“How lovely you are, Violaine, and how lovely is the world where you are.”78
“Who is she who stands before me, gentler than the breeze, like the moon among the young foliage?… Here she is like the fresh honeybee unfolding its newborn wings, like a lanky doe, and like a flower that does not even know it is beautiful.”79
“Let me breathe your scent like that of the earth, when it glows and is washed like an altar, and brings forth blue and yellow flowers.
“And let me breathe the summer’s aroma that smells of grass and hay, and is like the autumn’s fragrance.”80
She is the sum of all nature: the rose and the lily, the star, the fruit, the bird, the wind, the moon, the sun, the fountain, “the peaceful tumult, in noon’s light, of a great port.”81
And she is still more: a peer.
“Now, this time for me, that luminous point of night’s living sands is something quite different from a star,
“Someone human like me …”82
“You will be alone no more, and I will be in you and with you, with you forever, the devoted one. Someone yours forever who will never be absent, your wife.”83
“Someone to listen to what I say and trust in me.
“A soft-voiced companion who takes us in her arms and attests she is a woman.”84
Body and soul, in taking her into his heart, man finds his roots in this earth and accomplishes himself.
“I took this woman, and she is my measure and my earthly allotment.”85 She is a burden, and man is not made to be burdened.
“And the foolish man finds himself surprised by this absurd person, this great heavy and cumbersome thing.
“So many dresses, so much hair, what can he do?
“He is no longer able, he no longer wants to be rid of her.”86
This burden is also a treasure. “I am a great treasure,” says Violaine.
Reciprocally, woman achieves her earthly destiny by giving herself to man.
“For what is the use of being a woman, unless to be gathered?
“And being this rose, if not to be devoured? And of being born,
“Unless to belong to another and to be the prey of a powerful lion?”87
“What shall we do, who can only be a woman in his arms, and in his heart a cup of wine?”88
“But you my soul say: I have not been created in vain and he who is called to gather me is alive!”
“The heart that was waiting for me, ah! what joy for me to fill it.”89
Of course this union of man and woman is to be consummated in the presence of God; it is holy and belongs in the eternal; it should be consented to by a deep movement of the will and cannot be broken by an individual caprice. “Love, the consent that two free people grant each other, seemed to God so great a thing that he made it a sacrament. In this as in all other matters the sacrament gives reality to that which was but the heart’s supreme desire.”90 And further:
“Marriage is not pleasure but the sacrifice of pleasure, it is the study made by two souls who forever, henceforth, and to end beyond themselves,
“Must be content with each other.”91
It is not only joy that man and woman will bring to each other through this union; each will take possession of the other’s being. “He it was who knew how to find that soul within my soul!… He it was who came to me and held out his hand. He was my calling! How can I describe it? He was my origin: it was he by whom and for whom I came into the world.”92
“A whole part of myself which I thought did not exist because I was busy elsewhere and not thinking of it. Ah! My God, it exists, it does exist, terribly.”93
And this being appears as justified, necessary for the one it completes. “It is in him that you were necessary,” says Prouhèze’s Angel. And Rodrigo:
“For what is it to die but to stop being necessary?
“When was she able to do without me? When shall I cease to be for her that without which she could not have been herself?”94
“They say that no soul was made except in a life and in a mysterious relationship with other lives.
“But for us it is still more than that. For I exist as I speak; one single thing resonating between two people.
“When we were being fashioned, Orion, I think that a bit of your substance was left over and that I am made of what you lack.”95
In the marvelous necessity of this union, paradise is regained, death conquered:
“At last the being who existed in paradise is here remade of a man and woman.”96
“We will never manage to do away with death unless it be by one another.
“As purple mixed with orange gives pure red.”97
Finally, in the form of another, each one attains the Other, that is God, in his plenitude.
