Reason and Laughter: Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher and La Danse des Morts

Abstract

While Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher and La Danse des Morts do not give any objectifying explication which would make creation amenable to history and psychology, and while Claudel firmly holds that all his works unfold his creative imagination and not facts, there is the appeal of a poignant subtext, impossible to ignore in any performance and which has moved the audience to both tears and laughter. Both the historical division of countries into North and South and the emergence of an exceptional individual with a unique vocation were points of departure in the unfolding of Claudel’s creative imagination. In La Danse des Morts, he refers to the division of Biblical Israel, in Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher, to the antagonistic religious views which opposed North and South after the schism of Bâle in 1361 and to the voices of dissent when in 1429 an English King reigned in Paris; English forces occupied all the land from the Channel to the Loire, as well as the Duchy of Aquitaine. The powerful and autonomous Duke of Burgundy tolerated the invaders. Pestilence and famine, dissent, chaos, civil strife and warfare inspired painters and poets. Villon’s obsessive visions of death and decay and frescoes of danses macabres on the walls of churches and cemeteries recorded the human condition of despair. In this period of bitterness there emerged Jeanne d’Arc. In the entire history of France there is no more stirring figure than the young peasant girl from Lorraine who became the soul of national resistance.

L’ordre est le plaisir de la raison, le désordre le délice de l’imagination.

(Paul Claudel)¹