I'm Explaining a Few Things... About Gaza 
Saturday, 05 October 2024 13:51

I'm Explaining a Few Things... About Gaza 

Published in Films
The Art Of Resistance presents a short film about Gaza. Image above: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APA images
 
There is a climate of intimidation concerning criticism of Israel. Anyone who speaks out about the Gaza genocide, particularly creative figures, is certain to suffer media attack. Roger Waters is probably the best known example. Eighty years ago, the treatment of the great Nobel prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda, was similar. Until the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, Neruda had been celebrated as the great modern Spanish love poet. The war changed that. It drew Neruda into the centre of politics. 
 
Neruda's great poem, I'm Explaining a Few Things, like Picasso's painting, was created in response to the bombing of civilians by Hitler and Mussolini's airforces at Guernica in 1937. This atrocity resulted in the death of over 1000 civilians. As of today, December 11th, 2023, over eighteen times that number have been buried in the rubble of Gaza. Almost eight thousand children have been killed by Israeli bombing. If he were alive today, maybe Neruda's poem would have gone something like this. 
 
I'm Explaining a Few Things... About Gaza 
Text by John Graham Davies, after an original poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by Nathaniel Tarn. 
Readers: John Graham Davies, Tayo Aluko, Amina Atiq @aminaatiqartist, Haneen @scousersforpalestine 
Producer: Chris Bernard 
Cameras: Hazuan Hashim, Phil Maxwell 

Editor: Hazuan Hashim

I'm explaining a few things.....about Gaza - 7 min - 2023 from Hazuan Hashim and Phil Maxwell on Vimeo.

The Radical Extension of Reality: Jorge Luis Borges
Saturday, 05 October 2024 13:51

The Radical Extension of Reality: Jorge Luis Borges

Published in Fiction

Jim Aitken unearths the radical and progressive meanings in Borges' writings

It was his fellow Argentinian writer and, like his mentor, a former Director of the National Library of Argentina, Alberto Manguel, who told us in Packing My Library (2018) that Borges, while trapped in Geneva during the Second World War, came across the story of the Golem. Borges was sixteen years old and reading Gustav Mehring’s book The Golem (1915), which totally captivated his mind and helped to form the writer he became.

The story of The Golem has quite a lineage. The word is first mentioned in Psalm 139: ‘Thine eyes did see my golem.’ In the 1st century C.E. it was Rabbi Eliezer who wrote that the golem was ‘an inarticulate lump.’ And in the fourth century C.E. the Babylonian teacher Rava created a creature out of clay and sent it to Rabbi Zera. The Rabbi attempted to speak with it and in anger at its refusal to reply, the Rabbi said ‘return to dust’ whereupon the creature crumbled into a shapeless heap.

Then in 16th century Prague another Rabbi, Rabbi Loew, the spiritual leader of the Jewish people in the Prague ghetto, divines from his astrological tables that a disaster is imminent. He decides to summon the dead spirit of Astaroth and build a clay figure of a Golem. This is built to serve him in this time of need. However, the creature escapes his master’s control and caused chaos in the ghetto. The Rabbi had then to turn it to dust by removing from its brow the first letter of emet – meaning truth – so that the word now read met meaning death.

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The Golem

The German film-makers Carl Boese and Paul Wegener brought out in 1920 one of the first horror films called Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, how he came into the world) and this film is still popular with the more discerning film buffs around Halloween. In 1957 Borges, along with Margarita Guerroro, published the Book of Imaginary Beings which mentions the Golem and in 1969 Borges travelled to Israel to meet with the scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. The scholar’s surname was used to rhyme with golem in Borges’s poem The Golem, chosen by Borges for inclusion in his Personal Anthology, published by Picador in 1972.

Scholem and Borges discussed issues on art. Borges wondered how a writer could ever achieve his purpose when all he has at his disposal is the imperfect tool of language. He asked the scholar what is created when an artist sets out to create and is the work of art a lasting reality or an imperfect lie. Effectively, he asked Scholem, is the work of art a living Golem or a handful of dust?

The politically liberating power of culture

All of this reads remarkably like one of Borges’ own stories. It is a description of links in a chain that go back through history and tradition and make us – as readers – marvel. And that is what great art should always do. It should create wonder but also apply it with warning. The Golem shows us how periodically the embodied hopes of individuals or the masses themselves can give birth to monsters that create disastrous consequences for us all. Or to put it more plainly we should sometimes be careful what we wish for. Borges had died long before Golem Trump came on the scene but Trump’s arrival, sanctioned by the vested interests of the few and supported by the basest of bases, has most certainly wrought havoc.

While Borges could clearly not make such an analogy, his work allows us as readers to do this because of its relevance regardless of era.  His stories take his readers on labyrinthine journeys with no discernible exits that could ordinarily be expected from more conventional fiction. It is in this way that Borges gives his readers a radical extension of reality. While a good story can transport the reader, under Borges’ direction you are transported further still.

It is by radically extending reality through the power of his creative vision that his art has to be seen ultimately in a progressive light. Culture more broadly, and great art forms more particularly, can be seen as a kind of imaginative liberation. And, of course, once the artist has created this leap there is the suggestion at play of a deeper, more material liberation that can be implied. While Borges may have called himself a Conservative in his politics, his art can nonetheless inspire the greatest of all possible worlds.

The Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea called his method ‘irreality,’making such a pronouncement largely on account of the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existentialism, which she detected in his writing. However, though the term ‘irreality’ may certainly have some mileage, Borges worked under many more influences.

In an interview given to Rita Guibert in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1968 Borges was asked the following question:

If an intellectual shuts himself up in an ivory tower, and sometimes even ignores reality, can he contribute to solving the problems of society?

The reply by Borges was both perceptive and illuminating with regard to his own work:

Possibly shutting oneself up in an ivory tower and thinking about other things may be one way of modifying reality. I live in an ivory tower – as you call it – creating a poem or a book, and that can be just as real as anything else. People are generally wrong when they take reality as meaning daily life, and think of the rest as unreal. In the long run, emotions, ideas, and speculations are just as real as everyday events. I believe that all the dreamers and philosophers in the world are having an influence on our present-day life.

