THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ANDRE MALRAUX
significance is inextricably bound up with the role of the
peasa~t
in the collective struggle for justice, while in Malraux's book it
~
the medium of an illuminated consciousness on the part of the her,?,
through which he achieves a God-like vision.
The nature of Malraux's hero was already more or less clea!ly
defined in one of the early books,
The Conquerors.
Garine is
mor~
anarchist than bolshevik, a fact which Trotsky realized in 1931
wh~t:t
he attacked Malraux for "dilettantism." The masses whose strugglf
is seen
in
this book are defined in ultimate, apolitical terms. They
are, as Picon has pointed out, more a symbol of absurdity than
~~
class of the revolution. For Malraux, the important fact is that "All
Asia is entering on a phase of individualism and discovering death"
(Garine), and not whether this or that struggle will succeed. In
other words, revolution is not an end in itself, but rather is defineq.
in the context of the individual hero face to face with the absurd.
Roger Stephane has suggested a somewhat extreme footnote to
this fact in his
Portrait de l'Aventurier.
He points out that
all qf
the struggles in which Malraux engaged were popular front actions.
He was not, therefore, confronted with the strict ideological discipline
of the revolutionary party, but rather with bourgeois rhetoric.
Th~
point is certainly overstated, yet it has the merit of understanding the
"non-revolutionary" character of Malraux's revolutionary heroes.
One need only contrast Malraux's conception of Asiatic
revo~
lution with that of Brecht. In
The Conquerors,
for example, Mao, an
orator in an anarchist dispute, describes the coolie in a favorite Mal–
raux term, that of the initial, as one "whose only identification
mar~
is the wound on his shoulders and the bruise on his hip;." Com–
pared to Brecht's grim, Stalinist morality of revolution in Asia ill
which the crime is precisely to romanticize the coolie, this is, in
revolutionary thought, dilettantism indeed.
An inevitable corollary of this kind of definition of the masses
is
the aristocratic hero. As symbols of absurdity (for they have been
condemned to death by having been born), the people, even in
movement, serve primarily to release
one
individual, or at best a
few, from man's fate: they are the condition of a personal transcend–
ence. Empson understood this point some time ago when he wrote
of
Man's Fate,
"...
the heroes are communists, but they are franklr
out of touch with the proletariat; it is from this that they get
th~i~
