François-René de Chateaubriand: The Adventures of the Last Abencerraje. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Publishing, 2011.

 

Chateaubriand describes the Abencerrajes as a Moorish tribe that ruled the Emirate of Grenada, the last city ruled by Muslims in Spain, reconquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, uniting the two Christian Catholic kingdoms, gave the Spaniards the military heft they needed to complete the reconquest of their country, much of which had been taken by Sunni Muslims, beginning in the 700s. The Nasrid dynasty had ruled Grenada since the 1200s but had been weakened by factional struggles by the 1400s, with the Abencerrages facing off against the rival Zegris. After his surrender to the Spaniards, Grenada’s governor, Boabdil (Muhammed XII), departed for north Africa, stopping on Mount Padul, where he could see the Mediterranean and look back on the city and the tents of the Spanish army. As he wept, his mother, the Sultana Aixa, maintained the warrior spirit of Islam: “Thou weepest now like a woman for a kingdom thou wast unable to defend like a man.”

The Abencerrajes settled on the outskirts of Tunis, founding, “within sight of the ruins of Carthage, a colony that can still be distinguished today from the other Moorish colonies of Africa, by the elegance of its moeurs and the temperance of its laws.” So strong was their love of “their former homeland,” the exiled Abencerrajes prayed five times a day, facing not Mecca but Grenada. “Allah was invoked in order that he might render once more to his elect that land of delights,” which no longer “sounded to their cry to arms: ‘Love and Honor.'” Nevertheless, they turned to the practice not of war but of medicine; a “race of warriors, who had once inflicted wounds, now occupied themselves with the art of healing,” an art they had once practiced even during war, “tend[ing] the wounds of the enemy they had conquered.” The study of medicine was “a calling as esteemed among the Arabs as the profession of arms”—both satisfying the aristocratic passion for honor. Of the medicinal herbs they gathered, some relieved “the ills of the body,” some “the sorrows of the soul”; “the Abencerrajes especially valued those that served to calm vain regrets,” those “dispel[ling] those foolish illusions and hopes of happiness forever nascent, forever disappointed.” What religion perpetuated, futilely, medicine palliated. In the Islamic world, piety and philosophy once balanced each other.

Chateaubriand begins his story in 1516, a generation later, with young Aben-Hamet, a descendant of a man who was accused of seducing the Sultana by Ibrahim Benedin, leader of the rival Zegris,  in Grenada. He determines to return to Grenada “to satisfy his heart’s desire, and to accomplish a purpose which he hid carefully from his mother,” a purpose Chateaubriand will not reveal quite yet. Under the guise of an herb-gathering Arab physician, he heads for Spain, and although pained by the sight of palm trees planted by his ancestors and by the sight of Moorish ruins, he acknowledges to himself that “since Allah had willed that the Moors of Spain should lose their beautiful homeland,” he “could not help but esteem its somber conquerors.”And the beauty of that homeland has its own influence, as climatologist Montesquieu would expect: “Enchanted skies, a clear and delightful atmosphere, plunge the mind into a secret languor, from which travelers, even mere passers-by, can scarcely defend themselves. It would seem that in this country the tender passions would quickly extinguish the heroic ones, if love, to appear valid, had not the need to be always occupied with glory.” As his guide identifies the great, partly ruined castles, one “where they claim the Abencerraje was surprised with the Sultana Alfaima,” “how cruel it was” to Aben-Hamet “that he must have recourse to strangers to identify the monuments of his ancestors and be told by those indifferent to them the history of his family and friends!” He lodges at a caravanserai which had been built by the Moors but, “too agitated to enjoy even a brief repose,” he wanders the streets, listening to the sound of flutes, playing songs of love, which have replaced the sound of the Arabic trumpet: “the victors rested on the bed of the vanquished.” By daybreak, he is lost.

He then sees a beautiful Spanish girl, accompanied by a duenna, walking toward a monastery for morning Mass. “Recovering from her initial astonishment” at the sight of a Moor in Grenada, guessing that he is lost, “she beckoned to the stranger to approach with the grace and freedom peculiar to the women of that country.” He responds with Arabic eloquence: “Sultana of the flowers, delight to the eyes of man, O Christian slave, more beautiful than the virgins of the mountains of Georgia, thou hast divined it!” Well. “The Moors are renowned for their gallantry,” she replies “with the sweetest of smiles,” but “I am neither a Sultana of the flowers, nor a slave, nor pleased to be commended to Mohammed.” She exhibits Christian charity, guiding him to the caravanserai, then disappearing. With this, Aben-Hamet forgets to gather medicinal flowers, as “the flower he now sought was the beautiful Christian.”

The story will proceed from there, sometimes but if not always predictably. But why does Chateaubriand choose to tell it? 

Early in his career, Chateaubriand took upon himself the task of vindicating Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment. In The Genius of Christianity, published in 1802, he showed that pre-modern, Christian Europe had made substantial advances in science, without the materialism of modern science. Yet, there was another charge the Enlightenment made against Christianity, and against religion generally. Religion had sparked uncompromising wars not only between Christians and Muslims but among Christians themselves. These wars saw priests urging warlike aristocrats to fight heretics. Chateaubriand’s source for his story, Ginis Bérez de Hitas’s Guerras civil de Grenada, would have provided him with a forceful reminder of this. Was religious toleration founded upon a turn to ‘secularization’ and ‘democratization’ (especially rule by the commercial middle classes) not more favorable to real peace than the Religion of Peace—a claim fought over by both Christians and Muslims? Yet had not the Enlightenment issued in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, embarrassments to Enlightenment pacifiers? What Chateaubriand offers might be called a thought experiment, one showing how religious fidelity and aristocracy might overcome the urge to fight, how chivalry might not deserve to die. It is noteworthy that Christopher Columbus was likely present at the conquest of Grenada; he would set sail for what would turn out to be an unknown continent later that year. If Columbus’s voyage might be considered the beginning, or at least the harbinger, of European modernity, inaugurating the ‘Age of Exploration,’ might this hinge between religious and aristocratic feudalism and irreligious and ‘bourgeois’ modernity not strike Chateaubriand as a point of considerable interest?

As the months wear on, the lonely Abencerraje returns to gathering herbs. One day he hears his beloved’s voice singing a Castilian song “which traced the history of the Abencerrajes and the Zegris.” Once again, his greeting is gallant: “I cast at thy feet the heart of Aben-Hamet.” This time, she won’t disappear, as her song was a song in remembrance of him and their encounter. But she doesn’t know that he himself is “the last of the Abencerrajes,” and “a vestige of prudence restrained him” from telling her so, as that news might prove dangerous if related to the rulers: “The Moorish Wars were scarcely over, and the presence of an Abencerraje at that moment might justly inspire fear among the Spaniards.” For his part, he fears not the danger of combat but the danger of separation from Dona Blanca. 

Who is she? She descends from Roderigo Diaz de Bivar, the famous El Cid, who conquered Valencia and ruled it in the years before his death in 1099. During a period of exile from the Castilian court, he had fought with the Muslims, and as ruler of Valencia he found support among both Christians and Muslims. Although his line fell into “extreme poverty,” Blanca’s grandfather revived their fortunes, becoming “well known less for his true titles than for the brilliance of his valor”—that is, by means of virtue, of nature, not of convention. Ferdinand made him Duke of Santa Fé as reward for his battlefield prowess. His son, Don Rodrigo, was named for El Cid, who has two children, eighteen-year-old Blanca and her valorous older brother, also Don Rodrigo but called Don Carlos to distinguish him from him from his now elderly father. Don Carlos accompanied Cortez in his expedition to Mexico in 1519—the continuation of European voyages of discovery and conquest; “endur[ing] every danger, he had witnessed all the horrors of that astonishing venture,” witnessing “the fall of the last king of a world till then unknown.” A few years later, he fought among the Spanish forces allied with the House of Hapsburg, defeating the French at the Battle of Pavia, an event that led to the imprisonment of the French king. “The aspects of the new world, the long voyages over as yet unknown seas, the spectacle of revolutions and vicissitudes of fate, had badly shaken the religious and melancholy mind of Don Carlos,” who renounced marriage, giving his possessions to his sister and joining the Order of Calatrava. That is significant because the Order of Calatrava was founded in the twelfth century by warrior aristocrats and Catholic monks who had joined in defending a Spanish fortress; it valorizes the Church-aristocracy alliance of Spanish and indeed of European feudalism. 

His sister sings, dances, rides a horse: “Athens would have taken her for Aspasia and Paris for Diane de Poitiers.” “But allied to the charms of a French woman, she had the passion of a Spaniard, and her natural coquetry stole nothing from the steadiness, constancy, force, and elevation of the sentiments of her heart.” When her father rushes to discover what the commotion is, she nonetheless lies, telling him that the Moor “entered the garden to thank me for having shown him the way” to the caravanserai. She has already chosen to leave her father and to cleave to him, which would be an act of Christian if not filial fidelity. That will prove easier to think than to do. Chateaubriand pauses, however, to elaborate on the ethos and the moeurs of the Spanish regime: “The Duke of Santa Fé received the Abencerraje with the grave and yet simple politeness of the Spaniards. There is nothing of a servile manner to be seen in that nation, none of those turns of phrase that denote abjection of thought or degradation of spirit. The language of the great lord and of the peasant is one, greetings, compliments, habits, customs, all are one. Both their trust in and the generosity of that people towards, foreigners are boundless, just as their vengeance is terrible when betrayed. Heroic in their courage, unfailing in their patience, incapable of yielding to evil fortune, they must overcome it or be crushed. They have little of what we call wit, but the exalted passions take the place of that enlightenment that comes from subtlety and abundance of ideas. A Spaniard who spends the day without speaking, who has seen nothing, who cares to see nothing, who has read nothing; studied nothing; compared nothing, still finds in the grandeur of his resolutions the resources required to face the hour of adversity.” That is, in terms of modernity’s democracy, the Spanish were and remain democratic in the uniformity of their moeurs but aristocratic in their moeurs, and so in reality, by their nature as improved by their regime, not by convention, as established by the false nature-philosophy of the Enlightenment philosophes. Spaniards remain outside of the Enlightenment but suffer nothing on account of that, thanks to their grandeur, their greatness, of soul. For Chateaubriand, then, they are models of what other Europeans might be.

