On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible, and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series, works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (EMERITUS, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing by Wendy Arons Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject by Alan Sikes Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen

Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish-American Drama and Jewish-American Experience by Julius Novick American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance by John Bell On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster by Irene Eynat-Confino

On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster

Irene Eynat-Confino

ON THE USES OF THE FANTASTIC IN MODERN THEATRE

Copyright © Irene Eynat-Confino, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60821–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–60821–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

1. The Infernal Machine

5

2.

The Sphinx

25

3.

Laius, Tiresias, and Jocasta

45

4.

Oedipus

57

5.

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems

77

6.

Cocteau and His Monster

93

7.

Visibility, Invisibility, and the Fantastic

111

8.

Ethics, Alterity, and Designed Emotion

137

Notes

153

Selected Bibliography

177

Index

195

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Acknowledgments

I

would like to express my gratitude to Don Wilmeth, the editor of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, for his knowledgeable support in the publication of this book. I also wish to thank Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Kristy Lilas, and Brigitte Shull, at Palgrave, for their assiduous assistance in seeing the manuscript through its different stages. My thanks are due also to the Newgen team, for their attentive care in the production process of the book. Part of the research for this book was carried on while I was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and I would like to thank the Center and its librarians for their friendly and precious help. I also wish to thank the Département des Arts du Spectacle at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for their prompt and willing assistance. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Michael Confino. Without his unfailing encouragement during all the years that I was working on this book, this book would not have been possible.

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Introduction

A

t the origins of this inquiry lies a text, written for the theatre. Its narrative, which employs mythological figures of men, women, and gods, is supposed to be familiar. Yet it is not. Instead, it surprises by its detours and raises unsettling questions concerning its use of myth and fantastic elements, contemporary slang, and the theatre as a public cultural institution. This is why a different reading was required. The text is The Infernal Machine (La Machine Infernale), Jean Cocteau’s interpretation of the tale of Oedipus.1 That the hypnotic unease experienced when reading or listening to the chant of the Sphinx in Act II is the effect of its rhythmic structure, does not entirely explain the emotional response the chant elicits. To fully understand this response, one has to look where the chant comes from. Likewise, to understand the reason of the recurrent use of the monster, both as a trope and as an actant, one has to comprehend not only what a monster represents but also what a monster is, not only its semiotic value but also its phenomenological impact. The Sphinx is a visible monster and so is Anubis, while many others were still to be uncovered. The monster belongs to the realm of the fantastic, as do the Sphinx, Anubis, Laius’ ghost or Jocasta’s ghost. As a male who was briefly a female, so does Tiresias. Other monsters, metaphorical this time, would emerge in due course during my investigation. The recurrence of the monster was the clue to a hidden meaning, encoded in the fantastic, or so it seemed at first. For, as it will become clear, the monster was also the message. Form and contents were one. The next step in my investigation was the deciphering of the text. The monster, an emotionally powerful trope or being that evokes the realm of the fantastic, serves as the matrix of the play and embodies the theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity as no other. A composite and nonnormative creature, belonging and yet distinct from any known category of beings, its hidden disparities publicly uncovered and exhibited, the monster is the negation of binaries per se. The negation of binaries embodied by the monster is reflected on the dramatic, aesthetic, and ethical levels

2

The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

in Cocteau’s play. Thus, Oedipus is at once a son and a husband; Jocasta a mother and wife; Tiresias a male and a female; the Sphinx a flesh and blood girl and a goddess, a ruin-come–to-life and Nemesis, a living human being, a dead monster, and an evanescent light in the sky. The tragic is mixed with the farcical, slang and clichés with poetic metaphors, realism with fantastic elements, and realism with expressionism. Taboos are deliberately broken, by Jocasta for instance. If, at first, Cocteau seems to keep and respect traditional binary notions, it is only to later deflate them. While his previous reworkings of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos closely followed the Greek tragedy, only the last act of The Infernal Machine, Act IV, recalls it. The first three Acts of the play are of Cocteau’s invention and so are many of the characters in his play. Cocteau displays an irreverent use of myth and a cynical and ironic use of intertextuality, introduces cartoonish characters taken from contemporary gossip columns, and uses Parisian slang. The parallel between modern “consensus reality” and the mythical times invoked is easily inferred. The dialectical role of the monster is made evident by the blurring of the boundaries between the mythological past and the present, as between “real life” and the consensually fantastic realm—a blurring made visible by the change of settings on the stage. While Cocteau used the monster in his previous works, it is in The Infernal Machine that it reaches its most substantial expression and becomes a rhetorical weapon. The Sphinx is the dominant monster in The Infernal Machine, a shapeshifting monster, of indeterminate gender, and the possessor of a threatening sexuality. Each of its visible transformations is misleading and not one discloses its true identity: the Sphinx is none other than Nemesis, the Goddess of Revenge. By creating this character, Cocteau blurs the borders between the human and the nonhuman, the normal and the nonnormal, as between man and beast, man and monster, and the visible and the invisible. In this all-encompassing world, the borders between real life and the fantastic are in constant flux and so are the various masks that Nemesis will borrow. Beside the visibly defined monsters, the Sphinx and Anubis, there are metaphorical monsters, such as the aging Jocasta who, according to Cocteau, bears the burden of the incest, lusting as she is after younger and muscular males. Oedipus too is a monster, an invisible monster that will finally be brought to light. Young, conceited, and brash, he expects to find in the Sphinx (a monster of indeterminate gender) his double. And so he does, for, like the Sphinx, he is a scourge. When the Sphinx, under the guise of a young girl, suggests that he marry her to escape the oracle, he rejects her. His sexuality obscured, Oedipus will marry the older woman who lusts for him. A closer look at the nonmonsters among the

Introduction

3

characters will show that they have one thing in common: they are young and “innocent” and they lack sexual experience, while the monsters possess a nonnormative sexuality. The scope and significance of the monster for Cocteau are brought to light by the study of his earlier writings. In The White Paper, Cocteau had revealed his nonnormative sexuality and protested against the homophobes who regarded him as a monster. An anti-Freudian, he regarded sexuality as inborn, a mystery of the nature that had to be accepted as such. In his portrayal of Jocasta as the temptress and of Oedipus as the guilty person—for other reasons than those mentioned in the myth—Cocteau suggests that we are all monsters. Those who are not will yet be, because there is no “normative” sexuality; sexuality may be shape-shifting, regardless of one’s will. It is this nonconformist argument that is encoded by the fantastic in The Infernal Machine, embedded as it is in the monster both as a concrete being and as a figure of speech. Cocteau’s play was the end product of a long aesthetic and contemplative process, initiated by the prevalent interest in psychoanalysis and the Oedipus myth in France after World War I. Nonnormative sexuality, a component of one’s identity, has been more or less secretive till the 1970s. Threatened by homophobia, religious rules, cultural taboos, and legislation, it endured mainly beneath a mask and in encoded texts, while mainstream culture often turned it into ridicule, as gender and queer studies have shown. For Cocteau, in 1934, the embodiment of the complex theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity in one trope and one body, the monster, was the only way an artist could publicly portray an existential ordeal without being ostracized and yet hope for greater understanding and tolerance. Cocteau chose the theatre, a public institution, to convey not only his private truth and show that his truth was that of each one of us, but also to give it the imprint of collective legitimization that the theatre could provide. Cocteau’s stance denotes not only an interrogation of moral values, philosophical notions, or aesthetic standards but also a subversive act intended to establish, on the stage and in front of the audience, a more humane and humanistic ethical code. He did so by using the fantastic within a realistic discourse. The theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity is a recurrent one of the fantastic in general and the topic of numerous plays. Other playwrights, beside Cocteau, used the same rhetorical strategy—the fantastic within a realistic discourse—in their attempt to validate on a public stage subversive propositions, without risking censorship or social opprobrium. The fantastic is not only an exploration of the limits of knowledge by means of mythical characters and magical acts but also a critique of consensus reality.

4

The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

The use of the fantastic mode in the arts is common practice today and “the monsters have moved from the margins to the center,” as William A. Senior has remarked.2 Regarded by its commentators as a transgressive reinscription, the fantastic mode finds a privileged site on the stage, where it reaches in full its emotional power sometimes in fantasy and most often within a realistic discourse. Fantasy, whether in literature or in theatre, like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, is a genre built on the shared convention that the fictive narrative belongs to the realm of fantasy with rules of its own.3 In such a self-contained world, the supernatural is comprehended as an integral, ordinary part of it and hesitation has no place here. Conversely, the introduction of the fantastic into a realistic narrative—built on the assumption that it reproduces the everyday experiential world of the audience—disrupts and negates what is conventionally regarded as “the real.” Such a mode distorts the spectator’s sense of perspective, perverts his perception of space, time, and sound, and inflects his emotions and thinking long after the performance has ended. Unlike the study of the fantastic in film, the study of the fantastic in theatre has not yet been given the attention it deserves. The collection of essays edited by Patrick D. Murphy Staging the Impossible (1992) includes articles only on Yeats, Strindberg, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Leivick, while a mere handful of articles in this field of research have appeared till now in scholarly journals.4 The purpose of the present study is manifold: first, to uncover the role of the fantastic as an encoding system in the theatre; second, to throw a new light on Cocteau’s unheeded fight for sexual tolerance and for gay liberation; finally, by examining Cocteau’s play as an exemplar, to demonstrate and comprehend the import and scope of the workings of the fantastic in the theatre.

1. The Infernal Machine It is the custom to call the unusual accord of discordant elements a MONSTER: the Centaur, the Chimera are defined as such for those who do not understand. I call all original, inexhaustible beauty a monster. —Alfred Jarry, “Les Monstres” (The Monsters)1

O

ne figure, used by Cocteau throughout his The Infernal Machine, dismantles the binaries that order the play as a whole and informs his interpretation of the Oedipus myth: monster. The monster, whether as a synecdoche or a metaphor, does not appear in Cocteau’s two adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos that precede The Infernal Machine. Nor is it found in Sophocles’ play, for the simple reason that the term “monster” as we understand it today first emerged during the Middle Ages.2 Instead of “monster,” the Sophoclean text employs the emotionally and ethically charged terms “impious” and “murderer” to describe the unsuspected author of parricide and incest, Oedipus. The libretto for Stravinsky’s oratorio Oedipus Rex (1925) was Cocteau’s first attempt to rewrite Sophocles’ play.3 Written in French and translated later to Latin by Jean Daniélou, the libretto follows closely the Greek text. In its final version, it brings in the monster as a trope only in the Chorus’ finale: CHORUS :

Look at King Oedipus, he comes out a putrid monster, the most putrid monster! 4

At once a portrayal and a condemnation, the trope “monster” encapsulates here both Oedipus’ now despicable achievement and his pitiful downfall. The monster does not appear in Cocteau’s play Oedipe-Roi. Adaptation libre d’après Sophocle (Oedipus the King. Freely adapted from Sophocles) (1928), which is a reworking of his earlier drafts for the oratorio.5

6

The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

The title of Cocteau’s play La Machine Infernale written a few years later, in 1932, can be variously translated as The Time Bomb, The Explosion Device or The Infernal Machine. It is interesting to note that one of its earlier versions defines the play as a mystery play and bears the title La Machine Infernale (Vie d’Oedipe). Mystère en 4 actes, en prose [The Infernal Machine (Life of Oedipus). A mystery play in 4 acts, in prose].6 In its final version, the lengthy title was dropped and so was its definition as a mystery play. The play was accepted by Louis Jouvet for his theatre, to be first produced in 1934 and published the same year.7 To the English-speaking audiences, the play has come to be known as The Infernal Machine. Cocteau had for a long time played with the idea of writing a piece for the stage that would have Oedipus for its protagonist but would scoff at the classics. A dramatic poem in prose from 1926, written soon after the completion of the libretto for the oratorio, illustrates his intentions: Here is my theatre. They play Sophocles in a lion’s cage. Oedipus, with a lion’s head and a trainer’s costume, declares: “Salvator! Salvator!,” perched on a pile made of package boxes that contain statues and drawers full of mortal secrets. It is noon. On the right, below, a small fire exit leading to a street in Nice at seven o’clock. One sees there men, women, dogs, cyclists.

The poem is duly named “Le Théâtre de Jean Cocteau (The Theatre of Jean Cocteau).”8 Neither a king nor a king’s son, Oedipus is a hybrid creature, a trainer with a lion’s head, trapped in a lion’s cage and crying for help. He is at once a victim and a perpetrator, trapped in an impossible situation. After this short scene, the setting changes to a shipyard (Nice is a seashore town), where the Argonauts build their ship. They have Athena’s head instead of a helm; the head is made of wax, with hair made of gold. The head talks and introduces itself as the goddess who is “the key to the dreams, the sad column, the bust with the iron pince-nez.” A messenger suddenly enters: MESSENGER :

Citizens! Jocasta’s divine head is dead. Jocasta was reading in the living room, lying on the red couch. Suddenly her limbs fall apart, dropping down on the floor. She was shouting: “I am my uncle’s sister! His plaster head is there, atrocious, hung by the chandelier and linked to the carpet by a column of blood.”

To which the Chorus immediately responds: CHORUS :

What shall I say?

The Infernal Machine

7

A Greek chorus has usually a lot to say, but not this one. Athena’s next lines turn the scene into Grand Guignol, first by enumerating a too long series of disasters awaiting the sea voyagers and then by describing her costume, which is hidden from view. Hers is the unexpected campy costume of a femme fatale, such as the audience would see in a murky cabaret but not on the revered goddess. To disprove her calamitous predictions and show that she lies, Jason hurls a white hoop on Athena’s head, like a lasso. Weakened, Athena’s voice starts now to emit a series of numbers, four by four. Unmoved, Jason orders his steersman to “make a note of the numbers and take a bearing.”9 The goddess-as-helm has returned to her duties and functions now as a regular navigation tool, Jason will continue his journey, and the short piece ends. Irreverent, subversive, and mockingly anti-Freudian, the spirit of The Infernal Machine is already present in this rough draft. Jocasta is comparable to a dismantled puppet that fell into pieces when she tried to figure out the entangled kinship of her family. She dies while witnessing a fantastic phenomenon, that is, blood running from a plaster head. The goddess Athena, whose costume denotes a shady past, is no more than a navigation tool, and the mythical Jason acts like a regular cowboy. The red color that marks Jocasta’s couch will reappear in The Infernal Machine, in the settings and lighting of Act III, the “Wedding Night.” So will the contemporary street scene with its characters and sounds. However, in the play, the street scene will no more be perceived through a slit in the auditorium’s wall but will be enacted onstage as well, with present-day characters speaking present-day idiomatic French while still trying to disentangle kinship relations in the family.10 It is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos that serves Cocteau to construct the finale to a series of genuinely invented dramatic sequences in The Infernal Machine. As expected, Cocteau’s play is neither a faithful illustration of the ancient mythological source nor an illustration of Freudian theories that were fashionable in France at the time the play was written.11 On the contrary, by subtly displacing and replacing the Sophoclean narrative, which had served Freud so well, Cocteau turns it into an undisputable support for his own iconoclastic argument. In addition, Cocteau expands the scope of the play by borrowing scenes and characters from other Western cultural icons, such as Shakespeare, Racine, or Wagner, as well as from various ancient mythologies. So, for example, the first scene in Act I echoes Hamlet’s first, and Jocasta’s dream during the wedding night is a parody of the dream scene in Racine’s Athalie. Mythological figures such as Siegfried—made famous for contemporary audiences by Wagner—are called in as witnesses. The Sphinx, left by Sophocles in the wings, now revels in the limelight with

8

The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, at its side. Contemporary events, too, find their way into the texture of the play—such as Jocasta’s death, which echoes that of Isadora Duncan who died strangled by her scarf.12 Intertextuality is routine and serves Cocteau as a rhetorical weapon in his attempt to demolish current established notions. However, among all the intertextual references, it is ancient myth that is the most prominent. “The word ‘myth,’ which is one of the fetishes of contemporary youth, has proved the most potent of all in sending admirers back to Greek texts. Anthropology and psychoanalysis are the two goddesses worshipped by many who refuse to see nothing but literature in literature and must fill it with problems that they promptly proceed to solve with ingenuous ingeniousness.”13 More than fifty years have passed since Henri Peyre wrote these lines and myth is still with us, not as a fetish but as one of the apparently unquestionable foundations of civilization. Bernard Valette affirms that Cocteau’s use of myth stems not from a drive to actualize or modernize the “classic storehouse of our dreams and fantasies,” but from a deliberate refusal of the anecdotal and the commonplace in order to turn to other sources of knowledge.14 These sources of knowledge are in no way restrictive in their meaning. Far from reducing human experience to wellcut patterns and categories, they blur the borders between the empirical and the supernatural and thereby open limitless vistas for reflection, speculation, and imagination. As Eric Gould affirms, “myth is a structural network, a value system even, but not an absolute truth. . . . We identify in myth, not with specific characters. . . . Rather we link up with their circumstantial tact and compromising equations, with their aphoristic and vicarious solutions to human compromise. In myth we enter the therapeutic of sheer inventiveness.”15 Of the many myths that have shaped literature and drama in the twentieth century, none has been as powerful as the Oedipus myth, and many have variously explored this cultural phenomenon.16 No doubt, Oedipus’ transgressions—parricide and incest—have greatly appealed to the artists’ imagination and will do so as long as our civilization continues to condemn these acts and consider them as taboo. For Cocteau, myth offered a parallel narrative of human experience, worked and reworked on from immemorial times. Moreover, for Cocteau the many existing versions of a myth—its open-ended narrative—served as an exemplum that established, legitimized, and consecrated the unexplainable and the supernatural as integral elements of human experience. If at first glance The Infernal Machine may seem only a reworking of the Oedipus myth in the guise of Cocteau’s The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel) (1921) with its snapshot-like scenes, hilarious

The Infernal Machine

9

juxtapositions and bitter-sharp ironic witticisms, a closer look will dispel this notion. Considered today as Cocteau’s best play, The Infernal Machine is also regarded as one of the best French pieces for theatre of the twentieth century. Moreover, for the past two decades the play has been counted as one of the classic works in French drama. As such, it is included in the curriculum for high school diploma (baccalauréat) in France and has generated a cottage industry of critical studies designed to facilitate its study by the younger generation which discovers now a play that bears all the marks of today’s postmodernism.17 In addition, the play enjoys a long due celebrity all over the world and is frequently produced.18 An open text, Cocteau’s essential argument in The Infernal Machine has been overshadowed not only by the play’s brilliant theatricality and entertaining wit but also by the critics’ confident belief that it is an examination of the Oedipus myth in the light of Freud’s teachings. However, a closer look at The Infernal Machine will throw a new light on Cocteau’s stance. The first act of the play opens with a short Prologue spoken by an unseen narrator, “the Voice,” who will also introduce each of the next three acts.19 Cocteau had already used this narrative strategy in his oratorio Oedipus Rex, his play Oedipe-Roi, and his film The Blood of a Poet, as he would for the revival of his Antigone at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in 1927. In this production, instead of having a chorus and a coryphaeus, Cocteau opted for a single voice that, according to his stage directions, spoke loudly and quickly “as if it were reading a newspaper article. This voice came from behind a hole at the center of the backdrop.”20 Clearly, Cocteau recognized the powerful sensorial and emotional impact of an unseen voice and used it again in The Infernal Machine. In this play, it is the unseen Voice that delivers the oracle’s prophecy in the Prologue. Thus, Oedipus’ mythical tale is vocally spread out before the audience, framing the narrative of the play and emphasizing the inexorability of the rule of the “infernal” gods: “He will kill his father. He will wed his mother.” After the Prologue, Act I—named “The Ghost”—begins to unfold. It takes place on the city walls where, during their night watch, two soldiers discuss the disaster brought on Thebes by the mysterious Sphinx. The only young man that managed to escape the Sphinx’s grip, so they tell, went mad. The two soldiers discuss Laius’ ghost, whom they had seen on the ramparts. Summoned by the soldiers’ superior, Jocasta arrives. She cannot see the ghost, bewitched as she is by a young and muscled soldier. She will soon bring the young man to the palace. Laius’ partly delivered message, warning her of a young man approaching Thebes, will not reach her. Act II, “The Encounter of Oedipus and the Sphinx,” is synchronic with Act I and takes place on a small hill

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The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

overlooking Thebes, where the ruins of a Chimera are scattered. Young, beautiful, clad in white, a girl is calmly talking to her attendant. She is the Sphinx; he is Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead who wears a jackal head. An unnamed Matron with her two children, a little boy and a little girl, pass by and stop to chat with the Girl in White about the mysterious Sphinx that causes so much trouble to the city. The Matron believes that female vampires, like her sister-in law or her future daughters-in-law, threaten the well-being of her family. The body of one of her sons, slain by the Sphinx, bore the mark of the vampire’s kiss on the neck. With the Matron’s and the children’s exit, young Oedipus enters the stage looking for the monster, the Sphinx. The Girl in White falls in love with him, although Oedipus has no eyes but for the monster he seeks. When she suggests that he marry a younger girl to fool the oracle, he refuses and gallantly gives her his belt as a token of comradeship, in case she needs his help. In her turn, the Girl in White promises to help him and disappears behind the Chimera ruins. It is now that, out of its ruins, the Chimera comes to life and its head is that of the Girl in White. Hypnotizing him by its chant, the Sphinx reveals to Oedipus the answer to the riddle while he is in a trance-like state. Once awakened, Oedipus evidently solves the riddle. He tosses over his shoulder the monster’s dead body, that is, the girl’s body bearing the jackal’s head. Oedipus will marry Jocasta and rule over Thebes. Act III, “The Wedding Night,” unfolds in the royal bedroom where Jocasta still keeps the cradle of her baby, who was removed from the palace soon after his birth. Her boy would have now been of Oedipus’ age. In spite of an obvious omen— Oedipus’ pierced feet, reminiscent of her baby’s feet—she is determined to consummate the marriage. Neither reason—Tiresias’ arguments—nor the supernatural (a sudden bout of blindness, a vision of the future, and the sight of his belt in Tiresias’ hands) can convince Oedipus to give up queen and throne. Act IV, “Oedipus King (Seventeen Years Later),” is bound to illustrate how Oedipus becomes, as the Voice says, a man. From a king challenged by still another riddle and by the task of saving Thebes from another scourge, Oedipus turns into a self-aware human being. The “filthy beast” that brought the plague on the city turns out to be none other than Oedipus himself. He leaves Thebes, a blind man led by his young daughter Antigone and Jocasta’s ghost. The first thing that strikes the reader or the spectator of the play, produced according to Cocteau’s detailed stage directions, is the sharp disparity in tone and mood between the Prologue and the opening of Act I. After the somber tone of the Voice and the gloomy foreboding that reminds the audience of Oedipus’ tragic tale and fate, a change of scene brings along a

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change of tone and mood. Act I shows the walls of a city but only the reader, not the spectator, would be immediately informed that this is Thebes. It is a stormy night (with the appropriate lighting and sound effects) and two soldiers, one younger and one older, are on their night watch on the city ramparts. Is this Hamlet’s opening scene? Not quite, because the sound of drums and popular music (coming from the working-class part of the town, as indicated by the stage direction) brings us back to modern times. After a short joyful sequence introduced by the music, the mood changes to one of énervement (nervousness), brought on by the soldiers’ conversation. It takes now only one minute for the spectator to grasp that the city is Thebes, for the information is provided now by the spoken text. The Young Soldier says that he wishes to put an end to the overall anxiety and the “appalling lack of action” in the city by volunteering to go and face the Sphinx. The mention of Laius’ ghost that haunts the place finally situates the action in the time and place where it belongs: that of myth. That is, the action may take place here, there, now, then, everywhere, and anytime, for, the sound of contemporary popular music is still fresh in memory and so is the proximity in time and place suggested by the familiar idiomatic language spoken onstage.21 The colloquial language, as well as the sound effects and the music, brings the dramatic action closer to the reader’s or the spectator’s experiential reality. Soon after the two soldiers’ chat about the Sphinx, two voices are heard offstage: one is that of a man, the other of a woman with a distinctive foreign accent. The man addresses the woman as “Madam,” while the woman calls the man “Zizi,” a term that in French is more than a nickname. From their conversation, it is clear that the almost blind man is a seer and the woman hates climbing stairs. Soon after they enter the stage, Tiresias the seer steps on Jocasta’s long scarf and she cries out. An audience familiar with Isadora Duncan’s tragic death, only seven years before The Infernal Machine’s first night, would not miss the allusion. Isadora died strangled by her own scarf. However, by the time she died, the famous dancer had become a ridiculed celebrity, an older woman whose lust after young males brought on her untimely death. The intertextual use of the piece of costume, the scarf, has a mirroring effect and it defines Jocasta as another ridiculed celebrity. With the introduction of Jocasta and Tiresias, first heard and then put on view, the mood changes again. Are these two pathetic figures a caricature of royalty and statesmanship or are they two clowns enacting Isadora’s death? Isadora’s long scarf became entangled in one of the wheels of the open car in which she had been riding with a young man and strangled her. Now, it is Tiresias who steps on Jocasta’s scarf and he is almost blind and failing, although his nickname “Zizi” may hint at a

12 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre glorious sexual past. Like Isadora, whose attraction to younger men proved fatal, so is Jocasta drawn to young men: she now feels the Young Soldier’s muscles like a peasant checks a horse at the marketplace before buying it. Attracted by the young male, she is oblivious of anything else, including the desperate attempts of Laius’ ghost to draw her attention. The Young Soldier too steps on her long scarf. The changes in the mood in Act I are abrupt and disorienting, passing from amusement to laughter, pity, anger, helplessness, and contempt. A rich diversity of dramatic strategies is employed by Cocteau in the play, in a never-ending parade that plunges the reader or the spectator into a universe at once strange and familiar: farce, parody, pastiche, displacements, atypical juxtapositions, irony, slang used for tragic scenes, irreverent representation of sacred myths, and expressionist cinematic techniques, among many others. The Infernal Machine challenges the dramatic conventions prevalent in the early 1930s and offers instead a “nonnormal” mixture of genres, discourses, and intertextual sequences, while it manages to eschew any overt affinity to artistic movements such as Dada, surrealism, or expressionism. As a play, The Infernal Machine is a monster-like aesthetic construct that not only speaks its own language but, by a masterful sleight of hand, it is also clearly understood by all. Or so it seems. Simplicity seems to be, at first glance, the mark of Cocteau’s play. However, this simplicity conceals a rich and often puzzling complexity, because the apparently ordinary and the commonplace subtly lead to the invisible and open up the imaginary and the unexpected. The Infernal Machine is a multilayered construction, in which the representation of a concept, be it by means of a character, an action, a word, a form in space, a color, a sound, or a tangible object, embodies or follows a well-established set of conventions while it blatantly contradicts another; out of the clash between the two sets of aesthetic conventions emerges the grotesque or the caricature. The dramatic construct of Jocasta is such an instance. Like one of the protagonists of the neoclassic drama, she is a queen, she belongs to the upper class, and adopts—as indicated by the stage directions—the “accent of royalty.” That she is a troubled woman, like Racine’s Phedra, does not yet set her apart from the neoclassic pattern. Jocasta, who suffers from a recurring nightmare, seems obsessed by the loss of her son who, had he lived, would have been nineteen, the age of the Young Soldier. She might readily find in the latter a fitful substitute, were it not for her Isadora-like desires. Her outrageous behavior with the Young Soldier—which is duly interpreted by the Older Soldier as an overt sexual invitation—singles her out not as a déclassée but as a character akin to the whore of ancient comedy. By a process of ironic reversal, she is not the one

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who is paid for her sexual services but the one who pays: she will bring the Young Soldier to her palace. Furthermore, she is fully conscious of the incestuous aspect of her behavior, as she makes clear to Tiresias. By the decontextualization and ironic distortion of their conventional representation, the once easily identifiable representation of mythical figures is partially stamped out. On the other hand, because of their being “updated” and humanized, they seem now closer to us than ever before. For contemporary audiences—both now and in the twentieth century—the Greek gods and Sophocles’ heroes are distant fictional figures about whom one learns at school, reads in books, or sees in B-movies; not very often, one also sees them in the shape of museum exhibits. Now, by letting them speak a colloquial language, act foolishly, reveal their weaknesses and surprise us, Cocteau turns them into close kinsmen. The human protagonists of ancient tragedy provoked respect and awe, but not so Cocteau’s human heroes. His stance is ironic, disrespectful, and bold. The gods alone escape his mockery. Jocasta, pathetic and driven by desire, cuts a ludicrous figure while a goddess merely provokes curiosity and deepens the mystery around her. Jocasta is not the only one who is driven by desire, the Goddess Nemesis alias the Sphinx alias the Girl in White, who delivers the answer of the riddle to Oedipus and thereby triggers his downfall, also is. Is the Sphinx’s self-immolation an act of love, or is it an act planned by the gods and meant to activate the infernal machine? If it is a predetermined act, why does the Girl in White return among the humans shortly before Oedipus’ wedding to Jocasta? If there is no answer to this question, it is not because Cocteau believed in fate and predetermination, but because he sensed and comprehended the part of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic, in human experience. The fantastic is an inherent part of the gods as they are portrayed in mythology and as they appear in The Infernal Machine. But, as Cocteau shows in his play, the fantastic is also an integral part of daily life. One may encounter it at the turn of the road and not recognize it. One may overhear its echoes, as Jocasta hears Laius’ call, or one may not. The fantastic is the common ground of interaction between the known and the unknown, between the human and the nonhuman. While Cocteau’s play is framed within a realistic discourse that integrates elements from the Sophoclean text, it is the integration of the fantastic that restructures his play on a distinctive basis and contributes to the construction of its multiple significations. Kathryn Hume, who expanded Tzvetan Todorov’s groundbreaking study on the fantastic, defines the fantastic as a departure from consensus

14 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre reality. She includes in her definition both the supernatural and the uncanny or Freud’s unheimlich.22 The Infernal Machine is rich in fantastic elements. The first fantastic element is Laius’ ghost, which appears on the city ramparts in Act I. Both the Young Soldier and the Older Soldier have seen the ghost before; they tell their officer and the officer summons the queen. When the queen and Tiresias arrive and proceed to question the Young Soldier, the ghost appears again but none of those present can see it. Only Jocasta can hear her name faintly called by someone she cannot perceive. Having learnt from the Young Soldier that the ghost had tried to warn her of a looming danger, the two high dignitaries leave. The pitiful ghost, who still wears his mortal wound, finally succeeds in delivering bits of his message to the two soldiers before disappearing forever. The ghost’s message, which warns Jocasta of a young man approaching Thebes, will never be delivered to her. This brief summary leaves out the comic innuendoes in the soldiers’ discussion of the Sphinx, the funny aspect of the ghost’s ghastly apparition, the ironic gap between the queen’s self-image (she thinks she is still a young woman) and the sad reality, as well as the incongruous physical interaction between her and the younger male, the Young Soldier. Composed as a pastiche with grotesque farcical overtones and functioning as a distantiation device that throws a new light on the mythic figures of Laius, Jocasta, and Tiresias, Act I raises the question as to Cocteau’s reason for borrowing Hamlet’s ghost. According to Cocteau, the ghost, like the dream, belongs to the realm of the dark, an apparition whose mystery one cannot solve. Far from trying to explain Jocasta’s dreams in the light of Freud’s theories, Cocteau relates to them as psychic phenomena that belong to the realm of the mysterious, a realm that man cannot decipher but whose imprint he nevertheless experiences. Jocasta tells Tiresias about her recurring nightmare but Tiresias cannot make it go away, nor can he restore her peace of mind. The reader or spectator, aware of Jocasta’s obsession with the loss of her child, can infer that her nightmare is connected to a traumatic experience of childbirth, but so may Tiresias. On the other hand, it may well be connected to sexual intercourse. The nightmare stays within the realm of the dark, tormenting her soul. However, while dream is a phenomenon lived through by all and can easily be explained as a working of the mind, not so the apparition of a ghost. Like the dream, the ghost exerts the same inexplicable uncanny power over the living. Unlike the dream, it cannot be explained by rationality and the doubt about its real existence relegates it to the domain of the fantastic. While an identical dream is seldom part of the experience of more than one person, the ghost borrows the shape of a recognizable human who passed away and is often reported to be

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“witnessed” by more than one person. So is the Ghost in Hamlet and that in The Infernal Machine. Far from embracing Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to the Oedipus myth, Cocteau offers instead another interpretation. To this end, he avails himself of the rich ambiguity of the fantastic—the fantastic being a realm not more uncertain than Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. Both the fantastic and Freud’s theory have a hold on imagination and both relate to a creation of the mind—myth—that man weaves and becomes ensnared by. Cocteau does not try to explain the fantastic but accepts its mystery as an unavoidable but enriching part of human experience. Laius’ ghost is apprehended by the dramatic characters as a messenger from the Other World, keen to assist and warn the dwellers of this world. The two worlds interact and it is this interaction that Act II, Act III, and Act IV of the play will display. As a mode, the fantastic has been the object of rigorous scholarly examination during the past few decades, an examination that went hand in hand with the study of postmodernism in the arts. In theatre, the sensorial appeal of the concrete representation or embodiment of the fantastic not only generates emotions but also enhances its import as a rhetorical tool. Cocteau’s version of the Oedipus myth, or so he believed, was bound to reveal a deeper truth by exploiting not only the benefits of the theatre as an artistic medium but also as a public institution.

MONSTER, BEAST, AND OTHER CREATURES After Laius’ ghost, the second fantastic element that we can see and hear in The Infernal Machine is the Chimera/Sphinx, who will go through a series of physical transformations. Next is Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, a man with a jackal’s head. Anubis will finally part with his head for the sake of Oedipus’ histrionic parade before the citizens of Thebes. Both the Sphinx and Anubis are monsters. The play will end with the appearance of still another fantastic character, the ghost of a metaphorically monstrous creature, Jocasta. As a rule, the various definitions of the term “monster” draw attention to one essential feature, the departure from the norm. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a monster is: “Originally: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance. Later, more generally: any imaginary creature that is large, ugly, and frightening. The

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centaur, sphinx, and minotaur are examples of ‘monsters’ encountered by various mythical heroes; the griffin, wyvern, etc., are later heraldic forms.” The monster, literally or metaphorically, acts as a link between consensually divergent orders, such as the normal and the abnormal, the human and the animal, or the natural and the unnatural. Its use as a trope denotes a particular apprehension of experiential reality, an apprehension based on duality and polarity. The object perceived as a “monster” denotes not only the way in which the perceiver acts and reacts to the object but also how the perceiver considers his or her own self. The monster is a recurrent motif in literature as well as in drama, painting, art, folklore, and myth. The most famous monster on the stage is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s Caliban. In the nineteenth century, another monster captured the imagination of audiences, Frankenstein, as the numerous stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel show.23 Another well-known theatrical monster from that period is the Golem. Less famous are the hordes of monsters that people Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St. Anthony) (1874). Closer to Cocteau’s time, the Sphinx in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1905) was portrayed as a monster, a woman with “hideous limbs” and “polyp arms.”24 As a metaphor, the monster appears in several of Cocteau’s early poems, among them “Les Salomés” (1908), “La Cendre” (1908), and “Quasimodo” (1908) (where it also appears as a synecdoche), and in his collections of poems Le Prince Frivole (The Playful Prince) (1911) and Plain-Chant (1922). But it was in his novel The Potomak, written during 1913 and 1914, that Cocteau turned the monster into a rhetorical figure on which his main argument rests. Before The Potomak was written, Cocteau’s drawings brought to light a gang of grotesque creatures that he named “the Eugenes,” which would be later incorporated in the novel. These are male and female physically distorted humanoids, mostly one-eyed. In a section of the novel, entitled “How They Came,” Cocteau describes the arrival of the first Eugene: “He had in him a little of the priodont, the larvae, the test tube,” with a sealed surface.25 The graphical representation of the Eugenes is, in Cocteau’s words, “the outline of a figure equivalent to their shapeless mass.”26 Still, it is not the mental and physical portrayal of the Eugenes that bewilders the reader of The Potomak, close as it is to caricature, but their appalling actions. Like sticky larvae, they can hardly be kept in one place. Their appetite stirred by troubled bourgeois couples, the monstrous Eugenes gulp down the Mortimers. The satirical Potomak bears personal connotations, since Eugene was one of Cocteau’s baptismal names, his maternal grandfather’s name was Eugene,

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and his mother’s first name was Eugenie.27 The naming of the crawling monsters was not accidental. While the drawings of the Eugenes offer a cruel critique of the bourgeoisie, not so the Potomak, the novel’s eponymous character. The Potomak is a monster too: he is a jellyfish living in a jar, has one eye, big pink ears shaped like a conch, a flat body, and cold and soft flesh. He feeds on everything, from mandrakes to gloves to a program of the Ballets Russes. And he can smile and write poems. “My confused life and the coherence of my dreams make me akin to this Potomak,” affirms the firstperson hero of the novel. “The same fluid runs through us.”28 He is also akin to the Mortimers, the Eugenes’ victims: Born in a bourgeois family, I am a bourgeois monster. I see the fact and the fact itself compels me to a deferential solitude. The Bohemia, Argemone, alas! I flounder in it. I hurt myself against a blazon. And back I run to the Potomak. And the Eugenes overwhelm me. And I write this book.29

A monster, born of monsters, gobbled up by monsters, the first-person narrator is resigned to his fate, that is, to a solitude that was not deliberately chosen but was imposed on him because of his birth into a certain socioeconomic class. Among Cocteau’s critics, Milorad construes the Potomak as an image of the poet’s subconscious.30 For Serge Linares, the Potomak incarnates love.31 Whatever referent is attributed to these monster-like imaginary creatures, the vivid physical depictions of both the Potomak and the Eugenes are intended to inspire disgust. Whether they are read as allegorical figures of the poet/narrator or of social bodies, they convey a feeling of revulsion, hatred, and inevitability. After World War I, Cocteau used the Eugene’s grotesque graphical shape to illustrate the horrors of the war. Other young writers who took part in this war took a similar stance. As Alfredo Bonadeo shows, they too used the trope of the monster—this time as a verbal trope—to depict the manifestations of the man/beast on the battlefield.32 The monster reappears in a different shape in Cocteau’s play Orpheus (1926) where, as Orpheus declares, he and Eurydice “find [themselves] in the supernatural up to [their] neck,” and nothing and nobody is what he/ she/it seems to be.33 The horse head that keeps the poet Orpheus under his spell is a composite creature, half-horse and half-man. Cocteau’s monster differs from the conventional representation of the centaur. Instead of a

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human head and torso and an animal lower body, the supernatural creature in this play has the body of a white horse and human legs. The creature communicates with humans both by moving his head and by tapping the alphabet letters with his foot according to a simple code: five knocks mark, for example, the letter E, the fifth in the alphabet. Orpheus feels that this creature, which dictates to him mysterious but poetic phrases, loves him. The monster is introduced in the text as “the horse” and will reappear in a slightly different shape in Cocteau’s film The Testament of Orpheus (1960). Milorad highlights the autobiographical aspects of the use of this mythological creature in Cocteau’s work and identifies this monster as a Minotaur, a phallic symbol of the father’s castrating virility.34 However, as with any open work, the examination of the monster in this play suggests various readings. Thus, in the light of the prevailing cultural perception of the Minotaur in the social, artistic, and intellectual circles that were close to Cocteau in the early 1920s, and according to Cocteau’s own use of the figure in his past works, the Minotaur functions as a sexual symbol. Already in The Potomak, the narrator brings up a myth he “likes,” namely “Theseus in the labyrinth,” and introduces the monster as a man of royal descent. Moreover, he acknowledges the mythical encounter with the Minotaur as a homosexual encounter: There is a myth that I like: Theseus in the labyrinth. He walks with the Minotaur. The Minotaur shows him the merits of his apartment. “A pretty monster probably waits for you at the entrance of yours,” adds this eccentric prince. “You have a thread on you.”35

The thread that serves Theseus in the myth to find his way out of the labyrinth functions here as the symbol of a sexual bond between the Minotaur and the prince. The sexuality embedded in the figure of the Minotaur is echoed by the unexplained attraction exerted on Cocteau’s Orpheus by the horse/monster. A similar figure of lust would be invoked later on by Gide in his play Theseus (1944).36 Cocteau constructs his Orpheus as a human being whose distinctive power lies in his ability to connect with the supernatural. Tennessee Williams, on the other hand, constructs his Orpheus (Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending) as a superhuman hybrid creature, a man whose blood is akin to that of the snakes. The common thread between the two playwrights is their construct of the poet as a being, human or not, whose artistic creativity is bestowed by some supernatural power. But while for Tennessee Williams, the source of artistic creativity is embedded in the artist’s identity, for Cocteau, it is mysteriously connected to external stimuli.

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Another composite creature appears in Orpheus, the angel Heurtebise. The traditional iconography of the angel combines the human with the divine, while the fantastic creature is represented as an asexual human being with wings. But the wings, symbols of spirituality, denote also a kinship to the animal kingdom. Therefore, the figure of the angel serves as a go-between for different realms such as earth and heaven, man and the supernatural, and man and animal. The angel appears early in Cocteau’s writings, as for example, in his poem “Discours du Grand Sommeil (Speech of the Long Sleep)” (1915). The figure will reemerge in later poems, as in “L’Ange Heurtebise (The Angel Heurtebise)” (1925). The same year, in his essay Le Secret Professionnel (The Professional Secret), Cocteau referred to Rimbaud and Verlaine as his angels. As models and initiators, these were the poets who opened up for the young Cocteau the mysterious and highly regarded realm of poetic creation. In Orpheus, the angel assumes a human shape: this is Heurtebise, a glazier who carries on his back panes of glass instead of a pair of wings. When he first enters the stage, the sun is reflected in the glass and it instantly evokes the image of a mirror. In Cocteau’s mythology, the mirror is the threshold to the Other World. Heurtebise will help Orpheus to find his Eurydice by passing through a mirror into the world of the dead. Heurtebise serves as a go-between for two worlds, this time the world of the living and that of the dead.37 Under the appearance of a young human male, he is a monstrous creature endowed with supernatural powers and can stand in midair like a bird, his wings unseen. A would-be suitor of Eurydice, he ends up as a visible guardian angel, a partner/ butler of a bourgeois ménage à trois (including Orpheus and Eurydice) in an Other World that is a mirror copy of this world. In Cocteau’s poetry, drama, novels, and drawings or sculpture, the figure of the angel appears alternately as an asexual being of unearthly beauty—a familiar representation in Christian iconography—or as a male lover, the source of poetic inspiration. Cocteau’s frequent use of the angel has intrigued his critics and they have dwelt on the role of the angel as a rhetorical tool as well as a personal symbol for Cocteau. Monic Robillard, for example, has discussed Cocteau’s use of the angel as the poet’s double and she maintains that Cocteau first used the angel as a personification of the poet’s creativity under Mallarmé’s influence.38 For Danielle Chaperon, Cocteau employed the angel as the “representation of the representation” of the soul as well as of the body.39 Marielle Wyns emphasizes the angel’s animality in Cocteau’s poetry, its hybrid nature and phallic aspect, as well as its psychological import for the poet.40 Pierre Macris considers the angel as a projection of Cocteau’s own subjectivity, while Serge Dieudonné argues that Cocteau, dissatisfied with his own sexual attraction to beautiful young men,

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elevated them in his writings to the rank of the angel and endowed them with spiritual powers that they did not always possess.41 Cocteau would throw more light on his concept of angels in his Journal d’un inconnu (Diary of an Unknown), a long essay on visibility and invisibility: Graceful monsters, cruel, terribly male and androgynous, this is how I imagined the angels, angles that fly; this was before I had the proof that their invisibility could take the form of a poem and thus become visible without the risk of being seen.42

Thus, for Cocteau the angel is a monstrous creature made up of mysteriously nonopposing parts, at once “terribly male” and androgynous. Cocteau’s late elucidation of his concept is fluid and baffling and no more definite than any other explanation of the monster. Nevertheless, Cocteau’s equation of the angel with the monster is of foremost significance, for it illuminates his idiosyncratic use of the interchangeable figures as well as his subversive blurring of the conventional physical and ethical boundaries between the two. In Cocteau’s play Oedipe-Roi, a composite animal is verbally referred to, though it does not appear as a character nor is it openly designated as a monster. This is the mythical Sphinx. The Sphinx will arrive on Cocteau’s stage a few years later, in another play, The Infernal Machine—this time as a shape-shifting character. Monsters play a part also in Cocteau’s celebrated film The Blood of a Poet from 1930. Here, a mouth that is deeply engraved on the poet’s palm, becomes alive and transforms into a horrible fleshly wound that breathes and speaks on its own—a visual image that recalls Odilon Redon’s nightmarish drawings, like Eye Balloon (1878) for instance. The wound leads to the poet’s physical and mental transformation, for he miraculously becomes endowed with supernatural powers and will move in an uncanny world where statues speak, gravity is absent, and, instead of walking, the poet floats in the air. A second monster is soon in full view: this time it is a hermaphrodite, a creature that Foucault would consider as the paradigm of the transgressive beings.43 Before long, a third monster enters the scene in the shape of a nonnormal humanoid, none other than an angel.44 In a talk delivered in January 1932 at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, Cocteau commented on the various figures that inhabit his film: “They are more like coupling monsters, secrets that emerge in the light, a whole equivocal and enigmatic world, quite capable of giving one an idea of the nightmare in which poets live, that makes their lives so moving and that the public so wrongly interprets

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as exceptional exhilaration.”45 For Cocteau, art is a language that uses signs such as the monster, the angel, or the hermaphrodite—all supernatural beings—to give form to an otherwise inexplicable contents, “the nightmare in which poets live.” Poetically, these supernatural beings function as tropes that embody the poet’s emotions, such as horror or wonder. In a fantastic reading, they are concrete beings that affect not only the lives of the dramatic characters but the emotions of the audience as well. The monster appears not only in The Infernal Machine but also in The Sacred Monsters, a play written in 1939 as a vehicle for the renowned actress Yvonne de Bray. There are no literal monsters in this play, only metaphorical ones. Yet, a literal monster serves as the main character in Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast (1946), which has by now become one of the classics in cinema. In the film, a reworking of the eighteenth-century fairy tale, the spoken text alternates between the terms “beast” and “monster” (bête and monstre), the two being used as synonyms.46 That same year, Cocteau wrote The Eagle with Two Heads, choosing for title the emblem that glorifies such a monster, the two-headed eagle. Another literal monster, a new incarnation of the Minotaur, will appear in Cocteau’s film from 1960, The Testament of Orpheus. Monsters and angels would people Cocteau’s work to the end.

THE MONSTER AND THE INFERNAL MACHINE In the “Notes for the Programme,” Cocteau describes Jocasta and Oedipus’ wedding as a “monstrous” wedding. Even before the play unfolds before the audience, the reader of the “Programme” is instructed, under the guise of an informative notice, how to assess the wedding. At the same time, the metaphorical use of the monster confronts the reader with the soon visible fictional world of the play. Two distinct orders are brought together here under one marker, the monster: the real and the imaginary, the human and the nonhuman, the lawful and the forbidden, the known and the unknown. In the Prologue of The Infernal Machine, the monster first appears as a synecdoche for the Sphinx, and then, by an act of displaced parallelism, the monster is used as a trope for aberrant horror, illustrating the nature of Oedipus’ incestuous marriage to Jocasta: “a monstrous wedding.”47 Those who did not read the “Programme,” as well as the readers of the play, are now informed and instructed. The incestuous marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta becomes a scourge similar to the Sphinx who decimated Thebes’ youth.

