Arena Two

Description

In the second issue of Arena we aim to provide general insights into the role of the anarchist in fiction, both as protagonist and author.

David Weir’s essay “Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibilities” focuses on the progenitor of anarchist fiction, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, published in 1794, that demonstrated the pressing need for the utopian system he described in the first systematic elaboration of anarchist philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

“Epic Pooh” is a newly updated revision of a 1978 article by Michael Moorcock reviewing epic fantasy literature for children, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

While researching early twentieth-century French anarchist plays translated into Italian, Santo Catanuto discovered interesting information on the literary side of the Communard Louise Michel, indicating that she was the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

Stephen Schwartz, a longtime critic of the detective novel, evaluates the arc of French writer Leo Malet from anarchist to arabophobe and in “Between Libel And Hoax,” counters Miguel Mir’s libelous depiction of the Spanish anarchist movement, Entre el roig i el negre.

In his discourse on B. Traven’s The Death Ship, Ernest Larsen looks at the intractable modern problem of identity. Larsen’s short story “Bakunin At The Beach” is about Mr. and Mrs. Bakunin holidaying at Lake Maggiore under the watchful eyes of Inspector Dupin of the Swiss Department of Justice and Police.

Joseph Conrad’s short story “An Anarchist: A Desperate Tale” is republished here from A Set of Six (1908).

“Anarchists in Fiction” is a collection of idiosyncratic reviews of books in which anarchists are portrayed as an eclectic group of villains and criminal degenerates.

Finally, we conclude this second issue of Arena with an article by our cinema editor Richard Porton on Dušan Makavejev’s playful, allusive 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

Sujets

• Literature
• Left-libertarianism
• Political culture
• Socialism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604865172
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ARENA 2: ANARCHISTS IN FICTION Publisher: ChristieBooks/PM Press Editor: Stuart Christie Art Director: Leslie Prince
Copyright © the individual authors
First published in the UK and USA in 2011 by ChristieBooks PO Box 35 Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ZS ISBN: 1-873976-42-9 ISBN-13: 978-1-873976-42-5 and PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org ISBN: 978-1-60486-050-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912419
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
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INTRODUCTION

Stuart Christie
In this second issue of ARENA we aim to provide general insights into the role of the anarchist in fiction, both as protagonist (as angels and demons, but mostly demons) and author. Obviously, there will be writers whom some readers will think I have unjustifiably missed. All I can reply to such complainants is that you can’t please everyone and that there will be other opportunities in future issues. Meanwhile, it is best to allow the articles here included to speak for themselves, without comment.
David Weir’s essay ‘Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibilities’ focuses on the progenitor of anarchist fiction, William Godwin ’s Caleb Williams, a highly political novel, published in 1794, that demonstrated, in fictional form, the pressing need for the utopian system he described in the first systematic elaboration of anarchist philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. ‘Epic Pooh’ is a newly updated revision of a 1978 article by Michael Moorcock (later published in his 1989 book Wizardry and Wild Romance) reviewing epic fantasy literature for children, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien ’s The Lord of the Rings. While researching early twentieth-century French anarchist plays translated into Italian, Santo Catanuto discovered interesting information on the literary side of the indomitable Communard Louise Michel, indicating that she was the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Strapped for cash, she reputedly sold the manuscript to Jules Verne for 100 francs. Stephen Schwartz, a lifelong aficionado of the detective novel, takes a critical look at the arc of French writer Leo Malet from anarchist to Arabophobe and, in ‘Between Libel And Hoax’, counters Miguel Mir ’s libellous depiction of the Spanish anarchist movement Entre el roig i el negre. In his extended essay, ‘Reading the Runes’, Stephen also takes a fresh look at the archival and related research on the historiography of the Spanish Civil War since the death of Franco. In his essay on B. Traven ’s first full-length novel, The Death Ship, Ernest Larsen looks at the intractable modern problem of identity. Larsen’s short story ‘Bakunin at the Beach’ is about Mr and Mrs Bakunin holidaying at Lake Maggiore under the watchful eyes of Inspector Dupin of the Swiss Department of Justice and Police. Joseph Conrad ’s short story ‘An Anarchist. A Desperate Tale’ is republished here from A Set of Six (1908), originally published in Harper’s Magazine in August 1906. Anarchists in Fiction’ is a collection of idiosyncratic reviews of books in which anarchists are portrayed as an eclectic group of villains and criminal degenerates. Finally, we conclude this second issue of ARENA with an article by film editor Richard Porton on Dušan Makavejev ’s playful, allusive 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
Stuart Christie
CONTENTS
1 David Weir ANARCHIST FICTION, ANARCHIST SENSIBILITIES An Enquiry into the Strange Case of Caleb Williams
2 Michael Moorcock EPIC POOH
3 Santo Catanuto LOUISE MICHEL AND TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA Notes, Rumours and Confirmation Regarding the Real Author of the Renowned Novel
4 Stephen Schwartz LEO MALET From Anarchism to Arabophobia
5 Ernest Larsen TRAVEN HYPOTHESES (The Death Ship)
6 Stephen Schwartz BETWEEN LIBEL AND HOAX Review of Miguel Mir’s Entre el Roig i el Negre
7 Various ANARCHISTS IN FICTION
8 Joseph Conrad AN ANARCHIST A Desperate Tale
9 Ernest Larsen BAKUNIN AT THE BEACH
10 Stephen Schwartz READING THE RUNES New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War
11 Richard Porton WR:MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM Anarchist Realism and Critical Quandaries
ANARCHIST FICTION, ANARCHIST SENSIBILITY An Enquiry into the Strange Case of Caleb Williams
David Weir

