Economies of Lethal Emotions in La Condition humaine

Le héros est encore celui qui lutte pour nos pourvoyances collectives.

Albert Memmi, La Dépendance: Esquisse pour un portrait du dépendant (1979)

You've just tied me to the mast of the ship of fools.

Marianne Faithful, "Why d'ya do it?" Broken English (1979, based on a poem by Heathcote Williams)

When Susan Rubin Suleiman shares the response she had to André Malraux's novels as a graduate student, in "Malraux's Women: A Re-vision" (1984), she may well voice the reaction of a good many critical readers today almost 20 years later. ¹ She recalls thinking, without equivocation, that "they [the novels] were not repeatable today" (141). Although Suleiman means that nobody would write those novels in the 1980s, her comment points us just as aptly to their absence from the successive waves of critical re-releases, or literary reruns, of writers. Not in the decade preceding Suleiman's article, nor in the two following decades, have scholars found compelling reasons to rediscover Malraux's fiction. Certainly, in the American academy, not the textualism of the 1970s, nor the historicism of the 1980s, nor again, what can arguably be considered, the prevalent scholarly interest in ethics in the 1990s, has taken Malraux's novels off the shelves for a critical dusting and recirculation. ²

Malraux was more of an intellectual theorist than a specialist of the text itself. He was driven by a sense of literature as narrative locus of moral or metaphysical discussions rather than being needled by questions regarding the literary, or literariness as such. For these reasons, together with his transposition of cinematic techniques to the novel, textualists have found few reasons to return to Malraux. Since Malraux was a notoriously ahistorical, if not anti-historical, writer, one for whom art's universality in the Museum without Walls comes from form, and not from its place in a specific time or culture, critics who work from historicist or cultural studies perspectives have not returned to Malraux either. Postcolonial critics have turned to La Tentation de l'Occident, La Voie royale, and La Condition humaine, but as Mary M. Rowan's analysis brings out so forcefully, Malraux's Asia is an "Asia Out of Focus," an abstraction that takes second place to the novel's discussions and ideas. ³ In short, although Jean-François Lyotard's biography, Signé Malraux (1996) has reawakened critical interest, as has Herman Lebovics's study of Malraux's work as Minister of Culture for De Gaulle, Mona Lisa's Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (1999), when it comes to Malraux's novels, critics haven't sought to extend Malraux's shelf-life through invalidating the existing critical expiration dates, and replacing them with updated critical apparatus, and a new lease of life.

Indeed, this issue of expiration dates, perishable texts, and outmoded ideologies, lies at the heart of Suleiman's analysis. Here, however, she changes the stakes. Suleiman writes out of a concern that the combination of her own graduate student nostalgia and a historical nostalgia for the period might have dulled her feminist critical vigilance in the face of glaringly worn-out structures of representation in these potentially perishable literary goods. Her concern addresses, and re-examines, Malraux's recourse to patterns of gendered dynamics that, to take but one example from Malraux's corpus, in La Voie royale, critics have considered part and parcel of the historically specific exoticist ideologies which reinvigorated and recreated a compensatory, masculine "Romantic" individual heroism. Since the possibility of European stages for such heroism seemed unimaginable in the early twentieth century, these ideologies took form, in part, through narrating such quests on exotic stages. ⁴ "Might these novels be not simply unrepeatable but maybe deservedly unreadable today?" Suleiman's statement invites us to ask. Accordingly, her 1984 revisiting of Malraux's novels tracks down the ways the stamp of time marks "the status of...