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After the preparatory Prologue, spoken out by the invisible Voice and carrying with it the apparent inexorability of fate, and after Act I, centered on Jocasta and Laius’ ghost, a monster is revealed onstage under disguise. This is the Sphinx, which dwells near the remnants of its traditional iconographic representation, the ruins of a Chimera. Soon to be unmasked as the Sphinx, the Girl in White is reminded of the oracle’s predictions: Laius and Jocasta’s son would be “a scourge,” “a monster, a filthy beast.”48 Cocteau uses the juxtaposition of the three notions—scourge, monster, and filthy beast—not only for the sake of evaluation, linkage and emphasis, but also as synonyms. Together or apart, they act as an infallible affective lever for the manipulation of the audience feelings. When Oedipus encounters the Sphinx under the guise of the Girl in White, he uses the term “monster” as a synonym for “Sphinx,” the horrendous but mysterious creature that he is looking for.49 Indeed, the people of Thebes too refer to the Sphinx as a monster to be destroyed, though no one who ever saw it could live to describe it.50 The term “monster” will soon be used as a metaphor by the Sphinx in its human shape, the Girl in White. In an ironic twist, the enamored Girl will comment on the half-human and half- animal shape that she will borrow in order to serve as Oedipus’ trophy: “I am now ugly, Anubis. I am a monster! . . . Poor kid . . . if I frighten him. . . .”51 Oedipus will carry on his shoulder the dead body of a seventeen-year-old girl whose head is that of a jackal. The term “monster” will next be used by Jocasta as a metaphor to pass judgment not only on Tiresias but also on those who mocked the newlywed royal couple.52 The metaphor is further taken up by Creon, to condemn the sinner whose public exposure would stop the plague in Thebes: “The gods are punishing the city and want a victim. A monster is hiding among us. They demand that we find him and banish him.”53 The monster emerges now as a metaphor both for the evildoer destined to be punished and for the victim that will appease the gods. Oedipus vows to chase “the ideal victim, the hiding monster.”54 He demands that this “filthy beast” be killed.55 After he discovers that it is he who is the monster, Oedipus blinds himself and begs: “Let me be banished, let me be killed, let me be stoned, let the filthy beast be killed.”56 Again, the filthy beast comes as a synonym for the monster, blurring the boundaries between the animal and the human, the apparently innocent (because deprived of self-consciousness) and the guilty. Oedipus’ monstrosity, both moral and physical, uncovered, is now visible to all, and it is all the more repulsive because of his selfinflicted mutilation. “The traditional idea of the monstrous [is] strongly associated with visual display,” comments Chris Baldick, “and monsters

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were understood primarily as exhibitions of moral vices: they were to be seen and heard.”57 Like the medieval monsters, which were exhibited as signs of God’s powers of retribution, Oedipus functions here as the incarnation of the gods’ warning—a frightening sight, blinded, wounded, and bleeding. A monstrous being, he still fulfills his role as a king even in the newly created situation, in which he is not only the instrument of the gods’ wrath but also the sinner: he is still the go-between for man and the gods. Olivier Biaggini explains: “The monster is but a mediator between the finger that points at it and an ordered and harmonious meaning, of which the monster is only the allusive and improper substitute. The monster then appears both as the detour and the relay point of the emergence of a meaning, of a truth. The monster is certainly abnormal, but it offers in return a particular point of view on the norm and its foundations. No more the monster that is pointed at, but the monster that points at, or rather by means of which one points at. . . . A didactic monster.”58 A belatedly uncovered monster, Oedipus’ self-mutilation and exile elevate and isolate him from his fellow beings; as Cocteau was quick to perceive, the magnitude of his deeds turns him into a mythical figure, the stuff of poetry. Only the poet, the artist, can give an acceptable form to what imagination can barely grasp. In the artist’s hands, the monster becomes the tangible but poetic link between two realms, that of the real and that of the fantastic. But Oedipus is not the only monster that inhabits The Infernal Machine.

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2. The Sphinx Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal! .................................. Who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust? Which was the vessel of your Lust? What Leman had you, every day? .................................. Or had you shameful secret quests and did you harry to your home Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock crystal breasts? —Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx”1

M

onsters disturb, the more so when they change their shape not once but often, only to finally vanish in a mist. Such a monster is the Sphinx in The Infernal Machine. Different versions of the ancient myth portray the Sphinx as a bastard daughter of Laius and a claimant to his throne, a woman brigand, or Echidna’s and Typhon’s daughter and sister to such monsters as Cerberus or Hydra. In the ancient world, her statues, made of parts of various animals, were a familiar sight.2 As for the Egyptian Sphinx, a computer reconstruction revealed a few years ago that “contrary to popular belief . . . Napoleon’s troops had not blasted off the nose by using the Sphinx for cannon practice; it had been chiseled off by 15th century vandals. At some point, the beard also fell off.”3 Thus, even after it was erected as a gigantic statue, the monster was and still is shape-shifting, due to time’s and men’s irreverent work. Cocteau’s first visit to Egypt and the Sphinx took place in 1936, two years after The Infernal Machine was first produced, when the Sphinx was still partly buried in sand; his second visit was in 1949.4

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The Fantastic in Modern Theatre

The Sphinx is not one of the characters in Sophocles’ play, but neither was Cocteau the first playwright to introduce the monster on the stage. Prior to The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx played an important part in Joséphin Péladan’s play Oedipe et le Sphinx (Oedipus and the Sphinx) (1903).5 The Sphinx also appears in Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1905). In The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx is first mentioned in the Prologue and its description closely follows that of Sophocles. The Greek Sphinx, represented as a halfhuman and half-animal monster with a woman’s head, is portrayed by the disembodied Voice as “the Winged Girl” and “the Singing Bitch,” a description that openly clashes with the masculine pronoun that the French language uses for the Sphinx. Depicted in these terms, the Sphinx seems an aberration of nature, a case where reproductive sexuality has gone wrong, a creature that shares something with the woman, the bird, and the dog. Like the mermaid, another monster-like creature, the Sphinx seduces its victims by its song. “This monster asks a riddle and kills those who do not solve it.”6 The Sphinx has “the ‘godlike science’ of language, slipping free from its defining functions while mobilizing its persuasive power,” as Baldick underlines when he comments on another monster, Frankenstein.7 In Western culture, the Sphinx itself is considered a riddle. “Horror monsters exist without explanation,” points out James Twitchell. “To explain . . . is to dilute, to make horror into terror and terror into the predictable and the predictable into the reasonable.”8 In Act I of The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx’s shape is a matter of speculation to the Thebans, since the only one who saw it and managed to escape went mad and talked only about its riddle. A rumor, reported by the Young Soldier, goes that it is shy and no bigger than a hare with a tiny woman’s head.9 This particular representation of the Sphinx fits the image of women prevailing in popular culture in Europe before World War I, according to which the woman is a shy creature with a small head and a small and frail body, and her main function is reproduction. This representation implies an animal-like sexuality, increased fertility, and limited intellectual powers. Consequently, for the Thebans in The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx is a creature of vulnerable appearance and dangerous contact. This image fits that of the Girl in White, one of the shapes invented by Cocteau for his Sphinx, but the Girl in White makes her appearance only in Act II. The Young Soldier’s image of the Sphinx is different: he expects it to be a hermaphrodite and admits to being attracted to its ambiguous erotic power: “As for me,” he says, “I believe [he, the male gendered French pronoun of the Sphinx] has the head and the breasts of a woman and sleeps with the young men.”10 The encounter with such a being is perhaps devastating, both physically and psychologically, but the Young Soldier is not sure: “Maybe he asks nothing, he does not even touch you. One meets him,

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one looks at him, and one dies of love.”11 The use of the impersonal mode reveals the Young Soldier’s state of mind: enthralled as he is by his image of the Sphinx, he is not yet (sexually?) ready to go and meet him. In his turn, the Older Soldier too credits the Sphinx with a different kind of sexuality. He believes the Sphinx is an old male vampire: SOLDIER :

A simple vampire! A guy in hiding whom the police can’t get hold of. . . . An old vampire, a real one! With a beard and a mustache and a belly, one who sucks your blood. This is why all the stiffs they bring back to their family carry the same wound in the same spot: on the neck!12

As Nina Auerbach points out, it was Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu (1922) and Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) that first featured male victims of the vampire.13 It is possible that these films provided Cocteau with this new representation of the Sphinx/vampire’s victims. The wound left by the Sphinx on its victim’s neck is Cocteau’s own invention and provides a sensible basis to the illustration of the Sphinx as a vampire. The vampire of folklore, a human being with animal-like teeth, is a sexual being who chooses his victims among the young, bites them, and draws their blood. Cocteau’s vampire chooses his victims only among the young men (but so did the Sphinx of yore). However, unlike the folkloric vampire who infects his victims but does not kill them (and thereby becomes their initiator in vampirism), Cocteau’s Sphinx does not spare their life. For the Officer—the third character we meet in Act I—the Sphinx is a fiction, a political stratagem intended to increase the power of the clerical clique and to entrap Queen Jocasta. The purpose of this scheme, used by the clerics who work hand in hand with Jocasta’s brother, would be to reinforce their hold on the light-headed Jocasta as well as on the whole city. The visualization of the Sphinx on stage will prove the Officer’s belief unfounded, though it does not preclude the possibility that the clerics might have used its threat for political ends. As for the Matron from Thebes, who makes her appearance in Act II, the mention of the Sphinx reminds her of an incident that happened in her family and involved her brother and his wife. That incident persuaded the Matron that vampires do exist. The connection between the vampire and the Sphinx is now unambiguous, as is the connection of the two notions with sexuality. The Matron believes that her sister-in-law is a vampire, a monster; she also believes that her own sons are prone to fall victims to infernal monsters because of their incredulity. For her, it is the

28 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre appearance of the Sphinx that brought death and confusion in her family. While her eldest son was a victim of the beast and his dead body had a big ugly wound on the neck, her sixteen-year-old son dismisses its threat. As the Matron reports, the latter believes that the Sphinx is a paper tiger, a weapon in the priests’ hands, and a lame excuse for the police helplessness in face of the famine, murders, and robberies that are now so common in the city. In fact, what the Matron describes is a state of anarchy in the city. She does not recognize the Sphinx in the Girl in White whom she tells her plight; she only prays for a savior who would deliver the city from the scourge. Like the multiform scourge imagined by the people of Thebes, so is the Sphinx embodied onstage in different shapes.

THE CHIMERA RUINS The first visible signs of the Sphinx on stage are a wing, a paw, and a rump, the ruins of the Sphinx statue on its socle, placed amidst the ruins of one of the walls of a temple. As the stage directions indicate, what look like the ruins of a Sphinx are in fact the remains of a Chimera, the mythical half woman and half beast.14 The Chimera, a symbol of destructive female sexuality, was a recurrent motif in symbolist paintings at the end of the nineteenth century and so was the Sphinx.15 In the Iliad, the Chimera is a monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a dragon’s tail, and it breathes fire. As seen, for his visual representation of the Sphinx, Cocteau chose the shape by which it was known in classical Greece: the body of a lion with a pair of wings and a woman’s head and breasts, a figure that the audience could easily identify.16 For the play’s first production, designed by Christian Bérard, “there was an azure background and a small stage in the centre of the forestage draped in blue; the dominant colors of rocks and columns were white, gray and brown.”17 About Bérard’s settings and their import, Cocteau would write in 1945: Christian Bérard, to whom I owe the settings of The Human Voice and The Infernal Machine, came at the right moment. I would even say that I had been waiting for him. Without renouncing the splendor and the quasi-human presence of the settings, he brought along his youth and his almost frightening proficiency to illustrate his method of truer than truth and to answer my need of anti-decorative settings, of functional settings which play a role just like the actors, and where no detail was superfluous.18

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Cocteau wanted functional but symbolic settings, and Bérard provided them. The text indicated a desert place on a hill overlooking Thebes and bordering the route to the city, and Bérard’s small elevated stage conveyed the necessary information while it also focused the gaze. The location, somewhere on the outskirts of the city of Thebes, fits a pattern long established in myth, legend and folklore, where monsters “live in a borderline place, inhabiting an ‘outside’ dimension that is apart from but parallel to and intersecting the human community,” as David Gilmore shows.19 The choice of the ruins of a temple as a locale is of special significance for the modern audience, because the ruins represent the remains of a work of art as well as a sacred place. In Cocteau’s play, the ruins are brought back to a fictitious and ephemeral life, offered to the gaze during the entire Act II, and constantly reminding the audience of the historic and mythical past. Bound together with the masked figure of Anubis, the ruins onstage construct a visual discourse that operates simultaneously to the divergent but parallel verbal discourse. The visual discourse is a signifier of the past, while the verbal is composed of contemporary colloquialisms. The constant fluctuating indeterminacy between past and present, myth and reality, substance and imagination, and the visual and the verbal, is thus initiated by the first visual manifestation of the Sphinx, which functions as the mediator between the two poles, with myth, oracles, and the fantastic at one end, and reality and sensual gratification at the other. To borrow Roger Schlobin terminology, the Chimera ruins prove to be a geomorphical concept that inflects the audience comprehension of the dramatic place and events.20 When the curtain rises for Act II, which bears the title “The Encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx” and takes place at night, the Chimera’s ruins are visible together with the figures on stage. The figure seated on the ruins establishes the physical link between the temporal poles, the present and the past, as between reality and imagination, life and art. This seated figure is the Girl in White, the human shape of the Sphinx. The dialogue between her and the man with the jackal’s head, whose head rests in her lap, situates the action in the realm of the fantastic from the beginning of Act II. In addition, the presence of Anubis—the God of the dead and, as we shall see, the Sphinx’s double—marks this well-defined territory (a stage upon a stage) as the Other World, the mythological place of the dead. No male who ever met the Sphinx came back alive; the one who did, went mad. His heart and mind belonged now to another world.

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THE GIRL IN WHITE The second stage metaphor for the Sphinx is the beautiful Girl in White. In this incarnation, the color of her dress is a symbolic white, suggesting that she is a young virgin, pure of heart and body. To the Matron and her children, who pass by at this late hour of the night, this is how she introduces herself: “I am a stranger, just arrived in Thebes. I am going to a relative who lives in the country and I have lost my way.”21 To Oedipus, she tells that she is “a seventeen year old little girl.”22 She behaves like a conventional teenager of the 1930s: she has to be reminded of her duties by an elder person (Anubis in this case) and she falls in love (with Oedipus) at first sight. The first inkling that she is not as innocent as she looks is provided by the scheme she suggests to Oedipus in order to escape the oracle: marry a younger woman—and the reader or spectator understands that she is the woman in question. Oedipus refuses. As we shall see, in spite of her innocent-looking appearance and young age, the Girl in White inspires an inexplicable fear in Oedipus when he first comes near her.

THE SPHINX ON ITS SOCLE The Sphinx, although a divinity, is under the orders of higher powers and will soon display different visual markers. The Sphinx will have the wings, paws and rump of the Chimera and the human head and upper body of the Girl in White, who inhabits now the Chimera ruins. The Sphinx is now a hybrid creature, a monster made partly of stone and partly of human flesh and blood. The stage directions indicate that the Sphinx on its socle wears spotted gloves, visible signs of the animal nature that she shares with the snake and the panther. This visual representation offers a striking resemblance to Fernand Khnopff ’s painting L’Art des Caresses (The Art of Caresses) (1896) which portrays the Sphinx as a hybrid creature, with a panther’s body and a woman’s head. Like the Sphinx in Aléxandre Séon’s Le Désespoir de la Chimère (The Despair of the Chimera) (1892), which has a woman’s head and breasts, a lion’s body, a serpent’s tail, and pale, luminous wings, so has Cocteau’s monster luminous wings, signs of its divine nature. Like its pictorial representation at the fin-de-siècle, the Sphinx’s body is part human, part animal and part divine, and made of bits and pieces. Then again, this is only one in a series of transformations or metamorphoses that the Sphinx, the gods’ agent, undergoes in the play.

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The present visual transformation bears multiple meanings. First, it involves the manipulation of time, which is one of the main attributes of the fantastic, and operates on two simultaneous levels, visual and audial. Both for the reader or spectator and for Oedipus, the dramatic character, the act of bringing together the disparate architectural elements of the ruins and the sudden visual reconstruction of an intact body, negates the passage of time. Within the dramatic narrative, Oedipus is bestowed now with a future that the oracle did not predict, a future that seems (for this is an illusion only) to obliterate his past. This manipulation and annihilation of time is soon displayed again by sound, when the Sphinx’s rhythmic chant arrests narrative time (the course of dramatic action) and removes Oedipus to another temporal dimension: he now moves and mumbles as if he were in a trance or asleep. Second, on a symbolic level, it is significant that the Girl in White brings to life a chimera, that is, she creates a fleeting illusion that will soon disappear. Pertinent questions, raised in Act I, about the existence, identity, and sexuality of the Sphinx, are now raised again, targeted this time to the reader or spectator. Third, instead of certainty, the “living” Sphinx introduces ambiguity in the narrative. The question whether female sexuality (embodied by the Girl in White) is destructive remains open, for the Sphinx’s help to Oedipus proves disastrous. So is the question regarding the Sphinx’s gender, given that its female appearance (its head and upper body) may be a chimera, a flight of fancy. Is the Sphinx’s gender not female but male? Its gloved hands may belong to a male as well as to a female, if not to some mysterious, undefined, and indefinable creature. Far from being accidental, these intentional ambiguities inform the playwright’s particular stance toward sexuality/sexualities in the play while, on the other hand, they weave the dense texture of the fantastic and its uncanny presence on stage. It is on its socle that the Sphinx conveys to Oedipus, in a bewitching chant, the fateful answer to the riddle. One version of the Oedipus myth, reported by Pausanias, tells about Oedipus who learns the answer to the riddle in a dream, but it is not clear whether Cocteau was familiar with Pausanias.23 Nowhere in the play is the parallel between the poet’s word and the monster’s as evident as in the chanting sequence. The Sphinx’s chant operates like a magic ritual: Oedipus becomes possessed by its spell, just as the reader or spectator is by the poet’s words. The Sphinx/monster/Girl in White lures its victim into a hypnosis-like state where free will, mental powers, and survival instinct are put to sleep. Entrenched in this state, Oedipus resembles the Sphinx’s other victims, “the youngest, the weakest, the most beautiful” chosen by the priests as an offering to the Sphinx.24 Like them, he will be sacrificed but differently. When he wakes up from the spell, the

32 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre Sphinx asks the riddle and Oedipus provides as a matter of course the right answer. The Sphinx crumbles on its socle, Oedipus cries victory and leaves. Within the dramatic context, the chant serves as a subterfuge for the enamored Sphinx to disclose the answer to the riddle without apparently forsaking her duty as the gods’ messenger, though the disclosure of the secret may also be part of the gods’ plan to destroy Oedipus. The poetic rhythmic chanting sequence provides an inspiring theatrical experience to the reader or spectator, who cannot escape its sensorial hold and affective impact.

WHITE, COLOR OF REVENGE In the Sphinx’s next appearance, the monster reverts to its mortal shape, that is, the Girl in White. It is under this guise, deceitful but already familiar, that her true identity is finally revealed during her conversation with Anubis. The Sphinx is “the greatest of the great,” Nemesis, the Goddess of Revenge who performs her regular duty. She complies with higher authorities in a boundless hierarchical system whose workings no human can apprehend: she is only one of the many parts in a gigantic infernal machine that operates like a time bomb. From an innocent-looking young girl, who sought to entice Oedipus by her charms, she is now perceived by the omniscient reader or spectator as an inexorable, ferocious force, deceitful under its vestal-like appearance. From a signifier of purity and innocence, the white color of the Girl’s dress has come to signify her morbid ceremonial role in a ritual whose outcome was established from its very beginning, as the Voice had announced in the Prologue. A legend has it that Nemesis, an Oceanoid, became the object of Zeus’ desire and, to escape his embrace, she took the form of a fish then of a goose, in which form she was raped by him. Later known as Adrasteia, “the one whom nobody can escape,” the angry goddess was, according to some legends, the mother (or surrogate mother) of Helen. In Western culture, Nemesis has become a synonym for revenge. Karelisa Hartigan points at the significance of the Sphinx as a willful critique of women in general: “Cocteau’s representation of the Sphinx is unique, as is the way he unites her with Nemesis, most dread and unswerving of the divinities. He is not, of course, the first to see the female as the figure of destruction, to ally sex and ruin.”25 Romana Lowe’s feminist reading, informed by Freud and René Girard, considers Cocteau’s Sphinx a figure of monstrous femininity; as such, it functions as the female victim whose sacrifice will restore the patriarchal order.26 These readings do not take into consideration that

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the Girl in White/Sphinx is not an emblematic figure. In its human and female incarnation, the Sphinx is a rejected woman who has endangered her own life for the sake of the beloved one. Deeply hurt, she wavers between hope and despair, love and desire for vengeance. She rejoices when Anubis enumerates for her the long list of Oedipus’ past and future calamities but, when Anubis sees Oedipus coming back, she is still hopeful that he loves her and would carry her away. Finally, she tries in vain to save him from the gods’ verdict at the last moment, before the marriage to Jocasta is consummated. Unlike Jocasta, the Girl in White is neither a caricature nor a schematic character but the incarnation of a young woman whose life-saving gift of love has been declined. This gift of love was not the disclosed answer to the riddle but her offer to marry Oedipus and thus to defy the gods’ verdict. It is only after being rejected by Oedipus that the Girl in White transforms into a “real” Nemesis. Facing her in her new but familiar attire, Oedipus accepts her transformation from Sphinx to a human being as a natural and ordinary phenomenon. For him, as for the other dramatic characters, the fantastic is an integral part of consensus reality. Little does it matter to him that the young woman he has just rejected is a supernatural power and that by rejecting her he rejects the love, mercy, and support of divinity. Intent on fulfilling his ambitions, Oedipus needs now a dead body, whatever shape it may assume, and the Girl in White obliges. She disappears behind the ruins and will reemerge, bearing Anubis’ jackal head instead of hers. The Sphinx is dead, but not Nemesis nor the hopeful girl in love.

THE JACKAL HEAD AND ANUBIS The Sphinx’s next incarnation is a new composite figure, half human and half animal. By putting on the jackal head (the change takes place behind the Chimera’s ruins), the Girl in White becomes, as she tells Anubis, a monster. “The young girl with the jackal head comes out from behind the [ruins’] wall. She totters forward, flaps her arms, and falls down.”27 It is in this shape that the Thebans will be acquainted with the dead body of their scourge, the Sphinx. This transformation underlines the complex association between the Sphinx/Nemesis and Anubis, the god of the dead, whose attributes the Sphinx now endorses. In this context, it is significant to note the similarity between some of the tasks of the two gods in ancient mythology. Among Anubis’ duties was the weighing of each person’s heart on the scale of justice,

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and Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, was the one who gave each his due according to his merits; the one retaliated after death, the other before. In The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx and Anubis complement each other and represent a Janus-like image of one entity that is visually represented already at the beginning of Act II by the blocking of the two figures. As seen before, the curtain rises on the seated Girl in White who holds the jackal’s head in her lap, a grouping of supernatural beings that immediately places them in the realm of the fantastic. Act II will end with a similar physical pairing or juxtaposition—a narrative and visual framing device—when the jackal’s head replaces that of the Girl in White. In fact, by constructing the separate figures of the Sphinx and Anubis, Cocteau used the dramatic strategy of the doubling or the splitting of the initial character—Sphinx/Anubis—in two. This doubling is prompted by the etymology of the term “sphinx,” for the meaning of “sphinx” in Greek is strangler. The physical differentiation between the two characters brings forth the complexity and complementarities of the conceptual entity Sphinx/Anubis as imagined by Cocteau. Anubis is the cynical reasoner, the gods’ messenger and watchdog, and the Sphinx’s aide. He is the factotum, the killer with the dirty hands or, to be more exact, he is the one with the blood-soiled jaws. Dramatically, he also functions as a one-man chorus. The Girl in White embodies enticing female sexuality, Eros in all its splendor and promising appeal—while Anubis is rigor, Thanatos in all its inexorability. She is the seductress and the judge; he is the executioner, armed with the necessary weapon, the jackal’s jaws. To an ordinary man, they seem to operate in unexplainable ways and to mysterious ends. In The Infernal Machine, Oedipus, who is portrayed like an ordinary man, looks for the Sphinx but meets a young innocent-looking girl; little does he suspect that she is the monster. He believes that he solved the riddle by his wit; little does he know or remember how and why the solution came to his head during his sojourn in the territory of the dead. The new incarnation of the Sphinx may have an additional source in ancient Greek mythology, where Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads, who was connected with hell and the dark powers, is described as either accompanied by dogs or having three heads: a dog’s, a horse’s, and a snake’s. The snake’s skin would resurface in the Sphinx’s spotted gloves, the horse in its rump, and the dog (or jackal)—in Anubis’ head, which the Girl in White makes her own in the present monstrous incarnation. The donning of the jackal head materializes another image attached to the mysterious Sphinx and which was mentioned in Act I: the image of the vampire, one of the recurrent figures in the fantastic. The marks left

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by the Sphinx on its victims are those left by an animal’s fangs and they are identical to those left by the vampire. Like in folkloric tales, where the impaled vampire reverts to its true “nature,” to bones and ashes, so does now the Girl in White after she was apparently vanquished: she becomes a dead body with a jackal head. Like the vampire, she operates at night. As a female vampire, the Sphinx/Girl in White/jackal is an incarnation of a lamia. In medieval bestiaries, the lamia is described as a fantastic animal with a woman’s head and a lion’s body, a depiction that reminds that of the Sphinx. Other iconographic representations show the lamia as a monster with a woman’s head and breasts and with a snake’s body. In folkloric tales, the lamia is a monster or a demon capable of assuming a beautiful woman’s shape and sucks children’s and young men’s blood.28 For the Matron who talked with the Girl in White, the young women who lure away her sons are vampires, possessors of a devouring sexuality. This depiction corresponds to prevailing prejudices around the time when the vampire, made illustrious by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was very popular and the metaphor was applied to the threatening New Woman.29 The lycanthropic connotations of the Sphinx’s present incarnation convey and enhance the threatening aspect of the Sphinx as a rejected woman. Ethnographic studies emphasize the connection between the vampire and the werewolf, as well as the varying degree of their monstrosity. As Jeffrey Burton Russell explains, “Wer animals are found in most cultures (India, for example, has wer tigers, but Europe, where wolves were more prevalent, has werewolves). Vampires also are found everywhere. Wer animals are not the same as other monsters, for their monstrosity consists less in physical deformity than in their demonic ability to change shapes, and whereas monsters can be ambivalent, wer animals are essentially evil. The Devil is the chief of the shape shifters; werewolves, vampires, and witches imitate their master in this quality in order to do his will.”30 The Sphinx in its incarnation as the Girl in White/Anubis accumulates its gruesome attributes in an ironic oscillation between two poles, both equally repulsive: the human and the animal, the enticing woman and the deadly werewolf. Visually suggested either by action or by costume and props, the implications of the Sphinx’s new metamorphosis are essential for apprehending the import of Cocteau’s approach to the Oedipus myth. By exchanging her head with that of an animal, the Girl in White seems to renege on her humanity, feelings, reason, and stake in civilization and asserts the ascendancy of the sexual and the beastlike. On the other hand, this stance is contradicted by the openly declared nature of the physical transformation undergone by the Girl in White: the donning of the jackal head is a masquerade to foil

36 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre the Thebans into believing that Oedipus has indeed destroyed the Sphinx. Oedipus is quite content to take events at their face value: he tosses the monstrous body over his shoulder and happily goes away, oblivious of the still living scourge, the elusive and shape-shifting Sphinx. Cocteau’s strategy is a systematic reversal of commonly accepted truths and values. Instead of a composite beast with a human head, his Sphinx is portrayed now as having a female body and an animal’s head. According to the ancient myth, it was the human head of the monster that posed the riddle, a riddle that no one but Oedipus could solve. In Cocteau’s version, Oedipus— who has been exposed as a not so bright young person—is not even offered the opportunity to solve the riddle. Within the narrative frame, the reason for this step is twofold. First, the gods had ruled that Oedipus shall solve the riddle and commit incest; the Sphinx has to obey the gods and so Oedipus must solve the riddle at all costs. Second, the human part of the monster, the Girl in White, wishes to spare his life in case he fails the test, because she is in love with him; consequently, she reveals the answer to the riddle. While Oedipus’ trophy—a woman’s dead body with an animal head— may well reflect a not uncommon prejudice concerning women’s intellect, Cocteau’s ironic twist is not one but triple. First, he shows that the Sphinx was not defeated by Oedipus’ intellect; the young man is too ambitious—and dense—to give it a thought. Moreover, Oedipus is a poseur. Trying to resemble Hercules who, according to Apollorodus, returned to Cleonae carrying the dead Nemean lion on his shoulder, Oedipus enters Thebes carrying the dead monster on his shoulder. Except that the monster is not dead and will soon return—and here lies the second twist. And finally, if the Sphinx did apparently surrender to Oedipus, it was not because of his wit and wisdom but because of his unwittingly displayed sexuality: the Girl in White fell in love with him when she first saw him walking from afar. As we see, if the female gender is not spared Cocteau’s caustic wit, neither is the male. In Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx, the dominant figure is the Sphinx in any of its various incarnations. At this stage, as at all others, the course of events is staged by the Sphinx—first for the sake of the naïve Oedipus, then for that of the Thebans. For the reader or spectator, Oedipus is a make-believe defeater of a seemingly monstrous woman, part human, part animal, part god, part fleeting and untouchable like a vanishing cloud or reflected light; Oedipus’ interaction with the Sphinx occurs in an elusive realm, the fantastic. However, within the dramatic narrative, Oedipus’ trophy, a monstrous woman/vampire/ werewolf, marks him as the defeater of nonnormative sexuality. This is how the Soldiers and the Matron, so full of sexual apprehensions, will consider Oedipus, and so will their fellow citizens.

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THE RAINBOW While Oedipus is preparing his grandiose entrance in Thebes, the Sphinx shifts its shape and so does Anubis. If there was any doubt regarding the delineation of Anubis as the Sphinx’s double, the present incarnations leave no doubt. The metamorphosis takes place while the two are hidden by the Chimera’s ruins. Instead of two human-sized figures, they emerge now as two gigantic shapes: “Behind the ruins, on the small hill, two gigantic shapes appear, covered in iridescent veils: the gods.”31 The voice of Anubis is heard coming from the right shape, Nemesis’ from the left. As they look from above at Oedipus rehearsing a whole range of impressive postures, Anubis and Nemesis exchange their comments, unheard by Oedipus. Anubis is sarcastic; Nemesis, embarrassed but riveted by the ludicrous spectacle, is compassionate. In her present incarnation, Nemesis is full of concern and empathy for the humans, like Indra’s daughter in Strindberg’s Dream Play: ANUBIS,

veiled: We must leave. I saved the city! ANUBIS : Let us go. Come, come, Madam. OEDIPUS : I will marry Queen Jocasta! NEMESIS, veiled: Poor, poor, poor humans. I cannot stand it anymore, Anubis. I cannot breathe. Let us leave the earth. OEDIPUS : I will be king! OEDIPUS :

A muffled noise envelops the two big shapes. The veils flutter around them. It is the crack of dawn. Cocks crow. Curtain.32

The stage directions do not indicate the exact form of these two gigantic shapes that represent the gods. Their big size suggests their belonging to the realm of the supernatural, and their iridescent luminosity and position high above the small hill (the elevated podium of the stage upon the stage) indicate their divine nature and evoke an image of transcendence.

THE GIRL IN WHITE, AGAIN Tiresias visits Oedipus in the royal bedroom on his wedding night and tries to dissuade him from proceeding to the consummation of the marriage. After a violent dispute, the priest adds: TIRESIAS :

Excuse my boldness. This evening, after the temple was closed, a beautiful young girl came into the small chapel where I work and,

38

The Fantastic in Modern Theatre without any explanation, gave me this belt, saying: “Bring it to sire Oedipus and repeat to him what I say, word by word: Take this belt, it will allow you to reach me after I will have killed the beast.” No sooner had I seized the belt that the girl burst into laughing and disappeared I know not where.33

The Sphinx, in the shape of a beautiful young girl, appeared again— this time to Tiresias alone, returning to Oedipus what looked as a token of faith and turning Tiresias into an undisputed messenger of the gods. Tiresias alone, who is almost blind, saw her in her resplendent beauty. She mysteriously entered the temple when it was closed and disappeared by magic after delivering her message and the belt. Her uncanny apparition does not astonish Tiresias; for him, as for the other characters of the play (including Oedipus), the magical and the supernatural are integral parts of consensual reality. The belt bridges between the two worlds, the human and the supernatural, and introduces the uncanny. It simultaneously conveys two distinct covert messages, one concerning Oedipus as a public persona and the other Oedipus the private man. Symbolically, it is the belt that connects the two. For Tiresias, the belt indicates that the future king has other matrimonial commitments and the wedding to the queen has to be brought to a halt. For the seer, the gift of a belt—an intimate piece of clothing that holds all other pieces of clothing together to cover the naked body—is a sign of a former matrimonial bond, as Oedipus is well aware, and therefore the royal marriage is void.34 For Oedipus the private man, as for the audience, the belt is a tangible proof of his false victory over the Sphinx as well as of the ever-present menace of the oracle. The gods laugh at him: not only he has not defeated their messenger, the Sphinx, but he has also wed an older woman who is his mother. The present manifestation of the Sphinx as the Girl in White completes the circle. In an exposition passage in Act II, Anubis tells the Sphinx/Girl in White: “To appear before the humans, logic requires us to put on the form used by them to represent us; otherwise, they will see nothing but emptiness.”35 This affirmation explains not only the many existing representations of divinity and the fantastic, but also Cocteau’s strategy in the Infernal Machine. Although Act II is not formally divided into scenes, it comprises several dramatic sequences, each one defined by the specific task that the Sphinx has to perform. The representation of the Sphinx in each of the sequences of Act II is contingent on the task it has to perform in that specific sequence; the tasks are either imposed by the narrative (partly borrowed from Sophocles)

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or required by the dialectics of the play. Another factor that determines the shape of the Sphinx’s representation is credibility (vraisemblance), important for the communication process between the stage and the audience. Thus, the shape of the Sphinx is not only appropriate to the task to be performed in a dramatic sequence but is also audience-targeted. So, for example, to seduce its male victims, the Sphinx becomes a sexually enticing object of desire: for the nonhuman, gender is performative at will. Since the Sphinx’s is a game of duplicity, the object of desire has to give the impression of purity and innocence—hence the beautiful young girl in her white dress. In another instance, the creature that asks the riddle is itself a riddle, made as it is by stone (the Chimera’s ruins) and flesh and blood (the Girl’s head). After the enamored Sphinx/Girl in White “helps” Oedipus by disclosing the answer to the riddle, the newly created situation between Oedipus and the Sphinx is that between an indifferent lover and a scorned woman—who literally and metaphorically becomes a monster. Another instance where the representation or physical transformation of the Sphinx corresponds to the task is the girl with the jackal’s head, the woman-monster defeated by the male hero. The Sphinx is embodied either by reification, as is the case with the settings of the Chimera ruins, or by personification. Both strategies heighten the dialectical dichotomy that structures the play. So for example, if the dominant and constant presence of the Chimera ruins on the stage underlines their temporal, cultural, and mythical connotations, it also suggests the notion of death, decay, and destruction traditionally linked to the image of the Sphinx. In this capacity, the ruins serve as a visual frame and background to the action during Act II, a constant visual reminder of the Voice’s prediction in the Prologue. The same dichotomy embodied in the Chimera ruins—the abstract notion of the Sphinx versus the concreteness of the ruins—is replicated in the second and emotionally charged manifestation of the Sphinx, the Girl in White, the innocent seductress—a dichotomy that both opposes and joins together the Girl in White and the Chimera ruins even before their actual physical fusion. When the Girl in White, according to the stage directions, goes behind the ruins and fills the space initially allotted for the head of the Sphinx, another aspect of her personality comes forth. The Girl in White is a missing part of the bigger body of the Sphinx, not unlike one of the small spare parts of a machine. This time, however, the object under scrutiny is an infernal machine where the missing piece, the Girl, fits in perfectly. Once it is “pieced together,” the Sphinx comes to life, literally and metaphorically. This “piecing together,” with its disastrous effects, brings to mind another pieced-together monster, Frankenstein’s creature.36

40 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre For Twitchell, there are three categories of monsters: the vampire, the Frankenstein monster, and the transformation monster.37 All three are serial killers. Cocteau’s Sphinx merges all three into one. His monster is a transformation monster, a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Girl in White and Sphinx/Nemesis and Sphinx/Girl in White and Mrs. Werewolf. It acts like a vampire, it shifts shapes, and in one of its manifestations its body is pieced together like Frankenstein’s. As a shape-shifting serial killer, the Sphinx is akin to Fantomâs, whom Cocteau admired. Fantomâs was the hero of Louis Feuillade’s cinematic crime thrillers and very popular among the Parisian avant-garde before and after World War I.38 Consequently, this monster, faithful to its definition as a nonnormal creature, has no fixed referent. To complicate matters even further, the Sphinx also functions as the double of Anubis or vice versa; moreover, the Sphinx functions as the double of still another character in the play. These considerations about the various manifestations of the shapeshifting monster in The Infernal Machine must be weighed in the light of the specificity of the artistic medium, the theatre. In theatre, the materiality of the visual sign has an irrefutable physical, emotional, and mental impact on the audience. This impact is enhanced by the length of time during which the visual sign is exposed to the gaze. What the audience can see during the greater part of Act II, “The Encounter of Oedipus and the Sphinx,” is the recurrent and comparatively prolonged presence on stage of one manifestation, the Girl in White. But is the Sphinx a young human female, a male, or a hermaphrodite? The latter haunted Cocteau and appears also in his published poetry as late as 1934, the year The Infernal Machine was first produced.39

THE SPHINX’S GENDER The Sphinx in The Infernal Machine is a protean force, materialized by personification, reification, and stage metaphors that bear sexual connotations. The Sphinx may be a hermaphrodite and maybe not. The mystery surrounding the sexual identity and the body of the Sphinx pervades the first two acts of The Infernal Machine and bonds them together. Compared to the bewilderment engendered by the Sphinx and its multiple bodies, the verbal riddle it posed seems a negligible trifle. The reader of the French text of The Infernal Machine perceives two contradictory images. One image, generated by the male pronoun of the Sphinx in French, is that of a male-gendered figure; this image is constantly

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before the reader’s eyes whenever the lines are spoken by le Sphinx. The second is a visual image, that of the Girl in White, the female personification of the Sphinx. This double entendre was clearly intended by Cocteau, or else he would have used the French noun “sphinge” that designates a female sphinx. This intentional ambiguity has already been brought up by Shoshana Felman who noted that the Sphinx’s gender is ambiguous while its appearance is that of a female.40 Albert Bremel, in his English translation of the play, overlooks this ambiguity and lists the character as “The Sphinx, the Goddess of Vengeance,” thereby determining its female gender at the beginning of the act of reading.41 For the English reader, as for the audience at a live performance—where it is usually an actress who plays the role—the indeterminacy of the Sphinx’s gender is established by the Sphinx’s multiple transformations. The indeterminacy is also prompted when the English text uses for the Sphinx the neutral pronoun “it.” The ambiguity about the Sphinx’s gender sets off from the beginning of Act I. The conversation between the two soldiers focuses on the question of the Sphinx’s gender which, as it soon becomes clear, is a matter of speculation. Is the Sphinx a male in female attire, or is it female? Is it a male vampire or a lamia? No clear answer is provided. The audience at the play’s first production in 1934 was familiar with another vampire, Dracula. If few had read Bram Stoker’s novel, many had seen Tod Browning’s eponymous picture from 1931, which starred Bela Lugosi and enjoyed a huge box office success in France as elsewhere. If critics still argue today about the gender of Stoker’s vampire, not so in 1934, when Browning’s Dracula was positively bisexual.42 Nor was the female vampire absent from the screen: the super villain and head of the thieves’ gang in Louis Feuillade’s crime series Les Vampires (The Vampires) (1915–1916), a series favored by the surrealists, was Irma Vep, an anagram for vampire. But whereas the “regular” vampire was and is still perceived as only a sexual initiator, Cocteau’s Sphinx/vampire, regardless of its gendered sexuality, is a terminator like Irma Vep. A seminal indication regarding the Sphinx’s gender comes from the playwright himself, voiced by Anubis at the beginning of Act II. Logic compels the gods, he tells the Girl in White/Sphinx, to appear before the humans under the guise that humans use to represent them, or else they would see a void.43 The first of the Sphinx’s apparitions is in the shape of a young female; when on its socle, the Sphinx may be androgynous, as when it dons the jackal head of Anubis, a male. Shifting shapes is shifting gender(s). And conversely, it is the perceiver who determines the gender of the perceived. But if the series of physical manifestations of the Sphinx denote its manifold sexuality, so does its apparently irrefutable manifestation as a human

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female. In the following crucial scene, the first encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx, the physical presence of the Girl in White (the Sphinx) upsets Oedipus. Although he is aware of his feeling of unease, he is unable to identify its cause. He hesitates, and hesitation is a decisive factor in Todorov’s definition of the fantastic. Oedipus cannot decide what to believe in: should he welcome the easily classifiable young female or should he draw back from the confusing “other,” the nonhuman creature that he vaguely senses behind the girl’s appearance. Ultimately, he will trust what he perceives as a material fact, the girl that he sees before him: Enter Oedipus upstage left. He walks, looking down. He gives a start. OEDIPUS :

Oh! Sorry . . . I scared you. OEDIPUS : Not exactly . . . I was dreaming, I was far away, and then, suddenly . . . SPHINX : You took me for an animal. OEDIPUS : Almost. SPHINX : Almost? Almost an animal, that’s the Sphinx. OEDIPUS : I confess. SPHINX : You confess that you took me for the Sphinx. Thank you.44 SPHINX :

The “almost an animal” is the monster, a creature whose gender is unclear. However, Oedipus lacks the necessary imaginative faculty to resolve the indeterminacy and ambiguity concerning the nature and gender of the creature he perceives. He is swept away by “evidence,” by the physical presence of the girl he sees—only to dismiss it later, when he will be swept away by his greedy haste to take hold of his prize, the queen and the throne. Not so the omniscient reader or spectator for whom the questionable equation “woman5almost an animal5Sphinx5monster” initiates, like any other fantastic element, an epistemological process. As seen in this short scene, the “truth” about the Sphinx’s gender is deceptive, for it soon becomes veiled if not denied. In theatre, the body perceived by the audience is the product of a number of strategies that are designed to operate on the perceiver beyond the limited span of time of the theatre performance. The construction of body, as well as of gender, depends not only on the density and intensity of the signals released by the perceived body but also on the duration of its sensorial exposure: the longer the duration, the stronger the visual or audial impact. In The Infernal Machine, it is as a young girl dressed in white that the Sphinx is first visualized and it is under this guise that it occupies the

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stage during most of Act II. The Sphinx not only assumes the body and gender of a girl, it also identifies with its now human shape and falls in love.45 As a younger-than-the-male woman, the girl embodies the normative mating partner in a heterosexual society. As Judith Butler explains, “the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative.”46 If Oedipus disobeys this imperative, it is not only because he is portrayed as a vain and imperceptive youth but also because he is one of the signifiers in a complex inquiry into gender and sexuality. Long before Foucault, Cocteau recognized that gender is a function of context and that sexuality is a fluid concept. Exploring sartorial, behavioral, mental, and emotional manifestations of sexuality in various situations, Cocteau suggests a concept of gender as performance. The extended exposure of one of the monster’s manifestations, the Girl in White, is an indisputable vehicle for communication, based as it is on a popular cliché, the woman-monster.47 Cocteau not only expands the duality implicit in this cliché but also turns it into multiplicity, incarnated by the monster’s various transformations. Behind the innocent appearance of the seventeen-year-old girl in the immaculate dress, lurk no others than the goddess of vengeance, a lamia who only plays her part in a preordained game of death, a Lilith figure bonded to Anubis the god of the dead, a stone come to life (the ruins), a female werewolf, (the jackal head), and a chimera (the evanescent light in the sky). But most important, under a mysterious guise, the Sphinx is the devourer of young males on whose dead bodies it leaves the imprint of another sexual devourer, the vampire. Is this still the woman monster? Or is this the male for whom the Young Soldier pines? Cocteau’s monster is shape-shifting; not only is the monster an unstable signifier but so is the signified. Long before postmodernism, Cocteau proceeds to undermine what Craig Owens terms as “the referential status of visual imagery,” showing that reality, “whether concrete or abstract, is a fiction, produced and sustained only by its cultural representation.”48 In 1936, two years after the first production of The Infernal Machine, Cocteau visits the Sphinx in Egypt and writes: The Sphinx is not an enigma. It is pointless to question it. It is a reply. “I am here,” it says, “I watched over the filled up tombs and I watch the empty tombs. No matter. The cravings for beauty, the fire of the genius, the human phoenix, are forever reborn of their ashes. They draw new forces even from

44 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre destruction. There are several boundary stones like us in the world that gather the wandering spirits and force them, in spite of the dead beliefs and the speed, to go on a pilgrimage and take a break.”49

The work of art, the vehicle of stable and unstable significations, is Cocteau’s answer to all existential uncertainties. Made of disparate parts, the work of art embodies at once man’s genius and man’s monstrosity, bridging the gaps of time and place, and providing both solace and enlightenment.

3. Laius, Tiresias, and Jocasta POLICEMAN,

to Therese/Tiresias’ husband: Madam or Mister, I am madly in love with you. And I want to be your husband. HUSBAND, sneezes: But can’t you see that I am a man? POLICEMAN : I can nevertheless marry you by proxy. HUSBAND : That’s silly. You could better make children. . . . Come back this evening and see how nature will give me children with no need of a woman. —Apollinaire, The Breasts of Tiresias1

T

he visual and emotional impact of the Sphinx, the paradigmatic monster, extends beyond the time limits of Act II of The Infernal Machine, stirring an unsettling question. If this innocent-looking girl is none other than a monster in disguise, what lurks beneath the appearance of the other human characters in Cocteau’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth? A closer investigation shows that Tiresias, Jocasta, and Laius (whose ghost appears in Act I) belong to the monster category as well. Tiresias does so literally, Jocasta and Laius metaphorically.

