Abstract

In La Corde et Ies souris Malraux attempts to overcome human transience and mortality by memorializing the ephemeral through the artifice of writing. The rhetoric of the self-portrait takes the form of a historical narrative in which the relationship of history to memory as textual archive affords the Malrucian subject a "reprieve" by effacing the inherent status of contingency. The text thus becomes a veritable cultural mausoleum that sublates the implicit negation of death and allows the author to become more than a conscience without memory.

Keywords: La Corde et Ies souris, Malraux, human transience, mortality, memorializing, ephemeral, self-portrait, Malrucian subject, contingency, death, author

How to Cite:

Kritzman, L. D., (1985) “History and His-Story in André Malraux's La Corde et les souris”, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1173