MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS Of ACTION
very little avail without the devotion of a small group of friends and
of his first wife, who succeeded in having the prosecution withdrawn
in the face of a violent campaign by the reactionary Parisian press
against the "Communist thief."
"There is a decisive way of being shut off from the human
community: it is humiliation, shame," says one of the scholars
gathered to discuss the "essence of man" in
Les Noyers de l'Altenburg
( 1945), the first part, and the only one published so far of
La Lutte
avec l'Ange.
In Indo-China, Malraux came to know humiliation
both in
his
own person and in the fate of the oppressed Indo-Chinese.
At the same time, he had the opposite experience of being drawn to
others and of finding that he could count on their fidelity; the com–
radeship which tied him to the Indo-Chinese rebels and to those who
stood by
him
in the moment of humiliation was decisive. The con–
text was an act of revolt against the established order and its rules.
Malraux never wrote a novel about the struggle of the Indo–
Chinese. But (until, in 1946, political expediency apparently cau–
tioned
him
to remain silent) he consistently defended the cause of
the Annamite rebels. The "Appeal for Those in Indo-China," pub–
lished in 1933 was as ringing an indictment of French colonialism as
has ever been written.
As
for his adventure in search of artistic treasures, it became
the theme of
The Royal Way
(
1930) . Centered on an enterprise
whose meaning can hardly go beyond that of a resolute egotistic drive,
the novel lacks scope. It has, however, strong and revealing mo–
ments. Significantly enough, Perken, the German adventurer who is
the hero of the story, and with whom the young Claude has asso–
icated himself, is not interested in treasures. He is going into the
jungle in order to find a friend of
his,
who has been lost for months.
Perken has conceived the strange plan of founding a native state
capable of fighting French domination. What he wants is "to leave
a scar on the map." "Hostility toward established values, ... a taste
for the actions of men together with the consciousness of their vanity.
Above
all,
nonconformity ... " are his motives. But, deeper than this,
what Perken refuses to submit to is "limited, irrefutable destiny, falling
upon you as a set of rules on a prisoner.... The certainty that you
will have been
that,
and nothing else ... my human fate: that I
should become older, that time, this atrocious thing, should grow in
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