L'Asie fantome : or, Malraux's Inhuman Condition

André Malraux's infamous sojourn in colonial Indochina (November 1923-January 1926) paradoxically appears as both completely episodic and completely transformative, as merely one of many noteworthy moments in a hyperbolically eventful life and as that life's most determinative event. ¹ The cubist poet and art collector emerges from his Asian experience as a politicized novelist. The cynical aim of plundering Khmer temples to restore his failed finances gives way to the idealism of anticolonial journalism. The notoriety accumulated through his successive incarnations as thief (of art treasures), as victim (of a bureaucratic judiciary) and as révolté (against a bankrupt colonial governance) is quickly parleyed into the crescendo of literary successes that lead from La Tentation de l'Occident through Les Conquérants and La Voie royale to La Condition humaine. The time spent in Indochina would thus appear to have set Malraux well on the royal road to the Prix Goncourt.

Yet the sudden appearance of Asia as the site of political and literary maturity is matched by its equally sudden disappearance (save minimally, as one contributor among others to the "museum without walls" of human art). The Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Cold War all contribute to the retreat of Malraux's Oriental context into the deep background of his public as well as aesthetic life, as if to relegate that powerful encounter with Asia to the derisory stage of mere juvenalia: "ce livre d'adolescent," he says dismissively of Les Conquérants in a postface written barely twenty years after the novel's initial publication in 1928. ² It is all as if Asia appears so brightly in Malraux's career only to disappear, in its own way as--to parody Leiris--a kind of "Asie fantôme," an "être de fuite" not unlike those other two privileged categories of Malraudian reflection: women and art. ³

Of course, it can also be argued that Asia occurs in the early novels as the place from which to think various moral and philosophical issues (the relation to death, to others, or to the aesthetic impulse) on a global scale and precisely as a condition of a universalized humanity beyond any historical or cultural particularisms. It is not just the extreme Orient that fascinates Malraux, however, but the Orient of extremes, where life, love and meaning itself hang precariously in the balance of contingent historical forces and the ability of individual human beings to assume responsibility for their destiny, i.e., to confront lucidly the fundamental absurdity of one's existence. And this Nietzschean assertion of self is all the more impressive and dramatic for its emerging against the backdrop of a landscape that is portrayed as aggressively threatening and bewildering. The Indochinese jungle, like the turmoil of the Chinese city, assaults the hero until he is either annihilated or takes fate into his own hands--or both! Strangers in a strange land, the Malraudian hero thus recalls the protagonists of the colonial adventure novel, but in a post-Spenglerian register of decline and "déchéance." Malraux's early novels thus proceed to rewrite the figure of the European adventurer so as to give him at least the possibility of a good conscience and of a non-imperialist form of heroism.

As such, though, the apparent universalism of the human condition turns out to be nevertheless highly restricted indeed. Malraux's "Asian" novels feature a cast of almost exclusively white, male European protagonists: "Cette Chine peuplée d'étrangers, dont la révolution ne serait faite que par des Russes, des Baltes, des Allemands, des Suisses et des Franco-Japonais." ⁴ On the one hand, these European characters, having lost faith in the values and institutions of their homelands, seek a certain authenticity abroad--whether through art, eroticism, opium or service to the revolutionary struggle. On the other hand, the heroic reclaiming of a certain humanity--as...