“What we give one another is God in different guises.”98
“Would your desire for heaven have been so great if you had not glimpsed it once in my eyes?”99
“Ah! Stop being a woman and let me at last see on your face the God you are powerless to hide.”100
“The love of God calls in us on the same faculty as the love of his creatures, it calls on our feeling that we are not complete in ourselves and that the supreme God in which we are consummated is someone outside ourselves.”101
Thus each finds in the other the meaning of his earthly life and also irrefutable proof of the insufficiency of this life:
“Since I cannot grant him heaven, at least I can tear him from the earth. I alone can give him need in the measure of his desire.”102
“What I was asking from you, and what I wanted to give you, is not compatible with time, but with eternity.”103
Yet woman’s and man’s roles are not exactly symmetrical. On the social level, man’s primacy is evident. Claudel believes in hierarchies and, among others, the family’s: the husband is the head. Anne Vercors rules over her home. Don Pelagio sees himself as the gardener entrusted with the care of this delicate plant, Doña Prouhèze; he gives her a mission she does not dream of refusing. The fact alone of being a male confers privilege. “Who am I, poor girl, to compare myself to the male of my race?” asks Sygne.104
It is man who labors in the fields, who builds cathedrals, who fights with the sword, who explores the world, who acts, who undertakes. God’s plans are accomplished on earth through him. Woman is merely an auxiliary. She is the one who stays in place, who waits, and, who, like Sygne, maintains: “I am she who remains and who am always there.”
She defends the heritage of Coûfontaine, keeps his accounts in order while he is far away fighting for the cause. The woman brings the relief of hope to the fighter: “I bring irresistible hope.”105 And that of pity.
“I had pity on him. For where was he to turn, when he sought his mother, but to his own humiliated mother,
“In a spirit of confession and shame.”106
And Tête d’Or, dying, murmurs:
“That is the wounded man’s courage, the crippled man’s support,
“The dying man’s company …”
Claudel does not hold it against man that woman knows him in his weakest moments; on the contrary: he would find man’s arrogance as displayed in Montherlant and Lawrence sacrilege. It is good that man knows he is carnal and lowly, that he forgets neither his origin nor his death, which is symmetrical to it. Every wife could say the same words as Marthe:
“It is true, it was not I who gave you life.
“But I am here to ask you for life once more. And a man’s confusion in the presence of a woman comes from this very question
“Like conscience in the presence of a creditor.”107
And yet this weakness has to yield to force. In marriage, the wife gives herself to the husband, who takes care of her: Lâla lies down on the ground before Coeuvre, who places his foot on her. The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. In George’s hands, Sygne takes the vow of the knight to his sovereign.
; “You are the lord and I the poor sibyl who keeps the fire.”108
“Let me take an oath like a new knight! O my lord! O my elder, let me swear in your hands
“After the fashion of a nun who makes her profession,
“O male of my race!”109
Fidelity and loyalty are the greatest of the female vassal’s human virtues. Sweet, humble, resigned as a woman, she is, in the name of her race and her lineage, proud and invincible; such is the proud Sygne de Coûfontaine and Tête d’Or’s princess, who carries on her shoulder the corpse of her assassinated father, who accepts the misery of a lonely and wild life, the suffering of a crucifixion, and who assists Tête d’Or in his agony before he dies at her side. Conciliator and mediator is thus how woman often appears: she is docile Esther accountable to Mordecai, Judith obeying the priests; she can overcome her weakness, her faintheartedness, and her modesty through loyalty to the cause that is hers since it is that of her masters; she draws strength from her devotion, which makes her a precious instrument.