At a birthday celebration for her father, Blanca, worried that her beloved might be distracted by the other women, dances a Zambra, “an expressive dance the Spaniards had borrowed from the Moors.” The music and her dance “settled the fate of the last Abencerraje irrevocably: they would have sufficed to disrupt a heart less afflicted than his.” As for Blanca, although “to love an Infidel, a Moor, a foreigner, seemed so strange a thing to her,” she accepted “that malaise like a true woman of Spain,” foreseeing “dangers and sorrows” calmly. “Let Aben-Hamet become a Christian, let him love me, and I will follow him to the ends of the earth.” That, of course, is the dilemma, as for his part Aben-Hamet thinks, “Let Blanca become a Muslim, let her love me, and I will serve her till my dying breath.” “Fixed in their resolutions,” the lovers “only awaited the moment to reveal their feelings to one another.”

He has disclosed this much, that his family originated in Granada. She invites him to walk through the Alhambra, surely a site of interest. They enter at the Gate of Justice, where “all the charms of his homeland, all his regrets, mingled with the glamor of love, seized the heart of the Last Abencerraje,” in this place where “something sensual, religious, and yet warlike” pervaded this “kind of cloister of love, a mysterious retreat in which the Moorish kings tasted all the delights, and forgot all the duties, of life.” He sheds “tears of fidelity, loyalty, and honor” at the sight of King Boabdil’s name inscribed in the mosaics. When she leads him to the Room of the Abencerrajes, Blanca points out their bloodstains, caused by their slaughter as punishment for the seduction of the Sultana. “That is the manner in which they treat men who seduce credulous women in your country,” she observes, doubtless intending this as a cautionary monition. Aben-Hamet responds nobly, swearing “by the blood of these knights, to love thee with the constancy, fidelity, and ardor of an Abencerraje.” He has not yet quite disclosed that he is an Abencerraje, but the religious impasse remains: she would have him to convert; he, her. Having resisted the temptation to forsake religious fidelity for romantic love, they “emerged from that place of danger,” but not before Blanca asks him how he would love her, if he was indeed an Abencerraje. “More than glory and less than honor,” the Moorish aristocrat answers, confirming that his natural virtue overrides conventional opinion. Given both the impasse and their strength of character, they agree never to love anyone else, to wait with patience until one or the other converts. He vows to return every year “to see if thou hast kept faith with me, and whether thou wishest to renounce thy errors,” that is, Christianity.

He does return the following year, bringing with him the gift of a gazelle, “almost as light-footed as thou,” on whose collar “she read with tender gaze her own name.” Both lovers would have known that the gazelle symbolizes the soul and is often depicted as being attacked by a lion symbolizing the passions. This living gazelle has survived the hunt. Having tested each other’s fidelity in love and in religion, “they separated again without succumbing to the passion that drew them to one another.” The next year proves more eventful, and fateful. Having returned “like one of those birds of passage that love brings back to us when it is spring in our climate,” in France, it transpires that Blanca’s brother has also arrived, accompanied by a French prisoner, captured at the Battle of Pavia, whom he has befriended. Perhaps borrowing from the custom of the Abencerrajes, or simply out of Christian charity, Don Carlos, “who witnessed Lautrec’s bravery” on the battlefield, “cared for the young Frenchman’s wounds, and between them formed one of those heroic friendships” in which “esteem and virtue form the foundation.” Aben-Hamet “felt his heart sink,” seeing that Don Carlos intends this man, Thomas de Lautrec, to court Blanca. And Don Carlo “nourished in his heart that hatred against the infidels which he had inherited from El Cid.” Introduced by his sister to the Moor, Don Carlos chivalrously acknowledges him as a man of “noble race and brave”; in the coming war of Spain against Tunisia, “I trust we will see you take the field.” Aristocratic courtesy tempers religious animosity, without abandoning religious animosity. To his grave disappointment, Blanca “made no attempt to hide the secret of her heart” and, having won the love battle before taking the field in any war, Aben-Hamet gracefully takes his leave.

When Don Carlos demands an explanation from his sister, she unhesitatingly declares her love for the Moor: “Nobility, honor, chivalry, are his; I will worship him till my last breath,” and you, brother, should “keep thy vows of knighthood as I will keep my vows of love,” refusing to marry unless he converts to Christianity. When Don Carlos complains that “our family will vanish from the earth,” Blanca ripostes, “It is for thou to revive it.” “Besides, what use are descendants thou wilt never see, and who will lapse from thy virtue? Don Carlos, I feel that we are the last of our race; we are too far out of the common order for our race to flourish after us: the Cid was our ancestor, he will be our posterity.” Spanish aristocrats are the Christian equivalents of the last of the Abencerrajes.  Blanca will “worship” her beloved but not at the expense of relinquishing her worship of Christ. And although she worships the man of chivalry, she also suspects that chivalry is dead, at least in her family, knowing that genuine aristocracy, what Chateaubriand’s older contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, is no matter of inheritance. Shining in a few generations, it eventually must disappear.

Frustrated by his sister, Don Carlos challenges Aben-Hamet to a duel. Once satisfied that Blanca has not sent him (“she loves thee more than ever,” the knight tells him), the Moor declines the challenge; he is not a knight, and Don Carlos would betray his superior rank if he were to fight him. Don Carlos promptly grants him a knighthood, “gird[ing] him with the very sword that the Abencerraje might well be about to plunge into his chest: such was the former idea of chivalry.” He also offers Aben-Hamet baptism, which the Moor faithfully refuses. In the fight, Don Carlos proves the better swordsman, but Aben-Hamet’s Arabian horse is more agile, his Arab-forged sword stronger. With the Christian at his mercy, the Muslim refuses to kill him. “Thou wert free to kill me, but I have never thought to do you the least injury; I wished only to prove to thee that I was worthy of being thy brother, and to prevent thee from despising me.” The principle of warrior aristocracy, across religious lines, is honor; at the same time, both Christianity and Islam add grace, grace in imitation of God, to honor. That is “the former idea of chivalry.”

Despite Blanca’s efforts, the three men will not reconcile, as Don Carlos continues to “loathe” Aben-Hamet, Lautrec to “envy” him. As for the Muslim, “I esteem Don Carlos, and I pity Lautrec, but I cannot love them.” Blanca can only counsel patience.

Her patience is nearly rewarded. “It came to [Aben-Hamet’s] mind to enter the temple of Blanca’s God, and seek advice from the Lord of Creation.” In “an ancient mosque converted into a church by the faithful,” his heart is “seized by sorrow and religion” in this “temple that was once of his God and his homeland.” “The airy architecture of the Arabs was married to the Gothic, and without losing its elegance had acquired the gravity appropriate to meditation.” Married, indeed, but human beings are not buildings. “Aben-Hamet was about to throw himself headlong onto the marble floor” and give himself to Christ, “when he saw, in the lamplight, an Arabic verse from the Koran, which appeared beneath the half-ruined plaster of the wall. Remorse awoke in his heart, and he hastened to leave the building where he had considered renouncing his loyalty to his religion and country.” Upon leaving the church, he meets Blanca, who worries that, now weakened by passion, she will die if he does not “adopt my faith before the Christian altar.” This moves him to “renounce the error of his religion,” as “the fear of seeing Blanca’s death outweighed all other feelings” in his heart. “After all, he told himself, the God of the Christian may well be the true God,” a “God of noble souls, since He is worshipped by Blanca, Don Carlos and Lautrec.” It seems that love and honor overcome the aristocrat’s religious fidelity. Chateaubriand appears to prepare what indeed would be a ‘Romantic’ conclusion to his tale, one that his sentimental readers would expect and delight in.

But not so. At a gathering arranged by Lautrec, who had also been present in the church, praying for guidance, the three men tell stories of victory: Don Carlos, the conquest of Mexico; Aben-Hamet, the founding of the Ottoman Empire, “newly established on the ruins of Constantinople” (conquest can cut both ways); Lautrec the glories of the French royal court and “the rebirth of the arts from the barbaric womb,” uniting Christian France with ancient Greece. Each man then sings a ballad: the captive Lautrec longing for his homeland; Aben-Hamet longing for the lost Grenada, “lost to an accursed Christian,” but “so it is written” by the will of Allah; Don Carlos of “his illustrious ancestor El Cid,” who “preferred his God, his King, his Ximena, to life itself, and above all: his honor.” Until now, Aben-Hamet had no thought that Don Carlos and Blanca were descendants of El Cid, “whom Christians call the Flower of Battles” while having “a name among us for his cruelty.” This means that Blanca’s grandfather killed Aben-Hamet’s grandfather during the conquest of Grenada. Like Boabdil before him, Aben-Hamet weeps, first confessing that “yesterday, the sight of this French knight at prayer” and the sound of “thy words in the cemetery of the temple, made me resolve to know thy God, and sacrifice my faith for thee.” He had come to Grenada in order to revenge his family for the death of his grandfather. Now, he absolves Blanca of her vows to him and “to fulfill by my eternal absence, and my death, what we both owe to the enmity between our gods, our homelands, and our families.” He forfeits Blanca to the French knight, who chivalrously refuses the offer: “Thou shalt not carry into exile the fatal idea that Lautrec, insensitive to thy virtue, seeks to profit from thy misfortunes.” For his part, Don Carlo tells them both, “I expected nothing less from your illustrious origins.” He then offers to meet Aben-Hamet once again in combat; “If I am vanquished, all my good, once yours, will be faithfully restored to you,” and if you refuse combat, “become a Christian and receive the hand of my sister, which Lautrec has requested on your behalf.”

