Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  This is, of course, a profoundly romantic story due to its poetic nature, its extreme antisocial individualism and its tragic ending, and one could also consider the mention of Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet in the first pages of the novel as an auspicious, premonitory indication of what will happen later. What distinguishes Nadja from those extreme stories of impossible love and couples torn apart by an implacable Fate that the romantic sensibility favoured, is not the plot but rather Breton’s elegant, coruscating prose, with its labyrinthine pace and its unusual metaphors, and still more the originality of his structure, the daring way in which he organises his chronology and the different planes of reality from which the story is narrated.

  Of course it is important to point out that that the main character in the story – the hero, in romantic terminology – is not the eponymous Nadja but the person who evokes her and tells her story, that overwhelming presence who is never away from the reader’s eyes or mind for one second: the narrator. Visible or invisible, a witness or a protagonist who narrates from inside the narrative, or an all-powerful God the Father at whose commands the action develops, the narrator is always the most important character in any fiction and is always an invention, a fiction, even in those mendacious cases like Nadja, where the author of the novel declares that he is hiding under the skin of the narrator. This is never possible. Between the author and narrator of a novel there is always the unbridgeable gap that separates objective reality from fantasy, words from deeds and the mortal being of flesh and blood from the verbal simulacrum.

  Whether they know it or not, whether they do it deliberately or through simple intuition, authors of novels always invent the narrator, even though they might add their own name or include episodes of their biography. The narrator invented by Breton to tell the story of Nadja, whom he passed off as himself, has clear romantic affiliations in his monumental self-worship, that narcissism that drives him all the time that he is narrating to display himself in the centre of the action, to refract himself through the action, and the action through himself, so that the story of Nadja is, in truth, the story of Nadja filtered through the narrator, reflected in the distorting mirror of his exquisite personality. The narrator of Nadja, like the narrator of Les Misérables or The Three Musketeers, reveals himself as he reveals the story. It is not, therefore, surprising that from these first pages, he confesses his scant interest in Flaubert who, we remember, was opposed to narrative subjectivity and demanded that the novel had the semblance of impersonality, that is to say that it pretended to be a self-sufficient story (in reality told by invisible narrators).

  Nadja is the complete opposite: an almost invisible story told by an overpowering subjectivity, which is shamelessly visible. In the story many things happen, of course, but what is really important is not what can be summarised concretely: the actions of the heroine, the rare coincidences that bring the couple together or separate them, their cryptic conversations, of which we are only given snippets, or the references to places, books, paintings, writers or painters that the astute narrator uses to frame the action. What is important is an other reality, different to the reality that offers a setting for what takes place in the novel, which begins to emerge in a subtle manner, somewhat awry, in certain allusions in the conversations, in Nadja’s drawings that are full of symbols and allegories that are difficult to interpret, and in the sudden premonitions or intuitions of the narrator who, in this way, manages to make us share his certainty that real life, genuine reality is hidden beneath the reality that we live consciously, hidden from us by routine, stupidity, conformity and everything that he undervalues or despises – rationality, social order, public institutions – and that only certain free people, who are outside what Rubén Darío called the ‘thick, municipal common herd’ can have access to. The fascination that Nadja exerts over him, and that he transmits to us, is due precisely to the fact that she appears to be a visitor in our world, someone who comes from (and has not entirely left) another reality, unknown and invisible, that can only be glimpsed in premonitions by people of exceptional sensibility like the narrator, and can only be described through association or metaphor, approximating to notions like the Marvellous and the Fantastic.

  This invisible reality, this life of pure poetry, without prose, where is it to be found? What is it like? Does it exist outside the mind or is it pure fantasy? In the prosaic reality of us common mortals (the phrase is from Montaigne), which Surrealism desperately wanted to transform through the magic wand of poetry, Freud had discovered the world of the unconscious and had described the subtle ways in which the phantoms sheltering there influenced behaviour, caused or resolved conflicts and meddled in people’s lives. The discovery of this other dimension of human life influenced, as is well known, in a decisive (but not pious) way the theories and practices of Surrealism, and there is no doubt that without this precedent Nadja (which contains an ambiguous sentence that criticises but also shows respect for psychoanalysis) could not have been written, at least in the way that it was written. But a Freudian reading would give us a truncated, caricaturist version of the novel. For it is not the traumas that brought the heroine to the edge of madness – which a psychiatric reading of Nadja would focus on – that are of interest in her story, but rather the elated justification that the narrator makes for this borderline space, a domain that he considers a superior form of life, an existential realm where human life is more full and more free.

  It is, of course, a fiction. A beautiful and seductive fiction that exists only – but this only must be understood as a universe of riches to beguile our sensitivity and fantasy – within the bewitching life of dreams and illusions that are the reality of fiction, that lie that we fashion and in which we believe in order better to endure our real lives.

