Jean Giraudoux

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Giraudoux, [Hippolyte] Jean (1882–1944), playwright. Thanks to a number of fine productions, Giraudoux has been the most successful of the modern French playwrights in the American theatre. He met varying measures of popularity with four works: Amphitryon 38 (1937), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948), Ondine (1954), and Tiger at the Gates (1955). His best works were felicitously witty mixtures of fantasy and realism.

The plays and novels of the French author and diplomat Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) are marked by the use of myth, fantasy, and an original, somewhat precious style.

Jean Giraudoux was born on Oct. 29, 1882, in the little town of Bellac in the Limousin, the second son of a provincial employee of the highway department and a gentle, reserved mother whose letters show a natural gift for writing. Although the family moved to Pellevoisin when Jean was only 7, Bellac remained for him the symbol of a certain ideal way of life. Several of his most appealing characters are also natives of Bellac, for example, l'Apollon de Bellac and Suzanne.

In 1893 Giraudoux received a scholarship at the Iycée of Châteauroux, where he was an excellent pupil for 7 years. His partly autobiographical novel Simon le pathétique (1926) and memories of his classmates give a picture of a polite, sensitive, aloof adolescent with a certain elegance in dress and language and a passion for excelling in both studies and sports. He received in this provincial school a solid humanistic education from excellent, idealistic teachers. His last 2 years of secondary school were spent in Paris, where he stood first in his class.

In 1903, after a year of military service, Giraudoux was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he maintained his brilliant record. His study of German literature, his major field of interest, and his subsequent contact with German civilization during a year on scholarship in Germany had a lasting effect on his intellectual and artistic life. While hesitating before committing himself to the career of a scholar, he spent a happy year as an assistant in French at Harvard University, a year which proved to be his last formal contact with the academic world.

Prose Writings

Upon his return to France in 1908, Giraudoux took a position as assistant literary editor on the paper Le Matin. For several years, free at last from the discipline of school and examinations, he led a carefree life and kept postponing a decision on a career. Through his position he began to meet writers and eventually tried his own hand at writing short stories. Some of these were completely traditional and undistinguished, but others, published in 1909 in the volume entitled Les Provinciales, already showed signs of his original style and his peculiar vision of the world.

In these stories, based on childhood memories, Giraudoux gives a universal dimension to commonplace events by setting them in a cosmic context, a formula that was to become his most characteristic manner. Another volume, of three novellas, L'École des indifférents (1911), reflects his own existing mood of uncommitted detachment.

In 1910 Giraudoux took and passed the examination that would allow him to train for the consular service. Before the war he was never promoted beyond the rank of diplomatic courier and vice-consul. At the outbreak of hostilities, he was drafted and subsequently served on the French front and at the Dardanelles. Twice wounded and finally discharged, he was sent in 1916 as a military instructor to Portugal and later to Harvard. His war books, Lectures pour une ombre (1917) and Adorable Clio (1920), are meditations on the war rather than descriptions of it. In Amica America (1919) Giraudoux paints the New World with a good deal of fantasy but with genuine sympathy.

In 1918 Giraudoux married Suzanne Boland, who the following year bore his only child, Jean Pierre. Another examination entitled him to the post of embassy secretary, but he accepted instead the directorship of a government service which was eventually to become the Department of Cultural Relations. This position may have inspired his first nonautobiographical work, the novel Suzanne et le Pacifique (1921), whose heroine, a newstyle Robinson Crusoe, rejects the temptation to abandon her native culture as she grows to understand it better alone on her desert isle.

Ever since his student days Giraudoux had been concerned with the Franco-German question. This is the problem he takes up in his novel Siegfried et le Limousin (1922). Quite characteristically he treats it not in political or economic (that is, realistic) terms but in a poetic, almost mystical consideration of national character and cultural inheritance.

While serving as chief of the Information and Press Services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1926-1934), Giraudoux was appointed to the commission to settle Turkey's war claims. He assumed the post of inspector of diplomatic and consular positions in 1936. In this office he wrote Pleins pouvoirs (1939), a remarkable double-headed work that outlines, on the one hand, the political, economic, and moral reforms he proposed to Édouard Daladier, and defines, on the other, his understanding of the cultural heritage and destiny of France. At this critical moment of its history, Giraudoux saw France's salvation in a preservation of the humanistic ideal. Profoundly affected by the events of 1939-1940, he retired from public life and died on Jan. 31, 1944.

