France
The living embodiment of French versatility, JEAN COCTEAU has in his more than seventy years been successively poet, novelist, artist, stage designer, movie director, essayist, dramatist, and critic. He is now a venerated member of the French Academy.
THE ATLANTIC
BY JEAN COCTEAU
FRANCE is in perpetual struggle with herself. This is what strikes me about her. The great French tradition is a tradition of anarchy. Disorder allows France to thrive just as order is indispensable to others. People amuse me who arc afraid that France is turning into a village. She has always been one. She was one under Louis XV. A village with its Café du Commerce, its newspaper kiosk, and its bureau de tabac, where everyone discusses and argues. From this endless argument is born the glow of that soft, intense light which Guillaume Apollinaire used to say the eye could gaze into tirelessly.
Viewed from outside, all this is baffling and resembles a dense log. The foreigner sees only opposing groups, personalities who contradict one another, individuals who insult one another. Does he perchance realize that it is all like boiling water, in which rise bubbles of a matchless irridescence?
In France everyone thinks. Even folly thinks. Everyone is on the stage. Few people sit in the audience, and ordinarily our public believes that it could do a good deal better than our leaders do. But this astonishing indiscipline offers advantages. France today is one of the few countries where the crowd can make a hit of a play because the papers condemn it. No one takes anyone else’s word for anything, and I dare say that a spirit of contradiction pushed to this extreme leads the crowd to hold a directly contrary opinion and to applaud because there are some who want to boo.
I have often written that the spirit of creation is simply the spirit of contradiction in its highest form. A great work opposes itself to a preceding one and contradicts it a fact which does not keep the preceding work from living, breathing, taking root, and flowering. One should ever be reminded of this Hebrew proverb: “Equilibrium engenders inertia. It is from disequilibrium that exchanges are born.”
This is the secret of most celebrated architectures — those of Versailles, of Venice, of Amsterdam. The plumb line has killed that human vivacity of facades which used to offer the irregular and charming features of a face. There is a great danger in wanting order and in not providing for a kind of disorder where the soul fends for itself and is not dried out in dead lines.
One day, in the country, I stumbled on an old copy of the Journal of the Goncourt brothers. I opened it and discovered this passage: “A friend has just arrived from New York with a piece of news we dare not believe and which would be the real end. The wash-basins remain fixed to the walls.”One’s first instinct, on reading this, is to laugh. But on further reflection one begins to wonder if our troubles don’t come from just this.
For man must now obey the order given to him by the wash basin and hie himself to it, as the ox to the stable, the horse to the feedbin. His will succumbs and leaves him weak. Formerly water, light, food were brought to us, without our having to move. We were free to remain in our armchair with a book in our hands. Domestic help was plentiful and gracious, and everyone could have it. But this help has disappeared, supplanted by mechanics. The faucet has killed the water carrier. And here’s the rub! While the faucet works well in America, it works very badly in France,
Our mistake, then, would be to imitate nations of discipline and order. Our strength will be to admit our indiscipline and our disorder and to draw hidden resources from them. The more talented a man is, the more he taxes himself, the more he struggles against the gift which predisposes his ink to flow faster, the more he strives to master and contain it.
Our universe develops in waves and eddies. Where there is an eddy, there will be a wave. It is a question of patience, and I for one do not believe that a wounded country, that a workingsore, can cure itself in a few weeks. It is absurd to say that France is tottering. France, after all she has suffered, is a working sore. This is a term used in medicine to describe a sore which is in a good condition. Which is not to say that the sore is ugly and turning to gangrene. On the contrary, a sore which does not work is a dangerous sore and one which merely seems hygienic. It fools those who are reassured by what is static and who are unaware of the terrible work oi plants, saps, and barks.
Sergei Diaghilev, who took the colorful and famous Russian Ballet around the world, used to tell me that he never launched a new spectacle before showing it in Paris. It is, he said, the only city in the world where works of art are capable of arousing lovers’ quarrels.
I know well that today politics play a considerable role and that party disputes overshadow lovers’ quarrels; but entre nous, don’t these disputes offer the same appearances of peevishness and ill will which characterize lovers’ quarrels? It is still a fine disorder, a good fracas, a splendid storm, a rich dunghill, a fertilizing humus thanks to which plants burst right, left, up, and down, showering their seeds all over. And what matters is this “all over.”
It would be amusing, while we are at it, to list the names of the poets who honor France and assure her prestige. They have been the men whom she pursued with her police and her scorn: Racine, Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ducasse, Nerval, Verlaine. So many setbacks, desperate retirements into monasteries, flights, suicides, catastrophes.
If all this changed, there would be discipline, order, awe, comfort — all of them qualities which, I repeat, France does not possess and which would cause her death. France bristles with peaks and ridges. A flat France is unimaginable. Anyone wishing to flatten her would fail. Just try, and she bristles. And it is a good thing that there are some who try to do so. For a country which took its disorder for granted, and honored it, would be a land of death. Its accidents would stiffen into principles and its men would, in the process of reading horticultural treatises, come to resemble plants.
France has everything to lose in aspiring to those resources for which she is unfitted — a huge industry, for example. Her prerogatives are the arts, invention, discovery, accident. Above all, accident, that son of disorder, which breaks the straight line and offers those surprises which France naïvely continues to call miracles and which give to things a course that no one could foresee.