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PARTISAN REVIEW
elements, is it not obvious that our eclecticism, defying history, merges
them in a past whose whole conception is other than that of the real
past, and which acts as a defense, in depth, of our own culture?"
The very question places Malraux near the heart of a classical
tradition that always has felt the severe tensions in the human condition,
has touched the borders of the night, has heard the fierce words of oracles
in Thebes, in Macbeth's Scotland, in the soul of Cassandra and Racine's
Phedre.
The Voices of Silence
is an exercise of modern man's culture
operating
in
depth.
As for the rest:
The Voices
is a third longer than
The Psychology
(out of print). Though some of the 465 illustrations lack the tonal accent
of those in
The Psychology,
together they speak to us from almost
every page, expressively and from strange angles, a museum without
walls. The translation is sympathetic, in spite of a few stumbling
phrases: "come into the picture" is a vulgarism for ((
serait
a
peine en
cause";
"pontify" (?) corrupts
((ne prouuent point";
and on p. 104
"pure color looked like dying out"! Occasionally, also, one boggles at
Malraux's own judgments-on Romanesque, for example, or on retro–
gression in styles. And Malraux stubbornly neglects architecture, particu–
larly Roman architecture.
But the poetic texture of
The Psychology
is preserved in every
paragraph of
The Voices,
where one reads that modern painting is
"a photographic negative of the styles of the transcendent," and that
baroque added "gesture" to "illusion of movement in depth." The
social contexts are more apparent, too: "when painting ranks as the
supreme value it has no concern with, and no place in, a social order
that, itself, lacks any supreme value"; "if Picasso had painted Stalin in
Russia he would have had to do so in a style repudiating that of all
his pictures, including
Guernica."
To see how this masterpiece is Malraux's final release from Com–
munism, Fascism, or Spenglerian fatalism, we must approach it by way
of W. M. Frohock's recent
Andre Malraux and the Tragic Imagination .
The Voices
is a decisive 'conquest," affirming with all its intuitions and
vigors the splendor of our modern criticism- a criticism too seldom
ventured by our academic scholars. This is a daring and majestic book,
and inexhaustibly fertile.
Wylie Sypher