The notion of the ivory tower, of course, takes us back to Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) who lived in a tower in Guyenne in Renaissance France. It was there that he wrote his famous collection of Essais (1580) giving us the first essays that would go on to influence countless writers from Francis Bacon and Shakespeare to Pascal, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, Sartre, Camus and Foucault along with many others.

We want bread and roses, too

What Borges has in common with Montaigne is a scepticism about things. Montaigne had made a medal with the words Que sςay-je? meaning ‘what do I know?’ in Middle French, rendered as Que sais-je? in modern French. However, Montaigne’s scepticism seeks to deal with the human condition in all its multiplicity and complexity whereas Borges’ scepticism was grounded in his conservatism. While his imaginative stories can offer a radical extension to reality, he is not seeking to change actual lived reality in any way except by offering us intellectually illuminating diversions from reality. As the song goes, ‘yes we want bread, and roses too.’ Borges certainly provides roses, but his conservatism means that the bread will always be in short supply if actual reality does not change, with only the conservatives getting the bread since they own all the bakeries.

Not for Borges the Sartrean ‘literature engagée’ that sought to make the artist politically responsible and engaged within society. Not for him the notion of the committed artist except his commitment to his craft. And not for him any Gramscian sense of being an ‘organic intellectual’ on behalf of those desperate for bread. Conservatism has and always will be about seeing that you are well catered for and keeping it that way in order to maintain such privileged status. A case of ‘I’m alright, Jorge.’

Borges did speak out against both Nazism and communism as well as anti-Semitism but seemed to revile Peronism even more. This made him somewhat ambivalent about democracy. The Peronist government punished him  for not supporting it by ‘promoting’ him from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to inspector of poultry and rabbits at a market in a suburb of Buenos Aires. He resigned immediately from the position.

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Juan Perón

The figure of Juan Perón dominated Argentinian politics and Borges detested him. He was a populist politician who was much enamoured by Italian fascism and after the Second World War he enabled former Nazis like Eichmann and Mengele to escape to Argentina along with the Croatian fascist leader of the Ustaše, Ante Pavelić. Argentina also had a sizeable Jewish population - the largest in Latin America - which Perón supported being there. He appointed several Jews to advise him and he was also an early supporter of Israel – the first Latin American nation to recognise Israel.  He actually sent his wife Evita to meet with Golda Meir.

While he was outspoken against military dictatorships saying that they fostered oppression, servitude and cruelty, he also said that ‘more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.’  This comment was addressed to the Argentine Society of Letters in 1946 but he seemed somewhat quiet on the General Videla and General Galtieri dictatorships of the 1970s and early 80s. By this time Borges had become internationally renowned and words from him could have embarrassed the junta. He did, however, quite brilliantly quip to Time Magazine in 1983 that he thought the Falklands war was akin to ‘a fight between two bald men over a comb.’ And he did sign petitions and letters condemning the military once it had fallen – but he had also accepted honours from the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

This shows that conservatives will fall in line with military juntas if their wealth and position seems in any way threatened. This is precisely what military regimes feel empowered to do. For them the problem is always with the left and any plans they may have to redistribute wealth. In our own era the key supporters of Trump and Johnson remain traditional conservatives even if these more populist leaders go along the road of becoming the uglier brands of American and British nationalism respectively.  

It draws us from our hovels

Yet the influence of Borges on Latin American literature has been immense. He was one of the first to receive international acclaim for his unique art. As Carlos Fuentes put it in 1973:

The work of Borges is the first to put us in connection, to draw us from our hovels and throw us out into the world, to which it relates us without diminishing us. It gives us reality. For the final meaning of Borges’ prose – without which there would be no modern Spanish-American novel is that it bears witness that Latin America has no language and must create one.

This is telling praise and justified. Borges did put Latin American literature on the map and this was in part achieved by his incorporation of the world into his stories. His work is peppered with references from Chinese philosophy, Jewish and Islamic mysticism and philosophies and literatures from across the world. His realm is incredibly vast. The other part concerns his craft. He manages to make the incredible seem credible, and he achieves this through a style that is relaxed and at ease with his reader. For Borges a story has to be made as plausible as it can be, because if not, the reader’s imagination would surely reject it.

Borges is often credited as being the founder of the so-called school of ‘magical realism.’ While his influence is certainly clear there are other writers who can also be mentioned in this regard. The Mexican writer Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), more generally a short story writer, found acclaim with the novel Pedro Peramo which came out in 1955. The novel describes a man’s search for his unknown father, and it is written in a haunting way as if a recurrent nightmare. Time seems to shift in one state of consciousness after another, in an almost hypnotic flow of dreams, desires and memories, in a world populated by ghosts and dominated by the figure of Pedro Peramo himself. Susan Sontag described the book as ‘one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature’ and one that could not ‘overestimate its impact on literature in Spanish.’ Both Miguel Asturias (1899-1974) and Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) said it was the novel they would have loved to have written themselves.

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Alejo Carpentier

Asturias and Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) have both had a major impact on the development of the Latin American novel and their association with magical realism. Miguel Angel Asturias was the Guatemalan Nobel laureate who, although he served his nation as foreign ambassador, wrote the trilogy El Senor Presidente (Mr President) which came out in 1946 and is a searing indictment of economic, social and political power and its privileges.

Alejo Carpentier was the living embodiment of internationalism. His father was French and his mother Russian and he was born in Switzerland. They moved to pre-revolutionary Cuba and Carpentier became involved in the Cuban Minority Group which was a forum for discussion on artistic and political matters. The group produced a manifesto which anticipated the revolution and Carpentier was briefly jailed for signing it. After moving to Europe and settling in Venezuela he returned to revolutionary Cuba and was appointed Vice-President of the National Council of Culture and Professor of the History of Culture at the University of Havana. He was also active in the National Campaign against Illiteracy and considered himself proudly Cuban.

The unexpected richness of reality

It was Carpentier who wrote the first major essay on what came to be known as magical realism. Carpentier’s term was lo real maravillosa (marvellous realism) and he wrote ‘On the Marvellous Real in Spanish America’ in 1949. In it he talks of:

an unexpected alteration of reality…an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favoured by the unexpected richness of reality.

Many of these great Latin American novelists had travelled in Europe. After Borges, Asturias and Carpentier came the likes of Fuentes, Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. They were all influenced by European, in particular Spanish literature and thought.. Carpentier was particularly attracted to surrealism and its influence can be seen in his own novels. It has been said that when Márquez was writing his landmark Cien anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967) he ripped up his first draft after reading Carpentier.