Although “the temptation was great,” it “was not beyond the self-rule of Aben-Hamet,” not beyond the virtue of his nature. “He could not think without horror of any idea of uniting the blood of the persecutors to that of the persecuted” in “so unholy an alliance,” as his grandfather would have deemed it. “Let Blanca pronounce my fate,” which she does: “Return to the desert!” At this, Aben-Hamet “offered his adoration to Blanca even more than to Heaven,” leaves Grenada and soon undertakes a pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps to repent of that impious adoration. Blanca will pass “the rest of her days among the ruins of the Alhambra,” the palace of love. “She did not complain; she did not weep; she never spoke of Aben-Hamet: a stranger might have thought her happy,” the sole survivor in her family after her father dies of grief and Don Carlos is killed in a duel. 

Chateaubriand breaks in with his own memory. In Tunisia he had been shown, in a cemetery near the ruins of Carthage, where Dido mourned the absence of her lover, Aeneas, a tomb called “The Tomb of the Last of the Abencerraje.” “The rainwater collects at the bottom of this funeral basin and serves, in that hot climate, to quench the thirst of birds of passage,” emblems of lovers. There Chateaubriand leaves his story, but his readers, familiar with Virgil’s epic, know that Aeneas left Dido, not only the queen but the founder of Carthage after fleeing Tyre, which she ruled jointly with her overbearing brother, even as Blanca’s people were the founders of reconquered Grenada. Aeneas left Dido not at her command but at the command of Jupiter, who intended the exile from conquered Troy to become the founder of Rome. Unlike Christian Blanca, pagan Dido cursed Aeneas and all the Trojans, then committed suicide, prefiguring the brutal wars between Carthage and Rome, and their outcome. Rome would conquer Europe, including Spain, providing the political framework within which Christians could evangelize, despite persecution—or because of it, since the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. The Spanish reconquest of Spain, ending in Grenada, reprises both the Roman conquest of Europe and the Christian conquest of Rome. 

The religio-political settlement Chateaubriand arranges in The Adventures of the Last of the Abencerrajes thus amounts to a thought experiment vindicating both Christian and Muslim aristocracies while acknowledging their demise. The settlement depends primarily upon the character of aristocracy itself—the genuine aristocracy of virtue, and especially of warrior virtues, not the conventional aristocracy of titled oligarchs. This requires upholding honor by means of self-sacrifice. Religion inflects this conduct, but it is noteworthy that no priest and no imam ever appears in the course of the story. Chateaubriand keeps his thought experiment centered on the conduct of aristocrats as aristocrats, across religious frontiers. Aristocrats can settle peace between rival religions, at the cost of exile and loving sacrifice. Chateaubriand’s much younger distant cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, would find a different role for aristocrats, one consonant with their decline in the wake of civil-social equality, a role consistent with the maintenance of honor.

 

 

Seneca: Epistles. Number 88: “”On Liberal and Vocational Studies.” Richard Mott Gummere translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920.

 

Addressed to “his friend Lucilius,” a Roman procurator, Seneca’s letters range over an array of topics likely to concern a gentleman-politician. Gentleman-politicians distinguish themselves from ‘the vulgar.’ But on what terms? By what criteria? Most immediately, because they are “free-born,” neither slaves nor dependent upon civil-social superiors, and therefore potentially capable of self-government and of governing the city. But capable in what way? And how can the desired capability be cultivated? Roman gentleman often hope to make their sons distinguished from ‘the vulgar’ by providing them with an education in the liberal arts.

“You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies,” Seneca begins, alluding to the famous opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” Gentlemen, however, direct this natural human inclination in a gentlemanly direction. “I respect no study,” Seneca continues, “and deem no study good, which results in money-making.” Respect or honor; deeming or judging; goodness: these are the preoccupations of one who wants to rule, one who wants to rule prudently, one who wants to rule virtuously, not with mere virtuosity. And surely not for a task so base as money-making. Seneca distinguishes the work of a gentleman from the work of buying and selling, some “profit-bringing” work “useful only in so far as” it prepares the mind for better things, which is “our real work” as gentlemen and perhaps as human beings simply. That is, while practical, the gentleman is no ‘utilitarian.’ Liberal studies “are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman,” and there is really only one such study, the one “which gives a man his liberty.” That is “the study of wisdom,” which is “lofty, brave, and great-souled.” The love of wisdom, which will lead a soul to the study of wisdom, is philosophy. But loftiness or high-mindedness, courage, and magnanimity are moral virtues par excellence. Seneca seems to conjoin philosophy not only with a life animated by morality but with the most conspicuous virtues, the virtues a gentleman-politician might most want to possess. He associates liberty primarily with philosophy, secondarily with what a gentleman would ordinarily think, that liberty is citizenship, sharing in the rule of the city.

Do liberal studies really “make men good,” though? The liberal arts, the objects of liberal studies, consist of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—and the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. What have they to do with moral virtue? When it comes to “investigations into language,” including works of history and poetry, Seneca doubts that they have much to do with it at all. “Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions?” Unlikely: linguistics, history, and poetry “would resemble each other if they taught the same thing,” whether it were morality or anything else. They don’t. That is, in terms of the trivium, logic tells us that grammar and rhetoric (specimens of which highlighted the works of the classical historians) do not teach virtue. 

What about rhetoric, the most persuasive manifestation of which might be said to be poetry? Teachers of this liberal art often make the claim that Homer teaches virtue, that Homer “was a philosopher,” and therefore a teacher of virtue as Seneca has defined “philosopher.” Did Homer deploy poetry in defense of philosophy? If so, what school of philosophy did Homer represent? Some call him a Stoic, some an Epicurean, some a Peripatetic/Aristotelian, some an Academic/Platonist. “Yet “no one of these doctrines is to be fathered upon Homer,” just “because they are all there,” all seen in one or another of the characters he presents in his poems, and these characters “are irreconcilable with one another.” Homer’s characters thus defy the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of logic, the third liberal art of the Trivium. And even if Homer was indeed a philosopher, a philosopher who anticipated and comprehended all subsequent philosophic schools, “surely he became a wise man before he had any knowledge of poetry.” His wisdom must have preceded his art. The study of poetry didn’t make him wise. 

What did? One cannot learn that by what ‘moderns’ would call the facts one might turn up by reading his poems—asking where Ulysses voyaged “instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times.” There are storms of the soul “which toss us daily,” troubling us as much as all the misadventures of the Homeric hero. “For us there is never lacking the beauty to tempt our eyes, or the enemy to assail us; on this side are savage monsters that delight in human blood, on that side the treacherous allurements of the ear, and yonder is shipwreck and all the varied category of misfortune”; “show me rather, by the example of Ulysses, how I am to love my country, my wife, my father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I am to sail toward these ends, honorable as they are.” A philosopher will inquire not whether Penelope actually was “a pattern of purity,” or whether “she suspected that the man in her presence was Ulysses, before she knew it was he”; “teach me rather what purity is, and how great a good we have in it, and whether it is situated in the body or in the soul.” That is, a philosopher will ask questions about how things are, what they are, what good things are, and the nature of things—the ‘What is?’ questions of Plato’s Socrates. At best, poems might be the work of a poet who, already knowing the answers to these questions, or at least knowing the several opinions about them and thereby being capable of raising questions about the answers, portrays characters who illustrate virtues, vices, good fortune and bad, bringing them to us for our own investigation. 

As for the quadrivium, the study of music teaches virtue no more than poetry does. It teaches me to produce harmonies of sound, but that doesn’t “bring my soul into harmony with itself” or prevent “my purposes [to] be out of tune.” Mathematics, in particular geometry, teaches me “how to lay out the dimensions of my estates” but not “how to lay out what is enough for a man to own.” In teaching me to count, arithmetic only “adapts my fingers to avarice” without teaching me “that there is no point in such calculations,” except to ruin my soul. And as for my estate, why should I allow myself to indulge the love of what is my own—or rather, what only seems to be my own? If someone connives to take your carefully measured land that your father and grandfather owned, “Who owned the land before your grandfather?” And who owned it originally? After all, you are only tenant on that land, keeping it for some future tenant. Moreover, “what you hold and call your own is public property—it belongs to mankind at large.” And as for your grander calculations, your computations of “the distance between the stars,” if you were “the real master of your profession, measure me the mind of man!” And in terms of ethics, knowing what a straight line is doesn’t tell you what a straight life is.

Astronomy? “What benefit will it be to know this?” As for astrology, the planets and stars “are driven along by an unending round of destiny, on a course from which they cannot swerve.” That being so, “if they are responsible for whatever happens, how will it help you to know the secrets of the immutable?” You can’t do anything about them. The right-minded man weighs probabilities, preparing for whatever events may befall, good or evil, exhibiting phronēsis, practical wisdom.

What of the non-liberal, if not illiberal arts? Painting and sculpture are not liberal arts but mere “helps toward luxury.” Athletic training is even less liberal; to learn how to wrestle (for example) is to gain knowledge “compounded of oil and mud”—the oil with which wrestlers slather their bodies, the mud in the pits where wrestlers fight. As to the arts of perfumery and of cooking, they serve bodily pleasures, not the mind, catering to the wrong ordering of the soul. What of the strict warlike skills? “Do we really believe that the training which they give is ‘liberal’ for the young men of Rome, who used to be taught by our ancestors to stand straight and hurl a spear, to wield a pike, to guide a horse, and to handle weapons?” Those ancestors who taught their children “nothing that could be learned while lying down” were no better educators than our teachers of the arts of satiation. Why learn to “guide a horse and control his speed” without knowing how to bridle our passions? And why learn to beat opponents in wrestling, if we “find that we ourselves are beaten by anger?”

