The Conquerors by André Malraux

Author:André Malraux [Malraux, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, @westerncanon
ISBN: 9780226502908
Google: 4g1n2P_-MEYC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1992-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

2 P.M.

Hong’s new attitude worries Garine. Garine counts on him to free us from Ch’eng-tai; but even though in­formers’ reports tell us that Hong won’t wait to be in­dicted before acting—and that he wants to act fast, knowing that the police aren’t after him yet—they still tell us nothing about how the terrorist plans to strike. For some time now an unusual personality has been working to Hong’s surface, Garine tells me; and beneath the veneer of culture, contrived of meditations on a few virulent ideas plucked at random from books and conversations, the illiterate Chinese in him, the Chinese who cannot read characters, is rising and beginning to dominate the other, who reads French and English books. And this new per­sonality is wholly ruled by the violence of his nature and of youth, and by the only way of life he truly knows: poverty. As an adolescent he lived among men whose uni­verse was poverty, in the lower depths of huge Chinese cities crowded with the sick, the old, the crippled in body, mind, spirit, crowded with those who die of hunger and those many more condemned to a permanently brutish and feeble existence by a diet not fit for rats.

For people like that, whose sole hope is to survive one day more, misery is almost so pervasive that it doesn’t even leave room for hate. Feelings, heart, dignity have all collapsed inward, and brief flashes of rancor and de­spair barely flicker here and there, like the rare wide-eyed man leaning on a staff donated by missionaries and so rising above the mass of tattered humanity ground into the dust.

But for others, those whom events make soldiers or bandits, who can still react, who invent complicated swindles for a pinch of tobacco, hate still exists, persistent and comradely. They live with it, waiting for the day when beleaguered troops are ready to call on looters and arsonists for help. Hong has liberated himself from poverty but he hasn’t forgotten its lesson, or the image of the world it creates, ferocious and permeated by impotent hatred. “There are only two races of man,” he says. “The poor and the others.” His disgust with the rich and powerful, formed in his childhood, is so intense that he desires neither wealth nor power. Little by little, as he emerged from the beggars’ underworld, he discovered that what he hated wasn’t the happiness of the rich, but their good opinion of themselves. “A poor man,” he also said, “cannot know self-respect.” He might have accepted all that if he’d be­lieved, with his ancestors, that his existence wasn’t lim­ited to this one lifetime. But bound to the present by his overwhelming discovery of death, he now accepts nothing, seeks nothing, discusses nothing; he hates.

In poverty he sees a sort of sickly demon, continually confirming men’s baseness, cowardice, weaknesses, their aptitude for degradation. Unquestionably he hates most the man who respects himself, is sure of himself; he couldn’t be more of a rebel against his own kind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.