TIRESIAS Tiresias, whose story appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III, was reproved for having separated with his stick two mating serpents, breaking thereby a taboo. As punishment, he was turned into a woman. After seven years, he saw again the same coupling serpents, separated them,

46 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre and instantly turned back into a man. Since he experienced sex both as a woman and as a man, Zeus and Hera asked him to give his final verdict on a much-debated issue: who was experiencing the most pleasure, the man or the woman?. Zeus had said that it was the woman but Hera believed it was the man. Tiresias supported Zeus, thus stirring Hera’s anger, and she robbed him of his sight. To console him, Zeus turned him into a seer. This story is also reported by an ancient Greek source from the sixth century BC, erroneously attributed to Hesiod. In another version of the origin of Tiresias’ blindness and powers of vision, reported by Callimachus, Tiresias looked at Athena while she was bathing and the angry goddess punished him by depriving him of his sight. Chariclo, who was one of Athena’s attendant nymphs and Tiresias’ mother (Everes, a mortal shepherd, was his father), begged Athena for mercy. Instead of restoring his sight, Athena bestowed on Tiresias the power of foresight and offered him a walking stick as well. In both versions, vision is linked to a sexual taboo, infringed by Tiresias. By divine intervention, the loss of the physical ability to see is replaced by the power of vision and prophecy. In both versions, Tiresias undergoes a physiological transformation, sexual or ocular, and this transformation is closely connected to the sexual transgression. Forbes Irving suggests that “it may be that the motif of the blind or repressed seer had prompted or was felt to be in harmony with defects or deviation in the sexual field: persistently in Greek myths a physical maiming or defect is connected with sexual unorthodoxy and ambiguity.”2 Though Callimachus’ version of the myth connects prophecy to the intellect (Athena was the goddess of wisdom), it is Ovid’s version that is most often quoted, no doubt because it is so much more appealing to the imagination. It involves the witnessing of a sexual act, a prohibited act (the parting of a procreating couple), and a sexual symbol, the snake. The story of Tiresias as a hermaphrodite or an androgynous human being is a narrative that bridges the forbidden and the permissible, the real and the imaginary, as well as the normal and the nonnormal. Tiresias’ physical transformation assimilates him to the nonnormal, the monster. Like the monster, he holds supernatural power. In Ovid’s version, Tiresias’ gift of prophecy is linked to his sexual transformation, which bestows on him the power to see, know, and understand beyond the human or the “normal,” and, as myth tells us about Zeus and Hera’s dispute, even beyond that of the divine.3 Closer in time to The Infernal Machine, another Tiresias occupied the center stage, though only for a very short time. Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias, defined by its author as a “surrealist drama,” opened in Paris on June

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24, 1917 for a one-time run to an audience consisting mainly of artists. The play follows the intricate itinerary of Thérèse’s breasts from the moment she disposes of them and becomes Tiresias to the moment she returns, after a brilliant career in the army, to her husband’s bosom. Both Thérèse and her husband undergo gender transformation. An anarchic satire that did not hesitate to spit fire and venom on gender roles, war and biological reproduction, journalism, institutionalized art, and the so-called sacred institution of the family, the play used the myth of Tiresias as a subversive stratagem. Thérèse/Tiresias was construed as the symbol of undesired upheaval, the monstrous “other,” and the free spirit. For Apollinaire’s audience, who had witnessed the advent of the suffragettes, the New Woman, and the women’s dumping of the corset, Thérèse/Tiresias’ sexual metamorphosis seemed a prophecy come true. Several artists contributed poems for the printed program: Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Pierre Albert-Birot, and Cocteau.4 Cocteau wrote a short cubist poem, “Zèbre (Zebra),” ending with the following lines “The devil at Médrano/Hermaphrodite vault.”5 In The Infernal Machine, Cocteau would not go as far as Apollinaire, but he used Tiresias’ hermaphroditism to his own ends. Speaking to Oedipus about Tiresias’ visit during their wedding night, Jocasta refers to him as a “monster.”6 Tiresias’ supernatural powers as a seer link him to the mythical monsters, like the Sphinx for example, as well as to nonnormative sexuality. Forbes Irving, for example, understands Tiresias’ sex change as emasculation and credits it with Tiresias’ increased insight and knowledge.7 Although emasculation does not explain Tiresias’ renewed virility after seven years, it may serve as a logical explanation of Tiresias’ sex change. In The Infernal Machine, Tiresias’ emasculation is his distinctive mark from the beginning of the play, embedded as it is in his nickname, Zizi.8 The nickname Zizi can belong to a man as well as to a woman, thereby rendering the gender of its bearer indeterminate. In addition, colloquial French uses this term derisively to designate the male and the female sexual organ; it is frequently used in children’ speech. Calling Tiresias “Zizi,” Jocasta reveals a past intimacy between the two, hints at the seer’s present physiological condition, and turns him as well into an object of derision. Her attitude toward him is ambivalent, as she is emotionally dependent on him. She believes in his supernatural powers and needs him not only to interpret her nightmarish dreams but also as a go-between between her and her subjects. It is this seer, the highest in the clerical hierarchy, who tries to prevent the incest, with the expected outcome. Jocasta perceives Tiresias’ hostility to her marriage as a symptom of moral degeneration and she condemns it as such. For her, Tiresias is metaphorically and literally a monster.

48 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre In his interesting reading, based on the analogy between Tiresias’ physical impotency and that of the dead Laius, Jacques Brosse construes Cocteau’s Tiresias as the materialization of Laius’ ghost.9 Seen in this light, Tiresias is the mediator between two worlds, the private and the public. These two distinct realms will, in a sinister way, blend together during Jocasta and Oedipus’ wedding night in Act III, when their private nightmares take shape before the audience’s gaze and intersperse without touching each other.

JOCASTA, THE MONSTER-WOMAN An aberrant, Tiresias is not the only one among the characters to be compared to a monster. So is Jocasta, judged by the public eye. Her drunken subjects mock her wedding to a younger man and give vent to their dissatisfaction under her window. In Act I, Jocasta offers the negative image of a deplorable and pathetic queen, the epitome of camp fumbling about in tragic surroundings. As such, she casts an aberrant shadow among typical royal figures, a metaphorical monster of nonnormative sexual behavior, a queen who brings her younger sexual favorites to the palace and transgresses social behavioral norms. Jocasta’s otherness is proclaimed even before she enters the stage, at the moment we hear her voice in the wings. The stage directions indicate that she speaks with an accent that tells her apart from her subjects, the citizens of Thebes.10 She is an outsider, like Oedipus, like the Sphinx. She cannot see Laius’ ghost, entrapped as she is in her own guilt, nightmares, regrets, and desires. This grotesque caricature, this parody of grandeur, undergoes a change during the wedding night, when from an apparently harmless but lustful middle-aged matron she becomes a bird of prey who will not let go of her victim. The Young Soldier has served her as a temporary though socially unbefitting lover. Now she holds the Sphinx’s young slayer, of unknown origins but, by public decree, fit to be a king. Little does it matter that the young savior bears on his feet the marks of her lost infant son. From an outrageous figure to a deplorable older woman in quest of young lovers and an incestuous mother, Jocasta’s character does not cease to inspire the reader and spectator with mixed feelings, ranging from amusement to disgust and pity. Most of the press reviews of the play’s production in 1934 preferred to ignore this shocking portrayal of the mythological queen and construed her interest in the Young Soldier as maternal. This prudish attitude of the press reviews reflected the then prevailing viewpoint of the larger public;

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understandably, they did not want to shock their readers. Apart from Jean Schlumberger, it was only Gabriel Boissy who pointed out Jocasta’s lust. As he explained, it was both her lust and her foreignness (emphasized by her Slavic accent) that turned her into an unpleasant, hot-tempered figure, disliked by her people. His review paid tribute to Cocteau’s undisputable originality.11 Fifty years later, Jocasta’s lust was no more an issue to be covered up. Comparing Cocteau’s treatment of Oedipus with that of Hélène Cixous, Judith Miller was prompt to notice that Jocasta consciously commits incest.12 Moreover, if Jocasta is indeed obsessed by her missing son, as many of the 1934 reviews and Marie Jejcic’s more recent study affirm, then she has already committed incest with his look-alike, the Young Soldier, whose body she touched and felt in public and whom she brought to her palace.13 As Jocasta unabashedly claims, her son would be now the same age and as handsome as the Young Soldier—a claim that should satisfy only the faint at heart. In fact, Jocasta is haunted less by her missing/grown up/son than by the infanticide she believes she committed. She has kept her son’s cradle near her bed ever since she disposed of him, a constant reminder of her guilt as well as a justification of her act: after all, she did not kill her offspring; she only cast it away and spared him the tragic fate predicted by the oracle to Laius. A recurring nightmare keeps tormenting her since that day, the fear of which prevents her from sleeping. In this nightmare, she sees herself standing on a rampart and rocking an infant in her arms; suddenly, the infant becomes a sticky paste that spills through her fingers and the paste sticks to her in an amorous but horrendous embrace. As she tells Tiresias when they come to meet Laius’ ghost on the ramparts, JOCASTA :

. . . I scream and try to toss away this paste; but . . . oh! Zizi . . . If you only knew, it’s filthy . . . This thing, this paste stays glued to me and when I think I am free of it, the paste swiftly comes back and slaps me in the face. And this paste is alive. It has a sort of a mouth that glues itself on mine. And it slides along: it seeks my belly, my thighs. What a horror! . . . I do not want to sleep anymore, Zizi. . . . 14

The notion of incest is haunting her. On her wedding night, the ominous dream with its horrendous paste—sperm or placenta—haunts her again. The imaginary big jellyfish of The Potomak that feeds on everything has become the nightmarish jelly paste that shapes Jocasta’s days and nights as well as her present and future. To escape its terrifying grip, she disregards its unmistakable meaning. She disregards as well the tangible proof—the scarred feet—that

50 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre mark Oedipus as her own son. To explain her emotional reaction to the sight of these feet, she invents a story about her linen maid, her double: JOCASTA :

. . . These scars remind me of something that I always wanted to forget. . . . It happened to a woman, my foster sister, my linen maid. At the same age as me, at eighteen, she became pregnant. She valued her husband in spite of the big difference in their age and wanted a son. But the oracle predicted the child such a frightening future that after having given birth to a son, she did not have the courage to let him live. OEDIPUS : What? JOCASTA : Wait. . . . Imagine the force an unhappy woman needs to put an end to the life of her life . . . the fruit of her womb, her ideal on earth, the creature she loved most. OEDIPUS : And what did this . . . lady do? JOCASTA : With the fright of death in her heart, she pierced the baby’s feet, tied them together, stole him away to a mountain, and abandoned him to the wolves and bears. She hides her face in her hands. OEDIPUS :

And the husband? Everybody believed that the child died naturally and that the mother buried him with her own hands. OEDIPUS : And . . . this lady . . . is she still alive? JOCASTA : She is dead. OEDIPUS : The better for her, because my fi rst instance of royal authority would have been to inflict on her, in public, the worst torture and then put her to death. JOCASTA : The oracle was categorical. A woman finds herself so stupid, so weak when facing it.15 JOCASTA :

It is this story that will ultimately reveal her deliberate act of monstrosity not only to Tiresias and Creon but to Oedipus as well.16 At the inquiry, she repeatedly tries to prevent the messenger from disclosing to Oedipus his true origins. The timing of her suicide is significant, for she does not leave the scene to commit suicide after the recognition scene, when it has become clear that Oedipus is the baby she had given birth to: she has no remorse for her incest. She leaves the scene only when Oedipus’ killing of Laius is uncovered, when all hope for survival is gone. In his perceptive press review of the play’s first performance in 1934, Jean Schlumberger described Jocasta’s maternal ghost as “cleansed of her murky love.”17 Knowingly committing incest, Jocasta transgresses social norms—she is older than her future husband—as well as sexual taboos and becomes an

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exemplar of untamable sexuality. Her sexual interest in the Young Soldier, whom she brings to the court, anticipates her interest in young Oedipus. Furthermore, she contemplates incest as a “sweet union”: JOCASTA,

to Tiresias: All the small boys say: “I want to become a man so that I marry my mother.” It is not that stupid, Tiresias. Is there a sweeter and crueler union, a prouder union, than the couple of a son and a young mother?18

Cocteau boldly deflates the Freudian theory whereby the desiring son kills his father so that he may possess his mother. By an act displacement, it is now the sexualized mother who poses a threat to her son (as well as to any innocent young man!). When young Oedipus marries Jocasta, he is still a virgin whom the older woman will try to seduce. Intent on stirring his sexual interest, she is worried not about breaking a taboo but about her physical appearance. If Cocteau condemns Jocasta, it is because of her uncontrollable lust for younger men (the Isadora syndrome), her role in maiming and forsaking her own child, and for committing incest. Seen in this light, Jocasta is metaphorically a monster of lust and selfishness, guilty not only of incest but also of attempted infanticide. It is significant that in his interpretation, Cocteau reverses the mythical narrative: the father’s role in the infant’s maiming and desertion is discarded while Jocasta bears the entire burden. From the unnatural mother who physically maims her child to the incestuous mother, the journey is short. Jocasta is a monster-woman. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain the recurrence of the monsterwoman in male texts as a representation of threatening female autonomy: “Male dread of women, and specifically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectified itself in vilification of women, while male ambivalence about female ‘charms’ underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorceress-goddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, Circe, Kali, Delilah, and Salome, all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce and to steal male generative energy.”19 The prevailing image of woman as monster in Western culture is most visible in early horror films and Patrice Petro too ascribes it to the prevailing patriarchal ways of seeing woman.20 Another angle is provided by Eva Figes, who finds that the evil woman in patriarchal drama is represented as both sexually unchaste and avid for power.21 Cocteau’s Jocasta is not only sexually unchaste but, unlike the Sophoclean heroine, she is the one—not Laius—who pierced the baby’s

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feet and carried it to the mountains. In other words, Jocasta took upon herself the prerogatives of the male, the head of the family, and decided the fate of their infant by discarding the infant and preferring her mature male partner and the continuation of their rule of the city. Cocteau provides a detailed description of Jocasta’s action: she pierced the baby’s feet, tied them together, and hanged the baby by its feet to a branch, far in the mountains, a prey to the she-wolves and bears. The cruelty of her act—which she obliquely describes to Oedipus during their wedding night as an emotional sacrifice—was at odds with any affection she may have felt for her child or with normative respect for human life. Thus, for modern audiences, Jocasta is a monster both because of her lustful incestuous drives and her murderous treatment and abandonment of her child. Her later reemergence as a ghost allows for the negation of her sexuality as for the negation of her ambivalent feelings for her child. Cocteau’s use of the ghost, a fantastic element, is doubly ironical, first, because such a negation of monstrous drives is made possible only by death and second, because it is by death only that sublimation, and possibly bliss, may be achieved.

THE MATRON Another mother occupies the stage in The Infernal Machine for a short sequence, in juxtaposition to another female figure, the Girl in White/ the Sphinx. Two small children, a boy and a girl, accompany the Matron, a woman of the lower classes and one of the commoners. The Matron is earthy, chatty, indiscreet, obnoxious at home with her brother and sisterin-law, and impatient with her children. She is the mother of three sons and one daughter; the Sphinx killed her fourth son. On the stage, unlike what one might expect, she does not offer the image of a sorrowing mother; on the contrary, she cuts a comic figure. Another horror-inspiring woman, she is preoccupied not by her loss, nor by the imminence of her losing a second son to the Sphinx, but by trivia and gossip. According to the social conventions that expect women to conform to the image of the self-sacrificing mother, she is (metaphorically) a monster of selfishness. The Matron adds the third panel to a triptych representing the monster-woman. The two other panels are Jocasta and Nemesis/the Sphinx/the Girl in White. All the mature female characters in The Infernal Machine—the Matron (the lower-class woman), Jocasta (the queen), and Nemesis/the Sphinx/the Girl in White (the notion of the protean woman construed

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by patriarchal society) have one trait in common: monstrosity. As for the Matron’s daughter and Antigone, both still children, monstrosity is yet to come.

LAIUS The introduction of Laius’ ghost is another of Cocteau’s innovations in the play and a parodical intertextual reference to Hamlet’s royal ghost. Seen from the perspective of the fantastic, the apparition of Laius’ ghost is the personification of the Other World, the fantastic, which permeates the real world without being fully perceived by most. For those who perceive the fantastic, the wounded ghost is a terrifying and monstrous apparition. For those who cannot, the fantastic is relegated to the realm of parody. Unlike the ghost in Hamlet, the ghost in The Infernal Machine is unable to deliver his message to the living, because they are blind and deaf to the unseen, the invisible. Jean Touzot adopts a Freudian psychoanalytical approach to explain not only Cocteau’s treatment of the Oedipus myth but also the introduction of Laius in The Infernal Machine. He affirms that the suicide of Cocteau’s father, when Cocteau was only nine, was a traumatic experience that left an indelible mark on the poet. According to Touzot, Cocteau’s identification with Oedipus and the identification of his own father with Laius left their imprint on The Infernal Machine.22 Mitsutaka Odagiri offers a more realistic, but still hypothetical, explanation for the introduction of Laius’ ghost in the play. As she suggests, Cocteau may have known Saint-Georges de Bouhélier’s play Oedipe, roi de Thébes (Oedipus, King of Thebes) (1919). In Bouhélier’s play, a “gold-crowned ghost” is mentioned, evoking the ramparts’ scene in Hamlet.23 Yet another source may have been Seneca’s Oedipus. In Seneca’s play, Creon tells Oedipus about Laius’ ghost that had been summoned from the dead by Tiresias during the necromancy ritual, in an effort to uncover the reason for the plague in Thebes: CREON :

. . . There [Laius’ ghost] stood, A fearful sight, his body drenched with blood, His matted locks o’erspread with horrid filth. And now, with raging tongue, the specter spoke: . . .’tis thy bloody king Who, as the prize of savage murder done, Hath seized his father’s scepter and his bed.24

54 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre Cocteau’s ghost is wounded too, but this is where the similarity with Seneca’s offstage ghost ends. The Seneccan Laius’ ghost points to Thebes’ king, Oedipus, as the one whose deeds brought on the plague; the Coctelian could not deliver his message to Jocasta and his warning did not reach her. Cocteau, well versed in Greek mythology, was familiar with the Labdacus myth. The ancient myth tells of Labdacus’ son, Laius, who went into exile after Amphion and Zethus had unlawfully taken the reins of Thebes in their hands. Laius found shelter at Pelops’ court where he lusted after Chrysippus, Pelops’ illegitimate son. He abducted the boy, raped him, and fled away to Thebes, taking the boy along. For his deeds, Laius incurred the curse of Pelops and the wrath of the gods. Hera sent the Sphinx to Thebes as a punishment for Laius’ sins. As for Chrysippus, some sources say that his father rescued him; other sources claim that he was either killed or committed suicide while at Laius’ court. Thus, myth attributes to Laius unbridled sexual passion and unrestrained violence. Given the mythical stature of Oedipus in Western culture during the twentieth century, thanks to Freud, it is easy to understand that Laius’ own past as a sexual offender is overlooked if not completely ignored. Cocteau, however, used the Laius myth to his own ends. In his play, it is the ghost of this monstrous figure that haunts the ramparts in a futile attempt to prevent Jocasta’s incest. The satirical stance is clear and the joke is on the reader or the spectator: it is now the ancient rapist who attempts to prevent the infringement of a sexual taboo. Death has indeed a cleansing effect, as Jean Schlumberger noticed about Jocasta’s ghost. Laius’ ghost emerges from Hades to warn the living of a forthcoming calamity. According to Charles Segal, the descriptions in literature and drama of monsters breaking out from Hades denote the breakdown of an established order.25 Cocteau conforms to this tradition but his ghost is powerless and his message does not reach Jocasta. Warning her of a dangerous young man would have anyhow been useless. The parallelism between the first two acts of the play, the encounter with Laius’ ghost (Act I, “The Ghost”) and “The Encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx,” (the title of Act II,) is brought out by Felman, who shows that each of these acts revolves around two enigmatic figures, the Ghost and the Sphinx respectively.26 However, there is a similarity between these two figures too. Both the Sphinx and Laius are monsters, the one literally and the other metaphorically, and the monstrosity of both is linked to a nonnormative manifestation of sexuality. But while the Sphinx’s monstrosity is visible and audible, the monstrosity of Laius is silenced, reduced to a wink (monstrous rapists, in the 1930s as of today,

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have little exposure time on the stage, if at all). In addition, Laius and the Sphinx are causally interconnected, since it is Laius’ monstrosity that brought the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes. And like Laius, who lusted after a boy and directly or indirectly brought about his death, so did the Sphinx decimate the youth of Thebes. Seen from another angle, Laius’ nonnormative sexuality is perpetuated by the Sphinx, then by Laius’ son, Oedipus.

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4. Oedipus Oedipus begins to see clearly only when he is blind. —Cocteau, Maalesh1

O

f all the monsters in The Infernal Machine the last to be marked as such not by the gods but by men, is Oedipus. From the first line of the play’s prologue, spoken by the unseen Voice which serves at once as chorus and narrator, it is made clear that the gods had assigned him a role long before he was born: THE VOICE :

. . . He will kill his father. He will wed his mother.

As the Voice explains, Oedipus abandons Polybus and Merope, who raised him as their own child, as soon as he learns the oracle prediction: “The fear of parricide and incest propels him towards his destiny.” Soon enough Oedipus kills an old man by a blow that, in Cocteau’s version, was intended for the man’s servant. Oedipus meets the Sphinx, “the monster that poses a riddle and kills those who cannot answer it,” stays alive, and finds himself, as the Voice declares, engaged in “a monstrous wedding.”2 Later on, the gods’ messengers on earth brand him a monster: ANUBIS :

A long time ago, Jocasta and Laius had a child. Since the oracle had foretold that this child would be a scourge . . . SPHINX : A scourge! ANUBIS : A monster, a fi lthy beast . . . SPHINX : Faster! Faster! ANUBIS : Jocasta tied him up and sent him to be lost on the mountain. One of Polybus’ shepherds finds him, takes him along and, as Polybus and Merope did not have any children . . .

58 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre SPHINX :

I tremble with joy. They adopt him. Oedipus, son of Laius, has killed Laius at the meeting point of the three roads. SPHINX : The old man! ANUBIS : Son of Jocasta, he will marry Jocasta.3 ANUBIS :

Cocteau’s hero is no hero. He is pompous, vain and violent. Not only did he kill unintentionally the old man but he will also try to strangle Tiresias. He confesses that he is ill-tempered and vindictive. Anxious about the impression he would make in Thebes as the Sphinx’s victor, he stages his entrance in the city: He moves forward without looking, picks up the body [of the girl with the jackal’s head] and plants himself on frontstage left. He carries the body on his two stretched arms. OEDIPUS :

Not like this! I will look like this Corinthian tragedian that I saw. He played a king who carried his son’s body. The posture was pompous and nobody was moved.

He tries to hold the body under his left arm. OEDIPUS :

No! I will look like a fool! Like a hunter who comes home with an empty bag after he has shot his own dog. OEDIPUS : Hercules! Hercules tossed the lion on his shoulder! He places the body over his shoulder. Yes, on my shoulder! On my shoulder! Like a semigod! Oedipus starts walking to the right, advancing two steps after each bow and flourish. OEDIPUS : OEDIPUS : OEDIPUS : OEDIPUS :

I killed the filthy beast. I saved the city! I will marry Queen Jocasta! I will be king! 4

During this comic scene, the gods’ incisive comments intersperse with Oedipus’ lines and provide a sad and ironic counterpoint to his loudly spoken thoughts. The gods, Nemesis and Anubis, are represented by two projected giant forms that offer a visual counterpoint and belittle the foolish youth who has just cast himself in the role of the semigod, the savior. Cocteau was merciless in his portrayal of his anti-hero. Oedipus first appears in Act II as a handsome nineteen-year-old youth with broad shoulders and dressed as a traveler. Unlike the hero of Cocteau’s Oedipe-Roi who

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walked with a stick, Oedipus in The Infernal Machine is not physically impaired. Not only he is not lame but it is his manly walk that stirs the Sphinx’s admiration.5 He is conceited, violent, ambitious, insensitive, selfcentered, immature, and quick-tempered. In Act III, “The Wedding Night,” which takes place soon after Oedipus’ victory, he wears the royal crowning robe. Exhausted, he fails to detect the lie behind Jocasta’s story about the lost baby of the linen maid and ignores the similarity between his scarred feet and those of that baby. He is blind to whatever does not serve his interests and ambition. This is yet another instance where Cocteau calls attention to Oedipus’ failings as the key to his apparently unavoidable fate. In Act IV, “Oedipus King,” Oedipus has a small beard and looks old, despite the fact that only seventeen years have passed since he became king. He is now thirty-six. He has acquired a greater understanding of himself but his violent temper is still the same; he turns now this violence against himself. After he blinds himself, Oedipus becomes a hideous sight, a literal “filthy beast.”6 Ironically, it is as a blinded outcast that Cocteau’s Oedipus obtains what he craved for when he wed Jocasta: the fondling arms of a mother. It is his mother’s ghost that will take care of him in his expiatory exile, to which Antigone will lead him.7 Like Sophocles’ hero, Oedipus does not deliberately set out to kill his father, nor does he premeditate the incest. Until the breakout of the plague, he apparently excelled in his task because his people came to love him. As the Voice states in the Prologue, “The people love their king.”8 Determined to save his city, Oedipus proceeds to an inquiry to find out the source of the plague, the sinner who brought it about. It is now that Oedipus’ hitherto undetected monstrosity, initially conferred on him by unnamed and unseen forces, comes to light. Is Oedipus an innocent sinner? Unlike Sophocles, Cocteau demonstrates that Oedipus could have escaped the incest by marrying a woman younger than him, an option that he chose to ignore. Likewise, Oedipus could have prevented killing his father, if only he knew how to control his violent temper. Not only did he not learn from this incident but he also tried to strangle Tiresias when the latter stirred his anger. Oedipus is both a monster and a noninnocent victim. Oedipus is pronounced a victim from the start of the Prologue: the gods, some unknown superior powers, have decided his fate even before he was born. The standpoint is apparently deterministic, justifying those among the critics who consider The Infernal Machine as a drama of free will. The narrative, however, shows otherwise. The infernal machine put in motion by the gods is a metaphor for his personality. If Oedipus had controlled himself, he would have changed his fate. To do so, Oedipus needed self-knowledge,

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which he lacked. When he acquired it, it was too late, for parricide and incest had already been committed. Oedipus acquires inner vision, understanding, and maybe self-control long after all is done and said, long after he has committed acts condemned by society and religion. The self-searching and the inquiry after his origins should have come much earlier, before he left his adoptive parents. After his true parentage comes to light and with it the parricide and incest, Oedipus recognizes the monster that he is. As expected of him, he literally becomes the monster the people declare him to be. He blinds himself. He destroys his eyes, the organ that was not put to use. Because, if his parricide may be exonerated, not so the incest. During the crucial moment on his wedding night, he had before his eyes several warning signs but he chose to ignore them. Now, he deprives himself of eyesight and maims himself—a monstrous act and a monstrous sight, usually inflicted on an enemy but not on oneself. He is now a monster that bears on his body the mark of his nonnormativity. However, by associating Oedipus with the Sphinx, Cocteau shows that it is neither parricide nor incest that turns Oedipus into a monster. He had been a monster long before.

OEDIPUS, THE SPHINX, THE BELT When he sets out on his journey to win a kingdom, Oedipus imagines the Sphinx as a monster that has to be faced and eliminated. When he comes face to face with it in its mythic form—the Sphinx on a socle—he falls under its spell: he does not confront it but succumbs to its charm. The answer to the riddle is provided to him by none other than the Sphinx while he is hypnotized by its chant. Thus, in his encounter with the monster, he does not win his victory but victory is handed out to him. His spared life, his rank, and his kingdom are neither the fruit of his labors nor of his ruse: they are the monster’s cruel and cynical gifts, ordered by the gods. Oedipus’ meeting with the Sphinx unfolds on three simultaneous levels. The first is physical and circumstantial: the Sphinx is the obstacle on Oedipus’ way to glory, kingdom, and what he regards as self-fulfillment. As such, it represents a hostile power that has to be conquered and destroyed. The second is the intellectual level. The third is that of sexuality and affect. Oedipus fails on all three. He rejects any sexual and affective bond with a woman younger than himself, a woman who could not possibly be his mother. He answers the riddle, thanks to the help of a supernatural power; and he

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receives the Sphinx’s dead body as a present. Self-centered, Oedipus does not question the Sphinx’s survival after he has “provided” the right answer to the riddle. Such a question would put his victory in jeopardy. Instead, he is content with his dead trophy, an undeniable gift that he knowingly accepts, and moves on. Oedipus is not only a deceiver but a self-deceiver as well, as Ralph Yarrow has observed.9 His only victory over the Sphinx—making the Girl in White fall in love with him at first sight—was achieved by the sex appeal he inadvertently displayed. As the playwright shows, this victory was inconsequential, since the gods willed Oedipus’ “solution” of the riddle and the Girl in White was no more than a ephemeral manifestation of Nemesis/ the Sphinx. His encounter with the Sphinx demonstrates to Oedipus that the monster he has been looking for has many faces. The first is the Girl in White, with whom Oedipus establishes—again unknowingly, like the killing of Laius—friendly and trustful relations. So much so that it is the Girl in White, in love with him, who advises him to escape his fate by marrying a younger woman. However, Oedipus has higher aspirations: he would not take such a wife “who would quickly become a Sphinx, worse than the Sphinx, a Sphinx with teats and claws!”10 If the Girl in White/ Sphinx represents a destructive sexuality that has to be avoided—and the reader or spectator does not know what shape the Sphinx assumed in its encounter with the other young contenders—it follows that Oedipus is the only contender who rejects it (by rejecting her oblique offer of marriage) and consequently stays alive and sane—certainly an unexpected conclusion. While the Sphinx’s mysterious sexuality attracted men—as the soldiers’ conversation in Act I affirms—Oedipus seems impervious to it and, significantly, approaches the “white young girl” as an asexual human being: “And here I see, instead of a column, a white young girl standing in my way.”11 The relations he wishes to establish with her would be based on comradeship. Theirs would be a bond between two equals, a homosocial bond. In its mythical shape—the Sphinx on its socle—the monster comes alive. The Freudian approach considers the monster as the unconscious, the id, and the crystallization of sexual anxiety. The monster is also a symbol of evil, of animal nature and the confrontation with the monster is usually regarded as the confrontation with one’s inner truth. From this angle, Oedipus’ encounter with the monster is not a confrontation but an act of evasion. Oedipus does not confront his inner truth but eludes it, only to confront it soon again in his dream on his wedding night. In his haste to reach Thebes to seize the promised prize, he leaves the scene but soon

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returns to pick up his trophy. At this moment, he already knows that the Girl in White is the Sphinx but shows no surprise to find it/her alive. He does not question its survival. If the monster represents sexual anxiety, then Oedipus has obviously not confronted nor conquered it either but had run away from it. Oedipus’ rejection of the Girl in White/Sphinx is not incidental but it is part of a behavioral pattern demonstrated throughout The Infernal Machine. Oedipus had first rejected his filial attachment to Polybus and Merope and left Corinth instead of trying to defy the oracle and avoid parricide and incest. He further rejected a possible filial attachment—though unknowingly—when he killed the old man at the crossroads. Shortly after, he rejected not once but twice a sexual, emotional, and conventional bond to a young girl and married instead an older woman. As he would tell Tiresias on his wedding night, it was not sexual attraction that tied him to the woman he wed. Finally, by going deeper than necessary (and against Jocasta’s and Tiresias’ advice) into the inquiry in Thebes, he rejects himself by turning his body into that of a maimed monster, as he rejects his new ties with Jocasta and his children/brothers, his home, and Thebes. To understand the reason for these repeated rejections, we must go back and examine Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx, an encounter that not only illuminates Oedipus’ conduct but also his bond and kinship with the Sphinx. In The Infernal Machine, Oedipus looks for the Sphinx but meets the monster by accident. He expects to find the Sphinx on a socle or on a column. Instead, or so it seems to him, he meets a girl in white, not much younger than he, erring alone near the ruins of a Chimera. At first, as we have seen, he is startled by her physical presence and wonders about the reason for her wandering out of the city at that time of the night. He suspects that she is looking for the Sphinx out of curiosity, but she denies it. She tells him that she is on her way to a relative in the country, but he disbelieves her again. His response to the girl is twofold. On one hand, he summons up a possible logical explanation for her unconventional behavior and expresses it verbally. On the other hand, he is unconsciously frightened by her presence and his fear is displayed by his startle. Aware of the inexplicable presence of the Girl in White, Oedipus can intuitively feel the uncanny and the supernatural though he cannot logically explain it. “Man’s problem, as Anubis so correctly puts it,” remarks Lewis W. Leadbeater, “lies in his reliance on sight; he believes what he sees.”12 Oedipus believes that the Girl in White is a human being, even as he senses and acknowledges her disturbing presence. Unknowingly, when Oedipus entered the site of the Chimera

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ruins he entered the fantastic realm, the realm of the marvelous, of the uncanny or Freud’s unheimlich. OEDIPUS :

. . . Your presence here, at these ruins, is very puzzling. You are unbelievable. OEDIPUS : Because, if you were like the other girls, you would have already run away at once. SPHINX : You amuse me more and more, my boy. OEDIPUS : It would have seemed so marvelous to fi nd in a girl an emulator worthy of me! SPHINX : An emulator? You are therefore looking for the Sphinx?13 SPHINX :

The French term for “emulator” is the polysemic émule, which denotes an equal, a competitor, and/or an emulator. Oedipus, portrayed by the Voice in the Prologue as a young man “eaten up by curiosity and ambition,” assumes that the unconventional girl is similarly motivated.14 The girl whom Oedipus would consider his equal would be inquisitive, audacious, and adventurous—a young male in a white dress, his double. Though Oedipus does not know it, he has been granted his wish: the Girl in White/Sphinx is indeed his equal and the similarities between the two are salient. In what seems an absurd move but is nevertheless consistent with the dialectics of the play—the inescapable working of the time bomb, the infernal machine, set between the moment the bomb is put in motion till its explosion—the Girl in White too wishes to kill the Sphinx, because she (Nemesis/Sphinx/Girl in White) detests her task, which consists in luring young males and having them killed by her double, Anubis. Ironically, in their run for the coveted prize, both will win: the Sphinx will provide Oedipus the answer to the riddle and will thereby bring an end to its hated mission. And Oedipus will bring the Sphinx’s body to Thebes, marry Jocasta, and become a king. Both Oedipus and the Sphinx are tools in the hands of the gods and both are scourges that bring devastation to the city. Is the Sphinx/monster/Girl in White Oedipus’ emulator, an emulator “worthy” of him, or is Oedipus the emulator of the Sphinx/monster/Girl in White? The two are not identical but complementary doubles, whose strange kinship is brought forth in Act III, “The Wedding Night,” when Oedipus in his half-wake state repeats certain sequences of the Sphinx’s chant. The parallelism between Oedipus’ trance-like state during the Sphinx’s chant and his half-wake state on the wedding night is made manifest by the identical web of words that spreads out during both states. Oedipus had fallen into the trap of the Sphinx’s chanted words, just as he

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had fallen into the trap of the oracle words. Now, on his wedding night, his own words have trapped him: by presenting himself as the one who found the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, he unknowingly doomed himself to commit incest. It is during this half-wake state in the royal bedroom, after he has mechanically repeated part of the chant’s words, that Oedipus tells Jocasta: “I do not exist anymore.”15 Has the “singing bitch” to which he had given his belt trapped him, defeated him, and taken possession of his soul and body? Has he become part of the chanting bitch, the Sphinx? In this context, David Williams’ comment on the Oedipus myth in ancient and medieval literature is enlightening: “The sphinx is Oedipus, and Oedipus is the sphinx,” he observes. “This identification of Oedipus with the monster was not uncommon. Seneca, in his play Oedipus, . . . has Laius called up from the dead to explain Thebes’ ongoing pestilence; he does so by identifying Oedipus as his own monster.”16 In The Infernal Machine, Oedipus looks for his émule to fight and destroy him. Only by killing the monster would he be inserted in society, have a family and a social position. But, paradoxically, by killing the monster Oedipus appropriates its attributes: he will be uncovered as a scourge, a monster to be expelled. Finally, it is the belt given by Oedipus to the Girl in White that explains and enhances the bond between the two. The belt is not only the piece of clothing that holds together the body cover and enables its wearer to move freely, but also a Christian symbol of chastity and modesty and a reminder of Christ’s sufferings on the Cross, as Cocteau and his audience were well aware. Within the dramatic context, the belt is more than a sign of comradeship and goodwill from a condescending youth to a young girl. It is also a token, a chain, a sign of Oedipus’ real but unacknowledged debt to the Sphinx and a reminder of the vow he made to the Girl in White before her transformation into the Sphinx on the socle: “Take this belt; it will allow you to reach me after I will have killed the beast.”17 During the wedding night, the belt returns to its owner, handled over by Tiresias. According to the latter, he did it on behalf of a beautiful girl. Oedipus snatches the belt. He prefers to ignore it, hiding its existence both from himself and from Jocasta. He puts it out of sight, placing it under the animal hide. This is the same animal hide that will envelop Anubis’ body in Oedipus’ dream, an ominous sign that links Oedipus to death as well as to the Sphinx and to the Sphinx’s double, Anubis. Mireille Brémond, who compares Cocteau’s use of the Sphinx to Marguerite Yourcenar’s use of another monster, the Minotaur, draws attention to the divine nature of the Sphinx that, as such, cannot be completely destroyed.18 The Sphinx’s apparition to Tiresias under the guise of a young girl and the returned belt are a material proof of the Sphinx’s

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permanence and, at the same time, another chance to belie the oracle. The possibility of marrying a younger woman—any young woman, including the Girl in White—before the marriage to Jocasta was consummated, still existed, and the risk of incest would have vanished. Oedipus chooses to ignore the Sphinx’s message. He chooses his own fate. He will not desert the kingship or his position as a savior of Thebes; he will not marry a younger woman; he will not join the Girl in White/Sphinx, his double, the monster. And he will not desert the royal matrimonial bed. For Judith Miller, the belt is “a metamorphosized umbilical cord” that Oedipus gave to the Sphinx in appreciation of her befriending him.19 Seen in this perspective, the belt brings forth the kinship between Oedipus and the Sphinx. Oedipus partakes of the same nature as the Sphinx. Furthermore, theirs is not a maternal or fraternal kinship but the kinship of émules, of equals and doubles, a bond that should be kept secret. Oedipus’ hiding of the belt under the animal hide at the foot of the matrimonial bed is not only the metaphoric illustration of the rejection of a visceral bond but also suggests the rejection or repression of the beast inside. As critics have shown, since the late eighteenth century the doppelgänger has represented in literature the repressed inner demons.20 If it is so, Oedipus consciously rejects the one to whom he is bound by an umbilical cord, his double, the monster. That is, he tries to escape from the beast in him by seeking refuge in the arms of the older woman, a woman to whom he is not sexually attracted: he had always dreamed about “an almost maternal love,” he says.21 It ensues therefore that the rejected monster is closely connected with sexuality; more specifically, it is associated with a repressed expression of sexuality. Accordingly, although the dichotomy between monsters and heroes is a staple of all ancient cosmologies, in The Infernal Machine the polarities man/monster, human/divine or human/animal are dissolved. The Sphinx is both human and divine, human and monster, human and animal (Girl in White/Anubis). Like the Sphinx, his émule, Oedipus is a monster, a fusion of binaries, long before committing incest.

OEDIPUS AND THE MONSTER One of the awe-inspiring attributes of Oedipus in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1905) is his self-image as monster, a self-image construed long before he is publicly exposed as a monster. In Hofmannsthal’s version of the Oedipus myth, Oedipus does not have to kill the Sphinx

66 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre because the Sphinx, in love with him, flees away from him as from a monster (he had unknowingly committed parricide). When Oedipus comes to claim the queen and the throne as the victor of the Sphinx, he tells Creon: OEDIPUs:

I am both king and monster in one body: quickly, strangle both! The gods cannot separate one from the other; Kill me! 22

Creon, too, senses Oedipus’ monstrosity but cannot bring himself to kill him; Oedipus will therefore meet Jocasta and they will fall in love. Though Cocteau may have been influenced by Hofmannsthal’s portrayal of the Sphinx, as Mitsutaka Odagiri affirms, he construes Oedipus as an ambitious young man, confident in his intellectual abilities, and impervious to accidental mishaps such as the killing of an old man in a general fight.23 In The Infernal Machine, young Oedipus’ self-image is identical to the image he wishes to present to the Thebans, that of a clever savior, not of a monster. Clever he may seem, not because he demonstrated any extraordinary intellectual abilities by solving the riddle but because he knows, or so he believes, how to reach his goals without wasting energy on such trifles as an accidental killing or an offer of marriage from a younger woman, who is in love with him. His self-knowledge, rudimentary as it may seem, is apparently sufficient for attaining his limited goal: to escape the oracle. Thus, he hides the object that connects him to the monster that, as he alone knows, is still alive. Oedipus’ deeper self-knowledge will emerge not as the end product of an introspective process but will be forced on him by external factors. Oedipus will submit to disclosure, public exposure, and forced introspection as to an unavoidable expiatory ordeal. His self-blinding is an act of penance, a cilice that will perpetually remind him not only of his actions but also of his abstentions, not of his sins but of his flaws. The notion of sin is absent from The Infernal Machine. Oedipus’ parricide, attributed to accident, self-defense, and hot temper, is not dwelt on as much as the nonnormative sexuality that is the focal point of the play. Oedipus’ crime consists in willfully ignoring all that hampers his desire. To this end, he does not hesitate to lie. The story of his “slaying” of the Sphinx, as he tells it to Jocasta on their wedding night, is fabricated; he lies to Tiresias too. Desire—be it Oedipus’ desire for power or Jocasta’ lust—is portrayed as a ruthless force that disregards ethical norms, social conventions, and feelings. Unchecked desire functions like a time bomb, like an infernal machine: it puts in motion a psychological mechanism that proves impossible to stop unless one understands one’s motivations. Seeing and

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comprehending the unspoken or the unspeakable, this task was beyond Oedipus’ powers well before his public exposure as a monster. Louis Jouvet, who directed the play in 1934, when it was first produced, commented in his journal: “The myth of the Sphinx is the depiction of man. To the question that one’s destiny asks, one has to answer by asserting the human in oneself. Each man plays for himself the simultaneous roles of the monster and the traveler of the ancient fable.”24 By saving Thebes from the grips of a scourge at its gates, it took the traveler seventeen years to uncover the scourge that was living within its gates. While Thebes will ultimately designate Oedipus as a monster, the reader or spectator is plainly told by the omniscient Voice that after seventeen years Oedipus “become[s] finally a man.”25 The dichotomy man/monster is explicitly eradicated. Oedipus is both a man and a monster.

THE PLAGUE Act IV of The Infernal Machine takes place seventeen years after Oedipus has entered the city, at the moment of crisis, when the plague spreads on and on in Thebes, making no distinction of class, gender, or age. Cocteau dwells in particular on its psychological effect, linked as it is to the growing number of victims, the inefficiency of the civil authorities, and the lack of any medical remedy in view. Creon, a high dignitary and Jocasta’s brother, comes to Oedipus for a solution: CREON :

The plague attacks our morale. The gods are punishing the city and want a victim. A monster is hiding among us. They demand that he be uncovered and banished. Each day sees the police failing at this task and the corpses piling up in the streets.26

In the Prologue to Act I, the plague is established as an infectious disease introduced by an anonymous offender. In the Prologue to Act IV, the Voice describes it as a “great plague,” widely spread.27 Creon acquaints the reader or spectator with the contagious plague, the oppressive mood reigning in the city, and the exceedingly high number of casualties; he mentions that the queen is exhausted by her visits to the hospitals. The weather is hot and the foul smell of the dead bodies pollutes the air. Even the light seems bleak, “the light of a plague.”28 As we remember, Oedipus himself now looks old and worn out. The differences between the present scourge and that of the Sphinx are significant and provide a clue to the nature of this plague. Unlike the

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devastation seventeen years earlier, the cause of the present epidemic appears to be undetectable. People die now in great numbers, the same as during the earlier disaster, when one could find the dead bodies of the young men “almost everywhere.”29 This time, the victims come from all age groups, gender, and appearance. In addition, instead of the political, social, and economic mayhem of the past, the city now enjoys peace, order, and prosperity. In the absence of a visible source of the epidemic, the plague is attributed by the Thebans to the sins of a hidden offender, an outsider perhaps; this man’s atonement for his sins would presumably cure the community of the plague. In her essay on AIDS, another epidemic, Susan Sontag comments: “It is usually epidemics that are thought of as plagues. And these mass incidences of illness are understood as inflicted, not just endured,” she affirms. “Considering illness as a punishment is the oldest idea of what causes illness. . . . Diseases, insofar as they acquired meaning, were collective calamities, and judgments on a community.”30 Similarly, Barbara Leavy claims that “Plague, rather than the seemingly neutral epidemic, is traditionally associated with such ideas as sin and God’s judgment on individuals and whole peoples.”31 As with Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, there is no indication in The Infernal Machine that Oedipus’ self-blinding and exile puts indeed an end to the plague. In past narratives, the plague has sometimes been associated with the bubonic plague and sometimes interpreted as a metaphor for some kind of calamity.32 The temptation to consider it a metaphor is today as strong as ever. Thus, for Colin Jones, “the plague text offers a dystopic vision of the individual, the community of saints, and the collectivity of citizens, all in their different ways profoundly violated.” As Jones argues, the power of the plague as a metaphor consists in its simultaneous association of three discourses, medical, religious, and political, that “can feed on, can infect, each other.”33 Similarly, René Girard regards plague in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos as “a transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence that spreads, literally, like the plague.”34 Finally, Frederick Ahl suggests that the plague is a metaphor for tyranny.35 These readings of the plague cannot however apply to the plague in The Infernal Machine, for Oedipus’ seventeen years of reign are depicted as prosperous and Oedipus, tyrant or not, is loved by his people.36 No political or social turmoil is mentioned nor alluded to, but, like in past narratives, the plague is a metaphor for a spreading evil. One cannot but agree with Sander Gilman when he affirms that “it is the culturally determined reading of any text or image in its historical (and, indeed, national) context which determines its particular meaning; and one basic aspect of

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this culturally determined reading of a text is the image of disease which dominates any given culture.”37 Given the specific connotations of the term “monster” as a bearer of nonnormative sexuality in its various manifestations and its recurrent use in Cocteau’s play, the plague can be construed as a metaphor for nonnormative sexual mores. It is the union of Oedipus with a much older woman or Jocasta’s with a much younger man that displays his nonnormative sexuality, the iniquity of which resides in its incestuous connotations. This is why the drunkard who sings under Jocasta’s window scolds and mocks her for taking a “much too young husband.”38 Compared to an infectious disease, this conduct is not limited to its perpetrator but spreads on and on, with no distinction of class or gender, affects behavioral norms, and threatens the survival of the community. Nonnormative sexual mores are encouraged by the pattern set by Oedipus, the King. From the appearance of incest to incest itself, from connotation to performativity, the slippage is smooth. Though his sexuality is nonnormative according to the decrees of society and religion, Oedipus does not consider that he is a monster until the moment when the real identity of the persons involved in his past actions is established. These acts, the killing of a man and sexual relations with an older partner of the opposite sex, were already blamable by law and social conventions. Now, they are revealed as parricide and incest, committed by a monster. Oedipus’ still metaphorical monstrosity is informed by his complacency, self-centeredness, vanity and violence, and is at the source of his actions. He is guilty of ignoring ominous signs and thrusting aside whatever hindered the achievement of his desire. Oedipus should have understood that it was Jocasta who had pierced her baby’s feet and exposed it to the wild beasts in the mountains, as nothing else would explain the presence of the cradle in her bedroom for nineteen years. He should have recognized that he was the baby with the pierced feet and Jocasta the baby’s mother. He should have listened to the warning signs in his nightmare before the consummation of the incest. He should have listened to the disastrous premonitions that Tiresias warned him of, not because of Laius’ killing (of which Tiresias was aware at that time) but because of his “outrageous” and “unclassifiable” marriage, the marriage between a youth and a much older woman.39 He should have seized the meaning of his temporary burning blindness. And he should have not dismissed the warning sent by the Sphinx in the shape of the belt and its offer of escape. In this context, the belt takes on new and ambiguous significations. On one hand, the belt signals the call of socially normative sexuality, the conventional union of a man with a woman younger than himself. On the other hand, the belt signals the appeal of a creature of nonnormative

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sexuality, variously approached as a vampire, a lamia, a heterosexual woman, a man, and a hybrid between the human and. the beast. Oedipus rejects alternative options to his union with Jocasta and rejects the sexuality, fluid or not, of his double and equal, the Sphinx. Like the Sphinx, Oedipus is shapeshifting, assuming the role imposed by circumstances: one day a Hercules, the next day a dutiful king. A false defeater of the Sphinx but winner of the royal throne and queen, he now acts the role, as expected. While his self-image as a monster emerges only after he has become aware of the two taboos he infringed, monstrosity—both sexual and moral—is an integral part of Oedipus’ mental makeup. Oedipus’ monstrosity is now visually suggested by his looks: in the fourth and last act of the play (devoted to the uncovering of the monster), he seems prematurely old for his age (while he is only thirty-six). In fact, Cocteau borrows in this instance Oscar Wilde’s stratagem, used in The Portrait of Dorian Gray that Cocteau had adapted for the stage in 1909, but upturns it. Unlike Dorian, whose young and innocentlooking appearance did not show the stamp of time and depravity, Oedipus bears now on his body the mark of his sins. His past and present actions exposed and designated as crimes, he is once again marked as a man apart, an “other.” The love of his people had turned him from an outsider to an insider. Now that he proves to be an insider by birth, he becomes by a sleight of hand a social outcast and regains the status of the outsider. Oedipus is now doubly maimed, scarred by his mother at birth and blinded now by his own hand. His self-maiming is an act against nature, demanded neither by religious nor by human justice; as such, it is a further deviation from behavioral norms. For the community to which he belongs and now expels him, Oedipus’ selfinflicted blindness becomes the outward sign of his moral impairment. He literally becomes an awe-inspiring figure, a monster in which such binaries as insider/outsider and guilty/innocent are appropriately effaced. Long before Girard in his Violence and the Sacred, it was Cocteau who considered the monster as the nucleus of the Oedipus myth.40

VISION Vision and blindness, physiological and metaphorical, are recurrent motifs in Cocteau’s works as in The Infernal Machine, linked as they are to the concept of reality, physiological perception of appearance, and the psychobiological phenomenon of hallucination. Tiresias is blind but he possesses the farsightedness of a shrewd politician. Jocasta reproaches him for his intelligence and skepticism that prevent the possibility of any miracle. Cocteau’s Tiresias sees behind appearances but, unlike the mythical

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figure, he is unable to apprehend the supernatural and, like Jocasta, he is unable to see Laius’ ghost. Literally and metaphorically, he is in the dark. Oedipus will metaphorically see the light only when he will be blind. The conventional symbolism of light and darkness serves Cocteau to underline the spiritual journey of Oedipus from darkness to light, from partial to fuller self-knowledge. Thus, Act I of The Infernal Machine (“The Ghost”) unfolds at night, as does Act II (“The Encounter of Oedipus and the Sphinx”) and Act III (“The Wedding Night”). It is in Act III that Cocteau, in a masterful scene, blurs the boundaries between dream states and reality and brings alive a fluid state of mind which, as Susan Rubin Suleiman showed, was at the center of the surrealists’ attention.41 While the surrealists found in this in-between state of mind the kernel of artistic creativity, Cocteau relates to it those intimations of truth that are conveyed by the subconscious and that rarely attain the conscious mind. During the darkness, their hallucinations provide Jocasta and Oedipus short glimpses into the domain of light and truth, mixing bits of past experiences into their physically exhausted present. These hallucinations have a strong emotional impact on the reader or spectator not only by their emotional contents but also because Cocteau exploits the specificity of the stage, the lighting effects and the dark-colored settings of the royal bedroom. The last act, Act IV, symbolically unfolds in daylight. Oedipus’s self-blinding in The Infernal Machine is presented as a premonition come true. It is during his encounter with Tiresias on the wedding night that he experiences for the first time, if only for a very brief moment, a loss of vision. The loss of vision comes shortly after his attempt to strangle the priest: OEDIPUS :

. . . Oh! Oh! But God! Here . . . here . . . in his blind eyes, I did not know it was possible. TIRESIAS : Let me go! Beast! OEDIPUS : The future! My future, like in a crystal ball!

