Nicola Chiaramonte
MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
"History. History haunting Europe even as Buddha's interro–
gation overwhelmed Asia."-Malraux,
L e Musee imaginaire.
Andre Malraux has been on the scene for over twenty
years. He is still a "public figure" in the most emphatic sense of that
term, being dominated by the resolve
both .
to obey and to express
the imperatives of world history, or, as he would put it, the
destiny
of contemporary man. The author of
Man's Fate,
former Assistant
Secretary-General of the Kuomintang, colonel in the Spanish Re–
publican Air Force, commander of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade first
in the underground and then at the front, now intellectual lieutenant
of General de Gaulle, has in fact turned the will to be "public" into
an ethical principle. From the point of view of a Kierkegaard as of
anyone who values "inwardness" .above all, this is a most wrong–
headed attitude. But then, one of Malraux's main contentions is pre–
cisely that modern man has lost
all
objective (i.e., intellectually
justifiable) possibilities of turning inward to a "spiritual reality" of
some kind. Nothing is to be found in that direction except formless
ambiguity. Modern man must, literally,
do
or die. His situation
is an extreme one. Nothing short of a jolt of passionate energy will
save him.
It is the constant assertion of this sense of urgency, expressed
in a style of exalted intellectual lucidity, that has won Malraux
the admiration of so many young (and also not so young) Europeans.
Having been forced into one extreme situation after another on the
stage of world history, those youths look up to Malraux as to an elder
brother who, in a time which has been throughout "a time for despis–
ing," succeeded in leading a proud life, one in which doing and
thinking were not split but rather extolled as two aspects of the same
energy. Whatever one's opinion of his deeds or works, one cannot
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