So on the human level she is seen as drawing her greatness from her very subordination. But in God’s eyes, she is a perfectly autonomous person. The fact that for man existence surpasses itself while for woman it maintains itself only establishes a difference between them on earth: in any case, transcendence is accomplished not on earth but in God. And woman has just as direct a connection with him as her companion does; perhaps hers is even more intimate and secret. It is through a man’s voice—what is more, a priest’s—that God speaks to Sygne; but Violaine hears his voice in the solitude of her heart, and Prouhèze only deals with the Guardian Angel. Claudel’s most sublime figures are women: Sygne, Violaine, Prouhèze. This is partly because saintliness for him lies in renunciation. And woman is less involved in human projects; she has less personal will: made to give and not to take, she is closer to perfect devotion. It is through her that the earthly joys that are permissible and good will be surpassed, but their sacrifice is still better. Sygne accomplishes this for a definite reason: to save the pope. Prouhèze resigns herself to it first because she loves Rodrigo with a forbidden love:
“Would you then have wanted me to put an adulteress into your hands?… I would have been only a woman who soon dies on your heart and not that eternal star that you thirst for.”110
But when this love could become legitimate, she makes no attempt to accomplish it in this world. For the Angel whispers to her:
“Prouhèze, my sister, luminous child of God whom I salute,
“Prouhèze whom the angels see and who does not know that he is watching, she it is whom you made so as to give her to him.”111
She is human, she is woman, and she does not resign herself without revolt: “He will not know how I taste!”112
But she knows that her true marriage with Rodrigo is only consummated by her denial:
“When will there no longer be any way to escape, when he will be attached to me forever in an impossible marriage, when he will no longer find a way to wrench himself from the cry of my powerful flesh and that pitiless void, when I will have proved to him his nothingness and the nothingness of myself, when there will no longer be in his nothingness a secret that my secret cannot confirm.
“It is then that I shall give him to God, naked and torn, so that he may be filled in a blast of thunder, it is then that I will have a husband and clasp a god in my arms.”113
Violaine’s resolution is more mysterious and gratuitous still; for she chooses leprosy and blindness when a legitimate bond could have united her to the man she loves and who loves her.
“Jacques, perhaps
“We loved each other too much for it to be right for us to belong to each other, for it to be good to be each other’s.”114
But if women are so singularly devoted to saintly heroism, it is above all because Claudel still grasps them from a masculine perspective. To be certain, each of the sexes embodies the Other in the eyes of the complementary sex; but to his man’s eyes it is, in spite of everything, the woman who is often regarded as an absolute other. There is a mystical surpassing insofar as “we know that in and of ourselves we are insufficient, hence the power of woman over us, like the power of Grace.”115 The “we” here represents only males and not the human species, and faced with their imperfection, woman is the appeal of infinity. In a way, there is a new principle of subordination here: by the communion of saints each individual is an instrument for all others; but woman is more precisely the instrument of salvation for man, without any reciprocity. The Satin Slipper is the epic of Rodrigo’s salvation. The drama opens with a prayer his brother addresses to God on his behalf; it closes with the death of Rodrigo, whom Prouhèze has brought to saintliness. But, in another sense, the woman thereby gains the fullest autonomy: for her mission is interiorized in her, and in saving the man, or in serving as an example to him, she saves herself in solitude. Pierre de Craon prophesies Violaine’s destiny to her, and he receives in his heart the wonderful fruits of her sacrifice; he will exalt her before mankind in the stones of cathedrals. But Violaine accomplishes it without help. In Claudel there is a mystique of woman akin to Dante’s for Beatrice, to that of the Gnostics, and even to that of the Saint-Simonian tradition which called woman a regenerator. But because men and women are equally God’s creatures, he also attributed an autonomous destiny to her. So that for him it is in becoming other—I am the Servant of the Lord—that woman realizes herself as subject; and it is in her for-itself that she appears as the Other.
There is a passage from The Adventures of Sophie that more or less sums up the whole Claudelian concept. God, we read, has entrusted to woman “this face which, however remote and deformed it may be, is a certain image of his perfection. He has rendered her desirable. He has joined the end and the beginning. He has made her the keeper of his projects and capable of restoring to man that creative slumber in which even she was conceived. She is the foundation of destiny. She is the gift. She is the possibility of possession … She is the connection in this affectionate link that ever unites the Creator to his work. She understands him. She is the soul that sees and acts. She shares with Him in some way the patience and power of creation.”
In a way, it seems that woman could not be more exalted. But deep down Claudel is only expressing in a poetic way a slightly modernized Catholic tradition. We have seen that the earthly vocation of woman does not cancel out any of her supernatural autonomy; on the contrary, in recognizing this, the Catholic feels authorized to maintain male prerogatives in this world. If the woman is venerated in God, she will be treated like a servant in this world: and further, the more total submission is demanded of her, the more surely will she move forward on the road to her salvation. Her lot, the lot the bourgeoisie has always assigned to her, is to devote herself to her children, her husband, her home, her realm, to country, and to church; man gives activity, woman her person; to sanctify this hierarchy in the name of divine will does not modify it in the least, but on the contrary attempts to fix it in the eternal.
