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From The New International, Vol. IX No. 11, December 1943, p. 351.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Men from Nowhere
Jean Malaquis
L.B. Fischer, pub., $2.50.
The Javanese – the title of Malaquais novel in its original French – are a unique product of contemporary European civilization. They are the social lava, who wander from border to border with one eye on their false passports and the other keeping watch for the “occupation” of the country in which they momentarily reside. They are an unwanted conglomeration, a heterogeneous jumble of nationalities, classes and types flattened into the homogeneity of the lumpen-wanderer. They are neither optimists nor pessimists, revolutionists nor reactionaries, sophisticates nor primitives. They are the Massenmensch brought to his last resource. They succeed in reaching that terrible goal for which every soldier yearns and almost never grasps: they live only for the moment; tomorrow one’s passport may again be examined. They are the final ironic italicization to a continent gone mad with nationalist frenzy.
For a few months, they are thrown together into a tiny peninsula of Southern France, “the island of Java.” And these several hundred wanderers are known as the Javanese. What happens in that little span of time – their loves and hates, their luxuries of memory, their pathetic strike, their final dispersal – is the subject of Malaquais’ novel. Les Javanais are more, however, than a mere backwash of a continent in its death-throes; they are the very distillation of capitalist civilization itself. They come from all over the world and each bears on his shoulders the welts of the sufferings of his brothers. Much more adequately than the time capsules buried by the recent World’s Fair, they gather into their narrow boundary the final residue of how humanity has fared in the era between world wars.
Is it any wonder that Leon Trotsky, than whom none saw more dearly and passionately the corrosion of our society, hailed Malaquais as a “great new writer”? Malaquais has opened the cancer for all to see – its corruption, its rot, its pus and filth. And he has done so without any commentary other than his compassion and humanity.
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