658
PARTISAN REVIEW
pathos and dignity and the book its freedom from propaganda." One
might more accurately say, not freedom from propaganda, but free–
dom from politics.
Thus, the climactic moment of
Man's Fate
is probably Kyo's
suicide and Katov's execution. The occasion of both deaths is political
activity. Yet their significance for Malraux is in how they express a
human solidarity which transcends death. Here again, the central
fact
is
the escape from fate and not the success of the revolution. In
the later metamorphosis, it will be the solidarity of art which will
achieve this function.
At this point, it is necessary to make an important qualification.
My analysis does not imply that revolution is of no consequence for
Malraux. No one who has experienced the exciting, visual, almost
cinematic, opening of
The Conquerors
could make such a statement.
It is of the greatest significance in understanding Malraux that he
looked for his escape from fate first in revolution and then in art.
These are not accidents. But it is also important to realize that the
subject of the search, and the hero who made it, were always the
same, because Malraux's concern was not
basically
politics or art,
but immortality. Far from diminishing the importance of the politics
and art, the under.standing of this allows us to place them in their
proper perspective.
Man's Hope
may seem to be a contradiction of this general
thesis. The "hero"
is
a political attitude, the aristocratic individual
in
his
struggle with fate is subordinate to the needs of the struggle.
Yet precisely because Malraux allowed something extraneous to his
art to intervene in this work, the book has a certain paradoxical
character: there is an unresolved tension between the discursive
meaning, which is political, and the emotional sympathy, which is
not. Frohock
is
right when he finds the most impressive persons and
scenes in the book-Hernandez, Alvear, the descent of the mountain
-in an emotional contradiction to the political conclusion. For these
events place the hope of man in a solidarity too intimate for the
social order, while the formal ending places it in a political cause.
This split was not confined to
Alan's Hope.
Even at that time
when Malraux was most active in the Left, in the mid-'30s, he was
unable to suppress his own fundamental themes. In 1934, at a Stalin–
ist conference on politics and art, he clashed head-on with Karl
