Editing André Malraux (section)

===Asian novels===
On his return to France, Malraux published ''[[The Temptation of the West]]'' (1926). The work was in the form of an exchange of letters between a Westerner and an Asian, comparing aspects of the two cultures. This was followed by his first novel ''The Conquerors'' (1928), and then by ''The Royal Way'' (1930) which reflected some of his Cambodian experiences.<ref>Cate, p. 159</ref> The American literary critic Dennis Roak described ''Les Conquérants'' as influenced by ''The [[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]'' as it was narrated in the present tense "...with its staccato snatches of dialogue and the images of sound and sight, light and darkness, which create a compellingly haunting atmosphere."<ref name="Roak pages 218-224"/> ''The Conquerors'' was set in the summer of 1925 against the backdrop of the general strike called by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang in Hong Kong and Canton, the novel concerns political intrigue amongst the "anti-imperialist" camp.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 45">Harris, Geoffrey ''André Malraux: A Reassessment'', London: Macmillan 1995 page 45.</ref> The novel is narrated by an unnamed Frenchman who travels from Saigon to Hong Kong to Canton to meet an old friend named Garine who is a professional revolutionary working with [[Mikhail Borodin]], who in real life was the Comintern's principal agent in China.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 45"/> The novel alternates between depictions of Chinese nationalist militancy and British imperial anxieties.<ref name=":172">{{Cite book |last=Crean |first=Jeffrey |title=The Fear of Chinese Power: an International History |date=2024 |publisher=[[Bloomsbury Academic]] |isbn=978-1-350-23394-2 |edition= |series=New Approaches to International History series |location=London, UK |pages=50}}</ref> The Kuomintang are depicted rather unflatteringly as conservative Chinese nationalists uninterested in social reform, another faction is led by Hong, a Chinese assassin committed to revolutionary violence for the sake of violence, and only the Communists are portrayed relatively favorably.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 46">Harris, Geoffrey ''André Malraux: A Reassessment'', London: Macmillan 1995 page 46.</ref> Much of the dramatic tension between the novel concerns a three-way struggle between the hero, Garine and Borodin who is only interested in using the revolution in China to achieve Soviet foreign policy goals.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 46"/> The fact that the European characters are considerably better drawn than the Asian characters reflected Malraux's understanding of China at the time as more of an exotic place where Europeans played out their own dramas rather than a place to be understood in its own right. Initially, Malraux's writings on Asia reflected the influence of [[Orientalism]] presenting the Far East as strange, exotic, decadent, mysterious, sensuous and violent, but Malraux's picture of China grew somewhat more humanized and understanding as Malraux disregarded his Orientalist and Eurocentric viewpoint in favor of one that presented the Chinese as fellow human beings.<ref>Xu, Anne Lijing ''The Sublime Writer and the Lure of Action: Malraux, Brecht, and Lu Xun on China and Beyond'', New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007 pages 11 & 13.</ref>

The second of Malraux's Asian novels was the semi-autobiographical [[The Royal Way|''La Voie Royale'']] which relates the adventures of a Frenchman Claude Vannec who together with his Danish friend Perken head down the royal road of the title into the jungle of [[Cambodia]] with the intention of stealing bas-relief sculptures from the ruins of Hindu temples.<ref>Harris, Geoffrey ''André Malraux: A Reassessment'', London: Macmillan 1995 page 69.</ref> After many perilous adventures, Vannec and Perken are captured by hostile tribesmen and find an old friend of Perken's, Grabot, who had already been captured for some time.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 70">Harris, Geoffrey ''André Malraux: A Reassessment'', London: Macmillan 1995 page 70.</ref> Grabot, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion had been reduced to nothing as his captors blinded him and left him tied to a stake starving, a stark picture of human degradation.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 70"/> The three Europeans escape, but Perken is wounded and dies of an infection.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 70"/> Through ostensibly an adventure novel, ''La Voie Royale'' is in fact a philosophical novel concerned with existential questions about the meaning of life.<ref name="Harris, Geoffrey page 70"/> The book was a failure at the time as the publishers marketed it as a stirring adventure story set in far-off, exotic, Cambodia which confused many readers who, instead, found a novel pondering deep philosophical questions.<ref>Harris, Geoffrey ''André Malraux: A Reassessment'', London: Macmillan 1995 page 71.</ref>

