Down to Earth: André Malraux’s Political Itinerary
249
natural world and transposed onto the national context of France, that
helps to explain Malraux’s political itinerary in the post-war years.
Adopting Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, we will examine to what
extent the natural world in the Asiatic novels constitutes a horizon
against which the individual hero acts. For Bakhtin, in our every-day
lives, we experience the world around us not as an all-encompassing
and ultimately reassuring environment, but as a problematic horizon
against which the purposive and future-orientated self is condemned,
with a certain anticipation of Sartrean existentialism, to act.
3 However,
it is the encounter with the other and the resulting aestheticization of
human activity that transform the world from a problematic horizon to
an all-encompassing environment in which human action gains aesthetic form and temporal depth. We will therefore consider to what extent flight and the return to earth can be understood as leading to the
discovery of such an environment in opposition to the problematic horizon of the early novels, and how the Bakhtinian notion of environment helps to understand Malraux’s concept of the nation.
The Asiatic Novels
Malraux’s first three novels are set against Asia’s anti-colonial struggles of the 1920s; the action of both Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine is located in China, while that of La Voie royale is
located in the former French colony of Indochina. Here, the Asian
climate is fundamental in establishing a conflict between humanity
and the natural world that is crucial to Malraux’s conception of the
human condition more generally. This conflict resides in the natural
world’s apparent permanence in opposition to the Malrucian hero’s
sense of transience; Perken in La Voie royale and Garine in Les Conquérants, both examples of the Malrucian adventurer, act in the
awareness of their own physical decline and eventual deaths, but do so
in an environment marked by torpor and stasis suggestive of nature’s
permanence. The insects that Claude and Perken encounter in La Voie
royale live “dans une immobilité d’éternité” that results from their
___________________________
3 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, in Art and Answerability:
Early Philosophical Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. by
Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Bostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp.
4-256 (p.97).
249
natural world and transposed onto the national context of France, that
helps to explain Malraux’s political itinerary in the post-war years.
Adopting Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, we will examine to what
extent the natural world in the Asiatic novels constitutes a horizon
against which the individual hero acts. For Bakhtin, in our every-day
lives, we experience the world around us not as an all-encompassing
and ultimately reassuring environment, but as a problematic horizon
against which the purposive and future-orientated self is condemned,
with a certain anticipation of Sartrean existentialism, to act.
3 However,
it is the encounter with the other and the resulting aestheticization of
human activity that transform the world from a problematic horizon to
an all-encompassing environment in which human action gains aesthetic form and temporal depth. We will therefore consider to what extent flight and the return to earth can be understood as leading to the
discovery of such an environment in opposition to the problematic horizon of the early novels, and how the Bakhtinian notion of environment helps to understand Malraux’s concept of the nation.
The Asiatic Novels
Malraux’s first three novels are set against Asia’s anti-colonial struggles of the 1920s; the action of both Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine is located in China, while that of La Voie royale is
located in the former French colony of Indochina. Here, the Asian
climate is fundamental in establishing a conflict between humanity
and the natural world that is crucial to Malraux’s conception of the
human condition more generally. This conflict resides in the natural
world’s apparent permanence in opposition to the Malrucian hero’s
sense of transience; Perken in La Voie royale and Garine in Les Conquérants, both examples of the Malrucian adventurer, act in the
awareness of their own physical decline and eventual deaths, but do so
in an environment marked by torpor and stasis suggestive of nature’s
permanence. The insects that Claude and Perken encounter in La Voie
royale live “dans une immobilité d’éternité” that results from their
___________________________
3 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, in Art and Answerability:
Early Philosophical Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. by
Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Bostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp.
4-256 (p.97).