Martin Hurcombe
260
s’en arracher, imposaient à la fois l’idée d’une volonté et d’une métamorphose sans
fin. (p. 151)
It is his son, however, who, like Magnin in L’Espoir, and following
his near-death experience in 1940, will realise that the tree is suggestive of humanity’s collective and tenacious struggle for permanence in
an inhospitable world.
Large parts of Les Noyers de l’Altenburg are inspired by Malraux’s own wartime experiences and are therefore reproduced in his
anti-autobiography Antimémoires. Like Vincent Berger, Malraux
served in a tank regiment in 1940 and was captured by the Germans.
He would go on to fight in the Resistance, again being captured by the
Germans in 1944, and then, after the Liberation, lead a regiment of the
French army. It was perhaps by choosing tanks over aviation in 1940,
before joining the maquis, a form of Resistance whose very name
suggests a confusion with the soil of France, that Malraux, the erstwhile aviator of the España squadron in Republican Spain, came back
down to earth himself and encountered the seemingly timeless French
people.
22
In Antimémoires, this encounter occurs primarily following
Malraux’s capture in 1944. Imprisonment at the hands of the German
forces places Malraux in the position faced by a number of his characters (Kyo and Kassner, to give but two examples). Here he feels: “amputé de l’éternel” due to the imminence of his own death.
23 Yet the
support afforded him by the local population as he approaches his
death supplies a form of fraternity that in turn supplies a sense of existing not as an individual subject delimited by personal finitude, but
as part of an encompassing human environment that will survive this:
Mon passé, ma vie biographique n’avaient aucune importance. […] Je pensais aux
paysannes athées qui saluaient mes blessures du signe de la croix, à la canne
apportée par le paysan craintif, au café de l’hôtel de France et à celui de la
Supérieure. Il ne restait dans ma mémoire que la fraternité. Dans ce silence de
couvent où sans doute on priait pour moi […], ce qui vivait aussi profondément en
___________________________
22 Janine Mossuz-Lavau therefore asserts vis-à-vis Malraux’s Resistance experiences:
“[La France] a gagné dans cette épreuve une réalité charnelle qui n’apparaissait guère
quelques années plus tôt”. Janine Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme
(Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1982), p. 31.
23 André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 229.
260
s’en arracher, imposaient à la fois l’idée d’une volonté et d’une métamorphose sans
fin. (p. 151)
It is his son, however, who, like Magnin in L’Espoir, and following
his near-death experience in 1940, will realise that the tree is suggestive of humanity’s collective and tenacious struggle for permanence in
an inhospitable world.
Large parts of Les Noyers de l’Altenburg are inspired by Malraux’s own wartime experiences and are therefore reproduced in his
anti-autobiography Antimémoires. Like Vincent Berger, Malraux
served in a tank regiment in 1940 and was captured by the Germans.
He would go on to fight in the Resistance, again being captured by the
Germans in 1944, and then, after the Liberation, lead a regiment of the
French army. It was perhaps by choosing tanks over aviation in 1940,
before joining the maquis, a form of Resistance whose very name
suggests a confusion with the soil of France, that Malraux, the erstwhile aviator of the España squadron in Republican Spain, came back
down to earth himself and encountered the seemingly timeless French
people.
22
In Antimémoires, this encounter occurs primarily following
Malraux’s capture in 1944. Imprisonment at the hands of the German
forces places Malraux in the position faced by a number of his characters (Kyo and Kassner, to give but two examples). Here he feels: “amputé de l’éternel” due to the imminence of his own death.
23 Yet the
support afforded him by the local population as he approaches his
death supplies a form of fraternity that in turn supplies a sense of existing not as an individual subject delimited by personal finitude, but
as part of an encompassing human environment that will survive this:
Mon passé, ma vie biographique n’avaient aucune importance. […] Je pensais aux
paysannes athées qui saluaient mes blessures du signe de la croix, à la canne
apportée par le paysan craintif, au café de l’hôtel de France et à celui de la
Supérieure. Il ne restait dans ma mémoire que la fraternité. Dans ce silence de
couvent où sans doute on priait pour moi […], ce qui vivait aussi profondément en
___________________________
22 Janine Mossuz-Lavau therefore asserts vis-à-vis Malraux’s Resistance experiences:
“[La France] a gagné dans cette épreuve une réalité charnelle qui n’apparaissait guère
quelques années plus tôt”. Janine Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme
(Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1982), p. 31.
23 André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 229.