Sans oublier Malraux by Jean-Claude Larrat (review)

As the title implies, woven into this extensive collection of Jean-Claude Larrat's articles on André Malraux's life and work is a thread of anxiety about his place in the world of French letters. While francophone (and even anglophone) critics and commentators like to embellish their reflections on the human condition with references to, or quotations from Malraux, it is open to question whether many of them have ever acquainted themselves with his writings in a sustained manner. This is even more true of a younger generation of readers whose cultural attitudes would find little in common with his archetype of 1930s commitment. Larrat's articles, which were published over the last two decades, therefore bridge the divide between the significance of the intellectual cross-fertilization among Malraux and his contemporaries (this he analyses with particular lucidity with regard to André Gide and Michel Leiris), and the fascination Malraux exercised for a later generation of major intellectual figures (for example, Jean-François Lyotard). The four areas covered by the articles deal broadly with: the relationship between biography, autobiography, and fiction; the representation of history and the challenges this engenders; the reflection on art and the dynamics of its creation; and Malraux's ceaseless interrogation on the nature of literary creation. The pursuit of an 'antidestin'—as seen in a large array of Malraux's fictional characters, who gamble, sometimes literally, on their ability to negate the fatal ravages of time—is expressed in different ways across the volume's four focuses, but is most apparent in the relationship between the individual and the unfolding of history. But this power of negation evokes a wider and encompassing possibility of metamorphosis, which allows the individual and the work of art to challenge fixed boundaries and re-imagine their origins. Ultimately, what Larrat endeavours to do is to identify, in a way that can be appreciated by a contemporary readership, the 'voice' that is the key to the understanding of the essential being. Larrat, as critic, is faithful to the objective fixed by Malraux the novelist, most notably in La Condition humaine, where he evokes the voice in the individual that is not apprehended via the ears but via the throat, and which is the manifestation of the inner life that escapes temporal boundaries. Larrat's well-organized volume is informative and largely persuasive, representing a methodical and conscientious endeavour to re-assert the relevance of Malraux. It appears almost half a century after Roland Barthes's dismissal of Malraux's status as 'un grand écrivain' in an interview in Le Figaro, 27 July 1974. Barthes's comment was made in an era when the frontiers explored by the nouveau roman seemed to have turned Malraux's prose into the poste restante of a pedestrian literary past. Larrat makes a vigorous case for the enduring value of Malraux's work, and of his life-long obsessions, for our postmodern times.