La Métamorphose des dieux

Endowed with an exceptional visual memory, cultivated from his youth by frequent visits to museums (notably the Musée Guimet) and by his travels, Malraux placed his culture at the service of a metaphysical doctrine of art, first set out in 1951 in Les Voix du silence. Photography allowed him to bring together masterpieces scattered across the world in a museum without walls: using photographs by Maurice Jarnoux, he composed the first volume of what would become La Métamorphose des dieux — three volumes entitled Le Surnaturel, L’Irréel and L’Intemporel. “Like my novels, like my Antimémoires, like Les Voix du silence, La Métamorphose des dieux deals essentially with the relationship between man and destiny,” he writes in his preface.

It is the seventh volume in the “Galerie de la Pléiade” series; 30 color plates and numerous black-and-white reproductions accompany the text.

Malraux and Genevoix are the only two twentieth-century writers to be interred in the Panthéon: this volume is a discreet but valuable trace of the intellectual bond between two men brought together by their experience of war, their reflection on the transmission of memory, and their place in French public life — one at the head of the Ministry of Culture, the other soon to become perpetual secretary of the Académie française, and a member since 1946. Their dialogue continued well beyond this inscription: in the 1960s, when Malraux became Minister of Culture, it was Genevoix who was entrusted with the task of reviving the memory of writers who died for France, notably through the Comité du souvenir littéraire de la Grande Guerre.

Malraux, for his work and his public action, was interred in the Panthéon in 1996; Genevoix followed him there twenty-four years later, with Ceux de 14, in keeping with the idea of an invisible museum of human greatness that Malraux had envisioned.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix (presentation inscription and bookplate).

Huret, 331.