Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (71 page)

Again, I posit the other of the other of the other as a nonparadigmatic, ci- phered alterity that eludes all categories, even that of radical alterity. Is this ci- phered alterity what it means to be both Jewish and Queer: always already, al- ways potentially, in
all
ways now?
30
La Belle et la bête
affirms what it means to be both beautiful and bestial, that is to say, human, always capable of both difference and its erasure, aways capable of what Cocteau called “travestis in- quiétants. Le sexe surnaturel de la beauté” (“Troubling disguises. The uncan- ny sex of beauty”;
Essai
210).
31
In the travesty of the bestial lies a perturbato- ry resemblance to a beauty composed of both flames and ashes. For if the Beast’s transformative erasure at the film’s end mirrors the doubly erased fig- ure of the Jew hidden in the margins of the film, then Beast and Jew have merged in the symbolics of the film as emblems of an always threatened, al- ways threatening difference.

Notes

I am deeply indebted to Richard Dellamora who played an active, collaborative role in shap- ing the argument of this essay and without whom it could (and would) not have been writ- ten. I also wish to thank Donna Palmateer Pennee and Martha J. Nandorfy for their close readings of earlier drafts of this essay. Ann Pellegrini gave me the benefit of an astute com- mentary that made me reconsider crucial assumptions buried in the first version of this essay, originally published in much shorter form in
textual practice
12.1 (1998): 69–88.

Daniel Boyarin gave me the gift of an elliptical comment that resolved a crucial strategic problem in the last section of the essay. An anonymous reader for Columbia University Press pushed the essay in productive directions and took the time to offer detailed comments on cru- cial aspects of its argument. I thank them all for their patience and constructive insight.

1. Sander Gilman observes that “skin color marked the Jew as both different and dis- eased” (
   The Jew’s Body
   176) and that “the association between the Jewish nose and the cir- cumcised penis, as signs of Jewish difference, was been made [
   sic
   ] in the crudest and most revolting manner during the 1880s. In the streets of Berlin and Vienna, in penny-papers or on the newly installed ‘Litfassäulen,’ or advertising columns, caricatures of Jews could be seen . . . . These extraordinary caricatures stressed one central aspect of the physiogno- my of the Jewish male, his nose, which represented the hidden sign of his sexual difference, his circumcised penis. The Jews’ sign of sexual difference, their sexual selectivity, as an in- dicator of their identity was, as Friedrich Nietzsche strikingly observed in
   Beyond Good and Evil,
   the focus of the Germans’ fear of the superficiality of their recently created national identity” (189). Gilman’s book contains an entire chapter devoted to “The Jewish Nose” (167–93), a small indication of the importance of this organ in the bodily discourses as- sociated with the Jew. James Shapiro notes that “the belief that Jews had large hooked noses, had earlier appeared in medieval England (at least in the marginal drawings of monastic scribes), and would reappear in the eighteenth century, but were surprisingly rare in early modern English prints depicting Jews” (33–34).
   

2. See Slater for visual confirmation of this.
   

3. Sprigge and Kihm state that the fairy-tale “is usually attributed to Perrault because
   

   . . . it appears in the
   Bibliothèque Rose
   , on which all well brought up children are nurtured, in company with Charles Perrault’s famous stories” (164). For further commentary on the sources of the story, see Pauly 84–86, Hayward, “Gender Politics” 127–28.
   

4. Only the dimmest echo of the moneylender exists in these versions of the story, troped as the briefly mentioned creditors who seize the merchant’s ship, thus impoverish- ing him, “leaving him,” as Cocteau puts it in his treatment for the film, “nothing, not even enough to pay off a lodging at an inn of the port” (
   Beauty
   1).
   

5. The general critical blindness to this aspect of the film calls for further comment in relation to critical complicities with antisemitic representations. Literary critics who have written on the film with varying critical methods and levels of sophistication consistently miss the antisemitic coding described in this essay. Among others who overlook this aspect of the film, see McGowan, Hains, Hoggard, Bryant, Popkin, Galef, and Pauly. Naomi Greene’s study of French historical films dealing with the Vichy era notes the way in which denials of France’s antisemitic legacy continue to be “rendered as believable, as credible, as possible” (296). She concludes that “as the rise to power of Le Pen suggests—the deep- seated attitudes which helped establish Vichy, and which flourished during that regime, have by no means disappeared” (297), suggesting that a filmic refusal to confront the past begs the question of “how we then come to terms with the present” (297). This essay begs the same question in relation to Cocteau’s treatment of the Jew in
   La Belle et la bête
   . For an essay dealing with similar issues in relation to a canonical work on French and interna- tional film, Robert Brasillach’s and Maurice Bardèche’s
   Histoire du cinéma
   , a “first major ef- fort to write an international history of film,” see Green, 164. Brasillach (who was execut- ed in 1945 for collaboration) and Bardèche attempt, according to Green, “to restructure political reality in aesthetic terms” (178), an argument that could well be made in relation to the aestheticization of the figure of the Jew in Cocteau’s film. This would explain criti- cal silence on the matter—the moneylender is unremarkable because so negligible in terms of the overall aesthetics of the film. As soon as he is politicized by a reading such as this, his import changes dramatically.
   