He is soon afflicted with a temporary, painful blindness. TIRESIAS :

You wanted to read by force into my sick eyes what I myself have not yet figured out and you are punished. . . . No doubt, you approached a point that the gods want to keep in the dark, or perhaps they punish your impudence.42

This uncanny bout of blindness is self-inflicted, like Oedipus’s later blindness, and marks one more incident in what proves to be a pattern in Oedipus mental makeup. This behavioral pattern was expounded during

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Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx, in Act II. Oedipus has just told the Girl in White about the accidental killing of the old man at the crossroads and he adds: OEDIPUS :

Well, it was not my fault and I don’t think about it anymore. It is important that I jump over the fences, that I wear blinkers, that I do not get emotional. My star comes first.43

Showing no sympathy for his victim, he compares himself to a racing horse that has to win at any cost. He deliberately chooses to repress all emotional involvement that may be an obstacle on his way to glory. At the same time, he represses all intuitive understanding he may possess, as we have seen in the scene where he first ran into the Girl in White. It is therefore not surprising that later on, in the royal bedroom, Oedipus perceives in the mirror—the Coctelian gate to the unknown—only the reflection of his physical appearance and nothing beyond. At the performance in 1934, Bérard recognized this limitation of the hero, and gave the mirror’s frame the shape of a human figure.44 If Oedipus deliberately decides to ignore whatever hampers his ambition, he also repeatedly and unwittingly confuses appearance with reality, having faith only in his sensorial perception: he believes what he hears and what he sees. He does not see beyond appearances nor does he try to. He mistakes his adoptive parents for his natural parents, Laius for a total stranger, the Sphinx for “a white [pure] girl,” the Sphinx’s offering—the solution to the riddle—for his own shrewdness in obtaining it, and his real mother for a stranger.45 According to Leadbeater, “it is . . . the irresponsible connection between sight and knowledge which occasions the multitude of double entendres in both Sophocles and Cocteau.”46 Ironically, Oedipus’ metaphorical blinkers do not protect him from the unsuspected enemy, his own self. It is only after his background has been revealed and his crimes exposed that Oedipus suddenly has a glimpse into his past. Self-blinded, he tells Tiresias: OEDIPUS :

. . . Eighteen years ago, I saw in your eyes that I would become blind and I did not know how to understand it.47

Blinded, Oedipus has presumably gained insight but it is unclear whether he has become aware of his past failings and failures and has now acquired self-knowledge. The man whom the Sphinx considered

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unable to solve the riddle (and therefore offered him the solution), the man who could not comprehend on his wedding night that his scarred feet are those of the lost baby in Jocasta’s story, this man had again to be offered the solution to a riddle, the riddle of his own origins. The gods, so tells him now the old shepherd, forgive his parricide and incest. Still, it is the gods who sent the plague to Thebes. Even if they now forgive the sinner, the ruler who pledged to banish the monster from the city cannot absolve him. Bound to Thebes by his exemplary high office as well as by his pledge, Oedipus banishes himself. Gone is the throne, gone are the maternal arms of his spouse, and gone is the love of his people. He leaves Thebes, led by his small daughter Antigone in whose body he alone perceives the ghost of his caring mother, Jocasta. If indeed it is the gaze that constructs sexuality, then Oedipus, blind as he is now to Antigone’s sexuality, will be unable to reiterate his crime, incest. Much more so that it is Jocasta’s ghost that inhabits now their daughter’s body. Oedipus, the sexual monster, has been castrated.48

NONMONSTERS AND THE IN-BETWEEN The characters of The Infernal Machine can be divided into three dynamically overlapping groups, defined by their association with sexual and moral ethics. At one end, there is the monsters group—Jocasta, Tiresias, Laius, Sphinx, Anubis, the Matron, and Oedipus, in order of appearance. At the other end, there is the group of the “simple at heart.” To this group belong the two soldiers on the city ramparts, the Little Boy and his sister, the Little Girl (a mute character who falls asleep soon after she enters), and little Antigone. These characters, all very young, can perceive the beyond: the two soldiers see and converse with Laius’ ghost, the Little Boy recognizes the Sphinx in the Girl in White, and Antigone (though unaware) will be inhabited by her mother’s ghost. Cocteau attributes to children a power of vision that mature people have lost: “Those simple at heart see the fairies more easily than the others, because they do not oppose to the marvelous the resistance of the dogmatic cranks,” he wrote in his Preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower) (1921).49 Lydia Crowson offers a Rousseauistic explanation to Cocteau’s concept of childhood. “Since [the child] is not limited by ‘normal’ categories of perception or of ‘the real,’ ” she writes, “[he] is sensitive to aspects of life hidden to the adults. Rather than being isolated

74 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre from nature, then, he forms an integral part of it, and his relationship with the world is unmediated . . . . Yet, as the child grows older, his purity is contaminated by society. He conforms to its explanations of the world, he begins to see reality only as his civilization sees it, he surrenders his ability to perceive the universe in all its magic.”50 The “simple at heart” are the nonmonsters, those who still preserve their innocence, like the young children. The Young Soldier belonged to this group, together with his comrade, but once he was brought to the palace he changed. At the palace and asleep at his duty, the Young Soldier offers a false image of innocence not only because his look-alike—Oedipus—is portrayed as a monster and a scourge, but also and mainly because he forfeits his duty and endangers the royal couple. Brought to the palace by Jocasta, the Young Soldier becomes, in Crowson’s words, contaminated. He has left one group to join the other. The third group, the intermediate between the monsters and the nonmonsters, is that of the ordinary man, eager to satisfy his desires and ambition, keen on his physical survival, and potentially ready to join the monsters, for the “plague” is contagious. To this group belong the Officer, the Corinthian messenger, Laius’ shepherd, and Creon. They do not possess the insight of the pure of heart, nor are they aware of their deficiencies and their affinity with the monsters. While the ranks of the in-between grow thinner, as many join the monsters and the old perish, they are also constantly replenished. Day by day new recruits swell these ranks, as the pure of heart grow older, become more knowledgeable in matters of sex, and lose their power of vision. Cocteau portrays a society in constant flux, where the borders between the monsters, the nonmonsters and those in-between are constantly shifting, where the concept of monster is fluid. The Infernal Machine offers a complex vision of society where sexuality, like the protean Sphinx, is multifaceted, where the concept of monster has no stable referent, and where everyone, at some stage in his or her life, is or can become a monster. If monsters are differentiated by their nonnormative sexuality, Cocteau demonstrates that each man, at one stage in his life, is or can be subject to different sexual impulses. If so, nonnormative sexuality should not be considered a crime. It is not unconventional sexual orientation but the infringement, conscious or not, of age-old taboos like parricide and incest that makes a crime punishable by law. Oedipus’ sins stretch beyond the crimes committed with no premeditation. They lay as much in his partial self-knowledge—he recognizes that he is vindictive and has a quick temper—as in his self-indulgence and lack of self-control.51 Cocteau constructs his play on a deterministic stance but

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contrary to the traditional approach that designates an external power—fate, God, gods, hazard—he suggest an internal factor that puts in motion the “infernal machine,” the time bomb that may apparently lead man or woman to his or her destruction but lead in fact to self-knowledge. This factor is no other than the person himself or herself. Critics, and Neal Oxenhandler among them, maintain that the theme of the play is the conflict between free will and fatality. However, according to Cocteau, fatality as an existential concept is engendered and fueled by one’s identity, by the interplay of those drives—instinctual, affective, intellectual, sexual, and other—that shape one’s uniqueness as a human being in a society that hastens only too often to use binary categories, expel the nonconformist, and turn him into an outsider, a monster.

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5. Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems Is art reasonable? If it is, then theatre is only a lie that consists in letting us believe that we are what we are not. But if art is unreasonable, then it [theatre] ceases to cheat the world. It becomes a new, mysterious and marvelous form of truth. —Cocteau, L’Impromptu du Palais Royal (The Impromptu of Palais Royal) (1962)1

V

arious strategies are used by Cocteau in The Infernal Machine to convey his reading of the Oedipus myth and bring out, in an encoded form, its relevance for modern audiences. The monster, a figure emblematic of the fantastic, serves as a paradigm that informs not only Cocteau’s argument but also the whole play as a poetic work. The play mixes the comic with the tragic and the pathetic, intertextuality with camp, parody with satire and pastiche, and poetry with slang and clichés. In addition, the specificity of the theatre as an artistic medium is masterfully put to use, with movement (acting), forms, volumes, and colors (settings, lighting, props, and costumes) serving not only as semiotic signs to illustrate or supplement the written text but also to direct the reader’s or the spectator’s response. The play amuses, stirs emotions, throws a new light on the ancient myth, and raises haunting questions about traditionally sacred values. The uniqueness of Cocteau’s treatment of the Oedipus myth in The Infernal Machine consists in its blending an amused perspective on human affairs with a deeply affecting existential despair. The play is a tragedy clad in comic attire. Thematically, the first three acts uncover a series of lost opportunities that depict a seemingly inevitable march toward a catastrophe. The fourth act unfolds the catastrophe, presenting it as a tragic ending that could have been avoided. The tragic stance emerges when Oedipus, convinced

78 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre of exerting free will, yields to a predictable course of action dictated not by reason but by desire. Dramatically, each of the first three acts, except the last, is centered on the interplay between two characters, an interplay designed to delineate the dominant features of the mythological figures. In Act I, the interaction between Tiresias and Jocasta, as between Jocasta and the Young Soldier, provides a detailed and unexpected portrayal of Jocasta the queen. In Act II, the interaction between the Sphinx and Oedipus offers an unconventional portrait of Oedipus (and of the Sphinx, his double) before he encounters Jocasta. In Act III, the interaction between Oedipus and Jocasta reveals how the two figures act and respond when their desires are put to the test; the interaction between Oedipus and Tiresias complements the portrayal of Oedipus. Structurally, Act IV reflects its theme, the collapse of Oedipus’ edifice, by a series of limited interactions that take place between Oedipus and the other characters (Tiresias, Joacsta, the Messenger, Creon, the Shepherd, Antigone, and Jocasta’s ghost). This strategy enhances Cocteau’s rhetorical stance and the various stratagems employed for its implementation define, construct, and control the reader or spectator’s response even before Act IV, the last act, begins to unfold.

THE UNSEEN VOICE In the “Programme” to the play’s performance in 1934, Cocteau explained the necessity of providing the audience with indispensable information before the play begins and before each of its acts unfolds. The Prologue spoken by the Voice would ensure that significance is fully comprehended and shared by all. But Cocteau uses the unseen Voice for additional purposes as well. As a framing device, the Voice’s intervention before each new act endows the whole performance with a rhythm of its own, bursting forth and vanishing with the regularity of a clock. The Voice unmistakably precedes an event that starts innocuously but eventually proves to be disastrous and this is why the intervention of the Voice does not fail to engender suspense, anxiety and fear, thereby directing audience response. The Voice also functions as a “generative narrator,” a term coined by Brian Richardson in his study of postmodern drama; as such, it resides, as Richardson shows, in a distinct ontological level from that occupied by the characters.2 Unseen and located in an ahistoric time and place, the Voice provides an ironic material link between the past and the present and between the mythical times and the audience’s present, while it compels the

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 79 audience to perceive the theatrical event as a mediated and spatio/temporally encapsulated event. Thus, apparently in contradiction to its affective impact on the audience, the Voice serves also as a distantiating stratagem. However, the pattern established by the recurrence of the Voice at the beginning of each act, engenders also a feeling of anticipation that counters any distantiation. It is significant that the playwright, after having initiated a certain state of feeling in his audience, deflates or counters it with the help of distantiation techniques soon after it sets in. The constant fluctuation between different and often diverging states of feeling triggers a reevaluation of formerly accepted notions. The emotional pattern set by the use of the Voice as by the clichés, pastiche, camp, and parody on one hand, and the sensorial stimuli provided by the sets, props, costumes, lighting, movement, and sound on the other hand, create a state of tension and expectation as of recognition and surprise. The marital bedroom, which should be a haven of peace and love, looks like a butcher’s shop or brothel. And Oedipus is not the wisest of men but a ridiculous, pompous, and foolish youth.

CLICHÉS Ancient myth has been often adapted for the modern stage in France during the twentieth century by playwrights such as Giraudoux, Anouilh, Camus, or Sartre. Already Gide, in his Oedipe (1931), used colloquial French to bring the subject matter of myth closer to contemporary audiences.3 Cocteau went much further and used slang, low comedy, and camp. His chatty queen Jocasta and her chief advisor Tiresias have more in common with lower middle-class Parisian shopkeepers rather than with Corneille’s or Racine’s queens and counselors. Nor do Cocteau’s metaphors and parables belong to high culture: borrowed from daily life, they are easily accessible to the wider public. An appropriate example is his now famous metaphor for time and infinity, a metaphor rich in nuances. In Act II, Anubis explains to the Sphinx the difference between two notions of time, that of the gods and that of the humans: ANUBIS,

showing the folds of the Sphinx’s dress: Look at the folds of this cloth. Press them one against the other. And now, if you pierce this bunch with a pin, if you take out the pin, if you flatten the cloth so as to make all old folds disappear, do you think that a country bloke would believe that all

80 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre the countless holes that appear at equal distance come from one single stab of a pin? SPHINX : Certainly not. ANUBIS : The time of the humans is eternity folded over. For us, it does not exist. From his birth to his death, Oedipus’ life lays before my eyes, flat, with its sequence of episodes.4

Piercing a piece of cloth is an ordinary act, pertaining to daily, material life. We use the pin to fasten one or several pieces of cloth. Drawn into a regularly folded cloth, the one-time piercing creates a series of parallel holes in what seems to be an endless row when the cloth is flattened. The way this parable is construed instructs us as to the secret of Cocteau’s artistic creation. Like his parable, Cocteau’s art looks at first glance like simplicity incarnated; however, at close scrutiny, it reveals itself as complex and multilayered. The ordinary, the commonplace, and the visible lead to the invisible and open up the imaginary by a decontextualization strategy. The representation of a concept—by means of a character, an action, a linguistic sign (a word), a form in space, a color, and a sound—may look familiar at first but is found later on to stand in clear contrast to its context. By decontextualization, displacement, or bizarre juxtaposition, the representation generates not only amazement but also reflection. Like camp, this is distantiation at its best, an epistemological tool. By the time he wrote The Infernal Machine, Cocteau was a consummate playwright, in full control of his art and confident of its value and efficiency. “The Poet,” he wrote in his Preface to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, “has to take objects and feelings out of their veils and mists, show them suddenly so quickly and so naked that man barely recognizes them. They will then strike him by their youth, as if they had never become officially old.” And he explained: This is the case of the clichés, old as they are, powerful and universally accepted like the masterpieces, but whose beauty and originality do not astonish us anymore because they are worn out. . . . In our production [The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower], I rehabilitate the cliché. It is to me to present it in such a manner that it recaptures its freshness.5

In The Professional Secret (1922), he went deeper into this issue: This is the role of poetry. It uncovers, in the full sense of the term. It shows in their nakedness and under a refreshing light all the astonishing things that surround us and which our senses perceive automatically. . . . Place a cliché,

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 81 clean it up, rub it, highlight it so that it strikes by its youth and with the same freshness, with the same burst of vigor that it originally had, and then you will have achieved a poet’s work. Anything else is of trifling importance.6

In his later writings, published after The Infernal Machine, Cocteau restated his concept of the poet’s role, in theatre as in any other artistic medium.7 While he used the commonplace, the cliché, and the ordinary, because they were dependable communication vehicles, he also decontextualized them, turning them into epistemological tools.8 As Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen showed, this specific use of the cliché is a carefully engineered discursive strategy.9 The use of monster as a trope underwent a similar treatment in the poet’s hands. The term “monster” was used as a commonplace qualifier in Parisian jargon in the 1920s and 1930s. So, for example, Cocteau’s mother used it to depict Diaghilev in 1920, in her letter to Valentine Hugo, one of Cocteau’s close friends, and Cocteau himself used it to describe the obese Princess Violette Murat.10 However, within the dialectics of the Infernal Machine, Cocteau uses the banalized term, the cliché, and by personifying it, he turns the cliché into a symbolical beacon that calls attention not only to a mythical past but also to contemporary society and its mores. Furthermore, it is its uncommon personification that prevents the cliché “monster” from being perceived as such. Different but still the same, old connotations blend now with newer ones, while the commonplace colloquial origin of the term “monster” adds to its present efficacy.11 Hand in hand with the personification of the monster, the cliché, Cocteau proceeds to its banalization by proliferation: there are many monsters in The Infernal Machine. The banalization of the monster is, in its turn, mirrored by the banalization of the social and ethical mores depicted, that is, by the blurring of the borders between the high and the low (the queen brings the commoner to her palace), and the ethical and the nonethical (like Oedipus’ false report on his slaying of the Sphinx). The blurring of the borders and the negation of binaries within the narrative are mirrored in their turn by the reader’s or the spectator’s response. This response has been gradually shaped by subtly evoked emotions that compel the reader and spectator to react along the lines intended by the playwright. Thus, the illusion created by the play or performance is double: in addition to the illusion created by the theatrical make-believe during the act of reading or watching the performance, the reader or spectator (wrongly) believes now that the conclusions he or she reached are the product of his or her own deliberations, of his or her free will.

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PASTICHE The Infernal Machine begins with a pastiche of Hamlet’s first scene. The city ramparts, the two soldiers, and the late king’s ghost are all there, with a slight but decisive difference. The solemn, awe-inspiring and fearsome Shakespearean scene has given place to a comic one, where the two soldiers exchange views and report rumors about the monster, the Sphinx, while they excitingly construct its puzzling sexuality. Nor is their report to their Officer about Laius’ ghost lacking in comic elements. Slang, colloquialisms, invectives, and popular speech replace the loftier language of traditional tragedy. This is how the two soldiers tell their Officer about the difficulties encountered by the Ghost on his way back to the dead at sunrise: SOLDIER :

. . . And there he was, asking us to insult him, because this is what he told us, that insulting the ghosts was a sure means to make them go. But the fact is that we did not dare. The more he was telling us “Come, come, young men, call me names! Yell, don’t be afraid!” the more we went dummy. . . . But the king was such a nice king, poor king Laius, that bad language could not get out of our mouth. And he was pushing us, and we, we were mumbling: “Go away! Go away, you old cow!” At the end, we threw flowers at him. . . . “Go away!! Take off, you! You head of . . . You sort of . . . ” Poor ghost! He was hung up there between life and death, and he was kicking the bucket, out of fear of the cocks and the sun.

The comic sequence is based on a systematic reversal of attitudes, values, and social conventions as well as on a reversal of dramatic conventions. The ghost of the tragically killed king encounters obstacles that can be surmounted not by prayer but by foul language; his faithful emissaries are common people, inimical to all establishments; and low comedy replaces the loftiness of tragedy. The tone is still irreverent when the Soldier draws the portrait of the queen they had summoned. She is “kind,” but— SOLDIER :

. . . When all’s said and done, they [the people] don’t like her; they find her a little . . . He knocks his head. They say she’s eccentric and has a foreign accent, and that she’s under Tiresias’ sway. This Tiresias recommends to the Queen all that can harm her. Do this, do that. She tells

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 83 him her dreams, she asks him what foot she should put out first, the right or the left. And he leads her by the nose and sucks up to her brother with whom he plots against the sister . . .12

The queen seems to be the exemplar of inefficient royalty, the living counterpart of Laius’ ghost. The audience is thus prepared to see Jocasta as an innocent victim, weak in her head, and totally dependent on Tiresias. However, the reversal strategy continues to a dramatic effect. Jocasta’s voice is heard offstage. “She speaks with a strong accent: this international accent of royalties,” indicates the playwright in his stage direction. This special and “other” accent is enough to focus attention on Jocasta even before she enters the stage.13 What is more, it is not a submissive woman who talks to Tiresias but one who knows her rank and takes advantage of it, while Tiresias is on the defensive: JOCASTA’S VOICE :

Stairs again! I hate stairs. Why all these stairs? One cannot see anything! Where are we? TIRESIAS’ VOICE : But Madam, you know what I think of this escapade, and it is not I who . . . JOCASTA’S VOICE : Shut up, Zizi. Whenever you open your mouth, it is only to say something stupid. This is not the right moment for lecturing. TIRESIAS’ VOICE : You should have taken another guide. I am almost blind.

Jocasta is exasperated, petulant and sarcastic: JOCASTA’S VOICE :

To what purpose does it serve being a seer, I ask! you don’t even know where the stairs are. I am going to break my leg! It will be your fault, Zizi, your fault, like always.14

Tiresias, Jocasta’s “Zizi”—the meaning of the nickname has been discussed before—is offended and the kind-hearted Jocasta hastens to soothe him. When the two finally emerge on stage, her entrance is remarkably dramatic. She had mounted the last stairs to the ramparts moving backward (afraid as she was of looking at the stairs), so she enters with her back to the audience. In a swift sequence of silent acting, she turns to face the audience and moves to the left when Tiresias steps on the edge of her long scarf. She cries out. Visually and audially, the queen, with her extravagant but imposing presence, has taken possession of the stage. With Jocasta, camp is introduced on stage and will irreversibly

84 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre color the whole play, as it will inform the audience response to this mythological character.

CAMP “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-theyare-not,” affirms Susan Sontag.15 “Camp,” she observes, “[is] the sensibility of failed seriousness, the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary ‘avant-garde’ art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.”16 And she notes: “The personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are Camp, but not those of André Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner.”17 Since Sontag’s seminal essay on camp, the term has been not only further explored and celebrated in art and literary criticism, but it has also become the hallmark of a cultural phenomenon linked both to postmodernism and gay sensibility as well as to Marxism.18 The etymology of the term is unsure, possibly originating in France and finally landing in England, where it was happily adopted by slang and popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The French camper (to pose) implicates duplicity and the use of artifice in order to act and look different.19 Today, camp has come to denote an ironic stance that leaves out ethical assessment; camp is the veiled expression of a hitherto hidden truth, an amused and detached posture that commands a reassessment of age-old values. Camp is a philosophical attitude, an existential mode, and a style. According to Ian Lucas, “What has been misread in camp is its subversiveness, its use of subterfuge. . . . Camp achieves this undermining [of authority] through its penchant for the incredible, fantastic or fabulous. . . . Camp represents a gray area which can be mistaken for both truth and deception, but is ultimately not aligned to either. Camp’s only true allegiance is to mischief.”20 Jocasta hovers between royal haughtiness and abject despondency, as when she tells Tiresias about her haunting nightmare. She absurdly wears the outward signs of her position—her jewels—when she goes to meet at night the ghost of her murdered husband. She wears her much too long scarf, an attribute of her femininity, although it hinders her free movement and may possibly cause her injury. She calls Tiresias by his nickname in public, where she also ostentatiously flaunts her most secret dreams. She

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 85 responds to people around her in a flashy manner, exaggerating her emotions. She displays her sexuality regardless of her rank and social conventions, as she exhibits her desire by blatantly feeling in public the muscled arm and thigh of the “very handsome” Young Soldier. She is earthy, noisy, and probing: JOCASTA,

to Tiresias: I will immediately see whether he saw Laius. To the Young Soldier: How was he speaking? YOUNG SOLDIER : He was speaking quickly and a lot, Majesty, a lot, and he was getting confused and could not say what he wanted. JOCASTA : It’s him! Poor darling! But why on these ramparts? It stinks here. YOUNG SOLDIER : It’s just because of it, Majesty. The ghost was saying that it is because of the swamps and the stench that he could appear.

And the queen comments in her royal, haughty voice with the foreign accent: JOCASTA :

How interesting! Tiresias, you will never learn that with your chickens! And what was he saying?21

Intertextuality is at work. The educated audience is reminded of another stench, of something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark—a foul murder, among other things—and of the parodied dramatic source, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But unlike Hamlet, Jocasta cannot apprehend the invisible. Instead of the ghost of her murdered husband, she discovers an attractive young male. Jocasta intrigues, provokes, and scandalizes the audience. She shares with the mythological Jocasta her name and her fate, and with modern woman her sexual freedom and offers a harsh critique of the high-class socialite. Not only her foreign accent but also her looks have marked her as an “other.” On the wedding night, she tells Oedipus: JOCASTA :

One has to be truthful, little hero. They detest me. My clothes annoy them, my accent annoys them, my black eyeliner annoys them, my red lipstick annoys them, my liveliness annoys them.22

Although she is aware of the irritating effect her appearance has on her subjects, she does nothing to change it. On the contrary, she seems to cultivate it. In this respect, it is interesting to notice the similarity between Cocteau’s Jocasta and Tennessee Williams’ Blanche in A Streetcar Named

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Desire. As John M. Clum has correctly observed, Blanche “is sane as long as she is acting.” Elucidating this point, he writes: “Blanche chooses sanity, which means, for the homosexual, choosing camp, a theatricality that is protective covering and a defensive stance toward the hostile, straight world.”23 Jocasta, too, has chosen theatricality in order to survive. Her clothes, her makeup and her demeanor are part of her act, an act she puts on for the sake of her audience, be it formed of many or of one, as now in her bedroom. She is grotesque, a caricature, she is camp. Camp stands in overt contradiction to the solemn and gloomy mood introduced by the Prologue to Act I, spoken by the unseen Voice. At the first production, the Voice was played by Cocteau and carried the poet’s authority: Behold, spectator, well winded up so that its spring will unload slowly all along one human life, one of the most perfect machines built by the infernal gods for the mathematical annihilation of a mortal.24

The sobering effect of this speech is soon obliterated by the pastiche that serves as a fitful introduction to camp, and by camp itself. This deflating technique is not limited to Act I alone. The interplay between the two modes, the tragic displayed by the introductory Voice and the camp imbedded in the various sequences of each act, is used all through the first three acts of The Infernal Machine. In Act IV, Cocteau follows closely Sophocles, adopts a tragic mode, and ends the play by a self-reflexive and anticlimactic sequence. Tiresias tells Creon: TIRESIAS :

They [Oedipus and Antigone] do not belong to you anymore; they are not in your power anymore. CREON : And to whom do they belong now? TIRESIAS : To the people, to the poets, to the pure of heart.25

Introduced by the poet’s Voice at the beginning of the play, Oedipus is now integrated where he belongs, in the poet’s work. The circle is closed. The poet took his hero on a long journey and, highlighting him and his kin with the tools of the trade such as camp and parody, he tried to offer to the gaze not mythical heroes but people made of flesh and blood.

PARODY In her study of parody, Margaret A. Rose highlights the evolution of the notion during the ages and brings out the newer connotations it

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 87 acquired by the end of the twentieth century. As she points out, comic representation has always been essential to parody but for the past few decades parody has not been anymore restricted to a stylistic mode.26 The notion of parody has come to signify a philosophical stance, an ironic distantiation from all subject matter that results in a stylistically comic rendering or reshaping, and an ironic self-reflexive distantiation. A favored rhetorical stance during the past thirty years, the more recent use of parody has fashioned its definition, practice, and purpose. In addition, the stratagems it employs often supersede it in nomenclature, so much so that in scholarly criticism pastiche has become a synonym of parody and parody a quasi synonym of postmodernism.27 Linda Hutcheon, for example, noted in 1991 that “parody—often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or simply intertextuality—is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders.”28 Parody was a recurrent stratagem in most of Cocteau’s works for the stage, such as The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, Orpheus, The Infernal Machine, or The Knights of the Round Table. The merit of these works lies in Cocteau’s explicit refusal to fulfill any expectation of closure, a trait that marks postmodernist works. Whether this aspect alone of his work warrants him the privilege to be counted among the forerunners of postmodernism, it remains to be seen. Marjorie Perloff has already judiciously dwelt on the fading out of the term “postmodernism” by the beginning of the twenty-first century after the “tired dichotomy” between modernism and postmodernism in literary studies.29 Parody served Cocteau as a rhetorical stance, similar to its use since the 1970s. In The Infernal Machine, parody is used in Act I for the portrayal of Jocasta, as seen, and in Act II for that of Oedipus. In the last sequence of Act II, the young contender to the throne and “slayer” of the Sphinx hesitates before choosing the most impressive posture for presenting himself before the Thebans. Costume and posture are the outward signs of the role and of the public image that he has chosen for himself. Oedipus’ posture, which mimics mythical Hercules, undermines the tragic undertone introduced by the Sphinx’s chant and shapes the audience response to the character. The effect of Cocteau’s use of parody in shaping audience response is substantiated by Oedipus’ role-playing in Act III, where the audience meets again the histrionic Oedipus. Still clad in his coronation robe, Oedipus is tired and hardly capable of staying awake. The earlier parodical sequence casts its shadow on the present one, raising the doubt about Oedipus’ authenticity in whatever he says or does. When Oedipus tells Jocasta the story of his victory over the Sphinx, this doubt is quickly dispelled: the hero

88 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre is a liar. The earlier parody was a rhetorical stratagem that highlighted one of Oedipus’ dominant traits, that is, the mask that he constantly wears in order to play the part he has chosen to cast himself in. The determination to hide the ugly truth and to put on a mask is common to both Jocasta and Oedipus. Jocasta will not openly recognize Oedipus as her son, nor will Oedipus recognize his false victory over the Sphinx. Unknowingly to them, theirs is a union of complicity, based on shameful secrets. Parody and camp have assisted the playwright to elucidate their bond.

FORMS, VOLUMES, COLORS, AND MOVEMENT An exemplar of the poetry of the theatre that Cocteau aimed at is Act III, “The Wedding Night.” Settings, lighting, and props, as well as the costumes, confine Oedipus and Jocasta in an enclosed space within the larger stage and, in concert with movement and the spoken text, create an oppressive mood, full of suspense and fear. The audience hovers during all Act III between feelings of hope, incertitude, and despair, ignoring till the last moment whether incest will indeed be committed in Cocteau’s version of the myth. The red bedchamber is Jocasta’s private territory and reflects her personality and her obsessions. Oedipus is apparently the outsider who has conquered it but, in fact, he has inhabited this space since his birth, as the cradle shows. The bedchamber is placed on a raised platform and draped in red, “a small butcher’s shop in the middle of the city buildings.” The white furs thrown on the bed heighten the redness of the room.30 For the reader, the simile used for this room by the stage directions in the written text, “a butcher’s shop,” brings along specific connotations. The butcher’s shop is a place dominated by the blood-colored bodies of the slaughtered innocent beasts whose chunks are on display, as was the custom in such shops till 1960s and still is in some parts of the world. For the spectator, on the other hand, the red bedchamber conjures up images of a brothel. This is where the still virgin Oedipus will commit incest with the not-so-innocent Jocasta. The clash between innocence and lust is echoed by the symbolic use of colors on the bed, the focal point of interest in this act. This is where the incest will be committed. The bed is red, the color of love, blood, and passion, while the color of the furs is white, symbol of innocence. The texture of the bed cover, the furs, indicates a promising sensual embrace. Another soft object is placed on the floor near the bed. This is an animal’s

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 89 hide, a visual allusion to the dead body of the Sphinx, carried by Oedipus into the city not long ago. The animal hide, symbol of the dead monster soon to be revealed as undead, is a silent witness to whatever occurs in this chamber. Thematically, the hide is also linked to the butcher’s shop, where slaughtered animals are on display and for sale. The simile of the shop in the stage directions announces the nature of the relationship between Jocasta and Oedipus, as between Thebes and Oedipus. The locale—settings, props, textures, colors, and lighting— reflects and proclaims that this relationship is mercantile. In this locale, which is at once a butcher’s shop and a brothel, one part sells a commodity for a price and the other buys it. Thebes sold a kingdom and a queen for the Sphinx’s slaughter. Oedipus bought a kingdom and a queen, and the price he paid for it—as far as he knows at this moment on his wedding night— was the mask he would have to wear henceforth, pretending that he killed the Sphinx. Jocasta bought a young male for a mate and the price she paid was, as she discovers on the wedding night, the conscious infringement of a taboo. The deal will prove to be irreversible, sealed as it was by the so-called dead body of the Sphinx, the supernatural. The trap-like nature of the relationship between Jocasta and Oedipus is first brought up by the Voice in the Prologue to Act III. Further on, it is materialized by a stage metaphor, the wire mesh that covers the bedroom window, and voiced by Jocasta in the first lines that open Act III: “I am afraid that this room becomes for you a cage, a prison,” she tells Oedipus.31 Both Oedipus and Jocasta are caught in an inextricable web of their own making. The trap-like nature of the relationship between Oedipus and Thebes will be uncovered in Act IV, “Oedipus King (Seventeen Years Later),” in which Oedipus fulfills his duty as a king and the sinner who brought on the plague is found. Oedipus is the monster entrapped by his own hands. The props in the bedroom are revelatory of Jocasta’s past as well as of that of Oedipus. These objects do not only link the past to the present but they also unveil present choices. The cradle is an irrefutable proof that points to the loss of Jocasta’s own baby, not to that of her linen maid. Oedipus’ belt, hid beneath the animal hide, is an irrefutable proof that his victory over the Sphinx was a hoax. The mobile, man-size mirror in front of which Oedipus again mimics heroic postures, displays his role-playing as it will later display Jocasta’s empty soul. These objects function as visual ironic comments, silent members of an invisible chorus in a dramatic sequence that is constructed, literally and metaphorically, around a central symbolic element, the bed—the bed where Oedipus was fathered.

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The movements of the two characters within the limited space of the elevated platform serving as the royal bedchamber contribute to the mood of suspense and fear. The written text instructs the actors to move and act as if they were in between two states, wakefulness and nightmarish dream. Facing each other after the coronation, Oedipus and Jocasta try to perform their respective parts: she as the older woman and young wife of the younger hero, he as the slayer of the Sphinx and the loving husband. The slow motion of the performers, their makeup and their regal costumes, their drifting between wakefulness and dream in a small and oppressively lighted confined space, place the dramatic event at the uncertain border between dream and reality. Their dream is not a fantasyland but a disturbing aggregate of haunting, decontextualized lived-through moments. The spoken word mediates between the two states of mind and body of Oedipus and Jocasta, between the unconscious (when they lapse into sleep and dream) and the conscious (when they awake and address each other). Oedipus and Jocasta repeatedly shift between the two states, building up the tension and suspense in the audience. Bits of truth are revealed in the dream and are voiced by each dreamer in bits of phrases that may or may not wake the other. The audience expects the unconscious to burst forth and bring some insight to the dreamer as well as to his partner, but no such thing happens. The truth is too dangerous and can unsettle the present, and acting and disguising the truth is apparently their only safe harbor. Their mask is their protective shield, as for any outsider or possessor of a self-endangering truth. Oedipus and Jocasta, too, have appalling secrets to hide: Jocasta will commit incest, and Oedipus is a liar, a fake hero, and a murderer. The comic aspect of Oedipus’ and Jocasta’s role-playing surfaces again when Oedipus strikes not one but many poses in front of the mirror and Jocasta, in front of the same mirror, tries to look at a nonexistent younger self by pulling her cheeks up and making her wrinkles disappear. This is how the third act ends, with Jocasta’s vain attempt to create for herself, for her subjects and for her younger husband, an identity that is ultimately visually translated by an excess of makeup and a noisy, shallow, and pathetic vivacity. The mirror, a hitherto familiar object, turns into her hands into an uncanny tool that, far from serving its purpose, ceases to reflect tangible reality. Nor does it now reflect a newly created one, since from the moment that Jocasta holds it in her hands, she necessarily stops pulling up her cheeks and thereby her older face returns to its shape. Furthermore, according to the stage directions, she moves the mirror’s empty frame to face the public, so that the public becomes the mirror and Jocasta looks at herself while she is visible to all. Once the mirror steady, Jocasta starts again to pull up

Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 91 her cheeks “with full hands.”32 As the audience perceives, she looks not at herself but in the void—an act at once pathetic and horrible. Faced with the aging and deplorable queen, the public is turned into a voyeur and the queen into a grotesque caricature. The empty mirror frame has become a vehicle for multiple meanings as well as a bridge between the public and the stage. For both Oedipus and Jocasta, wearing a mask and playing a part are deliberate, if monstrous, choices. Significantly, the reader or spectator can easily empathize with the Girl in White/the Sphinx, the monster that is not one but many, than with Oedipus and Jocasta. Indeed, both Jocasta’s tearful reaction at Oedipus’ gauche behavior (when he reminds her of her age) and Oedipus’ temporary blindness strip the two performing figures of their masks and stir pity. However, their subsequent repeated and willful failure to acknowledge their past, even when it crudely impinges on the present, prevents the reader or spectator from empathizing with them. Nor does the playwright wish the audience to fall into the trap of cheap sentimentality and so melodramatic sequences are cut short by dramatic sequences that engender distantiation. So, for example, while Oedipus is dreaming about his encounter with the Sphinx and gives voice to whole phrases from her chant, Jocasta is tortured by a drunkard’s offstage jeering song and her pain is heartbreaking to see. Yet, instead of listening to the warning of the song, she chooses to consummate the marriage. She takes the mirror in her hand and, her face visible to the audience, she starts pulling up her cheeks—a laughable situation that does not fail to dispel whatever commiseration the audience might have felt. The comic sequence negates the former tragic one. By the time the fourth and last act opens, the reader’s and the spectator’s responses are already set, having been maneuvered by the playwright’s dramatic strategies. Deprived of their Sophoclean grandeur, Oedipus and Jocasta will remain to the end pathetic monstrous anti-heroes. *

*

*

Cocteau’s audience in 1934 was composed of educated theatergoers who were familiar with the classics, Greek mythology and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and with Freud’s theories as well. This was an audience composed of middle-class intellectuals, high bourgeoisie, aristocrats, and artists, who had anticipated a modern reworking of Sophocles’ play: “As the subject matter was ancient, we expected the dissonance without which a playwright today cannot do, unless he wishes to be blamed of academicism,” commented a theatre critic after the first night.33 The

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highly successful production had only sixty-four performances because the theatre lease expired and could not be renewed. However, although the greater part of the press reviews were excellent and praised Cocteau’s inventiveness and the high quality of the production, he was wrong when he believed that his contemporary audience would understand his strategies, perceive their purpose and meaning, and share his values. The play was and has been construed by Cocteau’s critics either as a Freudian illustration of the Oedipus complex or as a poetic debate on the question of determinism and free will. Whatever did not fit these two interpretive patterns has been construed as the expression of Cocteau’s idiosyncratic anxieties.34 Franco Tonelli’s comments from 1985 on Cocteau’s deconstruction of the Freudian discourse, published in an Italian journal, never reached a wide audience and only recently Cocteau’s objection to psychoanalysis has been rediscovered.35 Furthermore, Cocteau’s critics have not brought to light till now his systematic deconstruction of binary categories such as male/female, human/monster, heterosexual/homosexual, or high and low, and the covert proposition on sexuality imbedded in the literal and metaphorical monsters of The Infernal Machine, the play that is considered as Cocteau’s masterpiece. Cocteau’s dramatic strategies and stratagems were carefully designed to this end.

6. Cocteau and His Monster One has to understand that art, I repeat, does not exist for its own sake, detached, free, liberated of its creator, but that it exists only if it extends a scream, a laugh, a moan. —Cocteau. La Difficulté d’ être1

T

wenty years after The Infernal Machine and its first performance, Cocteau would wonder whether he had been right in saying that The Infernal Machine was a much too rich and important play for its age, an age that was absent-minded and impervious to poetry.2 Yet, he did not comment on his play and its deeper implications. To do so, be it in 1934 or in 1954, would have been too dangerous for a poet who appreciated his status as an international celebrity. Such explication would have entailed a coming out of the closet that in the reigning homophobic atmosphere in France would have given rise not only to ridicule and social rejection but to opprobrium as well. A public—and for Cocteau, publicized—exposure of his undisclosed yet open secret would have been an act of self-immolation, and Cocteau was unable to commit it. He could not do it when he first published The White Paper, he could not do it after The Infernal Machine’s first performance, and he could not do it ever after. As Cocteau’s works repeatedly show, by using the monster as a trope or a concrete supernatural being—be it in his poems, in The Infernal Machine, or in his films Beauty and the Beast and The Testament of Orpheus—he was giving voice to an ordeal that he shared with the many whose sexuality was nonnormative and condemned as such by society. His personal crusade against homophobia began not in 1934 with the performance of The Infernal Machine but in 1928 and bore the stamp of its times, of its author’s self-image as a poet, and of its author’s socioeconomic class. His was a lonely crusade, which borrowed the masks and artifice of poetry and

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was conducted according to the dictates of the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Catholic high bourgeoisie in France. That is, it did not brandish on its flag the name of the already well known Cocteau. Formulated in such terms that would allow social, economic, and artistic survival for its author, the crusade was nevertheless an act of bravura. In 1928, this was a brazen act; in 1934, the act was veiled but still discernible by those who wished to see it.

