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preface The Observatory (1967) is a book about political commitment and liberation. Perhaps the political commitment of intellectuals is always full of anomalies and contradictions, a streaking ahead, or a sideline scepticism. This novel, written as the year 1968 was in view and gathering brightly on the horizon, reflects the high season of Guevara in Bolivia, and the attempts to insert a revolutionary ‘foco’ in places where objective conditions were politically ripe, but where the subjective element, and the most rudimentary organisation, were absent.* The subjective factor, it seemed, could be supplied by the guerrilla intellectual, expansively supplied with visionary enthusiasm – entering the scene like a space traveller, able to ignite the revolutionary straw and engage armies, but also too respectful to damage the traditions and culture of those who were to be liberated. This, like the book, was a fantasy, but a fantasy of the real. The Observatory exaggerates only in the emphasis it gives to the incongruous aspects of this inspiration, where the would-be, self-transforming saviour pays with his life (and that of his comrades) in a situation where rectitude is on his side but the situation quite beyond his reach. Instead of violence, this political fable presents organisation, as against movimentismo, as a possible vehicle for the chiliastic transformation. If the theme is now read as wishful thinking or escapism, it might be more respectful to consider the recent history and the present, of the territories that lie from Eastern Turkey through Iran, Afghanistan, and into Middle Asia. The ‘peasant Marxism’ inspiring the narrative is as distant now as when the book was written, but one may ask if the ‘revolutions’ and repressions in the area, under their many different banners, have advanced the cause of political and cultural liberation outlined here. Certainly what is now absent is the commitment, however incongruous, of the analytical intellectual, who came from afar, and found a willing audience. July
2010 ‘Are they willing to lose all the comforts and charms of our
existence, to have barbarian youth rather than civilized senility, untilled
soil and virgin forests instead of exhausted fields and artificial parkland?
Will they demolish their ancestral castle for the sole pleasure of helping
lay the foundations of a new house which will be built, no doubt, long after
our day?’ A. Herzen, From the Other Shore. Year lvii of the Republic. |