Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (68 page)

In the Breker affair Cocteau published a “Salute to Arno Breker” (“Salut à Breker”) in 1943 to mark the occasion of Breker’s exhibition in Paris. Brek- er, by this time, had been in Germany since 1933, where, according to Steeg- muller, he had been “commissioned to create a veritable portrait gallery in bronze of the leaders of the Third Reich, as well as a pair of gigantic figures, ‘Torchbearer’ and ‘Swordbearer,’ to stand forever on either side of the en- trance to the new Chancellery building in Berlin” (Steegmuller 443). Cocteau’s article celebrating Breker’s Parisian exhibition was “published in the newspaper
Comoedia
in May, 1943” (ibid. 440). One of the key lines from the “Salute” states: “Je vous [Breker] salue de la haute patrie des poètes, patrie où les patries n’existent pas” (“I salute you [Breker] from the elevated fatherland of poets, fatherland where fatherlands don’t exist”; qtd. in Touzot 145).
11
Cocteau professed that Breker’s sculptures were “dignes du
David
” (“worthy of
David
”) and spoke of Breker as someone whom France “traite avec un ir- respect et une ingratitude absolus” (“treats with an absolute disrespect and in- gratitude”; Touzot 146). The lines may be read in terms of Cocteau’s anarchic (yet surprisingly conventional) notion of the artist as outside politics, as part of an aestheticized community beyond the reach of national politics.
12
As Cocteau had stated earlier in 1940 in a journal entitled “Le droit de vivre” (“The Right to Live”), “Un poète a, par principe, l’esprit trop anarchiste pour prendre une position, fût-elle révolutionnaire. Mais en face des crimes qui s’accomplissent chaque jour contre la liberté de l’âme et du corps il serait lâche de rester immobile” (“A poet has, in principle, too much of an anarchistic spirit to take a position, however revolutionary. But in light of the crimes ac- complished every day against the liberty of the spirit and of the body it would be cowardly not to do anything”; qtd. in Touzot 127).

But Cocteau seemed to remain strangely “immobile” during the Occupa- tion in terms of any form of resistance to Nazi ideology beyond his sexual ori- entation, which, though attacked, was tolerated by the authorities.
13
And crit- ics like Jean Touzot have concluded that “L’immobilisme ou le refus de choisir, c’est pourtant le reproche qui sera fait à Cocteau” (“The opposition to change or the refusal to choose are, however, what Cocteau will be reproached for”; 127). In the case of the salute to Breker, Cocteau, in return for his pub- lic support, is said to have procured “through Breker’s intervention, the ex- emption of French film employees from having to work in Germany” (Steeg- muller 443). Such an exemption can hardly have been an exceptional act of resistance in the face of the magnitude of the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazis. Jews were already prohibited from working in French film and thus were unlikely candidates for salvation (by the putative deal struck between Cocteau and the Germans) from being forced to work in Germany. After the

Liberation as noted by Steegmuller, Cocteau was either “exonerated” or “not even summoned” by the Conseils d’Epuration, “the tribunals that judged sus- pected collaborators” (ibid.). As Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm ob- serve with regard to the post-Liberation period, some of Cocteau’s friends “were in serious trouble as collaborationists and Cocteau felt his own position, partly because of his German friendships, to be precarious. He stressed his ties with the Left, with Aragon and the Jews, and he was delighted to be received at the British Embassy” (164). Such a canny bit of postwar jostling for ap- propriate political alignments flies in the face of commentators’ repeated ac- knowledgment of Cocteau’s supposed political naïveté and apoliticism.

