Malraux and the “Farfelu”

André Malraux: The Kingdom of Farfelu with Paper Moons. W. B. Keckler translation. New York: Fugue State Press, 2005.

Georges Lemaitre: From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature.  Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978 (1947).

André Vandegans: La Jeunesse Littéraire d’André Malraux: Essai Sur L’Inspiration Farfelue. Abbeville: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964.

Domnica Radulescu: André Malraux: The “Farfelu” as Expression of the Feminine and the Erotic. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

 

In 1921, the very young André Malraux dedicated his first published work of fiction, Paper Moons, to the Cubist writer, Max Jacob, an early friend and mentor in Paris. Paris in the years after the Great War saw a continuation of the artistic ferment that had begun before the war, an atmosphere of social and political security now of course long vanished. Lemaitre’s history evokes that time and place.

The French, he writes, “with almost complete consistency,” have esteemed rationality and realism, considering themselves “the upholders of le bon sens.” Seen in the neoclassicism of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment counter-rationalism of the eighteenth, what Malraux would later call the “mania for logic” has animated French minds. The stance has not been without its critics; Lemaitre cites the Rousseau of the Reveries and such Romantics as Gérard Nerval, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire. Two generations before Malraux, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé strove to transcend ordinary reality, “to enter the realm of the Absolute, which for him meant simply a more or less abstract, immaterial conception of perfect, ideal beauty” evoked by literary incantations tapping into “the hidden magic power of words,” which he compared to sentient, animated “living organisms,” organisms that have lost their original vitality in “the drab, stale vocabulary of modern days.”  Once “freed from the tyranny of reality, released from the necessity of having to ‘mean’ something definite,” words “will encounter a thousand possibilities of self-realization,” re-revealing “the ‘other’ world—the world of the ideal.” In philosophy, this was the time of the ‘irrationalists,’ of Nietzsche’s will to power and of Bergson’s élan vital. Moreover, from the 1890s on, science and mathematics themselves seemed to corroborate the unreality of reality, as “a series of correlated discoveries…revolutionized the conception of the structure of the universe that had prevailed since about the time of the Renaissance,” dissociating “certain aspects of reality that had been hitherto considered as forming an indivisible unity.” Mathematical physics, atomistic chemistry, and experimental psychology together left “the impression that every sentiment we entertain and every solid object that we perceive is but a flimsy assemblage ready to collapse into fragments at the impact of some new discovery.” “The world of our experience” seemed to disintegrate “into minute particles,” as the world “was seen as “infinitely more complex than had ever been imagined before,” with “enormous and profound unknown forces” were now understood to “envelop human life on all sides.” Such claims were no longer the province of poets, mystics, and madmen; “human intelligence, which the rationalistic Frenchman had so long trusted as the safest guide in the intricate maze of puzzling reality, came to be regarded with suspicion and even with contempt.” Rousseau’s noble savage reigned once more: “Since intelligence had betrayed the confidence placed in her, the desire was to return to a pre-intellectual state, to a primitivism akin to that of the Negroes of Central Africa—a stage of development in which intellect had not yet had a chance to draw an interpretative veil between the core of reality and man’s sentient being.” 

One littérateur who typified the Parisian scene near the turn of the century was the wealthy, garrulous, massively erudite absinthe drinker, Alfred Jarry, whose 1896 play, Ubu-Roi enjoyed a succès de scandale with its “hideous presentation” of “cupidity, cowardice, gluttony, lechery, bourgeois respectability, philosophical wisdom, and shar, dangerous cunning,” all set for with “a monstrous vital intensity reminiscent of the powerful creations of Rabelais.” King Ubu “stands as a symbol of the lowest human instincts, which, if given a free hand, might easily take possession of our whole being and…fasten the tyranny of ignoble appetites upon our entire personality”—a “bitter satire on the society in which we live,” a society in which the play “aroused either violent resentment or wild enthusiasm.” Among his young admirers were Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Max Jacob, the men who went on to start the Cubist movement in literature, painting, and sculpture. For the Cubists, Jarry “came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of a generation in revolt, a champion who had fallen”—he died in 1907 at the age of 34—in “a lofty struggle” against what young artists yawned at: the dullness of middle-class existence, with its stubborn insentience of the harrowing reality beneath the surface of worldly comforts.

