Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (69 page)

is compounded by the film’s disturbingly Aryan appearance, but Cocteau thought himself beyond politics. If his visions seemed to overlap with Nazi fantasies of the ideal hero, that was not his problem. For him, the mission of the work of art was personal, not social.
(321)

The combination of overt careerism that played a part in Cocteau’s return to the cinema during the Occupation, the consummate narcissism of an aes- thetic vision that pretends to separate the personal from the social (as if the two are not thoroughly interwoven, imbricated the one in the other), not to mention the choice of Wagnerian or Germanic material with obvious con- nections to Nazi ideology (all of which are evident in the role played by Cocteau in shaping
L’Eternel Retour
), helped create the aesthetic circum- stances that lead to the vision of otherness advanced in
La Belle et la bête
. It is worth remembering that reviews of the latter film accused it of “possessing Germanic characteristics” (Hayward, “Gender Politics” 134) and Michel de Saint Pierre found its Germanic character “disconcerting” (qtd. ibid.).
20

The polarities of Aryan and Jew as racial and ideological opposites are ex- emplified in a passage, cited by David Carroll, from Édouard Drumont, au- thor of
La France juive
and a prominent turn-of-the-century French nation- alist and antisemite. The passage instantiates many of the subtexts evident in Cocteau’s presentation of the moneylender in
La Belle et la bête
:

The Semite is mercenary, greedy, scheming, subtle, sly; the Aryan is en- thusiastic, heroic, courtly, disinterested, frank, assured, to the point of naïveté. The Semite is of the material world, seeing hardly anything be- yond present life; the Aryan is a son of the heavens, ceaselessly preoccu- pied with superior aspirations; one lives in reality, the other in the ideal. The Semite is by instinct merchant; . . . the Aryan is a farmer, poet, monk, and above all soldier. The Semite has no creative faculty, while in contrast the Aryan invents; not the slightest invention was ever made by a Semite.
(176)

This predictably malicious and fatuous portrait of opposites sets some note- worthy paradigms for stereotyping racial otherness against a supposedly Aryan norm, paradigms that are followed in Cocteau’s treatment of
La Belle et la bête
. The bourgeois heroism of Belle’s father struggling to make his for- tune followed by the peripeteia that reduces him to a simple farmer, the trans- formation of the Beast into the prince followed by the closing sequence of the film in which Belle and Ardent fly away beyond Diana’s pavilion, the idealism of the father-daughter relationship in which extraordinary sacrifices are made

to sustain that idealism, all arguably fit the perverse logic of Drumont’s defi- nition of Aryan identity. Similarly, the portrayal of the mercenary money- lender emptying Belle’s father’s house of its furniture, his evident materialism and greed, and even Cocteau’s intense frustration with the inability of the actor playing the role (remember, “The Semite has no creative faculty, while in contrast the Aryan invents”) recounted in his diary of the making of the film (
Beauty and the Beast
88–89), all fit the logic of Drumont’s description of the Semite.

The issue of the Frenchness of the tale is also worth dwelling on briefly, if only because it shows how the narrative, in Cocteau’s own reading of it, is predicated upon a logic of difference—sexual, racial, or national—that struc- tures the film’s meaningful constructs. Cocteau, while contributing to the Francization of the tale by choosing it as the first of his film vehicles in the postwar era of reconstruction, an era in which the recuperation of French na- tional identity was at stake, nonetheless recognizes the tale itself as alien, com- ing from elsewhere:

The famous tale of
Beauty and the Beast
is British in origin. Madame Lep- rince de Beaumont (1711–1780) lived in England for a while and must have heard ghost stories there, as well as rumors of those sons of certain great families who were hidden away because of some birthmark or blem- ish that might frighten society and dishonor a noble name.

Possibly one of those monsters, shut up in some Scottish castle, gave her the idea of a human beast who bears a noble heart under a frightening appearance and suffers the pangs of hopeless love.

