[La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate)] develops in a more explicit way the ideas implicit in Les Conquérants. La Condition Humaine is a much more ambitious and a more remarkable book than Les Conquérants. In the latter, Garine pretty well holds the spotlight, and there is an "I" who plays the role of Dr. Watson, deeply agitated by his hero's every utterance and standing by, indefatigably wide-eyed, while Garine receives portentous telegrams. He also plays the role of Conrad's Marlow. He is, in fact, our old friend the fictional observer who, from a more or less conventional point of view, looks on at a mystery or a moral problem. In [La Condition Humaine], however, the novelist gets rid of his European observer and, meeting Trotsky's challenge [see excerpt above], attacks the revolution directly. Dealing with cultures the most diverse, moral systems the most irreconcilable, he establishes a position outside them which enables him to dispense with the formulas alike of the "academic mandarins" and of the orthodox Communists. I do not know of any modern book which dramatizes so successfully such varied national and social types. Beside it, even E. M. Forster's admirable A Passage to India appears a little provincial; you even—what rarely happens nowadays to the reader of a French novel—forget that author is French…. The personalities of Malraux's characters are organically created and thoroughly explored. We not only witness their acts and see them in relation to the forces of the social-political scene: we share their most intimate sensations. (p. 27)
The device of presenting in dramatic scenes the exposition of political events, to which we owe Garine and his eternal dispatches, here appears as a series of conversations so exhaustive and so perfectly to the point in their function of political analysis as—in spite of the author's efforts to particularize the characters—occasionally to lack plausibility. And we are sometimes thrown off the track when a thesis that deals with psychology comes butting into a paragraph devoted to explaining the "objective conditions" or when a description that had seemed as external as a colored picture postcard of Shanghai takes a sudden subjective turn.
This is a free excerpt of 354 words. There are 727 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Malraux, (Georges-)André 1901–1976: Critical Essay by Edmund Wilson Access Pass.
