The Royal Way by André Malraux

First published:La Voie royale, 1930 (English translation, 1935)

Type of work: Adventure

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: French Somaliland, French Indochina, and Siam

Principal Characters:

• Claude Vannec, a French archaeologist sent on a mission by his government
• Perken, his friend, a Dutch adventurer
• Grabot, Perken’s former comrade and a deserter from the army

The Novel

The title of the novel refers to the route which links the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor and the lake region with the Me Nan river basin in central Siam. Claude Vannec, a young French archaeologist sent on a mission by his government, is drawn to the exploration of this route by a dual desire: to examine the archaeological treasures to be found along it and to profit from the sale of his discoveries. When he meets, in a Djibouti brothel, a Dutch adventurer by the name of Perken and later travels with him by ship to Singapore, Claude becomes convinced that he has found, in this older man, the ideal companion for his venture. Perken is a person around whom a legend has developed, because he has begun to create a kingdom in unpacified Laos. He views Claude’s mission as a means of securing money for the purchase of machine guns in order to pursue his objective. Admiring Perken’s scorn for convention and love of action, which reminds him of his revered grandfather’s outlook on life, Claude discovers that he himself shares with Perken an obsession with death—not as a negative motivation but as a stimulus for savoring the exaltation of life.

Taking leave of Perken in Singapore, after having arranged to meet him later in Phnom Penh in order to organize their expedition, Claude continues on to the French Institute in Saigon and to the bungalow of the Deputy Resident in Siem-Reap to seek assistance for his undertaking. Both the director of the French Institute, Albert Rameges, and the Deputy Resident try to dissuade Claude from making the trip into the jungle.

Undeterred, Claude and Perken set out on their adventure. Their party includes a guide; a male servant called Xa; and Svay, a Cambodian. The latter has been sent by the Deputy Resident ostensibly to recruit drivers for the carts which are to transport the archaeological treasures but his real assignment is to spy on the expedition. Perken’s plan is to accompany Claude to the Royal Way and then to make a detour through the unpacified area nearby where a former comrade of his, Grabot, is reported to have disappeared. Battling the heat and the oppressive plant and animal life of the jungle, the adventurers reach the Royal Way and eventually come upon the coveted sculptures, managing to load them on their carts.

During the night, however, their guide, Svay, and the cart drivers abandon them. Getting a new guide locally, but now having to drive the carts themselves, Perken, Claude, and Xa press on, with Perken still determined to find Grabot. A deserter from the army, Grabot had also sought to escape from the conformism of European life, expecting to realize in Asia his sexual fantasies and dreams of political power. Because the new guide is unfamiliar with the itinerary that the expedition had planned to follow, in order to reach Grabot the party must now traverse territory inhabited by the hostile Stieng tribes.

With the help of a Cambodian slave, Claude and Perken find Grabot in the hut of a Stieng village. Grabot has been blinded by his captors and is nothing but a slave himself, attached to a mill wheel that he circles like a beast of burden. Threatened by the tribesmen, who surround them, Claude and Perken nevertheless succeed in negotiating for their freedom and Grabot’s, but in the process, Perken is wounded in the leg by a Stieng weapon:a bamboo splinter. From a Siamese town, Perken sends a telegram to the Siamese government reporting his encounter with the Stiengs. By now his wound, aggravated by the additional travel, has become infected, and his condition is diagnosed as hopeless.

Despite Perken’s physical state, the expedition heads for Laos, which Perken considers to be “his” country, since he enjoys enormous political influence there. Claude has abandoned the sculptures in order to go with him. They reach a Laotian village, where Perken hopes to receive the assistance of Savan, a local chief. At the same time, the Stiengs are attempting to invest the village, aware that Perken is there. After having released Grabot, who was sent on to a Bangkok hospital, the tribesmen have been chased from their village and pursued by the soldiers dispatched in response to Perken’s telegram. Perken sadly suspects that the punitive Siamese action may have an ulterior motive: to occupy militarily the whole of the unpacified region. Savan arrives for the meeting with Perken, but two Laotians who accompany him suddenly aim their rifles at Perken, blaming him for the presence of the Stiengs. Perken shoots first and kills them. He senses Savan’s indifference, however, and notices that the chief, like Claude, looks at him as if he were already dead.

Claude and Perken set out for the mountains of northern Laos, whose chiefs Perken believes to be more loyal to him than is Savan. Close to death, Perken meditates on the solitude of dying and the need to make death a lucid individual experience. Even as Claude contemplates with compassion the agony of his friend, the Frenchman is permeated by a sense of his own ardent attachment to life. As Perken dies, Claude, in a desperate fraternal gesture, puts his arms around him, but Perken looks at Claude as if he were a being from another world.

