Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (72 page)

1. Hayward makes the convincing argument, based on the tale’s connections with both the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros and the Indian myth of the Vedic Aspara, Urvasi, with relation to the beast’s ambisexuality, something reinforced by the play on gendered pronouns in the film script that make the beast both female (la bête) and male (le mon- stre) (“Gender Politics,” 127–28). Hayward’s reading, however, only picks up on the obvi- ous binarism the beast then comes to incarnate: “as a ‘she,’ La Bête is a witch; as a ‘he,’ the monster becomes a rival” (ibid., 128). Such a reading, however, misses the queering effect of the Beast as a bisexual object of simultaneous desire, anxiety, and revulsion.
   

2. Notable resonances exist between the figure of this beast, whose unspoken desire is to out his princely self (he wants to become himself—to step out of the closet, so to speak, of his bestial form), and Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle,” with its powerful- ly sublimated tropes of homoerotic disavowal. See Sedgwick 182–212.
   

3. See Galand 294 (who mistakenly says that Cocteau’s father committed suicide when Jean was eight), Pauly 86, and Steegmuller 9. Pauly notes “Cocteau’s obsession with the idea that his father, a talented painter . . . was an unavowed homosexual” (86), while Steegmuller quotes Cocteau himself, who only spoke publicly, and then only enigmati- cally, about his father’s suicide in 1963, the last year of Cocteau’s life: “My father com- mitted suicide in circumstances that would not cause anyone to commit suicide today”
   

   (9). Steegmuller further avers that Cocteau wished for “‘some Freudian to tell me the meaning of a dream I had several times a week beginning when I was ten. The dream stopped in 1912. My father, who was dead, was not dead. He had turned into a parrot in the Pré Catalan, one of the parrots whose squawking is always associated in my mind with the taste of foamy milk. In this dream my mother and I were about to sit down at a table in the farm of the Pré Catalan, which seemed to combine several farms and the cockatoo terrace of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. I knew that my mother knew, and that she didn’t know that I knew, and it was clear to me that she was trying to discover which of the birds it was that my father had turned into, and why he had turned into that bird. I awoke in tears because of the expression on her face: she was trying to smile’” (9–10; also qtd. in Galand 294 with a slightly different translation). The absence of the father, or the threat of his absence, is central to the thematics of
   La Belle et la bête
   , as is the father’s restoration and salvation. Not surprisingly, there is a telling moment in de Beaumont’s version where the parrot figures almost as a surrogate father and companion to Beauty while she is alone in the Beast’s castle:
   

   La Belle, continuant sa route, aperçut une autre troupe emplumée. C’était des per- roquets de toutes les espèces et de toutes les couleurs. Tous en sa présence se mirent a caqueter. L’un lui disait bonjour, l’autre lui demandait à déjeuner, un troisième plus galant la priait de l’embrasser. Plusieurs chantaient des airs d’opéra, d’autres déclamaient des vers composés par les meilleurs auteurs, et tous s’offraient à l’a- muser. Ils étaient aussi doux, aussi caressants que les habitants de la volière.
   

   Leur présence lui fit un vrai plaisir. Elle fut fort aise de trouver à qui parler, car le silence pour elle n’était pas un bonheur. Elle en interrogea plusieurs, qui lui répondirent en bêtes fort spirituelles. Elle en choisit un qui lui plut davantage.
   

   (de Beaumont,
   Beauty and the Beast
   32)
   

   [“Beauty, continuing on her path, saw another plumed flock—parrots of all kinds and all colours. In her presence they all began to cackle. One said hello to her, an- other asked her out for lunch, another, more gallant, begged to embrace her. Sev- eral sang opera airs, others declaimed lines composed by the best authors, and all offered to amuse her. They were every bit as gentle, every bit as affectionate, as the inhabitants of the aviary.
   

   Their presence gave her real pleasure. It overjoyed her to find conversation be- cause silence for her was not a cause for happiness. She questioned many of the parrots, who responded with great wit. She chose one who pleased her most.”]
   

   Cocteau’s Proustian dream, with its fantasy of trying to determine which parrot at the farm is his father, and the parrot sequence in the fairy tale, with its comforting motifs of companionship, music, verse, affectionate gentility, and even spirituality, indicate a place where Cocteau’s personal mythology intersects uncannily with the symbolic structure of de Beaumont’s tale.
   

