That was great. Now I will have to find his books. Mike. > On Apr 14, 2021, at 8:04 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The Nation, April 14, 2021 > > B. Traven: Fiction’s Forgotten Radical > The enigmatic author’s anarcho-communist politics seep into his novels about > wage labor, class consciousness, and the violence of capital. > By Clinton Williamson > > In England, Germany, the U.S.A., everywhere it is the police who do the > whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who sit > smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks the table, > overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments. > > —B. Traven, The Cotton-Pickers > > The first novel by B. Traven appeared as a serialization in Vorwärts, the > newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in 1925. Originally > titled Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton-Pickers), it was renamed Der Wobbly > (The Wobbly), after the popular appellation for members of the radical > American syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World, in its initial > book printing in 1926. The novel follows Gerard Gales, an unemployed, > itinerant American in Mexico who peripatetically moves from cotton picking to > drilling in the oil fields to baking to driving cattle. Throughout, Traven’s > narrator barely manages to stay ahead of total immiseration. The only jobs to > be had are those which pay the least, if at all, and require the hardest > exertion. By the time one job pays out, the money ends up spent in trying to > find Gales’s next position. Consequently, labor agitation on behalf of better > pay and conditions seems to follow Gales from job to job, though Gales > himself is never the one to evangelize to the workers as some heroic voice of > class consciousness. > > BOOKS IN REVIEW > THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE > By B. Traven > > Traven’s novel depicts radicalism as an atmospheric presence, absorbed via > osmosis, alive wherever the exploited gather outside of the boss’s earshot. > The workers herein, an international and multiracial conglomerate of Black, > Chinese, Mexican, Indigenous, and white characters, share a mutual discontent > for the class of property owners who can always cheaply buy the degrading and > difficult labor of the desperate. In this novel we see the struggles against > capitalism, racism, and imperialism Traven would depict over the rest of his > literary career, returning to the plight of those inextricably caught in the > brutal cycles of precarious life on the margins of wage labor. > > Despite writing a remarkably diverse body of work focused upon the multiple, > intersecting freedom struggles of the poor, nearly every discussion of B. > Traven begins with the enigma of his identity. Too often, critical > engagements with his work have ended on this point. The man behind the > pseudonym sent his manuscripts from and received his royalty checks in > Mexico, living there from at least 1924 through 1969. According to an > anarchist comrade, Erich Mühsam, and decades later seconded by Traven > biographer Rolf Recknagel, he most likely was Ret Marut, a German stage actor > and anarcho-communist writer who briefly served as the director of the press > division of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. Marut narrowly escaped > execution by the Freikorps following its vicious reprisals carried out in the > wake of the Bavarian Soviet Republic’s overthrow. It appears that Ret Marut, > too, was also a pseudonym, just like Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, two other > identities he seems to have adopted while in Mexico. > > He may have been born in Chicago, as he often claimed, though at other times > he said San Francisco. His novels were most likely written in German and > translated into English, even as he stated that the reverse was true. > Traven’s widow, Rosa Elena Lujan, claimed that he was at least Marut, > Torsvan, and Croves, and provided the most compelling rationale for his > biographical instability, telling The New York Times in 1990 that her husband > never knew the circumstances of his birth and feared extradition to Germany. > Lacking a definitive narrative of his origin, Traven merely wrote and rewrote > his own life as a perpetual evasion. That the mystery of authorial biography > has loomed omnipresent over his textual corpus is made especially ironic by > the fact that Traven’s pursuit of anonymity appears directly tied to the his > novels’ leftist politics, continually focusing narrative attention upon the > ragged, the downtrodden, the homeless, the vagabond, and the stateless. > Traven’s particular brand of anarcho-communism resists the heroic individual > to such a degree that it even seeks to evade the capture of authorhood, > casting it as one more authority to be kicked against. > > Traven’s second novel, Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship), also published in > 1926, follows Gerard Gales again, who is now a sailor who loses his identity > documents and ends up caught in a hellish bureaucratic maze before being > relegated to hiring himself out as a stateless employee aboard a ship with > horrendously exploitative labor conditions. “Every age has its Inquisition,” > Gales muses at one point. “Our age has the passport to make up for the > tortures of medieval times. And unemployment.” His most famous novel remains > his third, 1927’s Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (The Treasure of the Sierra > Madre), a story of unemployed Americans in Mexico making a go of gold mining, > and it was quietly reissued by Picador last year. The novel’s fame is due in > no small part to John Huston’s 1948 film adaptation, which stars Humphrey > Bogart and won three Academy Awards. Like much of Traven’s work, The Treasure > of the Sierra Madre often falls under the classification of the adventure > novel, even as it frequently negates the genre’s conventions. > > The work opens upon an unemployed beggar, Dobbs, who takes off to find work > in the oil fields of Túxpam only to discover they have gone bust. When he > eventually finds employment from an American rigging a new oil camp, he and > his coworkers find themselves stiffed of their wages. The only adventure > found here is in surviving the capitalist’s capacity to exploit. Eventually, > Dobbs, along with a coworker who had also been cheated and an old prospector, > head off to hunt for gold, yet we do not see any fantastic bonanza so much as > endless drudgery and the logistical challenges of transporting their > treasure. Even as the work eventually takes up familiar narrative pathways > (greed and paranoia appear and, in an ironic twist, the gold is lost), Traven > steadfastly attends to the underlying problem of work, whereby nothing can be > extracted without loss: “Gold is for thieves and swindlers. For this reason > they own most of it. The rest is owned by those who do not care where the > gold comes from or in what sort of hands it has been.” In Traven’s world of > stultifying, piecemeal employment, solidarity and resistance hold out the > only assurances against deprivation, as no bootstraps are made strong enough > for the myth of individual success to ring true. > > What most intrigues about B. Traven, what ties his work so irrevocably to our > present moment, is precisely that which is not mysterious about his work at > all. The boom/bust cycles of fossil fuel extraction, the exploitative > conditions of service work, global shipping, and farm labor, Indigenous > dispossession, the bureaucratic horrors meted out upon the sans-papiers, and > the cyclical traps of un(der)employment all mark sites of struggle nearly a > century later. We know these all too well. His novels remain absent of any > utopianism, instead depicting the resiliency of those relegated to the harsh > peripheries of capital accumulation and the possible gains made through > collective action and internationalism. Traven hid himself and, in so doing, > made the violence of the capitalist world-system all the easier to see. > > Clinton Williamsonis a PhD candidate in English at the University of > Pennsylvania, specializing in 19th and 20th century American literature. > >
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#8002): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8002 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82089175/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
