Joan of Arc (19 page)

Hauviette, Joan's friend, is a commonsensical girl: You do what you can, she says to Joan, you feed whom you can, and while they're eating, they're happy. But she senses that Joan can't be comforted by her middle-range solution. “You are hungry for other people who are hungry, even when they aren't hungry,”
¹⁵
she says.

The other character in this three-character play is Sister Gervaise, a contemplative nun who has retreated from the wickedness of the world in order to pray for it. Her solution is also impossible for Joan, who must try to act in order to save everyone. She doesn't listen to Sister Gervaise's accusations of her lack of humility: Even Jesus understood that he couldn't save Judas, Sister Gervaise says to her. They part, understanding that their ways are dissimilar: Joan must save everyone, not feed one child at a time or pray for one soul at a time. She must act to transform the world. For Brecht, this transformation can happen only through Marxist revolution; for Péguy it can occur only through a kind of mystical French nationalism that will disinfect the land of its corruption.

There is no psychologizing in
Saint Joan of the Stockyards,
whereas Péguy's play is an extended examination of conscience in which not the psyche but the soul is formed. This is achieved in a highly repetitive, poetically hypnotic prose that has a monochrome somberness whose tonality is similar to Dreyer's film.

The slow, repetitive movement of Péguy's style could not be more different from the trudge and swing of Brecht's, and yet both are shot through with a cry of anguish: What is to be done with the suffering of the poor?

Brecht and Péguy share another characteristic in their portrayal of Joan. Unlike every other artist I can think of who has chosen Joan as a subject, gender is, for both Brecht and Péguy, largely irrelevant.

This was not true of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Verdi, for whom Joan's femaleness, and especially her virginity, were at the center of their dramatic portrayal. Each of these three giants failed to create a successful portrait of Joan, and each failure is particularly nationalistic in its tone. The grossness of the national traits betrayed in each work gives them the flavor of caricature, almost like a nightclub comedian doing his impression of the Englishman, the German, the Italian.

Shakespeare's
Henry VI
may not even have been by Shakespeare. It may be a product of his tinkering with the work of his inferiors, something he did to hone his craft (or maybe just earn money) while he learned it. Shakespeare's Joan is not only a slut but a witch; her sorcery is the only possible explanation for British defeat at the hands of the militarily inferior and generally spineless French. Every imaginable anti-French cliché is tossed into the pit—along with every assumption about a woman who makes a place for herself in the world of men. Not for a minute are the doughty English taken in by the wench: They know her for what she is. In an exhibition worthy of the Elizabethan equivalent of a junior-high playwriting competition, Talbot, who is portrayed as a cross between Charlemagne and Jesus Christ, shows impatience with the French lingo. When he hears of the dauphin and La Pucelle, he says, “Pucelle or pussel. Dolphin or dogfish / Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels.” (1.4.107-108) (A puzel was a slut; a dogfish, the sea's most unworthy catch.) In a penultimate scene that doesn't rank among Shakespeare's immortal moments, Joan, threatened with death by burning, asserts that she is pregnant. First she names the dauphin as the father, and then, seeing that this only encouragesthe English to destroy the potential heir, switches the paternity to Alençon. When he is called by Richard Plantagenet “that notorious Machiavel” and his issue considered worthy of death, she tries again with the king of Naples. To which Warwick replies in an excess of pre-Victorian prudery, “A married man! That's most intolerable. ” (5.4.78) Seeing that her ploy is in vain, Joan goes off to the stake cursing her executioners with a vivacity of language that prefigures later greatness: “May never glorious sun reflex his beams / Upon the country where you make abode; / But darkness and the gloomy shade of death / Environ you, till mischief and despair / drive you to break your necks and hang yourselves.” (5.4.86-90)

If you find this Joan hard to recognize, try the High Romantic German version by Schiller. Like Shakespeare, Schiller finds Joan's virginity a problem, but he's not aggressive toward the idea of Joan as virgin, just regretful at the waste implied. Every man who gets close to Schiller's Joan falls in love with her and is inspired not with lustful thoughts but with marital ones. Dunois and Alençon vie with each other over who deserves her more. But Joan is impervious to their charms; her spiritual crisis occurs when she meets Lionel, a brave English knight, whom she cannot bring herself to run through with her sword. The sight of his unvisored face leads her to question whether a life of virginity was the right choice for her, and although she flees before even their trembling hands can meet, she accuses herself of bad faith.