Do liberal studies “contribute nothing to our welfare,” then? Yes, “but nothing at all as regards virtue.” They contribute to “the equipment of life.” Like all equipment, and like all the arts that equip us for thinking and acting, they cannot “bestow virtue,” but they can “prepare the soul for the reception of virtue.” “The liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue,” but they do “set it going in that direction.” 

How so? Seneca calls upon the authority of Posidonius, the massively learned Greek who promoted the advancement of Stoicism throughout the Roman Empire. Posidonius identified four arts: the “common and low”—arts worked with the hands, “concerned with the equipping of life” with “no pretense to beauty or honor”; “those which serve for amusement,” pleasing to eye and ear; those deployed to educate boys, especially the trivium and quadrivium, which Romans call liberal; and the genuinely liberal arts, “whose concern is virtue,” which is what truly liberates the human soul from its passions. Only those are truly liberal, truly liberating. Stoic philosophy has exactly that purpose. 

Admittedly, philosophy also consists of the study of nature, and quadrivial geometry and arithmetic assist in that study. “But many things aid us and yet are not parts of ourselves”; were they parts of ourselves, we would not need to acquire them. “Mathematics is as indispensable to philosopher as the carpenter is to the mathematician” but carpentry isn’t mathematics and mathematics isn’t philosophy. The natural philosopher inquires into the causes of natural phenomena “while the mathematician follows up and computes their numbers and their measurements.” Similarly, the natural philosopher learns “the laws by which the heavenly bodies persist” and “what powers belong to them,” while the astronomer “merely notes their comings and goings.” No art is self-sufficient because all arts rest on “first principles” the art itself cannot and does not discover. If an art “could march unassisted to the truth, if it were able to understand the nature of the universe, I should say that it would offer much assistance to our minds; for the mind grows by contact with things heavenly and draws into itself something from on high.” But the only thing that perfects the soul is “the unalterable knowledge of good and evil.” Arts exist in order to alter things, not to discover the unalterable. No art “investigates good and evil.” The arts are amoral in and of themselves, although they may be propaedeutic to morality, and to philosophy generally. The possible exception, the third art of the Roman trivium, logic, is no exception in the sense that logic does not discover its first principle, the principle of non-contradiction; it rests upon that principle. Exercise in the art of logic can aid morality by helping (for example) to prevent incoherence of moral precepts. But it is itself no virtue; it does not make us good.

Consider the virtues, Seneca tells Lucilius, following the ‘What is?’ line of philosophic inquiry. Do liberal studies make us courageous? Courage “challenges and crushes the powers of terror and all that would drive our freedom under the yoke,” all that would deprive us of liberty, whether political or philosophic. In what way do liberal studies strengthen souls in this? Loyalty, a foundation of the friendship Seneca and Lucilius enjoy, “the holiest good in the human heart,” does not arise from such study, either. Nor does moderation, which “knows that the best measure of the appetites is not what you want to take”—which a mathematician might count and measure—but “what you ought to take,” which might be measurable in terms of bodily good, but not moral good. Liberal studies cannot teach us to be kind, to know “that it is not for man to make wasteful use of his fellow man.” Liberal studies are worthwhile preparations for the attainment of wisdom but wisdom “is not learned by means of these studies.”

Yet although “wisdom is not to be found in letters,” no man “ignorant of letters” will ever “be a wise man.” This is because “wisdom is a large and spacious thing,” indeed liberating, too large and spacious for any one person to become comprehensively wise. “One must learn about things divine and human, the past and the future, the ephemeral and the eternal”—time, the soul, the cosmos. “Whatever phase of things human and divine you have apprehended, you will be wearied by the vast number of things to be answered and things to be learned.” Better to “let all other things be driven out, and let the breast be emptied to receive virtue.” Winnow down your liberal studies to “as much of them as is essential.” Yes, all men by nature desire to know, but that desire too can be immoderate, as all desires can be. Pursue it immoderately to the peril of your soul. The “unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials.” One scholarly pest wrote four thousand books; “I should feel pity for him if he had only read the same number of superfluous volumes,” writings that address “problems the answers to which, if found, were forthwith to be forgotten.” This being so, “I can show you many works which ought to be cut down with the axe.” To want to hear the praise, “What a learned man you are!” is vanity. If you want to be praised, seek the compliment, “What a good man you are!” A good man will refrain from “wallow[ing] in the geometrician’s dust.”

You are a gentleman, Lucilius. You have no time for such things. To chase after them, you would need to “take no thought of all the time which one loses by ill-health, public duties, private duties, daily duties, and sleep.” Life is too short to be wasted on “superfluous and unpractical matter.”

Where does this leave philosophy? In its place. Philosophers “have taken over into their own art all the superfluities of these arts,” and “the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living.” That is, philosophy too is an art, but not often a liberal one, one that sets the soul free. Philosophers indulge in “over-nice exactness,” an enemy of truth. In so doing, they have gathered themselves into the distinct and opposing philosophic sects supposedly seen in Homeric poetry. Protagoras (the sophist Seneca classes with the philosophers) “declares that one can take either side on any question and debate it with equal success,” including the question of whether one can take either side on any question and debate it with equal success. And so it would seem, when examining philosophers who argue plausibly for atomism and reduce morality to mere rhetoric (Nausiphanes), for a cosmos that is real but whose various phenomenal manifestations are illusory (Parmenides), for the denial that anything at all exists (Zeno), and for the denial that we can know anything at all, with the possible exception of knowing that we do not know (the several schools of Skepticism). “You may sweep all these theories in with the superfluous troops of ‘liberal’ studies; the on class of men give me a knowledge that will be of no use to me, the other class do away with any hope of attaining knowledge.” Such philosophizing is nothing but a source of vexation. It is sophistry. It leads to intellectual confusion, not theoretical wisdom, and undermines morality, which requires practical wisdom not rhetorical posturing.

Genuine philosophy, Stoicism, centers the soul upon the virtues. In this, it calms the suspicions of the gentlemen who regard philosophy itself as suspect because so many philosophers evidently think in vain and undermine morality. At the same time, Stoic philosophy frees the philosopher, Seneca, not only from the threat of persecution by indignant gentlemen but for the pursuit of philosophy, including the investigation of nature—of the cosmos and of the place of human beings within it. 

 

 

André Malraux: The Kingdom of Farfelu with Paper Moons. W. B. Keckler translation. New York: Fugue State Press, 2005.

Georges Lemaitre: From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature.  Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978 (1947).

André Vandegans: La Jeunesse Littéraire d’André Malraux: Essai Sur L’Inspiration Farfelue. Abbeville: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964.

Domnica Radulescu: André Malraux: The “Farfelu” as Expression of the Feminine and the Erotic. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

 

In 1921, the very young André Malraux dedicated his first published work of fiction, Paper Moons, to the Cubist writer, Max Jacob, an early friend and mentor in Paris. Paris in the years after the Great War saw a continuation of the artistic ferment that had begun before the war, an atmosphere of social and political security now of course long vanished. Lemaitre’s history evokes that time and place.

The French, he writes, “with almost complete consistency,” have esteemed rationality and realism, considering themselves “the upholders of le bon sens.” Seen in the neoclassicism of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment counter-rationalism of the eighteenth, what Malraux would later call the “mania for logic” has animated French minds. The stance has not been without its critics; Lemaitre cites the Rousseau of the Reveries and such Romantics as Gérard Nerval, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire. Two generations before Malraux, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé strove to transcend ordinary reality, “to enter the realm of the Absolute, which for him meant simply a more or less abstract, immaterial conception of perfect, ideal beauty” evoked by literary incantations tapping into “the hidden magic power of words,” which he compared to sentient, animated “living organisms,” organisms that have lost their original vitality in “the drab, stale vocabulary of modern days.”  Once “freed from the tyranny of reality, released from the necessity of having to ‘mean’ something definite,” words “will encounter a thousand possibilities of self-realization,” re-revealing “the ‘other’ world—the world of the ideal.” In philosophy, this was the time of the ‘irrationalists,’ of Nietzsche’s will to power and of Bergson’s élan vital. Moreover, from the 1890s on, science and mathematics themselves seemed to corroborate the unreality of reality, as “a series of correlated discoveries…revolutionized the conception of the structure of the universe that had prevailed since about the time of the Renaissance,” dissociating “certain aspects of reality that had been hitherto considered as forming an indivisible unity.” Mathematical physics, atomistic chemistry, and experimental psychology together left “the impression that every sentiment we entertain and every solid object that we perceive is but a flimsy assemblage ready to collapse into fragments at the impact of some new discovery.” “The world of our experience” seemed to disintegrate “into minute particles,” as the world “was seen as “infinitely more complex than had ever been imagined before,” with “enormous and profound unknown forces” were now understood to “envelop human life on all sides.” Such claims were no longer the province of poets, mystics, and madmen; “human intelligence, which the rationalistic Frenchman had so long trusted as the safest guide in the intricate maze of puzzling reality, came to be regarded with suspicion and even with contempt.” Rousseau’s noble savage reigned once more: “Since intelligence had betrayed the confidence placed in her, the desire was to return to a pre-intellectual state, to a primitivism akin to that of the Negroes of Central Africa—a stage of development in which intellect had not yet had a chance to draw an interpretative veil between the core of reality and man’s sentient being.” 

