MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
man, in the gap between History and the myriads of stories that go
to make it up.
"The mystery of man" is the theme of Malraux's latest novel,
Les
Noyers de ['Altenburg.
There is no ideology in this book, which treats
two episodes from the two successive wars that have laid Europe
waste. The narrator, a Frenchman, is taken prisoner, in 1940. Around
him,
his fellow prisoners, Arabs, Senegalese, Frenchmen, hungry and
cold, write letters to their families, make up grotesque myths about
the war. Like Kassner in
Days of Wrath
(but not
alone
in a cell,
like Kassner), the narrator is
forced
to contemplate and wonder.
"A writer, what has haunted me for ten years,
if
not man? Now I
am here, confronted with the original stuff.... " He thinks of his
father, a scholar who, after the failure of a strange adventure in
Turkey, had come back to Europe just in time to become a Gen;nan
officer in the First War (he was an Alsatian). Before going to war,
he had had the time to test, in the company of several eminent
scholars, how brilliantly inadequate were the attempts of Western
intellectuals to find a definition of man beyond the utter relativity of
historical knowledge. In the war, this M. Berger had had two fun–
damental experiences. The first was nausea while witnessing the
efforts of a German intelligence officer to get a small boy to reveal
the identity of a woman spy, supposedly the child's mother. Then,
M. Berger participated in the first experiment with mustard gas,
made by the Germans on the Russian front. The scene (easily the
most poignant image of pity and horror described by Malraux) is
preceded by a significant insistence on the quality of the "raw ma–
terial" of history: the German soldiers who are going to "exploit".
the effects of the gas on the enemy. Like the prisoners of 1940, they
tell dirty stories, play cards, mythologize about the war: between
them and what
is
going to happen there is an utterly sardonic
dis–
proportion. Finally, the gas is launched, the German infantry sent out.
The landscape remains empty and silent for a while. Then all of a
sudden, on an earth on which nature itself has been monstrously
killed, a few figures appear, followed by more and more, until the
whole scene is crowded with German soldiers, coming back each
with a scorched Russian on his shoulders. The horror has been too
great. Everything collapses under the weight of a speechless pity.
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