Jean-Jacques Bernard

• Born: July 30, 1888
• Birthplace: Enghien-les-Bains, France
• Died: September 12, 1972
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Although Jean-Jacques Bernard’s reputation rests largely on his drama, he wrote several significant prose works. Primary among these is Le Camp de la mort lente (1944; The Camp of Slow Death, 1945), a powerful memoir of his imprisonment by the Nazis in 1941-1942 and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism. He published Le Pain rouge, a collection of stories focusing on the occupation of France, in 1947 and a novel, Marie et le Vagabond, in 1949. His memoir of his years in theater, Mon ami le théâtre (1958), remained popular and in print into the twenty-first century.

Achievements

Along with playwright Denys Amiel, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Charles Vildrac, Jean-Jacques Bernard popularized a type of theater that has been called the Theater of the Unspoken (l’inexprimé) or the theater of the unexpressed for its emphasis on nonverbal communication and symbolism. This movement arose after World War I in response to the perceived verbal excesses of earlier French drama. Bernard was active in numerous theater organizations and served as president of La Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques from 1957 to 1959.

Biography

Jean-Jacques Bernard was born in 1888 in Enghien-les-Bains, France. His father, Tristan Bernard (whose real name was Paul Bernard), made a name for himself in the theater by writing farce. Jean-Jacques Bernard was Jewish by birth and was educated in Paris at the Lycée Carnot and at the Sorbonne. He wrote his first play at the age of twenty-one and finished several other short plays before the beginning of World War I. While he was in the army, he wrote war dispatches for a newspaper.

The effects of war haunted Bernard. His plays of the years immediately following World War I reveal the trauma that war inflicted on the playwright. In the early 1920’s, however, he met the great director, Gaston Baty, and entered the richest period of his dramatic career. Along with another playwright, Denys Amiel, Bernard created a vogue for what has been called the theater of silence or the Theater of the Unspoken. However, war once again changed the course of Bernard’s life.

In 1941, Bernard was arrested by the Germans and was interned in Compiègne, outside Paris. He was released the following year because of poor health. The war, however, was of fatal consequence to other members of Bernard’s family. His father, Tristan Bernard, was arrested by the Germans in 1944 and died, broken in spirit and in health, in 1947. Jean-Jacques Bernard’s oldest son died in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was sent by the Nazis because of his activity in the Resistance.

Plagued by chronic illness most of his life, Bernard published little after 1950 (except for his memoir, Mon ami le théâtre). After the war, he worked for a time in film with his brother, and he became active in theater organizations, including La Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. He died in Paris in 1972.

Analysis

Some critics have noted that Jean-Jacques Bernard brought a new classicism to the French theater. Indeed, the simplicity of Bernard’s plays is comparable in some ways to the French theater of the seventeenth century—the era of classicism. His plays are concise and tightly focused, and although he does not follow seventeenth century theatrical conventions of confining action to a single day and place, Bernard’s theater has a spareness that creates a curious and strong impact.

Bernard is remembered as the chief member of the school of the Theater of the Unspoken or the theater of the unexpressible. In reaction to what he—and other playwrights—saw as the melodramatic and verbose theater of the nineteenth century in France, Bernard created plays in which verbal exchange is not necessarily the most important kind of communication. Instead, he believed that the real communication between people is in gesture, expression, and what is not said.

Clearly, such a theory places a great deal of responsibility on the actors of a play. Bernard wrote descriptions of his characters’ actions, reactions, and expressions, but it remains up to the actors—and to the directors—to successfully express what the playwright had in mind. Therefore, one cannot fully appreciate Bernard’s theater by simply reading the text of the plays. An ideal appreciation would be found in reading the text and seeing a performance of the play. This ideal approach might apply to all theater, but it is especially relevant to Bernard’s drama.

Invitation to a Voyage

Invitation to a Voyage takes its title from a famous poem by the nineteenth century French poet, Charles Baudelaire. The allusions that Bernard makes by using this title serve him well. His play is about the kind of vague, quasi-mystical longing to be somewhere else, with someone else, escaping from the humdrum of one’s everyday life of which Baudelaire writes. Invitation to a Voyage is also an excellent example of the kind of indirect communication in which Bernard’s characters engage.

