Witnessing André Malraux: Visions and Re-Visions ed. by Brian Thompson and Carl Viggiani (review)

258Rocky Mountain Review a new appreciation of its significance; with an intensified understanding of the rhetorical bases of Renaissance humanism; and, most important of all, with a deeper appreciation of the poetic genius of Donne and Milton, whose writings this study so richly illuminates. After all, isn't this what literary criticism is all about? MARY ELIZABETH GREEN Arizona State University BRIAN THOMPSON and CARL VIGGIANI, eds. Witnessing André Malraux: Visions and Re- Visions. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. 226 p. Witnessing André Malraux: Visionsand Re-Visions contains fourteen essays dealing with Malraux's life and political commitments, his fiction, and the philosophical "autobiographical" works he wrote at the end of his career. The essays, all eloquently written, are invaluable because they provide new insights into the man and his art and reconfirm his importance as an artist, critic, and thinker. Those essays dealing with Mairaux's life and political involvements focus primarily on his engagement on the side of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. in "Before L'Espoir. Malraux's Pilots for Republican Spain," Walter Langlois argues convincingly that the stories surrounding Malraux's important role in the Spanish conflict are based in fact and not legend. This cannot always be said of his revolutionary activities in Indochina. Two other essays, Nicholas Hewitt's "Authoritarianism and Esthetics: The Paradox of L'Espoir" and Robert Sayre's "L'Espoir and Stalinism," address the issue of Malraux's ideological stance during the Spanish conflict through close analyses of L'Espoir. The articles then demonstrate the manner in which that ideology, authoritarian and Stalinist in nature, informs characterization and dictates the structure of the 1937 novel. Both critics reject the widely held view that L'Espoir is a popular work whose democratic outlook and liberal heroes distinguish it from Malraux's earlier, revolutionary novels. Instead they argue that the novel is dominated by an elitist and authoritarian perspective in which what is validated is not the will of the masses but the cult of the revolutionary leader who imposes order and discipline around him. Rather than being "liberal heroes," Manuel and Magnin, for example, bear a strong resemblance to Malraux's earlier "adventurer-heroes." As Hewitt remarks, they "have not yet satisfactorily shaken off the ghosts of Perken, Garine, and Ferrai" (117). Malraux's strongly Stalinist perspective also determines what Sayre describes as the novel's "silences" and "presences." L'Espoir fails to treat the political debates within the Republican camp and remains silent on the subject of the social revolution which took place behind Republican lines after July 1936. The insistence that discipline, order, and military success take precedence over social change became the main thrust of communist propaganda, and these imperatives and priorities also govern the structure of Malraux's novel. The "lyrical illusion" gives way to the organization of the "Apocalypse" which in turn makes "Hope" possible. In this fashion, the Party line becomes one of L'Espoir's "presences." L'Espoir is certainly not the only novel treated here, although discussions of Malraux's other fictional works tend to be less historically based and in most cases, less concerned with ideological content. Brian Thompson examines blindness, both literal and figurative, in La Voie royale, Les Conquérants, La Condition humaine Book Reviews259 as well as in L'Espoir in "From Fascination to Poetry: Blindness in Malraux's Novels." He concludes: "Throughout the novels, blindness comes to represent, to make present, one aspect or another of man's condition as Malraux sees it — his vulnerability, his dependence on forces outside himself, his solitude, and the impossibility of fully communicating with others" (165). Mary Ann Frese Witt studies Shamanism in Malraux's fiction in "Malraux's Shamanism: Initiatory Death and Rebirth." She argues convincingly that the Shamanistic cycle of entry into a deathlike state, illumination, and rebirth accompanied by a newfound capacity to guide others in a spiritual sense is experienced by several Malrucian heroes, and especially Vincent Berger in Les Noyers de I'Altenburg. In "Malraux's Saint-Juste," Sergio Villani compares Pierre Garine of Les Conquérants (as well as his creator) to the "Archangel of the Terror." He concludes that there are strong similarities...