Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly James P. Gilroy Moraly, Yehuda. Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini. Sussex Academic P., 2021. ISBN 978-1-78976-036-1. Pp. 149. Mallarmé’s ambition was to write a total Book that would be an Orphic explanation of the Earth. He was never able to write this book, but this frustrated ambition informed all his poetic works. In a similar way, authors Paul Claudel and Jean Genet, as well as filmmaker Federico Fellini, pursued a dream work throughout their careers that would constitute a summa of their worldviews and artistic aspirations. Like Mallarmé, all three failed to bring such a work to completion despite repeated, obsessive attempts. The works they did produce, however, expressed in different ways the themes that haunted them in their unrealized masterworks. In the case of Claudel, he was obsessed by the wish to create a dialogue between the Old and New Testaments, between Judaism and Christianity. He was torn between two views of Judaism. He saw in the Old Testament the key to the New. At the same time Christianity represented belief and truth for him while Judaism represented falsehood and disbelief. He envisioned a fourth part of his L’Otage dramatic trilogy where a dialogue between the two faiths would be enacted. He also planned an oratorio on the subject similar to his Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. Neither project reached fulfillment. At the end of his life, Claudel became more sympathetic toward Judaism. The horror of the Holocaust led him to associate the persecution of the Jews with that of Christians by those who hate the divine. He also began but never completed a new version of another play of his, Tête d’or, about political tyranny. In this new version, there would have been a play-within-a-play about a performance of Tête d’or in a Nazi concentration camp. The performance is directed by a Jewish prisoner who becomes a self-sacrificing Christ figure. Genet had an obsession with death. His goal was to write a major essay on the nothingness of life. The work would have three parts. It would be a mirror of life, revealing its illusory nature. It would also announce a new morality, celebrating the Otherness of homosexuals and other outsiders, like racial minorities. Finally, it would present and exemplify a new aesthetic, wherein a book would effectuate the destruction of its themes, its author, and itself. Although Genet never completed this essay, Moraly finds the embodiment of its ideas in Genet’s four plays which each portray the illusory nature of human existence as role-playing, a form of revolution against accepted values and an ultimate self-destruction. Fellini made repeated efforts to produce a film titled Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna. Constantly rewritten and revised scenarios that have survived and which have been pieced together by Moraly give an idea of what Fellini wanted to achieve. His ambition was to create a kind of anti-Dante’s Divine Comedy, a total summa of this world and the afterlife. In both realms, humanity is confronted with the ultimate meaninglessness of everything. All values are a fraud, and the only sensible response is a serene detachment. [End Page 210] James P. Gilroy University of Denver (CO) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French