by Jean Cocteau
* There is nothing more dangerous than the words that are attributed to us and which are circulated and printed. I read in a preface of a book by Bernanos, written in Brazil, a remark of mine that I never uttered and that shocks me. The Word is always and instantly made flesh. That is why what is said has incalculable consequences. That is why it is important to take care what is hawked around, to verify the sources and, if they are false, to cut it clean out.
ON LAUGHTER
THE ABILITY TO BURST OUT LAUGHING IS PROOF of a fine character. I mistrust those who avoid laughter and refuse its overtures. They are afraid to shake the tree, mindful of the fruits and birds, afraid that someone might notice that nothing comes off their branches.
Like the heart and like sex, laughter functions by erection. Nothing swells it that does not excite it. It does not rise of its own accord.
This excitement is subject to the same rules as that of the senses, for what makes one person laugh does not make another laugh. And I know those who burst into fits of laughter at the same time as myself, while some others who are there only make grimaces, cannot understand us and sometimes imagine that it is at them that we are laughing.
The automatism of laughter is ruthless. It often happens that laughter torments us during funeral ceremonies where it is officially frowned on.
Bergson attributes the cruel laughter at the sight of a fall to the break in the balance which dehumanizes man and changes him into a puppet. Other philosophers contradict his theory. They hold that man, on the contrary, accustomed to his artificial mechanism, is de-puppeted by the fall and suddenly shows himself as he is. It is, they say, this rude discovery of man by man that provokes the laughter.
What vexes me is that neither the one nor the other carry their theory as far as the study of laughter at works of art. The shock of new works, causing a rupture between its customary outlook and the novelty with which it is faced, makes the public stumble. So there is a fall and laughter. This perhaps explains the laughter of crowds which, except by tears or insults, have no other way of expressing themselves.
I like jokes, but they must be long and realistic. If I invent names, places and events, I want them to be credible and pull their weight. I thoroughly enjoy playing this game with skilful players. The family I live with is given to laughter.* It excels in such exercises of the mind. It abandons itself to them without reserve. As a result, many visitors take their fiction for fact and, without realizing it, help in their own mystification.
If a third person knows the rules, interferes and goes astray, in short if he indulges in banter, I freeze and wish the game would stop. For playing is not banter and funny stories do not make me laugh. They are worth nothing unless they take their natural place in the conversation. Nothing is more rare than for a circle to amuse itself and not confuse cleverness and idle nonsense.
As a rule everyone jumps to right and left, up and down. Everyone mixes things up and all talk at once. That is why I keep to the circle to which I am accustomed and which uses the same vocabulary as myself.
One of the last times I happened to dine with muddle-headed people, my neighbour talked to me of La Duchesse de Langeais, a film of Giraudoux’s based on Balzac, which was being shown at the Biarritz. As I mentioned Balzac, this lady told me I was mistaken, that the film was not being shown at the Balzac (a cinema at the corner of the rue Balzac), but at the Biarritz.
One lives much of the time with one’s head under one’s wing. One is reluctant to admit the degree of lack of culture and the mental disorder in which people flounder. As a precaution when walking through the crowd one uses a somewhat blind eye and a somewhat deaf ear. But fashionable society splashes us with mud and throws us down in the mire. So it is unhealthy to frequent it. For we come home wretched, besmeared from head to foot, disheartened to the marrow of our bones.
Stupidity dismays and does not invite laughter. Rather it saddens and makes us stupid by contact with it. We do not relax and stretch to our full capacity except with people who can return the ball. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like people to talk to me and to listen to me. I like laughter that gives off sparks when struck.
I remember a summer at Trie-Château, at the house of Madame Casimir Périer (Mme Simone) with Péguy, Casimir Périer and Alain-Fournier, who was writing Le Grand Meaulnes. We were convulsed with laughter until we got cramp, and when we were going to bed a word would set it off again, would throw us down onto the stairs leading to our rooms. It clutched us by the belly until the small hours.
I am a very good audience. At the theatre, at the cinematograph, I cry or I laugh without my critical mind being roused. Nothing disgusts me if some force shakes me, shoulders me, makes me let myself go.
On the other hand my critical mind exerts itself over works which attempt to stir other regions in me, which are not those of laughter nor of tears, and whence tears spring to the eyes through the sole gift of beauty.
I have great debates with myself and long periods in which I accept myself for what I am. This is one I am now passing through. Although I go off at a tangent it is none the less true that I come full-circle. What would become of me without laughter? It purges me of my disgust. It ventilates me. It opens my doors and windows. It beats my upholstery. It shakes my curtains. It is the sign that I am not quite sunk by contact with the vegetable world in which I move.
Although I know, from films about plant-life, that the serenity of nature is a myth, that only its rhythm, different from ours, makes us believe in that serenity, that a garden is continually a prey to eroticism, to vice, to anxiety, to anguish, to hatred, to agitations of every kind, and that it lives on its nerves, I acknowledge that it has not the gift of laughter.