Picasso and Jacob befriended one another in Paris in 1901, the year Malraux was born. They met Apollinaire a few years later. “Cubism is the most direct and evident consequence of that collaboration,” finding an impetus in the statuettes now being imported from the Ivory Coast and Congo. “The candid expression of genuine, though brutal, sensations and sentiments stirred man in a way that was beyond the power of a clever, sophisticated technique,” that “hard crust of an age-old civilization,” with “the thick layer of interpretive notions and traditions which intelligence had deposited upon all things,” now held to be “the main obstacle to direct contact with the richest sources of human inspiration and emotion.” The “geometric simplification” seen in African art suggested that the artists had “succeeded in suggesting with almost overpowering force a mysterious order, not thrust upon passive objects by an organizing intelligence but existing, as it were, at the very core of things themselves.” A 1908 exhibition by Picasso’s friend Georges Braque provoked Henri Matisse (other art historians credit the critic Louis Vauxcelles) to describe the paintings as having been composed “with little cubes.” “At the bottom of the Cubist movement was an eager and fervent desire to penetrate beneath the motley exterior of material appearances and to grasp something of the fundamental substance of reality,” inasmuch as the structured atomism of geometric shapes leaves literary and visual art “utterly free from entanglements and compromises with the materialism of life,” especially as exemplified by those money-grubbing bourgeois. “Even though discursive logic was now discredited, the Cubists had little difficulty in persuading themselves that pure geometry reflected the basic architecture of the universe,” so long as it helped them “to dislocate the world of appearances” and got them well beyond the unthinking materialism of the middle classes. In a sense, they asserted themselves as a new class of aristocrats, inasmuch as this hitherto undisclosed geometrical metaphysic “was not to be determined logically, nor even mathematically, but solely by intuition” by “the poet and to the artist alone,” bringing forth a vision “reserved for those who have something of the poet in them” as the effect of paintings and poems intended “to arouse an enraptured response in the souls of the privileged few who held within themselves a spark of the sublime.” “Sublime” is exactly right: Cubist art had no patience for the merely beautiful, dismissing it as superficial, ornamental, decorative. Da Vinci’s perspectivism was out, medieval depictions of tortured saints in. The Cubists “were fully aware of the intervening rationalistic evolution,” the shift from Christian art to the art of Renaissance neo-classicism, “would have to be eradicated,” and they “were prepared to reject all the intellectual and technical advances achieved in the field of painting since the Renaissance,” which interfered with “a sense of the totality of the universe,” with “close contact with a sublime spiritual entity.” Whether “the force of spiritual energy” was Bergson’s élan vital, Nietzsche’s will to power, or T. S. Eliot’s Christianity, Cubists averred that it came “from the deepest recesses of man’s fundamental vitality.” As in Nietzsche, as in the Christian churches, music came to be seen as a more direct emanation from those deep recesses than any other art; Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, “We are drifting towards an entirely new art which will stand in relation to painting, as hitherto regarded, just as music stands in relation to literature.”

Apollinaire classified Cubist painters into four groups. “Scientific” or “conceptual” cubists remained ‘geometric,’ taking (for example) those Renaissance masterpieces and “decomposing” them into their supposedly underlying triangles, circles, and squares; Picasso and Braque were the masters among them. “Physical” cubists depicted new structures, borrowing elements from physical reality, as seen in the later paintings of Henri Le Fauconnier, whereas “Orphic” Cubism borrowed forms not from physical objects spun them out of their own minds, as seen in the paintings of the Czech artist, František Kupka, a man given to theosophy and trance states. “Instinctive” Cubism, perhaps more properly described as intuitionist Cubism, took its bearings from Bergson; Matisse was among its many practitioners.

Apollinaire—in Cubist fashion, he reshaped his Polish name, Wilhelm Apolinaris de Kostrowitzki— himself remained the foremost among the literary Cubists. His Catholic upbringing left “a spiritual exaltation [that] was always at work within him, concealed from public view,” an exaltation which did not interfere with either his “marked taste for the open and unrestrained enjoyment of material pleasures,” including “the art of eating,” or his “utter lack of respect for rules and self-imposed discipline.” He wrote copiously on the “Esprit nouveau” in literature, philosophy, and art, his masterpiece acknowledged to be his 1913 book of poems, Alcools. (Could a poem not be like a glass of absinthe, a delightful, risky, mind-bending intoxicant?) Unlike the shattered souls of the ‘Lost Generation,’ he found the Great War, in which he fought and was severely wounded, a source of “spiritual exaltation inspired by constant danger, the proximity of death, and a thousand weird and exciting adventures,” an event that caused a “universal breakdown of tradition values” that served as “an inspiriting confirmation of his own views and of his fondest hopes.” Jettisoning the French “superstitious reverence for good taste,” the “set of conventions and prejudices particularly developed in the old civilizations, that forbid the direct and unpolished expression of spontaneous and instinctive feelings,” Apollinaire insisted that “even the lowest, the crudest, the most banal, the most despised aspects of everyday existence, even the most hideous and repulsive actions committed in the war, were not to be excluded but joyously welcomed in their entirety,” as “they all contain a magic kernel of essential poetry which the vulgar may not perceive but which inspired men like Apollinaire himself can express with compelling power.” This “cannot be achieved through careful, rational analysis, nor through cold-blooded dissection of the external aspects of the world” but can be “realized only in a state of lyrical enthusiasm, when the soul of man enters into communion with the spirit of the whole Cosmos and the two vibrate together in perfect harmony,” the soul drawing upon the “superior, transcendental energy” or élan vital which animates all of Being. The poet-hero would then “be as much a benefactor to mankind as Christopher Columbus,” freeing man “to go and find something new, something real, at last.” Hence the practice of “automatic writing,” whereby the poet would go into a self-induced trance, writing down whatever popped into his head, kaleidoscopically. (It must be admitted that Apollinaire then took the trouble to edit the results.) This practice eventuated in, and was continued by, the Surrealist movement. [1]

Apollinaire adapted the methods of Cubism to literary purposes by breaking up his poetic narrative “arbitrarily into short or long passages, arranged in direct sequence but with almost no ascertainable connection between them, interrupted by digressions, personal reflections, or unexpected anecdotes,” dislocating “the forms of reality” into the verbal equivalent of geometric shapes or atoms. “All statements are made abruptly, without any preparation or transition, in a manner suggestive of the angles and bare surfaces to be found in the paintings of the same period,” producing “an atmosphere of unbridled fantasy and odd supernatural occurrence, carrying the reader into a half-real, half-imaginary world where the objects are solid enough, although their setting has none of the compelling stability that our senses find in normal circumstances.” Drawing from but reversing the Catholic mysticism that had found new life before and during the Great War, Apollinaire’s poetry features “strange outbursts of sadism [that] call up disturbingly the truly infernal abysses existing in human consciousness.”