Like Asturias’ great trilogy on the abuses of power, Carpentier also explores such themes in Caribbean-set novels like El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of this World) which came out in 1949 and in El Siglo de las Luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) which was first published in 1962. His novels show much the same literary inventiveness associated with all these writers along with startling imagery and vividly described scenes.

The other aspect that never seems to get too much of a mention when scholars discuss magical realism is the nature of Latin American landscapes. What is real and unreal or surreal can be occasioned by the sun, the shimmering heat, the abundance of colour that abounds in parts of this great continent. Carpentier, in his novel Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps) which came out in 1953 introduces us to a composer from New York who goes off to the jungles of Venezuela in search of primitive musical instruments. As his journey takes him to the upper reaches of the Orinoco he becomes overwhelmed by the primordial wonder of the place. His changing levels of consciousness and understanding brought on by the magnificence of the landscape make him question his whole sense of what it is that constitutes civilisation. His American sense of this is certainly challenged and ultimately denounced. One thinks of Gauguin seeking to leave his so-called civilised France behind him as he goes in search of a newer, less contaminated and more natural world in Tahiti.

All of this is important in order to place Borges not as the father of Latin American literature – as some do – but as one parent among others. His importance is clear but it is worth stressing that artists like Asturias and Carpentier were engaged writers with genuine political commitment; they were ‘organic intellectuals’ who used their craft in support of those who could not support themselves. 

It is worth looking at a couple of stories by Borges to test some of the claims already made about his work. In The Zahir we are initially told by Borges that ‘in Buenos Aires the Zahir is an ordinary coin worth twenty centavos.’ Long before this, however, towards the end of the 18th century:

the Zahir in Guzerat was a tiger…in Java it was a blind man from the Mosque of Sukarta…in Persia it was an astrolabe which Nadir Shah caused to be sunk to the bottom of the sea …in the Mosque of Córdoba, according to Zotenburg, it was a vein in the marble of one of the twelve hundred pillars.

Such a flight of the imagination is created by the word Zahir. Borges marvels at words. They are scrutinised like a scientist, their etymologies dissected. What happens now is a series of walks around Buenos Aires and by way of various encounters he pays for things with the Zahir and receives change in the Zahir. Now he digresses and expounds philosophically on the nature of money, claims to be obsessed by the Zahir and seeks psychiatric help for his obsession. He then discovers a copy of Julius Barlach’s Urkurden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage (Breslau, 1899) which diagnoses his disease. This rare book now opens up a whole series of ‘fictions’ concerning the disease and leads him to even more obscure sources such as the Asar Nama (Book of Things Unknown) where there is the verse ‘the Zahir is the shadow of the rose, and the rending of the Veil.’

The radical extension of reality

The mention of ‘the rose’ brings to mind that wonderful novel by Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980) which was also made into a film starring Sean Connery and released in 1986. In this novel the Franciscan friar William Baskerville is sent to a medieval abbey to solve a deadly mystery. There seems a play on the friar’s surname with a clear nod to the Sherlock Holmes stories.

What is so incredible about this novel is its Borgesian atmosphere. The library is a labyrinth full of learned texts and esoteric manuscripts and the librarian, like Borges, is blind and celibate. The Franciscan librarian is actually called Jorge de Burgos which sounds not too unlike Borges’ own name. Though Eco’s work shows a whole host of influences there are clear affinities in The Name of the Rose with the following three stories by Borges – The Library of Babel, The Secret Miracle and Death and the Compass. The Borgesian atmosphere of Eco’s text can clearly be attributed to them.

Such a digression as this one is in the very nature of Borges’ own method of writing. All of Borges’ stories refer constantly to other books and texts and the reader has no way of knowing if these texts are real or not. That is precisely the point, of course, for Borges. If they seem real or are presented as real then why should they not be taken for real? This is one way he radically extends reality.

At the end of The Zahir Borges suggests in an epiphanous moment that he will:

wear away the Zahir through thinking of it again and again. Perhaps behind the coin I shall find God.

In this ‘fiction’ Borges has managed to transform an everyday, a commonplace object – a coin – into something magically, marvellously real. He has radically extended the reality of an apparently inconsequential thing into something that points to God. It is the word Zahir that has enabled him to do this; it is his love of words that allows this to happen.

In a short piece called Borges and I the writer duels with his public and private personas. The private persona he describes as liking:

Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee.

This admission concerning ‘etymologies’ lies at the heart of The Zahir and many of his other stories. This ability that Borges has in transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary can remind us of Blake’s lines at the start of Auguries of Innocence:

To see a world in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. 

While Borges can radically extend reality by magnifying the mundane, it should be recalled that it is the mundane that finds us where we invariably are. A coin can take us in an elevated direction under Borges’ art but a pot can remind us where we really are, as in Beckett’s character Watt (1953):

It remained a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which you could say Pot, pot and be comforted.

Beckett’s art, in many ways as contracted as Borges’s, shows us the existential predicament we find ourselves in whereas Borges, who also knows this, seeks to redirect his reader into fictional flights of the imagination. The key point as far as art is concerned is that both have authenticity and both can offer great insight. For Beckett writing was a compulsion to describe the mess we find ourselves in whereas for Borges, as he says in the Preface to Dr Brodie’s Report:‘writing is nothing more than a guided dream.’

The Zahir has a certain resonance with The Aleph. The former was an actual object whereas the latter is a radiance perceived in a cellar, beneath a staircase:

On the underpart of the stairs I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it spun round; then I realised this was an illusion produced by the dizzying visions contained in it. The Aleph’s diameter might be two or three centimetres, but all cosmic space was within it, actual and undiminished. Everything (a mirror glass for example) was an infinity of things, for I clearly saw everything from every angle of the Universe. I saw the teeming sea, I saw dawn at night, I saw the hordes of America, I saw a silver cobweb in the centre of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (in London). I saw endless eyes near to, watching themselves in me as in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…I felt infinite veneration, infinite compassion.

