ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism (1st series), No.37, June/July 1969, p.39.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Aden Arabie
Paul Nizan
Monthly Review Press, 50s
A Marxist travelogue? What Nizan could have done for Zoo Time. Nizan’s journey was recorded nearly forty years ago. It has not been superceded like some dated guidebook, although it has been suppressed through slander. For him, there is only one valid kind of travel, and that the journey toward man. His book is a record of his path to revolutionary socialism. Its very value lies in that his was a roundabout route. Nizan opens his book with a superb lambast of the squalid quacks who so successfully masquerade as top-class athletes of the idea. As a student at one of the foremost institutes of the mind, he and fellows found they were running under the blows of a whip they had never seen.
‘Since, we did not know about our companions in revolt, buried in the countryside and in the furnished rooms of Billancourt, our only thought was to run away. They stayed where they were, condemned to a slavery that was harder because it was also the slavery of the body ... But we, from the depths of our bourgeois lives, how were we to guess that the foundations of our fear and slavery lay in the factories, the banks, the barracks, the police stations, in all the places that were unknown territory to us?’
Thus the possibility of the false solutions, where the compass, flight, a change in geographical location, point to release. Nizan’s sharpness allows, him, in a moment of humour now become sad, to anticipate later variations on these absurd and tragic solutions.
‘All that is left to be done is to conjugate the remaining utopias in the future tense, to bury them in the shining time to come, to invent, for the consolation of urban populations, the Never Land of the inner life.’
Nizan hit out for Aden. For only experience could teach the man he was that ‘moving through immense, anonymous space is no remedy for disorders that do not have spatial dimensions’.
Aden was to be his optician. It was a concentrated Europe – no mists to shroud reality, no attempts at justification of methodical exploitation. This was kept for European workers.
Nizan’s book is raw, out to the bone, full of a savage humour. It is an announcement of return, and a declaration of war. On leaving Aden, he thought of Europe in another way.
‘Europe is not a corpse, it is a tree trunk that has put out adventitious roots all around it, like a banyan tree. We must attack the trunk first: everyone is dying in the shade of its leaves.’
Nizan is one of the scattered seeds of the new roots. Read him.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 15.1.2008