Featured Essay
James Owens
( La Porte, Indiana )
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Why Poets Need Carl Th. Dreyer:
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and
Seamus Heaney’s “From the Frontier of Writing”
1.
For most of its history, Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc went about in disguise. The movie, filmed while Dreyer was living in self-imposed artistic exile in France, appeared in 1928, but the director’s precise, illuminated version was soon replaced by another—shorter, jumbled and fumbling, eviscerated—that seemed, to some, more in accord with audiences’ and critics’ taste, and seemed to the French censors more in accord with official Catholic accounts of history. During the fifties and after, movie houses screened a very altered, “sonorized” version. It is a story of disfigurement and suppression, until an original print, Dreyer’s own film, surfaced in a closet at a Norwegian mental hospital in 1981, having come there through dark channels no one has ever been able to trace precisely.
It is impossible not to see the film’s material history as a recapitulation of its theme: Dreyer’s pure and cruel vision of Jeanne’s trial and death is cut into by the authorities, wrenched on the wheel of assembled public decency, until it makes its false confession. But the word survives in secret, persists in its obscurity among those whom we moderns have defined as mad, until Dreyer’s voice can be heard once more, unaltered at last for all its hollow years in the great unconscious.
2.
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is an essential movie for anyone who wants to understand the process of writing poetry. It is almost as if Dreyer himself, or his ghost, had engineered that business in the Norwegian asylum just to make this point.
3.
The expatriate American poet Hilda Doolittle, known to the Imagists as H.D., reviewed La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc for a 1928 issue of Close Up, an English-language movie magazine published in Switzerland. Her review is one of the earliest and best treatments of the film, seminal for anyone interested in Dreyer, almost stream-of-consciousness as we hear her trying to work through her own, ambivalent response to the demands the movie makes on a viewer. “This great Dane Carl Dreyer takes too damn much for granted,” she writes. “Do I have to be cut into slices by this inevitable pan-movement of the camera, these suave lines to left, up, to the right, back, all rhythmical with the remorseless rhythm of a scimitar?”
Doolittle locates her discomfort with the film in the right place: the viewer’s subconscious identification with Jeanne, small and out of place in the courtroom, surrounded by powerful judges who demand that she renounce the voice of God, of inner mysticism, and say instead the words they will supply to her on a paper that she must sign even if she cannot read it. Doolittle focuses on the movie’s opening scene: “Jeanne is first represented to us, small as seen from above, the merest flash of sturdy boy-figure, walking with chained ankles toward judges (too many) seated in slices above on ecclesiastical benches. Jeanne is seen as small, as intolerably sturdy and intolerably broken, the sort of inhuman showing up of Jeanne that from the first strikes some note of defiance in us. Now why should we be defiant? I think it is that we all have our Jeanne, each one of us in the secret great cavernous interior of the cathedral (if I am to be fantastic) of the subconscious.”
Doolittle emphasizes Jeanne’s smallness, using the adjective twice in this short passage and recalling Dreyer’s adventurous camera-work that makes the judges loom over her like a cowed and chastised child. Elsewhere she points out the way Jeanne’s eyes fill and overflow with tears when she is forced to mention her mother in the company of these hard-faced masculine inquisitors. But, even while she opens the door on a possible Freudian reading of Jeanne’s story, Doolittle nervously casts about for a possible escape route—dismissively, “if I am to be fantastic”—before she dares suggest a setting for the real action of the film in the “cathedral ... of the subconscious.”
Already intensely interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose patient she would become in the early thirties, Doolittle knows what she is saying, but she backs off after this one tentative sentence, leaving the idea undeveloped, a ghost circulating just under the surface of her discussion of the Passion.
Freud, no longer the most popular of theorists, never meant his tripartite division of human selfhood to be understood as referring to three actual things—
id, ego, and superego—rather to a figurative way of representing the mind’s struggles with itself. He knew that the theory, no matter its provisional or clinical usefulness, was finally a cartoonish simplification. Still, it is fascinating, how elegantly the elements of Dreyer’s film click into the Freudian schema. What is Jeanne, if not the beleagured ego trying and failing to mediate the demands for control of the superego, her judges, measured against the irrational, vatic upwellings of the id?
