Andre Malraux's Ode to Art
LYDENBERG, JOHN
WRITERS and WRITING Andre Malraux's Ode to Art THE VOICES OF SILENCE. By Andre Malraux. Doubleday. 661 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by John Lydenberg Visiting Lecturer in English, University of...
...Now he finds it in something more enduring than revolution, in the artists' manifold assertions of their humanity...
...But, surprisingly, the publishers' confidence in their product is not misplaced...
...Malraux's awareness of the "collective virtue that stems from a communion," and his comments on the way in which our collective mass "arts" today lack that virtue and are actually the antithesis of art...
...the artist found "visions of his own absolutes," and "the modern painter came to find in his very ostracism the source of an amazine fertility...
...The subtly complex discussion of art as an expression of its culture and, at the same time, an autonomous continuum of styles...
...You may drop the book, but you can't doze over it...
...The absence of an index could be taken as one symbol, albeit a minor and an ambiguous one, of the book as a whole...
...Like any good book on art, this leads us from the pages to pieces of art outside the covers...
...The analysis of our modern interest in the primitive, especially as it reveals the irrational, the "night side," in man's vision...
...There is also the allusive-elusive style: passages crammed simultaneously with allusions and difficult dicta...
...If Malraux is no hawker of pink progress pills, he is no Spenglerian prophet of doom either...
...each movement has its coda, and the coda of the finale is particularly deep and rich in tone...
...or of sleep...
...the real subject is, as in all Malraux's writings, la condition humaine, commonly paraphrased as man's fate...
...Thus, when at the close of the seventeenth century a religion was "for the first time threatened otherwise than by the birth of another religion about to take its place," art as it had always been known was itself threatened...
...J.L.] on this teeming, brilliant work...
...But they need not...
...Again the publishers come to our rescue as they supply us with Andre Maurois's protest: "It would be easier to write another book rather than an article [to say nothing of a short review...
...The dismissal of "illusionist realism" as "the absolute negation of painting...
...I would guess that, except for mention of particular centuries, not more than a dozen dates appear in the 661 pages of text...
...Unable longer to find man's hope with Kyo and Katov in the solidarity of revolution, he still refuses to abandon hope...
...It consists of four long illustrated essays on the meaning of art, the meaning of life, and the destiny of man...
...Malraux's cavalier disregard not only of chronology but even of dates...
...Although the regular edition sells for only $25.00, the publishers assure us that one can pay $100 for a limited edition "bound by hand in France in full leather...
...Then modern art was conceived, though its birth was delayed while men fumbled, in sublime confidence, with secular absolutes...
...So far, I have obviously not given a very clear picture of the book...
...One should talk at length of many things: The truly extraordinary way in which the text and illustrations support each other...
...The unbelievably wide range of art objects of all sorts that Malraux gathers into his net...
...Especially one would like to discuss at length the "undemocratic" implications of Malraux's heroic "humanism...
...But, unlike any other that I know, this one is not merely about the artistic creations of other artists...
...Here the artist rather than the revolutionary is hero ??”with Malraux, as with few others contemporary writers, we not only can but must talk of heroes...
...But the hero is still the same (still Malraux...
...in each movement, the distinctive theme is modulated, repeated, developed...
...In that house of shadows where Rembrandt still plies his brush, all the illustrious Shades, from the artists of the caverns onward, follow each movement of the trembling hand that is drafting for them a new lease of survival...
...Of the many testimonials mimeographed for the critics, the wrapper austerely brings the purchaser but one...
...How can you get around in it without an index...
...separated from all his old ties, alone in an "august solitude...
...For as "style" in the plastic arts is to Malraux the defining characteristic of that art, and indeed the way in which the artist takes and makes the world, so the style, or styles, of this book are the book itself...
...With full solemnity, the publishers supply reviewers these and many more facts about their great venture, including a three-page account of Andre Malraux's excitingly varied life and, of course, the statistics on the illustrations which make the book so expensive: "465 illustrations printed by heliogravure process, including 15 in full color...
...Humanism does not consist in saying: 'No animal could have done what we have done,' but in declaring: 'We have refused to do what the beast within us willed to do, and we wish to rediscover Man wherever we discover that which seeks to crush him to the dust.' True, for a religious-minded man this loud debate of metamorphosis and rediscoveries is but an echo of a divine voice, for a man becomes truly Man only when in quest of what is most exalted in him...
...Religion is to the masses what art is to the artist: man's way of escaping or transforming his destiny...
...But who would ask for an index to a symphony or a poem...
...it is itself a work of art, complete, self-sufficient, leading not so much to the art galleries and the print shops as back into itself...
...Doubleday virtually invites the critic to scoff, to insinuate the damning word "pretentious," to show his Yankee independence by refusing to be stampeded by Hollywood superlatives or the reclame of Finland and France...
...The Japanese publisher plans to offer his buyers a number of statuettes instead of one monument by bringing the book out in twenty small volumes...
...Edmund Wilson's carefully qualified judgment that this is "perhaps one of the really great books of our time...
...The whole can be likened to a symphony, with its four movements: The movements have different themes, but they are related and in some respects cumulative...
...no one who knows Malraux's writings would expect, or want, anything as systematic as that from him...
...and who among us doesn't...
...Even the cheap edition was printed in France, so that it could be under the constant supervision of its author, and the paper for it was "manufactured especially in Finland" (why, we are not told...
...The virtues of such a treatment, and the concomitant hardships for the reader who lacks...
...Today, as the absurd has supplanted the absolute, men find themselves more than ever alone and terrified...
...Malraux's forbidding familiarity with the arts of all times and all places...
...There are his careful analytical passages...
...In past civilizations, the artist expressed through his art the hopes, fears and values that his fellows expressed through their religion...
...The book is in no way a history of art...
...Art and religion have a similar function, according to Malraux...
...Changes in art developed pari passu with changes in religion...
...By the nineteenth century, the artist "and the ruling classes for the first time ceased having the same values...
...A regular Cecil B. de Mille production, it would seem...
...yet there is beauty in the thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the disdainful splendor of the nebulae the music of the spheres and broadcast it across the years to come, bestowing on them messages as yet unknown...
...And that hand whose waverings in the gloom are watched by ages immemorial is vibrant with one of the loftiest of the secret yet compelling testimonies to the power and the glory of being Man...
...In despair, they may snatch miserably at newly-created, sub-human absolutes that shade the void with a specious and brittle facade...
...He made the discovery "that the depiction of a world devoid of value can be magnificently justified by an artist who treats painting itself as the supreme value...
...The term "essays" is too flat...
...He is the artist...
...He is the man who recognizes that his fate is isolation and eventual death, but, unwilling to accept this unmanning condition and unable (now that God is dead) to escape his destiny in religious belief, determines to transform the chaotic, indifferent, recalcitrant matter of the world by an act of imagination and will that gives shape and meaning to his life and the life of man and that thereby, for a brief moment (he still dies), allows him to transcend his tragic human condition...
...The effect of the whole is not primarily understanding or cognition of the sort usually provided by expository prose, but an awareness, an emotional experience...
...for "all art is a revolt against man's fate...
...Pervading all is the electric vibrant quality, characterized by unresolved tensions, shocking, sometimes numbing, more often stimulating...
...The passage quoted above well illustrates his oracular-poetic style, which is generally reserved for the codas...
...The formal subject is man's artistic creations...
...His style alone deserves a whole essay...
...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Visiting Lecturer in English, University of Minnesota The Voices of Silence is monumental right down to the dust jacket, which is of very heavy, off-white, faintly marbled paper...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
