Traven en la red

HAS TRAVEN FINALLY BEEN CAUGHT IN THE NET?

Like all dead authors who resist dying off, Traven has no other choice but to move with the times.

Throughout his life, he certainly understood how to exploit communication technology as it existed in his day: and how! Book publications, theatre roles, pamphlets, magazines, even ocean liners and correspondence – he became an unusually successful communicator who never wanted to be nailed down, neither within the communications themselves nor as their author and initiator. While others became intrusive with their methods of persecution – just look at censorship, arrests, Wanted posters, Interpol, interviews, telephone, and the technologically sophisticated curiosity of Traven researchers – he always found ways to escape.

Since his death, all traces that Traven left behind have been exposed rather mercilessly to researchers. Only with the protection of the public will his works be able to survive, sustain and continue to fascinate. His mysterious presentations will be picked apart; whether or not to the bitter end remains to be seen. It is not the Berlin International Traven Society’s goal to cultivate the game of Hide and Seek maintained by its hero. With information, tips, links, “networking” (no matter how fishy that sounds) and discussion, the Society endeavors to illuminate the significant contexts both of his biography and of the works he left behind. Responsible readers might be driven for a time by the charm of an unsolved mystery or puzzle; but eventually, they will want to see for themselves, comprehend and participate, even if only within their powers of imagination.

Traven’s texts demonstrate their true resistance against being dissolved into a series of mere information not with their trademark of mystery, but rather with their style: with their carefully developed storytelling strategy with an author who has the sequences of his imagined plot develop in a way consistent with real-life social processes. He does not unfold  before us a chain of commodities; rather, he involves us in the mental and practical activities with which other ordinary people take their situation in hand, thus – without much choice and always only partially – comprehending it. Alexander Kluge has observed exactly how that works (in Das B. Travenbuch, 1976, including an interview with him):"Experience hides behind grammar to enable the power of observation to reach out sensually not only to the intellect, but to the nerves, the diaphragm and the observation capacity of the reader."
With his theory that Traven “does not draw his realistic methods from the economy of capital, but rather from the economy of the labor force,” Kluge has provided a great deal of food for thought for the academic discourse, the accompanying literature and the exchange of opinions on it: How does the author accomplish this? How spontaneously or consciously, how willingly or reluctantly do we share these eminently plausible processes that all revolve around a core of things horrendous or absurd? Kluge has correctly observed that Traven, more rigorously than other writers, abandons and thwarts the economy of capital – but does the opposing position revolve around being the “labor force” and nothing else? Where would this leave the existential space and practical experiences of the dropouts, vagabonds and bohemians in Traven’s works, and the unqualified, permanently jobless, and superfluous people throughout the world today? We truly cannot forget the diaphragm; this “almost incredible abundance and density of jokes which move the wheel of storytelling,” as put by Tucholsky (1930).

In what practical relationship is the active and procreating individual (primarily male in Traven’s works) placed in terms of the absurdities of an economic and social order directed by capital? And how does it happen that this inactive, merely mutinous, grumbling, baffling relationship between intellect and emotion has so much greater effect on the reader than the fictitious plots of his leftist writer colleagues, where the hoped-for revolutionary will was literally anticipated? Of what consequence is it that this writer has chosen “the Jungle,” not only to conceal himself within it, but also to familiarize his readers with and penetrate the other Jungle, in which his readers in more moderate regions find themselves? What is the provocation and enlightenment value (in the sense of sudden insights) of the extreme situations and existence-devouring occupations of which Traven prefers to avail himself?

Much about this popular writer’s catchy and initially easily comprehensible stories is still in the dark. The central scandal that is his focus will remain thorny and unresolved as long as humankind continues to glean its most elementary and complex satisfactions exclusively from the byproduct of the self-propagation of profit. To merely circulate information will not shed much light on this darkness. But the horizon will brighten significantly if Traven’s readers take the next step and begin to exchange and debate what has shocked, amazed, and led them to a completely different view of the world. Will the source of the darkness ever be blocked? “Don’t say never as long as you’re still alive!” (Gorki/Brecht on their path to B. Traven).

(Translated by Agie Reeves)
© 2005; Internationale B. Traven Gesellschaft e.V.


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