The Playwright

For this statesman whose official vocation always seemed more like an avocation, Giraudoux's meeting in 1928 with the great actor-director Louis Jouvet was to have momentous repercussions. He wrote with Jouvet's encouragement and technical advice the play Siegfried, adapted from Siegfried et le Limousin. With its immediate success under Jouvet's direction, Giraudoux found himself launched in a new career, the one for which he is the most famous. His close association with Jouvet continued as he henceforth wrote almost entirely for the stage.

Although the basic conflicts of this theater are contemporary - conflicts, for example, between war and peace, freedom and destiny, man and woman, or man and the supernatural - the plots are often inspired by classical literature (La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, Amphitryon 38, Electre, Pour Lucrèce), German legend (Ondine), or the Bible (Judith, Sodome et Gomorrhe). Giraudoux's treatment of character is at the farthest pole from the psychological or sociological studies of the realistic theater. His young women, civil servants, ragpickers, or military heroes arrive before the audience in full possession of their essences and evolve no more than the gods against whom they are pitted. And yet so great is Giraudoux's magic of style that he enchanted a whole generation, weary of "bourgeois" drama and "well-made" plays, into believing that there was another way of dealing with reality. His popularity was challenged only by the ideological theater of the existentialists and the even more fantastic plays of the so-called theater of the absurd.

Further Reading

The best general studies of Giraudoux in English are Donald Inskip, Jean Giraudoux: The Making of a Dramatist (1958), and Laurent LeSage, Jean Giraudoux: His Life and Works (1959). Recommended for general background are Germaine Brée and Margaret Guiton, An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (1957); Wallace Fowlie, A Guide to Contemporary French Literature (1957) and Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to French Contemporary Theatre (1959); Jacques Guicharnaud, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Genet (rev. ed. 1967); and Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (rev. ed. 1967).

Giraudoux, Jean (1882–1944), French novelist, playwright, and critic. Strongly influenced by German romantics, he wrote Ondine (1939), a play based on a tale by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (Undine, 1811), which was itself a version of a 14th‐century poem. Through the unsuccessful union of a nymph and a knight, Giraudoux suggests the difficulty of reconciling the natural and the human worlds.

— Lewis C. Seifert

Giraudoux, Jean (1882-1944). Diplomat, novelist, playwright, and critic. Son of a minor civil servant, he was brought up in a series of small country towns and after a number of academic successes entered the French diplomatic service in 1910. After World War I, when he was wounded and decorated for bravery, he returned to diplomacy, filled several important posts, and finally, at the outbreak of World War II, was appointed commissioner for information. Here he was not a success and retired from the service (1940). His war memoirs of 1914-18 are contained in Lectures pour une ombre (1917), Amica America (1919), and Adorable Clio (1920), while his later political reflections are found in Pleins pouvoirs (1930), Armistice à Bordeaux (1945), and Sans pouvoirs (1946).

He began as a writer of fiction. Provinciales (1909), a loose collection of three stories of childhood, a tale of love gone wrong and a couple of sketches of country life, establishes his manner and prefigures all his later fiction. Stylistically it is in strong reaction against Naturalism. Giraudoux's preference is for the greater richness and complexity of 16th-c. French—he loved Ronsard—and for the fanciful and mysterious excursions of German Romantics like E. T. A. Hoffmann. He sings the praises of country life, relishing its charms, slow rhythms, and eccentricities, but he defamiliarizes the real world, rescuing it from its banality through verbal alchemy. His prose is highly imaged, full of fanciful similes, ingenious analogies, odd juxtapositions, ironies, paradoxes, and hyperbole. Fancy embellishes the world, revealing the intricacy and wonder of nature and the kinship between human and animal. There is no strong narrative line and characterization is impressionistic, dealing in types rather than individuals. Much is made of the freshness and mystery of young girls and of the natural code of living they embody. Subsequent novellas and short stories recreate this imaginary world, L'École des indifférents (1911) and La France sentimentale (1932) being the most successful. The novels take up the search for harmony and the poetic possibilities of ordinary life: Suzanne et le Pacifique (1921), where the virginal heroine abandons Paradise of her own free will; Siegfried et le Limousin (1922), a rather fey treatment of the differences between France and Germany, which greatly preoccupied him and which surface again in his first play, Siegfried (1928); Bella (1926), with its witty satire of political notables woven into a version of Romeo and Juliet; Choix des élues (1939), where the loves of Jacques and Maléna are played out in an American setting.

