EXPLAINING ANDRE MALRAUX
JEANNINE HARRAULT
(
Andre Malraux is a true friend of
Perhaps the deepest
already came to light in an early easy he wrote when his first inclinations
impelled him to travel East and offering his reader a subtle analysis of
salient divergences between the occidental and the oriental mind in the form of
letters exchanged between an imaginary Chinaman and an imaginary Frenchman. He
dwells there on the problems of destiny, of the shaping of the outer event from
the inner mind, at times intuitively drawing near Yoga-Vasishta.
His attentiveness to Hindu culture has never failed.
He was on friendly terms
with the late Jawaharlal Nehru. In the first volume of his autobiography Andre Malraux has recorded for us a long conversation they both
had on Indian and world matters. They discussed the possible misunderstandings
between their respective countries, the psychological impact of Gandhiji and
his gift of fortifying even the humblest, the inevitable westernisation
of Indian life through industrialisation and other
crucial questions, harping on need for more rooted solutions to the social
evils surfacing in a purely political context.
Lastly but not least,
and sealing the rest, Indians will recall that during India’s ordeal Andre Malraux made a public declaration stating that he was
willing to go and fight for Bangladesh. Three thousand Frenchmen, among whom
senior officers, then immediately proposed to follow his example. His gesture
was naturally compared to that of General Lafayette setting out some nearly two
centuries ago to help the present U. S. A. in their struggle for independence
by the side of George Washington. On the eve of the French Revolution itself
General Lafayette had initiated the Declaration of Human Rights in the Assembly
of Notables of which he was a member.
Andre Malraux is inhabited by a quicksilver soul. When prompted by a great subject he breaks into powerful Shakespearian terms, in speech or writing, as if some elements of the rajasic nature of the English tongue at its Elizabethan peak were finding its way into the more sober and sattvic French language. Ever haunted by an urging sense of tragedy which feeds the light and shadows of his text, indifference remains to him both impossible and incomprehensible.
He fathoms the abyss in
order to reach the heights more surely, examines the torturer and the tortured,
transcendently alive to the dimensions of the span between and shuddering over
its breadth. Are his three ‘dharmas’ or vocations,
and the three ensuing ‘obligations’ secretly at war in the hidden recesses of
his quicksilver soul...those of the artist, sensitive and porous to all
expressions of beauty, those of the theoretician of politics knowledgeable in
the brutal realities of history, those of the soldier, willing to write down
his ideals with his own blood? Hence the oscillations, a pervasive awareness of
the more contradictory nature than complementary nature of these triple
imperatives.
His times may best
explain the centrifugal explosion of his talents, the solicitations and tasks
at hand. Never Hamlet, however subtle his grasp of opposites, growing
promethean through his reformist intentions, he follows his course as the water
of a river follows her banks. Even, he rushes ahead of the escapement. In other
centuries might he have developed into a Goethe or a Leonardo da Vinci?
The close and constant
interaction of his life and writings characterize his destiny. He travelled
East in his youth and from then up to the recent moment when President Nixon,
on the eve of setting out for the first visit, ever, of an American President
to China, invited Andre Malraux to the White House in
order to consult him, the author’s life and letters also remain incessantly
woven into this last half century’s world history.
‘Outraged by certain
colonial abuses as the nineteen twenties , he made himself the defensor of the Indo-Chinese workers and founded as editor
a periodical favourable to their cause in their own
country. Following this he travelled to China, where the Chinese
revolutionaries, partisans of President Mao Tse Tung and General Tchang Kai Shek were active together before their eventual separation.
Back home in France he
was to become a militant again as a President or in various committees of
international movements for the ceasing of discrimination against the Jews, or
against the rising facism in Europe. This last
activity brought him to Spain in 1936, as a volunteer in the international brigades,
where he was made chief of the international air squadron, fighting by the side
of the Spanish Republicans.
During the last world
war he was made prisoner, but escaped, and devoted himself to leading a strong
underground action by organising the French Internal
Resistance to the occupant, subsequently leading a regiment in open war. He was
captured again and liberated from a jail in Toulouse where he was awaiting
torture, only a few hours in time, through the precipitated retreat of the
German armies. He was to become a minister, as well as a friend and inspirator to President de Gaulle. He has now founded in
Paris the Charles de Gaulle Institute for the perpetuation and the study of the
late President’s political thinking and doctrines.
