Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (70 page)

Glass’s musical restaging of these complicated national and personal dy- namics, for example, merely reinforces a transcendental reading of
La Belle et la bête
’s mythic narrative while ignoring the very work of that narrative in af- firming nation as the product of illusions about a demonized other. The pol- itics of such an aesthetic strategy play, however unsuspectingly, into all-too- familiar American fears about any form of otherness that threatens the perceived stability of a coherent national identity.
27
Little surprise that
Time
magazine’s critic, Michael Walsh, says of the Glass production that it surpass- es “Disney’s animated movie musical” of the same story and “[surges] with Wagnerian power in conjuring up a magic kingdom” (qtd. in Gladstone 10). The association of Disney, Wagnerian power, and a magical kingdom with Glass’s operatic rescripting of the Cocteau film has rather interesting symbol- ic relations with the American national imaginary, composed in somewhat equal measure of technological fantasy, power, and the self-regard capable of producing the “magic kingdom” as a trope for American national identity. Glass’s own programme notes to the production are somewhat ingenuous with regard to the ideologies subsumed in the opera, his own reading sug- gesting that the film is about “the very nature of the creative process” and that “it becomes hard to see the journey of the Father to the Château . . . in the opening moments of the film as anything other than the journey of the artist into his ‘unconscious’” (37). Interestingly, Glass refigures Cocteau’s merchant figure as a father-artist figure, a rewriting that allows for the aestheticized reading Glass presents at the expense of other ideological presences, both racial and gendered, evident in the film’s complex symbolics.

Glass’s fantasy of the fi as a pilgrimage by the artist deep into the uncon- scious performs its own erasures of the discomfi othernesses that disturb the

fi ’s apparent focus on a pure (that is to say, depoliticized) aesthetic. In the case of the sexual dissonances fi ed in the movie there is ample resistance to such erasures. The queer in the fi is not only on display as an object of specular fantasy and scopophilia, s/he also talks back in the ways that Cocteau explores the category of the perverse, which is also the category of the other. First of all, as in other Cocteau texts like
Les Enfants terribles
, Cocteau’s
La Belle et la bête
emphasizes the incestuous character of domestic relations as exemplifi in the father-daughter dyad. If the fi is read as a fantasy of the father, then it is a fan- tasy of his desire for the daughter. But it is also a fantasy of Cocteau’s desire for the father, who is perpetually under threat by the forces of otherness in the fi whether racial (the moneylender) or sexual (the Beast who will supplant him as Belle’s lover). The uncanny physical resemblance of Marcel André, the actor who played the merchant, to Avenant and the prince is striking, as if to suggest that Belle’s lovers—her father, the Beast, Avenant, and the prince—are all fun- damentally the same. It is not inconsequential that Cocteau’s desire for the fa- ther, his anxiety over the fate of the father (ultimately a trope for his desire to father the fi all had noteworthy symbolic resonances within his own per- sonal history involving his father’s suicide. The way in which Belle unwittingly endangers her father, then saves him, provides an important symbolic axis for the fi as does the merchant’s abiding love for his daughter. The fi enacts the father’s guilt in this regard while providing him with a fantasy of release: it is permissible and not monstrous to lust after his daughter, presumably because that lust is contained within the normal structure of family life in which he gives his as yet virginal daughter to a young man in his stead. The Beast merely rep- resents the externalization of the father’s incest wish, a projection that substi- tutes bestiality for incest. In short, transgressive desire inhabits and perverts the bourgeois (and ultimately, national) norm.

Another perversion does, however, inhabit this text: the perverse desire of the narrator, projected through Beauty, for the Beast, which is to say, Cocteau’s desire for Marais. Here anxiety about effeminacy as well as guilt are evident since two of the characters played by Cocteau’s lover (Avenant and the prince) physically resemble the father as a type of perversely heterosexual mas- culinity, a masculinity always in threat of being undone by the many forms of sexual difference the film encodes in the male body. Avenant’s perversity lies in his desire to interfere between father and daughter, while the prince’s, only hinted at in the closural moments of the film, lies in the apparent contradic- tion between his all-too-immediate desire for Belle, who has been the object of both bestial
and
incestuous love, and his figuration of queer male beauty framed in Cocteau’s cinematographic (eroticized) gaze. Belle, as the virginal object of such loves, embodies perverse sexuality even as she is troped as an

