Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (67 page)

1. Léon Daudet was the brother of one of Proust’s dearest friends, Lucien Daudet. Both brothers were arch-snobs, but Léon was far more active politically, ultimately joining Maur- ras’s Action Français. His political opinions, however, did not stop Proust from consistent- ly flattering him. In 1904, for example, Proust also dedicated
   The Bible of Amiens
   to Daudet. At roughly the same time, according to Birnbaum, “Daudet called upon his audience [at an
   

   Action Français rally] to defend the Catholic faith and make war on the Jews; the crowd re- sponded with shouts of “
   Vive le roi! Vive l’empereur!
   Death to the Jews!” Birnbaum,
   Jewish Destinies
   , pp. 128–129.
   

2. Seth Wolitz,
   The Proustian Community
   (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 205.
   

3. Barrès writes, in his famous 1895 novel
   Les Deracinés,
   that the problem with Jews was that they “threatened to transform Frenchmen into copies of themselves, undermining the psychological integrity of the nation.” Cited in Paula Hyman,
   From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979),
   

   p. 19. Marcel’s worrying about his own authenticity as a writer in the face of the plagia- ristic scribblings of Bloch would seem to be a version of this fear.
   

4. But note that “M. de Guermantes, perhaps to give an Israelite name a more foreign sound, pronounced the ‘ch’ in Bloch not like a ‘k’ but as in the German ‘hoch’” (I:1077). So the very same phoneme serves identically opposite intentions on the part of two differ- ent speakers at two different social moments.
   

5. Daniel Itzkovitz, “Passing Like Me,”
   South Atlantic Quarterly
   98.1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 36–57. Itzkovitz convincingly argues that Jewish performativity, linked both to the culture of performance and to the “mimicry” culturally ascribed to Jews (one that becomes the basis of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theorization of Jewish identity in the
   Dialectic of En- lightenment
   ) plays a disruptive role in American culture because it enters into the dialectical conflict between essentialist and performative models of selfhood inscribed into American discourses from the time of Emerson. A slightly different version of this essay appeared in
   Gay and Lesbian Quarterly
   7:4 (2001), pp. 521–552. I am grateful to David Halperin for shephearding it through the submissions process and to the journal for permission to print this version here.
   

Queer Margins: Cocteau,
La Belle et la bête
,

and the Jewish Differend

DANIEL FISCHLIN

“The Jew’s likeness to the Jew is comparable to that of a universe in flames to a uni- verse in ashes,” Yukel has noted.

—Edmond Jabès,
The Book of Resemblances

Scenario

The genre-bending version of
La Belle et la bête
, the Jean Cocteau film re- scripted as
An Opera for Ensemble and Film
by Philip Glass and given its world premiere in Gibellina, Sicily in 1994, stages yet again the Jewish differend. By Jewish differend I mean the controversy over meaning, the hermeneutics of difference and of ethnicity embedded in the Jew as a marker for the uneasy tensions that relate semiosis and Semite. The usurer in the film, a clearly racist caricature of the hook-nosed Jew, is used by Cocteau to lend pathos to the fig- ure of the merchant, whose daughter Belle ultimately pays, however indirect- ly, the price of the merchant’s business misfortunes. Set in the context of post- war France—the film was made in 1945 and 1946—what are we to make of its reinstatement of the stereotypical Jew as parasitical alien? What possessed Cocteau to include such an image in his film? What did he imagine its cul- tural work to be? And what are we to make of Glass’s restaging of the film some fifty years later in a context not quite operatic where singers lip-synch the words of the actors as the film plays out before its concert hall audiences? The ongoing cultural work of a film that has racist dimensions transposed into an operatic setting by a Jewish American (now Buddhist) composer is worth noting (before returning to it later in this essay) as we try to answer the question of how Cocteau came to reproduce and disseminate such an image. Similarly, the use of an analogous image, cannily transposed in Disney’s an- imated version of
Beauty and the Beast
(1991), is worthy of critical attention if

