MALRAUX AND THE DEMONS OF ACTION
between "virile fraternity" and the Communist Party. The two orders
of facts are related now (as they were in the past) only by Malraux's
own decision that they be so. Eventually, Gaullism cannot be for
him
anything but the latest development of the implacable need to act
by which he is possessed.
In his
Aesthetic of the Cinema
(
1946), speaking of the search
for movement in Baroque art, Malraux writes: "What the frantic
gestures of the Baroque world are calling for, is not a modification
of the image, but
a succession of images
...
the cinema." This search
for dynamic movement, and the cinema, are in their tum connected
with "the fanatical need for the
Object
itself, essential to the West,
and related to its political conquest of the world." Here, Baroque
art, and the cinema, come to occupy a place in the same view of
history which led the young Malraux to say that the West is "com–
mitted to the test of the
act,
hence pledged to the bloodiest fate";
and also to wonder "what could become of a reverie which would
borrow from intelligence the means to force upon the world the
acceptance of its folly."
What indeed, except Malraux's own enterprise, and the visionary
realism on which it is founded? The "cinematic" urge he attributes
to the Baroque is also his deepest drive. It is what gives his ideas the
peculiar quality of being not simply ideas, but outlines of gestures call–
ing for a succession of external movements; and also what makes his
vision demand so imperiously to be acted out, made into an object
belonging to the real world.
Finally, Andre Malraux has pushed to its extreme consequences
that modern pragmatic impulse which tends to see in the world of
action the only reality, and, what is more, to reject any proposition
which cannot be directly translated into a force, an act, or a series
of acts; hence, as a matter of principle, to give preference to the pos–
sibility of a gesture over the elusiveness of a meaning-an impulse
which obviously stems from a radical despair of truth.
Quite logically, Malraux sees the climax of such a passion in
world historical action. But then action appears to
him
as the ground
of chance and fate: discontinuous in essence and, from the point of
view of the individual who is inevitably seeking a unity of some sort,
absurd. Caught between the irrational test of the act, and the will
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