The setting is the Vosges section of eastern France, in particular a mountainous, forested area near the town of Épinal. The pine forests are of crucial import to Marie-Louise, the play’s main character, because they surround her home and represent the imprisonment she feels in her life. Marie-Louise has been married to Olivier for several years. The couple has a young son. By all appearances, Marie-Louise and Olivier are happily married. However, in actuality, Marie-Louise hides a chronic but not explicitly articulated malaise. She feels trapped in a life that is, while peaceful and contented, confining and boring. She fears a future in which she will do the same things again and again.

Marie-Louise makes the acquaintance of Philippe, a businessperson visiting her father’s factory. He gives her a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1931), which contains the poem “L’Invitation au Voyage.” This poem comes to articulate for Marie-Louise her own discontent—and her thirst for the exotic. When she hears that Philippe is leaving for Argentina, Marie-Louise is haunted by the word “Argentina” and the resonances that match her longings. Olivier rightly senses his wife’s vulnerability; he is afraid that Marie-Louise will in fact run away with Philippe. He does not directly express his fears, nor does Marie-Louise express her fascination with Philippe and his life.

Time passes. Philippe returns to Épinal from Argentina for a visit. When Marie-Louise learns that he is nearby, she cannot resist the attraction; she abruptly leaves her home and goes to seek Philippe in Épinal. Olivier is terrified that she will not come back. However, Marie-Louise’s adventure turns out badly. She does see Philippe, but contrary to what she had hoped, he is in no way interested in her. They talk—but about his business, not about love. Marie-Louise returns to Olivier, accepts her disappointment and her former life, as it was.

The Springtime of Others

The Springtime of Others features one of the most memorably cruel mothers in all theater. However, the other two characters in the play, the victims of the mother’s cruelty, are not entirely flawless either. This short three-act play is typical of Bernard’s economy: There are only three characters (excluding a maid), and while the setting changes for each act, the plot is free of complications.

The play begins in Italy, where Clarisse and Gilberte, mother and daughter, are vacationing. Young Maurice Gardier appears and introduces himself to Clarisse, who seems deceptively absent-minded, rude, and silly. As their conversation develops, it turns out that Maurice and Gilberte had met in Paris before coming to Italy—indeed, Gilberte is the reason Maurice is here at all.

Clarisse, an aging single parent, shows herself to be rather self-absorbed and sorry for herself, and when she discovers that Gilberte is in love with Maurice, she is moved—perhaps because she fears being left alone, perhaps because she is happy for her daughter, or perhaps because she is surprised that anyone would or could fall in love with Gilberte. It becomes obvious, however, that Clarisse is taken with Maurice and sees herself as her daughter’s rival for his attentions. Gilberte’s devotion to her mother is strong, even childish; she suspects nothing sinister in Clarisse’s actions and words. At the end of act 1, Clarisse takes a long look at Gilberte, tells her that, yes, she is in fact beautiful—then takes a table mirror and pauses at some length to look at her own image.

Maurice and Gilberte marry, and Gilberte becomes pregnant. Already given to instability, she becomes worse and begins to suspect that Maurice is having an affair with a horseback-riding friend of Clarisse, who fosters this suspicion in her daughter’s mind. Through most of act 2, Clarisse seems to sympathize with her daughter. However, as the second act ends, Clarisse effects a stunning reversal: She changes sides, defends Maurice’s right to have a female horseback-riding partner, and berates Gilberte, in front of Maurice, for being so touchy. Clarisse then smiles, calls Gilberte a clumsy little fool, and walks off. Gilberte dissolves into sobs.

Maurice, who was indeed unfaithful to his wife, eventually thinks the better of his actions and telephones Gilberte when she is staying with her mother. Clarisse makes a tactical error: While Gilberte stands nearby, she tells Maurice that his wife is not there and thereby loses the battle for Gilberte. Gilberte now recognizes her mother’s meanness, and she and Maurice reconcile—leaving Clarisse wretchedly alone at the play’s end. The Springtime of Others is a tour de force for an actor. There are a number of moments in the play when the meaning of words on the written page is open to several interpretations, and such richness and subtlety offer a range of opportunities for talented players.