Schiller presents us with a series of plot twists that makes soap opera look minimalist. Immediately after the dauphin's coronation, Joan is accused of witchcraft by her father, who never liked the idea of her refusing the local boys. She flees into the forest, accompanied by a shepherd who has loved her (chastely) since she was a girl. She is captured by the English in the forest, put under the charge of King Charles's wicked mother, Isabeau, who sticks a dagger into her skin, and meets up in chains with (guess who?) Lionel, who offers to marry her and take her to England, where she'll be appreciated. This causes her to remember that her true loyalty is to France. She breaks her chains and gallops back into the battle beside the brave dauphin, where she dies, not at the stake but gloriously at the side of her fighting king.

Many of these elements, but Italianed, are present in Giuseppe's Verdi's opera
Giovanna d'Arco.
The libretto, written by Timistocle Solera, includes an irate father who accuses his daughter Giovanna of polluting the family honor by being the lover of the dauphin. But he is wrong, wrong. He has misinterpreted Joan and the dauphin's chaste love. (They met while Charles, meditating in the forest, came upon Joan praying and was struck by her beauty.) But she resisted the temptation of the demonic chorus, who called her ungrateful in wasting the precious gifts of youth and beauty in a foolish devotion to virginity. “You crazy girl. You are lovely, what are you doing? If you lose the flower of love, it will soon die and never return.” Her only option, having been driven from her father's home, is to turn to a life of soldiering. She is captured by the English, and her father somehow happens to be in the tower where she is imprisoned. He overhears her in prayer and realizes that he has accused her falsely. He realizes the enormity of his error and begs her forgiveness. The emotion of this reconciliation allows Joan to break her chains and make her way back to the battle, where she dies, protecting both Charles and her father from the enemy. No burned flesh for Schiller or Verdi: only triumphant death in battle, the clean death at the sharp point of a sword.

These distortions are small potatoes considering what Hollywood, even some of its best directors, has done to Joan. Otto Preminger's
Joan of Arc,
with a screenplay by Graham Greene, which he tried to disavow, is mainly about Jean Seberg's short haircut. In Victor Fleming's 1948
Joan of Arc,
Ingrid Bergman does no better; she is all starry-eyedScandinavian idealism—her performance is utterly wooden. These actresses are too old and too feminine to get the important element of Joan's boyish youthfulness, and the scripts are too clumsy to accommodate her twists and turns. Perhaps the success of Dreyer's script lies in its silence. And certainly the overlong
Joan of Arc
by Jacques Rivette could use a little of Dreyer's stoic simplicity.

Interest in Joan never flags. In the last year of the millennium there were two new films made about Joan of Arc, one for American television. It was advertised as “the $20 million production, featuring an all-star cast, million dollar consumer print campaign, CBS's biggest and most expensive miniseries to date.” This is doubtless true. The kindest thing that can be said for it is that the actress playing Joan looks the part, although she delivers her lines with the flatness of a depressed teenager telling her parents she's on the way to the mall. Throughout, Joan seems to be involved in a massive twelve-step program. On the way to Orléans, Dunois says to her, “Joan, you have to take things one day at a time.” The young woman who played her told an interviewer that she liked playing Joan “because she was such a good person and I felt playing her made me a better person.” The Ukrainian star of another recent Joan film, who posed for
Vanity Fair
wearing a gingham bikini, said in that interview: “Joan was really a mover and a shaker. She was a real Tasmanian devil.”