THE WHITE PAPER In 1928, The White Paper was published anonymously in Paris, in a limited edition. Two years later, it was published again, this time accompanied by Cocteau’s homoerotic color illustrations but not by his name.3 France did not send its homosexuals to prison unless they were a public threat but wore them down. The Catholic Church condemned homosexuality. If a law from 1791 allowed sexual relations between people of the same sex, homosexuals could be arrested and accused of public indecency under Article 330 of the penal code. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the findings of psychiatric authorities such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan removed homosexuals from the hands of the law and placed them in those of the physicians: homosexuality was assigned to the domain of psychopathological diseases. The “invert” was a sick person but not a criminal.4 In 1896, it was Marc-André Raffalovich who, with his apologetic Uranisme et Unisexualité (Uranism and Unisexuality), attacked the medical approach and pleaded for the normalcy of “unisexuality.” The book empowered homosexuals within the artistic circles and the upper classes but did little to ease the prevailing homophobic attitude of the Catholic Church and of the vast majority of the public. One could have a gay or bisexual lifestyle but could not openly talk about it except in very close-knit circles. One could write and perform a play in which homosexuality was hinted at—as it happened with Gide’s Saul in 1904 at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier—but not openly discussed.5 In 1908, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Les Homosexuels de Berlin: le troisième sexe (The Homosexuals of Berlin: The Third Sex) was translated into French and it fueled a number of essays in defense of free sexuality.6 Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah was published in 1921 and Gide’s new edition of Corydon in 1924. The first gay magazine in France appeared in November of that same year but was soon seized by the police. It reappeared again in 1925, under the name L’Amitié (Friendship), but the police used an antipornography law from 1884 and banned it.7 Concurrently, a vigorous campaign against homosexuality in literature, led by such public figures like Georges Anquetil

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and François Porché, was taking place.8 The early 1920s in France saw the translations of most of Freud’s writings but they did not alter the reigning homophobic atmosphere. Carolyn Dean quotes a 1927 court decision that came shortly before the publication of The White Paper and ruled that a work was pornographic if it offered “an apology for pederasty, an appeal to homosexual passion, or a provocation to exercise unwholesome curiosity,” meaning all nonnormative sexuality.9 Homosexuality and pornography, as Dean demonstrates, were closely associated. In addition, the identification of the homosexual with the monster had become a staple of popular imagination. So, for example, in an article from 1928 designed to reinforce the “proper” moral standards, the critic Marcel Réja openly referred to homosexuals as monsters.10 And a judge could declare in 1931: “We can say that there are certain vices so monstrous (pederasty, homosexuality) that without being directly prohibited by legal texts, are so contrary to nature that we would not hesitate to condemn them.”11 In these circumstances, withholding the author’s name of The White Paper from being made public was a decent act of propriety that protected not only Cocteau but also his family and close friends from public embarrassment, an act that befitted the period.12 Edmund White notes that it is out of consideration for his mother that Cocteau never wrote openly about his homosexuality.13 Nevertheless, for all the fashionable society as well as for the tout Paris, artists, writers, theatre people and musicians, middle-class art amateurs, patrons of seedy nightclubs, and high school poetry aficionados in Paris and in the provinces, the author’s name was no secret. To blame today Cocteau for withholding his name from The White Paper or for not openly talking about his sexual orientation is anachronistic.14 Cocteau lived before Stonewall and not after, and revolutions are rarely the deed of only one man. If Gide’s Corydon—the first version published in a limited private edition in 1911, revised and printed again in few copies in 1920, and finally completed and officially published in 1924—was an overt and apparently unbiased defense and validation of homosexuality in the name of nature, Cocteau’s White Paper was a public confession of a first-person narrator of his sexual orientation. If Gide’s book was a valiant attempt to rationalize and legitimize “the love that dare not speak its name” under the cover of an emotionally detached exploration, Cocteau’s was a semifictional self-exposure that not only spoke loudly but graphically, leaving little doubt as to the author’s sexual preferences. A white paper is by definition an authoritative report that uncovers documents which highlight a topic of public interest. The topic of Cocteau’s white paper is nonnormative sexuality. As evidence of his lack of intentional

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wrongdoing, the first-person narrator traces his sexual itinerary from childhood to adulthood and presents his nonnormative sexuality as inborn, inescapable, and natural.15 Unaccepted as he is by family, society and the church, the narrator sees no other solution but exile, in order to live his life in the open as a free man. On the last page of the book, the first-person narrator explains that his is not only a testimony to his innocence and a portrayal of the natural though different paths that sexuality takes, but also a plea: Perhaps [this book] will help to understand that by going into exile I am not exiling a monster but a man whom society does not allow to live since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in the divine masterpiece to be an error. . . . A vice of society makes a vice of my honesty. I am going away. In France, this vice does not lead to the prison. . . . But I do not accept to be tolerated. It hurts my love of love and my love of liberty.16

In real life, Cocteau did not go into exile and if he bowed his head and accepted to be tolerated it was because of his unrelenting hope to find love, affection, and recognition at home, in France.17 He did not internalize the homophobia that he complained about or the negative image of the nonnormative sexual as a monster, but chose to fight it with the only weapon he knew and possessed: his art.18

MONSTROSITY It is in The White Paper, which preceded the writing of The Infernal Machine by four years, that the explicit connection between nonnormative sexuality and the social stigma of the monster is made. As noted above, nonnormative sexuality was already represented in Cocteau’s play Orpheus (1926); incest will be represented in his novel Les Enfants Terribles (translated by Rosamond Lehmann in 1955 as Children of the Game) (1929); and incest, bisexuality and homosexuality in The Infernal Machine.19 Two years later, incest is intimated in his play Les Parents Terribles (translated by Charles Frank in 1956 as Intimate Relations). In 1947, one year after he completed his film Beauty and the Beast, his concept of homosexuality is again stated in his The Difficulty of Being: homosexuality, he affirms, is a natural phenomenon that neither religion nor society can ever regulate.20 Homophobia, as Cocteau contends in The White Paper, is the vice of a society in which nonnormative sexuality is branded as a perversity, a monstrosity, a stigma that marks and masks the person it covers. According to Gilmore, “Ontologically intermediary, neither fish nor fowl, [monsters]

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do not fit into the mental scheme people rely on to explain the world. Being thus inexplicable, monsters are not only physically, but cognitively threatening: they undermine basic understandings.”21 What post-Foucault generations would understand is that not only homosexuality is censured but also alterity. The assignment of homosexuality to the domain of monstrosity and bestiality has been part of the church tradition in the West.22 The most famous sexualized monster in the fin-de-siècle popular literature was Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, who seduced both men and women. The homophobic attitude found its expression in high culture as well, and Henry James’s story The Beast in the Jungle (1902) is only one of many instances.23 Both Wilde and Gide used the metaphor of the Sphinx, the bewildering monster with a human head, as an encoded allusion to their homosexuality. Wilde used the trope in his poem The Sphinx (1874, 1889), where he hinted at the existence of “shameful secrets” and Gide, in a private letter to his friend Roger Martin du Gard, who was also gay, referred to his homosexuality as “the first sphinx on my road.”24 Long after Cocteau’s death, it was Arrabal, an overt homosexual, who referred to himself as a monster in his Plaidoyer pour une différence (In Defence of Difference) (1978): “Since I belong to the monsters, I confess it with much pride,” he declared.25 Nor did Arrabal avoid quoting a newspaper that discussed his “monstrosity.”26 For Cocteau, the illustration in The Infernal Machine of all nonnormative sexuality as a widespread, unavoidable, equally shared but stigmatized orientation—a “monstrosity”—was the final outcome of a long, artistic and emotional journey. It had started in 1909 when, together with his friend Jacques Renaud, he adapted Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray into a play.27 The two young writers were at that time part of Edouard de Max’s flamboyant and openly gay entourage but their play, Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray (The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray), was never published nor performed during their lifetime.28 Cocteau would, however, compose the scenario for a ballet Dorian Gray in 1952. The vampiric nature of Dorian is astutely brought up by Judith Halberstam: “[his] ‘fashion’ sense, his charm, his foppery make Dorian a monster because they allow him to seduce men and women alike with his appearance of perfect purity,” she comments. “Vampirelike, Dorian lives upon the desire he consumes from his lovers and he revels in the contrast between his own beauty and [the portrait].”29 But for Cocteau, Dorian was a metaphorical monster invented by another artist. Henceforth, he would forge his own monsters and bestow them with a distinctive look: most of them were differentiated from the human “norm” by their animal-like shape. Visual representation took precedence over the

98 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre verbal. As for other marginalized artists, whether nonheterosexuals or exiles, an encoded signal was a safe vehicle for communication. The monster served Cocteau first in a sweeping and then in a more focused and limited social critique. Thus, from the sociologically defined “bourgeois monster” of The Potomak and the poetically inclined (and covertly homosexual) monster of Orpheus, the monster of The White Paper becomes overtly sexualized. This shift in focus is symptomatic of the cultural changes that took place in Europe after World War I and were marked in France by the growing influence of Freud and psychoanalysis. Halberstam, however, situates the first signs of this cultural change as early as the 1890s and points to the consequent shift in representation: instead of signifying class, race, and nationality, the monstrous body came to signify sexuality and gender.30 The recent studies of the demonization of the homosexual and his representation in literature, film, and popular culture as a monster reaffirm this shift in emphasis.31 In the White Paper, as later in The Infernal Machine, Cocteau seeks to demolish the stigma of the monster by endowing this socalled monster with human feelings and demonstrating the inevitability of sexual attraction and desire. He will use the same strategy in his film Beauty and the Beast (1946), where one of the protagonists is a monster, the other an innocent young girl. Both are associated with nonnormative sexuality: after all, Beauty falls in love with a beast (that the beast transforms into a handsome young man is only a nonnegligible blessing—or is it?). In his film The Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau plays himself and refers to the monster as a homme-cheval (a man-horse). The monster has a horse head, a male’s body and limbs, and a horsetail and while this man-horse can dispose of his horse head at will and uncover the human head beneath, the tail stays on as an integral part of the body and a visual indication of its dual nature. Each man is both a human being and a monster. Cocteau’s rendition of the manhorse in this film rejuvenates the traditional representation of the Minotaur in art and provides as well a visual framing to his own poetic work, bringing together Orpheus, his theatre piece from 1926, and his cinematic creation from 1960.32 At the same time, the different uses of the monster unveil Cocteau’s long itinerary from a so-called objective and nonpersonal use of art (in this case, the theatre and his early adaptations of Greek classics) to an open, if still encoded, use of cinema as self-expression. In his play Orpheus, the talking horse embodied the poetic hidden forces that chose the poet as a vehicle, independently of his will, and defined poetry as a mysterious power that takes complete hold of the poet’s life. In the later film, the visual representation of the Minotaur links poetry with the beneficial powers of the mythic Chiron, the centaur famous for his healing

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powers. If the homosexual connotations of the horse as a phallic symbol are muted down in the play, they are now unmistakable, heightened as they are by the unusual shape of the man/monster.33 As Cocteau makes clear in the film, the poet’s quest is prompted and motivated by his attraction to the mysterious and sexually enticing male monster. This self-exposure was the poet’s public confession of his nonnormative sexuality and of its indissoluble link to his creativity. Like many youths at puberty age, Cocteau also had, at fourteen, sexual relations with one of his friends, René Rocher; the letters they exchanged became known only in 1995. Bertrand de Chambon reveals that Cocteau’s mother discovered some of these letters and guessed the sexual nature of the friendship between the two.34 Cocteau’s attraction at an earlier age to a fellow student at high school, Pierre Dargelos, is well documented. Though the young Cocteau had liaisons with women, he was also known as one of Edouard de Max’s entourage and they did not make a secret of their homosexuality. Supported by his talent, his family background, and Edouard de Max, Cocteau quickly became the rising star of high society, a dandified poet who reveled in his celebrity. Among his friends at the time, we find Proust, Robert de Montesquiou, Lucien Daudet, and Reynaldo Hahn. Later on, he befriended Gide, Diaghilev, Poulenc, Sir Francis Rose, Christian Bérard, Max Jacob, Radiguet, and the Prince and Princess Edmond de Polignac, but not André Breton whose hostility to homosexuals was well known.35 Peter Christensen may be right when he suggests that the reason for Cocteau’s refraining in 1909 from having his adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray performed was his fear of being publicly associated with “Wilde’s scandal-making homosexuality.”36 A public performance of Wilde’s adapted play in a theatre, day after day and in front of an unknown and maybe hostile audience, was more risky for the young homosexual poet than a one-time public reading of his poems—be they explicit or allusive only—in front of a select audience. A few years later, in 1912, Cocteau published what Richard Kaye identifies as an “unabashedly homoerotic poem,” “Les Archers de Saint Sébastien (St. Sebastian’s Archers)” in his collection of poems Sophocles’ Dance.37 St. Sebastian was and still is an iconic homosexual figure. Two years before the publication of this poem, it was Proust who had taken the young Cocteau to the Louvre to see one of the museum’s recent acquisitions, Mantegna’s painting “St. Sebastian.” The year before, he had attended Ida Rubinstein’s performance of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (The Martyrium of Saint Sebastian), put on the Index by the Catholic Church.38 In Cocteau’s poem, homosexuality was not named but only evoked. Later on, in Plain Chant and “The Angel Heurtebise,” he

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would use the conventional homosexual literary encoding and change the gender of his lover from male to female.39 It would take Cocteau another sixteen years to speak out in front of an unknown audience. When he did, it was under the cover of anonymity, for The White Paper did not bear the name of its author. In the book, the firstperson narrator compares homosexuality to a passion. Like all passions, it is not the product of a deliberate choice; it is cast upon a person and the person endures it. Irresistible and unexplainable, it imposes its own mysterious rules on body and soul: God, you forgive me. You understand me. You understand everything. You have created and willed everything: the bodies, the sexes, the waves, the sky and the sun which, because he loved Hyacinth, turned him into a flower.40

With this understanding comes also self-acceptance. However, he notices, often enough homosexuality is experienced like an ignored passion: the person blames its symptoms on sickness. This statement leads to what may or may not be an autobiographical detail. The first-person narrator portrays his father as a repressed homosexual, suggesting that his sexuality may be inherited.41 Were Cocteau living today, he would have been considered an essentialist. In Opium: Diary of a Cure, written during the winter of 1929–1930 while he was in a drug rehabilitation clinic, he wrote: A man who is sexually normal should be able to make love to anybody and even to anything, because the species instinct is blind; it works indiscriminately. This is what explains the easy-going conduct—credited to vice—of the ordinary people, especially that of the sailors. Only the sexual act counts. An animal thinks little of the circumstances that stir him up. I am not talking about love. Vice begins by choice. According to the person’s heredity, intelligence, or nervous exhaustion, this choice is whetted until it becomes inexplicable, comic, or criminal.42

The White Paper had been published shortly before. As an open work, The Infernal Machine, written in 1932, lends itself to a gay reading. Seen in this light, the character of the Sphinx/Girl in White, Oedipus’ equal, is what Cocteau himself dubbed as a “camouflage à la Proust,” that is, a male figure disguised as a female, or gender bending.43 In other words, Cocteau called on a strategy that was also prevalent in a mass-appealing medium, the cinema.44 This interpretation is consistent

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with Cocteau’s systematic abstention from defining the gender of the shapeshifting “monster.” Furthermore, the belt bestowed on the Sphinx can be construed as a tacit symbol of homosocial bonding, which will in time remind Oedipus of his “real” sexual orientation. Returned to him on his wedding night by Tiresias—another “monster” whose bisexuality is embedded in myth—the belt is literally hidden under the carpet. The Sphinx/ monster and its intimations of homosexuality—and Wilde’s use of the figure of the Sphinx as a symbol of homosexuality comes to mind—are rejected now as before. Ironically, a homosexual bond would have saved Oedipus from incest, just like a marriage to a younger woman would. In this reading, Oedipus is a closeted homosexual, a man who denies his sexual orientation, rejects the love and abnegation of his equal and, because of his ambition, thirst for power, and inability to “see,” falls into a bigger trap than that of unconventional same-sex love: he enters an incestuous relationship with his mother. Indicted by the rule of men, Oedipus is not condemned because of his sexual orientation, but because he infringed the taboos. As Cocteau shows, everyone but a child is a monster; however, it is only Oedipus who was a parricide and committed incest.

THE POET Cocteau considered his artistic achievement as the marker of his identity and of his uniqueness as a human being and not his sexual orientation (though he recognized and wrote about the impact of sexuality on artistic production). Nicholas de Jongh’s following comment applies to Cocteau as well: The sensibilities of the great gay may be tempered by their homosexuality, but it is implausible to argue that these artists share an identity. . . . Great homosexuals in history . . . have a necessarily different sense of their identity, and may not even have a homosexual identity in the sense we understand it. Social contexts shape identity after all. Homosexual sensibility, and the cultures which that sensibility generates, has changed and developed according to time and circumstance.45

From an early age, Cocteau regarded himself as a poet and his works as poetic creations, whatever the medium he employed. As he would explain in his Diary of an Unknown (1953) citing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as examples, sexuality was for him a natural force that might prompt and impregnate a work of art. For Cocteau and his generation,

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identity was established not by sexual conduct but by social and moral conduct, actions and achievements.46 Like the surrealists, Cocteau conceived artistic achievement as the product of unknown psychic forces but, unlike them, he did not agree with Freud’s theories. As a poet, or so he believed, his creative powers were bestowed on him unknowingly and unwillingly. In his preface to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower he repeated a phrase spoken in the play by the Photographer: “Since all these mysteries are beyond me, let us pretend to be their organizer.”47 Cocteau, consciously or not, used the same tactics in matters concerning self-explication. If he did find recurring patterns and leitmotivs in his work, he used them to weave his own mystery and mythology. Cocteau’s belief in man’s inability to arrive at truth and power (including creative power) underlies his shaping of Oedipus in The Infernal Machine. In Western culture, as it has been asserted, Oedipus is emblematic of the will to truth.48 Cocteau, however, goes against the grain and gives shape to an Oedipus who wishes not, cannot and does not accede to truth by himself. Instead, truth is bestowed on him by a higher power, unknown to man. All Oedipus wishes for is to survive within the dictates of the law (he wishes to escape the oracle’s predicted series of taboo infringements) and achieve glory. Independently of Oedipus’ will, a shape-shifting force that is impossible to seize bestows truth and power on him. In this respect, Cocteau created Oedipus in his image. Cocteau believed that a force that he cannot tame nor dominate reveals a poet’s truth to him. To give to this force a concrete form, Cocteau used the metaphor of the angel, another fantastic being. Another play, written not long after The Infernal Machine, attests to the extent of Cocteau’s preoccupation with the complex notion of identity. This is The Knights of the Round Table (1934), in which identity plays a pivotal role.49 The use of the fantastic in this play offers Cocteau the opportunity to raise questions such as: Is the notion of identity determined by physical appearance? Is it by gender? Or is it determined by a more or less constant aggregate of traits, translatable by conduct and action? Can one body shelter different and conflicting identities? The play, a parable situated in the Middle Ages, tries to explore these issues within concrete dramatic and often farcical situations, only to conclude that identity is partly genetic and partly selfconstructed, though one does not learn what leads to this self-construct. All his life, Cocteau strived to turn his self-image, his perception of his uniqueness as a poet, into a public image. It was this self-image that he considered his identity and wished to render visible to all. But, as he was well aware, this image was constantly obscured by the role he chose

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to play in public, that of a celebrity. He cherished this role, for he was eager to be loved and accepted by all, and could never give it up. Neither his multidisciplinary work nor his thirst for recognition and fame helped to bridge the gap between the public persona and his elevated self-image as a poet. The person perceived by his peers and by the media was too easily labeled according to prevailing cultural stereotypes and prejudices, to Cocteau’s disadvantage. No wonder that invisibility is a recurrent motif in his writings and that he perceived himself as a victim, an “other.”

OTHERNESS Oxenhandler considers the central theme of Cocteau’s whole work to be the “affirmation of the right to be different” and contends that Cocteau’s vision of the tragic stems from this goal.50 However, Cocteau’s argument in The Infernal Machine is much more radical and far-reaching. As he shows in this play, not only are we all different but also each of us holds some of the monster’s features. Cocteau’s vision of the tragic draws not from his “affirmation of the right to be different,” but from his conviction that, like Oedipus, man can see his own monstrosity only when it is too late. As Anubis, the god of the dead, tells the Sphinx, “Many people are born blind and don’t perceive it till the day an obvious truth strikes them in the eyes.”51 It is hard to delineate the part that homosexuality played in Cocteau’s feeling of otherness, for his self-chosen and self-constructed identity as a poet already comprehended and predicted otherness. His self-constructed identity was based on the romantic image of the poet, a Christ-like figure and an accursed artist, un artiste maudit. No doubt, this image engendered an intricate set of existential beliefs that explained, motivated, guided, and shaped Cocteau’s life as well as his work, though it is hard to determine whether his ordeals engendered the image or vice versa. Otherness was inherent in this image, and Cocteau cultivated his otherness, to which his social position and nonnormative sexuality contributed their share.52 He not only embraced this image, which informed his subjectivity, but also fully assumed the public role of the Poet and its social and cultural implications. As it is well known, Cocteau identified with Orpheus, the mythic poet, and chose the star—a lonely star—as his signature and trademark. Like Orpheus, whose music could charm man and beast, stones and trees, so did Cocteau try to reach people’s hearts if not by his poetry then by his plays, writings, drawings, paintings and films, as well as by his public persona. One version

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of the Greek myth tells us that, after Orpheus returned from Hades, the Maenads were angered by his preference of Apollo over Dionysus, whom they worshipped. Another version maintains that Orpheus preferred youths instead of women and thereby drove the women to frenzy. According to still another version, reported by Stobaeus, the fifth-century Greek author, in his Florilegium, Orpheus went to Thrace after he lost Euridyce and fell in love with a young man, Calais, spurring the women’s anger. All versions report Orpheus’ grisly end: the Maenads tore his body in pieces. Cocteau, familiar with the various versions of the Orpheus myth and hunted down by his enemies—either for preferring Apollo over Dionysus or youths over women—felt that his own story was as old as mankind. Myth provided Cocteau both legitimization and support, and he never hesitated to use it to his own ends. Cocteau’s critics and contemporaries agree that his feeling of being victimized was not imagined but real. There is no contention among his critics on this point: Cocteau was hated and despised by his peers, among whom one could find Apollinaire, François Mauriac, Gide, Breton, and even Picasso.53 Claude Arnaud’s comprehensive biography unveils a long series of petty incidents initiated by his peers, keen on harassing the poet.54 The detailed account of Cocteau’s life makes a painful reading, since Cocteau was generous not only with his loved ones but also with his enemies. So generous was he that although he had often been abused by some of his acquaintances, he still befriended them.55 On December 16, 1951, he wrote in his diary: My only purpose is to be at peace with myself. Whatever I may do I will be judged, accused, insulted. Success or failures do not count.56

A few days later, after the dress rehearsal of his play Bacchus, he jotted down: The triumph of the dress rehearsal must have exasperated the critics. They will batter me to death—if they have not done so already. My destiny is to be obstructed in all I do and to look like a lucky person. Nothing changes this bend. I have to accept it with patience and never to get emotional about it. It is sometimes hard.57

Still vulnerable in face of his critics, he notes on February 20, 1952: Thirty years of a manhunt of which I have been the victim. And yet, in this year of 1952, when [François] Mauriac believes that he can without punishment

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announce my death, the mechanism is broken. The soul resists. But what can this essence do when the cogs and valves give way?58

Yet he recovers quickly enough to remark: Forty years of this pack. Forty years of manhunt. For forty years I have succeeded to hold on. For forty years, they have treated me like a kid and a beginner. Forty years of freedom. For forty years I have annoyed them!59

And annoy he would: three years later, he was elected to the Académie Française. Cocteau had chosen to live and work within the norms imposed by a social, religious, and political establishment of which he was a member by birth. Not for a moment did he choose to forsake his inherited privileges. Germaine Brée correctly establishes that “as a young Parisian man about town his social class, his talents, and his homosexuality earned him early entry into the glittering world of la belle époque then at its height, and which was always to remain his preferred milieu.”60 Unfortunately, his high social standing was yet another reason for the middle-class French literary avant-garde and surrealist circles to reject him. Jean Touzot places Cocteau’s literary marginalization and persecution—or “cocteauphobia”—as early as 1917.61 The surrealists’ unrelenting and vociferous onslaught on his artistic ventures marked Cocteau as a marginal figure, an outsider, though homosexuality had its part too (as mentioned, Breton was a notorious homophobe). Cocteau was in his early sixties when, in a section of his diary that he would publish under the title “On Friendship,” he noted down: I happen to warn the young men of the risk they run when they follow me, because I know my fellow citizens and the present-day people. . . . Even if there is an inclination to what society defines as vice, one [the young male follower] is anguished not to be able to conform to the norm and to be considered by one’s family as a monster. . . . We do not pretend to reform the world. This is the task of science. Our explanation can convince only the righteous who are already convinced.62

Homosexuality is not named, only hinted at, and the homosexual still bears the stigma of the monster. A few years later, in his evasive, ambiguous but playful preface for the American edition of The White Paper, he expurgated of most of its sexually explicit illustrations. Cocteau continued to leave his authorship and sexual orientation in the (very bright) dark.63

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By the time Cocteau wrote The Infernal Machine, he was a living paradox. As a member of the French upper class, he was easily identified with it; a bourgeois insider, he never married and had no children (unlike Gide, who married and fathered a daughter out of marriage). Cocteau was a marginalized artist though he was always at the head of the avant-garde and a successful playwright. Both an insider and an outsider, he was not unlike Oedipus the déclassé, the socially uprooted, who would be uncovered as the king’s lost son, as the stranger who was a native of the city. Cocteau’s Oedipus tells Tiresias: You must learn that all that is class-bound smells of death. One must get out of one’s class, leave the rank. This is the sign of the masterpieces and of the heroes. A déclassé, it is he who astonishes and reigns.64

This is Cocteau’s voice speaking about himself. The story of Diaghilev challenging Cocteau in 1912 to astonish him is well known.65 But, just as Oedipus could not and did not halt the investigation of his origins, so did Cocteau search by means of various artistic media for a deeper selfunderstanding.66 And while he did so, he was still enacting and refining the identity he constructed for himself, that of the modern Orpheus.

FREUD Cocteau’s exploration of the Oedipus myth before and after The Infernal Machine cannot be separated from his response to Freud’s theories concerning sexuality and the formation of personality. Both Freud and Cocteau made use of the same source, Sophocles’ dramatic rendition of the Oedipus myth; the former used it as the proof that validated his theories, the latter used it to debunk these theories. Little does it matter that Sophocles’ play presented only one among many versions of the myth. The relevant factor is that Sophocles’ version—the artistic expression of a past series of events that may or may not have occurred—offered a seemingly irrefutable basis to a theory of sexuality that had such an emotional impact on generations to come and changed the way we look at ourselves, whether we accept Freud’s teachings or not, and informed many artistic endeavors. Freud’s works were translated into French from 1921 onward.67 His first followers in France were among the artists and writers, the surrealists finding in his works a much-needed and convincing “scientific” basis to their tenets and beliefs. Students of Freud such as Eugenia Sokolnicka not only practiced in Paris but also held a literary salon where artists and writers regularly met.68 By

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the time The Infernal Machine was produced, Freud’s theories on sexuality and dreams were familiar to the elite of the Parisian intellectuals. No wonder that theatre critics such as Schlumberger, Paul Saegel, or René Salomé, who reviewed the performance of Cocteau’s play, were quick to spot in it the “Freudian” elements and hastily dubbed it a Freudian illustration of the Oedipus myth.69 Unlike the surrealists, Cocteau’s attitude to Freud’s findings and explanatory theory was marked by skepticism. Freud’s claim about man’s innate bisexuality and his “finding” that homosexuality was not a mental disease corroborated Cocteau’s own beliefs. However, he did not accept Freud’s explanation of the subconscious, as logical as it might have looked.70 Cocteau considered Freud’s theories as an oversimplification of the workings of the mind. As a poet who confronted the workings of the mind day after day and struggled with them both in a drugged and in a sober state, he preferred to leave them in all their mystery, as we have said before. Years after The Infernal Machine, he would comment in his diary: Freud is of an easy access. His hell (his purgatory) is tailored to fit the crowds. Contrary to our exploration, he looks for visibility only. The night I am dealing with is different. It is a cave full of treasures. Boldness would open it and so will an open sesame, not a physician or a neurosis. A dangerous cave, if the treasures will make us forget the open sesame. It is from this cave, from this luxurious wreck, from this living room at the bottom of a lake, that all the great souls became rich. Sexuality is not, one can guess, without playing a role in all this. Vinci and Michelangelo prove it, but their secrets have nothing to do with Freud’s shiftings. . . . Freud’s mistake is to have turned our night into a furniture storage that brings it into disrepute, to have opened it up whereas it is bottomless and cannot be even half-opened.71

In her article on The Infernal Machine, Felman showed that by bringing together Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the two literary sources used by Freud to demonstrate his theory, Cocteau questioned the meaning of the Oedipus complex.72 In fact, Cocteau went much further. He not only censured Freud’s biased use of Sophocles and Shakespeare but also used a deadly weapon, parody. Cocteau’s was a sophisticated move: like Freud, he would use poetic license to fill in the gaps that Sophocles and Shakespeare “ignored.” This was an ironic move because poetic license is usually acknowledged as the poet’s privilege, but not so with regard to a man of science. To debunk the Freudian reading of the two works of

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art, he turned Hamlet into a parody and made up for “missing parts” in Sophocles’ play by providing the detailed encounter with the Sphinx and the eventful wedding night of the incestuous couple. In what might look as facetious move but was in effect a long-planned and thought-provoking strategy, Cocteau utterly deflated Freud’s thesis by turning Jocasta into the lecherous initiator of the incest. Another reason for Cocteau’s annoyance was Freud’s ignorance of Sophocles’ philosophical stance, that is, the latter’s deterministic belief in man’s subservience to external powers. So Cocteau obligingly set out to correct Freud’s “mistake.” For Cocteau, an external interference that shapes man’s life may have a rationale of its own, although man may never understand it. Open-minded but inquisitive, Cocteau recognized Freud’s merits and his so-called revolutionary revelations but put them to test within a poetic context that examined man and his tribulations in life in the light not of the already known but in the shadow of the yet unknown. This approach is demonstrated throughout The Infernal Machine. That our subconscious records events in a subtle way is displayed in Act II, “Oedipus’ Encounter with the Sphinx,” as well as in Act III, “The Wedding Night.” But that the subconscious does not enlighten nor help us to better understand the present, was also shown in the same acts. Likewise, Cocteau challenged Freud’s assertion that Oedipus was sexually attracted to Jocasta and set up an equally shocking situation in Act III, where a lustful Jocasta leaves Oedipus no choice but to carry out his duties as a husband (while all he had longed for was a maternal embrace!). Finally, Cocteau showed that Oedipus’ killing of his father (which had occurred before he met Jocasta) was not an act of free will. And most significantly, Cocteau showed that nonnormative sexuality is not a limited but a widespread phenomenon: all the characters of The Infernal Machine are “monsters” and those who are not will yet be. The power of Cocteau’s contentions lies not with words (as is the case with Freud’s writings) but with facts that can be visualized and, if acting and production are equal to the poet’s expectations, they offer the irrefutable proof of visualized credibility. This is the power of theatre at its best. As he grew older, and especially after he was elected to the Académie Française in 1955, Cocteau became increasingly discreet about his homosexuality and careful about his public image. The audacity that had marked his earlier writings dimmed, if it did not vanish. In 1958, in a letter to JeanJacques Kihm, we find this ambiguous denial of his homosexuality: The word homosexuality is inadmissible as concerning myself. It is an insult to my educational morals. Even if I chose to explain myself regarding sexuality, the

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joining of virile forces that homosexuality represents for me is far-off . . . from André Gide and the vice squad.73

He had suffered too many losses, tolerated too many humiliations, and endured too much abuse. Besides, he also had had several heterosexual liaisons. His veiled plea in The Infernal Machine went unheeded and nonnormative sexuality was still closeted. His laurels were hard won. If his nonnormative sexuality was still only tolerated, his work as a poet was now finally recognized, valued, and celebrated. For Cocteau, the election to the consecrated Académie Française rendered visible what he had so often and painfully described as his “invisible” self, that is, his self-image or selfidentity as a poet. *

*

*

Cocteau’s plea in The Infernal Machine—yet another “white paper”— for the recognition of human alterity and the validation of nonnormative sexuality went unheard and still is today. Critics who either turned him into an icon or accused him of being “a revisionist of his own sexuality” have often disregarded Cocteau’s bisexuality, which prompted and informed his liberal approach.74 In 1934, as today, the prevailing Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of the Oedipus myth inflected the attitudes and perceptions of the play’s audience and prevented them from apprehending a different approach to the Oedipus myth or to desire. By appropriating Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, the artistic work of one of the greatest classics, Freud appropriated the Oedipus myth and became, until recently, its only publicly proclaimed interpretive authority. Freudianism, a cultural phenomenon, has enjoyed such mass appeal that it came to exert considerable influence on Western thought during most of the twentieth century. Although critics such as René Girard in the 1970s or Frederick Ahl in the 1990s expounded well-founded divergent interpretations of Sophocles’ play and assigned the Freudian to its long overdue place as one among many, Freud is still considered by many an authority on psychoanalysis and a specialist in the reading of the Oedipus myth.75 Concurrently, the conventional reading of The Infernal Machine still ignores its underlying, anti-Freudian and transgressive bent. What Foucault designated and condemned as the social ordering of sexuality is still a current practice and the representation of homosexuals as gay monsters, as in film for example, is far from being extinct. Yet, if we approach current trends in gender studies as indicators of larger cultural shifts, the

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current reductive attitude to sexuality is changing and sexuality is slowly but increasingly comprehended as a complex of sexualities, as Bert Archer brings out in The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality).76 This is why the reading of Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, with its message and plea encoded in the fantastic, is now more pertinent than ever.

7. Visibility, Invisibility, and the Fantastic Alice laughed. “There is no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass1

C

octeau’s encoded representation of nonnormative sexuality and his plea for tolerance in The Infernal Machine have gone undetected for another reason as well: the narrative mode employed, that is, the fantastic. The fantastic in its various manifestations takes the center stage, to the delight of the audience, and overshadows the deeper import of Cocteau’s strategy and techniques in the play. John Clum affirms that, with regard to Tennessee Williams and William Inge, “it is their rich response to the closet and their mastery of its evasions and projections that made [them], in differing degrees, successful writers.”2 For Cocteau, this “rich response” was double-sided: while it did bring him glory, it sometimes diverted the reader or spectator’s gaze from the “invisible” to the visible. He repeatedly complained in his private journals about the public’s inability to perceive his invisible “truth,” all the while inadvertently or perhaps not, contributing to this predicament. Only one among the more than fifty critics that reviewed in 1934 the first performance of The Infernal Machine perceived the specificity of Cocteau’s approach: The French theatre does not think much of the supernatural and even less of the mixing of the real with the unreal that nourishes the English theatre. Shakespeare, Shaw, to cite only these two, one knows how they turn the real into the unreal by way of humor. It is impossible not to cite them when speaking of Cocteau. Except that English humor uses caricature in a serious vein in those situations where Cocteau prefers to play with reality, with truth, and

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captures them subtly instead of keeping them aloof. In his hands, the real, viewed cinema-like from many and diverse angles, dissolves and resolves its geometry, loses its shape and elates us.3

This critic was none other than Cocteau’s friend, the novelist Colette.

THE FANTASTIC For the fantastic to exist, it requires the reader or spectator’s willingness to accept it as an integral part of human experience and not merely as an ephemeral flight of fancy. An allegorical interpretation of the fantastic, such as Soraya Le Corsu’s reading of the supernatural in some of Cocteau’s works, obliterates the multiple import and significations of the fantastic and limits its function and effect to that of a rhetorical device.4 In fact, the fantastic is a representation of that breach into the unsteady ramparts that surround the ever-changing concept of reality, a breach that enables us to comprehend and accept the illogical, the seemingly impossible, and the out of ordinary as part of human experience. The many definitions of the fantastic in scholarly studies distinguish it from the “real,” while the common denominator of these definitions is their reasoning by negation and differentiation. For Eric Rabkin and Christine Brooke-Rose, the fantastic is not the real but the unreal or the nonreal.5 For Nancy Traill, it is not the natural but the supernatural.6 Lucie Armitt believes that the fantastic is not the “here” but the beyond.7 For Todorov, it is not the certain but the uncertain, and for Brian Attebery— not the probable but the improbable.8 For Todorov, the perception of the fantastic is attributable to the perceiver’s incertitude about the nature and effects of the object perceived as well as to the feeling of fear engendered by the object. Attebery expands Todorov’s study of the workings of the fantastic, as did Colin Manlove, and relates the perception of the fantastic to the feeling of wonder it prompts.9 According to Hume’s wideranging definition, anything that constitutes a departure from consensus reality pertains to the fantastic. She expands Todorov’s definition so that it now covers all manifestations of the fantastic, such as the marvelous, the supernatural, magic realism, and the uncanny, in the past as in the present. Furthermore, while she acknowledges the importance of the response generated by the fantastic, such as hesitation (or doubt) and wonder, Hume gives equal weight to the perceiver’s response—informed by an ever-changing notion of reality—as to the object perceived and its context.10 Since technology, beliefs, and cultural trends and contexts

Visibility, Invisibility 113 are in constant flux, Hume’s approach is most pertinent to the study of the fantastic in general and of the fantastic in modern theatre in particular, for theatre is at once limited in its cohesive representational power (versus cinema, for example) and richer (because of its three-dimensional capabilities and its implementation of multimedia technologies). Hume’s context-related definition of the fantastic seems more appropriate for a closer examination of the fantastic elements in Cocteau’s nonrealistic plays, including The Infernal Machine, because it ultimately addresses the problematics of the “real,” which is in its turn a fluid, contextual notion. Cocteau used fantastic elements pertaining to ancient myths, folklore and legends (like the gods, the Sphinx) as well as to contemporary beliefs (the angels, for example). The fantastic and its representation in theatre appealed to Cocteau from an early stage. Thus, Cocteau and Jacques Renaud’s adaptation for the stage of Wilde’s novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray in 1909 had an expanded title, somewhat different from the original, and a subtitle that drew attention to one aspect of the work particularly relevant to the present discussion, the fantastic: Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray, Pièce fantastique en quatre actes et cinq tableaux (The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray. A fantastic play in four acts and five scenes).11 Cocteau and his collaborator exploited the new medium into which Wilde’s novel was adapted and provided the play with a growing sense of urgency, from the fateful moment when Dorian expresses his willingness to sell his soul to his dire end. The audience never sees the portrait or the changes that it undergoes. Instead, it is Dorian’s horrified reaction at the sight of his distorted portrait that is to be shown on the stage. So is the reaction of Basil, who painted the portrait: BASIL :

There was nothing evil in my painting, nothing shameful . . . and this is the face of a monster. DORIAN : It is the face of my soul. BASIL : It is the look of a demon!12

The nonvisible painting, which has become the living trap and mirror of a monstrous but invisible soul, generates suspense and horror to the last moment, when Dorian, assuming his artistically rendered physical and moral identity, stabs the painting and crumbles down in a pool of blood. Death miraculously restores his looks, that of an old and decrepit sinner, a human monster, while the portrait recuperates its freshness and beauty. The invisible monster has become visible to human eyes.

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The problematics of identity, the mystery of a visible yet invisible self, and the unsuspected traps of sensorial perception as of truth and appearance— these themes were explored not only by Wilde but also by the symbolists. Theatre, with its acknowledged use of illusion, offered the symbolists an ideal medium for exploring metaphysical issues such as the mystery and meaning of life, death, and human soul. Is the concept of identity based on physical appearance, moral traits, and conduct, or is it an abstract entity, a philosophical construct labeled as “soul” and encompassing feelings, thoughts, and desires that can never be accurately asserted? Maeterlinck, among other symbolist playwrights, touched on this theme in his Pelleas and Melisande (1892) when he created the eponymous heroine. The reader or spectator of this play will never know whether Melisande was an unhappy, innocent young girl when she met Golaud, her future and much older husband, or an irresistible femme fatale who ensnared him and shrewdly evaded all questions regarding her age and background. In this play, Maeterlinck’s characters, actions, situations, and locations are imbued with mysterious ambiguity while the supernatural (like the well that restores sight to the blind) reinforces the feeling that sensorial perception can be misleading and the “real” or “true” are fluid notions.13 Maeterlinck returned to the theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity in a later play, Sister Beatrice (1902), where the Virgin Mary, a supernatural figure, takes on Beatrice’s appearance and stays in the convent while the latter is away. Far from offering a solution to man’s quest for definitive answers regarding the meaning of life or the meaning of self, Maeterlinck’s plays expose these issues in all their complexity. The inexplicable and the irresolvable in ordinary life are enhanced by his use of the fantastic, which is shown to be an integral part—acknowledged or not—of everyday life. Like Gide, Cocteau inherited from the symbolists their concept of drama and theatre as well as their interest in myths and legends.14 Most of Cocteau’s pieces for the theatre are multilayered dramas that offer an easily accessible fable, beneath which lay hidden multiple, deeper, and often encoded layers of meaning. A clue to these encoded meanings is provided by the visual and audial spectacle that stirs the imagination by an ever-engaging and entertaining flow of action. Cocteau outlined this concept of theatre as early as 1921, in his preface to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower. In this writing, which can certainly be considered as his aesthetic manifesto on theatre, the poet recognizes the specificity of theatre as an autonomous art and proposes to use this specificity in order to create “a poetry of theatre,” constructed by the materials and techniques proper to this medium. Instead of implementing on the stage some of the materials and devices proper to another art, that is, literature, and create “poetry at the theatre,” the playwright should strive to

Visibility, Invisibility 115 create an equivalent aesthetic object. He will do so by using the dominant trait by which theatre distinguishes itself from the other arts, three-dimensional dynamic visuality. Thus, Cocteau’s poetry of theatre, such as created in his plays, oratorio, scenarios for ballets, and films, went well beyond the symbolist teachings. It easily incorporated the provocative collages of cubism and Dada; the dislocated, altered, or decontextualized images of surrealism; and the often inflated emotive appeal and nonrealistic stage effects of expressionism. For Cocteau, it is the poetic use of the visuality specific to the theatre that will hold fast and tight the whole theatrical performance, like the ropes of a ship without which the ship cannot sail: I try therefore to replace the “poetry at the theatre” by the “poetry of theatre.” The poetry at the theatre is a delicate lace, impossible to see from afar. The poetry of theatre would be a thick lace, a lace made of ropes, a ship on the sea.15

The poetry of theatre would grow out regardless of the artistic style selected by the playwright for his piece. In his nonrealistic plays, Cocteau uses fantastic elements drawn from myth, legend, and folklore to stimulate in his audience that sense of wonder, excitement, and enchantment that is engendered by the unexpected irruption of the nonreal into the real, of the irrational into the rational, the supernatural into the natural, or the magical into the ordinary, as Colette was so prompt to perceive at the first night of The Infernal Machine. His play The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower has dancing telegrams, an oversize walking and talking camera that first spits out a girl in a bathing suit, a fat child and a lion, then swallows the lion and releases a general. Everyday life and its representation in art (photography) merge together while the boundaries between the two are radically erased. A lost anarchic tradition, borrowed from the circus and introduced by Jarry in his famous production of Ubu Roi at the symbolist Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris in 1896, comes again to life in this play when the invisible becomes visible, ordinary objects are blown out of proportion, and identity is questioned. The audience wonders whether the character is, within the dramatic context, a “real” person or a living photograph, and witnesses the ironic literalization of clichés and verbal metaphors.16 In The Professional Secret, published shortly after the production of The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, the unbreakable bond that Cocteau found between poetry and the supernatural is explicitly stated: The poet does not dream: he counts up. But he walks on quicksand and sometimes his foot sinks into death. He gets used to it however and it soon

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seems to him as normal as the throbbing heartbeats that don’t scare the cardiac patients anymore. Poetry predisposes to the supernatural. The hypersensitive atmosphere with which poetry envelops us sharpens our secret senses and our antennas dive into depths that our official senses ignore. . . . Poets live on miracles.17

Cocteau distinguishes the fantastic seen by all in a state of dream from that perceived by the poet while in a state of wakeful consciousness. The symbolists, often identified as postromantics, believed in the poet’s exceptional power to perceive the invisible and give it shape in his artistic creation, and so does Cocteau. For Cocteau too, the poet is sensitive to phenomena that ordinary people cannot perceive; everyday experience is one of constant uncertainty; his interpretation of sensorial data differs from that of the nonpoet, and he accepts the fantastic as an integral part of his daily life. For the poet, the supernatural, which may frighten others, is a daily, familiar experience. The fantastic is present in Cocteau’s play Orpheus, written four years after The Professional Secret. Although the play is based on the ancient Orpheus myth, the action takes place in the present: Orpheus is a poet and Eurydice a housewife. The characters, according to the stage directions, have to wear contemporary clothes. At first sight, they present the image of ordinary domestic life, with a husband who is so taken up by his work—he is a poet—that he neglects his enamored wife. However, it is in this realistic setup, with which the audience can easily identify, that the fantastic takes root. One month before, so the narrative goes, a horse had followed Orpheus on the street and Orpheus had taken him. The horse, now placed in a niche in the wall, moves his head and, as mentioned, communicates with Orpheus by tapping the alphabet letters with his leg. It is this monstrous creature, adored by Orpheus as his muse, which will prove to be the indirect cause of Eurydice’s death. Apart from the supernatural horse, other fantastic characters intervene: the glazier Heurtebise, who is apparently the couple’s guardian angel; Death, under the guise of an elegant woman in evening dress who enters the room through the mirror; and her two aides, the angels Azrael and Raphael, who perform their task in the proper attire of dedicated surgeons. Another fantastic creature is Orpheus’ severed (and talking) head. The retrieved Eurydice is a dead alive. Magical objects play their part too, like the mirror that serves as the gate to and from Hades, or the red rubber gloves that Orpheus has to put on in order to pass through the mirror. The mirror has a symbolic function, being the threshold to another world. Time is manipulated at will, signalizing the simultaneity

Visibility, Invisibility 117 of two separate but interconnected levels of reality, the real and the unreal. Thus, two identical scenes signalize a frozen moment on one level, while the linearity of time unfolds “as usual” on another. Bizarre coincidences take place, such as the horse’s death that occurs at the very moment of Eurydice’s death, or the sun eclipse on the very day that Orpheus is accused of blasphemy for sending in a poem (dictated to him by the horse), the anagram of which is “merde” and which predicted Eurydice’s death and return from the underworld. These ominous warnings are proven to be true, as, for example, Heurtebise’s warnings about the nefarious power of mirrors. The last scene of the play, which reinstates that seemingly peaceable atmosphere of ordinary domestic bourgeois life but in the Other World, dispels any hesitation about the “reality” of the events experienced. The settings are elevated high above the stage floor so that the room seems located in another sphere. Orpheus and Eurydice enter through the mirror, led by Heurtebise, look at their “home” as if they were seeing it for the first time. “They smile. They exude an air of calmness.”18 In this ironic anticlimax that serves as an epilogue, they sit down at their table, with Heurtebise ready to serve them. Is Heurtebise a guardian angel or is he Eurydice’s lover? Is this a ménage à trois? We shall never find out, just as we shall never know whether Eurydice has by now completely severed her ties with the Bacchantes or Orpheus with supernatural horses. Orpheus recites (so the stage direction says) a thanksgiving prayer to God for saving Eurydice who had killed the devil in the shape of a horse and died, and for having discovered the true source of poetry, God. The invisible may still emerge from beneath the visible. In The Lay Mystery, published two years later, in 1928, Cocteau states again his concept of the artist’s task and dwells on his understanding of realism in art: Realism consists in copying with exactitude the objects of a world proper to the artist, without the slightest connection to what is commonly considered as reality.19

Viewed from this angle, realism as a style should copy “with exactitude” not consensus reality but the artist’s particular image of the world. Gone is the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity as between the commonly accepted empirical real (Hume’s “consensus reality”) and the nonreal. It is this concept of realism that will be implemented in The Infernal Machine in 1932. Cocteau’s play The Knights of the Round Table, written one year after the production of The Infernal Machine, takes up again the problematics

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of visibility and invisibility and studies the effects that a visible change in character and conduct has on interpersonal relations.20 To this end, Cocteau turns again to the fantastic. The source now of the narrative is not myth but legend. Legendary characters provide, in Attebery’s terms, a formula that validates the verisimilitude of the fantastic.21 The main character, indicated by Cocteau in his preface to the play, is neither the scheming Merlin nor any of the legend’s figures but Ginifer, a young and often invisible demon of Cocteau’s own invention. Merlin the evil magician and vampire, who has been feeding on Camelot’s energy and poses as King Arthus’ (sic) sanctimonious chaplain, is another fantastic character. Ginifer is his captive servant, who borrows the identity of Gauvain, Galaad, and Guinevere at Merlin’s order; his distinctive (and comic) trait is his mispronunciation of X (like S). Other fantastic characters are Lancelot, the son of a water fairy; Galaad, the Knight of the White Armor and Lancelot’s son; the invisible red-clad devil that inhabits the Black Castle; and last, the fairies, heard but unseen. Among the magic places, there is Camelot, which has been under Merlin’s evil spell for two years and where vegetation has died, the sun does not shine anymore, and wild beasts multiply; the Black Castle, Merlin’s siege, an evil false ruin where objects move on their own; and the magic circles within which Merlin operates. Magic objects are used, such as the perilous seat at the Round Table, which inflicts an incurable wound (comic but well deserved) on the nonpure contender to the Graal; the invisible Graal, presumably hidden at the mysterious Corbenic; the talking flower that records voices and plays them off (a comic allusion to modern technology); and the self-moving chairs, table, chess, and doors at the Black Castle. And there are the double characters—another recurrent motif in fantastic art: there is a false Guinevere and a true Guinevere, just as there is a false Galaad and a false Gauvain. Ginifer, the facetious demon, enters the body of the “true” characters and endows them not only with evil but also with his enticing and entertaining vivacity. Like in The Infernal Machine, it is the young and pure at heart that pierce through the veil of visibility and can see the invisible. Blandine (Guinevere and Lancelot’s daughter) detects the “monster” in the new and entertaining Gauvain who has now inexplicably become the master of King Arthus’ heart (the ironic homosexual undertone cannot go undetected!).22 Likewise, before Galaad’s arrival, it is her young brother Segramor, a poet, who perceives the spell that has been cast on Camelot and senses that they live “in a dream.”23 Once Galaad has delivered Camelot from Merlin’s evil spell, the sun shines again and the birds are back. Segramor, who understands the language of the birds, is asked now to explain their message. He obligingly translates in what may

Visibility, Invisibility 119 be construed as an ironic and comic-laden commentary on the spectacle of human ordeals: SEGRAMOR :

. . . They say: Pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay. One must pay, pay, pay, pay. Pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay. One must pay, pay, pay. Pay, pay, pay.

