Dismembered
Peter Ackroyd
Lazarus Andre Malraux (Macdonald and Jane's £6.25) Although only one third of it actually tells a story, the whole of Lazarus is fiction; the man who speaks, for the most part Malraux himself, is a character and not an author; his monologue is composed entirely of external images and events which light up on cue, like signs, and spell out a message. In this vast aspiration towards meaning, nothing can be hidden or inaccessible; the conventional boundaries between fiction, fantasy and autobiography are all melted down and brought within the warm circle of Malraux's preoccupations. Nothing deflects him from his ravenous need to explicate, to, generalise and to send out public bulletins for all the world as if he himself were the 'moving strip of illuminated news headlines' which announces the Second World War to the citizens of Paris.
The story of Lazarus goes further back, to the First War, and it takes as its theme the first use of poison gas in modern warfare. In 1916, on the Russian front, the Germans release ethyl dichloride sulphate on the Russian troops — and the soldiers' irises turn black, their lungs hiss and gurgle, and eventually the skin begins to melt. This is the death of air, which Malraux sees as some kind of diabolic force and which — since the narrative slides restlessly between past and present — he then sees repeated in his own life when he suffers 'another attack' and falls victim to some 'terrifying possession'. But the second part of the story abandons death for a vision of 'fraternity'; the Ger man soldiery are cowed and horrified bY what is happening to their ostensible enemy, and they carry the wounded and the dying back to their own field hospitals. Major Berger, the hero of the narrative and someone whom Malraux created out of fragments, himself carries a Russian soldier out of the devastation. But the soldier iS dead, and Berger himself is poisoned by the sulphate. Who will save him? And, indeed, who will save Malraux himself — who has carried the dad weight of history for su long and seems, from his own account in this book, to be very close to death? But that is another story, which had its own natural ending. The war-story here i5 handled rather peremptorily, at least for au event through which 'Satan reappears in the world', because what interests Malraux iS only what Malraux thinks about it all. The narrative of the gas attack is designed sinr ply to introduce certain favourite themes, those of death and fraternity to which MO raux returns repeatedly throughout Lazarus as though he were trying to under
stand a secret that stubbornly refuses to reveal itself. And as he says, 'All shapes are related when the gaze that travels over them may be one's last'; so this relentless dwelling upon last things compounds and confuses fact and fiction, morality and art. The fiction is generalised and weakened; the voices of the German soldiers are merely representative: 'The pitch of the voices varied, but the tones remained the same — the same resignation, the same spurious authority, the same absurd science, the same experience.' The same, it seems is everyWhere and every time the same. I don't Myself see the point of an historicism which is so imperceptive — if the moralist can only discover his 'meanings' by using death and suffering as his examples, then it is better to have a literature without moralists and, in fact, without morality.
The actual questions which Malraux tries to answer with his grandiloquence aren't difficult ones: are there any objects or processes, in my own past or in the whole of recorded history, which actually correspond tu my rhetoric about them? In a book full of 'Satan' and 'epiphanies' — even 'obscure dPiphanies' — Malraux is really trying to recover that sense of the Bible which he describes to his doctor: 'The narrative was inseparable from the meaning, secreted in its own values.' A language which does not Contain meaning, or values, is as puzzling and as inexplicable to Malraux as his own Condition of sickness without pain. Everything must signify; the absence of content in Ids own illness directly parallels his inordinate search for it within Lazarus.
But it doesn't work. When language and Meaning have indeed become separated —
When, in other words, they are being handled by a flawed or incapable writer — the language becomes resonant but hollow in the same way that the meanings become grand and imprecise. The tragedy of public !nen is that they have already dismembered 1,11emselves in events, running like soldiers Into the poison gas of rhetoric and gesture, 4Lnd they assume that their language will deal them if it is insistent enough. But it's always too late for that. To have self-belief Without self-knowledge, to pile up events and images as though they might somehow
Comprise a living person, to become in other nrds a generalisation, is in fact Malraux's 'ate. Public men are the great nivialisers,
and Lazarus manages to trivialise even death.
, But the language itself doesn't lie. Even In this apparently profound and 'personal'
teudition of life, suffering and the mystery dr things, the images which actually emerge !Peak of something painted and superficial: and when the wooden carousel horses of 11)5ernory revolve, it is my life' is succeeded Y 'this tourist trip through the archipelago (lbf death.' Even the living memories in the nk, those historical occasions which glow ite fruit ready to be plucked, are curiously t'at to the taste. When the eye lingers on the cages of Lazarus, the book immediately iurs and dissolves.
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