(de Beaumont,
Beauty and the Beast
35)

Cocteau’s recognition of the tale’s national otherness is only one aspect of the simultaneous movement evident in the film toward internalizing that other- ness even as it is disavowed. Remember, Cocteau’s
personnage intérieur
(“inner character”) had been scapegoated by Laubreaux as contaminated by Semites. The film, then, simultaneously articulates disidentification with that ethnic otherness even as the erotic (queer) link in the signifying chain of Jew and ho- mosexual is internalized, both by the film’s signifying structures and the per- sonal circumstances circulating round Marais and Cocteau’s relationship as lovers. The move ironically reinstates the Jew’s presence in the metonymic form of queer other even as the representation of male Jews in the film enacts Cocteau’s disidentification of homosexuality and Jewishness. Disidentifica- tion resolutely reinstates identification.
21
Homology gives way to hybridity as

the beauty-beast construct that is the film’s crucial relay is aligned with the queer-Jew homology buried in the margins that center the narrative. Het- erophilia (the other as Beast) confronts homophilia, which articulates the logic of self-sameness that links Jew to queer in the film’s margins.

The further resonances of Cocteau’s reading of the tale as originating in “those sons of certain great families who were hidden away because of some birthmark or blemish that might frighten society and dishonor a noble name” are worth noting in terms of other notions of difference figured in the film. Later in this essay I discuss the notion of the blemish, the physical mark of difference, that literally marked Cocteau during the making of the film and in a way profoundly connected with both the queer erotics and the racial stereotyping evident in the film. Suffice it to note for the time being that when Cocteau speaks of sons of great families hidden away because of a birth- mark or blemish that presents a potential threat to society, one that involves dishonour, Cocteau is figuring the phantasm of a differential erotics (the queer) as much as he is figuring the threat to the purity of class and race (pat- rimony) posed by “illicit” couplings—with beasts, with Jews, with servants, and so forth.

The specter of the threat of otherness—again, whether sexual, racial, or national—clearly subsumes the narrative logic of the film. In this sense the work of the film coincides with the work of nation—the heterosexual French nation contaminated by foreign presences (Jewish, German, or queer)— which becomes nation only by defining itself apart from that other by which it achieves its illusory sense of autonomous difference. And the other in the film is not just the beast who is eventually transformed into a marriageable partner despite the queer overtones that charge the erotics circulating round his/her presence.
22
Otherness, however marginal, is also figured in at least three additional forms by the film. These include the usurer, who empties Belle’s father’s house of its possessions as he lies sick; the draper, who though almost entirely excised represents the way in which the alien other is disci- plined if not erased; and the sexual other, the queer, homoerotic other figured in the metanarrative of Cocteau’s relations with his lead actor Marais, in the subtly eroticized relations of Lodovic and Avenant, as well as in the Beast him- self, who gives new meaning to the homoerotic by being three men in one.
23
It is not too much of an interpetive leap to figure Belle’s father, the mer- chant-patriarch, as emblematic of a form of national identity threatened by the alien moneylender. And in the context of Cocteau’s own personal histo- ry—his father, Georges, committed suicide when Cocteau was ten years old—the threat to the father, the loss of the father, carries a palpable symbol- ic charge.
24
Furthermore, in the postwar context Cocteau’s narrative paradigm

not only refers to French national identity threatened by German invaders but also reproduces the very logic of the invaders themselves. Cocteau’s German governess, Fräulein Josephine, who figures significantly in his memoirs for “taking her young charge to the circus, sewing costumes for his toy theatre, helping him win school prizes in German, drawing and gymnastics” (Steeg- muller 12), lies in the murky background of the fraught national contexts played out in the film, as do the conflicting dimensions of French national culture, drawn simultaneously to collaboration with and resistance to the German invaders. Furthermore, Cocteau’s personal diary written during the filming of
La Belle et la bête
, provides us with the rather interesting account of the chess and usurer scene. The entry (“Tuesday evening, 10 o’clock” [No- vember 1945]) begins by telling us that “I’m disfigured, devoured by these rashes swelling my eyes and cheeks” (88). Then, as Cocteau discusses the film- ing of the chess and usurer scene, we’re told that “as soon as the film gets away from the leading characters and
an alien element is introduced
[“et qu’on y mêle un élément étranger”], the rhythm is broken and it requires an incredi- ble effort to get it back again” (ibid.; emphasis added).

