious censorship and reprisal against anarchist writers and publications. In these situations—e.g., in Spain following the infamous political trials at Montjuich (1897), or under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930)—it became impossible to openly publish and distribute works directly advocating anarchism. One of the ways in which anarchists adapted to this was to further “culturalize” their media, to camouflage politics under the guise of social science and aesthetics. Thus, as David Ortiz notes, anarchist journals benefited from “avoiding use of the words ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchist,’” taking on oblique, politically “blank” titles such as Revista Blanca (1898–1905, 1923–1936) Ciencia Social (1895–1896), or Natura (1903–1905), presenting anarchist texts under the lofty, academically consecrated rubrics of “sociology,” “history,” “letters,” “art,” “science,” and so on. Taking another direction, the wildly popular “Novela Libre” and “Novela Ideal” book series issued by Revista Blanca disseminated anarchist ideas in the form of novelas rosas, i.e., paperback romances. Other popular novel series authored by anarchists adopted different genre identities, all while gesturing discreetly, in the words of an advertisement for the anarcho-syndicalist “Novela del Pueblo” series, toward “criticism … of some aspect of modern society” and certain “hints and anticipations of a better human society.”134
The use of established genres of “culture”—both high and low, erudite and popular—as protective coloration for the continuation of political propaganda under repressive conditions poses some possibilities and some problems. On the one hand, softening the sectarian political content, presented as either edification or entertainment, might reach audiences otherwise beyond the range of anarchist ideological messages (say, middle-class intellectual workers interested in cultural trends, or depoliticized manual workers seeking distraction and relaxation). On the other hand, stripping away the symbols that distinguish anarchism, that establish it as a political identity, might allow readers to walk away unchanged—or worse, to appropriate the text for some other ideological purpose. The contents of La Revista Blanca might leave no room for such misunderstanding, but what about the paperback melodramas? The relative openness to interpretation that makes for the “literary” might work against the anarchists’ radical agenda. If a text is always, as Umberto Eco has it, “a lazy machine that appeals to the reader to do some of its work,” literary texts might be said to elicit even more activity on the reader’s part, an imagining, projecting, fantasizing activity that could erase or overwrite the anarchist content of anarchist literature, producing a depoliticized text—or worse, a politically co-opted text.135
This danger, the ineliminable possibility that what you’ve written or painted or sung can take on a life of its own or be turned against itself, is the condition of all art. Nonetheless, it is a special risk for anarchists just because the Idea is almost universally perceived as so terrifically threatening that it is all but literally unthinkable. “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could,” Malatesta wrote, “might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds.… That man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.”136 Thus with anarchists’ proposals to remove the bonds of Capital, State, and Church. Readers can resist, and the popular audience for anarchist messages resists “ferociously.” And anarchists are all too familiar with popular distortions of the Idea—the notion that anarchy means “chaos,” that anyone who is destructive or disregarding of others is an anarchist, and so on. In effect, these symbolic uses of “anarchy” are co-optations of anarchist themes for capitalist uses, promoting the kind of hedonistic individualism that moves product (and providing the police and the priests with a handy folk-devil). An anarchist writer can expect to be misread in many directions at once.
At the same time, there is also the danger of making anarchism into—again, in the words of Malatesta (apropos of his Russian colleagues’ attempt to formalize anarchist beliefs and methods into a “Platform”)—“a government and a church”:137 that is, anarchist militants could attempt to so tightly control meanings as to choke off any alternative readings, reintroducing authoritarianism into the heart of anti-authoritarian thought and practice. Here, I think of Roland Barthes’s speculation that a certain authoritarian element would always inhere in “the very fact” of speaking: “All speech is on the side of the Law,” he gloomily surmised, suggesting that to teach as an anti-authoritarian, the best one could do would be to somehow soften one’s speech, “‘presenting’ a discourse without imposing it.”138 This might indeed be taken as a model of anarchist pedagogy: the teacher presents but does not impose. “Teaching,” Ricardo Mella insists, “neither can