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- Title
Historical Consciousness in Stapledon and Malraux.
- Authors
Tremaine, Louis
- Abstract
A comparison of Olaf Stapledon's fictions (especially Last and First Men and Star Maker) with André Malraux's Man's Fate discloses an essentially narrative consciousness at work in both writers. Central to this historical consciousness is a dialectical awareness of the relationship between human actuality and human potentiality—an awareness that present events are meaningful only as they are measured against a larger vision of what human being have been and what they can become. Malraux accordingly steeps his novel in a particular historical moment to suggest that the appropriate response to the eternal condition humaine of inevitable suffering and death lies not in the mythic innocence of ideology or in a passive resignation to human tragedy, but in an ever greater lucidity on the part of humanity about what it is capable of within the natural limits that constraint it. So, too—but using an incomparably larger canvas than Malraux—Stapledon tests this same human capability for giving significance to human history. Indeed, it is Stapledon's historical consciousness that accounts, in part, for such characteristic element of his fiction as the distancing narrator, the extreme-situation plot device, and the personality-in-community theme.
- Subjects
FICTION writing; SCIENCE fiction; STAPLEDON, Olaf, 1886-1950; MALRAUX, Andre, 1901-1976. Condition humaine. English; LAST &; First Men (Book); MAN'S Fate (Book : Malraux); BOOKS; TRAGEDY (Drama)
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1984, Vol 11, Issue 2, p130
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism