PARTISAN REVIEW
his
battle, a Jacob who claims to know the name of the angel even
before the angel has appeared to him. To start with, he self-con–
sciously asserts the supremacy of the impersonal event over the indi–
vidual, and the fact that there is only one language that is decisive:
the language of history. But this does not make him any less aware
of the original
parado~.
The question raised by Stendhal and Tolstoy
is as constantly present to Malraux as his passion for what obliterates
it: the rationality of action itself, knowing no other measure than the
will to conquer. But, in the end, what remains is the question. The
angel appears to Jacob, and he has no name. Malraux's complete
works could well bear the title of his latest, unfinished novel: "The
"-,...____
Struggle with the Angel."
It is in the light of such radical self-consciousness, and not simply
as an egotistic utterance, that one should interpret Garine's exclama–
tion in
The Conquerors:
"I consider my youth the card on which
I gamble.
If
I could cheat, I would cheat." It is Julien Sorel, aware
of
his
own destiny.
Malraux himself began his gamble in Indo-China. He had gone
there as an archeologist in 1923, on a fellowship granted him by
the Ecole des Langues Orientales, where he had been a student. The
demon of action pushed him in two quite different directions. One
impulse drew him to make common cause with a group of Annamite
students belonging to the nationalist Young Annam League. Malraux
wrote articles for their papers and helped them in their underground
work. For the local French authorities, this was abominable treachery,
especially since the young scholar was using Government facilities to
carry on his archeological work. And it was in the course of this work,
in 1924, that Malraux was tempted by the realization that there were
unchartered regions, in the jungles of northern Annam, where one
was almost sure to find ruins of ancient Buddhist temples. Together
with a French rough-rider, he conceived the plan of going there and
of appropriating whatever examples of Khmer sculpture they could
find and take away with them. When he came back, the French
authorities lost no time in having him prosecuted for theft of Gov–
ernment property. That would teach the amateur revolutionist a good
lesson. Malraux's line of defense was that, since they were not indi–
cated on official government charts, the temples and their bas-reliefs
were nobody's property. But
this
legal point would have been of
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