The Second Sex (45 page)

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.

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 our 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.”
^*

And this possession is only possible in reciprocal love, carnal love, of course. “The portrait of the woman one loves must be not only an image one smiles at but even more an oracle one questions”; but oracle only if this very woman is something other than an idea or an image; she must be the “keystone of the material world”; for the seer this is the same world as Poetry, and in this world he has to really possess Beatrice. “Reciprocal love alone is what conditions total magnetic attraction which nothing can affect, which makes flesh sun and splendid impression on the flesh, which makes spirit a forever-flowing stream, inalterable and alive whose water moves once and for all between marigold and wild thyme.”

This indestructible love can only be unique. It is the paradox of Breton’s attitude that from
Communicating Vessels
to
Arcanum 17
, he is determined to promise love both unique and eternal to different women. But according to him, it is social circumstances, thwarting the freedom of his choice, that lead man into erroneous choices; in fact, through these errors, he is really looking for
one
woman. And if he remembers the faces he has loved, he “will discover at the same time in all these women’s faces one face only: the
last
face loved.
¹¹⁷
How many times, moreover, have I noticed that under extremely dissimilar appearances one exceptional trait was developing.” He asks Ondine in
Mad Love:
“Are you at last this woman, is it only today you were to come?” But in
Arcanum 17:
“You know very well that
when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation.” In a completed, renewed world, the couple would be indissoluble, through an absolute and reciprocal gift: Since the beloved is all, how could there be any room for another? She is also this other; and all the more fully as she is more her self. “The unusual is inseparable from love. Because you are unique you can’t help being for me always another, another you. Across the diversity of these inconceivable flowers over there, it is you over there changing whom I love in a red blouse, naked, in a gray blouse.” And about a different but equally unique woman, Breton wrote: “Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life.”

This unique woman, both carnal and artificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal objects loved by the surrealists: she is like the spoon-shoe, the table-magnifying glass, the sugar cube of marble that the poet discovers at the flea market or invents in a dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly discovered in their truth, and the secret of plants and stones. She is all things:

But she is Beauty, above and beyond every other thing. Beauty for Breton is not an idea one contemplates but a reality that reveals itself—and therefore exists—only through passion; only through woman does beauty exist in the world.