Tonight at a secondhand bookshop I picked up a copy of Malraux's _The Temptation of the West_ and I have a copy of his _Anti-Memoirs_ winging it's way to me as well from an online source. I also nabbed a copy of Jean Lacouture's Malraux bio, but who knows when I'll get to that. So, it's with Malraux that I'll make the transition from summer into fall (and it is alarmingly fall-like, with the thermometer plunging to under 40 degrees here when it was stiflingly hot not two weeks ago). --------
Well, double damn, Dave.
There are two other biographies on Malraux, _Malraux Life & Work_, Martine de Courcel ed., HBJ, NY, 1976, and _Malraux _, Axel Madsen, Morrow & Co., NY, 1976. There is an essay of Malraux's in de Courcel's collection, called naturally, 'Anti-critique'. I liked Madsen more than Lacouture because it seemed to cover more mundane detail, which considering Malraux's egotism and fabrications, was just what I wanted to read. There is also a collection of essays on Malraux put together under a Prentice Hall series called Twentieth Century Views (_Malraux, A Collection of Critical Essays_, Lewis, RWB, ed. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1964). This contains Trotsky's critical review of _The Conquerers_, and Malraux's defense.
>From 'The Strangled Revolution', Trotsky writes of The Conquerors:
"The book is called a novel. What in fact we have before us is a fictionalized chronical of the Chinese revolution during its first period, the Canton period. The chronicle is incomplete. It is in some cases deficient in its grasp of the social reality. By contrast, the reader sees not only the luminous episodes of the revolution, but also clearly delineated silhouettes that engrave themselves in one's memory like social symbols...
The local organization of the Kuomintang are thus defined: 'A gathering of a few fanatics, seemingly courageous, a few rich people who seek consideration or security, many students and coolies...' Not only do the bourgeois join each organization but they take over completely. The Communists are merged with Kuomintang. The workers and the peasants are persuaded not to do anything that might offend those friends come over from the bourgeoisie. 'Such are the organizations that we control (only partially, do not be misled)...' An edifying admission! The bureaucracy of the Komintern tried to 'control' the class struggle in China, just as the international banking systems controls the economic life of underdeveloped countries. A revolution, however, cannot be commanded. One can only give political expression to its interior forces. One must know to which of these forces one will link one's destiny." (13p, _Malraux_, Lewis)
Malraux wrote a lot, so don't forget L'Espoire (Man's Hope) on the Spanish Civil War, La Voie Royale (The Royal Way), an adventure into Cambodia following the royal road for archaeology looting, Les Noyers de l'Altenbourg (Walnut Trees of Altenburg), which was partly reworked in Lazare. This last work is hard to find. The original manuscript was destroyed by the nazis, and Malraux published the extant pieces as: _The Walnut Trees of Altenburg_, Fielding AW, trans, Lehmann LTD, London, 1952. And then there is La Metamorphose des dieux (Metamorphosis of the Gods), a long work on the transitions from Egypt to Greece and Rome to their sequel in Christianity which takes up most of the book, and finally to the beginning of its eclipse as the Renaissance.
It's hard to explain why Malraux is important to read for art and revolution. He lived within both worlds and created ways to weave them together that make them an expressive continuum as history. He was strongly influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. And, like the quote from Paz, he went to extremes to meld art and life together as a revolt. He was a protegee of Gide, especially in craftsmanship. Gide's influence might be hard to see at first, but Gide put together extremely tight plots--practically machines--which he also spoofed in _The Counterfeiters_ (which would be banned by the US Congress if they knew how to read--thankfully they don't). But the essential point of Trotsky's critique of individualism and eurocentricism is important to remember. Of course Trotsky forgot that novels are created out of the individualized sensibilities of the principle characters--which is why it is called a bourgeois art form, so you can't have it both ways, a novel and a collective consciousness.
On the other hand some of the scenes in Man's Fate were so stunning when I first come upon them, that they left an indelible impression on me. There is of course the scene of prisoners in the train station at night waiting to be executed by being thrown into the locomotives boiler furnaces--an ad hoc crematorium--hard to forget that one. Saturn eating his children. But the one I have in mind occurs in the middle section of the novel, between Ferral and his mistress, Valerie Serge. Ferral had abused her psychologically by insisting on turning the electric light on while they were fucking, so he could watch her. And so she set him up in a peculiar way. She arranged to have Ferral and a young Englishman arrive at the same time with the same present--a Chinese song bird in a cage and wait for a few minutes in a hotel lobby before separate messages arrive for both men. Her note to Ferral reads in part, "I have met enough men to know how to regard a passing affair: nothing is without importance to a man the moment it involves his pride, and pleasure allows him to gratify it most quickly and most often. I refuse to be regarded as a body, just as you refuse to be regarded as a check book."
This scene forms the objective control of women as sex in a reciprocal to the Nationalist's repressions and executions that form the objectification of the communist's self-awareness and solidarity in revolution. The entire novel is the dialectic of the revolt of life against its objectifications as capital, as colonial occupation, as sex, as jokes and trivia, as death, as body, as labor, as pain and torture, as drugged consciousness under opium. And each of these is also a character who struggles to defeat their objectification in revolt.
If I had it to read over again, I would read Malraux in sequence, finishing with Felled Oaks (an extended conversation with de Gaulle) and Lazare, his last work. It is also important to recall that de Gaulle appointed him Minister of Information in the provisional government installed by the Allies in 1945. Malraux's job was to convince the communist organized underground and its overt unions to disarm and form a coalition under de Gaulle's minority party. It was essentially a double cross and part of the Allied geo-political strategy to keep France from linking up with the USSR against the US and UK during the post-war partition of Europe. Once that geo-political goal was achieved, and popular elections were held, de Gaulle and Malraux were thrown out and French politics proceeded into its well known bedlam until the Algerian war brought de Gaulle back along with Malraux as a 'restoration'. And again, followed a duplicity over Algeria and the French paratrooper lead death squads. For which Malraux prescribed a commission of Nobel prize wining authors: Roger Martin du Gard, Francois Mauriac, and Albert Camus. Then more foot dragging.
Shit. What exactly is there about repression, torture, and death squads that you didn't understand, Andre? See how familiar it all sounds?
I could go on forever about Malraux and have with friends whose eyes glaze over now at the even the mention of his name.
The Voices of Silence is beautiful in its long conversation as a constantly shifting collage, a dialectic or dialogue across time, as if all the artists and their works were contemporary with one another. It has to be read after seeing most of the art books of the world in order to follow its convoluted comparisons--because these arise through Malraux's own imaginary collection. Gombrick reviewed it and hated it. And it has not the slightest hint of Marxism, rather it falls full face into the individual sensibility that Trotsky had criticized in The Conquerors. What The Voices of Silence most resembles is what Hegel should have done with his idea of world spirit, which is to see that idea as form in the arts and culture in the broadest sense of those words.
Chuck Grimes