Martin Hurcombe
248
figuration of time and space that casts further light on Malraux’s journey from the politics of the revolutionary left to those of the conservative right.
Initially, we will consider this relationship in Malraux’s three
Asiatic novels: Les Conquérants (1928), La Voie royale (1930), and
La Condition humaine (1933). These novels, where the natural world
is associated with a deathly and paralysing torpor against which the
novels’ characters attempt to act meaningfully, establish a challenge
that is at once political and metaphysical, but also adumbrate an essential antagonism between humanity and the natural world. This antagonism persists in Malraux’s anti-fascist works of the mid and late
1930s: the novels Le Temps du mépris (1935) and L’Espoir (1937),
and Malraux’s only film, Sierra de Teruel (1939). Now, however, it is
challenged by the fraternal revolt of Malraux’s characters. Here, we
will examine the role played by flight and what Malraux himself identifies as the retour sur terre: the rediscovery of the world following a
near-death encounter with the forces of nature and the concomitant
discovery of an age-old collective human struggle to coalesce with the
natural world through which humanity gains some of the latter’s permanence. This chapter will conclude with an examination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world in Malraux’s fiction
and memoirs of the Second World War, where Malraux’s association
with Gaullism begins, in his final novel, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg
(1948), and in his 1967 essay Antimémoires. The latter, published
whilst he was a member of de Gaulle’s government, fuses fiction and
autobiography, reusing passages from several of Malraux’s novels in
order to suggest a continuity of thinking between the revolutionary
and the Gaullist phases. In both works, the sense of human permanence revealed in the anti-fascist works is rediscovered in the French
people encountered during the Second World War and, in particular,
in the course of Malraux’s own Resistance activities. Here again, this
chapter will argue, the emphasis is on coalescence with the natural
world rather than on the integration of the human into the natural
world, as Gino Raymond has suggested.
2 More importantly, it will argue that it is the resulting reconfiguration of time and space, predicated upon a gradual reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship to the
___________________________
2 Raymond, André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth, p. 43.
248
figuration of time and space that casts further light on Malraux’s journey from the politics of the revolutionary left to those of the conservative right.
Initially, we will consider this relationship in Malraux’s three
Asiatic novels: Les Conquérants (1928), La Voie royale (1930), and
La Condition humaine (1933). These novels, where the natural world
is associated with a deathly and paralysing torpor against which the
novels’ characters attempt to act meaningfully, establish a challenge
that is at once political and metaphysical, but also adumbrate an essential antagonism between humanity and the natural world. This antagonism persists in Malraux’s anti-fascist works of the mid and late
1930s: the novels Le Temps du mépris (1935) and L’Espoir (1937),
and Malraux’s only film, Sierra de Teruel (1939). Now, however, it is
challenged by the fraternal revolt of Malraux’s characters. Here, we
will examine the role played by flight and what Malraux himself identifies as the retour sur terre: the rediscovery of the world following a
near-death encounter with the forces of nature and the concomitant
discovery of an age-old collective human struggle to coalesce with the
natural world through which humanity gains some of the latter’s permanence. This chapter will conclude with an examination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world in Malraux’s fiction
and memoirs of the Second World War, where Malraux’s association
with Gaullism begins, in his final novel, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg
(1948), and in his 1967 essay Antimémoires. The latter, published
whilst he was a member of de Gaulle’s government, fuses fiction and
autobiography, reusing passages from several of Malraux’s novels in
order to suggest a continuity of thinking between the revolutionary
and the Gaullist phases. In both works, the sense of human permanence revealed in the anti-fascist works is rediscovered in the French
people encountered during the Second World War and, in particular,
in the course of Malraux’s own Resistance activities. Here again, this
chapter will argue, the emphasis is on coalescence with the natural
world rather than on the integration of the human into the natural
world, as Gino Raymond has suggested.
2 More importantly, it will argue that it is the resulting reconfiguration of time and space, predicated upon a gradual reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship to the
___________________________
2 Raymond, André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth, p. 43.