One littérateur who typified the Parisian scene near the turn of the century was the wealthy, garrulous, massively erudite absinthe drinker, Alfred Jarry, whose 1896 play, Ubu-Roi enjoyed a succès de scandale with its “hideous presentation” of “cupidity, cowardice, gluttony, lechery, bourgeois respectability, philosophical wisdom, and shar, dangerous cunning,” all set for with “a monstrous vital intensity reminiscent of the powerful creations of Rabelais.” King Ubu “stands as a symbol of the lowest human instincts, which, if given a free hand, might easily take possession of our whole being and…fasten the tyranny of ignoble appetites upon our entire personality”—a “bitter satire on the society in which we live,” a society in which the play “aroused either violent resentment or wild enthusiasm.” Among his young admirers were Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Max Jacob, the men who went on to start the Cubist movement in literature, painting, and sculpture. For the Cubists, Jarry “came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of a generation in revolt, a champion who had fallen”—he died in 1907 at the age of 34—in “a lofty struggle” against what young artists yawned at: the dullness of middle-class existence, with its stubborn insentience of the harrowing reality beneath the surface of worldly comforts.

Picasso and Jacob befriended one another in Paris in 1901, the year Malraux was born. They met Apollinaire a few years later. “Cubism is the most direct and evident consequence of that collaboration,” finding an impetus in the statuettes now being imported from the Ivory Coast and Congo. “The candid expression of genuine, though brutal, sensations and sentiments stirred man in a way that was beyond the power of a clever, sophisticated technique,” that “hard crust of an age-old civilization,” with “the thick layer of interpretive notions and traditions which intelligence had deposited upon all things,” now held to be “the main obstacle to direct contact with the richest sources of human inspiration and emotion.” The “geometric simplification” seen in African art suggested that the artists had “succeeded in suggesting with almost overpowering force a mysterious order, not thrust upon passive objects by an organizing intelligence but existing, as it were, at the very core of things themselves.” A 1908 exhibition by Picasso’s friend Georges Braque provoked Henri Matisse (other art historians credit the critic Louis Vauxcelles) to describe the paintings as having been composed “with little cubes.” “At the bottom of the Cubist movement was an eager and fervent desire to penetrate beneath the motley exterior of material appearances and to grasp something of the fundamental substance of reality,” inasmuch as the structured atomism of geometric shapes leaves literary and visual art “utterly free from entanglements and compromises with the materialism of life,” especially as exemplified by those money-grubbing bourgeois. “Even though discursive logic was now discredited, the Cubists had little difficulty in persuading themselves that pure geometry reflected the basic architecture of the universe,” so long as it helped them “to dislocate the world of appearances” and got them well beyond the unthinking materialism of the middle classes. In a sense, they asserted themselves as a new class of aristocrats, inasmuch as this hitherto undisclosed geometrical metaphysic “was not to be determined logically, nor even mathematically, but solely by intuition” by “the poet and to the artist alone,” bringing forth a vision “reserved for those who have something of the poet in them” as the effect of paintings and poems intended “to arouse an enraptured response in the souls of the privileged few who held within themselves a spark of the sublime.” “Sublime” is exactly right: Cubist art had no patience for the merely beautiful, dismissing it as superficial, ornamental, decorative. Da Vinci’s perspectivism was out, medieval depictions of tortured saints in. The Cubists “were fully aware of the intervening rationalistic evolution,” the shift from Christian art to the art of Renaissance neo-classicism, “would have to be eradicated,” and they “were prepared to reject all the intellectual and technical advances achieved in the field of painting since the Renaissance,” which interfered with “a sense of the totality of the universe,” with “close contact with a sublime spiritual entity.” Whether “the force of spiritual energy” was Bergson’s élan vital, Nietzsche’s will to power, or T. S. Eliot’s Christianity, Cubists averred that it came “from the deepest recesses of man’s fundamental vitality.” As in Nietzsche, as in the Christian churches, music came to be seen as a more direct emanation from those deep recesses than any other art; Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, “We are drifting towards an entirely new art which will stand in relation to painting, as hitherto regarded, just as music stands in relation to literature.”

Apollinaire classified Cubist painters into four groups. “Scientific” or “conceptual” cubists remained ‘geometric,’ taking (for example) those Renaissance masterpieces and “decomposing” them into their supposedly underlying triangles, circles, and squares; Picasso and Braque were the masters among them. “Physical” cubists depicted new structures, borrowing elements from physical reality, as seen in the later paintings of Henri Le Fauconnier, whereas “Orphic” Cubism borrowed forms not from physical objects spun them out of their own minds, as seen in the paintings of the Czech artist, František Kupka, a man given to theosophy and trance states. “Instinctive” Cubism, perhaps more properly described as intuitionist Cubism, took its bearings from Bergson; Matisse was among its many practitioners.

Apollinaire—in Cubist fashion, he reshaped his Polish name, Wilhelm Apolinaris de Kostrowitzki— himself remained the foremost among the literary Cubists. His Catholic upbringing left “a spiritual exaltation [that] was always at work within him, concealed from public view,” an exaltation which did not interfere with either his “marked taste for the open and unrestrained enjoyment of material pleasures,” including “the art of eating,” or his “utter lack of respect for rules and self-imposed discipline.” He wrote copiously on the “Esprit nouveau” in literature, philosophy, and art, his masterpiece acknowledged to be his 1913 book of poems, Alcools. (Could a poem not be like a glass of absinthe, a delightful, risky, mind-bending intoxicant?) Unlike the shattered souls of the ‘Lost Generation,’ he found the Great War, in which he fought and was severely wounded, a source of “spiritual exaltation inspired by constant danger, the proximity of death, and a thousand weird and exciting adventures,” an event that caused a “universal breakdown of tradition values” that served as “an inspiriting confirmation of his own views and of his fondest hopes.” Jettisoning the French “superstitious reverence for good taste,” the “set of conventions and prejudices particularly developed in the old civilizations, that forbid the direct and unpolished expression of spontaneous and instinctive feelings,” Apollinaire insisted that “even the lowest, the crudest, the most banal, the most despised aspects of everyday existence, even the most hideous and repulsive actions committed in the war, were not to be excluded but joyously welcomed in their entirety,” as “they all contain a magic kernel of essential poetry which the vulgar may not perceive but which inspired men like Apollinaire himself can express with compelling power.” This “cannot be achieved through careful, rational analysis, nor through cold-blooded dissection of the external aspects of the world” but can be “realized only in a state of lyrical enthusiasm, when the soul of man enters into communion with the spirit of the whole Cosmos and the two vibrate together in perfect harmony,” the soul drawing upon the “superior, transcendental energy” or élan vital which animates all of Being. The poet-hero would then “be as much a benefactor to mankind as Christopher Columbus,” freeing man “to go and find something new, something real, at last.” Hence the practice of “automatic writing,” whereby the poet would go into a self-induced trance, writing down whatever popped into his head, kaleidoscopically. (It must be admitted that Apollinaire then took the trouble to edit the results.) This practice eventuated in, and was continued by, the Surrealist movement. [1]

Apollinaire adapted the methods of Cubism to literary purposes by breaking up his poetic narrative “arbitrarily into short or long passages, arranged in direct sequence but with almost no ascertainable connection between them, interrupted by digressions, personal reflections, or unexpected anecdotes,” dislocating “the forms of reality” into the verbal equivalent of geometric shapes or atoms. “All statements are made abruptly, without any preparation or transition, in a manner suggestive of the angles and bare surfaces to be found in the paintings of the same period,” producing “an atmosphere of unbridled fantasy and odd supernatural occurrence, carrying the reader into a half-real, half-imaginary world where the objects are solid enough, although their setting has none of the compelling stability that our senses find in normal circumstances.” Drawing from but reversing the Catholic mysticism that had found new life before and during the Great War, Apollinaire’s poetry features “strange outbursts of sadism [that] call up disturbingly the truly infernal abysses existing in human consciousness.”

Second only to Apollinaire among the literary Cubists, Malraux’s friend and mentor, Max Jacob, came from an entirely different milieu, a family of Jewish atheists in Brittany. He met Apollinaire in 1904, dabbled in occultism while taking care to make some money out of it. “His comic verve was prodigious,” as “he made fun of everything and everybody, including himself,” with the sole exception of his friend Picasso. Reaching for “the realm which was beyond the reach of his reason or his senses,” he eventually found it as he walked home from the Bibliothèque Nationale in September 1909, when “there appeared to him what he took to be an entrancing supernatural vision of the Deity Himself” and he fell, Paul the Apostle-like, to the ground, entranced, then picked himself up and reported to the nearest Catholic priest, who, suspecting a prank, laughed him off. Undeterred, he integrated his occultism and Cubism “within the compass of his Christian mystic revelation,” conversing with angels and “the blessed souls of the departing.” Nor did he abandon his “grotesque clowning,” now in front of God, acts of a “buffoon and prophet rolled into one.” “If I have sinned horribly on a certain day, then on the following day…I choke, I sob I cry, I beat my face, my beast, my limbs, my hands; I bleed, I make the sign of the cross with my blood, with my tears. In the end God is taken in.” His reader may be permitted to wonder if that were really the case, but in any event, he eventually received his baptism, “having Pablo Picasso himself for a godfather.” His years’-long, sincere-ironic soul-wrestling left him sympathetic to young men undergoing similar quests, including André Malraux. And none of his eccentricities should detract from his literary achievement. As LeMaitre writes, “Max Jacob has assisted perhaps more than any of our contemporaries”—he had died in a German concentration camp only five years before LeMaitre published his study—in “ridding the French sentence of all its superfluous literary ornaments and in reducing it to a plain, angular bareness reminiscent of the most aggressive Cubist paintings.” By doing so, he “struck at intellectual reasoning itself” by “ruining on principle the power of carefully arrayed words” in a quasi-Nietzschean foray into irrationalist estheticism which registered “the strangeness, the inexplicableness of the universe”—the spirit of the farfelu Malraux took on and never fully left behind. The marvelously named Fugue State Press, evidently the publishing arm of a university without walls, has made Lunes en Papier (dedicated to Jacob) and Royaume-Farfelu available in an English translation by the noted poet, W. B. Keckler.

