The Influence of Henri Barbusse in Bolivia

Abstract

The French writer and Communist intellectual, Henri Barbusse, is probably best remembered for his novel Le feu: journal d'une escouade, published in 1916 and based on his personal experiences of the First World War.' Its worldwide success and appeal were undoubtedly due to Barbusse's first-hand description of life and death in the trenches, as well as to his sympathetic portrayal of the ordinary working-class civilian turned soldier who became aware of the extent to which he was exploited in both peace and war. Viewed today more than sixty years later, with another world war and its fiction already a part of history, Le feu (English title Under Fire) probably deserves Ernest Hemingway's judgement: 'its greatest quality was his courage in writing it when he did. But the writers who came after him wrote better and truer than he did. They had learned to tell the truth without screaming. Screaming, necessary though it may be to attract attention at the time, reads badly in later years.'2 Yet David Caute's view that 'as a socialist epic Le feu was, without doubt, a tour de force'3 is also valid, and in spite of or because of its screams, the extensive influence of such a powerfully written work was inevitable, both for its anti-war message and for its contribution to the emerging class struggle throughout the post-war Western world. In Latin America the combination of these two elements made Le feu a perfect model for the novelists who wrote about Bolivia's war with Paraguay between 1932 and 1935, known as the Chaco War. Despite the differences in scenario and culture, most of the Bolivian novelists also opposed war as futile and dehumanizing and saw the ordinary soldier as a member of an oppressed and exploited class. Barbusse's novel had first appeared in Spanish in 1917, in Antonio Buendia Aragon's translation entitled El fuego: diario de una escuadra, and a timely second edition in 1934 ensured the accessibility of the work to the chroniclers of the Chaco conflict. Le feu was not, of course, the only First World War novel to be seized upon as a model, and there can be no doubt that Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929), with the fanfare which attended its publication and its less strident message, was at least as influential, as testified by several critics including one who was himself a Chaco novelist, Augusto Guzman.4 But Barbusse and his ideas were well known to Bolivian writers and intellectuals via another route, namely the message of the Clarte movement founded by Barbusse in 1919. The diffusion of this message in Bolivia was due largely to the efforts of a self-educated Peruvian, Jose Carlos Mariategui. Mariategui met Barbusse in Paris in 1919 during the Peruvian's 'exile' in Europe. Both, it would seem, were highly irnpressed with one another: Barbusse