PERKEN

AN INHUMAN TRANSCENDENCE:

PERKEN, IN MALRAUX'S LA VOIE ROYALE

A number of commentators have described Perken, a central character in André Malraux's second novel, La Voie Royale, as a figure of heroic stature for whom the experience of adventure constitutes a bid to affirm the significance of the human presence in the face of a meaningless universe. The critic David Bevan sees in Perken the "adventurer-hero" seeking to "affront the 'universelle désagrégation'" in the "struggle of man and fate".1 For W.M. Frohock, Perken is the "true tragic figure, the hero whose defeat comes in a manner which affirms his humanity".2 Elizabeth Fallaize regards Perken as the adventurer for whom action is an "'antidestin', a form of defence against death and an expression of man's determination to reject 'l'ordre du monde'". Fallaize interprets this as a struggle for human dignity and a refusal to yield to temptations of savagery and degradation, citing in particular the key scene in Part Three of the novel in which Perken confronts hostile Moï tribesmen. She writes:

In La Voie Royale, the theme of man's struggle against savagery, that is to say against his own most bestial and degrading instincts, becomes integrated with the general theme of man's struggle against destiny. The confrontation with the Moïs and the rescue of Grabot ... become a struggle for man's dignity and freedom and his potential to climb out of savagery and 'déchéance'.3 The present article proposes an alternative interpretation of Perken. It does not dissent from the widely held view that Malraux's fundamental preoccupation during the years in which La Voie Royale was written was to develop a convincing response to the sense of disorientation and meaninglessness which he discerned at the core of twentieth century Western culture, and which he had analysed in his two early essays, La Tentation de l'Occident and D'Une Jeunesse Européene. It accepts also that La Voie Royale played an important part in the formulation of that response, as did Les Conquérants two years earlier and La Condition Humaine in 1933. These broad propositions, however, do little by themselves to explain the significance of the individual characters within these novels. The following analysis will question both the suggestion that Perken represents a form of heroism in the sense implied in the quotations above and, more particularly, that he illustrates a struggle for human dignity and a rejection of anti-human impulses. The proposition to be advanced here is in fact in direct opposition to this. The claim will be that Perken is an embodiment not of heroism, but of a profound alienation and madness, and that, far from illustrating a struggle for human dignity, he represents an impulse which is fundamentally destructive in its implications and which rests on a profound contempt for human life in all its manifestations.

* * *

It is useful to begin with a brief glance at certain key themes in the two essays Malraux wrote prior to the publication of his first novels. A central claim in La Tentation de l'Occident is that Western culture has consistently drawn its vitality from a passion for lucidity - a fundamental urge to render the world intelligible and find a coherent meaning in things and events. The West, Malraux argued, had initially achieved this through its concept of God, then through an exploration of the idea of Man, and finally through a passionate quest for the individual self.4 This last alternative being on the point of exhaustion, a process of cultural disintegration has now set in, reality has become "anarchique" and, in the words of the European commentator in La Tentation de l'Occident, "l'idée de l'impossibilité de saisir une réalité quelconque domine l'Europe".5

If Western culture is to experience a renewal, Malraux argues, an essential requirement will be to satisfy its fundamental demand for lucidity. There must be a new "image intelligible [de l'univers]", a new "mythe cohérent".6 The key question now is: what form could this new myth take? What new value could rescue the West from the debilitating sense of intellectual anarchy which afflicted it?

La Tentation de l'Occident provided no clear answers to this question, but in D'Une Jeunesse Européene which appeared in the following year, Malraux began, tentatively, to point the way forward. Here, in some brief but highly significant remarks (which do not seem to have received the critical attention they merit7) he sketches for the first time the essential features of the new vision of reality which he believes to be emerging.