In the frontispiece, Malraux calls Paper Moons “a small book in which one learns of several little-known conflicts, and a voyage among objects familiar but strange, all of it true.” But true in what sense? That is the question, Hamlet might ask, if in an epistemological mood. What is true, if we are take the author at his word, is that “There are no symbols in this book.” According to Jean Moréas, author of The Symbolist Manifesto of 1886, the poetry of the Symbolistes—Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine—would “clothe the ideal in perceptible form.” There is nothing ideal about the perceptible forms sketched in Paper Moons; blink, and they have changed, a band of shape-shifting teases.

The beings we meet are geometric figures, beginning with the moon itself, which, “like a luminous advertising sign”—a novel thing, in 1921—changes color “in phases,” reflecting on a lake, itself changing with every ripple, producing “the play of light and water.” Geometric lines define what is, as seen in Plato’s Meno and, among Frenchmen, Descartes. They give the appearance of clarity, stability. But what if the lines undulate, thanks either to an electric current or a summer breeze? Do these surfaces not then reflect the inner instability of things, the physics and metaphysics of Cubism? Not stability but metamorphoses—even, as Malraux himself will style it, decades later, The Metamorphosis of the Gods.

The moon laughs and produces children whose eyes, “fearful and ironic,” evidently perceive the unstable nature of the world into which they have been born. [2] Fearful, because they cannot know what will come next? Ironic, because there is little to revere in what cannot be permanent? The moon-children can be irritated, however—their moods are no more stable than the world. They see “ominous balloons” on the lake, “a harem of smooth, hairless, roly-poly sultans” (sultans, who by convention keep harems); when the moon-children realize that the balloons are not “carrying out complicated, invisible duties” as rulers are expected to do,” when they “realized the truth” Malraux has promised to tell, they become “indignant,” their noses shift shapes into billiard cues, and they knock the balloons around, only to bounce indifferently on the shimmering water, “inflam[ing] the jealousy of the baby moons, who wanted them dead.” 

The balloons prove unkillable, even undeflatable, at least under billiard cue assault, yet not imperturbable; they “found themselves, alas, forced to act,” and, seeing “a flickering amber palace” thrown up by an “enchanted fountain,” they determine to invade it, anticipating “all kinds of lovely infamy” to be perpetrated therein. The palace’s inhabitants, hanging from the crossbeams under the roof, hoping to escape a beating, are tied up by the “savage balloons,” metamorphosed into beings of action from their previous languor on the lake. Among the inhabitants are philosophers, “black radishes full of sound.” In the world of paper moons and sultan balloons, philosophers are indistinguishable from the windbag rhetoricians and shape-shifting sophists we meet in the Platonic dialogues. Like all distinctions in the anti-bon sens universe, these blur. 

The balloons’ triumph doesn’t last, any more than anything else does. Insolently jeering at the “genie of the lake,” a “cat-shaped pincushion,” they are soon punished. The Genie captures them and decides to inflict the death penalty, after finding that no one wants to take them. “Since no one desires these cruel balloons, We, the Genie of the Lake, who possess rights of justice, high and low, over the totality of this, Our Fiefdom, condemn these balloons to death in the name of justice,” indistinguishable from revenge. And rightly so, by the light of the occasionally silvery moon, inasmuch as justice in a world of flux can only be a matter of arbitrary passion. But when they are hanged, the balloons’ tongues don’t stick out, and the frustrated Cat-pincushion hangs himself, exclaiming, “O passion, you’re about to lose your little Cat Deluxe!” His paws lay “fittingly across each other in the shape of a cross,” a parody-Christ who commits suicide. The weight of the Cat’s body pulls the ropes tight on the balloons, causing the balloons’ tongues to stick out, after all. The death of this mock-Christ consummates his intention not by saving but by humiliating his enemies. 

And yet some of the balloons are resurrected, metamorphosed—some “blossom[ing] into huge flowers,” others into “fruits with the soft gleam of antique polished wood,” but all exuding an “aphrodisiac aroma” which draws stuffed alligators out of the antique shops, running after them. One of the fruits then produces nine “new beings,” seven of whom are the Deadly Seven Sins, of which two, Envy and Greed, promptly explode, leaving Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Pride—fittingly the largest of the brood—who introduces his companions. One of the other surviving beings introduces himself as Hifili, a name perhaps derived from the Hebrew hifil, denoting causation. (“Perhaps” indeed—who knows? But to pretend it’s so runs with the spirit of the Lunes.) “Before the metamorphoses that gave me this balloon soul,” he announces, “I was a man who carefully studied shapes,” especially glassware, and among glassware especially the retorts, long-nosed flasks (he is a “red Pinocchio”) used in alchemical transformations. To shift from science to alchemy is to shift from ancient and modern geometry, from stable definition to the metamorphic geometry of Cubism. “I loved the retorts most of all,” beings that “would have run to eat out of my hand if they had known how to eat,” sardonic presences given to “contemptuous laughter,” and so the spirit of irony, regnant throughout the story. “I am the master of glass.” The other red being, who never gives his name, recalls his previous life as a musician, “before I had the mind of a balloon.” In that former life, he had been trapped by “an immense translucent lace” emitted by some fifty small rods “all hopping up and down like bobbins.” He was trapped, and “the trunk of my body had been replaced with a mandolin,” which sounded discordantly. “Can you imagine my despair?” And he couldn’t tune himself because the tuning pegs and the neck of the mandolin “were hidden inside my head!” Quel dommage. Pride offers them a role, to replace the exploded sins. “Being a mortal sin can not only give your life a purpose, but is also a career with many attractive benefits.” They accept, “for a number of reasons,” the Mandolin announces. “You will never know them all,” except this one: “If we didn’t accept your offer, we would end up in a lot of trouble,” which he leaves unspecified. Evidently, the trouble won’t come from God, who has by this day and age become “completely oblivious,” replaced by Satan. 

Would Satan, then, be the cause of trouble for the newly-minted Sins, if they hadn’t accepted Pride’s offer? Possibly, but Pride is as rebellious against Satan as was Satan against God. “We could take over from Satan.” But “our authority would be almost nil,” Anger complains, as “Satan’s best ally, Death, will destroy us.” Not to worry, Pride insists, “We’ll just kill Death!” And so the campaign, the expedition, begins.

They march into the forest, where “they saw the at the low-hanging leaves made geometric patterns: spheres, cubes, prisms and each pattern had a luminous core, like the bright eye of an ironic Russian hare.” The forest is a Cubist wonderland. Death seeks to destroy the Sins, but while soft Gluttony worries (“Maybe we should take some precautions”), “ingenious Hifili,” master of glass and of alchemical transformations, demurs: “No point. Because Death has an impoverished imagination.”

“Everyone knows that ‘Death’s empire’ is called the Kingdom of Farfelu,” Pride observes. Farfelu, André Vandegans explains in his erudite, exhaustively researched study, derives from a Greek word for bubble of air; in Rabelais (where Malraux found it) it means a bagatelle, fantasy. As Malraux himself wrote, a few years later, “The talent of a writer of fantasy consists almost always in perceiving that the commonly accepted world is only a dream, not because it is not true, but because it is fixed.” In the Lunes, the life world isn’t fixed and the kingdom of death isn’t final. Both are susceptible of being mocked, since neither finally can impose itself on anything or anyone.

On the way toward the river “that led to the Kingdom of Farfelu”—Lethe?—”they were delighted with themselves, because they saw how much Creation is in need of touching up, and how much more harmonious it could all be through the contributions of Sin.” They seem to have forgotten their troubles. Hifili, “metamorphosed into Greed now,” having replaced him, “watched all the sins brightened,” feeling he “could accept them as true friends,” but when they face the river his “reverie” ends. “An animal musk, intoxicating as ether,” arises from tufts of red fur floating on the river; “he felt that fruits of the flesh were against his lips, that he took a bite, and that the fruits were bursting open, splattering all across this face their sugared blood.” Birds hover above the river, then fall in, their feathers mixing with the animal fur. Nor is the reptilian absent, as the snakelike Bigophones appear, frightening the Sins, who, “without knowing why,” understood “that great and tragic events loomed ahead.” The carnival-cardboard instruments promise to drive the Sins “to the very edge of the Kingdom of Farfelu,” with their “banal poems and stupid songs, too frightful to image,” a prospect the former musician rescues them.

After a night at an inn managed by a poet, the Sins soldier on to the walls of the Kingdom of Farfelu, where the townspeople are celebrating but the queen Death herself, “was suffering a bout of listlessness” and has called for a retinue of physicians. Queen Death “inhabited a chamber with immense mirrored walls, reproducing to infinity the furniture in the room”—an illusion of infinity. As for Her Majesty, she “resembled a giant insect, because of her dinner jacket,” which fluttered in the breeze, giving the impression of wings. Death boasts to the head physician of her new skeleton, made of aluminum: “We must keep up with project,” as in modernity “everything has become mechanical, metallic, dazzling, and yet my beauty remained Gothic. I was slipping into passé.” Death, too, feels the desire to metamorphose, to keep up with ever-changing fashion, which imitates the ever-changing Cubist universe. 

But, sad for Queen Death, the physician turns out to be Pride in disguise, who prepares a liquid to destroy her. Being prideful, Pride orders the other Sins out of the room, “back into hiding,” but the Mandolin ex-musician admonishes, “No melodrama, please. A sin owes it to himself not to act as his title suggests. Even the various loves of Lust were only chimeras, and didn’t last.” Pride glares, “jealous of the musician’s intelligence,” but commands no more, proceeding to poison Death, who is thankful for whomever “helped me out this sorrow.” Sorrow? Yes, because, you see, “the world is only tolerable to us because of our habit of tolerating it,” and “my departure” from it “will be a great practical joke,” inasmuch as I am called Death “but you know perfectly well that I’m only Chance. Slow decay is just one of my disguises.” The farfelu world is really the world of atomism, but not the atomism of Democritus, who supposed atoms to be impenetrable. Now, atoms themselves are dissolvable, not to say dissolute, as scientists know that they can be split into careening sub-particles, driven by chaos-making energy. 

