The Six by Rudolf Rocker

Introductory Note

In The Six Rudolf Rocker has taken some well-known figures from world literature and done two things with them: first he has made them live again, and then he has made them, serve a purpose of his own; without doing violence in any way to the traditional character of any one of them, he has used them to introduce a beautiful dream of a world rebuilt and mankind set free.

He begins with a picture: At the edge of a boundless desert we gaze on a black marble sphinx, whose eyes are fixed immovably on something beyond the far horizon, and about whose eternally silent lips there plays a scornful smile, as if she were gloating over her unguessed riddle. Six roads coming from widely separated lands converge and end on the sands before her outstretched paws. Along each road a wanderer moves.

These wanderers, the six figures from world literature, are presented in three contrasting pairs.

First pair:

Faust, who burns himself out in ascetic brooding over the mystery of life, exhausts himself in the vain endeavor to trace its origin and its end, to find in it a meaning and a purpose, makes at last the traditional bargain with Satan—his soul in exchange for another life span and an answer to his question—and wakes at last to the realization that his second span is spent, and that all that he has had is some trivial, transitory pleasures, and all that he still has is his old question, still unanswered.

Contrasted with him, Don Juan. who declares that life is not a thing to be examined and understood, but to be lived and enjoyed; who says, knowledge is unattainable, if attained, it would be useless; pleasure is real and is sweet. It is fleeting, but it can always be found anew. I will pursue it, scorning any knowledge but what it brings me, defying every law and custom that would restrict my enjoyment. Thus speaking, thinking thus, he lives his life; drains pleasure to the dregs; comes to know that what he is draining is but dregs; at last, burned out by his lust, reaches his end, knowing that all that he has had is transient triumph and all that he still has is his defiant pride.

The second pair:

Hamlet, who, seeing the cruelties, the horrors, the follies of the world and finding them unendurable, flees from them.

Don Quixote, who, seeing the same cruelties, horrors, and follies, sets out with a rusty sword and a broken lance to do battle with them.

The third pair:

The monk, Medardus—created by Hoffmann to carry the legend of the devil's elixir — who quaffs the elixir and gives himself up to many forms of mystic sin.

The bard, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, whose songs are inspired by an equally mystic holiness.

These are the six wanderers who move along the separate roads, to fall at last, exhausted and defeated, in the sand at the feet of the sphinx — who heeds them not at all.

Year follows year into the ocean of eternity. The sphinx still broods on the desert sands—

And then a new day dawns. One by one the wanderers awake. Earnest sage and frivolous reveler arise and greet each other. The melancholy Prince of Denmark and the noble and imaginative Knight of La Mancha; the devil-ridden monk and the angel-inspired singer, face one another on the desert sands. They talk together and resolve their differences. The dawn advances, the desert turns to greensward, the sphinx dissolves into dust. A new day is at hand—but no summary will serve to convey this picture that Rocker has drawn of The Awakening.

In two things I have reveled as I worked at my task of translation:

In the completeness of understanding with which Rocker has identified himself with each of his characters in turn, thinking his thoughts and feeling his feelings and giving dramatic and satisfying expression to them all. (It seems to me that he has done this most impressively with the convincing, defiant sensualism of Don Juan and the unanswerable, gloomy logic of Hamlet.)

And in the incomparable beauty of the slightly archaic German prose.

The language of musicians is to me an unknown tongue, so the words I am about to use will likely all be wrong. But The Six *seems to me like a great symphony. There is a short introduction, a prelude, which sets a theme, sad and enigmatic. This theme is repeated after each of the six movements which make up the body of the symphony. Each movement has its own mood and tempo. After the last repetition of the introductory theme there comes a jubilant, resolving finale. Probably musicians have a name for such things. I have none; I merely know that the whole work affects me like a great orchestral performance.

The Six, as we have it now, is the final and finished outgrowth of a lecture, which became a set of lectures, then a book. I think nothing reveals more convincingly, not only Rocker's literary skill, but also his great power as an orator, than the fact that he could make those lectures real and impressive to new audiences of untaught workers—to the half-literate sailors whom he met in a British internment camp during the World War, for instance. That he did this is made clear by the fact that he was called upon to repeat the lectures again and again. That he did not achieve this success by talking down to the cultural level of his hearers is shown by the fact that the scholars and writers who were also among the interned men were equally impressed and equally eager for the repetition.

Men and women who heard him give the Hamlet-Don Quixote antiphony in London have described to me the response of his auditors—shrinking down in their seats, grasping tensely at the edges of their chairs, as, with drawn faces, they sank beneath the devastating logic of Hamlet's philosophy of despair; sitting forward, hands on their chair seats, feet drawn back as if about to spring from their places, when, with upturned faces they watched the valiant Don ride forth against evil giants transformed by magic into the guise of windmills. The reader of the book finds himself equally swayed by the author's changing moods.

None of Rocker's works seems to me to hit a higher level of artistry than this; none has made me feel so deeply the inadequacy of my rendering.

Ray E. Chase.
Los Angeles, March 11, 1938.

The Six

The heaven is gray. The desert yawns.

A mighty sphinx of smooth black marble lies outstretched upon the waste of fine brown sand, her gaze lost in dreary, infinite remoteness.

Nor hate nor love dwells in that gaze; her eyes are misted, as by some deep dream, and over her dumb lips' cold pride there hovers, gently smiling, just eternal silence.

Six roads lead to the image of the sphinx, six roads that come from distant lands to reach the self-same goal.

Along each road a wanderer moves, close-wrapped in Fate's grim curse, with forehead marked by a power not his own, striding on-ward toward some distant world glimpsed faint on the horizon, such wide, wide worlds away in space, so very near in mind.

The First Road