4. As noted earlier in comments by Robert M. Hammond, the moneylender is dressed as a sorcerer, a visual trope that identifies him with a Reformation Germany stereotype of the Jew, but also one that figures in the cinematic symbology of Cocteau as director and scriptwriter for the play. In this last regard Cocteau also figures as the sorcerer capable of conjuring monkeys in mirrors, of making people fly, of transforming Beasts into Princes,
   

   or, as John J. Michalczyk puts it, “Once Cocteau took up the camera he assumed the role of a sorcerer’s apprentice. With a clever legerdemain he would put the spectator in the hyp- notic state of a collective, wakening dream” (12). The symbolic identification of Cocteau with filmic sorcery adds yet another dimension to the interchangeability figured in Cocteau’s relations with the Jew(s) represented in the film.
   

5. These may be tied in with the vitriol spewed by Lucien Rebatet, “who under the pseudonym of François Vinneuil did the film reviews for
   Je Suis Partout
   ” (Truffaut,
   French Cinema
   13). Truffaut cites one of Rebatet’s more outrageous pronouncements published in 1941: “‘In theory all cinematic activity is forbidden to Jews. They don’t seem to be very alarmed by this. They find reassurance in the official accomplices they always manage to recruit. Whatever is undertaken or decided in favor of French cinema, the first thing to be done is to de-Jew it” (13). One of the first of the
   comités d’organisation
   (what Alan Williams calls vehicles for “oligarchical self-regulation” [249]) instituted by the Vichy government in December 1940 was the so-called C.O.I.C. (Comité d’Organisation de l’Industrie Ciné- matographique) (ibid. 249–51). Typically, “C.O.I.C. implemented a new law requiring that anyone working in the cinema had to obtain a ‘professional identity card.’ The regu- lators’ notion of identity, however, was not exclusively professional: each applicant had to prove, among other qualifications, that he or she was not a Jew” (ibid. 251). Williams notes that previous to Vichy there had been “relatively little anti-Semitism within the [French film] industry” (252), but that in post-war France “Jews would never again be as visible or influential in the industry as they had been before the war” (295). See also Tony Judt’s summary of Renée Poznanski’s “exhaustive account of Jewish experience under Vichy, where she shows, paradoxically, that the Vichy government was not preoccupied by anti- Semitism. Its rulers didn’t care for Jews, of course, but for the most part they weren’t de- termined from the first to persecute them. Anti-Semitism was just one of the ways in which Vichy sought to ingratiate itself with the occupier and obtain concessions. And so, in Poz- nanski’s words, Jews were first excluded from the national community, then deprived of their nationality, later of their employment and possessions, and only then abandoned to the Germans” (42).
   

6. I note the manner in which this sentence reduces the diversity of American re- sponses to otherness to the convenience of a trope, thus reproducing the ineluctable dis- course of othering difference I seek to critique.
   

7. The film opens with an arrow from Avenant’s bow making its way into a room where Belle is attending to Félicie—by the film’s end that same arrow has been transposed into the arrow from Diana’s bow that kills Avenant, who is then transformed into the Beast, thus re- leasing the Prince from his spell. The circulation of bodies here occurs at a dizzying pace and enacts the fluidity with which sexual personae are taken on and cast aside.
   

8. Besides being about homoerotic love, Hayward avers that
   La Belle et le bête
   is “about attempting to discover a different, non-phallic perception of human relationships.” Read- ing Beauty’s desire for the Beast as an attempt to escape from “a marriage of reason” through the confrontation with the fear of difference—Beauty “wants to be ‘frightened’ (
   ‘J’aime avoir peur’
   [‘
   I love feeling fear
   ’] she declares)” (“
   La Belle et la bête
   ,” 48)—Hayward further suggests that “the psychology of the unconscious, sexual awakening and the female agencing of desire were images not seen on-screen since the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. The advocacy of a female subjectivity (the story is told from Belle’s point of view) and the notion of equality, so present in this film, ran very contrary to the prevailing mes- sage of films in the late-1940s and early-1950s” (ibid.).
   