Curtain24

Like Orpheus, the play ends in an ironic and pessimistic vein, befitting the clear-sighted theatrical reflection on illusion, delusion, and selfdelusion. The dramatic plot and its unexpected twists offer an ironic commentary on the construction of identity. The inescapable conclusion conveyed with the help of humor, as Colette so astutely perceived regarding The Infernal Machine, is that identity is both the construct of genetics—demonstrated by Ginifer’s constant mispronunciation of X whatever the identity he borrows—and the construct of other factors— physiological, social, cultural, or plainly unknown—that man cannot control. Four years later, in 1941, Cocteau wrote Renaud and Armide, a play produced at the Comédie Française in 1943. The fantastic is again the vehicle for a new exploration of the theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity. The legend of Renaud, the crusader knight bewitched by the sorceress Armide, had been the subject of many literary works and paintings. Cocteau borrowed the legend’s characters and used them as allegorical figures in a poetic reflection not only on his favorite theme but also on the nature of love, illusion, and self-delusion. Renaud is in love with the invisible Armide: he wrongly believes that an evil magician had transformed her into the marvelous garden where he and his friends are kept captive. However, Armide— who is in love with Renaud—is soon to become one of the fairies and this is why she has now become invisible to human sight (that is, invisible to the dramatic characters but visible to the audience), as is Oriane, the fairy whom Renaud’s close friend Olivier considers a “monster.”25 The garden is a magic place where “nothing . . . seems to die or be born” and time stands still.26 Cocteau constructs here an alternate world where, like in the Celtic Other World, time is measured differently. So, for example, while the sorceress and the fairy are consulting at length, Renaud’s movement is frozen in what seems to him no time at all. Visibility is also manipulated at will: Renaud and his friends are subject to inexplicable visions; a child appears and disappears; a wall becomes suddenly transparent; and Renaud foresees the future. Magic actions take place and a cut-off hand opens a wall; Armide surrounds the sleeping Renaud with magic circles that keep him captive.

120 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre Magic objects, such as Orpheus’ ring that belongs now to Armide, affect human as well as supernatural destinies. If she takes it off, she will become a mortal, and if she gives it to somebody, she will win his love but his kiss will kill her. As before, Cocteau uses metamorphosis to explore the notion of identity: when Armide appears before Renaud in the shape of a symbolic dazzling shaft of light (her “true” identity), he rejects her. She will therefore conform to the (false) image he has of her and will put on the shape of a mortal woman. The sacrifice of her true self, of her “invisibility,” symbolized by the magic ring that she bestows on Renaud at his request, will also be her doom: by giving Renaud the ring, Armide will deliver him not only from the grip of the Other World (the garden) but also from hers. Finally, this poetic debate on visibility and invisibility as on true and false identity concludes by raising questions concerning the nature of Renaud’s love for Armide. Is love a self-delusion? Is desire annihilated once it is fulfilled? Is love only a fleeting, illusory enchantment of the senses? Is the visible the only truth man lives by? Regrettably, Renaud and Armide, unlike the rest of Cocteau’s nonrealistic plays, offers the construct of an alternate world where emotion is overshadowed by lengthy quasi-philosophic deliberations, and the artificiality of the spoken verse (the alexandrine) and of the delineated characters does not elevate the piece beyond a respectable exercise in neoclassicism. In this play, the supernatural loses its fascinating pungency and serves mainly as a decoration for an allegory that falls flat. But the main reason for the failure of Renaud and Armide to win the reader or spectator’s interest lies neither with the classicist verse that Cocteau used nor with the cartoon-like characters. It lies with that extra ingredient that was present in his other plays in addition to the fantastic and is here missing: the ironic stance, the playful juxtaposition of the real and the unreal that marked his other works and which Colette found so elating. Cocteau would further explore the issue of identity, visibility, and invisibility using the fantastic mode in his film Beauty and the Beast (1946) but will renounce the fantastic in Bacchus (1951). The fantastic, both as the representation of a philosophic stance and as an epistemological tool, is used, as seen before, in The Infernal Machine. In this play, the fantastic is informed by Greek and Egyptian mythology and by a work of art, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, which is in its turn informed by myth. Cocteau’s repeated use of the myth in his plays has intrigued his critics. Milorad correctly established that myth provided Cocteau the vindication of his deepest beliefs, a notion of undisputable truth, the truth of the unconscious. However, as a fervent disciple of Freud, Milorad easily overlooks Cocteau’s ironic and disparaging comments on the Master and his findings.

Visibility, Invisibility 121 For Milorad, the possibility that the workings of the unconscious may be differently accounted for is nonexistent.27 Scholars such as Pierre Macris, Claude Martin, and Jean Touzot contend, in Milorad’s wake, that Cocteau found his obsessions justified and legitimized by the Oedipus myth and that of Orpheus.28 Likewise, Geneviève Albrechtskirchinger believes that Cocteau’s interest in myths stemmed not out of intellectual curiosity but mainly because he discovered in myth a parallel narrative of his own existential dilemmas; thus, he would identify with certain mythological heroes and recognize their ordeals as his own.29 Valette maintains that Cocteau, because of his dislike of the “ordinary,” used the inimitability of myth as a most suitable vehicle for translating “obsessional themes.”30 Arthur Evans agrees that Cocteau found in myth a reflection of his own concerns; however, he argues, it was myth that permeated each theme treated by Cocteau with a most opportune believability.31 Chaperon offers a similar interpretation and asserts that Cocteau found support in myth for his own imaginary world as well as for the mythical figures he invented, such as the angel as muse and inspiration.32 Finally, Crowson offers a structuralist interpretation and estimates that myth offered Cocteau a “means of overcoming” the fragmentation of reality into “history (fact) and imagination or desire,” or objectivity and subjectivity.33 However, as a close reading of The Infernal Machine shows, Cocteau imposes on myth his own categories. He uses myth as a canvas that suggests only the main outline of the narrative and the characters. Myth has it that Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Cocteau’s Oedipus does likewise, but only because he was offered the solution by the Sphinx itself. The solution of the riddle is handed down to him with no effort on his part, not even that of asking for it. Is he stupid and incompetent? We shall never know, because the Girl in White/Sphinx, in love with Oedipus at first sight, does not want him to take any risks. Or so it seems from a human ordinary point of view, because the handing over of the solution may also be a trap set up by the gods. In this instance, the audience is a toy in the playwright’s hands, vacillating between the mythological and the human explanations, between the rhetorical superstructure and substructure. Myth provides Cocteau with a superstructure that consists in a given narrative, characters, and spatial and temporal setting. Within this superstructure, Cocteau sets up a substructure of his own invention, a substructure constructed by the interrelationships of the mythological and the newly added elements. These interrelationships are in their turn constructed by verbal exchanges and actions that reflect contemporary socioeconomic and cultural customs, conventions, beliefs, and language. Slang, idiom, allusions to current cultural events, realistic

122 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre body language and references to modern urban life turn this substructure into a lively spectacle, easily accessible, intellectually and emotionally, to modern audiences. The play is founded on the dialectics between these two structures, the mythological and the contemporary or the commonplace. Myth would convey authority and grandeur to such figures as Oedipus, Tiresias, or Jocasta, while their grotesque portrayal colors them with the familiarity of the commonplace. Myth brings along the supernatural and the inherent threat of the unknown, while the spectacle of daily life brings in the apparent solidity of the empirical. The mythological (like Act IV, based on Sophocles’ play) possesses the immutable reality of an aesthetically distanced object, while the contemporary (Act III, “The Wedding Night”) the immediacy, poignancy, and urgency of the present. The play constantly brings before the audience the spectacle of the grotesque present or the commonplace within the larger, encompassing spectacle of a debased mythological past—the later visually evoked by the settings (the ruins), by the characters that bear the names of the mythological heroes, and by decisive actions that echo theirs. It is the multifaceted tension between the superstructure and the substructure that endows the play with its sweeping vitality. It is their constant juxtaposition, interplay, and conflict that engender comic situations and allusions, and most important, Cocteau’s ironic stance when exploring such notions as identity, love, ethics, and taboos. No doubt, Cocteau inscribes his discourse within a mythical frame for a semblance of believability.34 However, he also unsettles the notions of myth, the sacred, and the taboo. In an all-sweeping gesture, Cocteau invokes in The Infernal Machine ancient Greek mythology as well as Egyptian mythology, abolishing whatever dissimilarities the audience may find in them. On the other hand, it is this mixture of beliefs that strengthens his argument concerning the destiny of man in the past as in the present, as signified by that of Oedipus. A threatening goddess, Nemesis, is portrayed as a young girl who falls in love with a man at the sight of his walk; furthermore, she has to be reminded of her position and her duties. Figures of lore blend into mythological ones, such as the vampire into the shape-shifting Sphinx. The Sphinx, that threatening ogre is shown not only as shape-shifting figure but also a servant of other gods. Tiresias, a symbol of impartial wisdom and power, is reduced now to the stature of a Zizi, who may or may not bear the physiological imprint of his gender-transgressive experience and is unable to perceive the divine: he does not recognize the true identity of the girl who gives him Oedipus’ belt. Jocasta, the tragic queen who committed incest unknowingly, becomes a lustful matron who consciously commits incest. And the mythic Oedipus, who vanquished the Sphinx by his wit, is exposed

Visibility, Invisibility 123 as brainless and vain. Besides turning the mythological figures into risible ordinary people, Cocteau proceeds to deflate the notion of taboo, throwing the doubt concerning Jocasta’s innocence as well as concerning Oedipus’ sexual orientation. Cocteau also raises questions about the notion of sin and infringement of taboo when an act is committed unknowingly. If Cocteau willingly embraces myth, it is with subversive intentions. If he brings the unreal mythological figures into the real, it is for rhetorical purposes. Thus, for example, he uses the figure of the Sphinx in The Infernal Machine to explore anew the theme of the visible/invisible identity. As Anubis, Cocteau’s proxy so correctly maintains, man’s problem—and ironically that of the audience too—is his reliance on the perception of one sense, sight. Man is dependent on his eyesight and believes what he sees: ANUBIS,

[to the Sphinx]: . . . To appear to the humans, logic compels us to borrow the shape they use to represent us, otherwise they would see emptiness only.35

This is a plausible explanation for the different shapes that Nemesis borrows while it is also a confirmation of the unreal nature of the shapeshifting character. It is the accessibility of an unthreatening young Girl in White, a recognizable human shape, which prompts the poet to represent the predator, the Sphinx, in this shape. Likewise, the lethal aspect of the Sphinx is embodied in Anubis, the god of the dead, just like the illusory form of the Sphinx is embodied in the Chimera. The theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity is imbedded in the transformation acts of the Sphinx. That is, the act of multiple physical transformations is in itself unreal, belonging to the realm of the fantastic. However, each physical transformation is visually suggestive of a well-known trope, cultural icon, or stereotype, thereby multiplying the layers of signification and bringing simultaneously to the fore the visible and the invisible embedded in one figure, the Sphinx. To this end, Cocteau uses a cultural stereotype (the embodiment of the Sphinx by a young innocent-looking girl in white, a stereotype of young virginity); a visual representation of a cultural icon (the Sphinx on its socle, the god of the dead Anubis); a visual familiar metaphor (the light in the sky as suggesting divinity); and visualized concrete antonomasia (Chimera/fleeting fantasy, Nemesis/revengeful woman, Sphinx/mystery). Thus, each transformation of the Sphinx borrows the shape of an easily recognizable figure that brings along cultural connotations that expand the significance of the Sphinx beyond the one suggested by myth. This expansion of significance is initially made possible by the

124 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre use of the fantastic, more precisely by the use of the supernatural provided by myth. Relating the Sphinx to a larger category of fantastic elements, the monster, attains a further expansion of significance. The monster associates two different and apparently contradictory aspects; it blurs the borders between binary categories, between the human and the beast, between the apparent and the concealed, the known and the unknown, the natural and the unnatural, the explicable and the inexplicable. A monster, the Sphinx blurs also the boundaries between the male and the female, as we have seen. Its identity and various manifestations in flux, its physical shape constantly changing, the Sphinx embodies the problematics of visibility, invisibility and identity, as does the monster. The monster is by definition is something to be stared at, yet it is unclassifiable, unknowable, and thereby threatening. A paradigmatic embodiment of the fantastic, the monster is fascinating by the hesitation it generates as to its “reality,” the fear, horror, or repulsion it engenders, and its appeal to be comprehended. As Jan Hokenson remarked, “Those clichés of the fantastic, the monster and the miracle, perhaps enforce our most disturbing engagements with all that lies beyond human reason and comprehension, in both our outer and inner worlds. Writers of such spaces populate them with strange creatures that may defy or charm us but always provoke us to define to them our own humanity.”36 Powerful visual images that pertain to the fantastic realm had been used in Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet, released in 1932: the palm of a hand that fosters a living mouth, a talking statue, a man’s walk in the air. Cinema provided Cocteau with adequate technical possibilities that enabled him to create a fast sweeping and emotionally disturbing flow of images that were impossible to achieve on the stage. Instead of the powerful images provided by The Blood of a Poet, the theatre performance of The Infernal Machine had to dwell on the emotional impact of the monster’s various transformations, the juxtaposition of the human and the nonhuman and the real and the unreal, and the sensorial affect of sound (such as the unseen Voice, the chanting of the Sphinx, the foreign accent of Jocasta, Oedipus’ scream when he becomes temporarily blind, or the drunkard’s song). The opposition between the monster and the human or between the supernatural and the human persists throughout The Infernal Machine as it does in Cocteau’s other nonrealistic plays. The juxtaposition, verbal and visual, of antithetic entities creates a constant state of suspense, tension, and questioning on the part of the reader or spectator. Cocteau’s presentation of characters and actions in his nonrealistic plays does not necessarily obey the rule of cause and effect since most often than not the plot is known

Visibility, Invisibility 125 well in advance. Thus, the expository scene of each play engenders not the question “what will happen next?” but “why”? Why did Orpheus take into his home the horse that he had met on the street, as in Orpheus? Why did King Arthus fall in love with the newly changed Gauvain, as in The Knights of the Round Table? Why did Renaud become enamored of a garden, as in Renaud and Armide? And in The Infernal Machine, why could not Laius’ ghost communicate with Jocasta? The question regularly reemerges at the closing of each of the following three acts. Why did Oedipus not accept the Girl’s suggestion to marry a younger woman (Act II)? Why was Oedipus impervious to all the signs indicative of his parentage (Act III)? And finally, why did Oedipus obstinately persist in his attempt to uncover the monster (Act IV)? To all these questions, there is only one answer: the protagonist did not break through the barrier of sensorial perception, he did not “see,” and therefore he did not know. As Rosemary Jackson has shown, the problematization of the perception/ vision/knowledge of the protagonist, the narrator, and the reader is one of the distinctive marks of the fantastic. The fantastic has therefore to be explored not merely as a literary trope or a psychological escapist solution to existential dilemmas (fantasy), but also as a subversive rhetorical device, as Jackson has established.37 This is especially relevant in Western contemporary culture, where “seeing is believing.” “That which is not seen, or which threatens to be unseeable, can only have a subversive function in relation to an epistemological and metaphysical system which makes ‘I see’ synonymous with ‘I understand.’ ”38 In this context, it is significant to call attention to the subversive and threatening itinerary of the “monster” in The Infernal Machine that moves from visibility to invisibility, from a physically concrete to an immaterial beast, from the easily identifiable to the unidentifiable. The Infernal Machine, in spite and because of its mixture of the comic with the tragic, is essentially a tragedy of nonrecognition that traces not only the itinerary of Oedipus and the rest of its dramatic characters from the visible to the invisible and from ignorance to knowledge but also the itinerary of each human being. Cocteau’s recourse to the fantastic, as well as his juxtaposition or opposition of the fantastic to the “real,” aim to a resolution that is not one, to an explanation that explains nothing but accepts everything. Cocteau’s heroes are not put to death and they do not die unless they take their own life, like Dorian and Jocasta. Cocteau’s is the acceptance of the visible together with the invisible as part of human experience. At the end of The Infernal Machine, Oedipus knows his parentage, knows why he deserves punishment (parricide and incest), but it is doubtful whether he has fuller

126 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre self-knowledge. The doubt or hesitation that, according to Todorov, is an inherent part of the perception of the fantastic, becomes in Cocteau’s hands an integral part of the dialectics of each play, a dialectics that initiates the epistemological process that leads inevitably to one conclusion, the poet’s “truth.” Francis Steegmuller was correct when he observed that Cocteau had a “singular gift for diving truth by means of the fantastic.”39

THEATRE Cocteau’s vision of the fantastic as an integral part of experiential reality did not preclude its use as an epistemological tool. On the contrary, he exploited its recurrence in myth, legend, and folklore, in order to reestablish it as part of contemporary mental setup. To apprehend the perennial existence of the fantastic would lead not only to an expansion of man’s perceptiveness and consciousness, but also to a reexamination of sensorial and logical “reality” and finally to an enhanced well-being, to a savoir vivre. Cocteau’s approach was at once moralistic and messianic. To implement most efficiently his vision, Cocteau needed the theatre, where he skillfully put to use the constant tension between experiential reality and the make-believe.40 To this end, it was essential that his nonrealistic plays, which use fantastic elements, be produced in such a manner that the borders between consensus reality and the fantastic be indiscernible. The reader or spectator’s discovery of the hidden truth, of the invisible beneath the visible, would come as a result of the encounter between the fantastic and the reenacted consensus reality. In his Notes for The Knights of the Round Table, he stipulated: “All elements of the supernatural have to be produced without the slightest negligence and must create the impression of realism.”41 It is within the artificially created “real” world on the stage that Cocteau introduces fantastic elements, easily recognizable as such. He playfully opposes the fantastic to the real and thereby subtly manipulates the reader or spectator into adopting an ironic stance not toward the fantastic but toward the conventional notion of reality. In The Infernal Machine, Cocteau first establishes a realistic setup by showing the soldiers chatting during their night watch, and then blows apart the credibility and the apparent verisimilitude of this scene by introducing the fantastic (or, in his own words, the supernatural), Laius’ ghost. The same strategy recurs in The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray, The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, Orpheus, and The Knights of the Round Table, as well as in his film Beauty and the Beast. As Colette was quick to notice, he playfully mixes the real

Visibility, Invisibility 127 with the unreal. The subversiveness of the fantastic is engendered by the dialectics between the two realms or contexts, the fantastic and the realistic. Cocteau’s purpose is not to reinforce the belief in a parallel world but to dismantle false truths. Years later, in a short essay written in 1947, not very long after his film Beauty and the Beast was out, he touched on the issue of the marvelous in art: They talk much about the marvelous. We have yet to reach an agreement and know what it is. If I had to define it, I would say that it is what drives us away from the limits within which we have to live, it is like a weariness that stretches out and far from that bed where we were born and will die. . . . The marvelous would be . . . not the miracle—disgusting by the disorder that it creates—but the simple human and down-to-earth miracle that consists in bestowing on objects and characters an out of the ordinary quality that cannot be analyzed. As shown by Veermer of Delft. . . . In Vermeer, space is peopled by a world other than the one it represents. The topic of his painting is only a pretext, a vehicle by which the universe of the marvelous is expressed.42

More than painting, theatre—a simulacrum—is the perfect vehicle for such abstract notions like illusion, enchantment and disenchantment, visibility and invisibility. Theatre can use concrete images and enable the spectator to physically and mentally undergo a simulatory experience. Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” prepares the reader or spectator to accept the fictitious on stage as “real,” and the incursion of the fantastic into a realistic discourse is comprehended as part of the fictitious “reality” produced on the stage. This “reality” operates according to a logic of its own, a logic that may or may not be identical to that of the reader or spectator’s experiential or “consensus reality” but is nevertheless accepted by him or her. So, for example, in exacting the creation of “realism” on the stage for The Knights of the Round Table, Cocteau wishes to create in a realistic style the illusion of “consensus reality.” The tension and suspense derive from the information imparted to the audience in the exposition scene, namely that much of the visible is only a deceitful appearance: Gauvain is a false Gauvain (the real Gauvain being kept prisoner while Ginifer the demon borrows his bodily appearance), and the meritorious chaplain is in fact the evil Merlin. The poet creates a fictitious world, a “lie” that speaks the truth—the truth that operates in the reader or spectator’s “consensus reality” and that now becomes visible to him. For the production of The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, Cocteau had used a different strategy. A few realistic objects—a long table, chairs, and costumes—and several common-looking characters were enough to evoke the idea of a

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“reality” that Cocteau was prompt to put to ridicule by the juxtaposition of disruptive fantastic elements (such as the oversize camera) next to the realistic. The truth imparted to the audience was the poet’s truth, his own perception and critique of the visible and the invisible in daily life. To enable the reader or spectator to pierce through the mask of visibility and perceive the poet’s notion of truth beyond the façade of the fable, that easily decipherable narrative, Cocteau employs distantiation techniques and devices. He does not hesitate to force his captive audience to search, question, and challenge sensorial perception. This is why, in all his nonrealistic plays (except Renaud and Armide, in which he created an alternate world), the fantastic is a familiar sign that underwent a certain transformation by means of decontextualization, recontextualization, multiplication, shape alteration, or doubling. Introduced into a realistic discourse, the now altered and often undetermined sign is thus apprehended differently, leaving behind consensus reality as a valid referent and inserting itself into a new discourse, the discourse of the fantastic. Consequently, the insertion of the fantastic element into a realistic framing discourse is not only disruptive but also subversive, because it deflates the logical texture of the realistic discourse, disseminates doubt, and focuses the gaze on those elements—tropes, characters, or elements in space and sound—that produce the “different” discourse by their indeterminacy. The monster is such an element. This strategy—the incursion of the fantastic into a realistic discourse—affects the reader or spectator well beyond the limited duration of the aesthetic experience, raising questions about the role of sensorial perception in the search of truth and essence in daily life. Likewise, conventional notions of time are called into question and a new light is shed on conventional narratives such as myth and legend as well as on clichés and accepted truth. Thus, the fantastic initiates a way of thinking of its own, which reflects on consensus reality and imparts to it a sense of uncertainty and indeterminacy; the different techniques of distantiation aim to initiate a critical approach and a growing awareness of the existence of the fantastic that has yet to be consensually acknowledged. In Cocteau’s nonrealistic plays, the introduction of the fantastic within a realistic discourse is generally accompanied by an ironic distantiating stance, generated by the use of various techniques and devices. As noticed before, Cocteau uses in The Infernal Machine low comedy, parody, pastiche, and camp. These comic devices place the reader or spectator in a judgmental and intellectually superior position, emotionally detached from the character and his ordeals, and distantiation is again generated. In addition, Cocteau achieves distantiation also by alternating scenes where the fantastic

Visibility, Invisibility 129 is present with scenes where it is not. In so doing, he prevents the reader or spectator from losing himself into the dramatic illusion longer than necessary for the understanding of the dramatic situation and its implications, and then carries him away to a sequence or scene that induces him to adopt an ironic stance that reflects on the previous sequence or scene. So, for example, Act I of The Infernal Machine introduces a ghost whose imposing presence is soon dissolved by low comedy and parody and consequently the whole Ghost sequence seems now, by hindsight, ridicule, absurd and improbable, even if menacing. In Act II, the parodical scene of Oedipus as Hercules carrying his spoils has a sobering effect on the reader or spectator who has been emotionally enmeshed by the scene between the Sphinx and Oedipus. The expressionistic Act III ends with a drunkard’s mocking song and Jocasta’s comic-pathetic gestures in front of the mirror, a down-to-earth finale to a nightmarish—literally and metaphorically—whole dramatic sequence. The realistic Act IV ends with the blind Oedipus leaving the stage in the company of Antigone and Jocasta’s ghost which, unlike the former ghost, no one among the characters but Oedipus can see. The doubt is therefore raised as to this ghost’s being a “real” ghost or only a hallucination: is Oedipus now talking to Jocasta’s ghost or has he gone mad? The reader or spectator cannot help but wonder and reflect on the protagonist’s end and therefore catharsis is precluded. As Patrick Murphy observes, the fantastic in the theatre “introduces not only a defamiliarization at the ontological level but also an epistemological self-doubt that thwarts a convenient catharsis in the final act.”43 Another stratagem that enhances the ironic stance and generates distantiation in The Infernal Machine is the literalization, by personification or reification, of figures of speech—a stratagem already employed in The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower and which is most effectively achieved on the stage, given the poetic credibility of the characters. This is how the Matron tells the Girl in White about her sister-in-law’s infidelity: one night, her brother woke up in bed and found at his side his wife’s body with no head and no entrails. Sans entrailles (with no entrails, with no insides) is a French cliché for the heartless; in other words, the brother found in his bed his wife but her mind and heart were elsewhere. After much ado, he let her head and entrails get back into the body—that is, he forgave her.44 The Matron’s literal reading of the incident turns this short narrative into a comic sequence, accompanied by the right intonation and gestures, and throws an ironic light on all three, the Matron, her brother and her sister-in-law. The literalization of the cliché, even if verbally conveyed, prompts the reader or spectator to adopt the judgmental distantiation intended by the playwright.

130 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre The literalization of the cliché sheds an ironic light on the fantastic element invoked as well, the vampire, and raises a doubt as to its “real” or metaphorical existence. Likewise, it also raises questions concerning the seen and the unseen as indicators of one’s “true” identity. The issues of visibility and invisibility are constantly raised in The Infernal Machine and their role in constructing the notion of identity is dealt with by verbal and/or visual discourse. For Cocteau, identity is one, but its manifestations—in today’s terms, genetic, sexual, generic, social, moral identities—are diverse and often fluid. As seen, there is no certainty about the sexual identity of the two soldiers on the city wall, the Sphinx, or Tiresias. The shape-shifting Sphinx has to be reminded by Anubis of its identity—Nemesis, the goddess of revenge—because Nemesis adopts the physical and mental attributes of each figure she inhabits. Jocasta, the mature queen, ignores her social standing as well as her genetic identity; all manifestations of her identity are shaped by her sexual drives. Still, there is a hidden aspect of her identity which she betrays again and again, that of the guilty mother. She will be able to assume and expose her maternal feelings only after death. As for Oedipus, the whole narrative illustrates his flight from a genetic identity he refuses to assume; his sexual identity is left in a limbo because he does not succumb to the charms of the Girl in White or to those of the queen matron. One common feature binds these characters together, as we have seen: they are monsters, exemplars of nonnormative sexuality. The recurrence of the monster (as a figure of speech or as a dramatic character) in The Infernal Machine does not help to elucidate any mysterious or deviant conduct but establishes an apparently immutable fact: monsters, metaphorical or not, do exist. As a given fact, the monsters leave behind the realm of the fantastic and enter “real” life, consensus reality. Furthermore, they do not live on the outskirts of humanity but are part of it, made of flesh and blood, and looking like any other man or woman. Except for the fact that the act of “looking,” of physiological vision and perception exerted by ordinary people, is incapable of recognizing them as such because, as Cocteau shows, all (adults) are monsters. Thus, from a trope belonging to the fantastic realm and used for rhetorical ends, the monster has become a visual entity in its own right and an integral part of experiential reality. The audience sees the monster and it looks like you and me. The interaction of movement (gestures and action), the actor’s physicality, costume, settings, props, sound, and lighting, affects the audience and engenders associations and connotations that sometimes go well beyond those engendered by the written text, controlling and directing audience response. So, for example, Laius’ ghost at the beginning of The Infernal

Visibility, Invisibility 131 Machine: the audience sees only its gapping and silent mouth, a horrifying image (that would later recur in Beckett’s play Not I). The action takes place on an elevated platform that centers the gaze and engenders a double distantiation, since the action unfolding on it is now doubly remote from the audience. The appearance of the ghost marks the intrusion of the supernatural into the reenacted realm of the possible and the interaction between this world and the Other World. This Other World is different from the world of dreams, about which we have the certitude that it is total fiction (in terms of phenomenological experience) although it is psychologically real. This Other World is now made visible, raising doubts, erasing certitudes, and stirring questions. An abstract concept has been materialized, stirring emotions or laughs but leaving no one in the audience uninvolved. Later on, in Act II, the sudden glimpse of the Chimera ruins in The Infernal Machine topped by the head and upper body of the Girl in White, introduces a swift change in the audience’s hitherto slightly suspicious but kind attitude to the Girl in White. Anubis’ hyena head that, in the 1934 production, looked hideous, ferocious, and repulsive engenders a different emotional attitude from that of the somewhat benign god of the dead suggested by the written text. The visualized Anubis is not to be dismissed and his reappearance in the royal bedroom in the form of an animal hide that serves as a carpet is a constant visual reminder of the fate of the mythological Oedipus. Beside the discourse generated by the characters’ interaction, the gestures, sounds, settings, lighting, and accessories generate separate, parallel, and complementary discourses. Together and apart, successively or simultaneously, they deal with the general theme of visibility, invisibility, and the notion of identity. Thus, Oedipus’ violent gesture toward Tiresias immediately brings to mind the violence he had exerted on Laius and foretells the violence he will exert on his own body. Likewise, the ruins of the Chimera impose a symbolic logic of their own, separate from the written and spoken text but going hand in hand with Cocteau’s reading of the Oedipus myth. Seen by the audience, the ruins of the Chimera bring to mind the conventional representation of the Sphinx; they therefore mark the visible territory of the Sphinx, while the route divides this territory from that of the Thebans (unseen on stage). The Matron and her children are passersby and have no intention of trespassing. Oedipus, on the contrary, is not a passerby; he is an intruder, a man who intends to enter the Sphinx’s territory and destroy its landlord. By ancestral rules, such an act of war would make this territory his. However, since Oedipus’ victory is a false victory, a chimera (he did not solve the riddle!), he will not hold any

132 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre power nor is he entitled to any claim over this territory. The landlord of this territory (which is also the realm of the supernatural) will take revenge on anyone who presumes to trespass. This is an age-old rule, where a territory is protected by the exercise of violence. Not only does Oedipus presume to have conquered the Sphinx’s territory on false pretenses but one of his possessions has also crossed the borders between the two realms, the two territories. This is Oedipus’ belt: it passes from his hands to those of the Girl in White, who is in essence the Sphinx, the human representation of the monstrous Nemesis. In Act III, the belt is returned to Oedipus. For him, as for the audience who believes in this make-believe, the belt is now a concrete sign that the Other World, the world of the dead and of the supernatural, not only exists but also intrudes into that of the living. Belonging now to the Sphinx, a supernatural being, the belt that was initially a token of good will becomes now a threatening weapon. Because of the semiotization of space (settings and props) by the audience as a result of the visual discourse engendered by space, the belt signifies now that the man who presumed to trespass into the Other World and yet stay alive will meet his doom. This discourse, engendered by visual signs, is at work on the stage and during the performance and can be subliminally apprehended by the spectator, simultaneously with the other discourse(s) generated by the proxemics and the spoken (and audially perceived) text. Sinister and disturbing is also the short silent sequence (produced by gesture and a prop) of Jocasta and the mirror at the end of Act III, with its own web of significations. Facing the audience, Jocasta is holding in her hands the empty frame of a mirror; she is supposedly looking at her own reflection in the mirror. It is now that the invisible truth is made visible: not only is Jocasta looking literally in the void but she is looking at a void, as if she does not exist. Indeed, she does not want to see herself, to accept herself as Oedipus’ mother. Instead, she sees only the empty (because of her denial) and soulless appearance of an aging lustful matron and the reaction of others (the audience whom she faces) at this pathetic appearance. The mirror, which in Cocteau’s Orpheus was the gate to the Other World, the world of the dead, is now the gate to nothingness. Without accepting her true identity (in this case, genetic identity), Jocasta does not exist. As is well known, of all the multiple simultaneous discourses in theatre, the most powerful is the visual and audial discourse generated by the actor. The actor not only makes the written word come alive and carries it to the audience but he or she also impregnates it with his or her own personality. The physicality of actors—their body and movement, their voice and inflections of voice—is the most important factor in the communicative

Visibility, Invisibility 133 process initiated between the stage and the audience and physiologically affects the spectator.45 Cocteau excelled in exploiting the many possibilities that theatre, with its effective apparatus, put at his disposal. He created a diversified and sometimes unequal “poetry of theatre” that baffled and annoyed his critics. The variety of pieces that he wrote for the theatre (some of them he directed), the various dramatic genres, strategies and techniques he employed, as well as his varying target audience, call to mind the rich experimentation with genres and production techniques that the symbolist theatre carried out in Paris at the beginning of the 1890s. Before The Infernal Machine, Cocteau had written scenarios for ballets such as The Blue God (1912), Parade (1917), or The Blue Train (1924) and, as Charles R. Batson reveals, he was not only present at the rehearsals but also imposed on them his own views about the choreographic scores.46 In theatre, he adapted for the stage Sophocles’ Antigone (1922), Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julia (Romeo et Juliette) (1924), and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos; he had written the libretto for the oratorio Oedipus Rex, as well as such widely different pieces as The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, the tragedy (his definition) Orpheus, and the melodramatic The Human Voice. After The Infernal Machine, which he simply called “a play in four acts,” came The Knights of the Round Table and, among others, the realistic Intimate Relations, the “tragedy” Renaud and Armide, the melodrama The Eagle with Two Heads, and the historical drama Bacchus. He designed the settings and costumes for Feydeau’s La Main Passe (Hand Pass) (1941), as he did for Georges Auric’s opera Phedra in 1950 and for Poulenc’s The Human Voice in 1959, both of which he also directed. In all his endeavors for the stage, Cocteau did not hesitate to use techniques and devices borrowed from Dada, expressionism, surrealism, film, ballet, circus, the music hall and the boulevard theatre, disregarding generic canons and blurring the boundaries between high and low culture.47 This is how he put to test ideas concerning not only representation but also communication with that perennial partner of the theatre, the audience. Cocteau knew his audience, its predilections, and its foibles. In the preface to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, he wrote: The secret of theatre, which needs a fast victory, is to set a trap thanks to which part of the audience amuses itself at the gates so that the other part may take a seat inside. Shakespeare, Molière, the profound Chaplin, know it. . . . The public comes to the theatre to relax. It is shrewd to amuse him, to show him the jumping jack and the sweets that let us dispense a medicine to the unruly children. Once the medicine is swallowed, we will pass on to other drills.48

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This is how he expected to create a proper state of perceptivity. Spectacle had an important role in this battle and so had humor and emotion. Once captivated, the audience would be ready to apprehend the deeper meanings imbedded in the theatrical work, be it the written or the performed text. However, the trap of The Infernal Machine was so dazzling that the deeper layer of the fable went unnoticed. Maybe the medicine was too subversive and the plea for tolerance untimely. As Cocteau correctly perceived, his concept of the theatre was shared by the greatest of playwrights as it was by his friend Charlie Chaplin, whose artistry was deeply rooted in the performing arts. A theatre to amuse and instruct has been both a goal and a hope. Though, there is no absolute assurance that this goal may ever be achieved in fullness—not because of the artist’s lack of ability but because of the spectator’s part in the theatrical endeavor. Like the actor’s paradox, to which Denis Diderot drew attention long ago, it is the spectator’s paradox that on one hand enables the existence of the theatrical play while, on the other hand, obstructs it. Like the actor, the spectator is part of the aesthetic game and yet out of it. Bringing along the emotionally, intellectually, and physiologically accumulated product of his lifelong experience, the spectator undergoes an experience initiated by a simulatory process which, according to the rules of the (theatrical) game, is not supposed to have any harmful repercussions on his or her daily life. For this reason, and in spite of the explicit or implicit intentions of the artist (or performer), the spectator’s awareness of the simulatory yet real aspect of the game may, constantly or intermittently, surface. Distantiation strategies and stratagems, Brechtian before Brecht, reinforce this newly created emotional and intellectual state of double awareness. In this state, the spectator is affectively and cognitively involved in the newly created reality, while he or she is also conscious of its simulatory aspect. There is no safe promise that the artist’s “truth” may be apprehended as “valid” not only within the simulated one but also in daily life (or consensus reality). In its best moments, the spectator’s aesthetic experience is a transcendental experience, in the sense that it offers him or her an experience of the past, the present, or the future; an experience of probable and improbable states that cannot be lived through in daily life, while keeping him or her immune and unharmed. Theatre functions as a means of exploring the unknown by means of a substitute, the actor. For this reason, in an era of popular television reality programs, the realistic theatre loses its edge and the postmodernist theatre, because of its recourse to the fantastic and the simulatory opportunity it offers to transcend reality, is slowly taking over the mainstream stage.

Visibility, Invisibility 135 For the artist who is conscious of the spectator’s paradox and yet is adamant to convey his vision of reality and to unravel the invisible that lies beneath the luring appearance of the accessible, theatre offers also another promise. A social institution, theatre provides a collective experience both on the stage and in the auditorium. As such, theatre consecrates the gathering of theatergoers and performers within one delimited space and provides the performance with the legitimizing stamp of the social body. “Standing in and authorization is the essential theatrical theme,” as Bruce Wilshire has so aptly observed.49 The bond between the audience and the stage is one of complicity, a bond based on the physical presence and emotional impact of the actor. After many years of experience in the theatre, this is how Cocteau asserted and explained the superiority of the theatrical experience over the cinematic: At the theatre, the spectators, shoulder to shoulder, unfurl a wave that bathes the stage and comes back much richer as long as the actors are moved by the feelings they simulate and don’t content themselves with copying them like monkeys, in which case it would prevent the flow back.50

This bond is as much emotional as physical and it links together, in one bloc, spectators and actors. The theatre artist, particularly the playwright, needs the bond and the complicity between the stage and the audience as among the theatergoers themselves. He or she needs the legitimization of the social body not only because it reassures each and one of the audience members of the legitimate validity of their response and thereby facilitates it but mainly because the theatre artist has a vested interest. The performance is meant to carry emotive and ideological contents that are of outmost importance for him or her. Long after the first production of The Infernal Machine and long after the Stonewall riots that marked a turning point in the history of gay liberation, Alan Sinfield commented: Theater is one of the most provocative spaces that might be claimed for a homosexual presence. It is a place of assembly, and things said and done there gain the legitimacy that always accompanies unchallenged presentation in public. They are allowed aloud. That is why theater has often attracted state attention— both promotion and censorship. At the same time, theater is understood in our cultures, in the main, as a place of personal self-making where plays are experienced and tested for emotional reality by authors individually.51

The collective validation is perceived by artists as the validation of themselves, of their identity, and of what they represent.

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Theatre provided a much-needed validation to Cocteau’s argument in The Infernal Machine, in spite of the different and diverging contemporary readings. This was the validation of the outsider, the monster, the homosexual, and the bisexual, and the validation of all nonnormative sexuality that Cocteau made visible by the use of the fantastic and the monstrous mythic figure of Oedipus who, as Cocteau claims at the end of The Infernal Machine, belongs to the realm of the poets (implicitly not to that of the doctors). This validation brought to the fore the subversive proposition, read or unread, that sexuality turns everyone into a monster, part beast and part human—an ironical validation if there was one, given that the theatre performance is ephemeral and noncommittal. However, this was the only validation that such monsters could obtain in France in the early 1930s.52

8. Ethics, Alterity, and Designed Emotion

T

he monster is rarely visualized on contemporary stage and, when encountered, it usually comes as a verbal representation, a trope. On the other hand, the monster is highly visible on the screen, both in film and television. In addition to the monsters of yore, new ones engendered by modern technology have come into being and they too have animated the screen rather than the stage. The robot, born in 1921 into the theatre in Karel Cˇapek’s R. U. R, was quickly adopted by the film industry where it has been a star ever since Metropolis (1926), a serious rival of King Kong’s offspring as well as of the more recent ETs. The last thirty years have seen the fantastic and with it the figure of the monster in various shapes invading and colonizing the screen. Mythological and folkloristic monsters, such as dragons, flying animals, supernatural humans or vampires, capture our attention along with such figures of awe as mutants, robots, or aliens. The film trilogy Star Wars, like Mars Attack! and Batman Returns, has been watched by millions in numerous countries, and so have television series such as Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Outer Limits, The Invaders, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, or Star Trek, to name but a few. Literature has profited from the propagation of the fantastic on the screen and the works of Tolkien, Rowling, or Philip Pullman have been successfully translated and marketed to millions of readers all over the world. Hand in hand with the spread of the fantastic in popular culture, teratology and vampirology have become favorite topics among scholars and so has the research of the fantastic in the arts.1 José B. Monleón offers an interesting psychological and sociological insight into the every-growing popularity of the fantastic. “As social production, the fantastic articulated apprehensions that were deeply attached to the specific characteristics of capitalist society,” he writes. “The perception of monstrosity had significant correlations with the way in which dominant cultures defined and redefined its political and economic supremacy, and depended upon the

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concrete forms of class struggle. On the one hand, the fantastic ‘reflected’ very real threats; on the other hand, it created a space in which those threats could be transformed into ‘supernaturalism’ and monstrosity, thus helping to reshape the philosophical premises that sustained the fantastic and effectively reorient the course of social evolution.”2 Monléon’s Marxist approach suggests an essentially cathartic explanation for locally limited manifestations of the fantastic in popular culture. Moreover, given that the fantastic has been psychologically and sociologically approached as embodying the Other, and because it is now widely accepted that the fantastic functions as an objectivization of “real threats,” Monléon’s argument is far-reaching. Responding to an initial and vital emotional need, the monster is still a constant in contemporary art and cultures—even if its representation has changed during the ages. The expanding communication technologies (television, cinema, cell phones, the Internet, and radio) have turned into common knowledge the increasing recurrence of the fantastic in arts as in popular culture—a recurrence unchecked by existing ideologies. Not only has this large-scale recurrence legitimized the incursion of the fantastic but it has also engendered a dynamics of its own, further spurring its growth. More and more representations of the fantastic (including science fiction) and the monster in the arts and popular culture catch the attention of the general public, and the number of movies and television films and series, comic books, and literary works where the fantastic is an active agent is steadily growing all over the world. This global spread of the fantastic in popular culture, even stronger since the 1990s, goes hand in hand with the global spreading of violence, when small- and large-scale violent acts attempt to offer an immediate solution to political, ethnic, and national conflicts. Within the worldwide emotional context in which cinema and television now operate—their commercial ads in the press, on the screen, and on the streets explicitly appeal to the public’s emotions—the greatest majority of works having a monster among its actants demonstrate that the monster, literal of metaphorical, can be tamed if not destroyed. This goes for the fantastic in literature also. Now as in the past, the fantastic offers a symbolic site for the perennial combat between good and evil and, at the same time, it advocates behavioral rules. The fantastic has never ceased to serve as a cathartic, epistemological, and didactic tool. But unlike other rhetorical devices, it is the widely and deeply reaching emotive potency of the fantastic that turns it into an exceptionally effective one, especially in theatre. Cocteau’s monster in The Infernal Machine is only one example among many.

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THE FANTASTIC ON THE STAGE Angels, ghosts, devils and fairies, gods and goddesses, magic and miracles, doubles, witches and wizards, and monsters and supernatural beings have peopled the stage for thousands of years. Their relatively recent massive migration to bidimensional media can be credited only to developing technologies that have allowed for a far greater accessibility than ever before. In terms of theatre history, it was not so long ago that Goethe’s Faust offered its audience a vision of Heaven, complete with God, angels, and Mephistopheles. If performed according to Goethe’s specifications in the written text, the audience may actually see how, in a high vaulted Gothic chamber, a spirit appears to Faust in a red flame. In another scene, which takes place at the gate of the town, a black dog—often associated in folklore with witchcraft, death, and the devil—approaches him, and leaves behind a line of fire.3 Following him to his study, where Faust had conversed with spirits (unseen but heard by the audience), the black dog undergoes a series of strange transformations and finally turns into a traveling scholar who is in fact Mephistopheles. Later on, Mephistopheles’ mantle serves as a flying carpet that would carry him and Faust to foreign places. Not last among this spectacular series of scenes that bewilder the audience is the scene in Leipzig: in Auerbach’s cellar, Mephistopheles draws wine out of plain-looking tavern tables. Further on, in the witch’s kitchen, talking monkeys act as her assistants and magical acts take place; Faust perceives in the mirror not his own reflection but the image of an unknown young woman with whom he instantly falls in love and whom he will soon meet; the witch comes in through the chimney in a halo of flames and Faust enters a magic circle and drinks a magic potion that would rejuvenate him. All this fantastic paraphernalia is only the preamble to Faust’s metamorphosis from an old to a young man; later on, more spirits, fairies, witches, and figures from the Other World will continue to interfere with the human world represented onstage, blurring the divide between the two. That the fantastic is an integral part of experiential reality and has a direct bearing on it is explicitly pointed out to the reader or spectator by Mephistopheles’ question as to the source of Gretchen’s downfall: who is the real culprit, he asks, is it he or Faust? Critics have long argued that Mephistopheles is Faust’s double, an elusive double, cynical, dark and evil, as shown in the scene where, having put on Faust’s cap, Mephistopheles impersonates him. But who is the “real” Faust, is he the ascetic scholar who undergoes a change initiated by Mephistopheles, or is the Devil the rationale for Faust’s uncovering of his secret self? Is Faust a

140 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre Mephistopheles manqué who, having regained physical vigor, finally lives out his potential for doing evil? Is a potent younger body a source of evil? Is evil embedded in the body or is it in the soul? Is evil self-generated or is it inspired by an external agent? These questions, put forth by the use of one specific fantastic element, metamorphosis (rejuvenation), pertain to ethics as well as to philosophy, religion, and psychobiology and concern that often indefinable but composite entity to which Goethe and his contemporaries referred as “man” and which has lately been dismembered at wish: identity. For more than twenty years did Goethe work on Faust (Part I) and, finding no definite answer to these questions, he transposed his hero to an imaginary heaven—another fantastic element—in a sequel to the play, Faust (Part II). It is only within this explicitly illusory realm, heaven, that the power of Faust’s double is annihilated and good triumphs over evil. By using the fantastic motif of the double, Goethe not only personified two abstract encompassing notions but also brought forth and took advantage of the emotional connotations of the satanic figure, Mephistopheles. Furthermore, Goethe astutely employed to rhetorical ends the threatening feeling of uneasiness and uncanniness evoked by the notion of the double. Finally, by relocating Faust to a fantastic site in Part II, Goethe formulated his own doubt about the probability of a conclusion that he himself had proposed as an ending to his philosophical meditation: the grip of evil can be avoided only in an imaginary realm, heaven. A fantastic reading of a play does not exclude a poetic reading, where the fantastic as a trope denotes the invisible, the hidden, the forbidden, and the nonacknowledgeable. On the contrary, the fantastic reading incorporates and assimilates this signification. While the poetic reading emphasizes the representative function of a trope and dwells on its semiotic value, the fantastic reading shifts the focus from the semiotic and rhetoric function of the trope to its literalness as an inexplicable entity whose emotional impact is part of experiential reality. The fantastic reading acknowledges the nonreal or the impossible as part of existential reality and thereby reinstates and legitimizes its emotional impact as well as its challenge on consensus reality. The emotional affect of a rose as a simile is different from that of the angel, as that of a vampire from that of a villain. Indeed, the use of the fantastic on the stage, in the past as in the present, offers an entertaining and beguiling spectacle because of the ever-evolving theatre techniques and devices.4 But when the awe and wonder subside, the epistemological process engendered by the use of the fantastic elements lingers on long after the spectacle has ceased, because this process is enhanced by the emotional impact of the fantastic.