6. I say this in the face of Richard Dyer’s observation, drawn from Susan Hayward, that
   

   La Belle et la bête
   is the “least ‘obviously’ homo-erotic” of Cocteau’s films (67).
   

7. Rebecca Pauly suggests that one may regard
   Beauty and the Beast
   as a “parable of France during the war, with the Beast as Germany and the rose and Beauty as the flower of youth sacrificed, or regard Vichy France as the Beast under the evil spell covering its fun- damental goodness” (86). Both readings oversimplify the dense levels of coding in the film that mix sexual, national, racial, and personal levels of signification. Further, Pauly’s first reading fails to address the politics implicit in the epiphanic ending to the film in which Beauty and the Beast transformed are united. Nor does her second reading deal with the idealist politics of regarding Vichy France in terms that recuperate its “fundamental good- ness,” especially if one then factors in the antisemitic images promulgated by the film. Nonetheless, Pauly’s reading does lay some basic groundwork for thinking through the problem of how nation gets figured in the film’s imaginary.
   

8. For an essay that establishes the connections between the Jew and the sorcerer in Re- formation Germany see R. Po-chia Hsia, who states that “in its fight to establish orthodoxy and control, the medieval church gradually eroded away any conceptual distinctions be- tween heretics, magicians, and Jews, lumping all under the realm of darkness, attacking all as the enemy of true religion” (116). Hsia’s thesis is that “the remarkable development in the century between 1450 and 1550 was that the medieval ambivalence concerning Jews as ma- gicians eventually gave rise to a new view of German Jews which dissolved the medieval foundations of pogroms but established simultaneously the basis of modern antisemitism” (ibid.). Hammond’s association of the moneylender in the Cocteau film with a sorcerer merely reinscribes deeply held cultural prejudices circulating round the Jew. Further, Ham- mond’s comment indicates the degree to which such associations are unthought and trans- parent, forming part of a coherent symbolic language of antisemitism that textures the film.
   

9. In fact, Cocteau had known Breker “since the 1920s, when Breker had been a stu- dent of Maillol in Paris, and the idealized homoerotic youths in Cocteau’s own drawings and paintings are members of the same race as the ‘noble’ athletes created by Breker. And Cocteau was at least consistent enough to remain friends with Breker and his wife after the war and to commission Breker to create his tomb sculpture” (White 191).
   

10. For a more complete exposition of “l’affaire Breker” see Touzot 142–46. All trans- lations from the French are mine.
    

11. See also Cocteau’s comments to the effect that “Je crois être un bon exemple, puisque je ne relève d’aucun groupe” (“I believe myself to be a good example because I’m not a product of any group”; qtd. in Touzot 123). Cocteau’s refusal to align himself with any one group is often used to buttress arguments about his supposed apoliticism (such a refusal necessarily enacting its own politicism).
    

12. Similarly, Cocteau’s affirmations about the relations between fictive writing and his- tory suggest an aestheticization of history that may be aligned with his aestheticized sense of politics, which proclaims the artist beyond politics: “I like imaginary stories better than history, whose truths eventually lose their shape. The lies in stories eventually become a kind of truth or, at least, a mysterious, new, and delightful form of history” (de Beaumont,
    Beauty and the Beast
    35).
    

13. I recognize that this observation suggests there are limitations to understanding a sexual identity (in this case homosexuality) as comprising, in and of itself, a politics. Fur- ther I recognize the degree to which the language of tolerance (in the contradictory face of
    

    attacks upon) is deeply complicit with the agency of the dominant majority. As a further complication of the contradictory dimensions of Cocteau’s politics, see White’s assertion that “If Cocteau was attacked by Vichy collaborators for
    The Typewriter
    (
    La Machine à écrire
    1941) and, along with many other bystanders, beaten up by right-wing rowdies because he refused to salute their flag during a 1943 anti-Bolshevist demonstration on the Champs- Elysées, at the same time he was dangerously naïve politically and flirted disgustingly with the Germans” (191).
    

14. Frederick Brown notes that Cocteau “portrayed himself as a bourgeois chimera (‘
    fils d’une famille bourgeoise, je suis un monstre bourgeois
    ’)” (“son of a bourgeois family, I am a bourgeois monster”; 6). I note that the “monster,” a crucial trope in the film, complicates the register of otherness for which he stands via the class context implicit in Cocteau’s self- evaluation as a “bourgeois monster.”
    

