MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
that of individualism. "Artistic individualism," he points out in the
preface to
Days of Wrath,
"is justified only insofar as it is applied to
the domain of feeling and dream.... What destroys the work of
art
is not passion, but the will to prove." The consequence was that it
was perfectly legitimate to think not of a "Communist art," which
was absurd, but of an art inspired by the acceptance of a "Commu–
nist situation."
Malraux's
intellectual
position with regard to Communism and
the Soviet Union in the late thirties could be summarized by saying
that he was perfectly willing to accept them as starting points, but
not at all ready to adopt the official ideology that was supposed to
be corollary of such a stand. Hence, in 1934, at the Soviet Writers'
Congress in Moscow, he launched an attack against "Socialist real–
ism," and also against the notion that the artist should bow to a
"line": "Art," he said, "is not a submission: it is a conquest ... if
Marxism is the consciousness of the social, culture is the consciousness
of the psychological. . . . The refusal of the psychological, in
art,
leads to the most absurd individualism. Every man, whether he wants
it or not, tries to
think
his own life. The refusal of the psychological
can mean only one thing, namely that he who will have reached the
deepest consciousness, instead of transmitting
his
experience to his
fellow men shall keep it to himself."
The argument was a telling one as far as it went. But, of course,
the attempt to draw a line between state dictation in society and in
art
was doomed. In order to connect the Soviet Union with
his
ideal
of a new
culture
based on "virile fraternity," Malraux had to over–
look a fact which is central in modern times, namely the implica–
tions of total state power. Yet the argument was significant insofar
as it revealed the one value on which Malraux was not ready to
compromise: the
quality
of human experience, and its highest form,
art.
Art was going to appear to him more and more as the supreme
form of human energy: a "conquest" superior to all others.
Malraux was a strange communist anyway. He did not only
contend that party officials had nothing whatever to say in the matter
of culture and ideas. ,He also maintained that Stalin, Thorez, and
Aragon, could
do
what they liked, but they shouldn't try to tell
him,
Malraux, what the
meaning
of Communism was. The claim was
insolent, and the Communist hierarchy (which had no authority over
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