Furthermore, as Cone avers, antisemitism in France did not suddenly ap- pear with the Pétain regime, and in France “the rampage against decadence and the connection between decadence and Jewishness antedate not only Léon Blum’s Popular Front but even the Dreyfus affair” (xxii). Despite the fact that “no art exhibition held in a locale belonging to the French administration could include Jewish exhibitors” and that “Jews were forbidden by the Ger- mans to exhibit anywhere” (12), Cone shows that many well-known French artists including Cocteau, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, and Henri Matisse staged gallery shows under the Vichy regime, hardly a gesture of solidarity for the Jewish artists banished from the gallery scene under Vichy. In addition, Cocteau, along with Colette and Louise de Vilmorin, signed catalogues associated with exhibitions staged by the Ga- lerie Charpentier (Cone 29). The gallery was well-known during the Occupa- tion for producing what Cone calls a revisionary history of French art, one in which the “selection of modern art was intended to show the harmonious con- tinuity of French art since the era of Romanticism” (ibid.). Cocteau’s (and oth- ers’) alignment with such revisionary histories connives to link his politics with the totalitarian and racist ideologies absorbed and promulgated under the Vichy regime. Bourgeois and class bonds made such accommodationist com- plicity possible in the face of the German occupation, which promoted anti- decadent art that promoted ideals of order and conformity. What resulted was a return to the materials of bourgeois culture
14
exemplified in “Orfèvrerie Cristofle, a firm famous for its silver-plated dinnerware,” one that “responded to the challenge of a revival in the decorative arts by inviting artists to adorn ceramic plates, metal platters, and other luxury objects” (Cone 76). Not sur- prisingly, Cocteau was one of the artists on Orfèvrerie Cristofle’s roster.
15

Though this sort of evidence is extremely circumstantial, circling round the specter of some form of essentialist antisemitism or fascist complicity that historical and personal circumstances inevitably complicate and obscure, it is useful to remember, as Pierre Birnbaum does, that

anti-Semitism, as a social fact and not as pure ideology, is in no sense limited to the extremes. Although it cannot be seen as a constant fea- ture in a purely imaginary generalized French ideology—and even though its expression is to be found very far back on the extreme Right—none the less in the twentieth century it is also present to vary- ing degrees both in the ranks of the great left-wing parties (not only among the non-conformists) and in pressure groups and organs which seek their inspiration from the Catholic side, as was the case at the end of the nineteenth century.
(4)
16

Furthermore, as affirmed by David Carroll, “a little anti-Semitism, a moder- ate form of anti-Semitism”—like that arguably found in
La Belle et la bête
— “is already the basis for absolute, unbounded, generalized anti-Semitism. Cul- tural or literary anti-Semitism can even be applied more extensively than biologically determined, strictly racist anti-Semitism, which is ultimately lim- ited by the restriction of having to bring everything in the last instance back to ‘blood’” (180).

The contours of Cocteau’s politics are not difficult to trace with regard to the antisemitic stereotyping evident in
La Belle et la bête.
But it would be fatuous to brand Cocteau a simple antisemite or racist given the complex po- litical and, supposedly, apolitical gestures he was in the habit of making.
17
For example, when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were condemned to death in 1953, Cocteau published on the first page of
Lettres françaises
a largely inef- fectual appeal on their behalf (“Initiative de Jean Cocteau pour la réhabilita- tion d’Ethel et Julius Rosenberg” [Touzot 150]). And earlier, as Steegmuller notes, “Just before the blitzkrieg Cocteau had published an anti-racist article in a newspaper which was one of those quickly suppressed by the new regime” (441). Cocteau had, in his pre-Occupation days, also dreamed of offering “‘un asile aux exilés de l’univers,’ pour que leur génie étouffé par ‘un idéal d’u- niforme’ puisse s’épanouir sur le sol français. On a compris que sont visés les réfugiés politiques, juifs pour la plupart, fuyant la persécution nazie” (“‘refuge to the exiles of the universe,’ so that their genius, repressed by ‘an ideal of con- formity,’ can come to light on French soil. Cocteau was understood to be re- ferring to political refugees, Jews for the most part, fleeing from Nazi perse- cution”; Touzot 124). Touzot’s reading of Cocteau’s imagined “refuge” neatly forgets the sexual dissidents that this passage may well be privileging. The am- biguity of the figure of the exile certainly has powerful resonances in terms of both sexual and racial othernesses, but such an ambiguity does not necessari- ly indicate a politics of philo-Semitism. Touzot also notes, as part of his at- tempt to deal with Cocteau’s ambiguous politics, that Cocteau was capable of

recognizing Wagner as an antisemite (124), though this did not prevent him from admiring Wagner, given that “Cocteau and his grandfather belonged to generations on either side of the philo-Wagnerian” (Brown 8).
18
Such sketchy and circumstantial evidence can hardly be used to adduce a simplistic politics, especially since the weight of contradictions in Cocteau’s own pronounce- ments would seem to indicate muddled thinking about the relations obtain- ing between aesthetics and politics.

