656
PARTISAN REVIEW
it by a quotation from Pascal: "Let us imagine a number of men
in chains, all condemned to die, and some of them slaughtered every
day in the sight of the rest, who see their own fate in that of their
companions. This is a picture of the condition of men." What man
should and can do is described by Walter in
The Walnut Trees of
Altenburg:
"In the prison which Pascal describes, men manage to
drag out of themselves an answer which,
if
I may say so, cloaks those
who are worthy of it with immortality."
In this persistent problem, the constant personality has been
that of the hero. The succes;ive cloaks--the stages of the metamor–
phosis-have been politics and
art.
The environment has always
been that of death. Thus, in
Saturne,
when Malr.aux writes of Goya,
"Separated from everything by the absurd, he discovered the vulner–
ability of the spectator, he understood that the painter can only
struggle with himself to become ... the conqueror of all," Goya,
the painter, is certainly a radically different hero from Perken in
the jungles of Indochina or Garine at the moment of revolution, yet
they are the same person.
In
The Case for DeGaulle,
Malraux describes politics and
art
as "successive distillations" of the world.
If
successive is here under–
stood in terms of a metaphor of organic growth, or metamorphosis,
Malraux has once more described his own life and art.
First, let us define the hero in terms of Malraux's political novels
-The Conquerors, Man's Fate, Man's Hope
and
The Walnut Trees.
In all of these novels, the primary motivation of the heroes,
and the revelation of their action, is set forth not in political terms,
i.e., those of collective struggle, but in individual, metaphysical terms,
and the revolution is the first phase of the metamorphosis. To see
this non-political character, one need only compare these books with
Darkness at Noon, The Case of Comrade Tulayev
or
The Burned
Bramble.
To say
this
does not imply a one-dimensional conception of the
political novel or of its hero. On this score, compare Malraux with
one of the more complex political novelists, Ignazio Silone. Both the
Handful of Blackberries
and
The Walnut Trees
conclude with a
meditation on peasant life and its metaphysical significance-the na–
ture symbolism of both titles is not unrelated. Yet for Silone this