If so, then Dreyer’s genius may lie in this: by an unforeseeable master stroke he has set up this three-way tussle that crushes Jeanne in its theological vise so that God is cast as the id.
Perhaps this is all too easy, too schematic and convenient, the same trouble that Freudian readings usually run into. Nobody wants to read Jeanne as a case study. But just for the moment—because now stress falls on the right terms of the conflict, the authoritative, social, moralistic church, in opposition to the private, mystical, dangerous words of Jeanne’s vision—read “God” as the id.
4.
Seamus Heaney’s poem “From the Frontier of Writing” can almost be taken as a gloss on Dreyer’s film, though transposed into Heaney’s own, Northern Irish setting. Heaney knows the saint’s and poet’s dilemma is trying to give true voice in the inhibiting presence of institutional, violent forces. He relocates the struggle to do so from the mediaeval torture chamber to a typically twentieth century, and now twentieth-first century, encounter with power. Heaney describes passing through a military roadblock in terms that recall Jeanne’s powelessness before her judges.The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move....
Neither Heaney nor Dreyer wastes time on backstory. For Dreyer, Jeanne’s history is too well known to require scenes of her leading armies into battle or fallen to her knees in the fields of her parents’ farm, listening to a voice from the clouds. For Heaney, his speaker is absolutely ordinary, with the same history as any of us. For both, backstory is irrelevant. Time has tightened to this one locale where one must prove oneself. All other space is “nilness” compared with this urgency. It is this that turns the experience of Heaney’s poem into “pure interrogation,” just as, in the Passion, six months of trial and endless pages of transcription are compressed into Jeanne’s final twenty-four hours.
The interrogation takes a familiar form. As one of the soldiers “bends his face // towards your window, you catch sight of more / on a hill beyond,” just as Dreyer’s camera, over and over, focuses in close-up on the inclined, haranguing face of one or another of Jeanne’s interrogators, then pans up to the assembled ranks of her judges. The cradled guns and the rifle are sure signs that those in power can inflict harm without threat of retribution, like the rack and spiked wheel Jeanne’s judges force her to look at, imagining her own potential for feeling pain, as certain ones of the judges look on, lustful for the tortures to begin.
After the guards have examined him and given clearance, Heaney’s speaker drives on through the roadblock and beyond, safe but “a little spent / as always by that quiver in the self / subjugated, yes, and obedient.” The speaker will carry this self-accusing knowledge of subjugation with him wherever he goes, and it tests and interrogates his inmost thoughts even as they are being shaped for expression. This knowledge, this subjugation, this internalized version of authority (here political; for Jeanne, theological and political and gendered) is the Freudian superego, and is also the resistant density a writer must push through in order to put words on paper. So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed....
The voice of cultural (political, theological, moral, artistic) authority, internalized and shaped into pro- or inhibition and self-hatred—this, Heaney suggests, is what the inner voice of the poet must struggle with, if the words are going to make it to the outside, into the air or onto the page.
Jeanne is a poet, too, in Heaney’s terms. Near the end of the Passion, she has internalized her interrogators’ threats and sophistry and guile until she seems to capitulate, signing a confession and renouncing her claims as a conduit for the words of God. But then, broken and just as small as ever, she does manage to hold on to herself, to speak a clear “No” to her tormentors. She takes back the confession. She has been “arraigned yet freed.” Her victory is the final purity of death at the stake. Sainthood is an afterthought.
5.
Hilda Doolittle notes in her review Dreyer’s shot of Jeanne’s chained feet as she is led into the courtroom. Doolittle doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mention, that Dreyer cuts from Jeanne’s chains to a Bible being carried into the room, also wrapped in chains, suggesting an equivalence between the two. Jeanne is a living form of the word, restrained and captured by the Church, just as the Bible itself has been captured, just as the tongue in the mouth is weighted down with the dense matter of the self.