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The Aleph

The Borges who saw this vision was the same Borges who, in The Zahir, took a small coin in his change and simply extended it into another realm of being. Then he had walked the streets of Buenos Aires mourning the death of Teodelina Vilar and now in The Aleph he mourns after Beatriz. Her name reminds us of the lost love Beatrice in Dante’s La Vita Nuova (1294) where the writer sought to incarnate his intellectual vision of the universe.

The Aleph now introduces us to a secondary character, one Carlos Argentino Daneri with a name clearly at play with the name of Dante Alighieri. This character seems to be psychologically related to Borges in that he is the first cousin of the lost Beatriz and is also a librarian and a poet. It is Daneri who discovers The Aleph and it is he who shows it to our narrator, Borges. Like The Zahir earlier, The Aleph becomes something obsessive but in this story it is easily got rid of as a team of demolition men come to knock down the house and the stone in which The Aleph is set will be destroyed. Rather than wishing to fight for the survival of this wondrous radiance set in a stone Borges instead muses that it may in fact have been ‘a false Aleph.’

Our narrator then simply conjures up another Aleph. He manages to do this through his usual device of etymological indulgence with the word Aleph itself.  Off the reader goes on another journey as Borges references a wide and varied selection of books which seek to locate the true Aleph. Borges seems at one with the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu who declared, ‘The Name that can be named is not the constant name.’

Just as in the tortuous prose of Beckett, Borges keeps on writing and keeps on inventing. Both writers have searched continuously in their writing after the Golden Fleece of illumination and exit from it, and because the Fleece of ultimate reality and meaning is never found they both have no choice but to keep on writing.

Borges became totally blind by the age of 55. This was a condition he inherited from his father and it is true to say that blindness was responsible for the imagined worlds he created. In Poem of the Gifts he tells us, ‘I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.’ Libraries enable dreams to take place and it is libraries along with dreams, mirrors, labyrinths, fictional writers, philosophers and myths that Borges has constructed his canon. Reading – when he was able to – and later being read to, allowed him to use his marvellous imagination to write his unique stories.

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The self-portrait Borges drew after going blind

Even his blindness was something to be incorporated into his realm of possibilities. He said of his blindness in Seven Nights, a series of lectures he gave and published in the year he died, that his blindness 'was not a complete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many – all of them so strange that fate or chance provide.'

Many of Beckett’s characters have illnesses and infirmities and keep on going and there is a similar kind of heroism in the way that Borges kept going. To keep going is to continue the struggle and for him to have often said that he was ‘a Spencerian anarchist’ as well as being a conservative seems somewhat disappointing in such a brave and visionary individual. His Spencerian anarchism sounds a lot like many of today’s Conservatives, who claim that they believe in the individual and not the state. The Janus-headed conservatism of today with its authoritarianism on the one hand and its libertarianism on the other works only to enable those with wealth to enjoy freedom to the full. It is an exclusive ideology and Borges, who read and re-read Cervantes, should have noted the comments of Don Quixote when he said, ‘To change the world is neither a utopia nor an act of madness, it’s simply justice.’

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Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

And that is something that political conservatives simply fail to see. In the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Borges is at his most indulgent. The story is essentially a piece of science fiction, in that it takes us to a completely different planet called Tlön. Borges has gone on this encyclopaedic journey with his collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares and they discover that the inhabitants of this place believe in a form of subjective idealism that denies the existence of objects and they speak in a language without nouns. The people here also understand a totally different concept of time. Philosophical ideas are turned on their heads in this place and we find that Tlön, through a kind of wish-fulfilment of its inhabitants, has managed to supplant the earlier world of Uqbar and now Tlön is inflicting its alien ideas on planet Earth because our world is becoming idealistic and receptive to such alien ideas.

The backdrop to the story was obviously the Nazism and Stalinism of the 20th century but Borges, like so many conservatives before and after him, seems to possess the same affliction as the Tlönites themselves. He singularly failed to see that it is the idealism of market forces that gives rise to the chaos of our world. Conservatives like to imagine that it is forces on the left who are ideological and that they are not. Conservatives often claim that they are not even political and that to be political you must be on the left. We have all met people and engaged in discussion with them and when a political issue arises out of that discussion they invariably say something like, ’Well, I am not really political myself’ or ‘ I don’t really know very much about politics myself’ thus tacitly admitting to their unquestioning adherence to conservative thought. Borges certainly fell short in this area.

A final word on labyrinths. Queen Pasiphae, in the ancient Greek myth, slept with a bull sent by Zeus and she gave birth to Minotaur, a creature that was half-man and half-bull. King Minos, though deeply embarrassed, did not wish to kill the Minotaur so he hid it in a labyrinth that was constructed by Daedalus at the Minoan Palace of Knossos. It was Theseus who volunteered to kill the Minotaur and the woman he loved, Princess Ariadne, gave him a long thread to take with him so that he could exit the labyrinth if he did manage to kill the Minotaur. He was successful in both killing the monster and in finding love.

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The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths, by Nima Abadeh

We are all walking through a labyrinth called life and it constantly poses problems for us. We have often lost our way, but we keep going because we have to. Which direction should we take? Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken is a similar form of this metaphor. We could equally say that politically we need to find a way out of our troubles. Though this was not envisaged by Borges because, as a bourgeois conservative, his troubles were few economically speaking. However, it is an ingenious metaphor to use for his fictions because they take us on mysterious journeys that radically extend reality – and such stories are the welcome roses we all need.

His English collection of his stories was called Labyrinths and came out in 1962. The title was apt when we consider how often labyrinths are used in his work. In the story Ibn-Hakim Al- Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth we are told:

There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

In Marquez’s novel El General en Su Laberinto (The General in his Labyrinth) the Great Liberator of the South American continent, Simón Bolívar, is facing death. He cuts a lonely, tragic figure as all his amazing triumphs lie in his past. He looks back while hearing news of the opportunist generals and emerging bourgeoisie who seek to carve out for themselves chunks of a continent he had hoped to unite into one great nation. Bolívar, knowing he is dying, dictates his last will and testament and then his doctor insists that he confess and receive the sacraments. Bolívar reportedly said ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?’

Capitalism is never happy with the past

Right at the independent birth of this continent, its greatest leader Simón Bolívar uses the word labyrinth. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998) also uses the word in his deeply penetrating study of his nation’s psyche in the work called El Labertino de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude 1950, revised 1959). This radically humane and intellectually rich study of his nation concludes along the following lines:

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.

