simple growth of Kassner to self-realization and
dignity against a backdrop of Nazi brutality. But in
cutting away a philosophic overgrowth Malraux
seems to have found it necessary to destroy a large
area of his experience, just as a man cannot really
deny his past without perverting his present char-
acter.
Days of
IF
rath
lacks the variety and com-
plexity of
Man's Fate,
getting whatever power it has
through exploitation of all the lyric overtones of
Kassner's battle for sanity and freedom. It is a jour-
ney of the spirit through a Nazi concentration camp,
and, as such is hardly a picture of Germany today.
Some critics who expect a novel to furnish the an-
swer to all political questions will probably find
Days
of Wrath
inadequate as a comprehensive study of
class relations in Nazi Germany. Malraux's novel
leaves too many things to their imagination. But,
considered solely from the angle of its effectiveness
as fiction, too little evidence for the actions of the
characters is produced. If ideas and emotions are
end-products of an almost infinite series of influences,
are we not justified in looking for some of the bricks
that built the responses of Kassner or Anna or the
few Nazis?
What kind of a man was Kassner before he
was imprisoned? What were his relations with his
wife, with other Germans? How were the values
created which steel Kassner through his inquisition
and which urge another communist to give his life
for the good of the cause? To have exposed these
processes would have involved Malraux in the psy-
chological background of the immediate situation, in
the actual or associative past of the characters, in the
lines of force steering behavior in Nazi Germany-
in short, Malraux would have had to extend the ref-
erences of social experience in order to convey the
momentum behind every psychological crash. Where
the premises and the values of the writer are com-
monly assumed, as in Mrs. Bloom's soliloquy, this
may not be essential; but Malraux is attempting to
order a relatively new world for fiction. Certainly,
Malraux is aware of this problem, for in his intro-
duction to
Days of Wrath
he says: "The individual
stands in opposition to society, but he is nourished
by it. And it is far less important to know what dif-
ferentiates him than what nourishes him....
Every
psychological life is an exchange." Yet the central
conception of
Days of Wrath
is in contradiction to
this idea of man as psychologically continuous with
other men. Of
Days of Wrath
Malraux himself,
says: "The world of a work like this, the world of
tragedy, is the ancient world still-man,
the crowd,
the elements, woman, destiny. It reduces itself to
two characters, the hero and his sense of life; indi-
vidual antagonisms, which make possible the com-
plexity of the full length novel, do not figure here."
This is the dualism that has so far split Malraux's
work: two ideas of tragedy: an inexorable law of
human destiny, and a situation that arises in the
18
course of events. It is hard to see how a resolution
of this conflict is possible except in abandoning the
idea of human destiny as something we inherit, for
is not destiny the result of everything men do?
So far, Malraux has pitted humanism against
fatalism~man's
effort
toward self-realization
against the coils of a tragic destiny. In
Man's Fate
the robust hopes of men were broken on the wheel
of destiny; in
Day.s of Wrath
a new world is in
sight. But in the actual substance of the novels,
events themselves are often in rebellion against
remote-control by a philosophy of fatalism. Hence
any criticism of this premise is an added appre-
ciation of Malraux's work. The humanist values,
however, are more deeply ingrained: they cannot be
simply peeled off the body of his writing, since the
experience of the novels is shaped to yield most of
these values. Kassner and Kyo, for example, actually
expand to a greater dignity. And, in large measure,
most men who fight for a new world justify their
activity to themselves in terms of some kind of hu-
manism. It is only as social conditions are changed
that human ideals are in turn revised. We are in a
state of psychological transition, and Malraux's
novels are a projection into fiction of this transition.
But, further, in articulating our humanist mythology,
Malraux's writing becomes part of our evolution.
Every summation not only draws a curtain over some
past, but also sets the stage for the next act.
On the other hand, the poverty of much revolu-
tionary fiction in America comes from an attempt to
construct a fabulous Christian world where political
virtue triumphs over political evil, where neon signs
point the moral, and conversion is swift and miracu-
lous. That these allegories have little correspondence
to the life of the American people, with its myriad
psychological tensions and dashes, is evidenced by
the further assumption that novels are to serve as
direct instruments of conversion. If a novel is to
have a social effect, it will come necessarily through
its tracing of a shift in values from a position which
is in some way identifiable with that of the reader's
to one which is more humanly desirable and psycho-
logically credible. Since much of the experience in
such a novel is not directly motivated by economics,
nor is it primarily instructive, whatever social effect
it has will be but a part of its total meaning. Yet
those revolutionary novelists-like Dos Passos, Far-
rell, Herbst, Cantwell-who have been more faith-
ful to the ethos of the American people than to the
demands of the utilitarians on the "left," have often
been criticised for not showing the "way out." Con-
fusing political meanings with political pointers,
these critics became the spokesmen for the most ex-
treme literalisms. And it was not long before their
formulas were in opposition to the more significant
revolutionary novels.
If Malraux's work achieves nothing more than
JUNE,
1936