This resonates throughout Dreyer’s work. In Ordet (The Word, 1955) it is the living voice that transmits the mystical experience of Johannes, ostracized and called insane, and which can raise the dead, while institutionalized religion is merely a source of sterile conflict, as opposed sects try to lay claim to “true” religion. The similarity in names, Jeanne (“Jehane” in the 15th century transcripts) / Johannes, is no coincidence.
Heaney’s world, too, is one marked by the deadening effect of religion. And both, of course, are face to face with an occupying force from England, which unites political and linguistic significance. Nothing is closer to the real self than the language in which one becomes manifest to oneself and to the world. Imagine Jeanne’s country-girl French pressed on all sides by Church Latin, Heaney’s soft Irish vowels sliced through by English consonants.
6.
Of course, Jeanne’s real opponent is not Cauchon the inquisitor. The combined forces of England and the Church could not stand against this Pucelle, if that were all there was to it. Jeanne’s real antagonist is herself. The external judges are buffoons, really. The dangerous foes are the internal judges, those she has built for herself on the model that power provides, those urging Jeanne to be, as Heaney would recognize, “subjugated, yes, and obedient.”
In the Passion, the pure genius of Dreyer’s collaboration with Renée Maria Falconetti makes all this clear with tremendous economy. Long, frequent close-ups make an icon of Falconetti’s face. As many critics have noted, she becomes Jeanne d’Arc, and it is impossible to imagine another actor in the role (certainly not Lillian Gish, whom Dreyer reportedly considered). Falconetti’s large eyes swimming with tears or her lips trembling as she searches for the right word are always representations of inner turmoil. Her victory, alone in her cell after she has signed the paper giving her physical life but foreclosing the other, better sort of life, the volte face that sends her to the stake (where she has, perhaps, longed to go), is a triumph in her wrestling match with herself.
7.
Poets must resist themselves, must resist the assembled judges.
Heaney’s thought about the writing life is parallel with Jeanne’s agon. It is not the literal guns out on the tarmac that hinder the making of poems, rather the “marksman training down / out of the sun upon you like a hawk” when you are back in your room, like Jeanne in her quiet cell, staring at the lethal mirror of the blank page.
The blockage poets resist needs not be so explicitly political or religious. Everyone has his or her own looming face that says No and only No. Clayton Eshleman, in his marvelous sequence “Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship,” leans heavily upon a poet’s need to fight pressure from the opaque stuff of the self—whatever it may be—that chokes the voice in the throat like a buildup of silt in a river channel. “The desire to write poetry leads first to seeing the vilifigura, the reviled face, the shame of your own face. To embrace your soul may be to experience the extent to which you despise your soul, the extent to which whatever this soul is feels despised.... It is the unpoetic, the anti-poetic, that encloses the precious material—your actual thoughts while writing, what you want to overlook, the awkward, the ugly, thoughts that make you feel ashamed. What do you resist while writing?” (Companion Spider, 8-9).
A paradox. A poet must resist the vilifigura, but could anyone write without it? Jeanne’s shining triumph over the dark angels would not happen if she had not momentarily yielded to their seduction. Heaney could never win out over subjugation if he were not subjugated, never be freed unless first arraigned.
The poet must, as Eshleman almost says, dig in and find the anti-poetic, seek out the roadblock, the guarded barrier, because that is always where the “precious material” is buried, always. All poets, all persons, are already arraigned. The first step toward being freed is to find the courtroom and enter, fully aware of the chains and tugging hard against them.
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WORKS CITED
Doolittle, Hilda. “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” American Movie Critics: From the
Silents Until Now. Philip Lopate, ed. New York: Library of America, 2006.
Eshleman, Clayton. “Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship.” Companion Spider:
Essays. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Heaney, Seamus. “From the Frontier of Writing.” The Haw Lantern. New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987.
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