Down to Earth: André Malraux’s Political Itinerary
253
the present is directed by a future-orientated consciousness. This
shapes the world around it into a series of obstacles, littering the
ground on the path to an action that, once completed, will simply fall
away to reveal the next challenge to the ever-questing Malrucian hero.
The tension at the heart of the Asiatic novels is therefore born of the
opposition between two different conceptualizations of time and
space. It is what Bakhtin would consider a chronotopic tension; one
that draws on the dialogic opposition of two opposing conceptualizations of time and space.
10
The Anti-Fascist Works
The parallel battles between revolutionary action and the forces of political stasis on the one hand and the struggle for human dignity and
the forces of nature on the other continue in Malraux’s anti-fascist
novels, Le Temps du mépris and L’Espoir. In both, nature remains indifferent to the presence of humanity but also, when the latter engages
in action, seemingly hostile to this presence. Thus, when one enemy
assault is repulsed, Manuel notes that it is:
[…] comme si [la vague ennemie] n’eût pas été défaite par les anciens miliciens
mais par la pluie éternelle qui déjà mêlait beaucoup de leurs mots [sic] à la terre, et
renvoyait vers d’invisibles tranchées les vagues d’assaut ennemies, effilochées et
dissoutes, à travers le voile de pluie aux détonations aussi nombreuses que ses
gouttes.
11
Again, the emphasis remains on nature’s permanence but also on its
ability to eradicate humanity’s presence, to dissolve the latter into its
murky indifference.
The natural world continues to be associated with the stillness
of cosmic time in contrast to the Malrucian hero’s own sense of finitude. Nowhere is this more evident than in the episodes involving
flight. Flight in these works not only confronts Malraux’s heroes with
___________________________
10 The chronotope is, according to Bakhtin, “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relations that are artistically expressed in literature”. M.M. Bakhtin,
“Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by
Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press), pp. 84-259 (p. 84).
11 André Malraux, L’Espoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 426.
253
the present is directed by a future-orientated consciousness. This
shapes the world around it into a series of obstacles, littering the
ground on the path to an action that, once completed, will simply fall
away to reveal the next challenge to the ever-questing Malrucian hero.
The tension at the heart of the Asiatic novels is therefore born of the
opposition between two different conceptualizations of time and
space. It is what Bakhtin would consider a chronotopic tension; one
that draws on the dialogic opposition of two opposing conceptualizations of time and space.
10
The Anti-Fascist Works
The parallel battles between revolutionary action and the forces of political stasis on the one hand and the struggle for human dignity and
the forces of nature on the other continue in Malraux’s anti-fascist
novels, Le Temps du mépris and L’Espoir. In both, nature remains indifferent to the presence of humanity but also, when the latter engages
in action, seemingly hostile to this presence. Thus, when one enemy
assault is repulsed, Manuel notes that it is:
[…] comme si [la vague ennemie] n’eût pas été défaite par les anciens miliciens
mais par la pluie éternelle qui déjà mêlait beaucoup de leurs mots [sic] à la terre, et
renvoyait vers d’invisibles tranchées les vagues d’assaut ennemies, effilochées et
dissoutes, à travers le voile de pluie aux détonations aussi nombreuses que ses
gouttes.
11
Again, the emphasis remains on nature’s permanence but also on its
ability to eradicate humanity’s presence, to dissolve the latter into its
murky indifference.
The natural world continues to be associated with the stillness
of cosmic time in contrast to the Malrucian hero’s own sense of finitude. Nowhere is this more evident than in the episodes involving
flight. Flight in these works not only confronts Malraux’s heroes with
___________________________
10 The chronotope is, according to Bakhtin, “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relations that are artistically expressed in literature”. M.M. Bakhtin,
“Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by
Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press), pp. 84-259 (p. 84).
11 André Malraux, L’Espoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 426.