406
PARTISAN REVIEW
Denis Donoghue
What Literature Does
N
ear the end of
The Voices oj Silence
Andre Malraux adverts to the
"museum without walls" that contains every manifestation of art available
to him. The creativity those works embody, he says, constitutes "man's
victorious presence" in the world. Rising further to hyperbole, he says:
Each of the masterpieces is a purification of the world, but their common mes–
sage is that of their existence, and the victory of each individual artist over his
servitude, spreading like ripples on the sea of time, implements art's eternal vic–
tory over the human situation. All art is a revolt against man's fate .
Malraux's tone is one we can hardly share. Forty years after the publi–
cation of
The Voices oj Silence,
we wonder how he found it possible to
speak of victory over the human situation, just a few years after World
War
II,
with images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death camps at
Auschwitz and Belsen inescapably before his mind. I don't think we are
ready to speak in such glowing terms, even on the evidence of art and its
plenitude.
But there is a sense in which Malraux's claim is valid. If we measure
it in relation to the servitude to which he refers, and the human condi–
tion which he hardly needs to delineate, the formula in a somewhat
muted tone becomes serviceable. Art is indeed man's revolt against his
fate. Presumably there are people who are content to coincide with their
fate and rest upon it, but artists do not see themselves in that posture. In
one degree or another they stand apart from their fate - or from their
sense of its obduracy - and they have the creative force to contest its or–
dinances. They do so because they want to participate in the general
culture, but only on their own terms, which coincide with the terms of
responsibility they divine in the history of art.
Malraux doesn't indicate, in
The Voices oj Silence,
what he thinks
man's fate is. He reserves that for his novels. But it can hardly be anything
else than the welter of limiting conditions we have to bear: our bodies,
time, the friction of daily life, the pressure of impersonal force, guilt, loss,
death, our blankness in the face of "first and last things." Some of these
are indicated, briefly and appallingly, in
T.
S. Eliot's poem, "Little Gid–
ding":
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