In this essay Paz is attempting to unravel the internal solitude that seems to inhabit the everyday temperament of his fellow citizens, despite the lively siesta celebrations that may occur. His analysis could apply not just to Mexico but to the entire continent of South America and, indeed, to the rest of the world:

The past has left us as orphans, as it has the rest of the planet, and we must join together in inventing our common future. World history has become everyone’s task, and our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of all mankind.

Capitalism is never happy with the past and seeks to eradicate the historic memory of all peoples so that they can simply enjoy as many commodities as they can buy, such as Coca-Cola or Pepsi along with a bigger and bigger Big Mac. This is the freedom that Capital speaks of and if you cannot buy such commodities you are not a victim, but a loser.

Borges, who admired America, never dealt with the historic pain of his continent nor with the psyche that emerged from conquest, colonialism, national liberation and the neo-colonialism of giant conglomerates who continued the plunder and pillage. That was left to some of the writers already mentioned and also to two seminal works by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) in Canto General (1950) and by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) in Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America 1971).

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Pablo Neruda 

What Neruda does in poetry Galeano writes in prose. Both works look at this magnificent continent before Columbus and before conquest, then during and after conquest and consider the ongoing exploitation of the lands that make up South America. Borges, while disagreeing with Neruda’s communism, was nonetheless generous enough to admit that Neruda was a better poet than himself and called him a great poet. Márquez went further and in The Fragrance of Guava, 1983 called him ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century, in any language.’

The veins that Galeano refers to in his title are the veins of gold, silver, cocoa, cotton, rubber, coffee, fruit, sugar, oil, iron, tin, copper and nitrates that guaranteed the riches of the continent went elsewhere. The subtitle to Galeano’s book is Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent and it is that historic memory that writers have to address in order for any radical movement to emerge in the future.

Interestingly, Asturias, Fuentes, Paz and Neruda were all ambassadors in Paris at certain times. Paz had also been ambassador to India and Neruda had spent time as the Chilean ambassador in Burma and Indonesia. They were all international figures of world renown, yet it seems that the customary Eurocentrism seeks to see them simply as Latin American writers, when their influence has been global. The work of Borges has obviously been enormously significant in drawing attention to Latin American literature and along with the ‘magical realist’ writers already mentioned we would have to add Isabel Allende of Chile, Jorge Amado of Brazil, Hanuki Murakami of Japan, Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino of Italy, Toni Morrison of America, and Salman Rushdie of England together with a number of Bengali writers who all show an enormous debt to the magical realist style of writing.   

We can also find magical realism in the paintings of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Edward Hopper (1882- 1967) and Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986). This is a major achievement for a subjugated continent, and it shows that all life wherever it is lived can be magical and strange, nightmarish and wonderful. In this regard it remains somehow magically real that the greatest export from Cuba is not tobacco but her doctors.

Borges died in Geneva in 1986. His funeral service was an ecumenical one presided over by a Catholic priest in memory of his mother, and a Protestant pastor in memory of his English grandmother. Father Jacquet spoke of a man ‘full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins.’ Pastor de Montmollin took as his text St John’s Gospel. He said that no-one can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. He concluded by saying ‘It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him.’

Borges could not have put it better himself.

Guernica, by Pablo Picasso
Saturday, 05 October 2024 13:51

Communism by way of the poem

Published in Poetry

Alain Badiou writes about the links between poetry and communism, with particular reference to the poetry of the Spanish Civil War.


In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Eduardo Sanguinetti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world.

Can we understand this link between poetic commitment and communist commitment as a simple illusion? An error, or an errancy? An ignorance of the ferocity of states ruled by communist parties? I do not believe so. I wish to argue, on the contrary, that there exists an essential link between poetry and communism, if we understand ‘communism’ closely in its primary sense: the concern for what is common to all. A tense, paradoxical, violent love of life in common; the desire that what ought to be common and accessible to all should not be appropriated by the servants of Capital. The poetic desire that the things of life would be like the sky and the earth, like the water of the oceans and the brush fires on a summer night – that is to say, would belong by right to the whole world.

Poets are communist for a primary reason, which is absolutely essential: their domain is language, most often their native tongue. Now, language is what is given to all from birth as an absolutely common good. Poets are those who try to make a language say what it seems incapable of saying. Poets are those who seek to create in language new names to name that which, before the poem, has no name. And it is essential for poetry that these inventions, these creations, which are internal to language, have the same destiny as the mother tongue itself: for them to be given to all without exception. The poem is a gift of the poet to language. But this gift, like language itself, is destined to the common – that is, to this anonymous point where what matters is not one person in particular but all, in the singular.

Thus, the great poets of the twentieth century recognized in the grandiose revolutionary project of communism something that was familiar to them – namely that, as the poem gives its inventions to language and as language is given to all, the material world and the world of thought must be given integrally to all, becoming no longer the property of a few but the common good of humanity as a whole.

This is why the poets have seen in communism above all a new figure of the destiny of the people. And ‘people’, here, means first and foremost the poor people, the workers, the abandoned women, the landless peasants. Why? Because it is first and foremost to those who have nothing that everything must be given. It is to the mute, to the stutterer, to the stranger, that the poem must be offered, and not to the chatterbox, to the grammarian, or to the nationalist. It is to the proletarian – whom Marx defined as those who have nothing except their own body capable of work – that we must give the entire earth, as well as all the books, and all the music, and all the paintings, and all the sciences. What is more, it is to them, to the proletarians in all their forms, that the poem of communism must be offered.

What is striking is that this should lead all those poets to rediscover a very old poetic form: the epic. The communists’ poem is first the epic of the heroism of the proletarians. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet thus distinguishes lyric poems, dedicated to love, from epic poems, dedicated to the action of the popular masses. But even a poet as wise and as hermetic as César Vallejo does not hesitate to write a poem with the title, ‘Hymn to the Volunteers of the Republic’. Such a title evidently belongs to the order of the commemoration of war, to epic commitment.

These communist poets rediscover what in France Victor Hugo had already discovered: the duty of the poet is to look in language for the new resources of an epic that would no longer be that of the aristocracy of knights but the epic of the people in the process of creating another world. The fundamental link organized into song by the poet is the one that the new politics is capable of founding between, on the one hand, the misery and extreme hardship of life, the horror of oppression, everything that calls for our pity, and, on the other hand, the levying, the combat, the collective thought, the new world – and, thus, everything that calls for our admiration.