Giraudoux's meeting with Jouvet in 1928 was crucial in helping him to discipline the poetic fancy of his prose fiction to the needs of the stage. The ensuing partnership produced a series of memorable plays, still highly verbal and stylized, but strikingly effective in performance. They range from the witty duel between the human and the divine in Amphitryon 38 (1929), and the clever and moving debate over peace and war in La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935), to the clash of sacred and profane love in Judith (1931) and the ingenious recasting of Greek myth in Électre (1937), where a sinister beggar is the voice of inexorable fate. This is a highly rhetorical theatre which reinstates traditional dramatic devices like monologue and tirade so as to give shape, order, and coherence to fragmented experience. Within the plays women emerge as the key to Giraudoux's persistent quest for harmony, and the exalted status he gives to love is inextricably linked with their qualities of delicacy, naturalness, candour, and fidelity. The plays in which harmony is attained have buoyancy and charm: Supplément au voyage de Cook (1935), with its triumph of ‘natural’ morality in the South Seas; Intermezzo (1933), where the unspoilt Isabelle rejects a proffered immortality; Amphitryon 38, in which married love is vindicated. Later plays are more pessimistic about the prospects of harmony: Ondine (1939), where knight and seamaiden prove incompatible; Sodome et Gomorrhe (1943); Pour Lucrèce (posth., 1953), where innocence is defeated; even La Folle de Chaillot (posth., 1945), where only madwomen believe in love and honour. Giraudoux also wrote criticism—Les Cinq Tentations de La Fontaine (1938); Littérature (1941)—and scripts for two films. An unfinished novel, La Menteuse (c. 1936), and play, Les Gracques (c.1941), were published in 1958.

[S. Beynon John]

Bibliography

• L. Le Sage, Jean Giraudoux, His Life and Works (1959)
• D. J. Inskip, Jean Giraudoux, the Making of a Dramatist (1958)

Quotes:

"Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom."

"The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the eternal seductiveness of life."

"There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people..."

"I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management."

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."

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Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (October 29, 1882 – January 31, 1944) was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Partial listing of works 3 Trivia 4 Notes 5 External links

Biography

Born in Bellac, Haute-Vienne, Giraudoux's father, Léger Giraudoux, worked for the Ministry of Transportation. Giraudoux studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Paris and, upon graduation, traveled extensively around Europe. After his return to France in 1910, Giraudoux accepted a position with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the outbreak of World War I, he served with honors, and in 1915, he became the first writer ever to be awarded the wartime Legion of Honor.^[2]

He was married in 1918, and in the subsequent period between the two World Wars, Giraudoux produced the majority of his writing. He first achieved literary success through several of his novels, notably Siegfried et le Limousin (1922) and Eglantine (1927), but it is his plays that gained him international renown. A meeting with Louis Jouvet, in 1928, stimulated his writing.

Before World War II, he published in 1939 a highly antisemitic political essay called "Pleins pouvoirs" (Full power).

He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.

Partial listing of works

• Comedies
  • Amphitryon 38--see Amphitryon; (in French Amphitryon 38)
  • Apollo of Bellac (in French L'Apollon de Bellac)
  • The Madwoman of Chaillot (in French La Folle de Chaillot)
• Dramas
  • The Trojan war will not take place (in French La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, presented in English-speaking countries as Tiger at the Gates).
  • Electra (in French Électre)
  • Ondine (in French Ondine)
  • Sodom and Gomorrah (in French Sodome et Gomorrhe, later set as a musical work, Gesangsszene, by Karl Amadeus Hartmann)

Trivia

• Giraudoux's name is graffitied on a Parisian wall in François Truffaut's 1959 film The 400 Blows as a reference to the writer.

Notes

1. ^ Brockett, Oscar. History of the Theatre Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 1968. p. 621.
2. ^ Fowlie, Wallace. Jean Giraudoux in Gassner, John and Edward Quinn ed. The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York, Thomas Crowell. 1969. p. 359.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Giraudoux

• The Theatrical Art of Jean Giraudoux
• Analysis of the play Ondine (in French)
• Works by Jean Giraudoux (public domain in Canada)

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