At the heart of European culture, Malraux writes, "une nouvelle puissance s'éveille". The precise nature of this new spiritual force cannot yet be defined, but

Il semble que notre civilisation tende à se créer une métaphysique d'où tout point fixe soit exclu, du même ordre que sa conception de la matière. This "metaphysic with no fixed point of reference" will lead to the development of un domaine de l'esprit et de la sensibilité tout en mouvements, en changements, en rapports nouveaux et naissances nouvelles, auprès d'une vie à quoi tout ce qui ne peut se traduire en actes ou en chiffres est devenu étranger...8 Brief and abstract though they are, these remarks provide a vital clue to the subsequent development of Malraux's thought. The emerging "image intelligible de l'univers", he predicts, will not take the form of a fixed ideal. There will be nothing to offer a sheet-anchor of permanency in a world of flux and change. Paradoxically, the new reality for the West will derive its force from a thoroughgoing embrace of change itself. The test of the real (and the unreal) will be that quintessentially ephemeral and contingent dimension of human experience, practical action. Meaning and intelligibility will be expressed solely in terms of the transitory perspectives of the world of action - a world in which "tout ce qui ne peut se traduire en actes ou en chiffres est devenu étranger". Transience will become the governing principle of intellectual and emotional life, giving rise to "un domaine de l'esprit et de la sensibilité tout en mouvements, en changements, en rapports nouveaux et naissances nouvelles".

These abstract prescriptions were soon to be translated into something much more vivid and concrete. Garine, the central character of Les Conquérants, published one year later, has been aptly described by one critic as the "man of action unleashed".9 Accurately illustrating the state of mind diagnosed in La Tentation de l'Occident and D'Une Jeunesse Européene, Garine has lost all faith in the grand ideals of Western culture - including the ideologies of social justice and "scientific socialism" espoused by his fellow-revolutionaries - but he insists, nonetheless, on lucidity. The world, and what he does within it, must have a clear meaning and purpose. This requirement is satisfied through a commitment to action - not simply as a form of experience but as a source and determinant of meaning. Garine is the revolutionary leader for whom the revolution is, first and last, a practical collective struggle, a world of tangible problems and possibilities, a joint combat against a specific enemy, at a particular point in time. The world of the noble ideal is a discredited world of shadows, but a thoroughgoing commitment to action (particularly to a major enterprise such as a revolutionary movement) reveals an immediate and concrete meaning in things and events which cannot be denied.

An exploration of this conception of action is the central subject of Malraux's early novels - Les Conquérants, La Voie Royale and La Condition Humaine. In effect, he is defining a new value - a principle that gives shape and meaning to an otherwise chaotic and unintelligible world. Malraux's account is not, however, a one-sided apologia limited solely to the positive elements of the value in question. He recognises also that action has certain inescapable limitations and that while it can certainly make sense of a senseless world, it can do so only under certain conditions and with certain qualifications. A key feature of the three novels in question is an exploration of these limiting conditions and of the negative consequences which result if they are breached. Thus, while central figures such as Garine in Les Conquérants, and Kyo Gisors in La Condition Humaine, illustrate the strengths and potentialities of action as a source of meaning, other key characters provide the vehicle through which the limitations and vulnerabilities of this intensely pragmatic view of life can also be revealed. These characters transgress the conditions that action imposes and, in so doing, radically distort the meaning it provides. Action in their hands ceases to be a test of the real and becomes instead a path to an unreal world - an insane, uninhabitable universe in which human limitations are no longer permitted to apply. Perken in La Voie Royale is one manifestation of this inhuman frame of mind.10 A representative of the "demonic" strain in Malraux's early novels, Perken rejects one of action's key conditions and ushers in a world based solely on malevolence and a will to destroy. He illustrates Malraux's new value "in reverse" (so to speak) by exposing its potential to crush and negate. Ultimately, as the following analysis will seek to show, he stands for a world in which the very notion of human dignity is anathema.

* * *

This essay offers a major re-interpretation of one of the two central characters in Malraux's second novel, La Voie Royale. In doing so, it explores further implications of the value common to Malraux's first three novels - action.

The essay appeared in Journal of European Studies, XXV (1995) 109-122.

