MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
whom he wants to get rid of anyway, he chooses appeasement. Stalin,
on the other hand, has ordered the Communists to get along with
Chiang at
all
costs, because Chiang is winning, and because the Soviet
Union must prevent the Japanese from being the only ones to profit
from Chiang's
rise
to power.
This
being the case, clearly the revolution is doomed. But could
what seems so obvious after the fact have been realized by people
involved in the day-by-day events? The answer (even in Malraux's
acconnt)
is
"yes."
If
Garine is so furious at Borodin, it is not because
he takes a sentimental (or ideological) view of the "people's cause,"
but for the simple reason that he considers Borodin's mechanical
strategy
to
be in contradiction with the logic of reality itself.
As
far
as the line from Moscow
is
concerned, Garine finds himself in a
rather "Trotskyist" frame of mind. In
Man's Fate,
the same
is
true
of Kyo, who
is
so critical of Vologin, Borodin's double: "The Blues
are giving the bourgeois what they promised the bourgeois. We don't
give the workers what we promised the workers. . . . We
will
all
be massacred, without even maintaining the dignity of the Party."
To the man who is committed to an action because he sees in it
the way towards the realization of his idea, the
detail- any
fact that
contradicts the logic of his faith-is not just a disturbing incident. It
is an utterly distressing and
fundamental
reality. It puts everything
in question, and makes the man stop and think, a posture that he
will not be able to bear for long. At this point, the question is raised:
"What then?" Here is the rub. Should one give up, and withdraw
from an action that has become worse than wrong, that has become
senseless?
To understand the kind of answer his characters give to this
question is to get to the core of Malraux's attitude. The first thing
to be said
is
that neither Malraux nor his characters accept for a
moment the idea that one can withdraw from an action in which
one has chosen to be involved. By withdrawing, one would become
a comedian, renouncing the very substance of identity, which requires
acceptance of the fact that life
is
essentially tragic, not a game whose
rules the individual can change at will. The next thing to observe,
however, is that the question raised refers not so much to what one
should
do
as to what one should
think:
a question of consciousness
and of meaning. Admitted that Garine and Kyo have no choice
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