Second only to Apollinaire among the literary Cubists, Malraux’s friend and mentor, Max Jacob, came from an entirely different milieu, a family of Jewish atheists in Brittany. He met Apollinaire in 1904, dabbled in occultism while taking care to make some money out of it. “His comic verve was prodigious,” as “he made fun of everything and everybody, including himself,” with the sole exception of his friend Picasso. Reaching for “the realm which was beyond the reach of his reason or his senses,” he eventually found it as he walked home from the Bibliothèque Nationale in September 1909, when “there appeared to him what he took to be an entrancing supernatural vision of the Deity Himself” and he fell, Paul the Apostle-like, to the ground, entranced, then picked himself up and reported to the nearest Catholic priest, who, suspecting a prank, laughed him off. Undeterred, he integrated his occultism and Cubism “within the compass of his Christian mystic revelation,” conversing with angels and “the blessed souls of the departing.” Nor did he abandon his “grotesque clowning,” now in front of God, acts of a “buffoon and prophet rolled into one.” “If I have sinned horribly on a certain day, then on the following day…I choke, I sob I cry, I beat my face, my beast, my limbs, my hands; I bleed, I make the sign of the cross with my blood, with my tears. In the end God is taken in.” His reader may be permitted to wonder if that were really the case, but in any event, he eventually received his baptism, “having Pablo Picasso himself for a godfather.” His years’-long, sincere-ironic soul-wrestling left him sympathetic to young men undergoing similar quests, including André Malraux. And none of his eccentricities should detract from his literary achievement. As LeMaitre writes, “Max Jacob has assisted perhaps more than any of our contemporaries”—he had died in a German concentration camp only five years before LeMaitre published his study—in “ridding the French sentence of all its superfluous literary ornaments and in reducing it to a plain, angular bareness reminiscent of the most aggressive Cubist paintings.” By doing so, he “struck at intellectual reasoning itself” by “ruining on principle the power of carefully arrayed words” in a quasi-Nietzschean foray into irrationalist estheticism which registered “the strangeness, the inexplicableness of the universe”—the spirit of the farfelu Malraux took on and never fully left behind. The marvelously named Fugue State Press, evidently the publishing arm of a university without walls, has made Lunes en Papier (dedicated to Jacob) and Royaume-Farfelu available in an English translation by the noted poet, W. B. Keckler.

In the frontispiece, Malraux calls Paper Moons “a small book in which one learns of several little-known conflicts, and a voyage among objects familiar but strange, all of it true.” But true in what sense? That is the question, Hamlet might ask, if in an epistemological mood. What is true, if we are take the author at his word, is that “There are no symbols in this book.” According to Jean Moréas, author of The Symbolist Manifesto of 1886, the poetry of the Symbolistes—Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine—would “clothe the ideal in perceptible form.” There is nothing ideal about the perceptible forms sketched in Paper Moons; blink, and they have changed, a band of shape-shifting teases.

The beings we meet are geometric figures, beginning with the moon itself, which, “like a luminous advertising sign”—a novel thing, in 1921—changes color “in phases,” reflecting on a lake, itself changing with every ripple, producing “the play of light and water.” Geometric lines define what is, as seen in Plato’s Meno and, among Frenchmen, Descartes. They give the appearance of clarity, stability. But what if the lines undulate, thanks either to an electric current or a summer breeze? Do these surfaces not then reflect the inner instability of things, the physics and metaphysics of Cubism? Not stability but metamorphoses—even, as Malraux himself will style it, decades later, The Metamorphosis of the Gods.

The moon laughs and produces children whose eyes, “fearful and ironic,” evidently perceive the unstable nature of the world into which they have been born. [2] Fearful, because they cannot know what will come next? Ironic, because there is little to revere in what cannot be permanent? The moon-children can be irritated, however—their moods are no more stable than the world. They see “ominous balloons” on the lake, “a harem of smooth, hairless, roly-poly sultans” (sultans, who by convention keep harems); when the moon-children realize that the balloons are not “carrying out complicated, invisible duties” as rulers are expected to do,” when they “realized the truth” Malraux has promised to tell, they become “indignant,” their noses shift shapes into billiard cues, and they knock the balloons around, only to bounce indifferently on the shimmering water, “inflam[ing] the jealousy of the baby moons, who wanted them dead.” 

The balloons prove unkillable, even undeflatable, at least under billiard cue assault, yet not imperturbable; they “found themselves, alas, forced to act,” and, seeing “a flickering amber palace” thrown up by an “enchanted fountain,” they determine to invade it, anticipating “all kinds of lovely infamy” to be perpetrated therein. The palace’s inhabitants, hanging from the crossbeams under the roof, hoping to escape a beating, are tied up by the “savage balloons,” metamorphosed into beings of action from their previous languor on the lake. Among the inhabitants are philosophers, “black radishes full of sound.” In the world of paper moons and sultan balloons, philosophers are indistinguishable from the windbag rhetoricians and shape-shifting sophists we meet in the Platonic dialogues. Like all distinctions in the anti-bon sens universe, these blur. 