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It is precisely this composite impact of the fantastic element—an emotional potency that induces and spurs reflection and questioning, and thereby unsettles accepted truths—which has prompted playwrights to use it repeatedly. By using fantastic elements that the audience can easily recognize, the playwright immediately establishes an emotional link between the audience and the fantastic on the stage. So did Goethe in Faust (Part I and Part II). If few of the ghosts that peopled eighteenth-century gothic drama survived into the nineteenth, other fantastic legendary figures of awe took their place, such as the man-made humanoid and the vampire. First appealing to the wider public from the pages of a book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was adapted for the stage shortly after its publication and so would Bram Stoker’s Dracula be.5 The man-made monster and the vampire, a hybrid creature, have never ceased to draw large audiences. Both represent man’s fascinating and frightening double. However, their survival into the arts and popular culture is due not to their rhetorical function as a trope but to their emotional and cognitive impact as autonomous entities. While the list of modern playwrights who invoke not the monster in particular but other fantastic elements may be short, it still is impressive, if we consider that realism as a style has long been the staple of mainstream theatre. Linked as it is not only to the coming into power of the bourgeoisie but also to the ever-growing bearing of scientific findings and positivism on everyday life, realism in theatre has offered a restructuring of daily experience that embraces and reflects the norms of its audience while emphasizing the preeminence of directly observed data over the (as yet) improbable.6 To escape the narrow embrace of realism, playwrights have not refrained from using fantastic elements, since they uncover those experiential realms that science and reason have not yet learnt to decode. The effect of the use of the fantastic element depends on the narrative frame. In a fantasy, where framing verbal, visual, or audial formulas establish from the very beginning that the operating rules differ from those in consensus reality and create a coherent self-contained world, an alternate world, the reader or spectator is directed to approach the narrative as an allegory. That is, in a fantasy the emotional hold of the fantastic on its perceiver is mitigated by the explicit imaginary framework, as it is the case with Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. When the fantastic element is used within a fully, partially, or minimally realistic framework that is aimed at mirroring consensual reality, the fantastic creates an explicit discursive conflict. This is when the emotional potency of the fantastic becomes most powerful, intriguing, and effective. Among the nineteenth-century playwrights acclaimed for their realistic oeuvre, both Ibsen and Strindberg used elements pertaining

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to the fantastic in some of their plays. In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867), for instance, the eponymous hero encounters trolls that draw him into their world. Escaping their hold, Peer Gynt will keep the tail that marks him as different from other humans: he is now apparently part-human and part-troll, a monster. Unlike the trolls, who are acknowledged by popular culture as supernatural beings that belong to an alternate world, the transformed young Peer might or might not belong to “real” life, since in “real” life a tail can easily be hidden from human sight. The doubt as to his existence as a hybrid creature persists: is Peer an imaginary being? Is he a human? The doubt concerning Peer’s identity as a human or a troll casts its shadow over the trolls themselves: are they “real” or not? Furthermore, another disconcerting question is now raised: how is the reader or spectator to distinguish between such creatures and “normal” humans in real life? As in Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, metamorphosis and the monster, recurrent motifs of the fantastic, draw yet again attention to the problem of visibility, invisibility, and identity. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, Peer’s transformation informs not about the satanic but about the beastlike component in man’s mental makeup. Both transformations—Faust’s and Peer’s—raise a doubt concerning the “true” identity of the hero and generate a feeling of threat, the threat of the unknown in everyday, experiential life. Later on, in Little Eyolf (1894), Ibsen would use the emotional impact of fantastic elements to raise questions concerning not only the commonly accepted notion of identity but also that of moral responsibility. In this play, Ibsen sets up two parallel realms: the one offered to the view realistically, the other invisible and mysterious in its physical manifestations. Drawing on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Ibsen introduces here two fantastic elements: the Rat Woman, who lures the unwanted rodents into the sea and has an inexplicable and fatal power over a child, and her equally foreboding helper, a dog whose broad black snout protrudes out of a black bag. Both the woman and the animal are portents of death. Ironically, Ibsen’s power over his reader or spectator is not unlike that of the Rat Woman over the rodents, for the playwright masterfully leads his audience to the apparently inevitable conclusion. A poetic reading of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf will apprehend Eyolf as a metaphoric construct that mirrors the flawed relationship of his parents: the little Eyolf, a crippled child, is drawn to the sea and drowns, and his untimely death leads his parents to self-discovery. The death of an endearing, innocent, and crippled child (the melodrama victim par excellence) does not fail to stir pity. Still, it is the fantastic that endows the narrative with its undeniable emotive intensity: the pity felt

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for the crippled child is engulfed by a stronger, inescapable emotion: the immediate threat of the unseen. To understand the full import of Ibsen’s use of the fantastic not only as a signifier but also as a feeling-inducing factor that manipulates audience response—much like pure color operates on its perceiver—we have to understand the emotional impact of the uncanny, that state of feeling that often precedes or accompanies the fantastic on the stage. In Little Eyolf, the uncanny takes slowly hold of the audience soon after the beginning of Act I, when Eyolf alludes to the Rat Woman, before she enters the stage, as to a possible werewolf. The feeling of the uncanny is enhanced first by her physical appearance, which reminds of an old hag, then by Eyolf ’s cry of horror at the sight of the dog’s head, a startling cry that inevitably affects the audience. Eyolf ’s fear swiftly turns into an irrepressible fascination and he touches the black bag where the dog with the black snout lies. In folklore, to touch a black dog is to die, and it is by Eyolf ’s gesture that this piece of information is subliminally conveyed to the audience.7 By now, the uncanny, so minutely devised, has taken hold of the audience and is further intensified when Eyolf furtively leaves the stage. His leaving is interpreted, both by the characters onstage and by the audience, as an ominous sign. Onstage, within the already emotionally charged atmosphere where personal guilt, old grudges, and unspoken fears are magnified, the characters construe Eyolf ’s death as a long-due punishment. The audience, on the other hand, has been emotionally prepared by the uncanny and falls easily prey to the following apparently inevitable (but illogical!) conclusion: Eyolf has been lured to his death by the Rat Woman. She was the one who guessed and fulfilled his parents’ secret wish to see him disappear from their sight, or so is the reader or spectator compelled to believe. If Ibsen wished his audience to recognize the binding and blinding power of instinct and emotions, he needed not the workings of reason but those of the uncanny and the fantastic, which stir in their turn feelings that inevitably lead the reader or spectator to the anticipated conclusion. Moreover, since this conclusion is the fruit of strongly felt emotions, its bearing on everyday life may last longer than the workings of the mind and, under the scrutiny of logical thinking, they will raise questions pertaining not only to ethics but to one’s identity, drives, and motivations. Strindberg used the fantastic to the same effect as Ibsen. So, for example, in his Ghost Sonata (1907), the Cook is a vampire, the Student is a Sunday child who possesses the gift of seeing the unseen, the Milkmaid is a ghost, and the identity of several other characters is either shape-shifting or undetermined. Here again the stage serves as the locus for the exploration of the

144 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre complex issue of visibility, invisibility, and identity, an issue personified in all its complexity by the protagonist, the Student, a fantastic figure, as well as by the other characters. It is through the Student’s eyes that the audience is able to detect and unravel the deeply hidden reality beneath appearances and perceive what the ordinary naked eye cannot. However, doubt persists as to the identity of the Student, who is presented from the very beginning as endowed with a supernatural gift and the theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity is embodied by characters such as the Milkmaid, the Old Man, the Cook, or the Mummy. The uncanny is visually introduced by a realistically represented house where the Student finds love and the supernatural is at work, and by the mysterious figure of the Old Man in the wheelchair/chariot. Unlike Ibsen’s minimalist Little Eyolf, in which the playwright focuses the audience gaze on one locus and a few characters in order to intensify the audience’s emotional experience, Strindberg brings in a plethora of fantastic elements to indicate that the fantastic is pervasive in everyday life. Although the emotional potency of the fantastic elements may be lost when the play is read, it comes to life and reaches its full effectiveness in performance, when the concrete presence of the Old Man and the physicality of the house’s interior affect the spectator, stirring feelings of uneasiness and fear and building up the ambience of increasing anxiety. Nor do these feelings subside at the end of the play, when doubt is raised as to the sanity of the Student who unmasks deceit at the price of his beloved’s death. The death scene takes place in her room. To display the transient nature of human experience and life in general, the scene ends by having the room disappear; the stage stays empty, while Böcklin’s painting The Island of the Dead fills the background. Only theatre could provide Strindberg with the adequate technical means of steering his audience into the proper state of mind and feeling, a state enhanced according to the stage directions by a “soft music, calm and gently melancholic.”8 And only theatre, with its compelling power of creating illusion and unmasking it, could render so concretely poignant the fleeting moments of joy and the pervasiveness of death and emptiness in the scene that ends the play. Other instances of the emotional and epistemological workings of the fantastic in theatre were offered by the symbolist playwrights and those who followed in their wake (and Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata is certainly a case in point). One example is offered by Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles (1894), in which the unseen figure of the merciless queen—ageless, eternal, and ever-growing in size—enables the playwright to raise the feelings of fear, horror, and helplessness that are often linked to an imminent death. The theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity is present in the construct

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of the fantastic figure of the queen. Yet again, through the melodramatic use of the figure of an innocent child as a victim, the play succeeds in making tangible not only the threat and immediacy of unexplained and unexplainable death but also in deeply affecting the reader as well as the spectator.9 Another range of feelings is engendered by the fantastic in Paul Claudel’s The Tidings Brought to Mary (1910). Though this poetic play is seldom performed, it masterfully blends together Christian and folkloric sources to create a narrative in which the fantastic is at play. Violaine, a virgin whose love and self-sacrifice turn her into an exemplar of the Christian saint, touches the hand of a leper. Suffering from leprosy after this act, blind and in seclusion, she receives the visit of her sister, Mara. Mara’s baby girl has just died and she brings it to Violaine. Violaine holds the dead body of the baby close to her chest and the infant comes to life, with drops of milk on her lips; the color of her eyes has turned to blue, like Violaine’s eyes. Eyes are commonly considered in popular culture as the mirror of the soul and Claudel uses this connotation to imply that the infant has inherited the eyes and soul of the one who gave it new life. The “newly reborn” infant has miraculously transformed into the child that Violaine never bore to the man she had loved and given up for her sister’s sake. The act of metamorphosis simultaneously operates on two inseparable levels, affection and cognition. On one hand, the visualized act stirs up feelings of awe and wonder; on the other hand, the emotion felt by the reader or spectator induces the apparently inescapable conclusion that saintliness and love can work miracles. What is more, a cathartic feeling of relief and joy is imparted with the resuscitation of the child, who is the paradigmatic innocent victim of melodrama. So is the feeling that justice has been finally done, for Violaine too is a victim. She is the beautiful and innocent young heroine, so often encountered in melodrama, a wronged creature suffering for no evil of her doing. But if these melodramatic devices (the wronged woman and the death of an innocent child) still work today, it is because Claudel, like Ibsen, invoked the supernatural. By staging the act of resuscitation—a fantastic element—Claudel touches one of the most sensitive chores of human existence, mortality and man’s innate fear of mortality. It is by means of this artful manipulation of audience reception that Claudel stirs the emotions of his audience while he simultaneously succeeds not only in conveying Christian values but also in raising questions about the bonds of flesh and the bonds of spiritual love. Moreover, he also questions the role of the visible (biology) and the invisible (spiritual parenthood and love) in each construct of identity: whose child is the infant with the blue eyes, Violaine’s or Mara’s?

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Within a carefully constructed realistic narrative frame, playwrights introduce the fantastic elements in order to explore issues pertaining not to the imaginary but to consensus reality. So did Yeats in his Noh plays and so do many of the playwrights that have by now become our classics. Ansky’s The Dybbuk (1914), Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), The Public (1933), and After Five Years (1934); Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1958), Macbett (1972), and Amedeus or How to Get Rid of Him (1954); Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961)— these are but a few of the plays in which the fantastic is at work. They are now part of the repertory of established theatres all over the world, as are Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1957) and Camino Real (1953), Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-doodle Dandy (1949),10 Albee’s Tiny Alice (1964) or Seascape (1975), Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers (1965), Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979), August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987), Michael Harding’s Hubert Murray’s Widow (1993), Tom Mac Intyre’s Sheep’s Milk on the Boil (1994), and, of course, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992).11 Nor have directors refrained from transferring fantastic literary works to the stage—as did Steven Berkoff with Kafka’s Metamorphosis in1969. Robert Wilson’s original piece Deafman Glance (1970) incorporated features proper to the fantastic mode, such as the condensation and expansion of time and decontextualization, and thereby changed forever not only the perception of time and space of its audience but also inspired other artists, such as Julie Taymor and Theodora Skipitares, who inherited his subversive approach to the art and craft of the theatre. During the past few decades, the fantastic has been more frequently used in operatic productions than in theatre, as for example in the pop opera The Black Rider at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1993 or The Tales of Hoffmann at the Palais Omnisports de Bercy in Paris in 2004. First baffling their audiences, they visually please critics and audiences alike. Musicals, inspired by popular culture that has accustomed the viewers to the old/new nonrealistic mode, have as well integrated fantastic elements in their productions. This is how, for example, audiences in San Diego in London in 1997 could enjoy meeting the Devil in the person of the well-known comedian Jerry Lewis in Damn Yankees. While the use of music in opera and musicals openly proclaims the fictionality of this medium and facilitates the use of the fantastic as a component of the encoded discourse, the case is different in spoken theatre. In the latter, in spite of the spectator’s willing suspension of disbelief, the spoken text enhances the mimetic aspect of the performance and consequently the similarity between the spectator’s empirical reality and the fictive

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mimetic reality of the perceived object (the performance or the written text) is hauntingly disturbing. Because of its use of the human performer, the spectator’s double, live theatre has an immediate and powerful emotional impact on its audience. With the current growing use of digital technologies, it offers not only a three-dimensional concrete environment peopled by performers but also bidimensional images that, like in cinema or television, interact with the human body and enhance the emotional impact of the fantastic as no other artistic medium can, in spite of the simulative aspect of the artistic experience. The consensual aspect of the aesthetic experience enhances the spectator’s emotional impact since it moderates and yet liberates instinctual and cultural inhibitions. Within this emotional context, a fantastic reading can be far more influential and affect more deeply than a poetic reading. A poetic reading of a text—whether the written text of a play or the perceived performance—is a tacit acceptance of its fictionality as an enclosed semiotic system, a coded representation within a larger representational system that has its own rules and exceptions to the rule. A fantastic reading is a tacit literal acceptance of the perceived text, a reading that comprehends the text as a phenomenological event or object. In other words, the fantastic reading implies a conscious choice; it involves a readiness to accept the text not as a representation within an encoded system, but as an entity per se. An angel, according to this reading, is not a representation of human spirituality but a creature, an entity—real or unreal—with its own characteristics and autonomous existence. The fantastic reading accepts the unknown, the mysterious, and the ambiguous as part of human experience; it demands and denotes a readiness to expose oneself to all the frightening aspects of the unknown instead of approaching it as a representation of a well-known (and therefore less threatening) referent. In this sense, the fantastic reading implies both a literal and minute acceptance of the perceived phenomenon and a transcendence of consensus reality. As myths, legends, and folklore illustrate, the fantastic reading has its own rules; the fantastic too is an encoded system. But whereas the referent of a poetic reading belongs to the here and now of the perceiver’s consensus reality, the referent of the fantastic reading appropriates what has been traditionally relegated to the realm of the supernatural and the yet unknown, and incorporates it into experiential reality. When the fantastic element is used not in a fantasy but in a realistic discourse, as is often the case in theatre, it operates according to a specific pattern. Though this narrative pattern resembles the one established by René Girard in his Violence and the Sacred concerning the intrusion of the Other, it is significantly different. The intervention of the fantastic element within a realistic discourse does not reinstate a given state of order but brings about

148 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre a new one. The intervention of the fantastic does not mark a closure but an opening. From the starting point A of the narrative, the intervention of the fantastic will lead to point B, which marks not only a breach into the given state of order but also a fundamental change. So, for example, in Ansky’s Dybbuk: once the Dybbuk is exorcised, a new order returns to the small community since the richest and most powerful man in the community will have no descendants and his rule will come to an end.12 In Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, the appearance of the Sphinx wreaks havoc in the city; once it vanishes, order and peace seem to return. However, this is only an apparent return to calm, for the city is ruled by another monster, Oedipus, and it is only with Oedipus’ departure that Thebes will regain its peace—or so it seems, because, as we have seen, the city is inhabited by countless physically unrecognizable monsters. On the other hand, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, a visual validating formula assigns these plays to another discourse, the fantasy. This visual formula, which frames the narrative in both pieces from the beginning to the end, is the mound. In Celtic mythology, the mound is the dwelling place of the fairies and a gate to the Other World. In the English version of Waiting for Godot, the mound defines the locale as an in-between space which links the Other World to man’s world. So it is in Happy Days, in which the mound gradually sucks Winnie in, while she apparently relates to the process as to a normal phenomenon. In both plays, the fantastic is not a catalytic as before but a defining agent that enhances Beckett’s stance that man’s life is a station in a sort of hell, ruled by repetitiveness, unrewarded hope, and loss of direction in time and scope.13 In these plays, the mound, the fantastic element, initiates an epistemological process that emotionally affects the reader or spectator because of its connotations with the Other World. Both in fantasy and within a realistic discourse, the fantastic element dispenses with the reductionist binarism of such constructs as monster and human, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, natural and supernatural. Whether the playwright, his characters, and the audience believe or doubt the existence of the fantastic in “real life,” the written play and the live performance offer a comprehensive view of reality that encompasses the known and the unknown and the sensorially perceived and the imagined. Since the early 1970s, the use of the fantastic within a realistic discourse in theatre has reemerged in force. Postmodernism, with its problematization of knowledge and the blurring of the borders between aesthetic modes as between high and low culture, has reinstated the fantastic in the arts and provided a laisser-passer to rhetorical devices that engender indeterminacy or undecidability. As Ruth Ronen affirms, “although logically inconsistent

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states of affairs are not restricted to specific literary periods or genres, with postmodernism, impossibilities, in the logical sense, have become a central poetic device, which shows that contradictions in themselves do not collapse the coherence of a fictional world.”14 The problematization of knowledge has emerged hand in hand with the legitimization of emotion. Persuasion is done not by logical argumentation but by a promise of strong emotions. A work of art, a politician’s speech, an article in a daily newspaper, or a consumer’s product has to stir emotion in order to win the attention of the wider public, assuming perhaps that emotion would initiate the reasoning process.15 Within this widespread fostering of emotion, when emotion has become both a valued commodity and a high-quality attribute, the fantastic and its emotional potency have become an accepted controlling rhetorical device, not unlike the melodrama. But while melodrama affects us by invoking a possible threat, the fantastic invokes what is commonly considered, within a cultural/temporal context, as the impossible and the unknown whose existence may be in doubt. It is the prolonged and harrowing affect of the doubt that turns the emotive potency of the fantastic into a consequential rhetorical device. While the victim of the melodrama is confined to the realm of the fictive narrative, that of the fantastic is no other than the (willing) reader or spectator, who has agreed to yield to its power. The emotion stirred by the use of the fantastic within a realistic discourse exceeds the temporal and spatial limits of the aesthetic experience, for such is the power of the unknown. This is especially true in theatre, where the living performer exerts his/her spell in concert with the powerful sensorial and/or imaginative affect of other stage devices. Artaud, who was not only a theoretician but also a director, an actor of theatre and cinema, and a spectator of both, recognized that “the action and effect of a feeling in the theater appears infinitely more valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life.”16 Though theatre performance consensually operates within a fictive world, it compels the audience to experience strong and often unusual emotions because of and with the help of the unmediated physicality of the theatre performance.17 However, since it embodies the unknown and the impossible, the fantastic does not necessarily have to be visualized or heard in order to be perceived by the audience; a simple unusual, cryptic, or encoded sign will often suffice. In Cocteau’s adaptation The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray, the monstrous portrait is never actually viewed by the audience and it is only its emotional effect on Dorian that is witnessed and felt (by ricochet) by the audience. In addition to the emotive properties of the spoken or sung word, theatre uses the emotive properties of silence and

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sounds, colors and shapes, as well as images engendered by conventional and digital technologies and multimedia to elicit a certain effect. Different from the cinema, the verbal, visual, and audial stimuli in theatre induce an all-encompassing feeling of unmediated truth that is vehicled and enhanced by the concreteness—partial or not—of the physically perceptible performance area. And if Cocteau’s monsters in The Infernal Machine are less frightening than an ordinary werewolf in a horror movie, it is because their creator intended them to borrow a familiar shape. That is not to say that they do not elicit a sense of horror. Theatre performance has long been considered an experiential model. When it involves the fantastic, it acts upon its perceiver like a mirror that not only concentrates and reflects the light it captures but also condensates it to the point of burning the surface that the reflected light touches. The use of the fantastic in theatre denotes a conscious attempt to apprehend complexity in all its perplexing contradictions. By dissolving the commonly accepted boundaries between the possible and the impossible, the natural and the supernatural, as between the human and the nonhuman, the fantastic offers an apprehension of experiential reality that has been pared down by reigning ideologies. Freddie Rokem argues that “[t]he postwar theatre, and in particular the theatre performing history, can no doubt be seen as an attempt to create restorative energies, in the sense of recreating something which has been irretrievably lost and attempting, at least on the imaginative level and in many cases also on the intellectual and emotional levels, to restore that loss.”18 The same can be said about the use of the fantastic in theatre. The fantastic does not offer ideological solutions but opens up new possibilities for consideration with the help of the doubt that it engenders. In its turn, doubt engenders a whole range of feelings, from wonder to fear, as Todorov has already asserted. The perplexity or wonder is existential and hence its strong emotional impact. In theatre, because of the immediate physicality of the medium, the fantastic introduces a potentiality that is at once frightening and overpowering and affects the audience well beyond the short span of time of the performance.

ENCODING THE UNSAYABLE The most salient feature that binds together the modern playwrights who used the fantastic in their works is their anguished notion of their alterity and their sense of mission. Their perception of their identity was informed both by the nineteenth-century romantic image of the artist as

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a seer and by the sense of their outsiderness. This outsiderness, real or imagined, could be artistic, religious, social, political, ethnic, generic, or sexual. Some of these playwrights, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Ionesco, and Beckett were expatriates. Sean O’Casey considered himself an exile in his own country. Claudel, a diplomat who lived for forty years mainly outside France, did not belong to the artistic mainstream; his pieces for the theatre are deeply religious and they employ a convoluted poetic language that challenges the actor. Ansky was Jewish and an active member of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party.19 And the sexuality of playwrights such as Cocteau, Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Robert Wilson, and Tony Kushner (who is also Jewish) has been considered nonnormative. A corollary of this alterity is the common interest in the theme of identity, visibility, and invisibility and consequently the choice of an encoded discourse to express an otherwise unacceptable proposition with a subversive content. Alterity and marginality often entail an imposed conduct and mask, as has been shown in the case of camp.20 A prevalent stratagem for gay playwrights has been gender transposition or “transference” which is, as James Fisher has judiciously remarked, “the act of hiding gay viewpoints and situations behind a mask of heterosexuality.”21 De Jongh mentions stratagems such as evasiveness, allusion, ambiguity, and innuendo.22 And Clum emphasizes the propensity of the best gay playwrights “from Jean Cocteau to Tennessee Williams to Tony Kushner and beyond” to escape the restrictions of realism.23 Or, as Cocteau would write in 1949, after his touring with The Infernal Machine: For thirty years I have been self searching and making sense of myself. For thirty years I have been trying to disguise my secrets by a metaphorical language addressed to those who can read.24

As a protective strategy and an epistemological tool, the fantastic has served to convey the nonacknowledgeable and validate it within the boundaries of a public institution, the theatre, as seen before. For all those who wished to “reveal by concealment,” the fantastic served as a protective strategy as well as an effective epistemological tool. To use the fantastic in the theatre is to pave, by encoding, the way to transgression or, to use Jonathan Dollimore’s term, to proceed to a transgressive reinscription.25 However, the use of the fantastic within a realistic discourse is relatively a safe strategy because the doubt it engenders protects the playwright and the theatre artist from censorship or opprobrium.

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An audience accustomed to realism in theatre has never ceased to offer an almost irresistible challenge to the playwright who wishes to eradicate established moral, political, or religious attitudes. Such a playwright will not preach to the “unconverted” but will attempt to change their concept and attitude to reality by uncovering the invisible beneath the visible, the reality behind illusion, and the truth behind the mask: The audience in the theater has to wrestle with the dialectical nature of illusion and reality, all plays, all stage events, demand of their audiences an ability to believe and disbelieve at the same time, to watch with sophistication and a tolerance, even an appetite, for paradox. On stage and off, in the theater and in the real world, “things,” as W. S. Gilbert put it, “are seldom what they seem.” Theater, which traffics in compelling but not entirely convincing illusion, which can’t avoid demonstrating the human activity behind the illusion, is a great model for critical consciousness, for looking at the world both with passion and with cool skeptical analysis. . . . Art has a power, but it’s an indirect power. Art suggests.26

This is how Tony Kushner explained his art not long ago. His best-known play, Angels in America (1991), embraces the fantastic, as its title suggests, but a close reading will disclose that, far from conveying an optimistic belief, the play denies it. At best, the optimistic belief is a matter of doubt. The root of negation is found in the use of the fantastic element, the angel, a creature whose existence can be attested only by belief. As a factor of change, the intervention of the fantastic element in human affairs is a matter of doubt, speculation, and belief. It is only the emotion elicited by the fantastic that can overpower doubt and induce one to believe against all proof and consensus. Playwrights who used the fantastic to convey their alterity have now become our classics. Their truth has become an accepted truth and their ethical values are becoming mainstream in the Western world. Today, they are considered not as subversive but as moralists, observant of an ethical code that is universal and basically humanistic. Cocteau’s truth has become ours. He took possession of the mythical Oedipus, invested him with a truth of his own, and turned him into a symbol of the modern Everyman, the man-monster.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. For La Machine Infernale, the English title will be used instead of the French. 2. William A. Senior, “Where Have All the Monsters Gone?” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 215. 3. Included in this category is most of science fiction drama, discussed by Ralph Willingham in his Science Fiction and the Theatre (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). 4. Patrick D. Murphy, ed. Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992).

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1. “Il est d’usage d’appeler MONSTRE l’accord inaccoutumé d’éléments dissonants: le Centaure, la Chimère se définissent ainsi pour qui ne comprend. J’appelle monstre toute originale inépuisable beauté.” Alfred Jarry, “Les Monstres,” L’Ymagier, January 1895, 2. 2. From the many studies in teratology, see David D. Gilmore, Monsters, Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manners of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); etymologically, the term may be derived from the Latin monere (to warn, to remind) or monstrare (to point out). 3. Michel Décaudin dates Cocteau’s first attempt to adapt Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos in 1921. See Michel Décaudin, “Chronologie,” in Jean Cocteau, Oeuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), xxxvii. However, critics are at variance about the date. See Derek F. Connon, “Folded Eternity: Time and the Mythic Dimension in Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (January 1993): 31; Paul Bauschatz, “Oedipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles,” Comparative Literature 43, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 150–170. 4. Jean Daniélou translated the libretto into Latin (only the Narrator’s text would be translated in vernacular as needed). The oratorio was first performed in Paris on May 30, 1927, at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, and was conducted

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12.

13. 14.

Notes by Stravinsky. It is interesting to note that whenever Cocteau used the adjective atroce (atrocious) in the text, Daniélou replaced it in the Latin text with “monstrum,” in all but one single instance. The play was published in 1928 together with Cocteau’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and was first performed in 1937. On Cocteau’s adaptations of Sophocles, see Carol A. Cujec, “Modernizing Antiquity: Jean Cocteau’s Early Greek Adaptations,” Classical and Modern Literature 17, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 45–56. An auctioneer put this version of the play on sale at the Hotel Drouot in Paris on April 17, 2002. According to the information provided, this manuscript was offered by Cocteau to his dentist, Dr. Marcel Brille (1892–1944), and contains the playwright’s corrections. See http://www.tajan.com/pdf/2002/ autographes17042002.pdf July 4, 2008. Contemporary press reports show that the dress rehearsal, in the presence of the press, took place at the Comédie des Champs Elysées on April 10, 1934, a day ahead of the first night (Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection théâtrale, Collection Louis Jouvet, Rt. 3767). Oedipus was played by JeanPierre Aumont, Jocasta by Marthe Régnier, the Sphinx by Lucienne Bogaert, Tirésias by Pierre Renoir, the Shepherd by Louis Jouvet, the Corinthian messenger by Marcel Khill, and the Voice by Jean Cocteau. Jouvet was the producer and director, while Christian Bérard designed the sets and the costumes. Although the play was a big success at the box office and the great majority of the press reviews were excellent, it had to close after two and a half months and sixty-four performances because the lease for the theatre building came to an end and could not be renewed. See also Henry Gidel, Jean Cocteau (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 173–180. The poem was first published in Les Feuilles libres (in its issue of November– December 1926), then in his collection of poems Opera, in 1927. See Opera, suivi de Plain-Chant (Paris: Stock, 1959), 106. Opera, suivi de Plain Chant, 107. For a discussion of similar framing techniques, see Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 117. For a detailed comparison between Sophocles’ play and The Infernal Machine, see Dwight H. Page, “The Resurrection of the Sophoclean Phoenix: Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 18, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 329–343. Years later, in an entry from October 31, 1952 in his memoirs, Cocteau acknowledged that his Jocasta bore some of Isadora’s traits. See Cocteau, Passé défini I (1951–1952) (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 367. Henri Peyre, “What Greece Means to Modern France,” Yale French Studies 6 (1950): 61–62. Bernard Valette, “Modernité du mythe chez Jean Cocteau,” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, no. 1–2 (1989): 19.

Notes

155

15. Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 188–189. 16. For an anthropological approach, see Lowell Edmunds, The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend (Königstein: Hain, 1981) and Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Eva Figes, Tragedy and Social Evolution (New York: Persea Books, 1990). For a study of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos within its historical and cultural context, see Frederick Ahl, Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-conviction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 17. See for example, Bernard Combeaud, La Machine Infernale de Cocteau: Etude de l’oeuvre (Paris, Hachette, 1998); Charles Delattre, La Machine Infernale: Connaissance d’une oeuvre (Paris, Bréal, 1998); Philippe Grandjean, La Machine Infernale: Jean Cocteau. (Paris: Hatier, 2000); Dominique Morineau, Cocteau. La Machine Infernale: 40 questions, 40 réponses, 4 études (Paris: Ellipses, 1998); Dominique Odier, Etude sur La Machine Infernale (Paris: Ellipses, 1997); Thanh-Vân Ton-That, La Machine Infernale: Dossier pédagogique (Paris: Petits Classiques Larousse, 1998). 18. Among the many productions since 1990, there is the recent one at the Teatro Manini in Terni, in Italy (2007); at St. Catherine College in Oxford (2007); at the Cabourg Festival and Théâtre Saint-Léon (Paris, 2004); in Concord, MA, by the Town Cow Theatre Company and directed by Thomas Caron (2003); at the Fourteenth Festival Théâtre Côté Cour, produced by the Noëlle Casta Company (Marseilles) and directed by Noëlle Casta (2003); at the Athénée Théâtre Louis Jouvet in Paris, directed by Gloria Paris who took it on tour in various French province cities (2002–2003); at the National Festival of Dramatic Arts in Pesaro, directed by Piergiorgio Piccoli (2002); at the Lycée d’Artois in Noeux-les-Mines (France), directed by Michèle Machiavello, Sylvain Petit and Véronique Tiers (2001); in Vicenza, by La Trappola Company and directed by Piergiorgio Piccoli (2001); in Rome, at the Teatro Studio Eleonora Duse, by the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio D’Amico” (2002); by the Eclipse Theatre Company in Chicago (1998); at the Théâtre Guichet-Montparnasse in Paris, directed by Elisabeth R. Oum (1997); at the Millsaps College in Jackson, MS, directed by Lance Goss (1992); and at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company in New York City, directed by Robert Hupp (1990). The play was also adapted for dance under the title The Sphinx and performed in 2002 by the Dance Theatre of Harlem, choreographed by Glen Tetley. 19. Huguette Laurenti goes as far as affirming that the Voice is the real central character and the invisible personification of fate. See her article “Espace de jeu, espace du mythe: La ‘poésie de théâtre’ selon Cocteau,” in Jean Cocteau Aujourd’ hui, ed. Pierre Caizergues (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1992), 133–143. 20. Cocteau, Antigone, in Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), vol. 1, 11.

156

Notes

21. On the dialectics between the word and the objects or settings in the play, see André Helbo, “La ‘théâtralité’ chez Jean Cocteau,” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, no. 1–2 (1989): 79–84. 22. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (London: Methuen, 1984), 21. See also Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970); Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003); Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919), in his On Creativity and the Unconscious. Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 122–161. 23. For the manifestation of Shelley’s monster on the stage, see Steven Earl Forry, “The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brinsley Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823–1826,” Theatre Research International 11, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 13–31. 24. In Hofmannsthal’s play, Oedipus assumes that the Sphinx is a demon with “hideous limbs . . . polyp arms.” The Sphinx throws itself into the abyss and authenticates Oedipus’ claim to victory. To the Thebans, Oedipus describes it as a female “creature,” a “woman.” See Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus and the Sphinx, trans. Gertrude Schoenbohm, in Oedipus: Myth and Drama, ed. Martin Kallich, Andrew MacLeish, and Gertrude Schoenbohm (New York: Odyssey Press, 1968), 233, 237, 248. 25. Le Potomak (Paris: Stock, 1924), 68. 26. Ibid. 27. Cocteau’s full baptismal name was Clément Eugène Jean Maurice. 28. Le Potomak, 116–117. 29. Ibid., 263. 30. Milorad [pseud.], “Les ‘Potomak,’ ” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 9–26. 31. Serge Linares. “Préface à une préface,” in Le Potomak (Paris: Passage du Marais, 2000), 14. 32. Alfredo Bonadeo, Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989). 33. Orphée (Paris: Stock, 1927), 1.1.28. 34. Milorad, “Le Mythe orphique dans l’oeuvre de Cocteau,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 111–113. 35. Le Potomak, 263. 36. Patrick Pollard contends that Gide’s Minotaur is “a monster with whom Theseus has to grapple before he can live a satisfactory life. He is beautiful and few men can resist his charms . . . . Symbolically, the labyrinth the monster inhabits is in everyone, taking on different shapes and pandering to the desires of the individual.” See his André Gide: Homosexual Moralist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 397–398. 37. See her Jean Cocteau, l’Empreinte de l’ange (Paris: L’Hatmattan, 2005), 229. 38. Monic Robillard, “L’Ange et le nom divin de Cocteau,” Romanic Review 81, no. 2 (March 1990): 224–235.

Notes

157

39. Danielle Chaperon, Jean Cocteau. La Chute des Angles (Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990), 120–121. 40. Marielle Wyns, Jean Cocteau, l’Empreinte de l’ange (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 56, 58, 229. 41. Pierre Macris, “L’Ange et Cocteau,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 71–90; Serge Dieudonné, “Cocteau entre soi-même et Radiguet,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau 8 (1979): 193–206. 42. Journal d’un inconnu (Paris: Grasset, 1953), 48. 43. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 65. 44. Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet, The Testament of Orpheus, trans. Carol Martin-Sperry (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), 50. 45. Ibid., 62–63. 46. Robert M. Hammond, ed. Beauty and the Beast. Scenario and Dialogs by Jean Cocteau (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 108, 132, 149, 193, 251, 253, 255, 275, 283, 347, 355, 373. 47. La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine) (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1934), 14. These are also the terms used by Cocteau in a communiqué to the newspaper Paris Soir on April 8, 1934. 48. Ibid, II, 124. 49. Ibid, 101. 50. Ibid, 131. 51. Ibid., 132. 52. Ibid., III, 164. 53. Ibid., IV, 202. 54. Ibid., 202–203. 55. Ibid., 211. 56. Ibid. 57. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45. 58. Olivier Biaggini, “Montrer par les monstres: polymorphisme d’un exemplum médiéval.” Des Monstres. Actes du Colloque de Mai 1993 à Fontenay-aux-Roses (Fontenay-St. Cloud: ENS, 1994), 48.

2

THE SPHINX

1. Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx,” in Complete Works (London: Collins, 1973), 833–835. 2. Ahl, 11–12, 63. 3. “Taking the Mystery out of Sphinx: A Computer Determines Its Past and Future Looks.” International Herald Tribune, September 26, 1991.

158 Notes 4. Ahmed Youssef, Cocteau l’Egyptien: La tentation orientale de Jean Cocteau. (Monaco, Editions du Rocher, 2001). 5. The play was published as a “tragedy in 3 acts.” See Joséphin Péladan, Oedipe et le Sphinx (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903). 6. The Infernal Machine, 14. 7. Baldick, 45. 8. James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 34. 9. The Infernal Machine, I, 24. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 25. 12. Ibid. 13. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampire, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 73. 14. Jacques Scherer quotes a legend according to which the Sphinx was not only Laius’ illegitimate daughter but also Chimera’s sister, who had the body of a goat and a lion. Of all Chimera’s many attributes, the most often cited was her illusory nature. See Jacques Scherer, Dramaturgies d’Oedipe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 49. Scherer also quotes a still different version of the myth, mentioned by Léopold Constans in his La Légende d’Oedipe (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1880), where the Sphinx, a robber, was first seduced and then killed by Oedipus. See Scherer, 50. 15. Among the many paintings showing a chimera or a sphinx, Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864, 1888); Max Klinger, Invocation (1879); Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity (1891); Aléxandre Séon, Le Désespoir de la Chimère (The Chimera’s Despair) (1892); Jan Toorop, The Sphinx (1892–1897); Charles Ricketts, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1891) and In the Thebaid (1894); Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx (ca. 1895); Gustav Klimt, Music (1895); Fernand Khnopff, The Supreme Vice (1885) and L’Art des Caresses (The Arts of Caress) (1896); Armand Point, La Chimère (The Chimera) (1897); Frantisek Kupka, The Conqueror Worm (1900); and, closer to the writing of The Infernal Machine, Nicholas Kalmakoff ’s Chimera (1926). 16. In 1932, the painter and stage designer Christian Bérard, one of Cocteau’s close friends, painted on a wall of his apartment at 9, rue Vignon a scene showing Oedipus and the Sphinx. Bérard’s Sphinx has an androgynous head, a pair of wings, an animal rump, and a snakelike tail. It has no female body and no breasts. See Pierre Chanel, Album Cocteau (Paris: Henri Veyrier-Tchou, 1975), 97. 17. Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm. Jean Cocteau: the Man and the Mirror (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), 126. 18. Cocteau, “Le théâtre et la mode,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, Nouvelle Série, no. 3 (2004): 96.

Notes

159

19. Gilmore, 12. 20. Roger C. Schlobin, “The Locus Amoenus and the Fantasy Quest,” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1984): 29. 21. The Infernal Machine, II, 86. 22. Ibid., 107. 23. Ahl, 170. 24. The Infernal Machine, II, 93. 25. Karelisa V. Hartigan, “Oedipus in France: Cocteau’s Mythic Strategy in La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 6, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 93. 26. Romana N. Lowe, The Fictional Female: Sacrificial Rituals and Spectacles of Writing in Baudelaire, Zola, and Cocteau (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 27. The Infernal Machine, II, 133. 28. In Greek mythology, Hera killed Lamia’s children because the beautiful Lamia was Zeus’ lover. Lamia, envious of other mothers, or out of revenge, began killing infants by sucking their blood. Another version depicts her as a temptress who lures away young men, seduces them, and then kills them by sucking their blood. The most famous literary treatment of the myth is John Keats’ poem “Lamia” (1819). 29. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 351. 30. Jeffrey Burton Russell. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 79. See also Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 93–94; James William Jordan, “Wereanimals in Europe and Africa: Some Practical Observations on an Esoteric Role,” Ethnos 42 (1977): 53–68. For a postmodernist approach to the vampire metaphor, see Veronica Hollinger, “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire,” in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 199–212. 31. The Infernal Machine, II, 133–134. 32. Ibid, 135. 33. The Infernal Machine, II, 162. 34. Ibid., III, 163. 35. Ibid., 84. 36. For the theatrical representation of the man-made and pieced-together monster, see Steven Earl Forry, op. cit. and also his Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 37. Twitchell, 7. 38. In “Fantomâs,” a short piece published in “Le Figaro Littéraire” on July 22, 1961, Cocteau expresses the admiration he shared with Apollinaire and Max

160 Notes

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

Jacob for the film. In 1912, soon after it was founded, Cocteau became a member of the Société des amis de Fantomâs au Nouveau Monde (Society of Fantomas’ Friends in the New World). See also Robin Walz, “Serial Killings: Fantomâs, Feuillade, and the Mass-Culture Genealogy of Surrealism.” The Velvet Light Trap 37 (Spring 1996): 51–57. The recurrence of the hermaphrodite in Cocteau’s works was examined by Milorad. See his “Des hermaphrodites à Vérone,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, Nouvelle Série, 3 (2004): 49–59. Shoshana Felman, “Le Scandale de la Vérité,” in Discours et Pouvoir. Michigan Romance Studies, ed. Ross Chambers, 2 (1982), 24. Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine, in The Infernal Machine and Other Plays by Jean Cocteau, trans. Albert Bremel (New York: New Directions Books, 1967), 3. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 179–184; Dijkstra, 90–91; Auerbach, 83–85. The Infernal Machine, II, 84. Ibid, 99. Judith Butler brings out the correlation between the process of assuming a sex and the question of identification. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3. Butler, 2. For a discussion of the woman as monster, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 29–79, 241–242; Patrice Petro, “The Woman, The Monster, and ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ ” in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, ed. Mike Budd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 210–215; David Williams, “Wilgefortis, Patron Saint of Monsters, and the Sacred Language of the Grotesque,” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Culture, Biography, Themes, Children’s Literature, ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 171–177; Dijkstra, 333–351. Craig Owens. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 111. Jean Cocteau, Tour du monde en 80 jours (mon premier voyage) [Around the World in Eighty Days (My First Voyage)] (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 49.

3

LAIUS, TIRESIAS, AND JOCASTA

1. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), in Oeuvres Poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 895, 897. 2. Paul M. C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 72.

Notes

161

3. On the hermaphrodite, see David Williams, “Wilgefortis,” 175. 4. Arlette Lafont, “Autour des Mamelles de Tirésias,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 123–126 (1965): 8. See also Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 122–135; Claude Schumacher, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 141–156. 5. The poem is included in Correspondance Guillaume Apollinaire Jean Cocteau, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin (Cahors: Jean-Michel Place, 1991), 47. 6. The Infernal Machine, III, 164. 7. Forbes Irving, 167. 8. See also Bauschatz, 156. 9. Jacques Brosse, Cocteau (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 84. 10. Ibid., I, 40. This is the reason why Cocteau initially intended to cast Elvire Popesco, a well-known actress of Rumanian origin, in this role. 11. Gabriel Boissy, “La Machine Infernale, pièce en 3 tableaux de M. Jean Cocteau,” Comoedia, April 12, 1934. 12. Judith G. Miller, “Jean Cocteau and Hélène Cixous: Oedipus,” in Drama, Sex, and Politics, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 206. 13. Marie Jejcic claims that Jocasta’s attraction to young males is inspired only by maternal instinct. See her Le Savoir du poète. Oedipe selon Jean Cocteau (Paris: Agalma, diffusion Seuil, 1996), 55. 14. The Infernal Machine, I, 45. 15. Ibid., III, 181–183. 16. Ibid., IV, 207–209. 17. My emphasis. Jean Schlumberger “La Machine Infernale de Jean Cocteau, à la Comédie des Champs Elysées,” Nouvelle Revue Française, May 1, 1934, 873–75. 18. The Infernal Machine, I, 65. 19. Gilbert and Gubar, 34. 20. Petro, 210. 21. Figes, 110. 22. Jean Touzot, Jean Cocteau, Le Poète et ses doubles (Paris: Bartillat, 2000), 124–127. 23. Mitsutaka Odagiri, Écritures Palimpsestes, ou Les théâtralisations françaises du mythe d’Oedipe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 167, 171. 24. Seneca, Oedipus, trans. Frank Justus Miller, in Oedipus: Myth and Dramatic Form, ed. James L. Sanderson and Everett Zimmerman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), III, lines 752–755, 764–766. 25. Segal, Charles. “Oedipus through the Ages,” Review Article, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 221. 26. Felman, 22.

162

Notes

4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

OEDIPUS

Cocteau, Maalesh. Journal d’une tournée théâtrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 179. The Infernal Machine, 13, 14. Ibid., II, 124–125. Ibid., 133–135. Ibid, II, 98. Ibid., IV, 211. Ibid., IV, 214. Ibid., 14. Ralph Yarrow, “Ambiguity and the Supernatural in Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale,” in Staging the Impossible, 113. Judith Miller finds that Oedipus “experiences no moral dilemma in proclaiming himself [the Sphinx’s] conqueror.” Judith Miller, 207. The Infernal Machine, II, 107. Ibid., 103. Lewis W. Leadbeater, “In Defense of Cocteau: Another View of La Machine Infernale,” Classical and Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 124. The Infernal Machine, II, 102. Ibid., 14. Ibid., III, 186. David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 251. The Infernal Machine, II, 108. Mireille Brémond, “Mais où sont passés les monstres? Réflexion sur le Sphinx de J. Cocteau et le Minotaure de M. Yourcenar.” Bulletin de la Société Internationale d’Etudes Yourcenariennes, no. 19 (December 1998): 63. Judith Miller, 206. See, for instance, Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford University Press, 2002), 165. The Infernal Machine, III, 154. Hofmannsthal, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 250. Odagiri suggests that Cocteau borrowed ideas from Hofmannsthal’s play. Odagiri, 141. Louis Jouvet, Le Comédien désincarné (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), 51. The Infernal Machine, IV, 193. Ibid, 202. Ibid, 193. Ibid., 195, 202. Ibid., II, 92. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 45. Barbara Fass Leavy, To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 4. See also Ahl, 275–276, Note 1.

Notes

163

32. See, for example, René Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43–44. 33. Colin Jones, “Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern France.” Representations 53 (Winter 1996): 112. 34. René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 139. 35. Ahl, 53. 36. The Infernal Machine, 14. 37. Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 155. 38. The Infernal Machine, III, 188. 39. Ibid., IV, 149, 150, 155. 40. For a discussion of the monster as a recurrent motif in the Oedipus myth, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 251–252. 41. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 149–174. 42. The Infernal Machine, III, 158–159. 43. Ibid., II, 109. 44. See Sprigge and Kihm, 14. 45. La Machine Infernale, II, 103. 46. Leadbeater, 124. 47. La Machine Infernale, IV, 212. 48. Julia Kristeva construes Oedipus’ self-blinding as equivalent to castration. See her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 84–86. 49. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, in Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), vol. 1, 41. Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois first performed the play on June 18, 1921, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. 50. Lydia Crowson, “Myth in Jean Cocteau’s Theater: Art as Revenge,” Research Studies 42, no. 3 (September 1974): 140. See also Leadbeater, 117; Serge Linares, Jean Cocteau: le grave et l’aigu (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1999), 139. 51. For Oedipus’ partial recognition of his failings, see La Machine Infernale, III, 160.