Furthermore, as Raymond Bach has shown, Cocteau was himself accused of being contaminated by the Jews in an attack published in
Je Suis Partout
(I Am Everywhere) by Alain Laubreaux entitled “La Querelle des
Parents terri- bles
” (The Quarrel of the Terrible Parents) “written in the form of a dialogue between a defender of [Cocteau’s] play and Laubreaux” (Bach 35). Bach cites Laubreaux’s closing comments, later supported by Céline, which clearly de- monize Cocteau, aligning him with the Jew:

Les héros de sa pièce . . . sont des êtres flasques et veules glissant sur la planche de leurs passions selon les lois de l’inertie. . . . Mais, de plus,
Les Parents terribles
résument tous les lieux communs démodés où, pendant quarante ans, s’est complu en France le théâtre juif de Bernstein. . . . [Cocteau] projette sur scène son personnage intérieur, contaminé par les sémites qui régnèrent avant lui sur la scène française.
(ibid.)

[The heroes of his piece . . . are flaccid and spineless beings sliding on the stage of their passions according to the laws of inertia. . . . But, addi- tionally,
Les Parents terribles
summarizes all the outmoded commonplaces in which the Jewish theater of Bernstein in France took pleasure over some forty years. . . . (Cocteau) projects on stage his inner person, con- taminated by the Semites who reigned with him over the French scene.]

When reading these comments it must be remembered that because Cocteau was (more or less) openly homosexual,
19
his supposedly scandalous morals had been subject to numerous attacks. The rhetoric of antisemitism evident in Laubreaux’s attack, then, may well be a displacement for an attack on his sexuality (“les êtres . . . glissant sur la planche de leurs passions”), thus con- firming yet again the discomfiting homologies between these two forms of alien otherness. And further, Cocteau’s own ambivalent antisemitism may well record his attempt to forestall censure of his homosexuality by breaking the signifying chain that links Jew to homosexual, even as that strategy was necessarily reinforcing the connections between the two. In any event, the aim of this essay is not to pronounce on the complex and frequently ambiguous

dimensions of Cocteau’s murky politics in general but to read
La Belle et la bête
as symptomatic of observable and contradictory tendencies apparent in his work linked with larger patterns of antisemitism also used, however iron- ically, to “contaminate” Cocteau. Hence, my reading of Cocteau in relation to the figure of the Jew in
La Belle et la bête
is not intended to align Cocteau’s motives, personal history, and ambiguous antisemitism with the film as a sim- plistic symptom of Cocteau’s agency in these regards: to do so is to risk the very structures of difference and scapegoating that are implicit in antisemitic discourses. Nor do I wish to ignore Cocteau’s place in the material (re)pro- duction of racist caricatures: to do so is to risk disavowing the specifics and responsibilities of human agency in the face of (supposed) historic inevitabil- ities. Rather, my aim is to put pressure on the very signifying structures of the film itself as a symptomatic and historicized instance of the way in which an- tisemitism
s
operate and circulate.

As symptom, then,
La Belle et la bête
bears further examination for the way in which the film articulates a postwar vision that simultaneously effaces any trace of the war from its visual images while nonetheless symbolically en- coding the underlying logic of otherness upon which the war was predicated. The antisemitic unconscious of the film circulates paranoia about the con- taminant presence of the other all the more effectively because it is encoded at the level of a textual unconscious. The film uses an amalgam of symbolic techniques to achieve this effect, including its reinscription of the Jews it fig- ures in its margins, its recuperation of a putatively classic French fairy (
Volk
) tale, its bourgeois epiphany in which the Beast is transformed into the prince, who looks just like Belle’s village suitor (she gets it both ways), thus implicit- ly restoring the merchant and his family to the class advantage they have lost, its use of lead actors with prominent Aryan features, and its complex erotic dimensions, framed as they are by the queer margins of Cocteau’s gaze form- ing and deforming the body of his lover through manipulation of the cam- era’s gaze.

Alan Williams notes in this last regard how Cocteau, after an absence of nearly a decade,

returned to the cinema during the Occupation to help his lover, the actor Jean Marais, become a film star. This goal he achieved spectacularly well in his first commercial screenplay, for Jean Delannoy’s
L’Eternel Retour
(
The Eternal Return,
1943). Marais became an early prototype of the postwar film star as sex symbol, playing a contemporary Tristan to Madeleine Soulogne’s similarly updated Isolde. The aesthetic problem of having two very modern, glamorous young players in an “eternal” story