La Louise

This one-act play is based on the notion that, as nineteenth century playwright Alfred de Musset put it, “one does not play around with love.” Bernard’s minimalism is evident everywhere. As the play begins, the audience learns only that the scene is a war zone; no particular war is noted. The soldiers bear no weapons. The stage is barely set—except that Bernard’s directions indicate a feminine presence (some prints, some flowers) in the few furnishings. What is most important in this context is that the meaning of what is happening or what is said is not always clear. This dimension of understatement, a thought-provoking subtlety, is one of the fascinating elements of Bernard’s theater.

One of the soldiers, Sermain, has been foraging in the war zone for lodgings for himself and several comrades. He has struck a pranklike bargain with a young woman named Louise—or “la” Louise. The “la,” the feminine word for “the,” is difficult to render into English; it connotes a familiarity, even patronization or condescension on the part of the speaker. Louise has agreed to billet one of the soldiers. However, because she has only one bed, the soldier will be obliged to sleep with Louise. Such a situation does not bother Louise, whom Sermain early on characterizes as loose. She is apparently happy to have the company and sex, even with a complete stranger.

Sermain adds malicious spice to the situation. He has chosen Pierre Garbin as the comrade who will share Louise’s bed—precisely because Pierre has openly declared his undying fidelity to the wife he left at home. Sermain thus wants to mock or test true love. Pierre knows only that he will spend the night in the home of a young woman; he does not know that he is to sleep with her.

Sermain’s scheme fails. Pierre is exactly what he seems to be—a loving, faithful husband, the only truly upright man in a group of morally slovenly brutes. Louise understands what Pierre is; she is able to observe him without being seen as he, for example, writes a letter to his wife then breaks into sobs. As Louise learns that Pierre is a man to be admired, she too weeps, moved by such devotion in a world in which she apparently thought true love was a myth.

The play’s crisis develops when it is time for bed. Instead of playing Sermain’s game, Louise gives Pierre her room and her bed. She directs him to her room without even exposing Sermain’s intended joke. Louise instead beds down in a closet, telling Pierre it is a second bedroom. As the curtain falls, Louise is in tears—because of her own loneliness and her admiration of Pierre’s steadfastness. In some sense then, Louise is the play’s heroine—her name is, after all, the title of the play. She has transcended Sermain’s cheap immorality and revived her own spirit as well.

Bernard delivers only what the audience needs to know to understand the play’s fundamental point—that true love exists and is a valuable commodity. Almost nothing is revealed about Louise or the soldiers other than Pierre. Even in his case, what is known is minimal: that he is married, has a baby son, and writes his wife faithfully. The play’s impact resides not in the conversation between Louise and Pierre but in Louise’s change in perspective, as it registers in her tone of voice, in her face, and in her final, verbally unexplained choice.

Biliography

Branford, Kester Adrian. A Study of Jean-Jacques Bernard’s Théâtre de L’Inexprimé. University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1977. Criticism and interpretation of Bernard, with emphasis on the Theater of the Unspoken. Bibliography.

Coindreau, Maurice. La Farce est jouée: Vingt-cinq ans de théâtre français, 1900-1925. New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, 1942. This classic is an imaginative, scholarly, pioneering work on numerous groups or schools of playwrights of the period, including Bernard. In French.

Daniels, May. The French Drama of the Unspoken. 1953. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. An indispensable study of Bernard and other writers of l’inexprimé (the unexpressed)—including Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Vildrac, and Denys Amiel. Daniels points out the positive contributions made by these writers in their plays, but she also sees the limitations of such theories.

Knowles, Dorothy. French Drama of the Inter-War Years, 1918-1939. London: Harrap, 1967. A widely available book that deals in literary history, including topics such as the differences between the theater of the boulevard and studio theater and the historical and cultural dimensions of French theater during this era. Contains much information regarding titles, plots, and chronology.

Surer, Paul. Cinquante ans de Théâtre. Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1969. A history of French theater from 1919 to the Theater of the Absurd. Surer includes Bernard in a chapter titled “Le Théâtre intimiste,” in which he suggests that the subtleties of the theater of the “unexpressed” may appeal only to a small, sophisticated audience. In French.