ANDRE MALRAUX
25
role, only a "spectacle." Now Malraux tried to motivate this psycho-
logically so improbable situation by providing Carine with a hierar-
chy of hates: if he was contemptuous of the proletariat, he hated the
bourgeoisie stilI more. But no social insights or values were involved
in his discriminations. Basic in Carine was the obsession of mortality
and the compulsion to thwart death by acts of desperate audacity.
It
was really a drive towards self-destruction; and the revolution, in
short, was a means for committing suicide as heroically as possible in
a world sapped of grandeur by the pervasive complacency of the
middle classes. The hero of
T he Royal Way
was an adventurer in
time and space: Carine is an adventurer in politics.
But Carine is not the whole novel; nor is Malraux's interest in
the plot defined by the nihilism of his leading character. There is the
background-the general strike in Canton-which he explores with
a genuine, if misdirected, historical curiosity. There are Cheng Dai,
the wealthy liberal, and Hong, the terrorist-two of the sharpest
political profiles Malraux has drawn. And there is Borodine, who
represents his idea of the "professional revolutionary." But Boro-
dine is an abstraction, and in his relations with Carine he remains
entirely passive. Carine, therefore, incarnates the traditional nihilism,
and Borodine the emotionally un assimilated Marxism, which were
the author's heritage as a revolutionary child of the petty bourgeois
intelligentsia. But Malraux was unable at this point to integrate the
twoworlds of value, and so, in
The Conquerors,
they merely confront
each other across an abyss of mutual incomprehension; and the novel,
striving to bridge the disjunction, breaks in two.
In
Malraux's next novel, the hero and the spectacle, communism
and nihilism, have acquired a more satisfactory relation. The revolu-
tion, in
Man's Fate,
has entered and transformed the concept of
mortality. The hero now combines
in himself,
as a conflict of impera-
tives, the death-ridden solitude of the individualist and the fraternal
drive of the revolutionary collectivity. And he tries to escape his fate
as a man, not, like Carine, in political adventures, but in political
action
undertaken in the name of the collectivity. The characters
accordingly have a psychological unity, and the novel, with its closely-
textured prose, its tight structure, its rhythm of alternating revery and
action, its variety of inner patterns and nuances, has a dramatic unity
to correspond. For if the Imperialists, on the one hand, and the Revo-
lutionistson the other, reflect in their different roles Malraux's sense
of historical values-if,
in other words, the Kyos are 'sympathetic'
and the Ferrals 'unsympathetic'-thcy are all in the end equally
figuresin a single pattern, which is the pattern of human "fate."
Thus Malraux accomplished in
Man's Fate
an imaginative con-
