Sunday, October 15, 2006
Book Review - La Condition Humaine, Andre Malraux
[warning: spoilers] La Condition Humaine is the story of the 1926-7 Chinese Revolution. Well before the rise of Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese Communist Party was a mass workers' party with its own press and armed wing. It led a Shanghai uprising of 100,000s of workers; however, it was crushed by its Stalin-ordered alliance with the Nationalists. La Condition Humaine details the inexorable rise and bloody battles of the Chinese working class. It's exciting, inspiring and leaves you with a chest-cavity-filling sense of what the working class can accomplish.
So French... - Andre Malraux
Given how history turned out, I wasn’t expecting a happy ending. But I also wasn't expecting characters going on about the meaning of existence - they're busy fighting a revolution, after all.
Yet for Malraux, actual events are a backdrop to his character’s suffering. And they suffer so much. The book opens with a detailed recounting of anarchist Ch’en stabbing a government official. Then it's a grenade attack on police headquarters, with wounded officers being blown up inside. When Chiang Kai Shek's troops crush the uprising, we're treated to chapters of people getting mowed down by bullets and torn apart by grenades. Communist leader Kyo is shoved in a prison of "men like worms", where he awaits death to the sound of a locomotive engine, whistling as it's fed wounded Communists.
But even this is nothing compared to their tortured interpersonal relations. Kyo and his partner May are modern revolutionaries, negotiating new sexual relations between them, common enough for 1920s leftists. But there are pages of argument when May has sex with another man and then confronts Kyo with it. He can't understand how his cherished ideals give way to insecurity:
I love this cover design, but the 'The Human Condition' would have been non-sexist, more accurate and conveyed more.
Despite the revolution, the book is really about the treatises inside the heads of La Condition Humaine's revolutionaries. Listen to this exchange between Gisors, Kyo's father, and Clappique, a nervous petit-bourgeois:
The problem is that Gisors comes out with these bon mots constantly - things that would take any normal person hours of practice. No one talks like that; only few people write like that. So either we live a much less profound life than these people (I know I do) - or this is Malraux is working out his philosophical dilemmas on his characters.
Communist workers in Shanghai, 1927
But I was willing to suspend my disbelief, because I enjoyed the dense psychological portraits, each character a stand-in for a type: Kyo the revolutionary - admittedly the calmest of the bunch, but still wrestling with his conscious; Ch'en the anarchist, the romantic whose only wish is to die rebelling; Clappique the petit-bourgeois, all surface with nothing inside; Ferral the capitalist, who can only gain pleasure by possessing something, and through that possession find himself.
Moreover, their personalities were a snapshot of their class. Clappique is the petit-bourgeois who's always under attack from capital and labour. Thus he clings to one or the other, embodied in Ferral or Kyo. Ferral uses people, particularly women, how capital uses labour power, without regards for its human content.
Malraux is sharply critical of the CCP’s stagism and alliances with the Nationalists, and even has Kyo go to confront the CCP leadership in Wuhan. There's a Stalinist twist at the end: May sees the first 5 year plan in the USSR as Kyo's legacy. There’s lots of imagery of sunlight cutting through the trees, workers forming a dense mass in the streets below, and even a eulogy to work, how the workers must truly feel part of their factories in order to transform them. This lends itself nicely to Soviet 'happy worker' ideology, and the later, anti-working class politics of Mao, who was one of only 1,500 Communists to survive the massacres.
If only he'd stuck to table tennis
But even these Stakhanovite touches could be read in a critical light. May goes to Moscow out of her grief at Kyo's death. She's determined, but not happy; it's like she’s saying, "The USSR is the best on offer." Malraux was there, he saw the betrayal of the Stalinists, he goes into detail about the CCP ordering its workers' brigades to hand over their weapons. Perhaps bitter, dogged optimism was the best he could muster.
In the last scene, Gisors has given up grief of his now-dead son Kyo, gotten more deeply addicted to opium, and is waiting for death. Through an opium-smoke haze, he tells May that he's beyond caring for life. She remains unconvinced, and angry. He kisses her like Kyo used to kiss her, passing on his love for Kyo to her, asking her to carry the torch. She gets the last word: "'I hardly ever weep any more, now,' she said with a bitter pride." This is the message of La Condition Humaine: to show our destiny is to struggle, to risk death, but not to acquiesce.
So French... - Andre Malraux
Given how history turned out, I wasn’t expecting a happy ending. But I also wasn't expecting characters going on about the meaning of existence - they're busy fighting a revolution, after all.