“Death was dead.” The Mandolin-musician muses, asking: “Forgive me, dear friends… When I was a man, I was subject to a kind of mental anemia. So please don’t mind too much if I ask: Why, exactly, did we kill Death?” The Sins “put their heads into their hands and wept,” as they can’t remember.

Readers will remember. The Sins set out to kill Death because they feared that Death would kill them at the behest of Satan, who has replaced an indifferent God and whom the Sins, spurred on by Pride, wanted to overthrow. But Cubist sins partake of the same randomness as the rest of things, and so cannot form any lasting intention, being finally mindless. The readers, considering Malraux’s art, however, will see that he has drawn order out of this disorder. As Vandegans remarks, in a contemporaneous article on Cubism Malraux paid homage “to the effort of art”; “fantasy and the fantastic are the modes of expression of the independence of the artist in relation to the world and of his individuality that are especially effective” against the randomness, the absurdity, of the world. Cubism, Malraux wrote, reveals “the desire of purity and of construction,” the “desire of discipline” seen in the literary style of the writers and painters who are its practitioners. He called this the opposite of “Hamletism,” of indecision, “the creation of an autonomous reality”—of paper moons, moons written on paper, or painted on it, as Picasso does, exhibiting “absolute creation.” [2] Vandegans finds this in Lunes en papier, “an absolute creation” which “opposes to the real a universe of art.” “Dominated by Death,” the “world is the kingdom of malice, of cruelty, of the absurd, of combat always renewed against enemy forces,” a combat so banal that Death herself has wearied of it. With the Cubists, Malraux opposes vitality against Death, order against Chance. 

Malraux’s second and final purely farfelu fiction, Royaume-Farfelu, appeared seen years after Lunes, in 1928. In it, Malraux has abandoned Cubist geometric figures, however, replacing them with human beings, however fantastic. What had intervened in those years was Malraux’s experience of a real alternative reality, one that needed imagination not to create but to understand: the East, Asia, “a civilization,” Vandegans remarks, “radically different from his own” one ruled by European imperialists. While in Cambodia, he made contact with the anti-imperialist members of Jeune Annam. “In Asia, Malraux had submitted to the grip of the real,” confronted no longer by risible modern Western banality, the regime of the bourgeoisie, but with the harder side of the French regime, which jailed him for stealing some ancient bas-reliefs, which he hoped to sell to a Paris collector. In response, he wrote The Temptation of the West and The Conquerors. 

The Temptation of the West is an epistolary novel, the correspondences being two young men, the European “A.D.,” symbol of the West after the turn to Christianity, and “Ling,” whose name means ‘sensibility.’ Ling sees in Europe “an attentively ordered barbarity,” as seen in Christianity, in which “all the intensity of love is concentrated on a body that has been tortured.” One body: the West also prizes individuality. Whether Christian or Napoleonic, the individual aims at conquest. True enough, A.D concedes, but China’s Confucianism, its sensibility, its refinement, nears collapse in the face of the West. While he feels his friend’s anguish, he neither embraces the Chinese sensibility nor adverts to the faith of Christianity. Instead, he faces the crisis of East and West with courage and “voracious lucidity.” With these virtues, he will resist “the most subtle temptation” that faces the young men of the West, which is the passion for ingenious artistic revival—obviously, the several ‘movements,’ announced in ‘manifestos,’ that proliferated just before and just subsequent to Malraux’s own arrival in Paris as a youth: Symbolism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism. A.D. and Malraux ready themselves for new discoveries.

The Conquerors takes the same struggle from words, the letters in an epistolary novel, to actions, the events narrated in a novel on a workers’ rebellion in Canton. These Chinese are no longer men of sensibility but of political revolution, ‘Westernized’ Chinese, organized by Borodine, a Soviet agent. In this novel, one character offers the first enunciation of what eventually came to be called Malraux’s “tragic humanism”: “it is rare, ein Mensch…a man”—a genuine man, conscious of his own humanness and standing against those who would reduce him, and other men, to sub-humans, to the conquered. Such dehumanizing conquest may be seen both in capitalism and in Bolshevism. Malraux called The Conquerors “above all an accusation against the human condition,” the condition of fatedness, of oppression of human beings by human beings and indeed Being itself, a condition to be resisted defense of the humanity that is capable of resisting tyranny. [4]

Published in 1928, the same year The Conquerors appeared, Royaume-Farfelu takes the artistic techniques of Cubism and literally humanizes them. That is, instead of characters who are anthropomorphized geometric figures—anthropomorphism itself being one of the many metamorphoses Cubism valorizes—the characters here are human (with a few devils thrown in). The fiction begins with a warning: “Watch out, curlyhaired devils: ghost images are forming on the silent sea. This hour no longer belongs to you.” Curlyhaired devils aren’t really devils but the men of the West, where “gilded popes and antipopes walk along the empty gutters of Rome; behind them, demons with silken tails—who are former emperors—laugh mutely.” Church and state are ruined, and “a king, who no longer cares for anything but music and the art of torture, wanders the night disconsolate, blowing on upraised silver trumpets, leading his dancing subjects onward.” In the East, “a broken conqueror sleeps in black armor, surrounded by restless monkeys.” The Western project of conquest has exhausted itself. 

The narrator (“a mysterious voice,” Vandegans calls him) is on a voyage, along the coast of Turkey, where “merchants threw themselves upon us as soon as we touched land.” One of them sells phoenixes, but the phoenix he burns to impress the voyagers reconstitutes itself from its ashes and “took advantage of the merchant’s foolhardy joy and escaped.” “As I left all of this behind, I thought: Oh seas of Asia, I yearn for the pale light of the medusas that drift on your warm tides,” for the “barks and vessels of the Orient, whose “scent rests in my heart.” But this Oriental reverie is interrupted by a summons to the prince, the Little Mogul. Neither the conquests of the West, nor the commerce of the Near East, nor dreams of the dreamlike Far East can evade the human reality of obeying the ruler.

He listens as the Little Mogul interrogates a messenger named Idekel, “an old man, sweet-tempered,” whom he had sent on an expedition to Babylon, whose hanging gardens, Idekel reports, have collapsed. The farthest reaches of the Little Mogul’s domains are deserts, now. His daughter, whom Idekel guided to “the fish-eating tsar” of Russia, now “rules by herself” in an empire in which she oversaw a “deathly flotilla” of the gods of the old religions, gods who rotted “while the Christian priests sang.” Like the narrator, the Little Mogul longs for the East, but specifically for the Princess of China, embodiment of the grace and wisdom of her civilization. Does he order his armies to advance toward Persia in order to move closer to China, to her? [5]

The Little Mogul appoints the narrator to the post of Historian to the Prince, who, after having destroyed the Persian army, intends to conquer Persia’s great city, “the undefended Ispahan.” The expeditionary forces of the Little Mogul seized Ispahan and the historian wrote the narrative of the conquest, aided by Idekel, who deems his youth “spent in scholarship” as an apprentice magician to have been worthless. “I journeyed with all the other magicians to the islands of Hell,” where he saw “the damned file along trough snow, like lines of miserable ants, escorted by fluttering demons.” The magicians’ spells scattered the demons, but they returned “to conquer us in the end.” In the aftermath of this disaster, “bit by bit I forgot my conscience; I was indifferent to learning, teaching, everything.” After conquering the city, the soldiers sacked it. “This night,” Idekel says, “was certainly one of the greatest nights in the history of the world, one of those nights when the stunned gods surrender the earth to the savage demons of poetry.” “And didn’t we find every last scrap?” But as for the narrator, “I found nothing.” “A few hours passed: I remained sprawled out on the roof, conquering cities in my daydreams,” while “the demons of the ruins were born, who are faceless and live in our own bodies.” The demon who inhabits the narrator tells him, “You won’t remember Ispahan, because Ispahan belongs to the beasts,” who were even then returning to its ruins. Ispahan’s “crown of desolation will protect it from your cursed comrades and their vile officers.” “Dream of your death, artist.” And each soldier, too, “heard the voice that rose up within him, and was shattered by it.”  The conquerors fled the city.

“It seemed as if mankind had disappeared from the earth, and that plants, silent animals, and stones lived in the perfect liberty that follows upon hopeless abandonment.” The remaining army retreated across the desert, chased by an “immense insect sheet” of scorpions. “Madness suddenly seized the whole multitude of troops and threw them by handfuls like grains of sand out to the vultures of the desert.” 

“I will never know how I reached Trebizond,” one of several smaller successor states to Byzantium, conquered by the Turks. “I arrived there dazed, senseless, guarded by children covered with amulets,” and “the prince took me in.” He now “manage[s] to make a living selling beautiful shells,” some of which “communicate with demons in hell, but nobody knows it.” Having collected two sirens, he intends to sell them to the prince of Trebizond, whose “Christian minister” denies the existence of. “With the money he will give me, maybe I’ll book passage on one of the ships that sail to the Fortune Islands. I’m only sixty years old….” The Fortune Islands, the Isles of the Blessed celebrated by ancient Greek poets, were supposed to be somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, reserved for aristocrats who had chosen to be reincarnated three times.

The Kingdom of Farfelu, instantiated in the Persian city, is both the Kingdom of Death and the Kingdom of Madness, setting limits on the ambition to conquer. The narrator himself survives but is mad, driven mad by the uncontrollable forces within the limbo between West and East. 