William Godwin (1756-1836)
‘Anarchist fiction’, rhetorically considered, is either a redundancy or an oxymoron. The phrase is redundant if the ideology of anarchism is considered from the uncharitable perspective of political history. Despite a number of sensational, even explosive, moments in its history, anarchism has fared less well over the centuries than other ideologies, such as liberalism or socialism. The continuing relevance of these two ideologies in particular is especially obvious in the age of Obama, since the talking heads on satellite radio and cable television make a habit of calling the President ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ (not to mention ‘fascist’). But so far, the right-wing machine has refrained from calling President Obama an ‘anarchist’. If anything, his right-wing detractors, with their jeremiads against ‘government takeovers’ of everything from Detroit automobile companies to the healthcare system, might be called ‘anarchists’ because of their hatred of the State, even though they would be reluctant to describe themselves as such. The reason for such reticence may be that anarchism today, for all practical purposes, is little more than a fiction, a make-believe ideology that might be fun to entertain or dream about, but stands little chance of emerging as a real alternative to other ideologies, as it assuredly did in the nineteenth century and at critical periods in the twentieth (during the Spanish Civil War, for example). A stateless society —a system of mutual, contractual arrangements between autonomous individuals rather than a system that subjects individuals to governance and law — does seem little more these days than the stuff of fantasy, an anarchist fiction.
At the same time, ‘anarchist fiction’, considered from the perspective not of political history but of literary history, sounds contradictory, especially if by fiction we mean the novel, a literary genre widely understood to have originated as an artistic expression of capitalist ideology. The argument for the novel as a capitalist genre is most often made with reference to the English variant, given the political and economic reforms that followed from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: ‘The features of a modern capitalist economy, so familiar to us now, were just being consolidated in England in the first half of the eighteenth century … The Bank of England and the sustaining of a substantial national debt, initiated at the end of the seventeenth century, developed so rapidly and so consequentially in the early eighteenth century as to represent what some have called a financial revolution’, the period ‘in which a true “consumer society” was born in England’. [ 1 ] Add to these social and economic circumstances certain older narrative traditions, such as the romance and the picaresque, and you get a form of fiction that highlights the adventures of some rather randy economic individualists, lusty characters who aim to enter the existing social order, not to overturn it: Tom Jones, Moll Flanders, Benjamin Franklin (a historical personage, yes, but an economic picaro in his Autobiography if there ever was one). The anarchist who would write a novel, then, has the game stacked against him from the outset, since the fictional form itself is stamped with capitalist coin.
But the socio-economic world of the eighteenth century reflected in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and the like has another side. The active, mostly masculine narrative of the picaresque adventurer who acquires prestige and wealth over the course of the typical eighteenth-century novel is countered by the passive, largely feminine story of those excluded from the new economic adventure but who nonetheless experience its effects. Novels about how economic and social power feels to those who are not themselves in control of that power are usually called sentimental: such novels form a mostly domestic record, frequently epistolary, of emotional sensibility. This type of novel, one critic writes, ‘supplied what was undoubtedly a potentially radical politics of subjectivity, promulgating a notion of exquisite individual sensibility which, although called into play by the outside world, was essentially self-authorizing rather than produced through subjection to any social structure (most especially the State) whatsoever’. [ 2 ] In other words, even though sentime