only to note how the avaricious moneylender threatening Belle’s father has shapeshifted into the villainous Monsieur D’Arque, director of the village’s in- sane asylum, hook-nosed, gray-skinned,
1
shaggy-eyebrowed, and seen in the film, Judas-like, a money grubber counting his bag of gold before he interns Belle’s father, Maurice, in Maison des Loons. D’Arque clearly echoes the un- named moneylender in the Cocteau film, even his name signifying the
nez arqué,
or the hooknose
,
that is one of his prominent characteristics, as it is the moneylender’s in the Cocteau film.
2
Interestingly, neither the French version of
La Belle et la bête
by Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), which followed Madame de Villeneuve’s version published some fifteen years earlier and served as the basis for Cocteau’s narrative,
3
nor the English translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s, with its afterword by Cocteau, makes any mention of either the moneylender or the director of the insane asy- lum.
4
The absence of such racial stereotypes from earlier versions of the fairy tale suggests that the racist caricature is first injected into the story by Cocteau, then perpetuated by his successors.
5
Which leaves the conundrum: how do the politics of othering the Jew in postwar France converge with the sexual politics of the film, made by a gay man with his lover, Jean Marais, cast in multiple roles that include the Beast, Avenant, and Ardent (Prince Charming)? In short, how does Cocteau’s making of a film that is more than a little “queer” impact upon the Jewish question?
6

Mise en Scène

Frequently given the status of transcendental myth or fairy tale (Hammond vi–vii), the story of
La Belle et la bête
nonetheless plays out in microcosm a version of the alien’s relation to a normative culture.
La Belle et la bête
’s drama has acute national resonances: nation functions, however illusorily, as the norm against which alien otherness is measured.
7
Those resonances are rendered more affective through the gendering of national vulnerability in the figure of Belle, the beauty threatened by the beast of otherness. Robert

M. Hammond merely affirms a version of this dynamic when he states that it “is obvious from the initial sentence of the story by Mme Leprince de Beaumont that the function of the tale is educational, that it expresses the ‘wisdom of nations’—that is, the social code in force—and that it is un- questionably the principal version of the myth which inspired the film” (vi–vii). According to Hammond, the tale expresses the “socio-moral preoc- cupations of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century” centered on the val- ues of marriage and virtue (vii).

Cocteau’s film represents those same values in terms of the racist and clas- sist paranoias that produced a scapegoat for National Socialist dogma. In fact, the scene cut from the film, entitled “The Draper’s Farce,” a scene Hammond notes is alluded to several times in the diary Cocteau kept during its making, allegorically stages the Jew’s relation to normative culture. The draper, who re- mains unnamed except by virtue of his trade, the stereotypically Jewish
sh- mateh
business, is, as Hammond observes (xxxiv), frequently confused with the moneylender in the film and thus comes to represent another form of marginalized Jew. Outsmarted of his money, beaten up by Ludovic and Avenant, the draper effectively becomes the Jewish antitype of the money- lender, as if the film could not allow the logic, even in its excised form, of Jew- ish usury to go without retribution. As a result, the Jew as threatening and ex- ploitative other (moneylender) is doubled by the Jew as dupe and subject of punitive action by normative society (the draper), even though the latter scene is missing or only fragmentarily present in some prints of the movie.

Hammond describes the missing scene as follows:

Ludovic and Avenant decide to trick a wealthy draper in the town out of some money. They pretend that the sisters are interested in the rich old man. He becomes excited, but wants to be sure. The two boys conceal him in a cupboard in the Merchant’s house and then, having failed to get the cooperation of the girls, play the roles of Adelaide and Felicie. The draper, convinced by this transvestic performance, gives the boys money presumably needed by the girls for more presentable clothes. The boys take the money for gambling purposes, of course.
(xxxiv)

Besides highlighting Avenant’s and Ludovic’s homosociality, the episode stages the draper/Jew getting his comeuppance as alien other while spoofing fears of miscegenation between the merchant’s daughters and the draper’s racial otherness. Furthermore, the transvestism of the missing scene, one that is convincing enough to fool the hapless draper, introduces an element of par- ody into the boys’ performance, for by becoming women they play to a well- worn convention linking the Jew with feminization: “At the turn of the cen- tury, male Jews were feminized and signaled their feminization through their discourse, which reflected the nature of their bodies” (Gilman,
Freud, Race, and Gender
163). The parody is doubly effective in that it attacks both the draper’s Jewishness and his implicit homosexuality (why is he unmarried at such an advanced age? why does he take such pleasure in a parodic perform- ance
en travesti
? is he “excited” by the cross-dressing parody of masculinity, by the implicit homoeroticism the
en travesti
performance embodies, or by the

seductions of a crude ruse to which he falls prey all too easily?), thus estab- lishing the Jew and the homosexual as links in the same signifying chain. The stereotype of male Jew as effeminate and womanly naturalizes Ludovic’s and Avenant’s impersonation, allowing it to pass (almost) without notice, even as the draper is foregrounded in the signifying chain that links homoeroticism with effeminacy and ultimately with the Jewish differend: Ludovic and Avenant can pass as women with impunity because the Jew’s assumed effem- inacy is
their
alibi.