  Borges often said, ‘I am eaten up by literature’. There is nothing pejorative in this remark when Borges makes it. Because what he most loved in life – and perhaps one could say that the only thing that he loved and knew deeply – was literature. But Breton would have considered it an insult if someone had said of Nadja what is now very obvious to us, that it is ‘a book eaten up by literature’. Literature for Breton meant artifice, pose, empty gestures of content, frivolous vanity, conformity to the established order. But what is certain is that while literature can be all those things, it can also be, in outstanding cases like his, daring, novelty, rebellion, an exploration of the most remote recesses of the spirit and an enrichment of real life through fantasy and writing.

  This is the operation that Nadja carries out on the real world that it purports to narrate: it transforms it into another world, by bathing it in beautiful poetry. The Paris of its pages is not the boisterous and carefree European city, the capital of artistic avant-gardes, of literary quarrels and inter-war political violence. In the book, thanks to its bewitching rhetoric and its theatrical trappings, its narrative strategy of silences and temporal leaps, of veiled allusions, puzzles, false trails and sudden poetic flourishes, its striking incidents – the terrible spectacle of Les Détraquées, the wonderful story about the amnesiac man – and its constant references to books and paintings that suffuse the story with its own special radiance, Paris has become a fantastic city, where the marvellous is an almost tangible reality and where everything seems to comply in docile fashion to those secret magic laws that only the diviners detect and the poets intuit, and which the narrator superimposes like a cartographer over the real city.

  At the end of the story the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, the statue of Etienne Dolet, the coal-yards, the Port de Saint-Denis, the Boulevard theatres, the flea market, the bookshops, the cafés, the shops and the parks have become transformed into landmarks and monuments of a precious, buried world that is eminently subjective, and has mysterious correlations and assonances with people’s lives, a perfect frame within which there can emerge a character so detached from everyday life, so removed from what is called common sense, like Nadja, the woman who enchants the narrator and
who orders him at one point in the story: ‘Tu écriras un roman sur moi’ (‘You will write a novel about me’).

  The spell was so strong that Breton obeyed and did not limit himself to describing the Nadja that existed, the fleeting Nadja of flesh and blood. In order to tell the story persuasively, he used his fantasy more than his memory, he invented more than he recorded and, like all good novelists, he took every liberty with time, space and words, writing, ‘sans ordre préétabli, et selon le caprice de l’heure qui laisse surnager ce qui surnage’ (‘without any pre-established order, following the whim of the moment which allows things to float on the surface as they will’).22

  London, November 1996

  La Condition humaine

  The Hero, the Buffoon and History

  When in November 1996 the French government decided to move the remains of André Malraux to the Pantheon, there was a very harsh critical reaction against his work in the United States and Europe, in contrast to the many events organised in his honour by President Jacques Chirac and his supporters. A critical revision that, in some cases, amounted to a literary lynching. See, for example, the ferocious article in the New York Times – that barometer of political correctness in the Anglo-Saxon world – by a critic as respectable as Simon Leys. If we were to believe him and other critics, then Malraux was an overrated writer, a mediocre novelist and a wordy and boastful essayist with a declamatory style, whose delirious historical and philosophical declarations in his essays were mere verbal fireworks, the conjuring tricks of a charlatan.

  I do not agree with this unjust and prejudiced view of Malraux’s work. It is true, he did have a certain propensity to excessive wordiness – a congenital vice of the French literary tradition – and at times, in his essays on art, he could strain after rhetorical effect and fall into tricky obscurity (like many of his colleagues). But there are charlatans and charlatans. Malraux was one to the highest possible degree of rhetorical splendour, brimming over with such intelligence and culture that in his case the vice of wordiness often became a virtue. Even when the tumultuous prose that he wrote said nothing, as is the case in some pages of Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence), there was so much beauty in that tangled emptiness of words that it was enchanting. But if as a critic he was sometimes rhetorical, as a novelist he was a model of efficiency and precision. Among his novels is one of the most admirable works of the twentieth century, La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate, 1933).

  As soon as I had read it, charging through it in one night, and then got to know something about the author through a book by Pierre de Boisdeffre, I knew that his was the life that I would have liked to have led. I continued to think this in the sixties in France, when as a journalist I covered the actions, polemics and speeches of the Minister of Culture of the Fifth Republic. I feel the same every time I read his autobiographical accounts, or the biographies that, following the work of Jean Lacouture, have appeared in recent years with new facts about his life, that was as abundant and dramatic as those of the great adventurers of his novels.

  I am also a literary fetishist, and I really like to find out everything there is to know about the writers I admire: what they did and did not do, what friends and enemies attributed to them and what they themselves invented for posterity. I am, therefore, overwhelmed by the extraordinary number of public revelations, betrayals, accusations and scandals that are now adding to the already very rich mythology surrounding André Malraux. For here was a man that was not only a great writer, but someone who managed, in his seventy-five years (1901–76), to be present, often in a starring role, at the great events of his century – the Chinese revolution, the anti-colonial struggles in Asia, the antifascist movement in Europe, the war in Spain, the resistance against the Nazis, decolonisation and the reform of France under De Gaulle – and to leave a distinct mark on his time.

