What We're Reading Now: "Cyrano de Bergerac in His Own Language" by Kevin Y
Even if you’ve never seen the play, you know this scene.
Two men stand below a beautiful woman's balcony. The younger is handsome but dumb. The elder is ugly, but a poet. The handsome face repeats the hidden poet's whispered words at full volume, charming his beloved and eventually winning her kiss. The poet, as enamored as his young counterpart, remains in the shadows, living vicariously through him.
The story of Cyrano de Bergerac is iconic, but this story is not one of those archetypal tales, like the Cinderella myth or the myth of the Great Flood, that have been woven into the folk traditions of cultures around the globe. It is the work of a single artistic mind, neo-Romantic poet and playwright Edmond Rostand, who, writing from one particular place at one particular time—Paris in the 1890s—managed to charm the world with his eloquence and hold theatre-goers in his sway for more than a century. Rostand’s famous plot has been repurposed dozens of times in sitcoms and cartoons, and has inspired artists from Steve Martin to Lucy Ives. Cyrano is constantly translated, updated, and adapted. Rarely does a day go by when Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane don't tread the boards somewhere in the world. The play is produced so often that in just the one year before lockdown began, I was able to see an adaptation by Jason O'Connell and Brenda Withers at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival; an off-Broadway rock musical version starring Peter Dinklage; scenes from the play incorporated into Theresa Rebeck's Bernhardt/Hamlet; and a National Theatre Live broadcast starring James McAvoy.
I see, in fact, every adaptation that I can. I love Rostand, I love Cyrano, and I will do anything I can to spend more time with them. But I am also seeking something. There is a deep resonance at the heart of this play that makes it so much more than the tragic romance it is often presented as. The English language adaptations I’ve seen often hint at it, but none of them live up to what I remember feeling during my first encounters with the original French text. This past summer, with the theatre world in lockdown, I returned to the original text in its original language, to try to identify what Cyrano first stirred in me.
Learning languages is one of the great joys of my life. A new language is like a window between the mind and the world: it gives you new ways to order your thoughts, and highlights different facets of human emotion and interaction. Implicit in every new grammar pattern are the thousands of years of history that made that particular method of communicating the most natural choice. There is no way to love a language without loving the culture or cultures that conceived it.
Students of French often start with a superficial fascination. We might be drawn in first by the food, the cinema, the fashion. Then the language brings into focus deeper elements of the culture—the fact, for example, that formal and familiar speech are codified in the grammar. The more we listen and watch and read, the more we are confronted with the culture’s contradictions. We might learn that a country can be both deeply Catholic and deeply secular; that a people can pride itself on its rationality, and also cultivate an appetite for childlike sentiment. We might encounter people who are more similar to and more different from ourselves than we could have imagined.
There is something heartening in the discovery of the universal, but what really makes the world come alive for me is the discovery of difference: that there are different ways to think, and speak, and live; that we needn’t be limited to the cultural patterns we were raised with.
I encountered Rostand and Cyrano for the first time in a college French class. Our teacher, charming and inspiring in a way that only a French teacher can be, was preparing us to watch scenes from the 1990 Gerard Depardieu film version. She described the way the text overflowed with France’s national iconography: the setting of the acts at centers of national identity, like a bakery, a battle front, and a convent; the resemblance of Cyrano's plume and beak-like nose to France's national animal, the rooster. She introduced us to the Alexandrine couplet of French classical verse, a convention that Rostand maintained throughout all of his dramatic work, despite the rising popularity across Europe of realist prose drama. Rostand’s hero was designed, in part, to reflect a distinctly French aesthetic, she explained—one that, in the decades following the industrial revolution, was beginning to fall out of fashion.
Rostand wrote Cyrano during a time of incredible technological change and cultural upheaval. He was nine when the first electric street lamps were installed in Paris. During his adulthood, the gramophone and then the motion picture began to undermine the immediacy of theatre. The same year that Cyrano premiered, the very first telegrams were being sent between France and the United States. Over the course of Rostand’s life, he saw technology displace the natural rhythms with which he was familiar, dissolve the boundaries between places, and divorce identity from locality. New developments led to unprecedented opportunities. But a part of him must have wondered: What is left to guide us when traditions fall out of fashion?
I imagine that these questions—which are not so different from those we ask today about social media and the global export of American pop culture—plagued Rostand. It was in this context that he crafted his hero, who would exemplify the values which he felt were fading. Who would sing hymns to the old France that he loved, and maybe keep some ember of it alive, as globalization accelerated.
Reading the play now, in its original language, I am struck by the very French sense of valor that runs through these verses, which has never quite been captured in any of the dozen or so English adaptations I have read and seen. Over and over, Cyrano forgoes profit in order to live up to his sense of duty. Early in the play, he is offered the patronage of a wealthy cardinal who would like to produce a play he has written, but he turns it down, refusing to cede the ownership of his work to someone whose morals he doesn't respect. He defends his friends in battle without a thought for his own safety. In his relationship with Roxane, he plays the role of poet and messenger but never lover, bringing her joy and fulfilling his promise to her without seeking her love for himself. These many facets of Cyrano’s identity—poet, lover, mentor, friend—all orbit around the same center: the ethos of a soldier, who sacrifices his body for the welfare of a country to which he may never return, who must forsake reward in pursuit of service, for whom to serve is an end in itself.