It is Dante’s Inferno. Each tree, each bush, shudders in the place assigned to it, in torment. The flowers it puts forth are like fires one lights, like cries for help.
A garden is ceaselessly fertilized, corrupted, wounded, devoured by great monsters equipped with armour, wings and claws. Its enemies mock at the artless weapons with which it blindly bristles. Its thorns give us a proof of its fears and seem to us more like permanent goose-flesh than like an arsenal.
I have seen a cultivated orange tree at Pramousquier, on Cap Nègre, lose its head. It was living in sunshine. A palm threw shade on it. This shade terrified it. On the four branches shaded by the palm it put out long thorns. It became wild again. The palm was cut back. The branches calmed down and became cultivated once more. The prickles disappeared. The following year I found them smooth like the rest of the bark. So much for fear.
I assure you that this orange tree did not laugh and that, even when delivered from the suspect shade, it had no desire to laugh.
If seed is sown it is another generation of the plant that springs up. If a cutting is taken, the same plant is prolonged to infinity. (It starts again from youth.) Why cannot an element be discovered comparable to the soil, that would allow man to be perpetuated, since the whole individual, look, voice, gait, is present in the least of his cells, so that if one of his nail-parings were to be planted he would take birth from it and begin again from the beginning. It is because everything has to be paid for. Plants pay for this privilege of not dying by the torment of occupying such a mean space, of their static condition, of cramp, of the lack of liberty (relative) to move about, which man possesses and pays for very dearly by the knowledge of the small stretch he is given to cover and by death.
In certain species, the tree does its own ‘layering’; it lets a branch hang down to the ground and from this branch is reborn in another age, but exactly the same. Thus these species avoid the intervention of man. If they could, they would laugh. For laughter is a great privilege which we have.
Our consciousness is lightened by laughter. Its lightness consoles us for having such heavy soles to bear us to the scaffold. False solemnity detests it because it enlightens us about the soul. It strips it like a stroke of lightning. I once happened to hear, through a door, the laught
er of someone against whom nothing had put me on my guard. This dreadful laughter revealed to me a person whom I was one day to unmask.
Laughter can work inversely and a person whom we find antagonistic may conquer our antipathy by a burst of childish laughter.
I know an extremely interesting story about uncontrollable laughter. In 1940, Germany was sending its youth to the armament factories. A young man from Essen, working at Krupp’s, was given the sack because he kept having fits of laughter. They moved him to other factories. He was thrown out of them all because he laughed. He was not punished. No other fault could be found with him. They got rid of him. They sent him home with this chit which I saw in 1946: Incurable frivolity.
To kill laughter in man is a crime. That is what happens when one involves him in political problems that make him take himself seriously and when he is consulted about things of which he knows nothing. He can no longer laugh. He gives himself airs. It is also what happens when he is not consulted and is beaten into submission.
Pierre Roy, when I ask him about his political opinions, declares: ‘I am a moderate anarchist.’ I wonder if he has not found the right formula and if France is not entirely committed to this shade of opinion.
* The Vilmorins.
ON BEING WITHOUT BEING
I MUST NOW TAKE MY BEARINGS IN THIS HOUSE where again I try to sleep. I have cut off all correspondence with Paris. My letters are opened and only the essential ones are brought to me. I do not communicate with anyone. My nettle-rash, on the other hand, is waking. I notice once again that it likes to thrive and takes advantage of my vegetating. My arms, my chest, my forehead burn. Doubtless, as the origin of this complaint is the same as that of asthma, I am incurable and can only hope for ups and downs. I avoid the sunshine in which I liked so much to be. I edge along it in the shade. The rest of the time I shut myself in. I read and I write. Solitude forces me to be Robinson Crusoe and his island, to explore inside myself. I bring to this no understanding, for I have none, but a certain boldness that stands me in its stead.
Incapable of following a trail, I proceed by impulses. I cannot follow an idea for long. I let it escape when I ought to creep up and leap upon it. All my life I have hunted in this manner, for want of being able to do better. That is what deceives people who take my strokes of luck for skill, my mistakes for strategy. Never has any man been surrounded with so much misunderstanding, with so much love, with so much hatred, for if the person they believe me to be annoys those who judge me from afar, those who come near me are like Beauty when she dreads a monster and discovers an amiable beast who only wants to reach her heart.
I must say that my dearest friendships spring from this contrast.
The legend surrounding me keeps fools at a distance. The intelligent find me suspect. What is left for me between the two? Strolling players like me change their pitch more often than their shirts and pay by a show for the right to stay where they are. That is why my solitude never appears uncommunicative. I only show myself at the times of the parade before the show, or before my own number. I apologize for this to those who share my caravan and who conclude that I am holding the worst in reserve for them, for they only witness my misery.
Like all vagabonds the obsession for property torments me. I am looking for one in the country. When I find one, either the landlord refuses to sell it, because my enthusiasm opens his eyes to it, or he wants too much for it.*
In Paris I find nothing that suits me. The apartments I am offered intimidate me. I want them to say: ‘I was waiting for you.’