Action, it has been said, speaks of the transient, practical fact. Unlike an idea, which is able to transcend the particularities of time and place, action baulks at the least suggestion of transcendence and stakes its more modest claim to truth in the contingent "here-and-now". Nothing, in other words, can be of universal or enduring significance. This in no sense invalidates action's capacity to serve as a source of meaning; it simply establishes a limitation: once action ceases, the meaning it provides is extinguished. In the words of the critic Nicola Chiaromonte, "In Malraux, when defeat comes, darkness is complete."11 This limitation, and its consequences, are of central significance for the character of Perken.

Perken resembles Garine and Kyo (and Claude in La Voie Royale itself) in rejecting any form of meaning which is not founded on complete pragmatism. There are, however, some important dissimilarities between Perken and these three characters which it is instructive to note. Garine, Kyo and Claude are all relatively young men embarking for the first time on enterprises of major significance in their lives - revolutionary movements for the first two and an expedition in Claude's case. Perken however is much older and, although he has one more important project in mind (to be described below), he is depicted as someone who has already experienced many years of struggle, who has tasted defeat on more than one occasion, and who now regards his life, and the opportunities it has afforded, as very largely spent.

Defeat has taken its toll. Garine, Kyo and Claude, acknowledging the limitations of the value on which they rely, embark on action with a mixture of hope and apprehension - determined to succeed, but prepared if necessary to accept the possibility of failure. Perken, however, has begun to regard the prospect of defeat as something he can no longer accept. Reflecting on the events of his past, he tells Claude early in the novel of the intolerable experience of "things coming to an end" and the unbearable sense of emptiness which defeat entails: "La fin de quelque chose, surtout... je me sens vidé de mon espoir, avec une force qui monte en moi, contre moi, - comme la faim".12

The crucial point to bear in mind here is the inability of action to transcend the "here-and-now". Action readily confers meaning and purpose on the decisions of Garine as he gathers information on enemy movements and issues orders for the defence of Canton, or on the tactics that Kyo Gisors formulates as he assesses the strength of the revolutionary forces and prepares for the uprising in Shanghai. But an ageing man looking to his past to find significance in his life will find no solace in a source of meaning so firmly rooted in the present moment. Events may once have meant something within their own particular set of circumstances at a particular point in time, but precisely because that is why they meant something, they mean nothing now. Seen in this perspective, as Perken confides to Claude, a whole lifetime - everything one has struggled for - reduces to an empty, pointless chronology which, like a prison sentence, simultaneously defines an existence and deprives it of all significance. The closest one can come to a sense of "identity" is an agonising awareness of possibilities one has missed:

Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est que le destin limité, irréfutable, qui tombe sur vous comme un règlement sur un prisonnier: la certitude que vous serez cela et pas autre chose, que vous aurez été cela et pas autre chose, que ce que vous n'avez pas eu, vous ne l'aurez jamais. Et derrière soi, tous ses espoirs, ses espoirs qu'on a dans la peau comme on n'aura jamais aucun être vivant...13 Perken's reaction to this oppressive sense of insignificance - a reaction that grows in intensity and ferocity as the novel proceeds - is to revolt. Other men may be content to tolerate existence on these humiliating terms, but he will not do so. "Ces termites vivent dans leur termitière, soumis à leur termitière," he tells Claude. "Je ne veux pas être soumis".14 Revolt, however, is not just a matter of rhetoric; it has drastic implications. It requires nothing less than an all-out attack on the transient nature of the world of action. Action - the only source of meaning Perken will accept - must now be compelled to yield more than particular, "passing" truths. This can only be so, however, if it ceases to be vulnerable to the depredations of time and circumstance - if the possibility of the "ending" of things ("La fin de quelque chose...") is completely excluded. Action, therefore, must now assume a radically different character: henceforth it must be action that can never know defeat. Come what may, life can never be permitted to gain the upper hand. Mere determination to succeed is no longer enough; the requirement now is nothing less than complete invincibility.