Most remarkably of all, when Cyrano dies, he dies with a smile on his face. It says so right in the stage directions. In the final act, after Roxane has put together the true story behind her love letters, Cyrano, fatally wounded, reflects on all he has missed out on. He will die without a lover, without a fortune, without fame. But there is one thing, he says, that he will carry with him into the House of God, despite it all. “’Tis?” asks Roxane.
“My panache!” he says, and goes, smiling, to his fate. Panache: this word, at the center of Cyrano’s moral universe, is one that a surprising number of adaptations elide.
Today, because of the popularity of Cyrano, panache has passed into English to mean a particular brand of flamboyance and wit. But in Paris in 1897 the word conjured something else. A few hundred years prior, the word panache had meant, simply, a plume, the kind you might see in the hat of a musketeer or a cadet (like Cyrano). The word took on a more figurative meaning, however, during the reign of Henri IV, who, it is said, would ride into battle with a grand white feather on his helmet, crying to his soldiers, “Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc!” Follow my white plume! He made himself the most identifiable target on the battlefield. He was literally ready to die for his people.
So panache for Rostand revolves around this willingness to dedicate oneself to a set of values without a thought of reward. It was baked into Rostand’s understanding of community and identity, integral to classical French ideals—ideals which, he feared, were fading, as the topography of world cultures began to flatten.
Any work of literature is bound to shift when it is adapted. But this particular kind of heroism at the heart of Cyrano seems especially prone to disappearing in translation. Jason O’Connell frames his Cyrano as a kind of avatar for adolescent self-doubt. Peter Dinklage sees the character as representing the propensity to feel unworthy of love. Jamie Lloyd, who directed James McAvoy, describes Cyrano as being about the universal experience of insecurity. What is striking to me about these visions is that each identifies in Cyrano what theatre artists might refer to as a “tragic flaw.” This interpretation makes a certain amount of sense. In my dramatic lit classes, I was always taught that great tragedy happens when an otherwise noble character succumbs to moral failure. Once you’ve identified the tragic flaw, you’ve found the key to the tragic hero.
The problem with this approach is that Rostand never intended the play to be a tragedy. We know this not only because of Cyrano’s dying smile, but because the words Rostand himself chose, as subtitle for the play, were “a heroic comedy.” It is not a meditation on human frailty. It is a joyful celebration of high ideals.
Perhaps the reason this play has a propensity to be reframed as a tragedy when adapted in English is that there is no place for panache in contemporary American and Anglophone culture. For us, watching a character die penniless and celibate could never be anything but a tragedy. In fact, if you want Cyrano to be anything other than a tragedy, today, you have to rewrite the ending completely, which is what modern-day adaptations tend to do. Among others, Steve Martin's Roxane, the 1945 romantic noir film Love Letters, and the 2018 teen comedy Sierra Burgess is a Loser all rewrite the story so that their Cyrano analogs get the girl (or, in Sierra Burgess's case, the guy). Restraint and sacrifice are dispensed with, and the audience is treated to that quintessentially American thrill: success. Many of these adaptations, both the tragedies and the comedies, are lovely, moving pieces of work, but Rostand’s voice is absent from them. This is odd to me, as I feel that the questions he was asking—specifically, what do we lose as we hurtle into modernity?—are as relevant today as they were in 1897. Perhaps we rewrite the play because we are afraid of the answer.
In some ways I feel that my own life represents exactly the future that Rostand was wary of. I don’t have a religion, or much tradition. I socialize in cyberspace, disconnected from any sense of place. I don’t feel bound to my country. And while I am happy to live in a freer, more prosperous world than my ancestors did, I am also plagued by a sense of being unmoored, of feeling disconnected from everything despite being more connected than ever. The freedom to choose our own values, and to cultivate a sense of identity that reaches beyond nations and borders, is invaluable, but it can be paralyzing. Absent the old ways, we look for new modes of identity in political movements, new permutations of old religions, and fractured online subcultures. Many of them are peaceful. Some are not.
In 1897, the Parisian public was largely looking forward to the future. They welcomed the innovation and social critique of prose dramatists like Becque, Feydeau, and Zola. They were ready for something new. And yet, faced with Cyrano, a character who seemed to leap onto the stage from an imagined past, and who represented the very things they were turning away from, according to legend the audience stood and cheered and continued cheering for over an hour. Why were they so bewitched by this old-fashioned man? I think it’s because no matter how rational and individualistic and open-minded societies of the world become, part of us will always long for something like a tribe or a nation; for a white plume to follow. Where can we look, today, for that kind of a calling? And what happens to those of us who never find one?
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Kevin Y is a clown school dropout and casual otaku who lives in New York City with his wife and piano. He is rumored to be affiliated with the YouTube channel The Stockroach OFFICIAL. He does not tweet and has won no awards.
