Of Heroism and Rhetoric

...He also examines the strange spell-binding style, quite distinct from the almost laconic, self-effacing style of novels like Les Conquerants and La Condition Humaine, which Malraux deliberately assumes in his works on art...

...As a critical essay this is an admirable piece of writing, concise, closely reasoned, astringent and serviceably eloquent...

...In less than 60 pages Righter produces a brilliant and surprisingly complete analysis of this extraordinary work...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics," "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde," and a forthcoming history of the modern French novel...

...it had been present in his own early career-in that mysterious expedition in search of Khmer statues in Indochina-while the role of artistic creation in the collective life of humanity had been a from the days when he published La Tentation de l'Occident in 1926...

...on the other hand, he devotes considerable and profitable attention to the book in which Malraux rearranges his themes, Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, This is a curious transitional work, highly unsatisfying if one considers it as a work of fiction, but interesting if one regards the novel as a mere framework for a series of dialogues which argue out the shift from the vision of the hero as man of action facing extreme situations to that of the hero as artist facing eternity...

...Nor was an intense involvement in art any-thing new for Malraux...

...at the same time he is eclectic enough in his scholar-ship and sufficiently undogmatic in his critical approach to present a study of his subject which is fair and, at the same time, uncompromising...

...Of Heroism and Rhetoric THE RHETORICAL HERO: AN ESSAY IN THE AESTHETICS OF ANDRE MALRAUX By William Righter Chilmark Press...

...Righter deals rather too summarily with the references to art in Malraux's prewar novels...

...on the other hand, there is no doubt that by his avoidance of the recognized methods and language of the academic scholars, Malraux has been able to establish a pattern of free relationships-contained within the insubstantial bounds of his Imaginary Museum-which at times is extremely illuminating...

...to convince us of the metaphysical significance of expression through the visual arts...

...In a strict sense this is true...

...It needs, in fact, no very deep study of Malraux's writings to see that the contrast between his early and late periods is more apparent than real...

...Malraux studies works of art not for what they tell us about art, but for what they tell us about man and his creative powers...

...The war, as his key novel Les Noyers de l'Altenburg made clear, was the decisive experience that turned him politically into a traditionalist and led him to discover in art the means he had always been seeking for man to defy death and wring a conquest from the perpetual battle with destiny...

...But the bulk of The Rhetorical Hero is devoted to Les Voix du Silence as the key work in Malraux's postwar writing...

...Malraux, with his sharp sense of the possibilities of significant action, realized before most of the other Men of the Thirties that the age when revolutions allowed adventures to define themselves by dramatic action had come to an end...

...Righter is clearly far enough removed temperamentally from Malraux to be able to look at him with detachment...

...To place works of art in unfamiliar contexts, to view them from improbable angles, to disturb the accepted relationships of scale: All these are devices which shock the orthodox critic, but they do at times produce valuable insights into the analogical relationships of distant cultures and hence into the common obsessions which all men share...

...Like Ruskin's Modern Painters, Les Voix du Silence is itself nearer to a work of art than a reasoned treatise, and Righter has done well to criticize so effectively its pretensions as a work of art criticism or art history...

...The continuity between this point of view and that of the novels whose adventurer heroes seek some means of defining themselves against the insult of death, is obvious...

...It is, of course, neither...

...It is the vatic voice of the prophet bringing the message of death disarmed and the grave defeated...

...Righter contends that Malraux's works on art contain "no aesthetic theory of any novelty or importance, nor any argument of serious interest to the philosopher or critic of art...

...Les Voix du Silence is a fascinating work of heretical philosophy which uses art as an elaborate metaphor for the continuity of human creativeness...

...While reading it, I could not help comparing Righter's style, so distinguished by the analytical clarity beloved of French classicists, with the almost Germanic romanticism of manner which characterizes Malraux's es-says on art as distinct from his novels...

...it represents a deliberate use of rhetorical means, of the resources of literary expression...

...THE RHETORICAL HERO is described as an essay on the aestbetics of Malraux...

...the Imaginary Museum becomes a great meeting place where the individual artist, emerging out of history, takes his place with his fellows, the known and the nameless, to bear witness that in creation man assumes the roles of the departed gods and gives the lie to mortality...

...As Righter remarks, Malraux here seeks not to argue but to convert, and his manner becomes allusive and incantatory rather than direct and expository...

...to be more precise, its author-William Rigbterexplores the continuity between Malraux's novels and his writings on art, and reveals how far both arc really concerned with the same subject: man and his fate...

...Yet-as Righter shows with considerable elaboration-the fact re-mains that all Malraux has to say about art is said with ulterior intent...

...The Rhetorical Hero begins with a brief recapitulation of the apparent paradox of Malraux's career, the transformation of the half-rnyttucal hero of revolutionary adventures in-to the Gaullist bureaucrat, of the novelist of violence into the self-appointed curator of the "Imaginary Museum...

...He does not only disentangle the historical and psychological elements, and show how these always bring us back to the almost messianic strain of neoNietzschean Existentialism, to the central concept of art as the supreme manifestation of man's triumph over destiny...