Right. On the other hand, she may be no further off the mark than Shakespeare or Schiller.

CHAPTER VIII

SAINT JOAN

EVEN CENTURIES as the angel of men's imagination did not make it easy for Joan to be named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. It was in 1869, nearly 350 years after her death, that the process of formal canonization was begun, and she was not declared a saint for another 50 years.

At the same time that her cause was being discussed, the question of Christopher Columbus's sanctity was also up for debate. But his case was dropped in 1892 on the grounds that he had an illegitimate son. This seemed to be an insurmountable problem overcoming the glory that he earned because “he did not hesitate to conquer the dark sea and to thrust himself into every kind of vicissitude in order to acquire new shores for the Gospel and enter into their possession in the name of Jesus Christ.”
¹
This transformation of Columbus's career as an explorer into one of evangelization indicates the problems for someone like Joan or Columbus, someone whose fame was achieved by exploits not specifically religious in nature. In order to be named a saint, the candidate has to be understood to have been acting for the greater good of the Church and in ways that conformed to the Gospel. As with Columbus, it required a certain amount of quick-stepping to interpret Joan's goal of uniting France under the scepter of Charles VII as a sacred mission.

That this was done for Joan and not for Columbus points to an aspect of the Church's canonization process that is always present, if not dominant. At any historical moment, the Church canonizes people to make a point about what it considers, at that period, an exemplary life. A saint is not made a saint because canonization does anything for him or her; presumably, he or she has already achieved eternal salvation. A saint is canonized to help the living, and the nature of the help that the living need is often determined by the contemporary pressures of the world on the Church.

Although the first and most natural question regarding Joan's canonization is “Why did it take so long?,” the more fruitful and interesting ones are “Why did it happen when it did?” Or, “Why did it happen at all?”

The process that resulted in Joan's canonization began in 1869. The France of that period was at the center of the intellectual and social phenomenon that the Church, beginning with Pope Pius IX and continuing to the present papacy, considered one of the greatest threats ever to its power. This was a series of impulses over which the Church spread the linguistic tarpaulin of the word “modernism,” a habit of mind that was secular, rationalist, and antihierarchical. Joan's canonization in 1920 can be seen as the Church's attempt to recapture the larger public imagination for itself. It was one response to the tide of socialist, anticlerical thought that was particularly powerful at the end of the First World War. Many in the Church believed that this tide, whose source was clearly in France, could potentially capsize the boat piloted by Peter's heirs to the papacy. What was needed was the ballast of Joan's image: the popular, and unmistakably loyal, daughter of the Church.

There is a certain irony that this loyal daughter of the Church was sentenced to death by an ecclesiastical court, but this irony was passed over for the greater good of a clearly legible symbolic truth. The greater irony is that this woman, who insisted upon the primacy of her individual experience, and has therefore been called by some the first Protestant, would be seen as the curb by which the faithful could be brought to obedient, communal heel.

It was an irony not unregarded by the devil's advocates charged with disproving Joan's qualifications for sanctity. This was only one of the problems that they addressed, and it is difficult not to sympathize with their reservations. In examining Joan's history of resistance to her clerical judges, they questioned whether this constituted a model of faithful obedience, whether, in presenting her for emulation by the faithful, the Church was backing the wrong horse, or filly.

It is important to understand what is in the mind of the Church when it names someone a saint and, in this context, to explore the differences between a saint and a hero. The Church's criteria for sainthood are based on a person's having lived an exceptional, in fact unimpeachable, life of virtue. The emphasis is placed on the three theological and four moral virtues; it is assumed that the candidate would have kept the Ten Commandments of Moses and the six commandments of the Church—the latter having to do with questions of fidelityto worship. Keeping the commandments is only paying membership dues in the club of potential salvation; it implies only the minimum compliance (however rare that might be in reality), not the distinction that sainthood implies.