IV. BRETON OR POETRY
In spite of the gulf separating Claudel’s religious world and Breton’s poetic universe, there is an analogy in the role they assign to women: she is an element that perturbs; she wrests man from the sleep of immanence; mouth, key, door, bridge, it is Beatrice initiating Dante into the beyond. “The love of man for woman, if we think for a moment about the palpable world, continues to fill the sky with gigantic and wild flowers. It is the most awful stumbling block for the mind that always feels the need to believe itself on safe ground.” The love for an other, a woman, leads to the love of the Other. “It is at the height of elective love for a particular being that the floodgates of love for humanity open wide.” But for Breton the beyond is not a foreign heaven: it is right here; it unveils itself if one knows how to lift the veils of everyday banality; eroticism, for one, dissipates the lure of false knowledge. “The sexual world, nowadays … has not stopped pitting its unbreakable core of night against ou
r will to penetrate the universe.” Colliding with the mystery is the only way of discovering it. Woman is enigma and poses enigmas; the addition of her multiple faces composes “the unique being in which we are granted the possibility of seeing the last metamorphosis of the Sphinx”; and that is why she is revelation. “You were the very image of secrecy,” says Breton to a woman he loved. And a little farther: “That revelation you brought me: before I even knew what it consisted of, I knew it was a revelation.” This means that woman is poetry. She plays that role in Gérard de Nerval as well: but in Sylvie and Aurélia she has the consistency of a memory or a phantom because the dream, more real than the real, does not exactly coincide with it; the coincidence is perfect for Breton: there is only one world; poetry is objectively present in things, and woman is unequivocally a being of flesh and bones. She can be found wide-awake and not in a half dream, in the middle of an ordinary day on a date like any other day on the calendar—April 5, April 12, October 4, May 29—in an ordinary setting: a café, a street corner. But she always stands out through some unusual feature. Nadja “carried her head high, unlike everyone else on the sidewalk … She was curiously made up … I had never seen such eyes.” Breton approaches her. “She smiles, but quite mysteriously and somehow knowingly.” In L’amour fou (Mad Love): “This young woman who just entered appeared to be swathed in mist—clothed in fire?… And I can certainly say that here, on the twenty-ninth of May 1934, this woman was scandalously beautiful.”116 The poet immediately admits she has a role to play in his destiny; at times this is a fleeting, secondary role, such as the child with Delilah’s eyes in Les vases communicants (Communicating Vessels); even when tiny miracles emerge around her: the same day Breton has a rendezvous with this Delilah, he reads a good review written by a friend called Samson with whom he had not been in touch for a long time. Sometimes wonders occur; the unknown woman of May 29, Ondine, who had a swimming piece in her music-hall act, was presaged by a pun heard in a restaurant: “Ondine, one dines”; and her first long date with the poet had been described in great detail in a poem he wrote eleven years earlier. Nadja is the most extraordinary of these sorceresses: she predicts the future, and from her lips spring forth words and images her friend has in mind at the very same instant; her dreams and drawings are oracles: “I am the soul in limbo,” she says; she went forward in life with “behavior, based as it was on the purest intuition alone and ceaselessly relying on miracle”; around her, objective chance spreads strange events; she is so marvelously liberated from appearances that she scorns laws and reason: she ends up in an asylum. She is a “free genius, something like one of those spirits of the air which certain magical practices momentarily permit us to entertain but which we can never overcome.” This prevents her from fulfilling her feminine role completely. Medium, prophetess, inspiration, she remains too close to the unreal creatures that visited Nerval; she opens the doors to the surreal world: but she is unable to give it because she could not give herself. Woman accomplishes herself and is really transformed in love; unique, accepting a unique destiny—and not floating rootless through the universe—so she is the sum of all. The moment her beauty reaches its highest point is at night, when “she is the perfect mirror in which everything that has been and everything that is destined to be is suffused adorably in what is going to be this time.” For Breton “finding the place and the formula” is one with “possessing the truth within one soul and one body.”*