“An Eternal Dance”: Paul Claudel, Japan, and Thermodynamics

Abstract

“An Eternal Dance”: Paul Claudel, Japan, and Thermodynamics Ryan Johnson (bio) Early during his time as French Ambassador to Japan from 1921 to 1927, Paul Claudel reflected on the structure of the universe.1 Having read at length about developments in physics, especially thermodynamics, Claudel wished to make recent discoveries in science fit with his Catholic cosmology. The world, he wrote in his journal, must have had an origin, but that origin must have been prompted by an outside power. The world has a trajectory, therefore a sense of movement. But movement cannot begin by itself: it must have been commenced “by a foreign power” (par une force étrangère).2 Once in movement, the world and all of the things in it gradually wind down and, “having achieved their task, enter into a state of eternal dance” (Claudel, Journal, 615; ayant achevé leur tâche, entrent dans un état de danse éternelle). Certainly, for the Catholic Claudel, the foreign power is God, and the eternal dance is life in God’s eternal kingdom. Yet Claudel’s religious interpretation of thermodynamics overlaps with his views on the writing systems and aesthetics he was encountering in East Asia. Though Claudel’s engagements with physics and East Asian aesthetics mirror the concerns of other early twentieth-century poets, the religious valency that Claudel gives to his readings in thermodynamics and the ultramodern dimension he adds to his appreciation of East Asian aesthetics produces a subtly different image of Japan and East Asia in his poetry than what we find in other early twentieth-century orientalists.3 My aim in this article is to draw attention to Claudel as sharing many of the concerns and interests of the assorted eccentrics and malcontents with whom we associate late nineteenth and early twentieth-century [End Page 265] orientalism but, through his blend of science, religion, and Japan, as existing in a unique dimension of the orientalist realm. Though Claudel and writers like Henry Adams, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore drew inspiration from East Asia at roughly the same time, and though all of them approached Asian, especially Chinese, and Western writing with similar interests and similar presuppositions, Claudel arrived at remarkably different conclusions about the nature of the archipelago, its art, culture, and landscape. In effect, what we find in Claudel’s writings on Japan is an attempt to make the art and scenes associated with premodern Japan incomparably modern, part of a country whose nature and writing anticipates and facilitates the understanding of developments in physics from the nineteenth century onwards. At the same time, Claudel attempts to shift the interpretation of physical theories, particularly of “énergie,” back to an older, more religious framework. The result is an image of Japan in Claudel’s work that is both antiquated and ultramodern, in time and timeless, with a peculiar interpretation of thermodynamics working to resolve the contradiction in Claudel’s conceptual universe. The ways in which East Asia has served as an alternative to Western industrialization have been well surveyed. R. John Williams describes how artists and writers from Lafcadio Hearn, Ernest Fenollosa, and Ezra Pound to Robert M. Persig and Steve Jobs have drawn inspiration from the ostensibly less mechanistic culture of East Asia in order to provide an alternative to the machine-oriented culture of the modern West.4 The view that “only the inherent aesthetic tradition of the East could rescue us [Westerners] from the inherently mechanical demons of the West” was, as Williams points out, largely founded on error.5 Williams’s monograph builds on Christopher Benfey’s and T. J. Jackson Lears’ earlier projects.6 Both earlier critics investigate the role of Japan as a focal point for American writers discontented with apparently materialistic and positivistic turn-of-the-century American culture—“misfits,” as Benfey calls them. Like Williams, both Benfey and Lears indicate that these Americans—among them Henry Adams, William Sturgis Bigelow, and Percy Lowell—flocked to Japan in search of a “primitive” culture that could turn the clock back on Western modernity. The impetus for most of the journeys to the East was a material appreciation that was bound up with Japanese art, particularly woodblock prints or...