  He was a Communist travelling companion and a fervent nationalist; a publisher of clandestine pornography; a speculator on the Stock Exchange, where he became rich and later bankrupt in a few months (squandering all his wife’s money); a raider of the statues of the temple of Banteai-Srei, in Cambodia, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison (his precocious literary fame gained him a reprieve); an anti-colonialist conspirator in Saigon; a driving force behind avant-garde literary magazines and a promoter of German Expressionism, Cubism and all the artistic and poetic experiments of the twenties and thirties; one of the first critics and theoreticians of cinema; a participant in and witness to the revolutionary strikes in Canton in 1925; an organiser and member of an expedition (on a toy motorbike) to Arabia in search of the treasure of the Queen of Saba; a committed intellectual and a towering figure in all the congresses and organisations of European antifascist artists and writers; the organiser of the Spain Squadron (that would later be called the André Malraux Squadron) for the defence of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War; a hero of the French resistance and colonel of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade; a political supporter and minister in all the governments of General De Gaulle who, from the time of their first meeting in August 1945, inspired an almost religious devotion in him.

  This life is as intense and diverse as it is contradictory, and can be interpreted in many conflicting ways. What there is no doubt about is that his life offers that very rare alliance of thought and action, and at the highest level, because while he participated with such brio in the great events and disasters of his age, he was a man endowed with an exceptional lucidity and creative drive that allowed him to keep an intelligent distance from lived experience and transform it into critical reflection and vigorous fictions. A handful of writers who were his contemporaries were, like Malraux, completely involved in living history: Orwell, Koestler, T. E. Lawrence. These three writers wrote admirable essays on the tragic reality that they were living; but none of them captured it in fiction with the talent of Malraux. All his novels are excellent, although L’Espoir (Days of Hope) is too long and Les Conquérants (The Conquerors), La Voie royale (The Royal Way) and Le Temps du mépris (An Age of Oppression) are too short. Man’s Fate is a masterpiece, worthy to be quoted alongside the work of Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Thomas Mann or Kafka, as one of the most dazzling creations of our time. I say this with the certainty of one who has read it at least a half a dozen times, feeling, each time, the agonised shudder of the terrorist Chen before he plunges his knife into his sleeping victim, and moved to tears by Katow’s magnificent gesture, when he gives his cyanide pill to two young Chinese, condemned, like him, by the torturers of Kuomintang, to be burned alive. Everything in this novel is perfect: the epic story, spiced with romantic interludes; the contrast between personal adventure and ideological debates; the opposing psychologies and cultures of the characters and the foolish actions of Baron Clappique that give a touch of excess and absurdity – or, we might say, unpredictability and freedom – to a life that otherwise could have seemed excessively logical; but above all, the effectiveness of the syncopated, pared-down prose, which forces readers to use their imagination at all times to fill the spaces that are scarcely outlined in the dialogues and the descriptions.

  Man’s Fate is based on a real revolution that took place in 1927 in Shanghai, led by the Chinese Communist Party and its allies, the Kuomintang, against the Men of War, as the military autocrats who governed deeply divided China were called, a China in which the Western powers had managed to establish colonial enclaves, by force or corruption. An envoy of Mao, Chou-En-Lai, on whom the character of Kyo is partly based, led this revolution. But, unlike Kyo, Chou-En-Lai was not killed when, after defeating the military government, the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-Chek turned against their Communist allies and, as the novel describes, savagely repressed them; he managed to escape and rejoin Mao, accompanying him on the Long March and remaining his deputy for the rest of his life.

  Malraux was not in Shanghai during the time of the events that he narrates (or rather, invents); but he was in Canton during the insurrectionary strikes of 1925,
and was a friend and collaborator (it has never been established to what degree), of Borodin, the envoy sent by the Comintern (in other words, by Stalin) to advise the Communist movement in China. This doubtless helped him to convey that sense of a ‘lived’ experience in the novel when he memorably describes the attacks and the street fighting. From an ideological point of view, Man’s Fate is unambiguously pro-Communist. It is not Stalinist, however, but rather Trotskyist, since the story explicitly condemns the orders from Moscow, imposed on the Chinese Communists by the Comintern bureaucrats, to hand over their arms to Chiang Kai-Chek instead of hiding them and defending themselves when their Kuomintang allies turn against them. Let us not forget that these episodes take place in China, while in the Soviet Union the great debate between Stalinists and Trotskyists about permanent revolution or Communism in one country was intensifying (even though the extermination of Trotskyists had already begun).

  But an ideological or merely political reading would miss the main point: that the world which the novel creates in such detail owes more to the imagination and the convulsive force of the tale than to the historical episodes that it uses as its raw material.