Yet for Malraux, actual events are a backdrop to his character’s suffering. And they suffer so much. The book opens with a detailed recounting of anarchist Ch’en stabbing a government official. Then it's a grenade attack on police headquarters, with wounded officers being blown up inside. When Chiang Kai Shek's troops crush the uprising, we're treated to chapters of people getting mowed down by bullets and torn apart by grenades. Communist leader Kyo is shoved in a prison of "men like worms", where he awaits death to the sound of a locomotive engine, whistling as it's fed wounded Communists.
But even this is nothing compared to their tortured interpersonal relations. Kyo and his partner May are modern revolutionaries, negotiating new sexual relations between them, common enough for 1920s leftists. But there are pages of argument when May has sex with another man and then confronts Kyo with it. He can't understand how his cherished ideals give way to insecurity:
The essential, what agonized him, was that he was suddenly separated from her, not by hatred - although there was hatred in him - not by jealousy (or was jealousy precisely this?) but by a feeling that had no name as destructive as time or death: he could not find her again... now this body was being invested with the poignant mystery of a familiar person suddenly transformed - the mystery one feels before a mute, blind, or mad being.The essential tragedy of life is to be separate from who one loves. Human frailty, physical or emotional, is a constant theme.
I love this cover design, but the 'The Human Condition' would have been non-sexist, more accurate and conveyed more.
Despite the revolution, the book is really about the treatises inside the heads of La Condition Humaine's revolutionaries. Listen to this exchange between Gisors, Kyo's father, and Clappique, a nervous petit-bourgeois:
[Clappique]:"I - what do you think of me?"Clappique is silly and self-centered because he needs to act, instead of fighting. The line between imitating life, and actually living it, defines who you are. Reading La Condition Humaine means pausing every few pages to digest another kernel.
Gisors was more inclined to take him by the shoulders and lead him to Konig's than to talk to him; but beneath what he took to be his intoxication he discerned such a turmoil that he did not dare to refuse to enter into the game.
"There are those who need to write, those who need to dream, those who need to talk. ... It's all the same thing. The theater is not serious, but the bull-fight is; novels aren't serious, but mythomania is." (277)
The problem is that Gisors comes out with these bon mots constantly - things that would take any normal person hours of practice. No one talks like that; only few people write like that. So either we live a much less profound life than these people (I know I do) - or this is Malraux is working out his philosophical dilemmas on his characters.
Communist workers in Shanghai, 1927
But I was willing to suspend my disbelief, because I enjoyed the dense psychological portraits, each character a stand-in for a type: Kyo the revolutionary - admittedly the calmest of the bunch, but still wrestling with his conscious; Ch'en the anarchist, the romantic whose only wish is to die rebelling; Clappique the petit-bourgeois, all surface with nothing inside; Ferral the capitalist, who can only gain pleasure by possessing something, and through that possession find himself.
Moreover, their personalities were a snapshot of their class. Clappique is the petit-bourgeois who's always under attack from capital and labour. Thus he clings to one or the other, embodied in Ferral or Kyo. Ferral uses people, particularly women, how capital uses labour power, without regards for its human content.
Malraux is sharply critical of the CCP’s stagism and alliances with the Nationalists, and even has Kyo go to confront the CCP leadership in Wuhan. There's a Stalinist twist at the end: May sees the first 5 year plan in the USSR as Kyo's legacy. There’s lots of imagery of sunlight cutting through the trees, workers forming a dense mass in the streets below, and even a eulogy to work, how the workers must truly feel part of their factories in order to transform them. This lends itself nicely to Soviet 'happy worker' ideology, and the later, anti-working class politics of Mao, who was one of only 1,500 Communists to survive the massacres.
If only he'd stuck to table tennis
But even these Stakhanovite touches could be read in a critical light. May goes to Moscow out of her grief at Kyo's death. She's determined, but not happy; it's like she’s saying, "The USSR is the best on offer." Malraux was there, he saw the betrayal of the Stalinists, he goes into detail about the CCP ordering its workers' brigades to hand over their weapons. Perhaps bitter, dogged optimism was the best he could muster.
In the last scene, Gisors has given up grief of his now-dead son Kyo, gotten more deeply addicted to opium, and is waiting for death. Through an opium-smoke haze, he tells May that he's beyond caring for life. She remains unconvinced, and angry. He kisses her like Kyo used to kiss her, passing on his love for Kyo to her, asking her to carry the torch. She gets the last word: "'I hardly ever weep any more, now,' she said with a bitter pride." This is the message of La Condition Humaine: to show our destiny is to struggle, to risk death, but not to acquiesce.
