Andre Malraux
ANTI-CRITIQUE
The concept of the individual pervades the nineteenth century
and part of the twentieth .
It
stretches from the original to the peculiar, from
the ambitious to the irreplaceable: from Rousseau to Napoleon, from
Napoleon
to
Zarathustra, from him to Barres and to Gide. Individualism
was blown to pieces by the atom bomb and bequeathed us biography.
For the first time a civilization could assume the cultural inheritance of
the planet. Even if successive civilizations were organisms, and similar ones
at that, our own ·had two unique characteristics: it was capable both of blow–
ing up the earth and of gathering together the achievements of art since
prehistoric times . However, this civilization has no assurance that biography
can account completely for artistic creations or that biography is the only way
or even the· best way of approaching the individual.
We have had the exemplary
lives
of the classics, and the far from exem–
plary ones of Vasari and many others . After that a
life
went hand in hand
with an autobiography from the
Confessions
of St. Augustine to those of
Rousseau. Then we come to the great biographies of the nineteenth century
and of our own time. These were apparently historical, yet the biographer,
like the novelist, but in a subtler way, changed a passively endured destiny
into a mastered one. Like all literature which matters to us, whether it is the
work of the living or the dead, biography has been a part of history and of
evolution . When the awareness of metamorphosis comes to dominate evolu–
tion and to create its own history, will another attempt to grasp man, a new
kind of biography, take shape over and above the one we already know?
Under what name should this ever-increasing type of book be known? The
old title
Miscellanea
springs to mind, but they are as inconclusive as the
others were affirmative, even when they do not give rise to any questions.
Let us therefore call them
Colloquies.
The births of literary genres make one think, since they are few and far
between . In 1900, to read nearly always meant to read a novel. In 1945, to
the question: .'What is the most important fact in literature between the two
