Traven’s Mexico in The Bridge in the Jungle

 

 

Flower Vendor by Diego Rivera

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Those in parentheses refer to page numbers in the 1967 Elephant paperback published by Ivan R. Dee.

 

     As a revolutionary exile B. Traven [1] chose like Trotsky and about twenty thousand Spanish Republicans to live in Mexico.  They felt welcome under the progressive administration of Lázaro Cárdenas.  Traven’s attachment to his adopted country was based, however, on his affection for the poor, particularly the Indian campesinos, as well as on a friendly government.  He saw them not only as deserving workers who had been cheated of the fruits of their labor, but also mythologically, possessing a timeless wisdom and a culture more humane and attractive than what he saw in the United States.  Thus his support for their interests rests upon symbolic and philosophic as well as political grounds.

     His radicalism is evident if idiosyncratic.  Bolshevism appears marginally in the narrative though at one point he offers a common sense definition placed in the mouth of a ”ragged” agrarista. 

 

 Communism can be boiled down to one simple formula: give men food, plenty of it, and assure them that they will always have a job.  Keep the bellies well filled and provide lots of movies, admission  one cent, and there will be no more preaching from soap boxes and never any talk about a revolution.              (159-160) 

 

     Traven was far from an ideologue, and this passage contains a bit, perhaps, of condescension, well-earned by his many years in the country, but at the same time it properly emphasizes the material aspect of oppression and the modest needs of the proletariat. 

     In Traven’s view, the campesino’s traditional mode of life, in spite of its material poverty, was closer to his ideals than that offered by large plantations, factories, and modernization in general.  The community remains indigenous in its ethics, unhesitatingly demonstrating its solidarity with the bereaved mother by rallying in  her support with every possible aid delivered with thoughtful discretion.  Their actions are dictated, the reader is told, not by “a cold formula which had been taught them,” but arise rather “out of their hearts” (170), displaying “good taste and delicate tact.”  Those who consider them “dirty and filthy” and their country “badly organized” have spurious values, overrating “radios, Fords, and speed records” while ignoring the peoples’ “hearts and souls, the only things in man which count” (171). 

     He fears in fact that he is witnessing the last days of the old ways and that soon would arrive “Fords, vacuum cleaners, electric refrigerators, air-conditioned grass huts, jungle-colored bathrooms, windmill-driven television, canned alligator stew, and pulverized hearts of young palm  trees” (190).  At present their world-view assures them, with greater confidence than Christianity, that “everything is in its right place” (192). 

     Traven’s affection for the Mexicans accepts their status as members of the working class which should by rights inherit the world, but he is motivated more profoundly by what seems to him their intuitive wisdom.  While denying that they possess magic, his narrator Gales saying “No Indian can do anything more than we can do, and no Indian knows more than we” (140) in spite of the fact that he cannot explain their locating the body underwater with a floating candle, and the reader is in the same difficulty.  The description of finding Carlos’ corpse leaves little possibility for rational explanation.  He thinks that Sleigh’s acceptance of their beliefs stems simply from living among them, yet he concludes that, even for himself, the wiser course is to suspend belief in a sort of enlightened skeptic ἐποχή.

 

I felt a certain comfort in not trying to think things through to the end.  And why should I not have let the whole matter rest?  One lives easier, happier, more in harmony with the universe, if one does not work one’s brain continually about things of which the explanations and analyses cannot make us any happier.   (144)

 

     Here the European’s itch to know is conflated with his constant push after progress, wealth, and power in contrast with the native peoples simply living their lives in a mutual support system.  He thinks that “death is understood by these people” as a “great mystery” (192).  They accept not-knowing as they accept a not-caring cosmos.

 

What does it all matter anyhow?  What does the sun above us care about the dead, about weeping mothers, about funerals, about American foxtrots and hair-removers?  What does it care whether there is genuine culture of faked civilization, whether good music or noise with brass tubes?  That glorious sun doesn’t give a rap about the white man’s dumping the contents of his ashcans over the heads of people he considers inferior.  Whatever woe, pain and sorrow  we may have, real or imaginary, the sun stays mighty and dignified in the universe.  It is a god, the only god . . .  And it never threatens punishments.                                             (193)  

 

     This view that the Indians possess “genuine culture” whereas Gales and his fellow whites have only a “faked civilization” is patently mythological.  In fact Mesoamerican religion was far from indifferent toward morals and did include varied fates in the afterlife determined by behavior with privileges for those who died in battle, special treatment for death by water, and greater challenges in Mictlan for those with less than honorable behavior (though the Mexicans never descended to the barbaric concept of eternal damnation).

     Traven participates in the Romantic European tradition of fetishizing the so-called primitive (2).  A literary convention, this pretense asserting a privileged access to truth for pre-industrial societies is merely a structural artifice constructing a polarity between the supposed good of indigenous peoples and the corruption of the technologically advanced, a reversal of the usual value judgment. The meaning rests rather in criticism of Christian/Capitalist culture than in an accurate description of the campesinos’ worldview.   The author deploys here a rhetorical figure of speech rather than an anthropological claim in the service of compelling storytelling.  Other renditions of the Meso-American indios may offer the insights of historians, anthropologists, or sociologists.  Readers may be glad to have this novelist’s vision though his goals are far from those of a scholarly researcher. 

                                      

 

 

1.  The facts of the author’s life, including name and dates, remain disputed.  The curious could do no better than to have a look at Jonah Raskin’s My Search for B. Traven.  Raskin is the author as well of The Mythology of Imperialism, perhaps the finest work of literary criticism to arise from the radical youth movement of the ‘sixties.

2.  See my article on twentieth century artists “The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-fetish-of-primitive-in-twentieth.html.