MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
help admiring in the French writer the quickness of that faculty of
the soul which the Greeks called
thumos,
"the spirited element." It is
precisely because it retains a quality of youthful recklessness in its
very errors that Malraux's adventure has the quality of being "exem–
plary." Or,
if
one prefers, typical in a very eminent sense.
Malraux's first important work was
La Tentation de l'Occident
( 1926 ) . Before that, in 1921 (at the age of twenty-six), he had
published
Lunes en papier,
a kind of dadaist fairy tale. But, together
with a later work,
Royaume farfelu,
a fantasy on the theme of an
exotic Nowhere,
Lunes en papier
has been repudiated by the author
and never reprinted. In themselves, these pieces were not particularly
significant.
If
they become significant at all, it is in the light of Mal–
raux's later work, insofar as they help us to catch a glimpse of what
he has since consistently striven to keep away from: the realm of
.aimless sensations and daydreaming, "the fishes of darkness ... the
beings that torment us, the Beasts.... They are born out of our
boredom and breed boredom"
(Royaume farfelu).
Irrelevant imag–
ery, daydreaming, recur only once in Malraux's work: Kassner, in
Days of Wrath,
being in prison, is
forced
to yield to the upsurge of
stray reminiscences. But, however forcefully controlled, and even re–
pressed, the sense of the aimless and the grotesque continues to be
a.
strong undercurrent in
his
writing. Out of it comes a character who
is artistically most successful, the one who represents
all
that Malraux's
heroes do not want to be: Baron Clappique of
Man's Fate.
La T entation de l'Occident
is written in the form of an exchange
of letters between a Chinese traveling in Europe and a Frenchman
living in the Far East. The Chinese criticizes the West in terms of a
strongly westernized outlook, the Frenchman corrects this in him on
the basis of his own awareness of the contrast between the two civil–
izations. Both know Nietzsche's considerations on cultural nihilism.
In fact, they both represent a single character: Malraux thinking
of Europe from China. The argument is as tense and as elliptical as
anything Malraux has written. The conclusions, if any, are those of
an anguished relativism. From Rome, the Chinese writes: "I under–
stand the message of these ruins: he who sacrifices himself parti–
cipates in the greatness of the cause to which he has made the sacri–
fice of his life. But I don't see any greatness in the cause except
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