ANDRE MALRAUX
31
detail of military matters, and this it does. The real hero is the Re-
publican Army, taking shape from the workers militias and coalescing
by degrees into a single big organization, under "unified command"
and subject to the bourgeois state. The structure of the novel is de-
termined by the logic of the war itself, and the characters function
largelyas observers and commentators on the various fields of action.
Most of the time, in fact, we feel as though we were reading the
memoirsof some superior, people's-front-minded reporter, a Heming-
way or a Matthews, who has collected hundreds of impressions and
anecdotes and is in haste to get them all into his book-all
the
campaigns of the war, the famous exploits, the headline personalities,
the picturesque details-from
La Pasion aria
to the agitational broad-
casts across no-man's-land, from the fascist spies in the Anarchist
federation to the salvaging of the EI Grecos. Lost in this enormous
massof documentation, the character element in
L'Espoir
is dwarfed
and pallid, and seems like the forlorn vestige of some obsolete lit-
erary form. The Manuels and Garcias, lacking any life of their own
withwhich to impose an intimate pattern on the military microcosm,
are merely spokesmen for this or that point of view. But even here,
in the field of moral argument, where the characters compare their
values,the atmosphere is close and guarded; and like the people, the
philosophies-but especially those opposed to the prevailing discipline
-fail in the last analysis to materialize. Liberals, Anarchists, none is
quite free to develop the drama inherent in his point of view; none is
allowed, as Hong was in
The Conquerors,
almost to reverse the cur-
rentsof sympathy set in motion against him by the author; but in the
long run all have the mechanical articulation of marionettes whose
possibilitiesare finally delimited by the sum of their moveable joints
and the will of the ventriloquist.
L' Espoir
is a product of the
will:
and not the literary will but the
will-to-action which, with Malraux, has finally taken its place. If
wecompare this novel with
Man's Fate,
where an artist's conscious-
nessis manifest in each nuance of form and meaning, we see that
he has transformed the revolutionary novel into a vehicle for
thinly-fictionalized reportage-vivid and readable, to be sure, but
without form or unity, and with only the meagerest human content.
Thedefects so far pointed out in
L'Epoir-the
signs of hasty construc-
tion, the symptoms of inhibition-must
be laid to the exigencies of
people's front progandism, whose pressures are felt as intimately by
a world writer like Malraux as by a
New Masses
reviewer. And we
notice before we have read very far in the novel that it embodies
other,more significant concessions to the current demagogy; and that
many of Malraux's characteristic ideas have been transmuted or