The balloons’ triumph doesn’t last, any more than anything else does. Insolently jeering at the “genie of the lake,” a “cat-shaped pincushion,” they are soon punished. The Genie captures them and decides to inflict the death penalty, after finding that no one wants to take them. “Since no one desires these cruel balloons, We, the Genie of the Lake, who possess rights of justice, high and low, over the totality of this, Our Fiefdom, condemn these balloons to death in the name of justice,” indistinguishable from revenge. And rightly so, by the light of the occasionally silvery moon, inasmuch as justice in a world of flux can only be a matter of arbitrary passion. But when they are hanged, the balloons’ tongues don’t stick out, and the frustrated Cat-pincushion hangs himself, exclaiming, “O passion, you’re about to lose your little Cat Deluxe!” His paws lay “fittingly across each other in the shape of a cross,” a parody-Christ who commits suicide. The weight of the Cat’s body pulls the ropes tight on the balloons, causing the balloons’ tongues to stick out, after all. The death of this mock-Christ consummates his intention not by saving but by humiliating his enemies. 

And yet some of the balloons are resurrected, metamorphosed—some “blossom[ing] into huge flowers,” others into “fruits with the soft gleam of antique polished wood,” but all exuding an “aphrodisiac aroma” which draws stuffed alligators out of the antique shops, running after them. One of the fruits then produces nine “new beings,” seven of whom are the Deadly Seven Sins, of which two, Envy and Greed, promptly explode, leaving Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Pride—fittingly the largest of the brood—who introduces his companions. One of the other surviving beings introduces himself as Hifili, a name perhaps derived from the Hebrew hifil, denoting causation. (“Perhaps” indeed—who knows? But to pretend it’s so runs with the spirit of the Lunes.) “Before the metamorphoses that gave me this balloon soul,” he announces, “I was a man who carefully studied shapes,” especially glassware, and among glassware especially the retorts, long-nosed flasks (he is a “red Pinocchio”) used in alchemical transformations. To shift from science to alchemy is to shift from ancient and modern geometry, from stable definition to the metamorphic geometry of Cubism. “I loved the retorts most of all,” beings that “would have run to eat out of my hand if they had known how to eat,” sardonic presences given to “contemptuous laughter,” and so the spirit of irony, regnant throughout the story. “I am the master of glass.” The other red being, who never gives his name, recalls his previous life as a musician, “before I had the mind of a balloon.” In that former life, he had been trapped by “an immense translucent lace” emitted by some fifty small rods “all hopping up and down like bobbins.” He was trapped, and “the trunk of my body had been replaced with a mandolin,” which sounded discordantly. “Can you imagine my despair?” And he couldn’t tune himself because the tuning pegs and the neck of the mandolin “were hidden inside my head!” Quel dommage. Pride offers them a role, to replace the exploded sins. “Being a mortal sin can not only give your life a purpose, but is also a career with many attractive benefits.” They accept, “for a number of reasons,” the Mandolin announces. “You will never know them all,” except this one: “If we didn’t accept your offer, we would end up in a lot of trouble,” which he leaves unspecified. Evidently, the trouble won’t come from God, who has by this day and age become “completely oblivious,” replaced by Satan. 

Would Satan, then, be the cause of trouble for the newly-minted Sins, if they hadn’t accepted Pride’s offer? Possibly, but Pride is as rebellious against Satan as was Satan against God. “We could take over from Satan.” But “our authority would be almost nil,” Anger complains, as “Satan’s best ally, Death, will destroy us.” Not to worry, Pride insists, “We’ll just kill Death!” And so the campaign, the expedition, begins.

They march into the forest, where “they saw the at the low-hanging leaves made geometric patterns: spheres, cubes, prisms and each pattern had a luminous core, like the bright eye of an ironic Russian hare.” The forest is a Cubist wonderland. Death seeks to destroy the Sins, but while soft Gluttony worries (“Maybe we should take some precautions”), “ingenious Hifili,” master of glass and of alchemical transformations, demurs: “No point. Because Death has an impoverished imagination.”

“Everyone knows that ‘Death’s empire’ is called the Kingdom of Farfelu,” Pride observes. Farfelu, André Vandegans explains in his erudite, exhaustively researched study, derives from a Greek word for bubble of air; in Rabelais (where Malraux found it) it means a bagatelle, fantasy. As Malraux himself wrote, a few years later, “The talent of a writer of fantasy consists almost always in perceiving that the commonly accepted world is only a dream, not because it is not true, but because it is fixed.” In the Lunes, the life world isn’t fixed and the kingdom of death isn’t final. Both are susceptible of being mocked, since neither finally can impose itself on anything or anyone.

On the way toward the river “that led to the Kingdom of Farfelu”—Lethe?—”they were delighted with themselves, because they saw how much Creation is in need of touching up, and how much more harmonious it could all be through the contributions of Sin.” They seem to have forgotten their troubles. Hifili, “metamorphosed into Greed now,” having replaced him, “watched all the sins brightened,” feeling he “could accept them as true friends,” but when they face the river his “reverie” ends. “An animal musk, intoxicating as ether,” arises from tufts of red fur floating on the river; “he felt that fruits of the flesh were against his lips, that he took a bite, and that the fruits were bursting open, splattering all across this face their sugared blood.” Birds hover above the river, then fall in, their feathers mixing with the animal fur. Nor is the reptilian absent, as the snakelike Bigophones appear, frightening the Sins, who, “without knowing why,” understood “that great and tragic events loomed ahead.” The carnival-cardboard instruments promise to drive the Sins “to the very edge of the Kingdom of Farfelu,” with their “banal poems and stupid songs, too frightful to image,” a prospect the former musician rescues them.