It is of this dialectic of compassion and admiration, of this violently poetic opposition between debasement and levying, of this reversal of resignation into heroism, that the communist poets seek the living metaphor, the nonrealist representation, the symbolic power. They search for the words to express the moment in which the eternal patience of the oppressed of all times changes into a collective force which is indivisibly that of raised bodies and shared thoughts.

The Spanish Civil War and Poetry

That is why one moment – a singular historic moment – has been sung by all the communist poets who wrote between the 1920s and 1940s: the moment of the civil war in Spain, which as you know ran from 1936 to 1939.

Let us observe that the Spanish civil war is certainly the historic event that has most intensely mobilized all the artists and intellectuals of the world. On one hand, the personal commitment of writers from all ideological tendencies on the side of the republicans, including therefore the communists, is remarkable: whether we are dealing with organized communists, social democrats, mere liberals, or even fervent Catholics, such as the French writer Georges Bernanos, the list is extraordinary if we gather all those who publicly spoke out, who went to Spain in the midst of the war, or even entered into combat on the side of the republican forces. On the other hand, the number of masterpieces produced on this occasion is no less astonishing. I have already noted as much for poetry. But let us also think of the splendid painting by Pablo Picasso that is titled Guernica; let us think of two of the greatest novels in their genre: Man’s Hope by André Malraux and For Whom the Bell Tolls by the American Ernest Hemingway. The frightening and bloody civil war in Spain has illuminated the art of the world for several years.

I see at least four reasons for this massive and international commitment of intellectuals on the occasion of the war in Spain.

First, in the 1930s the world found itself in a vast ideological and political crisis. Public opinion sensed more and more that this crisis could not have a peaceful ending, no legal or consensual solution. The horizon was a fearsome one of internal and external warfare. Among intellectuals, the tendency was to choose between two absolutely contrary orientations: the fascist and the communist orientations. During the war in Spain, this conflict took the form of civil war pure and simple. Spain had become the violent emblem of the central ideological conflict of the time. This is what we might call the symbolic and therefore universal value of this war.

Second, during the Spanish war, the occasion arose for artists and intellectuals all over the world not only to show their support for the popular camp, but also to participate directly in combat. Thus what had been an opinion changed into action; what had been a form of solidarity became a form of fraternity.

Third, the war in Spain took on a fierceness that hit people over the head. Misery and destruction were present everywhere. The systematic massacre of prisoners, the indiscriminate bombing of villages, the relentlessness of both camps: all this gave people an idea of what could be and what in fact was to be the worldwide conflict to which the war in Spain was the prologue.

Fourth, the Spanish war was the strongest moment, perhaps unique in the history of the world, of the realization of the great Marxist project: that of a truly internationalist revolutionary politics. We should remember what the intervention of the International Brigades meant: they showed that the vast international mobilization of minds was also, and before anything, an international mobilization of peoples. I am thinking of the example of France: thousands of workers, often communists, had come as volunteers to do battle in Spain. But there were also Americans, Germans, Italians, Russians, people from all countries. This exemplary international dedication, this vital internationalist subjectivity, is perhaps the most striking accomplishment of what Marx had thought, which can be summarized in two phrases: negatively, the proletarians have no fatherland, their political homeland is the whole world of living men and women; positively, international organization is what allows for the confrontation and in the end the real victory over the enemy of all, the capitalist camp, including in its extreme form, which is fascism.

Thus, the communist poets had found major subjective reasons in the Spanish war for renewing epic poetry in the direction of a popular epic – one that was both that of the suffering of peoples and that of their internationalist heroism, organized and combative.

Already the titles of the poems or collections of poems are significant. They indicate almost always a kind of sensible reaction of the poet, a kind of shared suffering with the horrible fate and hardship reserved for the Spanish people. Thus, Pablo Neruda’s collection bears the title Spain in Our Hearts. This goes to show that the first commitment of the poet is an affective, subjective, immediate solidarity with the Spanish people at war. Similarly, the very beautiful title of César Vallejo’s collection is Spain, Take This Cup from Me. This title indicates that, for the poet, the sense of shared suffering becomes its own poetic ordeal, which is almost impossible to bear.

However, both poets will develop this first personal and affective impulse almost in the opposite direction – that of a creative use of suffering itself, that of an unknown liberty. This unknown liberty is precisely that of the reversal of misery into heroism, the reversal of a particular anxiety-ridden situation into a universal promise of emancipation. Here is how César Vallejo puts it, with his mysterious metaphors, in Hymn to the Volunteers of the Republic:

Proletarian who dies of the universe, in what frantic harmony
your grandeur will end, your extreme poverty, your impelling whirlpool,
your methodical violence, your theoretical & practical chaos, your Dantesque
wish, so very Spanish, to love, even treacherously, your enemy!

Liberator wrapped in shackles,
without whose labour extension would still be without handles ,
the nails would wander headless,
the day, ancient, slow, reddish,
our beloved helmets, unburied!
peasant fallen with your green foliage for man,
with the social inflection of your little finger,
with your ox that stays, with your physics,
also with your word tied to a stick
& your rented sky
& with the clay inserted in your tiredness
& with that in your fingernail, walking!
Agricultural
builders, civilian & military,
of the active, ant-swarming eternity: it was written
that you will create the light, half-closing
your eyes in death;
that, at the cruel fall of your mouths,
abundance will come on seven platters, everything
in the world will be of sudden gold
& the gold,
fabulous beggars for your own secretion of blood,
& the gold itself will then be made of gold!

You see how death itself – the death in combat of the volunteers of the Spanish people – becomes a construction; better yet, a kind of nonreligious eternity, an earthly eternity. The communist poet can say this: ‘Agricultural builders, civilian & military, of the active, ant-swarming eternity’. This eternity is that of the real truth, the real life, wrested away from the cruel powers that be. It changes everything into the gold of true life. Even the accursed gold of the rich and the oppressors will simply become once more what it is: ‘the gold itself will then be made of gold’.