This analysis throws light on the violent project that Perken reveals to Claude early in the novel and which forms part of his motivation for joining Claude's expedition. During his previous exploits in the Indo-Chinese hinterland, Perken had established his authority over a number of the region's native tribes. The European presence in Indo-China is relentlessly spreading however, and his personal fiefdom, fifteen years in the making, will almost certainly yield to its influence before long. For Perken, another "end" is imminent. This major achievement will soon be nothing more than another forgotten, inconsequential stage in the "prison sentence" of his life.

The remedy he is planning is brutal and uncompromising. If the expedition with Claude can recover valuable bas reliefs from the ruined temples of the ancient Khmer "Royal Way", the proceeds will buy machine-guns. With machine-guns in the hands of his native tribes, Perken can turn his fiefdom into an armed fortress which could only be taken at the cost of a great many lives. As he explains to Claude,

Dans la région où je réside, je suis libre. Si je suis armé j'y tiendrai jusqu'à ma mort... Avec quelques mitrailleuses, la région est imprenable pour un État à moins de sacrifier un très grand nombre d'hommes.15 Perken's plan, in other words, is to construct an impenetrable barrier - with people and guns - that will effectively insulate his territory from the outside world. His goal, as he says, is to be "impregnable", even if this results in enormous loss of life. The possibility of defeat, at least while he is alive, will therefore be excluded. A ruthless use of force holds out the promise of a form of action which, this time, will be immune from the poison of transience.

The deeper implications of this craving for invulnerability begin to emerge in a dramatic fashion during the well-known scene in Part Three in which Perken deliberately courts torture and almost certain death in a confrontation with hostile Moï tribesmen. Critics have often interpreted this scene as a demonstration of exemplary courage and will-power - one commentator, for example, describing it as a "triumph of the will",16 and Elizabeth Fallaize, as we have seen, regarding it a high point in Perken's "struggle for man's dignity and freedom and his potential to climb out of savagery and 'déchéance'". A close examination of the scene suggests, however, that what is at stake is something more closely resembling an impossible bid for invincibility which begins to draw Perken into a world of inhumanity and madness.

The circumstances, and the effects they produce on Claude and Perken, are important to note. Having entered a Moï village, the two men come upon the adventurer Grabot in one of the huts, blinded and yoked to a grinding wheel like a beast of burden. Releasing him and returning to their own hut, both men suddenly realise that the Moï have surrounded them and are preparing to attack. Perken and Claude are in no doubt that they will be quickly overwhelmed once the assault begins and that, if captured, they will either share Grabot's fate, or face torture and execution. The one remaining option is to wait until sunset (when they expect the attack) and attempt to flee under cover of darkness. They realise however that their chances of reaching the surrounding jungle alive, and then surviving the jungle itself, are almost non-existent. The situation, in short, is disastrous. The predicament spells the end of the expedition and the hopes built on it - the end coming, in all probability, in the form of slavery or an agonising death.

Claude decides on the escape attempt as a final, desperate option, hoping at least to avoid being captured alive. The decision implies an acceptance of the possibility of defeat, but a determination to fight to the last. Perken seems initially to agree - until a sudden transformation begins to take place within him. The narrative at this point is reaching a climax: the Moïs are completing their placement of men and weapons for the attack, and the four men in the hut - Perken, Claude, Grabot and the native boy, Xa - are waiting like animals at bay:

... rien ne distrayait les Moïs de leur but. L'extrême tension de l'atmosphère, l'hostilité de ce qui baignait dans l'air, comme si tous ces gestes tendus vers eux se fussent ramassés en une seule âme, tout convergait des êtres à l'affût vers ces hommes acculés... At this moment, Claude suddenly sees Perken fall into a trance-like state: ... et quelque chose, dans la case même, s'accorda tout à coup à cette âme acharnée: Perken. Il était fixé comme par un instantané, le regard perdu, la bouche ouverte, tous les traits affaissés. Plus rien d'humain dans la case: effondré dans son coin Xa attendait, plié en bête; Grabot - qu'il continuât à se taire! - autour ces geules de fauve, cet instinct de sadiques ... et Perken pétrifié.17 Without warning, Perken rises to his feet, and ignoring Claude's caution, leaves the shelter of the hut and starts to walks towards the menacing ranks of Moï warriors. He is walking straight into the arms of his tormentors, and is now entirely at their mercy.