After a night at an inn managed by a poet, the Sins soldier on to the walls of the Kingdom of Farfelu, where the townspeople are celebrating but the queen Death herself, “was suffering a bout of listlessness” and has called for a retinue of physicians. Queen Death “inhabited a chamber with immense mirrored walls, reproducing to infinity the furniture in the room”—an illusion of infinity. As for Her Majesty, she “resembled a giant insect, because of her dinner jacket,” which fluttered in the breeze, giving the impression of wings. Death boasts to the head physician of her new skeleton, made of aluminum: “We must keep up with project,” as in modernity “everything has become mechanical, metallic, dazzling, and yet my beauty remained Gothic. I was slipping into passé.” Death, too, feels the desire to metamorphose, to keep up with ever-changing fashion, which imitates the ever-changing Cubist universe. 

But, sad for Queen Death, the physician turns out to be Pride in disguise, who prepares a liquid to destroy her. Being prideful, Pride orders the other Sins out of the room, “back into hiding,” but the Mandolin ex-musician admonishes, “No melodrama, please. A sin owes it to himself not to act as his title suggests. Even the various loves of Lust were only chimeras, and didn’t last.” Pride glares, “jealous of the musician’s intelligence,” but commands no more, proceeding to poison Death, who is thankful for whomever “helped me out this sorrow.” Sorrow? Yes, because, you see, “the world is only tolerable to us because of our habit of tolerating it,” and “my departure” from it “will be a great practical joke,” inasmuch as I am called Death “but you know perfectly well that I’m only Chance. Slow decay is just one of my disguises.” The farfelu world is really the world of atomism, but not the atomism of Democritus, who supposed atoms to be impenetrable. Now, atoms themselves are dissolvable, not to say dissolute, as scientists know that they can be split into careening sub-particles, driven by chaos-making energy. 

“Death was dead.” The Mandolin-musician muses, asking: “Forgive me, dear friends… When I was a man, I was subject to a kind of mental anemia. So please don’t mind too much if I ask: Why, exactly, did we kill Death?” The Sins “put their heads into their hands and wept,” as they can’t remember.

Readers will remember. The Sins set out to kill Death because they feared that Death would kill them at the behest of Satan, who has replaced an indifferent God and whom the Sins, spurred on by Pride, wanted to overthrow. But Cubist sins partake of the same randomness as the rest of things, and so cannot form any lasting intention, being finally mindless. The readers, considering Malraux’s art, however, will see that he has drawn order out of this disorder. As Vandegans remarks, in a contemporaneous article on Cubism Malraux paid homage “to the effort of art”; “fantasy and the fantastic are the modes of expression of the independence of the artist in relation to the world and of his individuality that are especially effective” against the randomness, the absurdity, of the world. Cubism, Malraux wrote, reveals “the desire of purity and of construction,” the “desire of discipline” seen in the literary style of the writers and painters who are its practitioners. He called this the opposite of “Hamletism,” of indecision, “the creation of an autonomous reality”—of paper moons, moons written on paper, or painted on it, as Picasso does, exhibiting “absolute creation.” [2] Vandegans finds this in Lunes en papier, “an absolute creation” which “opposes to the real a universe of art.” “Dominated by Death,” the “world is the kingdom of malice, of cruelty, of the absurd, of combat always renewed against enemy forces,” a combat so banal that Death herself has wearied of it. With the Cubists, Malraux opposes vitality against Death, order against Chance. 

Malraux’s second and final purely farfelu fiction, Royaume-Farfelu, appeared seen years after Lunes, in 1928. In it, Malraux has abandoned Cubist geometric figures, however, replacing them with human beings, however fantastic. What had intervened in those years was Malraux’s experience of a real alternative reality, one that needed imagination not to create but to understand: the East, Asia, “a civilization,” Vandegans remarks, “radically different from his own” one ruled by European imperialists. While in Cambodia, he made contact with the anti-imperialist members of Jeune Annam. “In Asia, Malraux had submitted to the grip of the real,” confronted no longer by risible modern Western banality, the regime of the bourgeoisie, but with the harder side of the French regime, which jailed him for stealing some ancient bas-reliefs, which he hoped to sell to a Paris collector. In response, he wrote The Temptation of the West and The Conquerors. 

The Temptation of the West is an epistolary novel, the correspondences being two young men, the European “A.D.,” symbol of the West after the turn to Christianity, and “Ling,” whose name means ‘sensibility.’ Ling sees in Europe “an attentively ordered barbarity,” as seen in Christianity, in which “all the intensity of love is concentrated on a body that has been tortured.” One body: the West also prizes individuality. Whether Christian or Napoleonic, the individual aims at conquest. True enough, A.D concedes, but China’s Confucianism, its sensibility, its refinement, nears collapse in the face of the West. While he feels his friend’s anguish, he neither embraces the Chinese sensibility nor adverts to the faith of Christianity. Instead, he faces the crisis of East and West with courage and “voracious lucidity.” With these virtues, he will resist “the most subtle temptation” that faces the young men of the West, which is the passion for ingenious artistic revival—obviously, the several ‘movements,’ announced in ‘manifestos,’ that proliferated just before and just subsequent to Malraux’s own arrival in Paris as a youth: Symbolism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism. A.D. and Malraux ready themselves for new discoveries.