We might say that, in the ordeal of the Spanish war, communist poetry sings of the world that has returned to what it really is – the world-truth, which can be born forever, when hardship and death change into paradoxical heroism. This is what César Vallejo will say later on by invoking the ‘victim in a column of victors’, and when he exclaims that ‘in Spain, in Madrid, the command is to kill, volunteers who fight for life!’

Pablo Neruda, as I have mentioned, likewise starts out from pain, misery and compassion. Thus, in the great epic poem titled ‘Arrival in Madrid of the International Brigade’, he begins by saying that ‘Spanish death, more acrid and sharper than other deaths, filled fields up to then honoured by wheat.’ But the poet is most sensitive to the internationalism of the arrival in Spain from all over the world of those whom he directly calls ‘comrades’. Let us listen to the poem of this arrival:

Comrades,
then
I saw you,
and my eyes are even now filled with pride
because through the misty morning I saw you reach
the pure brow of Castile
silent and firm
like bells before dawn,
filled with solemnity and blue-eyed, come from far,
far away,
come from your corners, from your lost fatherlands,
from your dreams,
covered with burning gentleness and guns
to defend the Spanish city in which besieged liberty
could fall and die bitten by the beasts.

Brothers,
from now on
let your pureness and your strength, your solemn story
be known by children and by men, by women and by old men,
let it reach all men without hope, let it go down to the mines
corroded by sulphuric air
let it mount the inhuman stairways of the slave,
let all the stars, let all the flowers of Castile
and of the world
write your name and your bitter struggle
and your victory strong and earthen as a red oak.
Because you have revived with your sacrifice
lost faith, absent heart, trust in the earth,
and through your abundance, through your nobility, through
your dead,
as if through a valley of harsh bloody rocks,
flows an immense river with doves of steel and of hope.

What we see this time is first the evidence of fraternity. The word ‘comrades’ is followed later on by the word ‘brothers’. This fraternity puts forward not so much the changing of the real world as the changing of subjectivity. Certainly, at first, all these international communist militants have come ‘from far’, ‘from your corners’, ‘from your lost fatherlands’. But above all they have come from their ‘dreams covered with burning gentleness and guns’. You will note the typical proximity of gentleness and violence. This will be repeated with the image of a ‘dove of steel’: combat is the building not of naked violence, not of power, but of a subjectivity capable of confronting the long run because it has confidence in itself.

The workers and intellectuals of the international brigades, mixed together, have given new birth to ‘lost faith, absent heart, trust in the earth’. Because we are at war, the dove of peace must be a dove of steel, but it is also and above all, says the poem, a dove of hope. In the end, the epic of war that Neruda celebrates, what he calls ‘your victory strong and earthen as a red oak’, is above all the creation of a new confidence or trust. The point is to escape from nihilistic resignation. And this constructive value of communist confidence, I believe, is also needed today.

The French poet Paul Eluard picks up on two of the motifs that we have seen so far, and mixes them together. On one hand, as César Vallejo says, the international volunteers of the Spanish war represent a new humanity, simply because they are true human beings, and not the false humanity of the capitalist world, competitive and obsessed with money and commodities. On the other hand, as Pablo Neruda says, these volunteers transform the surrounding nihilism into a new confidence. A stanza of the poem ‘The Victory of Guernica’ says this with precision:

True men for whom despair
Feeds the devouring fire of hope
Let us open together the last bud of the future.

However, in the Spanish war Eluard is sensitive to another factor with universal value. For him, as for Rousseau, humanity is fundamentally good natured, with a good nature that is being destroyed by oppression through competition, forced labour, money. This fundamental goodness of the world resides in the people, in their obstinate life, in the courage to live that is theirs. The poem begins as follows:

Fair world of hovel
Of the mine and fields.

Eluard thinks that women and children especially incarnate this universal good nature, this subjective treasure that finally is what men are trying to defend in the war in Spain:

VIII
Women and children have the same riches
Of green leaves of spring and pure milk
And endurance
In their pure eyes.

IX
Women and children have the same riches
In their eyes
Men defend them as they can.
X
Women and children have the same red roses
In their eyes
They show each their blood.
XI
The fear and the courage to live and to die
Death so difficult and so easy.

The Spanish war, for Eluard, reveals what simple riches are at the disposal of human life. This is why extreme oppression and war are also the revelation of the fact that men must guard the riches of life. And to do so you must keep the trust, even when the enemy is crushing you, imposing on you the easiness of death. We clearly sense that this trust is communism itself. This is why the poem is titled ‘The Victory of Guernica’. The destruction of this town by German bombers, the 2,000 dead of this first savage experience that announces the world war: all this will also be a victory, if people continue to be confident that the riches of simple life are indestructible. This is why the poem concludes as follows:

Outcasts the death the ground the hideous sight
Of our enemies have the dull
Colour of our night
Despite them we shall overcome.

Poetic communism

This is what we can call poetic communism: to sing the certainty that humanity is right to create a world in which the treasure of simple life will be preserved peacefully, and that, because it has reason on its side, humanity will impose this reason, and its reason will overcome its enemies. This link between popular life, political reason and confidence in victory: that is what Eluard seeks to confer, in language, upon the suffering and heroism of the Spanish war.

Nâzim Hikmet, in the truly beautiful poem titled ‘It Is Snowing in the Night’, will in turn traverse all these themes of communist poetics, starting out from a subjective identification. He imagines a sentry from the popular camp at the gates of Madrid. This sentinel, this lonely man – just as the poet is always alone in the work of language – carries inside him, fragile and threatened, everything the poet desires, everything that according to him gives meaning to existence. Thus, a lonely man at the gates of Madrid is in charge of the dreams of all of humanity:

It is snowing in the night,
You are at the door of Madrid.
In front of you an army
Killing the most beautiful things we own,
Hope, yearning, freedom and children,
The City …

You see how all the Spanish themes of communist poetics return: the volunteer of the Spanish war is the guardian of universal revolutionary hope. He finds himself at night, in the snow, trying to prohibit the killing of hope.

Nâzim Hikmet’s singular achievement no doubt consists in finding the profound universality of nostalgic yearning in this war. Communist poetics cannot be reduced to a vigorous and solid certainty of victory. It is also what we might call the nostalgia of the future. The hymn to the sentry of Madrid is related to this truly peculiar sentiment: the nostalgia for a grandeur and a beauty that nevertheless have not yet been created. Communism here works in the future anterior: we experience a kind of poetic regret for what we imagine the world will have been when communism has come. Therein lies the force of the conclusion of Hikmet’s poem:

I know,
everything great and beautiful there is,
everything great and beautiful man has still to create
that is, everything my nostalgic soul hopes for
smiles in the eyes
of the sentry at the door of Madrid.
And tomorrow, like yesterday, like tonight
I can do nothing else but love him.