Radulescu devotes most of her book to tracing the theme of the farfelu from Malraux’s most celebrated novel, Man’s Fate, and to his last great book, his ‘anti-memoir,’ Mirror of Limbo. In Man’s Fate the farfelu character is Clappique, erstwhile dealer in antiques and art, now an arms dealer, happy to sell his wares to either side in the ongoing civil war between the communists and the nationalist Kuomintang. Clappique, “the incarnation of the ‘farfelu,'” acts as “an anomaly in the midst of all that is normal, natural,” a “skinny Polichinelle,” the marionette, Punch, in the Punch-and-Judy show, who attempts to conceal the force of the strings that jerk him around from others and from himself with alcools and mythomania. But in this novel, “Malraux opposes mythomania, the conscious denial of reality, the grimacing laughter of the clown.” Clappique hangs out in the Black Cat bar; Radulescu remarks that in Christian folk tales the black cat is the agent of the Devil, “who, in his turn, negotiates best with women.” Clappique is a bit of “a prostitute himself,” perpetually “asking for money and perform[ing] services for money”—a capitalist who demonstrates the absurdity of pure capitalism, which would sell arms not only to the forces controlled by the Shanghai business corporations but to the communists who would ruin those capitalists and throw wheeler-dealers like Clappique into ‘re-education’ camps. Radulescu sees that Clappique is not all talk; “his actions make crucial points in the development of the narrative,” and that is the problem. His fantasies turned into action destroy the best man in the novel, Kyo Gisors, the head of the rebellion. Having learned that Kyo will be captured and killed in the next day or two if he doesn’t get out of the city, Clappique goes off to gamble at the casino (a type of fantasy land), instead of warning him. At the gambling table, “he surrenders entirely to hazard,” to Fortuna, to the strings that jerk him around. He himself will later take care to escape, disguised as a sailor. 

Radulescu goes easy on Clappique, calling him “a quite endearing figure,” a Trickster who “floats through the novel as a symbol of aesthetic values, opposed to both the Capitalist and Communist values.” But that is the problem. Clappique refuses the responsibility of humanness, as seen when he looks at himself in the mirror and makes faces, grotesquely. “A world made only of clowns, fluttering Pierrots, and watery creatures can well form the main substance of poetry,” or of prose fantasies like Paper Moons, “but it becomes aesthetically insufficient for a novel.” Yes, but not only aesthetically insufficient: it is morally and politically insufficient, deadly to the bodies of others and to the soul of the fantasist. Clappique’s “betrayal of Kyo” and “his abandonment to the round ball of the gambling table are all deliberate actions through which Clappique takes hold of his own destiny.” This is exactly wrong. He is abandoning himself to man’s fate, not resisting it. In a bit of misplaced feminism, Radulescu observes that “the tragic heroes, the complete men in the novel [emphasis in the text], die the violent and transformative death of fire, the masculine element, which consumes and reduces them to a substance other than their own.” This misses the climactic moment in Man’s Fate, when Kyo, about to be thrown into a furnace by his captors, takes the cyanide capsules he had secreted on his person in the event of such a fate, giving them to his terrified companions; when the men drop the capsules and grope blindly for them, one of his nameless comrades grips Kyo’s hand and says, “Even if we don’t find it….” The gesture of self-sacrificing human fraternity is the real answer to the human condition, a condition of mortality, fatedness. [6] In Man’s Fate, farfelu freedom meets the real freedom of responsibility, leaving its attentive readers with the sense that responsibility is better.

Radulescu is much more reliable in her discussion of the farfelu in Days of Limbo. Here, the farfelu floats in the air, an aspect of the Eternal Feminine, seen in the legendary figure of the Queen of Sheba, for whose lost temple Malraux searched, and in the imagery of flowers and butterflies and fire, and above all the image of the cat, no longer simply the devil of medieval Christendom, instead betokening a femininity “unleashed and ironic, a new kind of sensuality, dynamic and haunting.” The farfelu, like fate, is beyond human control, but it is not ‘fatal,’ destructive of human beings. In Man’s Fate, the women (Kyo’s wife, May, and Valérie, independent-minded mistress of the inhuman capitalist, Ferral) balance the men; so, too, in Mirror of Limbo, where even General Charles de Gaulle’s wife, Yvonne, appears as the courageous partner of her husband, responding to a failed assassination attempt by brushing the shattered car window glass off her clothes and straightening her hat. 

Malraux imagines a butterfly lighting on the nose of the Queen of Sheba. He encounters butterflies once more when he meets Méry, a former French colonial official in Indochina, now living in Singapore, whose hobby is butterfly collecting. They speak of colonialism, Méry wondering why individualistic Europeans forgot their taste for liberty “when the found themselves in the fact of another civilization.” Malraux deepens the question to the question of the memoir itself: “How do we become what we are?” “How does man become the Man that he carries in himself?” His answer is the answer embodied by Kyo’s act in Man’s Fate, an act seen again in Mirror of Limbo when a French Mother Superior interrupted his interrogation by a Nazi officer to bring him food, which Malraux offered to share with the Nazi. Méry takes the point, then raises the political question of mass, rather than individual, sentiments. This brings him to a discussion of butterflies, which he identifies with nature, with which “we begin to converse only when we begin to converse with death.” “In the face of Asia, I feel myself singular; in the face of the butterflies, humanity seems to me unprecedented”; nature is “the life that will continue if all men disappeared.” Malraux cites a Hindu text, in which butterflies descend upon the bones of dead soldiers on a battlefield. “Qu’importe?” Given the indifference of nature, what does human life mean, whether it confronts us in its grim aspect of death or in the beautiful indifference of life? Men ask that question in the face of death, women when they look at the face of a child, the face of new life. The answer Malraux’s book gives remains the answer of the anonymous prisoner: Even if we don’t find it in some metaphysical sense, we have it in one another, in our shared understanding that we are not fate, even if we are fated.

Radulescu cites one of Malraux’s favorite anecdotes, the story Mallarmé told about his cat. One night, Mallarmé listened as the neighborhood cats talked with one another in the ally outside his room. “Whose cat are you?” one asked. “At the moment, I pretend to be the cat of the Mallarmé household.” “Malraux, too, glided gracefully through History as if among pieces of temporary furniture” with an “ironic smile at his own different incarnations”—young literary arriviste in Paris, fascinated by the Cubism that came out of but opposed the Symbolisme of Mallarmé, adventurer in Asia, novelist of tragic humanism and winner of the Prix Goncourt, fighter in the Spanish Civil war, Résistant during the Second World War, writer on art and its metamorphoses, Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s cabinet in the first decade of the Fifth Republic, anti-memorialist. A cat’s tail curls like a question-mark. What does it all mean? Life, he writes at the beginning of the book, “like the gods of vanished religions, appears to me as the libretto for an unknown music.”

Radulescu considers Malraux’s visit to the cave at Lascaux, where some boys looking for adventure found paintings on the wall made by the earliest humans on French soil, men of pre-History. She speaks of the sexual imagery of the cave itself, with its evocation of the return to Mother Earth; decades earlier, upon his return to earth from the near-fatal airplane ride through a desert storm after his attempt to locate Sheba’s tomb, he thought of the lines on the earth as resembling the lines on his mother’s palm and, one might add, that his own lifeline was long. He sees that tourists’ breath has caused the paintings to deteriorate; the paintings can be saved on condition that men stop “coming there as they please”—that is, for light, ‘farfelu‘ reasons. In another irony, in this novel full of war and rumors of war, the conservation work has been left to the conscientious objectors. Here, for this task, they are the responsible ones.

Why does the Minister of Culture minister to culture? Because even near the beginning of human life, the man who took refuge in the earth against the certainty of death and the velleities of life left his mark on the earth, his art not a mere expression of estheticism, of beauty, but of human freedom, distinct from the human condition. The metamorphosis of the gods effected by men, differs from the farfelu metamorphoses of Cubism because the men who effect them take responsibility for them and for themselves, for human beings. What the Cubists did unwittingly, Malraux does deliberately, understanding even an art that bows to atomism as art, beyond the mystery of matter.

 

Notes

1. The most prominent of the political Surrealists was Louis Aragon, later an apologist for Stalinism. Stalin himself might be described as the apogee of political Surrealism, murderer of tens of millions, albeit in the name of a ‘scientific socialism’—in the hands of genocidists, a self-contradictory, irrationalist rationalism.
2. Domnica Radulescu remarks that “the birth process of the Moon Children is the opposite of a real birth: the little Moons are born as a result of their mother’s laughter, without pain, tears or blood. They effortlessly fall off and float through the universe.”
3. Radulescu sees this clearly: “The noun ‘paper’ points to the writing of literature” and of painting. “Malraux’s later view of art as an ‘anti-destin‘ is being prefigured here.” Additionally, and insightfully, Radulescu, writing after ‘second-wave’ feminism took control over much lit-crit terrain, emphasizes the Rabelaisian sexuality of the Lunes —the way in which the beings change sex, as sexual boundaries too loose their “corporeal nature, acquiring instead a playful, yet grotesque, quality” as changelings, as linear, phallic masculinity intermixes with round, fecund femininity in acts of “poetic alchemy.” Although sympathetic to feminism, Radulescu justly vindicates Malraux from charges of misogyny, as “the bizarre universe of this tale offers, in fact, a criticism of misogyny, a mockery of the male’s arrogance, for the protagonists and their actions are constantly projected into comedy, never truly taken seriously by either the author, whose tome is touched throughout by irony, or the Sins, since each of their undertakings stats with pomp but ends in a failure of some sort,” Pride leading the way to buffoonish failure in his very success. 
4. For a discussion of The Temptation of the West and The Conquerors, see Will Morrisey: Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984.
5. Radulescu makes much of the Princess of China, describing her as “the embodiment of female beauty and grace,” a person “entirely identified with Nature, in all of its majesty and succulence,” which “appears clearly dissociated from the fabricated world of man.” She is not Queen Death in the Lunes, and the Little Mogul would possess, not kill her. “She is a combination of death and nature.” One might add that for Malraux nature is ‘farfelu’ or self-contradictory, giving birth and dealing death, seductive and dangerous, a siren, a point Radulescu herself makes, in her conclusion to her chapter. 
6. See Morrisey, op. cit., Chapter 3.