The Conquerors takes the same struggle from words, the letters in an epistolary novel, to actions, the events narrated in a novel on a workers’ rebellion in Canton. These Chinese are no longer men of sensibility but of political revolution, ‘Westernized’ Chinese, organized by Borodine, a Soviet agent. In this novel, one character offers the first enunciation of what eventually came to be called Malraux’s “tragic humanism”: “it is rare, ein Mensch…a man”—a genuine man, conscious of his own humanness and standing against those who would reduce him, and other men, to sub-humans, to the conquered. Such dehumanizing conquest may be seen both in capitalism and in Bolshevism. Malraux called The Conquerors “above all an accusation against the human condition,” the condition of fatedness, of oppression of human beings by human beings and indeed Being itself, a condition to be resisted defense of the humanity that is capable of resisting tyranny. [4]

Published in 1928, the same year The Conquerors appeared, Royaume-Farfelu takes the artistic techniques of Cubism and literally humanizes them. That is, instead of characters who are anthropomorphized geometric figures—anthropomorphism itself being one of the many metamorphoses Cubism valorizes—the characters here are human (with a few devils thrown in). The fiction begins with a warning: “Watch out, curlyhaired devils: ghost images are forming on the silent sea. This hour no longer belongs to you.” Curlyhaired devils aren’t really devils but the men of the West, where “gilded popes and antipopes walk along the empty gutters of Rome; behind them, demons with silken tails—who are former emperors—laugh mutely.” Church and state are ruined, and “a king, who no longer cares for anything but music and the art of torture, wanders the night disconsolate, blowing on upraised silver trumpets, leading his dancing subjects onward.” In the East, “a broken conqueror sleeps in black armor, surrounded by restless monkeys.” The Western project of conquest has exhausted itself. 

The narrator (“a mysterious voice,” Vandegans calls him) is on a voyage, along the coast of Turkey, where “merchants threw themselves upon us as soon as we touched land.” One of them sells phoenixes, but the phoenix he burns to impress the voyagers reconstitutes itself from its ashes and “took advantage of the merchant’s foolhardy joy and escaped.” “As I left all of this behind, I thought: Oh seas of Asia, I yearn for the pale light of the medusas that drift on your warm tides,” for the “barks and vessels of the Orient, whose “scent rests in my heart.” But this Oriental reverie is interrupted by a summons to the prince, the Little Mogul. Neither the conquests of the West, nor the commerce of the Near East, nor dreams of the dreamlike Far East can evade the human reality of obeying the ruler.

He listens as the Little Mogul interrogates a messenger named Idekel, “an old man, sweet-tempered,” whom he had sent on an expedition to Babylon, whose hanging gardens, Idekel reports, have collapsed. The farthest reaches of the Little Mogul’s domains are deserts, now. His daughter, whom Idekel guided to “the fish-eating tsar” of Russia, now “rules by herself” in an empire in which she oversaw a “deathly flotilla” of the gods of the old religions, gods who rotted “while the Christian priests sang.” Like the narrator, the Little Mogul longs for the East, but specifically for the Princess of China, embodiment of the grace and wisdom of her civilization. Does he order his armies to advance toward Persia in order to move closer to China, to her? [5]

The Little Mogul appoints the narrator to the post of Historian to the Prince, who, after having destroyed the Persian army, intends to conquer Persia’s great city, “the undefended Ispahan.” The expeditionary forces of the Little Mogul seized Ispahan and the historian wrote the narrative of the conquest, aided by Idekel, who deems his youth “spent in scholarship” as an apprentice magician to have been worthless. “I journeyed with all the other magicians to the islands of Hell,” where he saw “the damned file along trough snow, like lines of miserable ants, escorted by fluttering demons.” The magicians’ spells scattered the demons, but they returned “to conquer us in the end.” In the aftermath of this disaster, “bit by bit I forgot my conscience; I was indifferent to learning, teaching, everything.” After conquering the city, the soldiers sacked it. “This night,” Idekel says, “was certainly one of the greatest nights in the history of the world, one of those nights when the stunned gods surrender the earth to the savage demons of poetry.” “And didn’t we find every last scrap?” But as for the narrator, “I found nothing.” “A few hours passed: I remained sprawled out on the roof, conquering cities in my daydreams,” while “the demons of the ruins were born, who are faceless and live in our own bodies.” The demon who inhabits the narrator tells him, “You won’t remember Ispahan, because Ispahan belongs to the beasts,” who were even then returning to its ruins. Ispahan’s “crown of desolation will protect it from your cursed comrades and their vile officers.” “Dream of your death, artist.” And each soldier, too, “heard the voice that rose up within him, and was shattered by it.”  The conquerors fled the city.

“It seemed as if mankind had disappeared from the earth, and that plants, silent animals, and stones lived in the perfect liberty that follows upon hopeless abandonment.” The remaining army retreated across the desert, chased by an “immense insect sheet” of scorpions. “Madness suddenly seized the whole multitude of troops and threw them by handfuls like grains of sand out to the vultures of the desert.” 

“I will never know how I reached Trebizond,” one of several smaller successor states to Byzantium, conquered by the Turks. “I arrived there dazed, senseless, guarded by children covered with amulets,” and “the prince took me in.” He now “manage[s] to make a living selling beautiful shells,” some of which “communicate with demons in hell, but nobody knows it.” Having collected two sirens, he intends to sell them to the prince of Trebizond, whose “Christian minister” denies the existence of. “With the money he will give me, maybe I’ll book passage on one of the ships that sail to the Fortune Islands. I’m only sixty years old….” The Fortune Islands, the Isles of the Blessed celebrated by ancient Greek poets, were supposed to be somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, reserved for aristocrats who had chosen to be reincarnated three times.