The explanation for this sudden, apparently suicidal gesture lies, paradoxically, in a crazed bid for invincibility. For Perken, the trap into which he and Claude have fallen represents almost certain defeat - the extinction of his plan to rule an impregnable kingdom of native tribesmen, and the prospect of enslavement or death at the hands of the Moï. As we have seen, however, Perken has resolved to be proof against defeat and this resolution must stand even in the face of such impossible odds. His solution to this dilemma - a solution that sends him lurching out of the hut towards the Moï spears and crossbows - obeys a logic that is both simple and demented: The threat he faces is the threat of torture and execution. This threat must, therefore, despite all appearances, be trivial and worthy of nothing but scorn. This sudden, overwhelming revelation can be shown to be true and he, Perken, will demonstrate it (he is, after all, a man of action, not an idle dreamer) by actions that prove it to be so: he will simply expose himself completely to the full force of the so-called threat. This insane logic has one further implication: The prospect of an agonising death at the hands of the Moï not only ceases to be a threat but now takes on the bizarre guise of an opportunity - a privileged occasion granted to Perken to reveal the contemptible insignificance of the prospect of torture:

Une idée idiote le secouait: les peines de l'enfer choisies pour l'orgueil - les membres rompus et retournés, la tête retombée sur le dos comme un sac, le pieu du corps à jamais planté en terre, - et le désir forcené que tout cela existât pour qu'un homme, enfin, pût crâcher à la face de la torture...18 Perken has begun to inhabit a world which, in a quite literal sense, is no longer human - a world in which human frailties and human limitations no longer exist. Struggling against "une folie fascinante, une sorte d'illumination", he stifles the voices of everyday common sense: "'Aucun homme ne tient contre la torture' traversa son esprit, mais sans force, comme une phrase..."19 As he walks towards the Moï, even his physical movements seem to be controlled by a non-human force: Jamais il n'avait marché ainsi, sans plier les genoux. La force qui le soulevait connaissait mal ses os: sans la volonté qui le jetait vers la torture avec cette puissance d'animal fasciné, il eût cru dériver.20 The suggestion by some critics that this suicidal episode is somehow part of a defiant struggle in defence of human dignity seems very difficult to sustain. From the moment Perken leaves the protection of the hut, an emphasis on inhumanity and incipient madness is a central feature of the narrative, as the passages cited here indicate. The scene vividly dramatises the consequences of the grossly distorted view of human life which has now begun to take firm hold of Perken, and which continues to tighten its grip on him as the novel proceeds. No longer willing to accept that a world understood in pragmatic terms is also one in which meaning is irredeemably ephemeral, he attempts to overcome this limitation by denying that the moment of action's "passing" - the moment of defeat - can ever occur. The crucial feature of the encounter with the Moï is that the threat of defeat has, however, suddenly become a menacing reality. Perken's refusal even to admit this possibility exposes the unreal, inhuman nature of the universe he has chosen to inhabit. He is now compelled to think and act as if torture and violent death are not threats at all, but are mere trifles worthy of nothing but contempt. He is forced, by the logic of his own position, to believe that ordinary human limitations (such as fear of torture and mutilation) simply do not exist. Far from illustrating a defence of human dignity, the scene turns crucially on the fact that Perken succumbs to urgings within himself which are brutal and inhuman.

The implications of this state of mind become even clearer in the final stages of the novel. Once again, the exact circumstances are important to note. After the encounter with the Moï, Claude and Perken begin the journey to Bangkok with the bas reliefs they have taken from the ruined temples. Perken has been wounded in the knee by a poisoned spike and his condition progressively worsens. A doctor in one of the native villages examines the wound and tells him that without expert medical attention - which will be impossible to obtain - he has only a short time to live. Soon afterwards, he and Claude learn that a column of Siamese government militia is advancing through the region intent on eliminating all resistance to government authority and making way for the construction of a railway line. Perken immediately decides to return to his own territories which are now under direct threat. Accompanied by Claude, he desperately tries to keep ahead of the advancing column, and to hamper its progress by encouraging native tribes along the way to mount a counter-attack. His efforts are in vain: the tribal chief to whom he appeals is unwilling to help, and his own worsening condition (he can no longer walk and lies immobilised in one of the bullock carts) is a clear sign that he will die before he reaches his destination.

