Vol. 43 No. 3 1976 - page 369

ANDRE MALRAUX
369
ary expressions of individualism- Andre Maurois'
Balzac,
Thomas Mann's
treatment of Goethe, bear no relation to the anecdotic records of Tallemant
des Reaux . This development does not of course anticipate the Colloquy.
But let us substitute a traditional "procession" for the vague idea suggested
by the word "Lives." Plutarch, Suetonius, Vasari, Tallemant, Saint
Simon. Chateaubriand's Rance and one of the recent biographies of Na–
poleon.
It
would appear that the Colloquy is meant
to
replace
this
procession
or at least to develop side by side with it rather as modern biography de–
veloped alongside the' 'Lives" and the" Studies." The time is coming when
people will say: " In the days of biography.. .. "
Besides, the Colloquy has at its disposal a much wider field,its methods
applying
to
more than the individual life . It selects events as well as people:
Mao's Long March, Hiroshima, the assassination of President Kennedy, all
follow one another like the acts of tragedy conceived on a planetary scale.
The Colloquy will tackle in the same way a Gandhi or Day of Indian Inde–
pendence, a De Gaulle and an eighteenth of June . Its methods of doing
this increase daily and will continue
to
do so in the near future . How can one
fail
to
see that we are working out a new method of grasping the individual
which is not that of individualism? Its method seems to be to substitute for
well regulated lighting a vast number of snapshots, bits of film, shadow
images.
It
owes much to journalism and audio-visual aids . Its values are not
those of biography.
The pluralism of a Colloquy surrounds its subject , picks him out, loses
him, like the beams of an anti-aircraft searchlight on the track of an air–
plane . The provisional element introduced by metamorphosis meets the ele–
ment of chance introduced by the Colloquy . So it is hardly surprising that
the list of the Colloquies develops concurrently with the awareness of meta–
morphosis . One must choose, as the seventeenth century would have put it,
between knowledge and ignorance. But our own time displays a lively taste
for those dubious sciences in which history and psychoanalysis are blended
with Marxism and biography . Here the United States has an important part
to
play, because there writers are not as paramount as they are in Europe.
Faulkner is on a par with Picasso rather than with Voltaire or Goethe. A
colloquy devoted to Hemingway is more suited to his character than a biog–
raphy or study that would concentrate only on his art. The link between to–
day's literature, and particularly American literature, and the audio-visual
leads us today to the Colloquy; television is and will continue
to
be more
suited to it than
to
"Lives ." It is the actors who prevent a biography from
being a documentary, and at the price of constant instability turn the
subject of a biography into the hero of a fiction. Whether it is dealing with
a biography or a novel, the television screen abandons analysis in favor of
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