PARTISAN REVIEW
but to carry out the mission they have undertaken, we still want to
know what has happened to their doubt, how it is being followed up
in their minds, and, eventually, in what way it influences their actions.
Especially since we are in a novel. (But even in real life that would
be an essential question, or wouldn't it?) Otherwise, what kind of
doubt would such a doubt be? Purely discursive? Just for the sake
of argument?
The fact is that this doubt is never answered in Malraux. It
is cut short by action. Not by the
logic
of action, but by the obscure,
overpowering force (really, a demon) to which men like Garine and
Kyo have yielded the moment they chose their place in history. With
Garine, it is his passion for efficiency and power. With Kyo, it is
something more vague: the
emotion
of the Revolution in act. Garine
has drastic doubts about Borodin's orders. But these doubts do not
prevent him from having the terrorist Hong executed, and the mod–
erate Chen-Dai poisoned. Garine wants to eliminate all obstacles to a
Communist triumph which, on the other hand, he knows is being
jeopardized by the very policies he is carrying out. Clearly, he is
not obedient to any practical reason, but is simply offering up victims
to a nameless fetish which he calls "Victory." Garine's consciousness
might be infected with "Trotskyist" thoughts, but his acts already
announce the crazed Stalinist commissars who, in Spain, will make of
the slaughter of their ideological adversaries a dogma to which prac–
tical reason itself must yield.
As
far as truth is concerned, Hong is
right when, to Borodin who tells him that "the Revolution means
to pay the army," he replies: "Then it does not deserve the slightest
interest." And proba bly Chen-Dai is no less right when he calmly tells
Garine: "I like to read tragic tales, but I don't like to contemplate
their spectacle in my own family. I cannot see without regret
my
people transformed into guinea pigs.... " But then, the argument
here does not relate to what is true and what is false.
When Kyo, after his discussion with Vologin, goes to take his
place in the insurrection which his reason tells
him
is doomed, he
thinks: "Moscow and the enemy capitals of the West could organize
their opposing passions over there in the night and attempt to mold
them into a world. The Revolution, so long in parturition, had reached
the moment of its delivery: now it would have to give birth or
die.... " And then he is "seized by the feeling of dependence, the
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