All Perken's options are now closed off and all his hopes extinguished. His plan to establish an impregnable kingdom where he can "hold out until his death" is now an empty dream. Instead, he now knows he will die a slow, agonising death while everything he has laboured for disappears without trace. Action of any kind - let alone effective action - is entirely out of the question. ("Maintenant, je ne pourrais même plus tirer...", he mutters as he lies in the bullock cart struggling to train his field-glasses on the advancing column.21) He is fully aware of what is about to occur and realises he is powerless to prevent it. In objective terms, he is utterly defeated.

Perken's reaction to this situation, and his final thoughts as he lies dying, are the central focus of the closing passages of the novel. The pivotal issue, once again, is his refusal, despite the circumstances, to tolerate the possibility of defeat. The situation now, however, is different in one important respect from his encounter with the Moï. This time, there is nothing he can do physically to negate the threat of defeat: there is no longer any practical option remaining. There is however one last alternative: there is the "mental act" - there is something he can think. Deprived of all physical response to the forces arrayed against him, he finds a final weapon in the powers of thought.

Once again his logic is brutally simple: The threat that confronts him is certain death. It is death, therefore, that must be overcome. But death can only be a threat if it can take away something of value. The necessary conclusion then, self-evidently, is that life itself, and all human activity, must be utterly valueless. Life - this thing that death threatens - must obviously be nothing more than a contemptible absurdity.

This final "revelation" begins to take hold of Perken as he lies immobilised, listening to the cries of natives fleeing before the advancing militia:

... les cris emplissaient la forêt jusqu'à l'horizon, comblant de leur profusion les espaces libres entre les fumées. Prisonnier, encore enfermé dans le monde des hommes comme dans un souterrain, avec ces menaces, ces feux, cette absurdité semblable aux animaux des caves. A côté de lui, Claude qui allait vivre, qui croyait à la vie comme d'autres croient que les bourreaux qui vous torturent sont des hommes: haïssable.22 Life in all its manifestations, he has now concluded, is devoid of all possible value. Simply to exist amongst human beings is to be held prisoner in an alien, absurd world. To go on living and believing in such a world, as Claude will, is to have a detestable, perverted scale of values.

This revelation also sheds a new light on death. Just as the prospect of torture at the hands of the Moï was suddenly transformed into a privileged opportunity, death now begins to lose all semblance of a threat and becomes instead a means of deliverance. Death offers release from the hateful human world; it represents liberation from the "subterranean" realm which holds him prisoner. Moreover, this is not ordinary mortality - the common fate that all men share - for there is nothing about human life, not even death that ends it, that is not self-evidently wretched and worthless. Perken's death can bear no comparison with the death of other men. In fact, he reasons, other men cannot really have died at all: they must simply have faded imperceptibly from view. Death belongs to him exclusively, as a privileged means of salvation. As he lies dying, he concludes that

... aucun homme n'était mort, jamais: ils avaient passé comme les nuages qui tout à l'heure se résorbaient dans le ciel, comme la forêt, comme les temples; lui seul allait mourir, être arraché.23 This bizarre certitude crystallises in his last thoughts, the stress on the key words driving the point home: Il n'y a pas... de mort... Il y a seulement... moi ... moi... qui vais mourir...24 These final moments are highly revealing. Extreme circumstances having compelled Perken to fall back on the powers of thought alone to sustain his resolve to be proof against defeat, the implications of that resolve necessarily become quite explicit. The conclusion is clear: Perken embodies a principle that denies all possible value to human life and treats human activity in all its forms as senseless and despicable. Human life - including his companion, Claude, who remains with him to the last - is fit only for contempt. Death, not life, is the one true value, since death offers deliverance. The supreme achievement - Perken's apotheosis - is to die an utterly solitary death (since only he can ever know death) convulsed by a paroxysm of hatred for all humanity.25

