The Dandy and the Commissar: Notes on the History of Culture

There is no doubt that in the future--and the farther we go, the more true it will be--such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, of railroads and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering architects, participators in competitions, but the large popular masses as well.

--Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
(Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1971), 249.

To those who admire him as the last French public intellectual and those who denounce him as another Gallic fraud perpetrated on the hoi polloi, Malraux is the personage (manqué) of the latter-day philosophe, who publicizes ideas, identifies causes and defends culture. To anthropologists and cultural historians, however, Malraux is worth more than a partisan fight. As a significant presence in the arts, politics, and government from the twenties to the end of the sixties, he illuminates what we understand today by cultural history: the study of fields of practices, memories and schooling, which we identify as the places of formation, encounter and contest for individuals, communities and nations-states. Though he joined de Gaulle's cabinet twice (once at the end of WWII and again from 1958 to 1969), and in the exercise of his official functions sought to promote a universal French culture, Malraux is best remembered today as the maverick enfant-terrible of French letters: a twentieth-century Rimbaud who went East but returned unchastened. ¹ In the end, the evaluation of Malraux's unique contribution to twentieth-century thought may be more a matter of style than of substance, more of form than of content. Not that this should prejudice us against him. As someone who combined the anarchistic and revolutionary zest of intemperate youth with high-minded engagement in each of his several lives, as a writer, an art critic and a public man, Malraux never parted with an occasionally pompous yet always distinctive Nietzschean discourse whose cryptic irony annoyed his critics. They theorized that Malraux was a shaman with a good sense of timing and a knack for masking a lack of formal education with the dazzle of a mock erudition.

To be sure, Malraux made things hard even for people who admired him. As a dandy who teased the public with his aloofness, he never seemed to want to do anything that might cause him to become lost in the blended mass of an unthinking populace and a vile bourgeoisie. One of the characters in Man's Hope states the overall importance of style in war as anywhere:

"It's unthinkable," Lopez broke out, "that given people who have something to say and people who are willing to listen, we won't create a style. Just give them a free hand, give 'em all the air-brushes and spray-guns, all the modern contraptions they can want and, after that, a chunk of modelling-clay--and then you will see!" ²

Even his grand attempt at a formal autobiography, Malraux called Antimémoires, in a gesture that demonstrated yet once more that he needed the sort of drama that would blur the distinction between reality and fiction and thus cast doubt on what otherwise passed for history. He had learned best from Nietzsche, who, in his time, had roundly criticized the vaunted professors of philology and politicians of his day who didn't realize that all of truth is masked by knowledge and that history is but a contest between competing voices, each seeking its proper register in a discourse of power and manipulation. One couldn't discuss ideas, Nietzsche argued, without becoming aware that they were part of a show, a spectacle, and thus, that art, even more than literature or philosophy, and within art, sculpture more than drawing or painting, was a privileged site of inquiry for the essayist, because there he could sense that, in the controversy over the works of deceased authors and artists whom he would never know, a drama was unfolding whose importance he...