emblem of purity. Her object relation to both Avenant and the Prince is con- flated in the figure of the Beast, who is both an ambiguated ideal (the prince as both heteronormative and queer) and the threatening lover (Avenant)
28
by virtue of being played by the same actor. The Beast condenses the anxieties and guilt circulating through these unstable forms of desire, encoding by his/her very difference the multiple configurations that complicate any notion of stable sexual identity. Thus, the queer dimensions of the multiple roles played by Marais—as Cocteau’s homosexual lover, as the object of heterosex- ual desire, as the Beast, as Avenant, as Ardent—inflect the film with a potent emblem of fluid sexual identities that resist simple categorization in the modes of mere hetero- or homo- or even queer normativity.

The Beast, then, is at one level the imaginary other of the director. But s/he is also an other, and the film suggests that this monstrous love can lead both Beauty and the Beast to a new humanity, one that leaves behind the troubled legacy of the patriarchal family, the perversion of restricted forms of sexual identity, and the disabling fear of all forms of difference, sexual or oth- erwise.
29
The Beast, depending upon the gaze constructing his or her pres- ence, is thus an ambiguous sexual construct, a queer, especially in a reading that incorporates Cocteau’s directorial eye into the context of the gaze that constructs the beast as an object of desire. From that perspective the film’s camera work becomes a sensuous point of contact between Cocteau and his lover, a way of framing their sexual relationship in a visual code that is un- ceasingly driven by the passion of the lover’s gaze. At that level of signification the Beast becomes the very signifier of queer presence in the film, despite the (not quite) conventional heterosexuality figured in the dénouement with which Cocteau was notoriously unhappy.

Indeed, as Hayward observes, “Cocteau did not like the ending of his film” (“Gender Politics” 129) and, “Sensing that the public preferred La Bête to the Prince (as indeed does Belle), Cocteau wished that he had ended the film with La Bête’s death and left Belle in mourning for La Bête” (ibid. 134, n.4). Such a move would have lent further pathos to the queer presence of the Beast at the expense of the heteronormative ideal the film’s closure ostensibly describes. Cocteau himself states, rather intriguingly, that “many people who saw the movie . . . would have preferred it if the beast had not turned into Prince Charming; like Beauty, they were disappointed by his transformation

. . . but, nonetheless, when the Prince asks Beauty if she is happy, I made her close her eyes and answer: ‘I shall have to get used to it’” (de Beaumont,
Beau- ty and the Beast
35). In fact, Cocteau engages in some retrospective rewriting of the script, the actual lines uttered by Belle and the Prince being somewhat different: “The Prince: ‘What’s the matter, Beauty?’ Beauty: ‘I’m looking at

you. I’m going to have to adjust’” (Hammond 376). Cocteau clearly leaves room here, in both versions of this scene, for resistance to the enormous pres- sure the narrative is under to conform to a normative notion of sexuality. The lines reflect, perhaps for the last time in the movie, the power of the queer margin—as it turns out, Belle too is attracted by the bestial more than by the idealized Prince, and the transformation will require her to “adjust.” Belle’s own desires, what
she
wants, remain opaque to say the least, a tissue of filial, bestial, and troubled heterosexual possibilities in which difference is always figured, the queer always in a potential state of eruption. Thus, even as mon- strous love is being erased, the film reinstates it in Belle’s retrospective attrac- tion to the difference(s) incarnated in the Beast and in the serial, performa- tive presence of Marais. Out of monstrous love emerges Cocteau’s critique of normative values. But that critique’s narrative logic nonetheless reproduces the very dissonances underpinning the troubled idealism that brings the movie to a close. The Queer and the Jew enact those dissonances as the film struggles into the discomfort of its closural opportunism.

