André Malraux beyond his Anti-Memoir

Abstract

Two hypotheses about the autobiographical genre –as well as about the self-portrait– seem to perfectly fit Malraux’s Antimémoires: first, that it is sterile to develop an interpretation based on the distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ and, second, that any autobiography reflects a social and individual vision of the temporality, so that it thrives in contexts more susceptible to be historically considered as “new”. Malraux, as revealed by his Antimémoires, is an enigma that feeds off itself, the intertwined fragments of his life and the passages from his works. To try to unravel his mystery we will resort to three different perspectives on what we might consider “a possible Malrauxian theory about the three Malraux”. Besides that, we will turn to some writings in which self-reference is less evident and where Malraux proposed a peculiar vision of art and life, perhaps because he concealed exactly there the keys to the best approach to the sense of his career and thought.