You can hear that strange mixture of the present, of the past and future that the poem crystallizes in the imagined character of the solitary sentry, confronted with the fascist army, in the night and snow of Madrid. There is already nostalgia for what true humanity, the combatant people of Madrid, is capable of creating in terms of beauty and grandeur. If the people are capable of creating this, then humanity will certainly create it. And, then, we can have the nostalgia for that which the world would be if this possible creation had already taken place. Thus, communist poetry is not only epic poetry of combat, historic poetry of the future, affirmative poetry of confidence. It is also lyric poetry of what communism, as the figure of humanity reconciled with its own grandeur, will have been after victory, which for the poet is already regret and melancholy as well as ‘nostalgic hope’ of his soul, past as well as future, nostalgia as well as hope.

With regard to the Spanish civil war properly speaking, Bertolt Brecht also committed himself by writing a didactic play, Señora Carrar’s Rifles, which is devoted to the interior debate over the need to participate in the right battle, whatever the excellent reasons may be to stay at a safe remove.

But perhaps the most important aspect is the following: as the independent communist that he has always been, Brecht is the contemporary of very serious and bloody defeats of the communist cause. He has been directly present and active in the moment of the defeat of German communism in the face of the Nazis. And of course he has also been the contemporary of the terrible defeat of Spanish communism in the face of Franco’s military fascism. But one of the tasks that Brecht has always assigned to himself as a poet is to give poetic support to confidence, to political confidence, even in the worst of all conditions, when the defeat is at its most terrifying. Here we rediscover the motif of confidence, as that which the poem must stir up based on the reversal of compassion into admiration, and of resignation into heroism.

To this subjective task Brecht devoted some of his most beautiful poems, in which the almost abstract focus of the topic aims to produce an enthusiasm of sorts. I am thinking of the end of the poem ‘InPraise of Dialectics’, in which we again find the temporal metamorphoses that I have already talked about – the future that becomes the past, the present that is reduced to the power of the future – all of which makes a poem out of the way in which political subjectivity supports a highly complex connection to historical becoming. Brecht, for his part, in Lob der Dialektik, poeticizes the refusal of powerlessness in the name of the future’s presence in the present itself:

Who dares say: never?
On who does it depend if oppression remains? On us.
On who does it depend if its thrall is broken? Also on us.
Whoever has been beaten down must rise up!
Whoever is lost must fight back!
Whoever has recognized his condition – how can anyone stop him?
Because the vanquished of today are tomorrow’s victors
And never will become: already today!

Must we, too, not desire that ‘never’ become ‘already today’? They pretend to chain us to the financial necessities of Capital. They pretend that we ought to obey today so that tomorrow may exist. They pretend that the communist Idea is dead forever, after the disaster of Stalinism. But must we not in turn ‘recognize [our] condition’? Why do we accept a world in which one percent of the global population possesses 47 per cent of the world’s wealth, and in which 10 per cent possesses 86 per cent of the world’s wealth? Must we accept that the world is organized by such terrible inequalities? Must we think that nothing will ever change this? Must we think that the world will forever be organized by private property and the ferocity of monetary competition?

Poetry always says what is essential. Communist poetry from the 1930s and 1940s recalls for us that the essential aspect of communism, or of the communist Idea, is not and never has been the ferocity of a state, the bureaucracy of a party, or the stupidity of blind obedience. These poems tell us that the communist Idea is the compassion for the simple life of the people afflicted by inequality and injustice – that it is the broad vision of a raising up, both in thought and in practice, which is opposed to resignation and changes it into a patient heroism. It tells us that this patient heroism is aimed at the collective construction of a new world, with the means of a new thinking about what politics might be. And it recalls for us, with the riches of its images and metaphors, with the rhythm and musicality of its words, that communism in its essence is the political projection of the riches of the life of all.

Brecht saw all this very clearly, too. He is opposed to the tragic and monumental vision of communism. Yes, there is an epic poetry of communism, but it is the patient epic, which is heroic for its very patience, of all those who gather and organize themselves to heal the world of its deadly diseases that are injustice and inequality; and to do so requires going to the root of things: limit private property, end the violent separation of the power of the state, overcome the division of labour. This, Brecht tells us, is not an apocalyptic vision. On the contrary, it is what is normal and sensible, reflecting the average desire of all. This is why the communist poem recalls for us that sickness and violence are on the side of the capitalist and imperialist world as we know it, and not on the side of the calm, normal and average grandeur of the communist Idea. This is what Brecht is going to tell us in a poem that carries the absolutely surprising title, ‘Communism is the Middle Term’:

To call for the overthrow of the existing order
May seem a terrible thing
But what exists is no order.
To seek refuge in violence
May seem evil.
But what is constantly at work is violence
And there is nothing special about it.
Communism is not the extreme outlier
That only in a small part can be realized,
and until it is not completely realized,
The situation is unbearable
Even for someone who is insensitive.
Communism is really the most minimal demand
What is nearest, reasonable, the middle term.
Whoever is opposed to it is not someone who thinks otherwise
It is someone who does not think or who thinks only about himself
It is an enemy of the human species who,
Terrible
Evil
Insensitive
And, in particular,
Wanting the most extreme, realized even in the tiniest part,
Plunges all humankind into destruction.

Thus, communist poetry presents us with a peculiar epic: the epic of the minimal demand, the epic of what is never extreme nor monstrous. Communist poetry, with its resource of gentleness combined with that of enthusiasm, tells us: rise up with the will to think and act so that the world may be offered to all as the world that belongs to all, just as the poem in language offers to all the common world that is always contained therein, even if in secret. There have been and continue to be all kinds of discussions about the communist hypothesis: in philosophy, sociology, economics, history, political science. But I have wanted to tell you that there exists a proof of communism by way of the poem.

Translated by Bruno Bosteels. This essay is from The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, by Alain Badiou, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2014). Thanks to Alain Badiou and Verso Books for permission to republish this essay.