PARTISAN REVIEW
M. Berger also picks up a stricken Russian, then realizes that he
is
himself poisoned: "there was nothing left in
him
except a forlorn
hatred against everything that had prevented
him
from being happy."
However, it is not pity that gives poetic meaning to the scene.
Beyond pity, what we have is a glimpse of doomsday: humanity
transgressing into the inhuman. (The book was finished before Hiro–
shima). Clearly, that collapse is only an incident: those men
will
be
as incapable of stopping the machinery of which they are both the
tools and the victims as they are unable to withstand the first shock
of that new horror. They simply don't know what they are doing,
or what's happening to them. Hence,
if
there
is
any salvation, it
must come to them from the outside, in the form of some extraor–
dinary act, a messianic intervention of some sort. Pity is of no avail.
The last part of the novel focuses again on the prison camp, in
1940, and it closes on a contemplative note: "The mystery ... which
connects through an overgrown path what
is
shapeless in my com–
rades to the nobility which lies ignored in man: the victorious part,
in the only animal which knows that it must die." In the village, barns,
ploughs, wells, recall the Bible and the Middle Ages, become symbols
of the immemorial "works and days" of man. The smile of an old
woman announces "the discovery of a simple and holy secret."
Simple perhaps, and also general. Between Malraux and the
particular incident, or the particular individual, there remains the
same everlasting distance as between Achilles and the tortoise in
Zeno's paradox. Nobody in particular is behind that smile, or in that
village. Face to face with the "original stuff," the narrator sees in it
symbols of the permanence of the "simple" beyond the turmoil of
history. The "simple" could be the native soil, France; it could be the
notion that, no matter how fateful, a historical event is only the sur–
face, not the core, of human existence; or it could be both. The
"discovery" remains ambiguous, a private affair. In any case, we can
hardly believe that the smile of an old woman is an answer to Mal–
raux's transcendental (and ultimately unanswerable) question. Who,
in fact, but an exceptional individual, an artist, a hero (or a saint?)
could bridge the gap between History and man, retrace the "over–
grown path" that connects the shapelessness (and the helplessness)
of the ordinary individual with "the nobility that lies ignored in
him"? A revelation seems to
be
needed, or rather, a redeeming act.
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