- Malraux et le christianisme
Even those who have a long familiarity with critical works on Malraux might be surprised by the extent to which Christianity, and Malraux's relationship with it, has been subject to appraisal and speculation. Perhaps it was Malraux's ability to contribute something on all sides of an argument that has encouraged such widely diverse critical [End Page 121] perspectives to bring about some kind of 'recuperation' in the debate over his spirituality. Myriam Sunnen's study, which possesses all the virtues of an extremely well-written and soundly researched thesis, provides a succinct overview of Malraux's fiction and writings on art. Weaving through her text a 'fil conducteur' that she develops with considerable power, Sunnen examines the many expressions of Malraux's agnosticism in his works and elucidates the potential for identifying a continuity framed by a quasi-spiritual sensibility. The sense of transcendence that Malraux evokes so powerfully in a novel like L'Espoir, for instance, points to the sense of the absolute unknowability of our condition that emerges in a text such as Lazare. Both cases emphasize a mystery at the heart of a faith in the eternal hope for mankind and the infinite possibilities of human existence: the unknowable should not frighten us — it should liberate us. Malraux's fiction presents numerous scenes in which, most commonly, a heroic fraternity is catapulted into a conflict with the elemental forces of an indifferent universe. At other times that same fraternity appears to achieve a kind of apotheosis whose symbolic reflection is found in the surrounding natural world. This tension, argues Sunnen, between humanity's need to resist the world yet to be reconciled with it, and even submit to it, is at the heart of a certain reading of Christianity and allows the parallel to be drawn with the spiritual sensibility and sense of mystery found in Malraux's work. Sunnen makes a plausible case when she argues that Malraux did not deliberately construct the myths that grew up around him, but neither did he seek to dismantle them. Mindful of his readership and the wider public, she suggests that the face he presented in relation to the issue of faith may have carried a subliminal response to the times in which he wrote. Whereas the anti-Christian and anticlerical resonances of his work in the 1920s embodied a tacit acknowledgement of the need for a common cause with the generation shaped by a Nietzschean aversion to a value system stamped, both culturally and politically, by reactionary Catholicism, Malraux's post-war proximity to figures who were 'croyants', such as Charles de Gaulle, Jean Grosjean, and Pierre Bockel, might have been partly responsible for an attenuation of his critique of Christianity. In this respect one is reminded of the judgement made of Tcheng-Daï, one of the more spiritually motivated characters in Malraux's novel Les Conquérants, of whom it is said, 'il soigne sa biographie'. In Malraux's case one could add, 'et sa postérité'.