By dint of counting on the impossible I put down roots in my hole.
‘Je sens une difficulté d’être.’ Thus did Fontenelle,† the centenarian, reply when he was dying and his doctor asked: ‘M. Fontenelle, what do you feel?’ Only his belonged to his last hour. Mine has been from the beginning.
It must be a dream that one can live at ease in one’s skin.
From birth I have had an ill-stowed cargo. I have never been trimmed. Such is my balance sheet if I prospect within myself. And in this lamentable state, instead of keeping to my room, I have knocked about everywhere. From the age of fifteen I have never stopped for a moment. Sometimes I meet this or that person who addresses me intimately, whom I cannot recognize until a firm grasp of the hand unexpectedly drags out of the shadows the whole setting of a drama in which he played his part and I played mine, and which I had completely forgotten. I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says, all that in them is. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of long periods which we had to live through in detail. That is why when I dig into my past, first of all I unearth a figure—with its earth still clinging to it. If I search for dates, for sayings, for places, for sights, they overlap, I add things, I bungle, I advance, I draw back, I no longer know anything.
My great concern is to live now in a way that is right for me. I do not boast that it is more expeditious than another, but it is more to my taste. This present of mine abolishes time to the point of letting me gossip with Delacroix and Baudelaire. It allowed me, when Marcel Proust was still unknown, to consider him famous and to treat him as if he had achieved the glory he was one day to enjoy. Having discovered that this state of being outside time was my privilege, that it was too late to acquire better ones, I perfected it and plunged even more deeply into it.
But suddenly I open one eye: I realize that I was using the worst system for thinking of nothing, that I was exhausting myself with trivial occupations that bind us and eat us up, that I was busying myself with too many things. I persisted in this mechanically; I was a slave to it to the point of confusing a legitimate instinct of self-defence that prompted me to rebellion with detestable fidgets.
Now I know the rhythm. As soon as I open one eye, I close the other and take to my heels.
* Since these pages were printed I have bought the house which was waiting for me. I am correcting these proofs there. I am living in this retreat, far from the bells of the Palais-Royal. It gives me an example of the absurd magnificent stubbornness of the vegetable kingdom. I rearrange the memories of former countrysides where I used to dream of Paris, as later I used to dream in Paris of taking flight. The waters of the moat and the sunshine reflect on the walls of my room their false shimmering marbles. Everywhere spring is jubilant.
† Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, writer, nephew of Corneille. E.S.
ON WORDS
I ATTACH NO IMPORTANCE TO WHAT PEOPLE CALL style and by which they flatter themselves that they can recognize an author. I want to be recognized by my ideas, or better still, by the results of them. All I attempt is to make myself understood as succinctly as possible. I have noticed that when a story does not grip the mind, it has shown a tendency to read too quickly, to grease its own slope. That is why, in this book, I turn my writing around, which prevents it from sliding into a straight line, makes one revise it twice over and reread the sentences so as not to lose the thread.
Whenever I read a book, I marvel at the number of words I meet in it and I long to use them. I make a note of them. When I am at work this is impossible for me. I restrict myself to my own vocabulary. I cannot get away from it, and it is so limited that the work becomes a brain-twister.
I wonder, at every line, if I can go any further, if the combination of these few words that I use, always the same ones, will not end by seizing up and compelling me to hold my peace. This would be a blessing for everyone, but it is with words as with numbers, or with the letters of the alphabet. They have the faculty of rearranging themselves differently and perpetually at the end of the kaleidoscope.
I have said that I am envious of other people’s words. This is because they are not mine. Every author has a bag of lotto cards with which he must win. Except in regard of the style I deplore, of which Flaubert’s is typical—too rich in vocables—the styles I like, that o
f Montaigne, Racine, Chateaubriand, Stendhal are not lavish with them. One would not take long to count them.
That is the first thing to which a teacher should draw the attention of his class, instead of extolling fine rhetoric. They would soon learn how richness exists in a certain penury, that Salammbô is nothing but bric-à-brac, Le Rouge et le Noir a treasury.
Words rich in colour and sound are as difficult to use as gaudy jewels and bright colours in dress. An elegant woman does not overdress.
I am astonished by those glossaries in which the notes at the foot of the page, claiming to elucidate the text, remove its point and iron it out flat. This is what happens with Montaigne, whose sole aim is to say what he means to say and who achieves this, cost what it may, by twisting the phrase in his own way. To this way of twisting the phrase the glossaries prefer a vacuousness as long as it flows easily.
This is not to condemn the exceptional use of a rare word, provided that it comes in its proper place and enhances the economy of the rest. My advice, therefore, is to admit it if it does not sparkle too brightly.
Words should not flow: they are set in. It is from a grotto in which the air flows freely that they draw their vigour. They demand the and that cements them, to say nothing of the who, that, which, what. Prose is not a dance. It walks. It is through this walk or manner of walking that one can tell its breed, that poise characteristic of a native carrying burdens on her head.