PARTISAN REVIEW
me like a cancer." What he wants above all is "to exist against
all
tllis." And that is why he finally meets the absurd: death from a
poisoned wound, among savages.
Many of Malraux's critics (both of the Right and the Left) have
spoken of his "egotism," or of his "aestheticism."
It
is beconling
more and more obvious that, if one must have recourse to formulas,
one should rather say that Malraux was the first to introduce into
French contemporary culture the themes that have come to be popu–
larized under the label of "existentialism." He did this, however, at a
moment when Heidegger was hardly known outside of Germany, and
with a concreteness and a directness that are those of an artist haunted
by metaphysical problems, but who depends very little on professional
philosophy as such. Certainly, Malraux's intellectual formation owes
much to the friendly influence of Bernard Groethuysen, a philosopher
of great erudition and wit who enjoyed something like a Socratic
position in the Paris of the twenties and thirties. Groethuysen had
been a pupil of Dilthey and was very well informed about philosophi–
cal novelties. He certainly told Malraux about Heidegger. But Mal–
raux's problems were, in any case, peculiarly his own.
There is plenty of egotism in modern culture, as well as
in
the
"existentialist" trend of thought. Malraux's egotism, however, is of
a peculiar kind since it strains continually to break through the bar–
riers of the self and to establish an authentic relation with the world
of men, as well as with the universe.
As
for aestheticism, Malraux is an aesthete in the sense that art
(especially plastic art) is for him the only realm in which man can
meet fate on equal terms. But art as a superior form of delectation
does not mean much to him. Once again, what he is interested in
is the victorious form. In
The Royal Way,
Claude remarks: "Making,
as we do, of the artist himself the essential value, we fail to see one
of the poles of the work of art: the condition of the civilization
which looks at it.
As
if, when it comes to art, time did not exist. What
interests me in works of art is their deeper life, the life made up
of the death of men." This is, in fact, the starting point of the recent
and very characteristic book,
Le Musee imaginaire:
the battle of art
through the ages, recounted by Malraux.
To carry out consistently the impulse of revolt which had taken
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