THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ANDRE MALRAUX
661
about the continuity of the two heroes is that
it
was
specifically
foreshadowed in the days of politics.
In 1930, in
The Royal
Way,
a young archeologist in Indochina
(whose adventures are superficially similar to those of the young
Malraux) remarks, "My view is ... that the personal value we set
on an artist may blind
lI&
to one of the main factors determining the
vitality of
his
work. I refer to the cultural status of the successive
generations appraising it. It looks as
if,
in matters of art, the time
factor were deliberately ignored. What interests me personally, I
must say, is the slow disintegration, the gradual change that comes
over such work-their secret life which battens on men's deaths.
Every work of art, in fact, tends to develop into a myth." And in
another context, the same speaker talks of "the obstinate desire that
every artist has to ward off death by a sort of intermittent im–
mortality."
In these quotations, written some two decades before the com–
pletion of
The Voices of Silence,
all the major elements in the later
book are recognizable. There is the historic factor ("the cultural
status of the successive generations"), the metamorphosis, character–
istically with its aspect of death ("the slow disintegration, the gradual
change), and finally the museum without walls ("their secret life
which battens on men's deaths").
The same development of the later theme within the earIier–
the action of the chrysalis--can be seen in a very revealing context.
Approaching the very height of
his
activity in the anti-fascist gener–
ation of the '30s, Malraux spoke at the Congress of Writers in Paris
in 1935. He told the group, "Every work of art is created to satisfy
a need that is passionate enough to give it birth. Then the need with–
draws from the art work, as blood from a body, and the mysterious
process of transfiguration sets in; and it is only our own need, our
own passion which can summon it forth again."
Here again, all the major themes of
The Voices of Silence
(with
a greater emphasis on the psychology of art) are present: history,
metamorphosis, museum without walls. It is, of course, the more in–
teresting because it shows that Malraux was continuing his develop–
ment even at the very pitch of his political activity. It furnishes a
further buttress to the argument which sees
Man's Hope
(from the
same period) as a book which reveals a deep duality.
