Responses and Interventions

Abstract

Responses and Interventions (1946–98) Maurice Blanchot r Days of Hope by André Malraux. 'L'Espoir d'André Malraux', in L'Espagne libre, collection 'Actualité' (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1946), 106–11. Blanchot's contribution to the first and only issue of a review founded by Georges Bataille, which was to be edited jointly by him, Blanchot and Jean Prévost. It isperhaps opportune to wonder why Malraux's novel about Spain is called 'Days of Hope'.1 The novel, we may recall, ends with the victorious battle of Guadalajara. Manifestly however, hope here is not for the victory, sooner or later, of the revolutionary forces over Franco. If it is not unconcerned by that victory, if it calls for it even, and not as an impossible and profligate dream but as an event already assured by history, the book is in no way restricted to the outcome it foresees. The Republicans' failure did not make the title of Malraux's novel seem ridiculous. Man's Estate,2 which is in many ways a gloomier book and which concludes with the tragic collapse of the Chinese revolution, is also a book on which hope has left its mark. It is through disaster and the terrible closing scenes of torture and death, and against a devastating background of desolation and misery, that hope is born. And though this hope bears the mark of the fate which crushes it, it is reborn and rises above it, and in the end it follows its own course, it is unchangeable, always threatened and always triumphant. We may assume that, in Malraux's work, the theme of hope—like the other themes no doubt—almost always has a double meaning, one of which is political. There is no way in which revolution can be defeated. It suffers serious setbacks, and the mistakes of its leaders sometimes lead to catastrophes made all the harsher in that those who pay the price of them are the masses whom revolution is meant to [End Page 5] liberate. But whatever the ups and downs of the movement, it cannot be brought to a halt. As it is linked to a whole, to the entire volume of history considered as a real totality, it never really comes to rest. It is in that sense first of all that revolution is permanent. And even leaving aside such purely theoretical considerations, and confining our attention to the simple, basic ideas of internationalism, which are necessarily familiar to Malraux's characters, it is clear why the defeat of the Shanghai uprising cannot be definitive. What does May do when, having lost the man she was close to, she sees the hope for liberation which was also her main grounds for hope disappear with him? She leaves for Moscow. 'Even now', she says, 'even though we are defeated politically and our hospitals are closed, underground forces are regrouping in every province'. And the men who are dead awaken in others the idea of living the way they lived: they help them become conscious of the meaning of their revolt. As The Conquerors3 puts it: 'the coolies are in the process of discovering that they exist, simply that they exist'. For Malraux, however, the political foundations of this hope are in no way messianic. If the reality of revolution does not depend exclusively on particular circumstances that will not recur again, or particular acts of will; if it is stronger than all errors, and more durable than what fortune brings, it is clear that its strength and its weakness are linked to factors which are affected by organised intervention, and in particular the tactics adopted by those who lead it. In that respect too, this hope is inherently political: good politics confirms it, bad politics renders it illusory. The fact that revolution is never defeated is a certainty which allows more or less the same sort of hope as that other saying: humanity cannot die. That is not enough to justify an optimistic outlook on the future, especially when the desired goal will not tolerate being put off indefinitely until tomorrow. One of the subjects of Days of Hope is undoubtedly the political organisation...