The Kingdom of Farfelu, instantiated in the Persian city, is both the Kingdom of Death and the Kingdom of Madness, setting limits on the ambition to conquer. The narrator himself survives but is mad, driven mad by the uncontrollable forces within the limbo between West and East. 

Radulescu devotes most of her book to tracing the theme of the farfelu from Malraux’s most celebrated novel, Man’s Fate, and to his last great book, his ‘anti-memoir,’ Mirror of Limbo. In Man’s Fate the farfelu character is Clappique, erstwhile dealer in antiques and art, now an arms dealer, happy to sell his wares to either side in the ongoing civil war between the communists and the nationalist Kuomintang. Clappique, “the incarnation of the ‘farfelu,'” acts as “an anomaly in the midst of all that is normal, natural,” a “skinny Polichinelle,” the marionette, Punch, in the Punch-and-Judy show, who attempts to conceal the force of the strings that jerk him around from others and from himself with alcools and mythomania. But in this novel, “Malraux opposes mythomania, the conscious denial of reality, the grimacing laughter of the clown.” Clappique hangs out in the Black Cat bar; Radulescu remarks that in Christian folk tales the black cat is the agent of the Devil, “who, in his turn, negotiates best with women.” Clappique is a bit of “a prostitute himself,” perpetually “asking for money and perform[ing] services for money”—a capitalist who demonstrates the absurdity of pure capitalism, which would sell arms not only to the forces controlled by the Shanghai business corporations but to the communists who would ruin those capitalists and throw wheeler-dealers like Clappique into ‘re-education’ camps. Radulescu sees that Clappique is not all talk; “his actions make crucial points in the development of the narrative,” and that is the problem. His fantasies turned into action destroy the best man in the novel, Kyo Gisors, the head of the rebellion. Having learned that Kyo will be captured and killed in the next day or two if he doesn’t get out of the city, Clappique goes off to gamble at the casino (a type of fantasy land), instead of warning him. At the gambling table, “he surrenders entirely to hazard,” to Fortuna, to the strings that jerk him around. He himself will later take care to escape, disguised as a sailor. 

Radulescu goes easy on Clappique, calling him “a quite endearing figure,” a Trickster who “floats through the novel as a symbol of aesthetic values, opposed to both the Capitalist and Communist values.” But that is the problem. Clappique refuses the responsibility of humanness, as seen when he looks at himself in the mirror and makes faces, grotesquely. “A world made only of clowns, fluttering Pierrots, and watery creatures can well form the main substance of poetry,” or of prose fantasies like Paper Moons, “but it becomes aesthetically insufficient for a novel.” Yes, but not only aesthetically insufficient: it is morally and politically insufficient, deadly to the bodies of others and to the soul of the fantasist. Clappique’s “betrayal of Kyo” and “his abandonment to the round ball of the gambling table are all deliberate actions through which Clappique takes hold of his own destiny.” This is exactly wrong. He is abandoning himself to man’s fate, not resisting it. In a bit of misplaced feminism, Radulescu observes that “the tragic heroes, the complete men in the novel [emphasis in the text], die the violent and transformative death of fire, the masculine element, which consumes and reduces them to a substance other than their own.” This misses the climactic moment in Man’s Fate, when Kyo, about to be thrown into a furnace by his captors, takes the cyanide capsules he had secreted on his person in the event of such a fate, giving them to his terrified companions; when the men drop the capsules and grope blindly for them, one of his nameless comrades grips Kyo’s hand and says, “Even if we don’t find it….” The gesture of self-sacrificing human fraternity is the real answer to the human condition, a condition of mortality, fatedness. [6] In Man’s Fate, farfelu freedom meets the real freedom of responsibility, leaving its attentive readers with the sense that responsibility is better.

Radulescu is much more reliable in her discussion of the farfelu in Days of Limbo. Here, the farfelu floats in the air, an aspect of the Eternal Feminine, seen in the legendary figure of the Queen of Sheba, for whose lost temple Malraux searched, and in the imagery of flowers and butterflies and fire, and above all the image of the cat, no longer simply the devil of medieval Christendom, instead betokening a femininity “unleashed and ironic, a new kind of sensuality, dynamic and haunting.” The farfelu, like fate, is beyond human control, but it is not ‘fatal,’ destructive of human beings. In Man’s Fate, the women (Kyo’s wife, May, and Valérie, independent-minded mistress of the inhuman capitalist, Ferral) balance the men; so, too, in Mirror of Limbo, where even General Charles de Gaulle’s wife, Yvonne, appears as the courageous partner of her husband, responding to a failed assassination attempt by brushing the shattered car window glass off her clothes and straightening her hat. 