* * *

As indicated earlier, Perken is part of what one might term the "demonic" element in Malraux's early novels. Characters such as Garine in Les Conquérants and Kyo Gisors in La Condition Humaine illustrate the strength and potency that can be drawn from action: they are genuinely heroic figures who have chosen action as their source of meaning and who accept (in Kyo's case, at the cost of his life) that action imposes certain inescapable conditions if the world it reveals is to remain recognisably human. These novels, however, are also inhabited by characters who yield to the temptation to transgress the limitations that action imposes. They resemble Garine and Kyo in insisting that the test of action is the only believable measure of the real, but, unlike Garine and Kyo, they violate the limits which that measure requires. This is the genesis of figures such as the terrorist Tchen, and the "Baron" de Clappique, in La Condition Humaine, who illustrate this transgression in different forms - one by embracing a form of suicidal fanaticism, the other by turning human life into an endless, pathetic farce.26 Perken illustrates another of action's temptations. Tormented by the fragility and impermanence of the meaning that action bestows, he seeks to arrest the fleeting moment by sheer brute force. Since defeat signals the extinction of meaning, he will simply eliminate defeat from the catalogue of possible human experiences. If the meaning action provides cannot transcend the present moment, he will manufacture transcendence, and a world impervious to change, by his own capacity to endure. The consequence, however, is not an earthly eternity but an inhuman universe of hate.

This conclusion differs fundamentally from those interpretations that have tended to paint Perken in heroic colours or see him as somehow engaged in a defiant struggle in defence of human dignity. There is little doubt that the confrontation with the Moï warriors suggests "a supreme effort of the will"27 as more than one critic has argued, but the crucial question is: what is that will seeking to achieve? The analysis given here suggests that, far from striving to defend anything identifiably human, Perken is in fact embarked on a frenzied attempt to obliterate all consciousness of a world in which human possibilities and human limitations are a part. His death in the closing scenes of the novel reveals this explicitly. He dies reviling human life in all its forms and regarding the human world as nothing more than a dungeon in which he lies prisoner. These are the thoughts of a character intent on negating the value of human life, not affirming it. Claude reflects early in the novel that what Perken seems to want is "self-annihilation".28 By the end of the narrative it is apparent that Perken's ambitions are in fact larger. What he really requires is the complete annihilation of the world and all it contains. His deepest yearnings would be satisfied only by universal destruction.29

NOTES

1. D. Bevan, André Malraux, Towards the Expression of Transcendence, (Kingston and Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986), 52.

2. W.M. Frohock, André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination, (Stanford University Press, 1952), 55.

3. E. Fallaize, Malraux, "La Voie Royale", (London, Grant & Cutler, 1982), 41,42,47.

4. André Malraux, La Tentation de l'Occident, (Paris, Grasset, 1951), 94,174,175. The essay was first published in 1926. Cf also: "Toute la passion du XIX^e siècle, attachée à l'homme, s'épanouit dans l'affirmation véhémente du Moi". (André Malraux, "André Malraux et l'orient", in Les nouvelles littéraires, 31 July, 1926.)

5. La Tentation de l'Occident, 209.

6. La Tentation de l'Occident, 155.

7. Generally, both essays have been viewed as concentrating on the negative aspects of the Western malaise. It has not been noted that D'Une Jeunesse Européene also includes some early indications of where Malraux believes the remedy might lie.

8. André Malraux, "D'Une Jeunesse Européene", in Ecrits, Les Cahiers Verts, vol.70, (Paris, Grasset, 1927), 147,152,153.

9. N. Chiaromonte, "Malraux and the Demons of Action", in Malraux, A Collection of Critical Essays, R.W.B. Lewis, (ed.), (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964), 102.

10. Tchen and Clappique in La Condition Humaine are two other examples. See also note 26 below.

11. "Malraux and the Demons of Action", 106.