Out-Takes

Cocteau’s
La Belle et la bête
teaches a number of things coincident with its post- war historical moment in which Jew and Queer resonate as signifi of a dif- ference that refuses monolithic notions of identity categories. In the margins of identity lies an ineradicable difference, the otherness that frames, as do all mar- gins, the orthodoxies of identity. Or, as Terence Hawkes puts it: “The margin is where authority faces its own limits. Characteristically, the very existence of those restricted to a periphery will inevitably bring the fundamental, meaning- making status of the center into question” (31). That margin makes of the queer a virtual presence with signifi relations to other forms of marginal differ- ence—racial, ethnic, sexual, class, and so forth. The Jew, as a historically overde- termined marker of racial difference, cannot help but be constructed in such a relation, making his or her presence a signifi of a potential queerness, harbor of an ineluctable alterity that refuses subsumption in a discursive economy ded- icated to the strictures and orthodoxies of normative identity—heterosexual, Christian, bourgeois. Slavoj Z
ˇ
izˇek argues that “in the anti-Semitic perspective, the Jew is precisely a person about whom it is never clear ‘what he really wants’—that is, his actions are always suspected of being guided by some hid- den motives (the Jewish conspiracy, world domination and the moral corrup- tion of gentiles, and so on)” (114). Curiously, this perspective, which codes the Jew (problematically) as an arch-signifi for undecidable political desire, only

hints at the sexual otherness(es) also fi ed in the Jew, who, like the Queer, re- mains ambiguous in his or her corrupt and corrupting desires, resistant to any determinate answer when posed the question “Che vuoi?” The Jew and Queer contravene structures of desire that seek to contain alterity through the imposi- tion of cultural, national, sexual, tropological, and other orthodoxies. Both Jew and Queer emblematize an exilic (ambiguated) identity constituted by their nonorthodox relation to normative discourses while also, importantly, refusing to be constructed as the simple binary against which such orthodoxies are de- fi Both remain in exile from the logic of the norm against which they are compared, but also from their construction as the other to the arbitrariness of that norm’s imperatives. Imagine the other of the other of the other, a phantas- mic hermeneutics of concealment and radical alterity in which nothing is what it seems. Which is to say: imagine fi a dream in which powerful stereo- types of otherness bump uncomfortably against one’s own confl otherness, as I would argue occurs in Cocteau’s
La Belle et la bête
. And imagine that con- fl alterity as especially so for the Jew and the Queer, defi by their em- bodiment of an alternative to logocentricism, the two being marked by bodily practices—circumcision and sodomy—that make them discursive ciphers, bod- ily signifi for practices that have powerful extradiscursive resonances. Marks of difference that they are, circumcision and sodomy contravene the desire for “univocity in interpretation” (Boyarin 16) threatening the “Hellenic search for univocity which the Universal Subject disembodies forth and which is frustrat- ed by women and Jews as the embodied signifi of difference” (ibid. 17).

But even the act of allocating a spurious one-to-one correspondence be- tween Jew and circumcision, Queer and sodomy, is to produce an oversim- plified version of a difference that is far more radically different than any such practices (or predictable hermeneutics) might entail. For the questions “Who the Jew?” “Who the Queer?” cannot be answered by recourse to normative categories of sexuality or gender or religious persuasion or practice. The act of instating those categories as binary twosomes (Jew/Christian, straight/gay, gay/queer, as recent epistemologies of identity would have it) seems tawdrily reductive, providing empty taxonomies whose politics are firmly tied to per- petuating controlled differences that are frequently more a function of nomenclature and ideological posturing than anything else. Thus no gay queers, no straight queers; no Christian Jews, no Palestinian Jews; no confla- tion of any or all the previously mentioned categories. The determination with which categories and nomenclatures are pursued in the name of differ- ence masks the elision of difference that is at stake in such suspect pursuits.

Is it possible to dislocate the notion of a queer identity from the telos of gender and sexuality, making it a site of a cultural difference not solely tied to

the determinations of either? Is it possible to do the same for the Jew in na- tional, ethnic, and religious terms? Such dislocations, such diasporas are al- ready in effect in both theory and practice, as Cocteau’s film readily demon- strates. The film articulates a radical otherness in permanent exile from itself (the most radical form of alterity). The aporia here is that the constructed space of heteronormativity against which other forms of sexual and gendered alteri- ty are posited may be a function of the “queer” need to taxonomize an alterity that enables its own discursive purposes while addressing the queerness that in- habits the putative purity of heteronormative discourse. Hence the heteronor- mative becomes the demonic other to the queer in a perverse mirroring of the very politics of difference against which the queer is posed.
La Belle et la bête
implicitly asks whether similar strategies of othering and othercide are at work in the way in which the Jew is defined in relation to the Christian, as if the two terms of religious and ethnic alterity represent an essential and unassailable pu- rity that sustains the very terms of such a perverse opposition.