MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
anguish of being nothing more than a man, than himself." Kyo
is
here falling on his knees, performing an act of submission to a
suddenly revealed God: the new Allah, the God of Hist<!ry. In
fact, Kyo is reminded "of the Chinese Mohammedans ... prostrate
on the plains, covered with sun-scorched lavender, howling those songs
that for thousands of years have tom the man who suffers and who
knows he is going to die." But, Voltaire would say, "the pain of that
angel does not heal us." There is a strange gap between Kyo's inter–
rupted political argument and his sudden communion with the age–
old sorrow of man. The one is no answer to the other.
Malraux's novels are char.acterized by a unique achievement: in
them, action, the most opaque and ambiguous of
all
human facts,
is observed and analyzed with the utmost vehemence until it becomes
immaterial and transparent, almost one with the workings of intel–
ligence itself. However poignant Malraux's descriptions of violence and
death may be, he is not the only modern writer who has been at–
tracted by such themes. What is unique is the resolve to show the
mechanics of the action itself
as a historical whole, and
the ideas
that move his characters as parts of the action. He says in his essay on
Choderlos de Laclos, that Laclos' characters,
for~hadowing
those of
Balzac, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky, "accomplish .acts that are
pre–
meditated
in function of a general view of life." Whether it is true or
not of those novelists, this certainly applies to Malraux himself.
Garine, Hong, Chen-Dai represent not so much Malraux's hesitations
as his unmodi:fiable views of the event in which his characters are
actors as well as victims. The conflict between the Communist, the
anarchist, and the sage, masks another and deeper conflict: the one
between the man who accepts the iron rules of historical action, the
individual who rejects them precisely in the name of the impulse which
pushes him to act, and finally the person who, like Chen-Dai, "is
only capable of a particular kind of action: that which demands the
victory of man over himself."
As
in
Stendhal and
in
Tolstoy, in Malraux the relation between
the individual and the event is a paradoxical one. Malraux's paradox
could be stated by saying that the individual moves in an ordinary
space, while the event proceeds according to a pluridimensional geom–
etry. There is no knowledge of such geometry save the one that
springs from the resolve: do or die. This is why Malraux rejects
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