claudel.history.htm

A Little History

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The Circumstances

It is during his first stay in the United Sates, in New York, 4 Battery Place, and in Boston, 34 Saint James Avenue, where he was successively Vice-Consul and head of the Consulate, from April 2 to December 1, 1893 and from December 2, 1893 to February 15, 1895, that Claudel wrote the first version of L'Echange. It will first be published in 1900 in a symbolist revue, L'Ermitage, then in 1901 with the three preceding plays, Tête d'Or, La Ville, La Jeune Fille Violaine, in L'Arbre at Société du Mercure de France. It will be produced for the first time at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier by Jacques Copeau in 1914 (Copeau taking the role of Thomas Pollock Nageoire). We know that for Claudel, "in art nothing is definitive," so that in 1950, Jean-Louis Barrault wishing to direct the play, Claudel, who was dissatisfied with the "first attempt" (ébauche) of "his youth." rewrote the play almost entirely. It is this second version "laborious compromise between the demands of the director and those of an eighty-year old author "which will be given at the Théâtre Marigny in 1951, and after a rather slow start will become a great success. Since then directors in France and other French-speaking countries produce the two versions, perhaps the second more often, although for us only the end of Act II seems superior to the first version. The style of the second is freer, more familiar, the liturgy of money is given greater prominence, the indications of décor are of a heavy symbolism. We have chosen to play the first version "the American version, completed by Claudel in Boston in March 1894. Wilder, more passionate, it is indeed the fruit of a 25-year old who was a champing at the bit in Paris while doing his stage there as student "consul (he had opted for the consular career) and had one wish only, to enter into a "splendid city", to "live poetry," and more prosaically (he had done his preliminary stage in the commercial section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), to study American capitalism. There, already having in mind his new play, which he called "nouveau guignol," then "dramaturgy of gold," he is incited by the business climate of the part of New York near the Consulate to begin at once.

Influences

To write the play, in the morning, one and a half hours before his consular duties begin, or during the absence of his superior form New York, he naturally uses what he see, what he is living, what he is hearing and what he feels. Crossing the Atlantic in the rain, the rains of New York (it rains seven times in L'Echange), a feeling of exile, boredom, the Puritan atmosphere, Catholicism without ceremonial in the churches (as opposed to the Gregorian chants he heard in Paris), the American manner of living ("absence of bread"), his surroundings in New York (on a poster he saw the name Thomas Pollock Fin, and used the French translation of Fin, "Nageoire", which he found more euphonious), the starry nights of Boston, also the company of a Frenchman, Christian de Larapidie, stranded at the Consulate, a personality high in color, older than Claudel, friendly and full of enthusiasm, professor of violin, who rounds out his salary by private lessons, badly paid, with whom Claudel shares a room in New York boarding house (in Boston they will live in the Consulate, both of them doing the cooking, and will take long walks in the woods of Massachusetts), who will serve in part as a model for Louis Laine "all these nourished Claudel's play. L'Echange is indeed, according to the expression of the author himself, a work of "assimilation," written both in "sufferance" and with "interest" (Mémoires improvisés, page 141, the memoirs giving, it is true, a more somber image than his letters, even if Claudel says in his letters that he finds himself in New York like a "fish out of water"). But his readings also nourished the play, the prior ones first of all, Aeschylus, whose Agamemnon he begins to translate in 1891, and whose influence is already obvious in Tête d'Or, and which he continues to translate while working on L'Echange: Lechy (a new Cassandra), the décor, with the night and the signals, the long stanzas, the confrontations between two characters. Other influence, that of Shakespeare, which Claudel has read in its entirety ("when I was all to myself, I threw myself first of all into Shakespeare"), from whom Claudel borrowed the character of the ruffian, just as Lechy is the traditional whore of Elizabethan theater. Rimbaud also, the dreamer, the lazy one, who lends his physique to Louis; Rimbaud (who died in 1891), whose Illuminations Claudel has red with wonder, who according to Claudel's own admission has profoundly influenced his character. Other readings: Whitman (who died in 1892), of whom Claudel had read poems from Inscriptions(which had appeared at the same time as Illuminations in the periodical La Vogue). In January 1894 Claudel will buy in Boston a copy of Leaves of Grass, at a moment, it is true, when the composition of L'Echange is already well-advanced, but the death of Louis at dusk does seem in reminiscence of Whitman's "Twilight". Among Claudel's other readings of the time we may cite Tocqueville (De la Démocratie en Amérique), in which he read attentively the pages on the Indians (their laziness, their love of the wide-open spaces... ); for folkoric sources, the works of the ethnologue Charles G. Leland on gypsies and Algonquin legends, for the characters of Lechy and Louis; and Thomas Hardy's The mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886, which tells of a farmer who sells his wife, as Louis sells Marthe.

