Claude Tannery: Malraux, the Absolute Agnostic: or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law. Teresa Lavender Fagan translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 16, Number 2, October 1992.
In the United States, where recent calls for ‘diversity’ amount to little more than a multicolored cloak for a thin ideological monism, any good study of André Malraux’s work deserves more than welcome—it deserves thoughtful attention. From first to last Malraux sought to understand the plurality of civilizations and to make that understanding address the spiritual crisis of the West. If ideologues reject Malraux because he was on the ‘wrong’ side in May ’68—on the side of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic against the New Left—perhaps they need a stronger dose of their own diversity. Politically and culturally,, Malraux was there first, with far superior mind and heart.
Claude Tannery is a novelist, encountering Malraux not to classify and analyze but to sympathize and build. The merit of this book derives from Tannery’s commitment to read Malraux as Malraux wanted to be read—as a man challenging readers to change their lives, not as a literary aroma to be inhaled and ‘appreciated,’ exhaled and ‘deconstructed.’ Tannery treats an homme sérieux seriously.
Tannery considers central Malrauvian themes, metamorphosis and agnosticism. He shows more emphatically than previous commentators have done (if not always more clearly) the extent to which Malraux integrates the Eastern delight in plurality, its charmingly relaxed attitude toward contradiction, with the Western insistence on unity, on logical rigor. Malraux does this by transforming Nietzsche’s concept of creativity. Like Nietzsche, Malraux finds in the will-to-create a cross-civilizational universal, a feature of ‘the human condition’ everywhere and always. Unlike Nietzsche, Malraux finds fraternity in this will, not self-isolating dominance. Nietzsche’s thought remains firmly within the modern Western framework, the attempted conquest of fortune and of nature. Malraux’s fraternal (but not egalitarian) creative will can open itself to the plurality of cultures, relax its individuality, without lapsing into some indiscriminate moral and political anarchism. Whereas Nietzsche finally must either rule or ruin, tyrannize or go mad, Malraux can govern—rule and be ruled, in Aristotle’s phrase. Hence the association with de Gaulle. Tannery formulates this well, calling Malrauvian fraternity “a fellowship of differences” (232).
This shows why the New Left could never accept Malraux, any more than the Old Left had done. The old, Communist-Party French ‘Left’ had denounced Malraux for his refusal to accept the supposedly iron law of economic determinism; indeed, Malraux opposed fatalism in all its forms. The New Left had to reject Malraux just as vehemently, but on different grounds: on the way they used not Marx but Nietzsche. The New Left took the Nietzschean will-to-power and made it not so much fraternal as egalitarian, a non-royal road toward communalism without so much Marxian dialectical signage. The New Left incoherently sought to maximize egalitarianism and freedom. But the New Left retained the core of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, seeking dominance over all other political contenders, seeking rule simply rather than ruling and being ruled. This has remained the case as the New Left has marched diligently through the institutions of academia, government, and the media in the half-century since the évènements of 1968.
If members of one civilization can admire other civilizations by fraternal recognition of the will-to-creation in all, then the question of human creativity arises. Agnosticism comes in because we cannot know much about the source of the artist’s creative metamorphoses. There exists a “metalanguage of art,” a “language of forms that transcends civilizations,” a set of form-generating archetypes inaccessible to reason. Responding to this unknowable realism as the artist does constitutes neither submission to destiny nor transcendence of it, but “the highest form of fellowship with destiny”—a reconciliation, a participation with forces ascribed to gods and to nature. Tannery does not mention the resemblance of this account of Malraux’s thought to Nietzsche’s amor fati, but it is noteworthy. It is also a mistaken resemblance, as Malraux insists on the self-consciousness of the artist’s metamorphoses of previous traditions. Picasso knew what he was doing, and so did his predecessor, and so will his successors.
Tannery’s generous ardor brings with it some weaknesses as well as strength. At times he exclaims and defends too much, persisting, for example, in treating the butcher Mao Zedong and his vicious ‘Cultural Revolution’ with undeserved respect. (In some respects this parallels Malraux’s own mythologized Mao, presented as a Chinese Charles de Gaulle.) It is too much to say that Malraux regards “every revolution” as a lyrical illusion (91); Malraux is both less ‘disillusioned’ and less utopian than Tannery, more genuinely political. Tannery does share one weakness with Malraux: the failure to distinguish sufficiently the classical from the modern form of reason. In Plato reason yields transcendence, a possibility Malraux, following Nietzsche, too hastily rejects. For them, creativity replaces reasoning, although in both the concept of ‘consciousness’ supplements creativity lends some rational content to creativity.
Tannery insists too much on the development, the metamorphosis, of Malraux’s thought, underestimating its continuity. He discusses The Walnut Trees of Altenburg without fully considering Malraux’s integration of that novel, its chapters largely unchanged, into his vast ‘anti-memoir’ memoir-novel, The Days of Limbo, published some three decades later. This happens because Tannery sometimes does not attend closely to the texts as Malraux presents them, making it difficult to see exactly where Malraux’s thoughts end and Tannery’s begin. This is especially and most regrettably true of Tannery’s penultimate chapter, treating his principal theme, metamorphosis as universal law. Here he brings in a plethora of writers from Goethe (quite informatively) to Stephen Jay Gould. There’s just not enough Malraux.
We who admire Malraux and find nourishment in his writings would betray what he has given us were we to use such occasions as this for multiplying un-fraternal complaints. Tannery has written a book to learn from, and to build with.
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