Return to Sender: Cocteau and Stoppard Respond to Nietzsche

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche’s theory of the “eternal return” has often proved compelling to artists. Two twentieth-century giants of the imagination, Jean Cocteau and Tom Stoppard, approached it in very divergent ways.

Friedrich Nietzsche first formulated the Eternal Return in his tract Die fröhliche wissenschaft (“The Joyful Science”), published in 1882. “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’.” He later expanded upon this idea in his career masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra (published serially in 1883-91). Some people, Nietzsche declares, would treat an eternal return experienced within their one lifetime as an absolute nightmare. That is how it is depicted in the 1993 Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. Others, Nietzsche surmises, would accept it with resignation but courage.

Such acceptance is the course of action that Nietsche recommends, informed by the behavior of the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome in the tradition founded by the fifth century (B.C.) cosmographer Empedocles. The Stoic Eternal Return provocatively suggests that the rational man must accept history’s cycles, including of failure and destruction, because history is a closed system within which nothing is ever really lost. According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, paraphrasing the lost Stoic writer Chrysippus, civilization is periodically destroyed, but after each episode of destruction, “all the same things come to be again in the world, so that even the same peculiarly qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in that world.”[1]

Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all objected to such a cyclical model of world history, as each of those religions is predicated upon two precepts: that a messianic cataclysm is destined to happen in the future and that people should read sacred texts that describe an actual past, because they can learn from them how to improve the human condition in the present and for the future. Modern secular humanist movements with a belief in the perfectibility of mankind, such as the atheism of British anarchist philosopher William Godwin and many of the French revolutionaries obviate the classical eternal return on similar grounds.

It is unclear whether Nietzsche went as far with the theory as the disciples of Empedocles did, but he certainly believed that human progress cannot meaningfully intervene in the cycles of suffering that constitute history. Plus la change, plus la même chose.

Jean Cocteau, an avant-garde artist, novelist, playwright, director, and filmmaker active in mid-twentieth-century France popularized the idea of the eternal return in the 1943 film L’Eternel Retour (The Eternal Return). Written by Cocteau and directed by Jean Delannoy, the film starred Cocteau’s lover and muse Jean Marais, l’Eternel Retour is an adaptation of the medieval English story of Tristan and Iseult that takes place in contemporary (that is, Nazi-occupied) France. At this point in Cocteau’s life, he was essentially a collaborator of the Vichy regime: the film premiered in Vichy with the regime’s full endorsement, and Marais and blonde costar Madeleine Sologne both embodied Nazi ideals of human beauty. However, the film’s subtext contradicts aspects of Nazi ideology. Primarily, its insistence that authoritarian forces disrupt erotic love throughout history contests the homophobia of the Nazi regime. Notably, while Cocteau’s inamorati Patrice (Marais) and Nathalie (Sologne) reliving of Tristan and Iseult’s nightmare suggests that hatred and authoritarianism cycle throughout human (or at least European) history, the film also represents the characters’ struggles against these evils as heroism – a viewpoint that contradicts the neo-Stoicism that Nietzsche recommends. The Nazi worldview tapped Nietsche in part for his endorsement of acquiescence–including with their occupation of France. Cocteau’s reinvention rejected that absolutely.

Tom Stoppard. “Arcadia.”

A generation after Cocteau, playwright Tom Stoppard rejected the entire theory of eternal return and implied that the ultimate demonstration of its wrongness is the impact on human progress of genocide. Born Tomas Strassler, the child of a Jewish country physician in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), and a refugee from the Nazis and later the violence of the Partition of India, Stoppard (renamed for his British stepfather) struggled throughout his more than half-century-long playwriting career with the shadow of the Holocaust and of genocide in general. Stoppard’s play Arcadia (1990), which the London Independent critic Johann Hari called the best British play of the twentieth century, sees Regency private tutor Septimus Hodge console his student, teenage maths prodigy Thomasina Coverley, for the loss of the Library at Alexandria, which Thomasina has imputed to “the Egyptian noodle” Cleopatra. Septimus tells Thomasina that history occurs in cycles and never “loses” anything. The ideas that were destroyed in Ptolemaic Alexandria will be “rewritten” in other times and places, so she should not mourn. At the play’s end, Thomasina dies in a house fire that is arguably partly Septimus’s fault. He goes mad and spends the rest of his life as a “hermit,” monomaniacally trying to reconstruct Thomasina’s lost solution to a famous maths problem. Some of Thomasina’s revolutionary (and, in reality, anachronistic) thought anticipates twentieth-century concepts in computer programming. Could the information technology revolution have happened earlier, with obvious benefit to civilization, had Thomasina not been killed? By suggesting this possibility, Stoppard implies that the Empedoclean cosmology is incorrect (because human progress happens), that Nietzschean Stoic acceptance of the eternal return is wrong (because it devalues human progress), and that human civilization is not a closed system constantly recycling the same ideas. Because all of this is true, genocide - the destruction of many people or whole human communities - removes formulated and potential new ideas from the ecosystem, inhibiting the improvement of human experience.

[1] Salles, Ricardo (2005). "On the Individuation of Times and Events in Orthodox Stoicism". In Salles, Ricardo (ed.). Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought. Clarendon Press. p. 107.