The Meaning

L'Echange is a classic play in that it follows the three unities of time, place and action. But it is modern in that Claudel put himself in each of his four characters, as he confided later in conversations with Jean Amrouche. In particular, in this "American quartet" each one successively takes the role of the other. Nevertheless the principal character remains Louis Laine (as to whom stage directors seem to forget that he is part Indian, Algonquin, but Claudel mixes characteristics of other tribes). For Claudel, Louis is the representative of a condemned race. Young and handsome, he is the object of desire on the part of the other three. Too fragile (he has been roughly treated by his father, as a child he lost his mother, Marthe and Lechy are substitutes), he is incapable of giving them what they ask of him, he is in a way definitively condemned by them. L'Echange is thus a drama on impotence, which engenders, by the seaside, at the same time a character study and sound and fury. The impotence vis-à-vis a woman is perhaps that of Claudel at the time, until the sexual hurricane of 1900, as Claudel transposed it in 1905 in Partage de Midi.

The Unconscious

It remains that L'Echange, even thought it fascinates, is an obscure play. What happens does not reveal what the drama means; the conclusion is not in the denouement. Repeated readings do not exhaust the meaning. This symbolist play (all outdoors!), even if based on contemporary events and reality, is in facet a play on the unconscious and, as we have said, on the unconscious of the young Claudel. What he has to say cannot be shown, but faced with the double image of woman that he has formed, voice of sin, voice of grace, it is represented. Thus the accumulation of symbols, the correspondence between nature and beings, as for example the presentiment on the part of Louis of his death when the sun goes down. As to this death, has not Marthe had a foreboding since morning on this death, has not Marthe had a foreboding since morning on this day of summer solstice, spoken in the first verse of the play? (In the second version it is Louis who speaks the words) The day that we see clear and that lasts until it is over! Obscurity again because of the images, especially of stories that apparently have only a distant connection with the tale, but which in fact mirror it, give it a multiple determination (the scene of the Old Woman Under the Wave &emdash; image of the castrating woman, the story of the Child with Eyebrows of Stone &emdash; the signified of the drama of Marthe). And obscurity from the quest for music in the verse, for the emotion that sacrifices the meaning to the sound... But strange beauty of the play, multiple identifications : who is not in love with one or the other of the characters? L'Echange is all that at the same time, a drama, a psychodrama, a parable, and a pure musical piece.

Maturity and the Final Exile

With this first play written far from his native soil, Claudel was able to perfect his technique and at the same time uncover the different aspects of his own personality. The play reveals to us a Claudel we had not suspected "his desires, his relations "fragile, easily influenced. Fortified by writing in that land of exile of the United States, and which played the role of reactive, he is ready to confront other countries. "The separation has taken place, and the exile into which he entered follows." He will leave the United States at his own request in February 1895, taking with him an image that is both incomplete and biased. He returns to Paris, bringing with him in his trunk a revised Act I of La Ville, the second version of Tête d'Or, minus the ending, the completed translation of Agamemnon, and especially his new play, that he will now want to see performed. Four months later he leaves to take up his post in Shanghai.

Performing L'Echange

But how should L'Echange be performed? In a letter of 1913 to Jacques Copeau, Claudel proposed two ways: delicate, gray, harmonious, as chamber music, or violently colored, excessive, and almost caricatural, like a painting of Van Dongen. He himself saw the production rather in the latter manner. And he managed to impose his views on Copeau. The public in 1914 found the text beautiful but did not receive the production kindly. Today, we still find our imagination challenged by this fundamental choice.

Pierre Krémer

Paul Claudel The Trade

Les Editions Albion Press, 1995, Canada