Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"

 

 

As a young man many held out high hopes that Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. Man’s Fate is a prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work. Although later events would tarnish his reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois (and in this case also feudal) world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society.

 

The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Second Chinese revolution at a point where the alliance between Chiang Kai Sheik’s Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down and Chiang was ready to butcher the Communists in order to take undisputed control of the Chinese state. Like Russia before it, everyone had known that a second Chinese Revolution was coming. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a bourgeois revolution in the classic Western sense or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1920’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. Neither event occurred at that time. This tension, and especially the tension of the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to Chiang unconditionally, is what drives the action.

 

The novel is also a well-written snapshot of what ‘high policy’ looks like as it is implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Chinese Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. It is also an early case study in the relationship between those who carry out, even if in small ways, imperialist policy in their separate and exclusive enclaves and those ‘natives’ who do the ‘coolie’ work. That tension exists today, as can readily be seen in places like Iraq, so one should pay particular attention to that dynamic. Read on.