9. I echo Eric Savoy’s rescripting of Michael Warner’s desire to make theory queer: “Queer, that is, as in: Always. Already. More than ever.
   Now
   ” (363).
   

10. The French word
    travesti
    has strong resonances with the notion of disguise in the sense of playing a female role, female impersonation (drag queen), and by extension with homosexuality and transvestism.
    

Works Cited

Bach, Raymond. “Cocteau and Vichy: Family Disconnections.”
L’Esprit Créateur
33.1 (1993): 29–37.

Bazin, André.
French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Esthet- ic.
Trans. Stanley Hochman. Foreword by François Truffaut. New York: Ungar, 1981.

de Beaumont, Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince.
Beauty and the Beast.
Trans. Richard Howard. Illus. Hilary Knight. Afterword by Jean Cocteau. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

———
La Belle et la bête d’après Madame de Villeneuve
. Illus. Ludk Maásek. Paris: Deux Coqs d’Or, 1970.

Birnbaum, Pierre.
Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Pre- sent.
Trans. Miriam Kochan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Boyarin, Daniel.
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Brown, Frederick.
An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau
. New York: Viking, 1968.

Bryant, Sylvia. “Re-Constructing Oedipus Through ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
Criticism

31.4 (1989): 439–53.

Carroll, David.
French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Cocteau, Jean.
The Art of Cinema.
Ed. André Bernard and Claude Gauteur. Trans. Robin Buss. London: Boyars, 1994.

———
Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film.
Trans. Robert Duncan. New York: Dover, 1972.

———
La Belle et la bête
. Directed by Jean Cocteau. Music by Georges Auric. Starring Jean Marais, Josette Day, Marcel André, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, and Michel Auclair. France, 1946.

———
Essai de critique indirecte.
Abbeville Somme: Bernard Grasset, 1932.

Cone, Michèle C.
Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Dyer, Richard.
Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film
. London: Routledge, 1990. Fuss, Diana.
Identification Papers
. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Galand, René. “Cocteau’s Sexual Equation.”
Homosexualities and French Literature: Cul- tural Contexts/Critical Texts
, 279–94. Ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

Galef, David. “A Sense of Magic: Reality and Illusion in Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast
.”
Literature Film Quarterly
12.2 (1984): 96–106.

Gilman, Sander.
Freud, Race, and Gender.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

———
The Jew’s Body
. London: Routledge, 1991.

Gladstone, Bill. “Reflective Glass: Composer’s Singular Vision Transforms a Film Classic Into a Stunning New Opera.”
Performance
8 (November/December 1995): 9–14.

Glass, Philip. “Programme Notes [
La Belle et la bête
].”
Performance
8 (November/Decem- ber 1995): 36–37.

Green, Mary Jean. “Fascists on Film: The Brasillach and Bardèche
Histoire du cinéma
.”
Fas- cism, Aesthetics, and Culture
, 164–78. Ed. Richard J. Golsan. Hanover: UP of New England, 1992.

Greene, Naomi. “
La vie en rose
: Images of the Occupation in French Cinema.”
Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and ‘the Jewish question’ in France,
283–98. Ed. Lawrence

D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Hains, Maryellen. “Beauty and the Beast: Twentieth Century Romance.”
Merveilles and Contes
3.1 (1989): 75–83.

Hammond, Robert M., ed.
Beauty and the Beast.
New York: New York UP, 1970. Hawkes, Terence.
Meaning by Shakespeare
. London: Routledge, 1992.

Hayward, Susan. “Gender Politics—Cocteau’s Belle Is Not That Bête: Jean Cocteau’s
La Belle et la bête
(1946).”
French Film: Texts and Contexts
, 127–36. Ed. Susan Hay- ward and Ginette Vincendeau. London: Routledge, 1990.

——— “
La Belle et la bête
.”
History Today
46.7 (July 1996): 43–48.

Hoggard, Lynn. “Writing with the Ink of Light: Jean Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast.
”
Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation
, 123–34. Ed. Wendell Aycock and Michael Schoenecke. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1988.

Hsia, R. Po-chia. “Jews as Magicians in Reformation Germany.”
Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis
, 115–39. Ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz. New York: New York UP, 1991.