Nicola Chiaromonte
MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION (II)*
What were the intellectual motives of Malraux's allegiance
to Communism
as an idea
from 1925 to 1939?
The strongest one was probably the notion of "virile fraternity."
Insofar as it took the form of "revolutionary combat," Communism
for Malraux gave back to the individual, made sterile by bourgeois
egocentrism, "his fertility," the absolutely fundamental sense of
be–
longing
to a definite time, a definite place, and a specific milieu,
without which authentic norms of conduct, and even a true under–
standing of the self, cannot be born. This was a strong idea, and a
deeply felt need. Its psychological roots could perhaps be found in
what Kyo says at one point in
Man's Fate:
"Men are not my bro–
thers: they are those who look at me, and judge me. My brothers are
those who look at me, and love me." "Virile fraternity" means a
type of human relationship cleansed of both sentimentality and sus–
picion, in which the individual will feel both "left alone" and trusted,
hence essentially encouraged: "fertile."
This
is,
for Malraux, the ideal social situation. Its opposite is
bourgeois individualism, in which the individual (like the capitalist
Ferral in
Man's
Fate)
is
the prisoner of a loathsome kind of nar–
cissism, can never see in the other person anything but the reflection
of his own self, is condemned either to use the other individual as
an instrument or to yield to masochistic sentimentality in his presence.
Because he condemned this kind of individualism, Malraux
also condemned the equivocation by which, since the second half
of the nineteenth century, the cause of art had become identified with
*
The first part of this essay was published in the July issue of
PARTISAN
REVIEW.
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