In his Asian novels Malraux used Asia as a stick to beat Europe with as he argued that after World War I the ideal of progress of a Europe getting better and better for the general advancement of humanity was dead.<ref name="Hérubel pages 556-575">Hérubel, Jean-Pierre "André Malraux and the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs: A Bibliographic Essay" pages 556-575 from ''Libraries & Culture'', Vol. 35, No. 4 Fall 2000 page 561</ref> As such, Malraux now argued that European civilization was faced with a ''Nietzschean'' void, a twilight world, without God or progress, in which the old values had proven worthless and a sense of spirituality that had once existed was gone.<ref name="Hérubel pages 556-575"/> An agnostic, but an intensely spiritual man, Malraux maintained that what was needed was an "aesthetic spirituality" in which love of 'Art' and 'Civilization' would allow one to appreciate ''le sacré'' in life, a sensibility that was both tragic and awe-inspiring as one surveyed all of the cultural treasures of the world, a mystical sense of humanity's place in a universe that was as astonishingly beautiful as it was mysterious.<ref name="Hérubel pages 556-575"/> Malraux argued that as death is inevitable and in a world devoid of meaning, which thus was "absurd", only art could offer meaning in an "absurd" world.<ref name="Sypher pages 146-165">Sypher, Wylie "Aesthetic of Doom: Malraux" pages 146-165 from ''Salmagundi'', No. 68/69, Fall 1985-Winter 1986 page 148.</ref> Malraux argued that art transcended time as art allowed one to connect with the past, and the very act of appreciating art was itself an act of art as the love of art was part of a continuation of endless artistic metamorphosis that constantly created something new.<ref name="Sypher pages 146-165"/> Malraux argued that as different types of art went in and out of style, the revival of a style was a metamorphosis as art could never be appreciated in exactly the same way as it was in the past.<ref name="Sypher pages 146-165"/> As art was timeless, it conquered time and death as artworks lived on after the death of the artist.<ref name="Sypher pages 146-165"/> The American literary critic Jean-Pierre Hérubel wrote that Malraux never entirely worked out a coherent philosophy as his mystical ''Weltanschauung'' (world view) was based more upon emotion than logic.<ref name="Hérubel pages 556-575"/> In Malraux's viewpoint, of all the professions, the artist was the most important as artists were the explorers and voyagers of the human spirit, as artistic creation was the highest form of human achievement for only art could illustrate humanity's relationship with the universe. As Malraux wrote, "there is something far greater than history and it is the persistence of genius".<ref name="Hérubel pages 556-575"/> Hérubel argued that it is fruitless to attempt to criticize Malraux for his lack of methodological consistency as Malraux cultivated a poetical sensibility, a certain lyrical style, that appealed more to the heart than to the brain.<ref name="ReferenceA">Hérubel, Jean-Pierre "André Malraux and the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs: A Bibliographic Essay" pages 556-575 from ''Libraries & Culture'', Vol. 35, No. 4 Fall 2000 page 562</ref> Malraux was a proud Frenchman, but he also saw himself as a citizen of the world, a man who loved the cultural achievements of all of the civilizations across the globe.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> At the same time, Malraux criticized those intellectuals who wanted to retreat into the ivory tower, instead arguing that it was the duty of intellectuals to participate and fight (both metaphorically and literally) in the great political causes of the day, that the only truly great causes were the ones that one was willing to die for.<ref name="Langlois 1976 pages 683-687"/>

In 1933 Malraux published ''[[Man's Fate]]'' (''La Condition Humaine''), a novel about the 1927 [[Shanghai massacre of 1927|failed Communist rebellion in Shanghai]]. Despite Malraux's attempts to present his Chinese characters as more three dimensional and developed than he did in ''Les Conquérants'', his biographer Oliver Todd wrote he could not "quite break clear of a conventional idea of China with coolies, bamboo shoots, opium smokers, destitutes, and prostitutes", which were the standard French stereotypes of China at the time.<ref>Todd, Oliver ''Malraux: A Life'', New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005 page 110.</ref> The work was awarded the 1933 [[Prix Goncourt]].<ref>Cate, pp. 170–181</ref> After the breakdown of his marriage with Clara, Malraux lived with journalist and novelist [[Josette Clotis]], starting in 1933. Malraux and Josette had two sons: Pierre-Gauthier (1940–1961) and Vincent (1943–1961). During 1944, while Malraux was fighting in [[Alsace]], Josette died, aged 34, when she slipped while boarding a train. His two sons died together in 1961 in an automobile accident. The car they were driving had been given them by Vincent's girlfriend, the wealthy Clara Saint.<ref>{{cite book|author=Christopher Petkanas|title=Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xh83DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT223|date=17 April 2018|publisher=St. Martin's Publishing Group|isbn=978-1-250-16142-0|pages=223–}}</ref>