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PARTISAN REVIEW
passing out of politics (the relation to Gaullist activity will be dis–
cussed shortly) toward cultural problems. He was still the same hero.
His
concern in art was to be the same as it was in politics: how to
escape man's fate. In the metamorphosis of the hero, there was radical
change into a new state-and a radical continuity with the old.
When
The Voices of Silence
appeared
in
English this year, it
caused considerable confusion. At one end of the spectrum was the
incredibly philistine review of the Director of the Metropolitan Mu–
seum of Art
in
the
New York Times;
at the other end, Randall
Jarrell's intelligent and sensitive-yet fragmentary-appreciation. One
of the difficulties which the reviewers faced should be clear from
my general thesis: that
The Voices of Silence
is a point
in
a process,
a stage in a metamorphosis, and cannot be considered independently
of its own past.
If
it is taken alone, it
is
a curious and elliptical series
of brilliant intuitions, lapses into purple prose, and sweeping general–
izations which do not quite explain themselves.
Let me take a few of the leading ideas of this book and attempt
to define them in terms of Malraux's obsessive theme, the escape
from fate, and the metamorphosis of that theme in all of his work.
Malraux propounds the concept of the museum without walls
as a historical phenomenon. Two developments made it possible. The
first is technological: the discovery that Greek statuary was not white;
the potentiality of reproductions. The second
is
psychological.
&
a
result of the triumph of the bourgeoisie-a class without an art of
its own-the artist was alienated from society. The consequence was
a highly individualistic art, hostile to its immediate culture, and
therefore capable of acts of the sympathetic imagination
in
under–
standing the value of other styles and other cultures-Negro, primi–
tive, Gothic-which official criticism deemed retrograde or not art
at all.
The resolution stemming from this analysis is that the artist–
a hero who performs a vicarious social function-is able to find a
solidarity with the past, and the dead artist with the present. Note
that once more the hero is aristocratic: as the revolutionary rose out
of the masses to find for himself an answer to the problem of man's
fate,
in the present,
so does the artist rise out of
past and prese'nt
to
answer, for man, the agony of his own existence. The amazing thing
