New Light on an Old Friend: Perken's Strange Family Tree

Abstract

As is widely known, most of Andre Malraux's writings are closely linked to events in his personal life, and his novels in particular contain a number of thinly-veiled autobiographical elements. The most notable among these are to be found in the first half ofLa Voie royale, an almost factual relation of the author's 1923 incursion into the Cambodian jungle in search of some ancient Khmer ruins.! Claude Vannec, the hero of that portion of LVR, is obviously closely modeled after Malraux himself. However, the second part of the story--a journey into the territory of the ferocious Mo1 or jungle savages of the unconquered hinterlands--has no evident links with Malraux I s real experiences in Indochina, and the model for the major protagonist of that adventure, Claude's friend Perken, has remained largely a mystery to literary historians. Recently it has become possible to shed a bit of light on the origin and genesis of that character, thanks to the discovery of the first manuscript draft of the novel. The evolution of this literary creation, in turn, illuminates an interesting change that the author made in the orientation of his novel during its gestation period. First of all, what are the basic elements of the background and early life of Perken as we know them from the text published in 1930, only four years after Malraux's return from Indochina?2 Most of the pertinent information is given in one of the early scenes of the book, when an unnamed Armenian gem dealer tells Vannec what he knows about a mysterious stranger who has just boarded the Indochina-bound vessel at Djibouti. Briefly, we learn that the man's name is Perken, that he is of German-Danish origin, and that as a youth of twenty-three he had tried to make his fortune among the savage tribes of the Indochinese jungle by trading costume jewelry for the real but clumsily worked gems and gold ornaments of the natives. We then learn of the subsequent missions que le Siam lui avait confiees aupres des tribus insoumises, de son organisation du pays shan [au nord-ouest] et des marches laotiennes [au nord-est]--where each of three fingers of his left hand had been disfigured by sillon profond , en spirale, comme un tire-bouchon (LP, pp. 9, 13). This mutilation was the result of a trial undergone at the hands of the savages. But Perken subsequently tells Vannec that he was ultimately successful in this mission and that he had become lie, de fa90n ou d'autre, a presque tous les chefs des tribus libres, jusqu'au