The Characters

Claude presents an autobiographical dimension. André Malraux had led his own expedition into the Cambodian jungle in 1923 and made his way to the ruins of the Banteay-Srei temple, the removal of whose sculptures caused him to be arrested and put on trial by the colonial administration. Like Claude, Malraux had a grandfather whom he admired, and for some of the same reasons. Claude’s characterization is nevertheless enriched beyond this autobiographical element. He, like Perken, is typical of the intellectual characters created by Malraux whose desire for adventure and revolt against convention are to be appreciated best on the metaphysical level. Their goal is to control their destiny, to pit successfully their will and determination against the order of the world. In contrast to Perken, however, Claude is the young, inexperienced beginner. As such, his role in the novel is often to stand as an admiring witness to Perken’s actions.

That Claude’s commitment to his friendship for Perken is sincere becomes evident when he agrees to journey with the fatally wounded man to Laos, although doing so means abandoning his precious sculptures. Yet Claude is destined to discover, at the end of his adventure, the tragic limits of fraternity. Once the hopelessness of Perken’s condition is confirmed, the latter seems to read in Claude’s look, despite their profound friendship, only the certainty of his own death. The conclusion of the novel only emphasizes the irreducible solitude of death: For the dying Perken, Claude is no longer a friend but simply a witness—and worse, a stranger.

Perken is by no means the ordinary adventurer, however worldly his grandiose political ambitions may be. His main concern is to live—and die—with absolute lucidity and, to the fullest extent possible, in response to the dictates of his own sense of the meaning of human existence. Nevertheless, once he senses that his death is imminent, Perken’s concern becomes narrowly circumscribed: how to die with dignity, rebelling to the very end against the idea of death as something imposed from without, something issuing from an external order of things. Perken is fighting against insuperable odds, however, as his progressive physical deterioration makes him more and more the prisoner of his own body, undermining, at the same time, his intellectual communion with Claude. About to die, Perken strives desperately to affirm the autonomy of his individual consciousness. In his last words, he struggles to mark a forceful distinction between death as an abstraction and his personal, lucid experience of it: “There is...no death. There’s only...I who...am dying.” Given the tragic inevitability of Perken’s death, these words do not register any real triumph.

Grabot’s fate symbolizes a possible, extreme consequence of Perken’s notion of political power gone awry. Though only briefly present before the reader, Grabot is more fully developed as a character through Perken’s stories about him. To demonstrate Grabot’s vengeful resolve, for example, Perken relates how the man deliberately infected and lost an eye merely to ruin an army doctor who had refused him sick leave.

Several of the minor characters in The Royal Way owe their vivid portrayal to their autobiographical source. Rameges and the Deputy Resident derive their bureaucratic stuffiness from Malraux’s personal contact with such colonial officials. In his own expedition, Malraux actually had a servant whose name was Xa.

Critical Context

Appearing two years after Malraux’s novel, Les Conquerants (1928, 1949; The Conquerors, 1929, 1956), a work also dealing with the tragic destiny of the European adventurer in Asia, The Royal Way belongs to the early phase of the novelist’s career. Its will-to-power motifs and pessimism reflect both the particular influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, an author much admired by the young Malraux, and the general impact of World War I, which shook the spiritual and intellectual, as well as the social and political, foundations of Europe. Initially regarded by many critics as an inferior work, The Royal Way was subsequently appreciated for its merits—thanks to a more general acceptance of nonlinear but thematically and metaphorically coherent plot structures. Another factor contributing to this shift of critical opinion was the realization that Malraux’s novels have only one plot: man’s fate.

Later novels, such as his masterpiece, La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate, 1934; also as Storm in Shanghai), and L’Espoir (1937; Days of Hope, 1938; also as Man’s Hope), sounded at times a more positive note, as Malraux dispensed with the adventurer and linked the actions of his heroes to the more laudable and tangible goals of political revolution against tyrannical regimes. Yet, to a considerable degree, these other works merely embroidered on the novelist’s fundamental themes and stylistic devices as revealed in The Royal Way. Even their optimistic aspects were related in part to a strain of hope already marginally present in The Royal Way, the strain of hope implicit in the fact that Claude does survive the physical and metaphysical endurance tests of his jungle adventure.

Bibliography

Blend, Charles. André Malraux: Tragic Humanist, 1963.

Fallaize, Elizabeth. Malraux: La Voie royale, 1982.

Frohock, Wilbur M. André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination, 1952.

Greenlee, James W. Malraux’s Heroes and History, 1975.

Kline, Thomas Jefferson. André Malraux and the Metamorphosis of Death, 1973.