Sander Gilman has done much to expose the historical contexts of this chain, affirming in one notable instance that “the image of the Jew and the image of the homosexual were parallel in the fin de siècle medical culture” (ibid. 165). Such parallels had literary and popular cultural analogues, and the reversibility in the signifying chain of Jew and homosexual as forms of mar- ginalized otherness was part of a well established cultural vocabulary that lurks at the margins of the excised scene Hammond describes. With regard to that scene, Hammond further remarks that

the episode explains the ensuing scene ([shots] 247–256) still visible in American copies of the film. The draper has learned of the hoax perpe- trated by the boys. He bursts into the tavern, shouts and pounds on the table. The two young men rough him up forthwith and steal his watch. Excision of the farce sequence deprives the viewer of any idea of the identity of the draper. The tavern scene marks his only appearance in the film, so the public mistakes him for the money-lender, even though the faces are completely different, and there is a significant variation be- tween the plain bourgeois dress of the draper and the baroque costume of the money-lender—a long coat that makes him look like a sorcerer.

(xxxiv)
8

In addition to extending the signifying chain of the moneylender to the drap- er to the Jew that the film makes in both the excised and the unexcised scenes, the moment in which Avenant and Ludovic beat the draper and take his watch extends the excised scene from farce to retributive violence. The scene was cut, perhaps because its sympathies were a bit too clear in postwar Eu- rope, reeling from the horrors of the genocide accomplished in the concen- tration camps. In its performance of a punitive antisemitism the scene is of- fensive in a way that the depiction of the moneylender as victimizing bourgeois French culture is (perhaps to some) not. Throughout, the draper is scapegoated for his otherness: the scene in which he is beaten merely confirms that his scapegoating
is
warranted, paralleling the racist and classist paranoias

that made the Jews such an obvious target for the National Socialists and those collaborators who faciliated their work in occupied countries like France. Cocteau’s movie, in its simultaneous erasure and staging of this mar- ginal moment, reiterates the violent logic of demonization upon which all forms of othercide are founded.

But does such a filmic iteration make Cocteau a racist or align him ideo- logically with Nazism? No easy answer presents itself, especially since the queer and seemingly progressive erotic politics of the film work, perhaps, as a counternarrative, albeit under enormous historical pressure, to the film’s im- plication in a profoundly racist ideology. If the film permits a form of queer otherness to emerge—one figured in the relationships between Belle and her father, between Belle and the Beast, between Ludovic and Avenant, between Cocteau himself and Marais, between the Beast and his other selves—then how does such permissive otherness function in relation to the antisemitic im- agery deployed by the film? What do these two contrasting treatments of the demonized other tell us about Cocteau’s politics?

As might be expected, Cocteau’s politics were anything but untainted, if his friendship with Arno Breker (1900–91), Hitler’s “official sculptor” (Cone 159), is any indication. Michèle C. Cone acknowledges that Breker’s mem- oirs, somewhat fatuously titled
Hitler, Paris, et moi,
and her own personal in- terview with Breker clearly indicate Breker was “befriended” by such art world luminaries as Jeanne Castel and Cocteau (159).
9
Cone admits that the “devo- tion shown toward Breker by French personalities from Cocteau to [Aristide] Malliol remains mystifying” (164). Cocteau himself recognized the problem of his friendship with Breker, stating, just after the liberation of Paris, that “ce qui compte, c’est Breker, l’article Breker, l’amitié Breker, le seul acte qui puisse servir a me perdre” (“What counts is Breker, the Breker article, the Breker friendship, the only act that could serve to undo me”; qtd. in Touzot 142).
10
Francis Steegmuller’s standard biography of Cocteau gives further details on the Breker affair, suggesting it was Cocteau’s low point during the war (443) and caused Cocteau considerable consternation. Steegmuller observes that “the courageous French writers who eschewed publication under [the] condi- tions [imposed by Germans during the Occupation, including the need to ac- quire a license for “almost any activity”]” (439) did not include Cocteau. Cocteau had no hesitation seeking German-approved authorization to pro- duce his plays; he saw Germans constantly, though not in his own home; in 1944 he published a volume of poems he said he had written in German—“I spoke German in my childhood because I had a German governess. . . . A poet must always express himself, whatever the language. . . . French, English, German or Russian is but a thin coating” (440).