He wrote his most
celebrated novels between the two world wars. They might be qualified as
‘documents’ in a literary style. They are indeed ‘documents’ as records of
revolutionary upsprings with the protagonists real
and true to the living man who made the event. The two most read are
significant in relation to the author’s aspirations. ‘Man’s Fate’ depicts the
revolutionary scene in China at the time of the impending split between the Kuo-Min-Tang and the Chinese Communist Party, tightly,
unadorned, unsparing of brutal scenes, yet poignantly with beauty The one
desperation and determination of the most leftist revolutionaries are here
outlined contrasted against the shaking society round them, the hesitations and
anguishes of the foreign companies and their directors, the ambivalent
attitudes of the Chinese middle classes themselves, loth
to accept radical measures, the uncertain arms supplies and ever present
ominous insecurity of human life on all sides, shown to us as in a modern film,
near and life size. ‘Man’s Fate’ was awarded France’s coveted literary prize,
the Gongourt award.
‘Man’s Hope’ is a much longer account of the Spanish Civil War observed from the then in power republican side during their attempt to resist the franquist. Essentially similar to the preceding in technique, its desperately convinced heroes interrupt here more frequently perhaps, their preparations and actions to reflect on the post revolutionary tasks, the urgent need to favour a fuller development of Man, and to give every single individual this opportunity as a birthright.
As an aesthetician and
art critic alone, other achievements forgotten, Andre Malraux
might still stand out as one of the most relevant to his times. He
searches for the beautiful everywhere on his long path, concerned with the
universality of masterpieces as a means of communion between man and man,
across time and space.
To him art is power. Art
is shakti. His quest for a new universal humanism
fitting the multiplying dialogues due to our accelerated technical progress,
between peoples of different cultures, is incessant, though he admits we may be
only on the eve of its adequate formulation. He compares the artist’s creative
act to an act of redemption, of purification, a form of action accomplished to
overcome the ‘imperfections’ of human destiny, a reconquest
as old as humanity. Each style or temper of an art is the expressed development
of one particular aspect of the inherent faculties of man, and thus all styles
inevitably complete each other. And he remains haunted, too, by the ideal of
human plenitude, perhaps by an attraction for a ‘complete yoga’, enhancing all
the faculties, certainly by the dance of Shiva-Nataraja
displayed to the full in tune with the whole universe.
It would be an error to
omit here any reference to his latest experiment, one which, again, seems to
answer precisely the needs of the day. Having written a treatise on the
psychology of the cinema, the eminent writer is still fascinated by the
question of the art value of the moving image on the screen.
His ‘Legend of the
Century’ created by him solely for television purposes and well received by the
French public, is a serialized evocation of the main events shaping the history
of our century, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the World
War...Technically a blend of documentaries, film sequences and excerpts of his
own writings read by professional actors, the whole is accompanied by a running
commentary by Andre Malraux himself appearing on the
screen, commenting events, and on this occasion airing his views on such
general and central themes as death, destiny, the youth of today and their
uncertain norms, and others.
Will this formula create
a precedent, a new manner of mass communication redeeming much of the cheapness
of mass means, and exercising an upward pull by its literary and artistic
worth?
India’s friend was never
a rationalist or even ‘logical’ in the occidental sense of the term. He is well
aware of the two poles of reality: the concrete hard outline of the ‘maya’ with which he has always played deftly as an organiser or soldier, and of the other extreme, of the
unexplained, ever receding and impregnable fringe of mystery. He knows the
human mind is always deeper than the concepts it elaborates. The riddle of
death is ever there in the mind of his heroes.
Willingly he dwells on
the puzzle of destiny, on why this man at that moment and none other. Why
civilizations flourish or fall, in search of the secret inner spring which
fertilizes them. Still intrigued by the occult he even confesses having
developed a talent for palmistry. About art he reiterates that the masterpieces
bequeathed to us do not necessarily reveal the major truths concerning the
nature of the people who created them, but perhaps only their aspirations. Nor
does he believe that we can judge precisely how the creators themselves saw
their own works. We ‘recreate’ them in a certain sense and the rest still lies
hidden. He lives aware at each step of that coming day when the sand and the
waves and the wind will cover civilizations into silence.
The notion itself of
conclusion is difficult to associate with the life and works of Andre Malraux, with their fixed centre yet expanding
circumference.
Because of his early
impulse to travel East and his early immersion into the ancient. Eastern
cultures and their contemporary metamorphosis, he may be regarded as having a
congenially occidental-oriental mind, justifying and maturing his planetary
views on world affairs. Concerned with the plight of humanity in its harshest
conditions he expresses an essential faith in a possible betterment. A democrat
par excellence he makes himself the defensor
of all civil rights, and at times becomes a knight errant in the service of
good causes. At times, too, the reformer races ahead of the artist, more
interested in creation than in perfection.
A man of symbolic and
motivated gestures, he belongs infinitely to French culture through the
classical concision of his style and strong unquestioned patriotism, and belongs
infinitely beyond it by the depth of his Shakespearian insight, the ideals
which haunt him, and a strange prophetic modernity which voluntarily and boldly
shuns all barriers and frontiers.