15. Others on the roster included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice de Vlaminck, Hubert Yencesse, and Marie Laurencin (Cone 76). Vlaminck, as noted in Francis Steegmuller’s bi- ography of Cocteau, was one of the French artists involved in the “an official Nazi-Vichy cultural interchange” (443), as were André Derain and Despiau, who also accepted invita- tions to tour Germany. For a more detailed listing of Cocteau’s friendships with both Nazi and Resistance sympathizers, see Touzot 137–38. As Touzot states, Cocteau had both friends and enemies, like Picasso, in both camps. Cocteau himself stated that “la radio anglaise [the BBC] m’accuse de ‘collaborer.’ La presse franco-allemande m’accuse d’être gaulliste. Voilà ce qui arrive aux esprits libres qui refusent de se mêler de politique et n’y comprennent rien” (“English Radio accuses me of ‘collaboration.’ The Franco-German press accuses me of being a Gaullist. This is what happens to free spirits who refuse to get involved in politics and who don’t understand anything about them”; qtd. in Touzot 137). Again Cocteau’s pretense at apoliticism is, as I suggest earlier, a form of politics, one close- ly aligned with denial and quietism.
    

16. With regard to similar problems in defining an essential notion of fascism, Robert
    

    O. Paxton observes that from the “profusion of national differences and changes in inter- nal fascist programs, it has proven all but impossible to extract an irreducible core—the so called ‘fascist minimum’” (48). Paxton affirms nonetheless that “the fascist analogy can be useful. It can help us to understand historic fascism not by its external trappings but by the particular functions it carried out; and it can turn our attention to the kinds of political opportunities, and the traditional potential allies, that have always been necessary to bring fascist movements to power” (52). Similarly, understanding the manner in which antise- mitic discourses are enabled, whether wittingly or unwittingly, in the aesthetics of Cocteau’s film provides further opportunity to understand the function of antisemitic dis- courses in a particularly charged historical moment.
    

17. David J. Jacobson outlines a working model for Cocteau’s conflicted relations with Jews, one based on a close reading of Cocteau’s relations with Maurice Sachs. According to Jacobson, “The lives, letters, and journals of other, generally less heinous figures [French antisemites like Drieu la Rochelle, Maurice Bardèche, and Aristide Maillol] re- veal a . . . discrepancy: an oscillation between sporadic outbursts against suddenly gener- alized Jews and an almost effusive philo-Semitism reserved for individual ones. In the pri- vate writings of Jean Cocteau, for example, this tendency has become especially clear” (181). Jacobson’s fascinating case study explains, in part, how Cocteau was able to dis- seminate antisemitic stereotypes of the Jew while also being capable of advocacy on be- half of specific Jews.
    

18. I do not mean to imply that antipathy for Wagner’s politics necessitates a corre- sponding aversion to his art, nor do I mean to suggest that the two can so conveniently be separated—but I do mean to suggest that the relation between the aestheticization of pol- itics and the politics of aestheticization complicates the ethical dimensions of one’s re- sponse to the Wagnerian oeuvre
    in its entirety
    .
    

19. To argue that Cocteau was “out” as a gay man is an anachronistic, post-Stonewall conception of identity projected onto him. Cocteau’s openness about his homosexuality is contradictory. Edmund White notes that Cocteau “published
    A White Paper
    (
    Le Livre blanc)
    [a story about homoerotic desire] in 1928. Both the publisher and the author were anony- mous. The publisher was Maurice Sachs, the half-Jewish homosexual author of
    Witch’s Sab- bath
    , who later collaborated with the Nazis and was killed by them at the end of the war. The author, Cocteau, never acknowledged his paternity of
    Le Livre blanc
    , although he did allow it to be included in his complete works” (171). Later White avers that Cocteau had “never wanted to write about homosexuality (except in the heavily disguised and anony- mous
    Le Livre blanc
    ) because he didn’t want to offend his mother” (196). Clearly, the lim- its to Cocteau’s public presentation of his sexuality require careful contextualization.
    

20. According to Hayward, Cocteau rejected such criticisms save for “the German cult of the body—as in Breker’s sculptures” (“
    La Belle et la bête
    ,” 48); she links accusations of Germanicism in Cocteau’s work with criticism of his “openness” about his homosexuality.
    

21. In this regard Diana Fuss usefully observes that “identification thus makes identity possible, but also places it at constant risk: multiple identifications within the same subject can compete with each other, producing further conflicts to be managed; identifications that once appeared permanent or unassailable can be quickly dislodged by the newest ob- ject attachment; and identifications that have been ‘repudiated and even overcompensat- ed’ can reestablish themselves once again much later” (49). In other words, identification grounds disidentification in ways that circumvent the predictable relations implicit to bi- nary dialectics, something Cocteau’s film details as it articulates epistemologies of differ- ence and similitude via the specifics of both its historical and (I would argue) deeply per- sonal agencies.