By the end of this entry Cocteau is “watching the countless errors of the Russian actor who’s playing the usurer. He couldn’t move or talk. He looked the part perfectly, but for the rest he was absolutely hopeless. If these shots of him screen as badly as they played, I’ll double the part myself. Courage. Courage. Courage” (89). The entry moves from the actual disfigurement Cocteau experienced during the making of the film, through to the “alien el- ement” who disrupts the making of the film, through to the silence, immo- bility, and ineptitude of the Russian alien playing the Jewish alien, through to Cocteau’s own (dis)figuring of himself in the alien’s role, as if to echo the image of disfigurement with which the passage begins. This last substitution is significant, for like the physical disfigurement Cocteau experiences, it be- trays Cocteau’s own recognition of himself as other, a particularly evocative working through of the virulent, internalized homophobia that “comes out” in the rash, a rash reminiscent of the “birthmark or blemish” briefly noted earlier on in Cocteau’s comments about the origin of the story of beauty and the beast in Britain. In this context the red rash on his cheek denotes a sym- bolic displacement, perhaps, of the pink triangle required of homosexuals or of the infamous yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. But the rash, too, signals a transference from Cocteau to the Jewish differend and back, its presence symbolizing the interchangeability of self- loathing with loathing for the other.
25
Jacques Le Goff calls the usurer a “contagious leper” (50) in his analysis of the relations between death and usury, and Cocteau’s psychic contagion, transmuted into the material sign of

the rash, merely gives presence to a pernicious signifying chain that extends from sexuality to ethnicity.

The reversibility of this chain, its capacity to reflect and invert difference, is crucial to understanding how Jew and homosexual converge in Cocteau’s affliction. Cocteau is infected by a pestilence instantiated in the Jew’s body, a pestilence with familiar antisemitic overtones that Gilman locates in the “view of the Jew as syphilitic” that was “not limited to the anti-Semitic fringe of the turn of the [nineteenth] century” (
The Jew’s Body
125). Gilman discusses Mar- cel Proust—“whose uncomfortable relationship to his mother’s Jewish identi- ty haunted his life almost as much as did his gay identity” (ibid.)—stating that, for Proust,

being Jewish is analogous to being homosexual—it is an “incurable dis- ease.” But what marks this disease for all to see? In the
mentalité
of the turn of the century, syphilis in the male must be written on the skin, just as it is hidden within the sexuality of the female. Proust, who discusses the signs and symptoms of syphilis with a detailed clinical knowledge in the same volume [of
Remembrance of Things Past
], knows precisely what marks the sexuality of the Jew upon his physiognomy. It is marked upon his face as “ethnic eczema.” It is a sign of sexual and racial corruption as surely as the composite photographs of the Jew made by Francis Galton at the time revealed the “true face” of the Jew.
(ibid.)

In such a context Cocteau’s rash marks the contagion of sexual difference as much as it marks correspondences between the ethnic and sexual otherness figured in the Jew. The rash functions doubly, reproducing not only the “eth- nic excema” associated with perverse Jewish sexuality but also the sexual ex- cema figured in the homosexual. The Jewish differend marks the place where the sexual differend, Cocteau’s queerness, comes out in a phenomenal dis- placement of one form of otherness transmuted into another—which is to say an otherness that is not merely other to some form of normative ethnicity or sexuality, but an otherness that refuses to be defined in relation to a simple act of binary difference. The simultaneous displacement of one form of otherness by yet another queers Cocteau’s project in
La Belle et la bête
. Pervasive sexual and ethnic stereotypes evident in the film are placed under enormous semi- otic pressure by the very ambiguities exposed as they collide in the figure of the Jewish merchant in the film.

Cocteau’s diary entry symbolically addresses the disruptive alien who
also
disfigures the film, unsettling its rhythmic coherence with his inability to “move or talk,” his “hopeless[ness],” his apparent doubleness in relation to

Cocteau himself. Astonishingly, the actor who played this marginally crucial role is not listed in the cast credits, as if the presence of his alienness had to be effaced even as it was proving so disruptive, a gesture with disturbing res- onances in relation to the strategies of systematic extermination effected by German nationals in the name of a putative Aryan purity. François Truffaut, in his foreword to André Bazin’s
French Cinema of the Occupation and Resis- tance: The Birth of a Critical Esthetic,
remembers “film credits on which cer- tain names had been scratched out or blacked over so as to render them illeg- ible; the idea was to eliminate the name of so and so, who had worked on the film—a Jew” (12).
26
Truffaut’s comment, if anything, suggests that the Russ- ian actor may also have been a Jew, thus warranting his effacement from the film’s credits. The cultural work of such gestures is not trivial and merits a re- turn to questions I posed at the beginning of this essay regarding the film’s transposition into more recent contexts.