Résistance du roman: genèse de Non” d’André Malraux par Jean-Louis Jeannelle, “Non”: fragments d’un roman sur la Résistance par André Malraux (review)

Jeannelle, Jean-Louis. Résistance du roman: genèse de “Non” d’André Malraux. Paris: CNRS, 2013. ISBN 978-2-271-07740-0. Pp. 328. 25 a. Malraux, André. “Non”: fragments d’un roman sur la Résistance. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-014055-8. Pp. 131. 15,90 a. Colonel Berger took leadership of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade in September 1944. Prior to commanding under that pseudonym, Malraux was a member of the maquis in Corrèze, Dordogne. There he was known as Berger among other leaders of the regional réseaux, namely Soleil, Loiseau, and Grandet. The latter name from the Spanish Civil War was fictionalized in Malraux’s novel L’espoir (1937). Many readers of this novel expected Malraux to publish a sequel about the Resistance. Pertinently, “Non” is an incomplete, episodic collection of Resistance anecdotes. The text was constructed by Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Henri Godard from the archives of Jacques Doucet’s personal library. The archival work to produce this tentative narrative is described in detail in Résistance du roman, a scholarly companion to“Non”that appeals to readers interested in genetic criticism. Jeannelle and Godard had the manuscripts by Malraux and the typescripts produced by Sophie de Vilmorin. Having worked with collections of original literary manuscripts, I can attest to the difficulty of the work by these scholars, from deciphering words to making choices about which versions and/or pages to include/exclude in the published text. They respected Malraux’s pagination where indicated. Otherwise, they had to make decisions about what was pertinent to the perceived overall project. This project offers much to be studied in the context of the evolution of Malraux’s literary work as well as his life relative to his literary choices. For example, Jeannelle’s presentation rekindles the critical fires about why Malraux, as one of the great practitioners of the novel in L’espoir, did not follow up Les noyers d’Altenburg (1943) with another novel (“Non”) on the Resistance but decided instead not to pursue this literary form. Did Malraux decide not to publish it after the War, or was he editing and revising it until his old age? Many such questions come up as the reader recognizes in“Non”a fictionalized Colonel Berger evolving from the maquis to the Brigade. Certainly, the word non brings up the writings by Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and many others about the human rejection of a stifling authority and the preparation for gaining integrity. The defining alternative is identified by Malraux’s narrator: “L’esclave dit toujours oui” (Malraux 118). The title also suggests the wordplay on nom in nom de guerre, the crucial use of an alias to disguise the players in the Resistance. The episodic style of these memoirs is familiar to many a combat veteran such as myself who remembers snippets of what happened in war rather than the linear story one might expect in a traditional novel or from a military historian. Jeannelle’s study assists the reader of“Non”in identifying some consistencies among the anecdotes. He provides links to some of Malraux’s published fiction, his known Resistance activity, and the mythomania he encouraged about it. Insofar as Malraux also claimed to want to make a movie about the Resistance, many of the scenes in “Non” resemble snapshots of what it was like to be part of the subversive, mostly heterogeneous, 216 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 217 opposition to Nazi tanks roaming in attack formations throughout the forests of the Dordogne.Weapons such as bazookas, parachuted in from England, became lifesavers in front of the Panzer tank,“le gros insecte” (Malraux 53) that menaced the countryside looking for partisans trying to get organized in secret places.“Non”also anecdotally bears witness to the roles women played in the Resistance. Other memories that still speak to us today recall, for example:“nos amis communistes”(Malraux 27) when the Left and the Right worked together for the same goal; the galvanizing moment when Jean Moulin was arrested at Caluire in Lyon; the use of torture by both sides to acquire information; and the specific uses of language such as the tutoiement employed...