THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ANDRE MALRAUX
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Radek. When he spoke of politics and humanism, his emphasis seemed
always to leave the politicals uneasy. And at the very minimum, we
can say this of
Man's Hope:
that if the political-even the propa–
gandistic-is formally dominant, the life-long theme of the escape
from fate, the individualistic hero, is emotionally pervasive.
The first stage of the metamorphosis is thus defined in terms
of the hero of the political novels. Only when the misconceptions
about these works have been cleared up can the transition be indi–
cated. For Malraux the revolution was not so much a political act
as a struggle against man's fate. This was, for him, the significance
of the masses.
As
a result of this point of view, the hero was almost
inevitably an aristocratic one, as distinguished, for instance, from
Pietro Spina who is certainly marked off from the peasants and yet
is delineated in terms of his relation to them.
The transition from the revolutionary as aristocratic hero to
the artist as aristocratic hero was becoming apparent in
The Walnut
Trees of Altenburg,
a book which ostensibly represents Malraux's
reaction to World War II. The major emphasis has shifted from
politics to culture.
The devil's advocate of the novel, Mollberg, states the problem:
"If
the world has any meaning, death should find a place in it, as
it
did in the Christian world; if humanity's fate is a story with a
point, then death is a part of life; but if not, life is a part of death."
In one sense, Mollberg's devil's advocacy is Miltonic: he is far
too successful. The reason lies in a split almost exactly opposite to
that in
Man's Hope.
For in
The Walnut Trees,
the very heart of the
book is discursive (a colloquy of scholars dominates the entire middle
of the work), while Malraux's answer is only in terms of description.
True, his hero becomes aware of the persistence of life-the gnarled
walnut trees, the peasants in the midst of battle-and escapes from
fate to a certain continuity. Yet the intellectual questions, stated with
great persuasiveness, are not answered in their own terms. As a result
of this, some read the novel as a victory of the pessimistic point of
view (more pertinent because Mollberg is presented as a fascist).
At the very least, it reveals a deep pessimism in Malraux-and per–
haps this almost Manichean attitude was one- of the factors which
kept him from a political commitment to revolution.
Thus, immediately after World War II, Malraux's hero was