12. André Malraux, La Voie Royale, in Oeuvres Complètes, (Paris, Gallimard, 1989), Vol.1, 413. Emphasis in original. All quotations from La Voie Royale are from this edition. Cf. also the following exchange earlier in the same conversation:

Perken: - Et peu vous importe le lieu où l'amitié peut vous entrainer?...
Claude: - Craindrai-je l'amour à cause de la vérole? Je ne dis pas: "Peu m'importe", je dis: "Je l'accepte."...
Perken: - Je vous souhaite de mourir jeune, Claude, comme j'ai souhaité peu de choses au monde... (Ibid., 410.)

13. Ibid., 411.

14. Ibid., 448.

15. Ibid., 412,413. Perken also interposes: "Et il y a les femmes". The present article does not attempt to include an account of Perken's eroticism. This aspect of his character can however be analysed in terms consistent with those discussed here. The essence of Perken's erotic ambitions is a will to negate the existence of the other person, as the episode at the conclusion of Part Three illustrates. This is an immediate, physical expression of the same fundamental will to negate the existence of others which is highlighted at the end of the present article.

16. D. Boak, André Malraux, (Oxford, Clarendon, 1968), 32.

17. La Voie Royale, 465,466.

18. Ibid., 466.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 467.

21. Ibid., 502.

22. Ibid., 502,503.

23. Ibid., 504.

24. Ibid., 506. Elizabeth Fallaize comments that these words are "rather lacking in intellectual credibility". (E. Fallaize, op.cit., 54.) Whether or not this is so, the words are certainly intellectually consistent as far as Perken's character is concerned. As the present analysis has shown, the statement gives explicit expression to fundamental aspects of Perken's character which are present throughout the novel. (Fallaize also notes (Ibid., 20) that, as Malraux pointed out in his Antimémoires, Perken's dying words echo those attributed to a real adventurer "famous in Indo-China", possibly Mayrena.)

25. Critical interpretations of Perken's death have varied considerably, though, generally speaking, the tendency has been to see the event in a less sanguine light than the confrontation with the Moï. Claude Tannery comments that "in the end [Perken] had given no meaning to his life, nor had he found meaning in his death, nor had he changed the world or accomplished his great plan". (C. Tannery, Malraux, The Absolute Agnostic, University of Chicago Press, 1991, 50.) Elizabeth Fallaize stresses the role of the will, writing that "[Perken] resolves ... to maintain his will and intellectual control to the last, in an attempt to convert this externally imposed destiny into a personal and unique act of consciousness". However, Fallaize questions whether the attempt is convincing. (E. Fallaize, op.cit., 54,55.) Christiane Moatti sees a note of final triumph, commenting that, "A bout de ressources, le héros doit regarder en face son désespoir et son néant. Mais comme beaucoup de romans, si l'on en croit René Girard, ce regard qui est la mort de l'orgueil est un regard sauveur où le héros triomphe de la défaite". (C. Moatti, Les Personnages d'André Malraux, Le Prédicateur et Ses Masques, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1987, 282.)

26. I have provided an analysis of Tchen along these lines in "The Psychology of a Terrorist: Tchen in La Condition Humaine", in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, May 1982, 48-66; and a brief account of Clappique, together with an analysis of Kyo, in "André Malraux: The Commitment to Action in La Condition Humaine", in French Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1981, 61-73. I have also discussed aspects of Kyo's and Garine's reliance on action in "Finding the Battle: History and the Individual in Les Conquérants and La Condition Humaine", in Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol. XXVII, Number 2, 1990, 173-181.

27. E. Fallaize, op.cit., 47.

28. La Voie Royale, 414.

29. This interpretation is consistent with Malraux's own description of Perken in his Antimémoires as a "holocaust". Recalling the creation of Perken, Malraux wrote: "... je pense au jeune homme de 1928 qui se rendait à Batoum, et arpentait le pont d'un cargo dans le détroit de Messine, l'un des plus beaux paysages du monde, en inventant dans un rayonnant matin italien ce personnage, ou plutôt cet holocauste". (Antimémoires, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, 473.)