Malraux imagines a butterfly lighting on the nose of the Queen of Sheba. He encounters butterflies once more when he meets Méry, a former French colonial official in Indochina, now living in Singapore, whose hobby is butterfly collecting. They speak of colonialism, Méry wondering why individualistic Europeans forgot their taste for liberty “when the found themselves in the fact of another civilization.” Malraux deepens the question to the question of the memoir itself: “How do we become what we are?” “How does man become the Man that he carries in himself?” His answer is the answer embodied by Kyo’s act in Man’s Fate, an act seen again in Mirror of Limbo when a French Mother Superior interrupted his interrogation by a Nazi officer to bring him food, which Malraux offered to share with the Nazi. Méry takes the point, then raises the political question of mass, rather than individual, sentiments. This brings him to a discussion of butterflies, which he identifies with nature, with which “we begin to converse only when we begin to converse with death.” “In the face of Asia, I feel myself singular; in the face of the butterflies, humanity seems to me unprecedented”; nature is “the life that will continue if all men disappeared.” Malraux cites a Hindu text, in which butterflies descend upon the bones of dead soldiers on a battlefield. “Qu’importe?” Given the indifference of nature, what does human life mean, whether it confronts us in its grim aspect of death or in the beautiful indifference of life? Men ask that question in the face of death, women when they look at the face of a child, the face of new life. The answer Malraux’s book gives remains the answer of the anonymous prisoner: Even if we don’t find it in some metaphysical sense, we have it in one another, in our shared understanding that we are not fate, even if we are fated.

Radulescu cites one of Malraux’s favorite anecdotes, the story Mallarmé told about his cat. One night, Mallarmé listened as the neighborhood cats talked with one another in the ally outside his room. “Whose cat are you?” one asked. “At the moment, I pretend to be the cat of the Mallarmé household.” “Malraux, too, glided gracefully through History as if among pieces of temporary furniture” with an “ironic smile at his own different incarnations”—young literary arriviste in Paris, fascinated by the Cubism that came out of but opposed the Symbolisme of Mallarmé, adventurer in Asia, novelist of tragic humanism and winner of the Prix Goncourt, fighter in the Spanish Civil war, Résistant during the Second World War, writer on art and its metamorphoses, Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s cabinet in the first decade of the Fifth Republic, anti-memorialist. A cat’s tail curls like a question-mark. What does it all mean? Life, he writes at the beginning of the book, “like the gods of vanished religions, appears to me as the libretto for an unknown music.”

Radulescu considers Malraux’s visit to the cave at Lascaux, where some boys looking for adventure found paintings on the wall made by the earliest humans on French soil, men of pre-History. She speaks of the sexual imagery of the cave itself, with its evocation of the return to Mother Earth; decades earlier, upon his return to earth from the near-fatal airplane ride through a desert storm after his attempt to locate Sheba’s tomb, he thought of the lines on the earth as resembling the lines on his mother’s palm and, one might add, that his own lifeline was long. He sees that tourists’ breath has caused the paintings to deteriorate; the paintings can be saved on condition that men stop “coming there as they please”—that is, for light, ‘farfelu‘ reasons. In another irony, in this novel full of war and rumors of war, the conservation work has been left to the conscientious objectors. Here, for this task, they are the responsible ones.

Why does the Minister of Culture minister to culture? Because even near the beginning of human life, the man who took refuge in the earth against the certainty of death and the velleities of life left his mark on the earth, his art not a mere expression of estheticism, of beauty, but of human freedom, distinct from the human condition. The metamorphosis of the gods effected by men, differs from the farfelu metamorphoses of Cubism because the men who effect them take responsibility for them and for themselves, for human beings. What the Cubists did unwittingly, Malraux does deliberately, understanding even an art that bows to atomism as art, beyond the mystery of matter.

 

Notes

1. The most prominent of the political Surrealists was Louis Aragon, later an apologist for Stalinism. Stalin himself might be described as the apogee of political Surrealism, murderer of tens of millions, albeit in the name of a ‘scientific socialism’—in the hands of genocidists, a self-contradictory, irrationalist rationalism.
2. Domnica Radulescu remarks that “the birth process of the Moon Children is the opposite of a real birth: the little Moons are born as a result of their mother’s laughter, without pain, tears or blood. They effortlessly fall off and float through the universe.”
3. Radulescu sees this clearly: “The noun ‘paper’ points to the writing of literature” and of painting. “Malraux’s later view of art as an ‘anti-destin‘ is being prefigured here.” Additionally, and insightfully, Radulescu, writing after ‘second-wave’ feminism took control over much lit-crit terrain, emphasizes the Rabelaisian sexuality of the Lunes —the way in which the beings change sex, as sexual boundaries too loose their “corporeal nature, acquiring instead a playful, yet grotesque, quality” as changelings, as linear, phallic masculinity intermixes with round, fecund femininity in acts of “poetic alchemy.” Although sympathetic to feminism, Radulescu justly vindicates Malraux from charges of misogyny, as “the bizarre universe of this tale offers, in fact, a criticism of misogyny, a mockery of the male’s arrogance, for the protagonists and their actions are constantly projected into comedy, never truly taken seriously by either the author, whose tome is touched throughout by irony, or the Sins, since each of their undertakings stats with pomp but ends in a failure of some sort,” Pride leading the way to buffoonish failure in his very success. 
4. For a discussion of The Temptation of the West and The Conquerors, see Will Morrisey: Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984.
5. Radulescu makes much of the Princess of China, describing her as “the embodiment of female beauty and grace,” a person “entirely identified with Nature, in all of its majesty and succulence,” which “appears clearly dissociated from the fabricated world of man.” She is not Queen Death in the Lunes, and the Little Mogul would possess, not kill her. “She is a combination of death and nature.” One might add that for Malraux nature is ‘farfelu’ or self-contradictory, giving birth and dealing death, seductive and dangerous, a siren, a point Radulescu herself makes, in her conclusion to her chapter. 
6. See Morrisey, op. cit., Chapter 3.