April 28, 2004

Fascinated by the poetic force of anarchy, I read The Man Who Was Thursday twice in the last couple of days, and with each reading the book became more imaginative and the anarchists more desperate.

I first read the book as Chesterton’s attack on nihilism and the destructive impulses that reached a fervent pitch at the turn of the century. “Revolt, in the abstract is — revolting,” the main character says, “it’s mere vomiting,” and most of the novel tries to show how desperately wrong-headed anarchists are. Their thoughts are mere vomit, Chesterton seems to say.

But when I picked up the book again and read it as an anarchist, I was struck by how vibrantly and poetically he painted his demons. Their ideas are seductive, fresh, and it’s hard not to appreciate the demonic intensity of the eccentric men who wanted to throw bombs at kings. While the anarchists are not poets, they are certainly poetry, and thus art and anarchy become one and the same thing:

An artist is identical with an anarchist. […] You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist; he prefers the great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen.

Chesterton too was of the Devil’s party without knowing it and wrote at liberty of the Devils and Hell. Lovely and bloody are the impulses of the anarchists, and enviable is their knowledge that “a man’s brain is a bomb.”