5

DRAMATIC STRATEGIES AND STRATAGEMS

1. L’Impromptu du Palais Royal (1962), in Théâtre complet, ed. Michel Décaudin et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 1279. 2. Brian Richardson, “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama,” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 683.

164 Notes 3. See Charles Segal’s seminal study of Oedipus in literature, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993). On Cocteau and his Infernal Machine, see ibid., 154–156. 4. The Infernal Machine, II, 123–124. 5. Preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 43. 6. Le Secret Professionnel (1922), in Poésie Critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 1, 49–50. 7. See, for example, Cocteau, Le Journal d’un Inconnu, 129. 8. Kenneth E. Silver defines this technique as “an act both of restoration and of transubstantiation.” See his “Jean Cocteau and the Image d’Epinal,” in Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, ed. Arthur King Peters (New York: Abeville Press, 1984), 96. 9. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen, Les Discours du Cliché (Paris: SEDES, 1982), 22. 10. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau. A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), 240, 387. 11. See also Amossy and Rosen, 18. 12. The Infernal Machine, I, 34–39. 13. At the play’s first production, the actress playing Jocasta spoke with a Russian accent. 14. The Infernal Machine, I, 40–41. 15. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1964), 279. 16. Ibid., 287. 17. Ibid., 278. 18. See, for example, Matthew Tinkcom, Working like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 19. See also Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 9. 20. Ian Lucas, Impertinent Decorum: Gay Theatrical Manoeuvres (New York: Cassell, 1994), 118. 21. The Infernal Machine, I, 57–58. 22. Ibid., 142. 23. John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 151, 154. 24. The Infernal Machine, 15. 25. Ibid., IV, 217. 26. See Margaret Rose’s study Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 27. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington, DC: Bay Press, 1983), 113.

Notes

165

28. Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodern Parody,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 225. 29. Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 1–2. 30. The Infernal Machine, III, 141. At the play’s first production, the scenery for the bedroom was elevated and placed at center stage; it was draped in red. See Sprigge and Kihm, 126. 31. The Infernal Machine, III, 141. 32. Ibid., 166. 33. Schlumberger, 874. In a comprehensive survey of the literary events in Paris in 1934, destined for the American readers of The Modern Language Journal, Albert Schinz mentions Cocteau’s play as a modern remake of Oedipus and Jocasta’s story “more like O’Neill’s Electra.” It is unclear whether he saw the production or only read about it. See his “L’Année littéraire mil neuf cent trente-quatre,” The Modern Language Journal 19, no. 8 (May 1935): 563. 34. See Schlumberger, 873–875; Neal Oxenhandler, Scandal and Parade: The Theater of J. Cocteau (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 129–158; Angela Belli, Ancient Greek Myths and Modern Drama: A Study in Continuity (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 5–35; Brosse, 85; Claude Martin, “Gide, Cocteau, Oedipe: le mythe ou le complexe,” Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 155–162; Milorad, “Romans jumeaux ou de l’imitation,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, 8 (1979): 101; Clément Borgal, Jean Cocteau, ou De la claudication considérée comme l’un des beauxarts (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 77–104; Leadbeater, 124; Lowe, 158–216; Anne Clancier, “Jean Cocteau et les Mythes,” in Mythes et Psychanalyse, ed. Anne Clancier and Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco (Paris: Arnaud Dupin et Serge Perrot, 1997), 155–163; Bernard Combeaud, La Machine Infernale de Cocteau: Etude de l’oeuvre (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 28; Delattre, 74–77; Jean Touzot, Jean Cocteau, Le Poète et ses doubles, 124–126; Philippe Grandjean, La Machine Infernale: Jean Cocteau” (Paris: Hatier, 2002), 89–124; Bertrand de Chambon, Le Roman de Jean Cocteau (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001). For a Lacanian approach, see Jejcic. 35. See Franco Tonelli, “Edipo, la rapprezentatione e la macchina infernale,” Il Lettore di Provincia 15, no. 61 (June–September 1985): 5–13; Dominique Paini, “L’Homme invisible,” in Cocteau, Catalog of the exhibition “Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle” (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2003), 279.

6

COCTEAU AND HIS MONSTER

1. Cocteau, La Difficulté d’ être (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1957), 282. 2. Entry of January 22, 1954. Le Passé défini, III, 1954 (Gallimard, 1989), 20.

166

Notes

3. In 1928, the book did not bear the author’s name or that of the publisher and the first run had only thirty-one copies. In 1930, the book was again published, this time by the Editions du Signe in Paris, in a larger edition, and with Cocteau’s explicit color illustrations. See Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 413–414. 4. Vernon A. II Rosario, “Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederast’s Inversions,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157. See also Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., eds. Homosexuality in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5. See Laurence Senelick, “General Introduction,” in his anthology Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894–1925 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 10. 6. Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 169. 7. See Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 148. 8. Dean, 147–149. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Marcel Réja, “La Révolte des hannetons,” Mercure de France 13 (March 1, 1928): 334; quoted by Dean, 153. 11. Ibid., 55–56. 12. Corydon was first published in 1911 in a private edition, then in a commercial one in 1924, that is, four years before Cocteau’s The White Paper. 13. Edmund White, “The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau,” Yale Review 81, no. 4 (October 1992): 37. 14. See, for example, Pierre-Marie Héron, “Demain je retrouve Jean Genet,” in Le siècle de Jean Cocteau, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Pierre-Marie Héron (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valery, 2000), 184–211. 15. See also Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature, (New York: Cassell, 1995), 49. 16. Ibid., 95. 17. On his quest for love, see also Chambon, 311. 18. For a different reading, see Steegmuller, 347. He claims that Cocteau’s self-doubts were fundamental, “welling up from the deep sources of his sexual guilt.” See also Robinson, 49; Bertrand de Chambon, Le Roman de Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 265. 19. In 1950, Les Enfants Terribles was turned into a film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, with a scenario by Cocteau and based on his novel. The Catholic Church banned the film because of its insinuations of incest between the two siblings.

Notes

167

20. Cocteau, La Difficulté d’ être, 225, 237–238. 21. Gilmore, 19. 22. See, for example, Gilman, 59; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 47. 23. For a discussion of the homosexual aspects of the story, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Sex, Politics and the Nineteenth Century Novel, ed. Ruth Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 148–186. 24. André Gide, Correspondance André Gide - Roger Martin du Gard (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), vol. 1 (1913–1914), 78. 25. Fernando Arrabal, Plaidoyer pour une différence (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978), 22. 26. Ibid, 100. 27. Jacques Renaud, the childhood friend of Cocteau, became a painter and a musician. Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot place the writing of the play as early as 1909. See their “Notice,” in Cocteau’s Théâtre Complet, 1829–1832. 28. Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray, pièce fantastique en quatre actes et cinq tableaux (The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray, a fantastic play in four acts and five scenes) was first published in 1978 by Olivier Orban in Paris. 29. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 63. 30. Ibid, 24. 31. See, for example, Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet”; Showalter, 105–126; Michael William Saunders, Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1998); Kent L. Brintnall, “Re-building Sodom and Gomorrah: The Monstrosity of Queer Desire in the Horror Film,” Culture and Religion 5, no. 2 (2004), 145–160; Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping,” in Gays in Film, ed. by Richard Dyer (New York: Zoetrope, 1984), 27–39. 32. On Cocteau’s films, see James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), and Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot, Jean Cocteau, L’Oeil architecte (Paris: ACR, 2000). On Cocteau’s play Orpheus, see also Kazuyuki Matsuda, “La métamorphose d ‘Orphée chez Cocteau,” Gallia (Osaka) 28 (1991): 51–58; on Cocteau’s film Orpheus, see her article “La Mort sous la forme d’une jeune femme chez Cocteau—sur la genèse du personnage de la Princesse du film Orphée,” Gallia (Osaka) 40 (2000): 219–226. 33. See also Milorad, “Le Livre blanc, document secret et chiffré,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 112–117. 34. Bertrand de Chambon, Le Roman de Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 191–192. 35. See Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality & Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986),

168 Notes

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

139; Alain and Odette Virmaux, “La malédiction surréaliste et ses limites,” La Nouvelle Revue de Paris, no. 16 (1989): 49–54. Peter G. Christensen, “Three Concealments: Jean Cocteau’s Adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Romance Notes 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 27–35. Richard A. Kaye, “ ‘A Splendid Readiness for Death’: T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and World War I,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no.2 (1999): 124. Charles R. Batson, Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater: Playing Identities (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005), 16, 21. See also Robinson, 53–59. Le Livre blanc et autres textes (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999), 83. Ibid, 62. Opium (Paris: Stock, 1983), 137. Quoted by Jean Touzot, Jean Cocteau (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1989), 92. See Benshoff ’s Monsters in the Closet. Nicholas de Jongh, Not in front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), 185. Journal d’un Inconnu, 40. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 42. See, for example, Ihab Hassan, “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust,” Angelaki 8, no. 1 (April 2003): 7. The Knights of the Round Table was published in 1937. Neal Oxenhandler, “Le Mythe de la persécution dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 97. The Infernal Machine, II, 133. See Borgal, 52. See also Germaine Brée, Twentieth-Century French Literature, trans. Louise Guiney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 243–244. See, for example, Virmaux, and Oxenhandler, “Le Mythe de la persécution dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau,” 91. See Arnaud. Virmaux, 51. Le Passé défini, I, 91. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 368. Brée, 249. Touzot, Jean Cocteau: Le Poète et ses doubles, 77–83. Journal d’un Inconnu, 201–202. Jean-Pierre Millecam is critical about Cocteau’s reluctance to discuss his sexuality in public. See his L’Etoile de Jean Cocteau (Paris: Criterion, 1991). See also Milorad and Jean-Pierre Joecker, eds. Album Masques. Jean Cocteau. Supplement to Masques, no. 19 (September 1983).

Notes

169

63. See The White Paper (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1958), 8. The book’s author was listed as “Anonymous” and did not bear the name of its translator either. Margaret Crossland translated again the book and it was published under the title The White Book: Le Livre blanc in 1989 in San Francisco by City Lights Books. This time, the name of the author, Cocteau, was not omitted. 64. The Infernal Machine, III, 131. 65. Arnaud, 104. 66. Serge Dieudonné delved into this self-searching. Dieudonné, 193. 67. Freud’s La Psychanalyse, translated by Yves Le Vay, was published in Paris by Payot in 1921; his Introduction a la psychanalyse and La Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne in 1922 (trans. S. Jankélévitch); Trois Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité and Cinq Leçons sur la psychanalyse were published in 1923; Totem et tabou and Psychologie collective et analyse du moi in 1924; then followed Le Rêve et son interprétation (1925), La Science des rêves (1926), Essais de psychanalyse, 5 vols. (1927), Un Souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci (1928), Ma vie et la psychanalyse & Psychanalyse et médecine (1928), Journal psychanalytique d’une petite fille (1929), Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’ inconscient (1930), Délire et rêves dans un ouvrage littéraire: la Gradiva, de Jensen (1931), Essais de psychanalyse appliquée (1933), and Malaise dans la civilisation (1934). By the time The Infernal Machine was first produced, most of Freud’s writings were available in French translation. 68. Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980 (London: Routledge, 1989). 69. See also Judith Miller, 205–210; Schlumberger, 874; Paul Saegel, “La Semaine Dramatique. Comédie des Champs Elysées, La Machine Infernale, pièce en 4 actes de M. Jean Cocteau,” Le Ménestrel, April 20, 1934; René Salomé, “Chronique Dramatique. Sophocle et Jean Cocteau,” Etudes, August 5, 1934, 380–387; André Bellesort, “La semaine dramatique,” Feuilleton du Journal des Débats, April 16, 1934; R. K. (pseud.), “La Machine Infernale à la Comédie des Champs Elysées,” Vu, April 18, 1934; Georges Godchaux, “Les générales à Paris. Comédie des Champs Elysées, La Machine Infernale de Jean Cocteau,” Journal d’Anvers, April 20, 1934; Lucien Dubech, “La Chronique des théâtres: La Machine Infernale,” L’Action française, April 21, 1934; and the anonymous review “Les pièces nouvelles,” Candide, April 26, 1934. 70. See Borgal, 152–153; Steegmuller, 392. 71. Journal d’un Inconnu, 40–42. 72. Felman, 21. 73. Quoted in Milorad, “Addendum. Esquisse d’une théorie de la sexualité,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 132–141. 133. 74. Lawrence R. Schehr, French Gay Modernism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 116. 75. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred and Ahl.

170 Notes 76. Bert Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality) (London: Fusion Press, 2002).

7

VISIBILITY, INVISIBILITY, AND THE FANTASTIC

1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (London: Penguin, 1973), 257. 2. Clum, Acting Gay, 173–174. 3. “Le théâtre français fait peu de cas du surnaturel, encore moins d’un mélange de réel et d’irréel dont se sustente le théâtre anglais. Shakespeare, Shaw . . . pour ne citer que ces deux-là, on sait comment ils mènent le réel jusqu’à l’irréel, par la passerelle de l’humour. Il est impossible de ne les point nommer, quand il s’agit de Cocteau. A cette différence près que l’humour anglais caricature grièvement, dans les conjonctures où Cocteau préfère jouer avec la réalité, la vérité, les capter subtilement au lieu de s’écarter d’elles. Entre ses mains, le réel cinématographiquement visité sous les angles les plus divers, fond et refond sa géometrie, se déforme et nous enivre.” Colette, “Première Parisienne,” Le Journal, April 15, 1934. 4. Soraya le Corsu provides biographical and psychoanalytical explanations for the recurrence of several motifs, such as the magic horse, the centaur or the magic glove, in Cocteau’s oeuvre. See her L’Image surréaliste dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau (Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2005), 205–252. 5. Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 20–21; Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3–11. For a psychoanalytic approach to the fantastic, see Louis Vax, La Séduction de l’ étrange (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 6. Nancy H. Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 8–9. 7. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996), 17–36. 8. Todorov, 25; Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1992), 14–15. 9. Attebery, 16–17; Colin N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 10. Hume, 21. See also Patrick Parrinder, “Introduction: Learning from Other Worlds,” in Learning from Other Worlds, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 4–11. 11. Cocteau’s “added stress on the fantastic” in this adaptation was pointed out by Christensen. Christensen, 29. 12. Le Portrait Surnaturel de Dorian Gray, in Théâtre Complet, III, 1, 1408. 13. Cocteau designed the sets and costumes for the production of Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande that marked the composer’s centenary at the Fifth Festival of Metz in 1962.

Notes

171

14. For a detailed discussion of the prevailing symbolists theories on theatre and drama, see Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an AvantGarde (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885–1895 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968); Jacques Robichez, Le Symbolisme au théâtre: Lugné-Poe et les débuts de L’Oeuvre (Paris: L’Arche, 1957). 15. Preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 45. 16. On the production of this play, see also Annette Shandler Levitt, “Jean Cocteau’s Theatre: Idea and Enactment,” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 363–372. 17. Le Secret professionnel, 53–54. 18. Orphée, Scene 13, 118. 19. Le Mystère laïc, in Poésie Critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 1, 159. 20. Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot place the writing of this play in 1934. See their “Notice” in Jean Cocteau, Théâtre Complet, 1702–1710. 21. Attebery, 17. 22. Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, in Théâtre, vol. 1, I, 91. 23. Ibid., II, 121. 24. Ibid., III, 176. 25. Renaud et Armide, in Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), vol. 2, II, 5, 253. 26. Ibid., I, 3, 206. 27. Milorad, “La Clé des mythes dans l’oeuvre de Cocteau,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 2 (1971): 97–140. See also Milorad, “Le Mythe Orphique dans l’oeuvre de Cocteau.” 28. See Macris, and Martin, 143–165; Touzot, Jean Cocteau. Le Poète et ses doubles, 122–135. 29. See her article “Les Mythes classiques dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau,” in Le Monde de Jean Cocteau, ed. Geneviève Albrechtskirchinger (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 73–85. 30. Valette, 22. 31. Evans, Arthur B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1977), 43. 32. See Chaperon. 33. Lydia Crowson, The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1978), 151. 34. See, for example, Evans, 43–44. 35. The Infernal Machine, II, 84. 36. Jan Hokenson, “Introduction,” in Forms of the Fantastic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 153. 37. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 1–91. 38. Ibid., 45. 39. Steegmuller, 416.

172 Notes 40. In his article “Le Numéro Barbette,” published in Paris in June 1926 in the Chronique des spectacles, Cocteau paid tribute to “the magic light of the theatre” and the aesthetic pleasure it provides. The article, an aesthetization of a homosexual experience, is considered by critics as Cocteau’s Ars Poetica. See Jennifer Forrest, “Cocteau au cirque: The Poetics of Parade and ‘Le Numéro Barbette,’ ” Studies in 20th Century Literature 27, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 9–47; Mark Franko, “Where He Danced: Cocteau’s ‘Barbette’ and Ohno’s ‘Water Lilies,’ ” PMLA 107, no. 3 (May 1992): 594–607; Maité R. Monchal, Le Sacerdoce de la désobeissance. Création et séxualite chez Jean Cocteau. Suivi d’un entretien avec Jean Marais. (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1994), and her Homotextualité: creation et sexualité chez Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 41. “Notices,” in Théâtre, vol. 1, 76–77. 42. Cocteau, “Du Merveilleux au cinématographe,” in La Difficulté d’ être, 75–79. 43. Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction,” in Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 1–14. 44. The Infernal Machine, II, 88–89. 45. See, for example, Bert. O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California, 1985); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 46. See Batson. 47. On the influence of popular traveling theatres on Cocteau, see Jeremy Cox, “ ‘Le théâtre forain’: Historical and Stylistic Connections between Parade and Histoire du Soldat,” Music and Letters 76, no. 4 (November 1995): 572–592. 48. Théâtre, vol. 1, 45–47. 49. Wilshire, 44. 50. Journal d’un inconnu, 95. 51. Sinfield, Alan. “Private Lives/Public Theater: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation.” Representations, no. 36 (Autumn 1991): 57. 52. On theatre and homosexuality, mostly in France, England, and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, see Laurence Senelick, “The Homosexual as Villain and Victim in Fin-de-Siècle Drama,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 2 (October 1993): 201–229; “The Queer Root of Theater,” in The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, ed. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 21–39; and Ibid., “General Introduction,” 1–14.

Notes

173

8 ETHICS, ALTERITY, AND DESIGNED EMOTION 1. Along with the studies of Halberstam, Gilmore, Twitchell, Benshoff, and Chris Baldick on the monster, see also Joseph D. Andriano, Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Edward J. Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001); Monster Theory, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Daniel Cohen, Encyclopedia of Monsters (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1982); David Williams, Deformed Discourse; David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Norton, 1993); Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); and Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, ed. Keala Jewell (Wayne State University Press, 2001). On the vampire, see Nina Auerbach’s and Paul Barber’s studies; David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994); Roz Kaveney, ed., Reading the Vampire Slayer (London: Tauris, 2004). On physical deformations, see Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). On the monster in cinema, see Stuart Galbraith, Monsters are Attacking Tokyo: The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films (Venice, CA; Feral House, 1998), and Katherine Fowkes, Giving up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films (Wayne State University Press, 1998). 2. José B. Monleón, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton University Press, 1990), 139. 3. The black dog is also the attribute of Hecate, goddess of the moon and goddess of death. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that demons often take the form of black dogs. See Jean Campbell Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 52–53; Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings behind Them, trans. James Hulbert (New York: Meridian 1994), 98. 4. From the many handbooks that have compiled some of the “secrets of the trade,” Albert Hopkins’ encyclopedic guide from 1898 is still an invaluable source. See Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (1898) (Rpt. New York: Dover, 1976). 5. On Frankenstein’s various adaptations for the stage, see Forry, “The Hideous Progenies,” 13–31. Stoker’s own adaptation of Dracula from 1897 was never staged. The first stage adaptation was produced by Hamilton Deane in 1912. See Anne-Marie Finn, “Whose Dracula is it anyway?” Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999): n.p.

174

Notes

6. For a definition of realism that is based on subjective perception, see Marshall Brown, “The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach,” PMLA 26, no. 2 (March 1981): 224–241. 7. Jean Campbell Cooper, Symbolic and Mythological Animals (London: Aquarian Press, 1992), 78. 8. “The Ghost Sonata,” in The Plays of Strindberg, trans. Michael Meyer (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), I, 467. 9. In 1905, the play launched Meyerhold’s short-lived Theatre Studio in Moscow. 10. I thank Joseph Donohue for bringing O’Casey’s play to my attention. 11. On the theatre of Tony Kushner, see James Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (New York: Routledge, 2001); “ ‘Succumbing to Luxury’: History, Language, and Hope in Homebody/Kabul,” in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, ed. James Fisher (New York: McFarland & Co., 2006), 190–200; “Between Two Worlds: Ansky’s The Dybbuk and Kushner’s A Dybbuk,” Slavic and East European Performance 18, no.2 (Summer 1998): 20–32; “On the front Lines in a Skirmish in the Culture Wars: Angels in America Goes to College,” On-Stage Studies 21 (Fall 1998): 6–30; “ ‘The Angels of Fructification’: Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and Images of Homosexuality on the American Stage,” Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 13–32. 12. See my article “Exorcising a Theater Myth: S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 1 (2000): 14–23. 13. See my article “Fantastic Elements in Beckett’s Theatre,” in The Cracked Lookingglass: Contributions to the Study of Irish Literature, ed. Carla de Petris, Jean M. Ellis D’Allessandro, and Florenzo Fantaccini (Roma: Bulzoni, 1999), 173–184. 14. Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50. 15. An ad by Chronotime for a fountain pen of Montegrappa (1912)—the reputed Italian manufacturer of writing instruments—reads: “Hand-made emotions.” The Marker, April 6, 2007. 16. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 25. 17. In a recent interview, Gérard Mortier, the director of the Opéra National de Paris, concedes that the smallest error in devising sounds, costumes, and lighting “destroys emotion.” Jean-Gabriel Fredet, “Gérard Mortier, l’Artificier de la Bastille,” Le Nouvel Observateur, March 29–April 4, 2007, 6. 18. Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 13. 19. See Ellen Schiff, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).

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175

20. See Moe Meyer, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse on Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–22. 21. James Fisher, “ ‘The Angels of Fructification,’ ” 17. 22. Nicholas De Jongh, Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968 (London: Methuen, 2001), 83–94. 23. Clum, Acting Gay, 186; Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), xiii. See also Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002); Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Carl Miller, Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History (London: Casssell, 1996); Ann Fleche, “When a Door is a Jar, or Out in the Theatre: Tennessee Williams and Queer Space,” Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 253–267; Edmund White, “The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau,” Yale Review 81, no. 4 (October 1993): 24–44; Jeffrey Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature 1890–1930 (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1977). 24. Cocteau, Maalesh, 104. 25. Dollimore, 325. 26. Tony Kushner, “Ten Questions for Tony Kushner,” New York Times, June 4, 2004.

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Selected Bibliography WRITINGS Ahl, Frederick. Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-conviction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Albrechtskirchinger, Geneviève, ed. Le Monde de Jean Cocteau. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991. Amossy, Ruth. “Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage: The Scenic Realization of Verbal Cliché.” Poetics Today 2, no. 3 (1981): 49–63. Amossy, Ruth and Elisheva Rosen. Les Discours du Cliché. Paris: SEDES, 1982. Andriano, Joseph D. Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Archer, Bert. The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality). London: Fusion Press, 2002. Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold, 1996. Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Arrabal, Fernando. Plaidoyer pour une différence. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Batson, Charles R. Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater: Playing Identities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Bauschatz, Paul. “Oedipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles.” Comparative Literature 43, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 150–170. Belli, Angela. Ancient Greek Myths and Modern Drama: A Study in Continuity. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

178 Selected Bibliography Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Besser, Gretchen. “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Reinterpretation of the Oedipus Myth by Gide and Cocteau.” Mythology in French Literature 3 (1976): 97–106. Boissy, Gabriel. “La Machine Infernale, pièce en 3 tableaux de M. Jean Cocteau.” Comoedia, April 12, 1934. Bonadeo, Alfredo. Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Borgal, Clément. Jean Cocteau, ou De la claudication considérée comme l’un des beaux arts. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. Brée, Germaine. Twentieth-Century French Literature, translated by Louise Guiney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brémond, Mireille. “Mais où sont passés les monstres? Réflexion sur le Sphinx de J. Cocteau et le Minotaure de M. Yourcenar.” Bulletin de la Société Internationale d’Etudes Yourcenariennes 19 (December 1998): 61–68. Brintnall, Kent L. “Re-building Sodom and Gomorrah: The Monstrosity of Queer Desire in the Horror Film,” Culture and Religion 5, no. 2 (2004): 145–160. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Brosse, Jacques. Cocteau. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. “Morts, Résurrections et survie du poète invisible.” in Jean Cocteau Aujourd’ hui, edited by Pierre Caizergues, 235–241. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1992. Brown, Frederick. An Impersonation of Angels. A Biography of Jean Cocteau. London: Longmans, 1969. Brown, Marshall. “The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach.” PMLA 26, no. 2 (March 1981): 224–241. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Chambon, Bertrand de. Le Roman de Jean Cocteau. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Chanel, Pierre. Album Cocteau. Paris: Henri Veyrier-Tchou, 1975. Chaperon, Danielle. Jean Cocteau. La Chute des Angles. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990. Christensen, Peter G. “Three Concealments: Jean Cocteau’s Adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Romance Notes 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 27–35. Clancier, Anne. “Jean Cocteau et les Mythes.” In Mythes et Psychanalyse, edited by Anne Clancier and Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco, 155–163. Paris: Arnaud Dupin and Serge Perrot, 1997. Claudel, Paul. L’Annonce faite à Marie. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Clement, Roland. “Jean Cocteau dans les parvis du Temple.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 207–226. Cleto, Fabio. “Introduction: Queering the Camp.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, 1–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

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Clum, John M. Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. ———. Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Cocteau, Jean. Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, translated by Ronald Duncan. New York: Dover, 1972. ———. Beauty and the Beast: Scenario and Dialogs, edited by Robert M. Hammond. New York: New York, 1970. ———. Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, in Théâtre, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. Correspondance Guillaume Apollinaire Jean Cocteau, edited by Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin. Cahors: Jean-Michel Place, 1991. ———. La Difficulté d’ être. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1957. ———. “Essai de critique indirecte” (1928). In Poesie Critique, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. L’Impromptu du Palais Royal (1962). In Théâtre Complet, 1263–1290. ———. “Inédit feudal.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 142–144. ———. The Infernal Machine. In The Infernal Machine and Other Plays by Jean Cocteau, translated by Albert Bremel. New York: New Directions Books, 1967. ———. Le Journal d’un Inconnu. Paris: Grasset, 1953. ———. Le Livre blanc. Paris: Ed. du Signe, 1930. ———. Maalesh. Journal d’une tournée théâtrale. Paris: Gallimard 1949. ———. La Machine Infernale. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1934. ———. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. In Théâtre, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. Le Mystère laic. In Poésie Critique, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. “Le Numéro Barbette.” Chronique des spectacles, June 1926. ———. Oedipe Roi. Adaptation libre d’après Sophocle. In Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 5. Paris: Marguerat, 1948. ———. Opera, suivi de Plain-Chant. Paris: Stock, 1959. ———. Opium. Paris: Stock, 1983. ———. Orphée. Paris: Stock, 1927. ———. Passé défini I (1951–1952). Paris: Gallimard, 1983. ———. Le Passé défini III (1954). Paris: Gallimard, 1989. ———. Poesie Critique, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray, pièce fantastique en quatre actes et cinq tableaux. In Théâtre Complet, 1381–1418. ———. Le Potomak. Paris: Stock, 1924. ———. “Preface,” Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. In Théâtre, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. Renaud et Armide. In Théâtre, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet, The Testament of Orpheus, translated by Carol Martin-Sperry. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989.

180

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Cocteau, Jean. “Le Secret Professionnel”(1922), in Poésie Critique, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. Théâtre, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. “Le théâtre et la mode.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, Nouvelle Série, no. 3 (2004): 93–97. ———. Théâtre Complet, edited by Michel Décaudin et al. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. ———. Tour du monde en 80 jours (mon premier voyage). Paris: Gallimard, 1936. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Combeau, Bernard. La Machine Infernale de Cocteau. Paris: Hachette, 1997. Connon, Derek F. “Folded Eternity: Time and the Mythic Dimension in Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (January 1993): 31–45. Cooper, Emmanuel. The Sexual Perspective. Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Cooper, Jean Campbell. Symbolic and Mythological Animals. London: Aquarian Press, 1992. Copley, Antony. Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Cox, Jeremy. “ ‘Le théâtre forain’: Historical and Stylistic Connections between Parade and Histoire du Soldat.” Music and Letters 76, no. 4 (November 1995): 572–592. Crowson, Lydia. The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1978. ———. “Myth in Jean Cocteau’s Theater: Art as Revenge.” Research Studies 42, no. 3 (September 1974): 139–146. Cujec, Carol A. “Modernizing Antiquity: Jean Cocteau’s Early Greek Adaptations.” Classical and Modern Literature 17, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 45–56. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Dean, Carolyn J. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. De Jongh, Nicholas. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968. London: Methuen, 2001. Delattre, Charles. Jean Cocteau: La Machine infernale. Rosny: Bréal, 1998. Dieudonné, Serge. “Cocteau entre soi-même et Radiguet.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 193–206. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres, and Post-colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism. London: Macmillan, 1998. Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Stereotyping.” In Gays in Film, edited by Richard Dyer, 27–39. New York: Zoetrope, 1984. Edmunds, Lowell. Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———. The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend . Königstein/Ts: Hain, 1981. Engelman, Suzanne R. “The Phoenix, Dragon and Sphinx: A Glimpse at Cultural Metaphors.” International Journal of Symbology 7 (1976): 94–105. Evans, Arthur B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1977. Eynat-Confino, Irene. “Exorcising a Theater Myth: S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 1 (2000): 14–23. ———. “Fantastic Elements in Beckett’s Theatre.” In The Cracked Looking Glass: Contributions to the Study of Irish Literature, edited by Carla de Petris, Jean M. Ellis D’Allessandro, and Florenzo Fantaccini, 173–184. Roma: Bulzoni, 1999. Felman, Shoshana. “Le Scandale de la Verité.” In Discours et Pouvoir, edited by Ross Chambers, Michigan Romance Studies 2 (1982): 1–28. Fifield, William. Jean Cocteau. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Figes, Eva. Tragedy and Social Evolution. New York: Persea Books, 1990. Fischlin, Daniel. “Queer Margins: Cocteau, La Belle et la bête, and the Jewish Differend.” Textual Practice 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 69–88. Fisher, Dominique D. and Lawrence R. Schehr, eds. Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Fisher, James. “ ‘The Angels of Fructification’: Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and Images of Homosexuality on the American Stage.” Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 13–32. ———. “Between Two Worlds: Ansky’s The Dybbuk and Kushner’s A Dybbuk.” Slavic and East European Performance 18, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 20–32. ———. “On the front Lines in a Skirmish in the Culture Wars: Angels in America Goes to College.” On-Stage Studies 21 (Fall 1998): 6–30. ———. “ ‘Succumbing to Luxury’: History, Language, and Hope in Homebody/ Kabul.” In Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, edited by James Fisher, 190–2000. New York: McFarland & Co., 2006. ———. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. New York: Routledge, 2001. Fleche, Anne. “When a Door is a Jar, or out in the Theatre: Tennessee Williams and Queer Space.” Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 253–267. Forbes Irving, Paul M.C. Metamorphosis in Greek Myths. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

182 Selected Bibliography Forrest, Jennifer. “Cocteau au cirque: The Poetics of Parade and ‘Le Numéro Barbette.” Studies in 20th Century Literature 27, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 9–47. Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. ———. “The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brinsley Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823–1826.” Theatre Research International 11, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 13–31. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. Fowlie, Wallace. Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet’s Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Fraigneau, André. Cocteau par lui-même. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Franko, Mark. “Where He Danced: Cocteau’s Barbette and Ohno’s Water Lilies.” PMLA 107, no. 3 (May 1992): 594–607. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919). In On Creativity and the Unconscious. Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, edited by Benjamin Nelson, translated by Alix Strachey, 122–161. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gidel, Henry. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. ———. Inscribing the Other. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Gilmore, David D. Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Gilson, René. Jean Cocteau cinéaste. Paris: Quatre-Vents, 1988. Girard, René. Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, edited by Mark R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford, 2004. ———. “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. ———. Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, translated by Gérard de Nerval. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1964. Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 1981. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

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Gumbrecht , Hans Ulrich, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Hartigan, Karelisa V. “Oedipus in France: Cocteau’s Mythic Strategy in La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 6, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 89–95. Harvey, Stephen. “The Mask in the Mirror: The Movies of Jean Cocteau.” In Peters, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, 185–207. Hassan, Ihab. “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust.” Angelaki 8, no. 1 (April 2003): 3–10. Hayward, Susan. “La Belle et la bête: What Cocteau’s Film Tells Us about Society, Politics, Gender and Sexual Identity in Post-war France.” History Today 46, no. 7 (July 1996): 43–48. Helbo, André. “La ‘théâtralité’ chez Jean Cocteau.” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, no. 1–2 (1989): 79–84. Héron, Pierre-Marie. “Demain je retrouve Jean Genet.” In Le siècle de Jean Cocteau, edited by Pierre Caizergues and Pierre-Marie Héron, 184–211. Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 2000. Heymann, “Jochen. ‘Un petit oiseau va sortir’: Le théâtre de Jean Cocteau et l’esthétique du ready-made.” In Oeuvres et Critiques (Tubingen) 22, no. 1 (1997): 77–89. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Oedipus and the Sphinx, translated by Gertrude Schoenbohm. In Oedipus: Myth and Drama, edited by Martin Kallich, Andrew MacLeish, and Gertrude Schoenbohm. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1968. Hokenson, Jan and Howard Pearce, eds. Forms of the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Hollinger, Veronica. “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 199–212. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. ———. “Specular SF: Postmodern Allegory.” In State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, edited by Nicholas Ruddick, 29–39. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. London: Methuen, 1984. Hutcheon, Linda. “The Politics of Postmodern Parody.” In Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett, 225–236. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Ibsen, Henrik. Little Eyolf, in The Master Builder and Other Plays, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor. London: Penguin Books, 1964. ———. Peer Gynt, translated by Rolf Fjelde. New York: Signet, 1964.

184

Selected Bibliography

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. ———. “Narcissism and Beyond: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Frankenstein and Fantasies of the Double.” In Aspects of Fantasy, edited by William Coyle, 43–53. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Jacquelot, Hélène de. “Le Potomak, le trait et la lettre, l’Image et l’Ecriture.” In Jean Cocteau Aujourd’ hui, edited by Pierre Caizergues, 68–77. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 111–125. Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, 1983. Jejcic, Marie. Le Savoir du poete. Oedipe selon Jean Cocteau. Paris: Agalma, 1996. Jones, Colin. “Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern France.” Representations 53 (Winter 1996): 97–127. Jordan, James William, “Were animals in Europe and Africa: Some Practical Observations on an Esoteric Role.” Ethnos 42 (1977): 53–68. Jouvet, Louis. Le Comédien désincarné. Paris: Flammarion, 1954. Kaye, Richard A. “ ‘A Splendid Readiness for Death’: T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and World War I.” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 107–134. Knapp, Bettina L. Jean Cocteau. New York: Twayne, 1970. Kontaxopoulos, Jean. “Orpheus Introspecting: Tennessee Williams and Jean Cocteau.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 4 (2001): 1–26. Kristeva, Julia. “The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras.” PMLA 102, no. 2 (March 1987): 138–152. Kushner, Tony. “Ten Questions for Tony Kushner,” The New York Times, June 4, 2004. Lange, Monique. Cocteau: Prince sans royaume. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1989. Laurenti, Huguette. “Espace de jeu, espace du mythe: La ‘poésie de théâtre’ selon Cocteau.” In Jean Cocteau Aujourd’ hui, edited by Pierre Caizergues, 133–143. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1992. Leadbeater, Lewis W. “In Defense of Cocteau: Another View of La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 113–125. Leavy, Barbara Fass. To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Le Corsu, Soraya. L’Image surréaliste dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau. Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2005. ———. Jean Cocteau, Arthur Rimbaud et le Surréalisme. Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2004. Levitt, Annette Shandler. “Jean Cocteau’s Theatre: Idea and Enactment.” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 363–372. Linares, Serge. Jean Cocteau: le grave et l’aigu. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1999.

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———. “Préface à une préface.” In Cocteau, Le Potomak 1913–1914, précédé d’un Prospectus 1916 (Paris : Passage du Marais, 2000), 11–28. Lowe, Romana N. The Fictional Female: Sacrificial Rituals and Spectacles of Writing in Baudelaire, Zola, and Cocteau. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Lucas, Ian. Impertinent Decorum: Gay Theatrical Manoeuvres. New York: Cassell, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Macris, Pierre. “L’Ange et Cocteau.” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 71–90. Maeterlinck, Maurice. La Mort de Tintagiles, in Théâtre Complet, vol. 2. Reprint. Geneve: Slatkine, 1985. Magnan, Jean-Marie. Cocteau, l’Invisible voyant. Paris: Marval, 1993. ———. “Jean Cocteau et le double peint de Dorian Gray.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 185–192. ———. “Le jeu des enfants terribles.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau no. 8 (1979): 145–172. ———. “La Machine à signification.” La Revue de Paris 72 (December 1965): 51–65. Malekin, Peter. “Knowing about Knowing: Paradigms of Knowledge in the Postmodern Fantastic.” In State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, edited by Nicholas Ruddick, 41–48. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Manlove, Colin N. Modern Fantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Marny, Dominique. Les Belles de Cocteau. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1995. Martin, Claude. “Gide, Cocteau, Oedipe: le mythe ou le complexe.” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 143–166. Mathews, Richard. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Mauriac, Claude. Jean Cocteau, ou la vérité du mensonge. Paris: Odette Lieutier, 1945. Mellencamp, Patricia. “Seeing is Believing: Baudrillard and Blau.” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May 1985): 141–154. Merrick, Jeffrey and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., eds. Homosexuality in Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Meyer, Moe. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, edited by Moe Meyer, 1–22. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Meyers, Jeffrey. Homosexuality and Literature 1890–1930. London: Athlone Press, 1977. Millecam, Jean-Pierre. L’Etoile de Jean Cocteau. Paris: Criterion, 1991. Miller, Carl. Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History. London: Cassell, 1996.

186 Selected Bibliography Miller, Judith G. “Jean Cocteau and Hélène Cixous: Oedipus.” In Drama, Sex, and Politics, edited by James Redmond, 203–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Milorad (pseud.). “Addendum. Esquisse d’une theorie de la sexualité.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 132–141. ———. “La Clé des mythes dans l’oeuvre de Cocteau” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 2 (1971): 97-140. ———. “Des hermaphrodites à Vérone.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau. Nouvelle Série, no. 3 (2004): 49–59. ———. “Introduction.” in Jean Cocteau. Mes Monstres sacrés, edited by Edouard Dermit and Bertrand Meyer, 9–14. Paris: Encre, 1979. ———. “Le Livre blanc, document secret et chiffré.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 109–131. ———. “Le Mythe orphique dans l’oeuvre de Cocteau.” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972): 111–113. ———. “Les Potomak.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 9–43. ———. “Romans jumeaux ou de l’imitation.” Cahiers Jean Cocteau, no. 8 (1979): 87–107. Milorad and Jean-Pierre Joecker, eds. Album Masques. Jean Cocteau. Supplement to Masques, no. 19 (September 1983). Miomandre, Philippe de. Moi, Jean Cocteau. Paris: AKR, 2003. Monchal, Maïté. Homotextualité: création et sexualité chez Jean Cocteau. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. ———. Le Sacerdoce de la désobeissance. Création et sexualité chez Jean Cocteau. Ph.D. thesis, University of Arizona, 1994. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1994. Monleón, José B. A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Mourgue, Gerard. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1965. Mourier Casile, Pascaline. “La ‘Firme’ du mythographe: l’ombre d’Orphée dans la ‘poésie de roman.’ ” Quaderni del Novecento Francese (Bulzoni, Roma) 15 (1992): 35–53. Special issue on Cocteau. Murphy, Patrick D. “Introduction.” In Staging the Impossible, 1–14. ———, ed. Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Odagiri, Mitsutaka. Ecritures Palimpsestes, ou Les théâtralisations françaises du mythe d’Oedipe. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Odier, Dominique. Jean Cocteau: La Machine Infernale. Paris: Ellipses, 1997. Ormand, Kirk. “Oedipus the Queen: Cross-gendering without Drag.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (March 2003): 1–28. Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, edited by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Selected Bibliography

187

Oxenhandler, Neal. “Le Mythe de la persecution dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cocteau.” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, no. 298–303 (1972/3): 91–107. ———. Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957. ———. “The Theater of Jean Cocteau”. In Peters, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, 125–151. Page, H. Dwight. “The Resurrection of the Sophoclean Phoenix: Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 18, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 329–343. Paini, Dominique. “L’Homme invisible.” In Cocteau, Catalogue de l’exposition ‘Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle.’ ” Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2003. Parrinder, Patrick, ed. Learning from Other Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Pasler, Jann. “New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Jean Cocteau’s Identity.” Musical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 255–279. Pauly, Rebecca M. “Beauty and the Beast: From Fable to Film.” Literature Film Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1989): 84–90. Pavis, Patrice. “The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theatre.” Modern Drama 29, no. 1 (March 1986): 1–22. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. ———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Peters, Arthur King, ed. Jean Cocteau and the French Scene. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984. Petro, Patrice. “The Woman, the Monster, and ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.’ ” In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, edited by Mike Budd, 210–215. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Peyre, Henri. “What Greece Means to Modern France.” Yale French Studies 6 (1950): 53–62. Philippe, Claude-Jean. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Seghers 1989. Pollard, Patrick. André Gide: Homosexual Moralist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Popkin, Michael. “Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast: The Poet as Monster.” Literature Film Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1982): 100–110. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Ramirez, Francis. “La Belle et la Bête, genèse d’un monstre.” In Le siècle de Jean Cocteau, edited by Pierre Caizergues and Pierre-Marie Héron, 133–146. Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 2000. ———. “Le comique sous-cutané dans le théâtre de Jean Cocteau.” In Jean Cocteau et le théâtre, edited by Pierre Caizergues, 123–137. Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 2000.

188 Selected Bibliography Ramirez, Francis and Christian Rolot. Jean Cocteau, L’Oeil architecte. Paris: ACR, 2000. ———. “Notice.” In Cocteau, Théâtre Complet, 1829–1832. Richardson, Brian. “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama.” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 681–694. Ries, Frank W. D. The Dance Theatre of Jean Cocteau. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Robillard, Monic. “L’Ange et le nom divin de Cocteau.” Romanic Review 81, no. 2 (March 1990): 224–235. Robinson, Christopher. Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-century French Literature. New York: Cassell, 1995. Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rorem, Ned. “Cocteau and Music.” In Peters, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, 153–183. Rosario, Vernon A. II. “Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederast’ Inversions.” In Homosexuality in Modern France, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragen, 146–176. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. ———. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Saegel, Paul. “La Semaine Dramatique. Comédie des Champs Elysées, La Machine Infernale, pièce en 4 actes de M. Jean Cocteau,” Le Ménestrel, April 20, 1934. Salomé, René. “Chronique Dramatique. Sophocle et Jean Cocteau,” Etudes, August 5, 1934: 380–387. Saunders, Michael William. Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1998. Savran, David. “Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity.” In The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla, 152–167. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Scheel, Charles. “Jean Cocteau et Franz Kafka: écriture de la métamorphose et métamorphose de l’écriture.” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 1, no. 2 (1989): 65–78. Schehr, Lawrence R. French Gay Modernism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Scherer, Jacques. Dramaturgies d’Oedipe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. Schiff, Ellen. From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Schinz, Albert. “L’Annee littéraire 1934.” Modern Language Journal 19, no. 8 (May 1935): 561–570.

Selected Bibliography

189

Schlobin, Roger C. “The Locus Amoenus and the Fantasy Quest,” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1984): 29–33. Schlumberger, Jean. “La Machine Infernale de Jean Cocteau à la Comédie des Champs Elysées.” Nouvelle Revue Française (May 1, 1934): 873–875. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” In Sex, Politics and the Nineteenth Century Novel, edited by Ruth Yeazell, 148–186. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Segal, Charles. “Oedipus through the Ages.” Review Article. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 215–226. ———. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Senelick, Laurence. “General Introduction.” In Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-sex Love, 1894–1925, 1–14. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. “The Homosexual as Villain and Victim in Fin-de-Siècle Drama.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 2 (October 1993): 201–229. Senior, William A. “Where Have All the Monsters Gone?” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 214–216. Sheaffer-Jones, Caroline. “Fixing the Gaze: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.” Romanic Review 93, no. 3 (May 2002): 361–374. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. Silver, Kenneth E. “Jean Cocteau and the Image d’Epinal: An Essay on Realism and Naiveté.” In Peters, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, 81–105. Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. “Private Lives/Public Theater: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation.” Representations 36 (Autumn 1991): 43–63. Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. ———. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” In Against Interpretation, 275–292. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966. Sprigge, Elizabeth and Jean-Jacques Kihm. Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968. State, Bert. O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: University of California University Press, 1985. Steegmuller, Francis. Cocteau. A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970. ———. “Proust and Cocteau: A Note.” In Marcel Proust, 1871–1922: A Centennial Volume, edited by Peter Quennell, 187–191. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. Strindberg, August. The Ghost Sonata, translated by Michael Meyer. In The Plays of Strindberg, vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Tinkcom, Matthew. Working like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, and Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

190 Selected Bibliography Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Tonelli, Franco. “Edipo, la rapprezentazione e la macchina infernale.” Il Lettore di Provincia 15, no. 61–62 (June–September 1985): 5–13. Touzot, Jean. Jean Cocteau. Lyon: La Manufacture, 1989. ———. Jean Cocteau, Le Poète et ses doubles. Paris: Bartillat, 2000. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Valette, Bernard. “Modernité du mythe chez Jean Cocteau.” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 1–2 (1989): 7–22. Vax, Louis. Les Chefs-d’oeuvre de la littérature fantastique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. ———. La Séduction de l’ étrange Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Oedipe et ses mythes. Paris: Editions Complexe, 1988. Virmaux, Alain and Odette Virmaux. “La malédiction surréaliste et ses limites,” La Nouvelle Revue de Paris 16 (1989): 49–54. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Weeks, Jeffrey. Against Nature. Essays on History, Sexuality, and Identity. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991. Weisweiller, Carole. Je l’appelais Monsieur Cocteau. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1996. White, Edmund. “The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau.” Yale Review 81, no. 4 (October 1993): 24–44. Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996. ———. “Wilgefortis, Patron Saint of Monsters, and the Sacred Language of the Grotesque.” In The Scope of the Fantastic: Culture, Biography, Themes, Children’s Literature, edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce, 171–177. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Williams, James S. Jean Cocteau. New York, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ———. “Resurrecting Cocteau: Gay (In)visibility and the Clean-up of French Culture.” Modern and Contemporary France 14, no. 3 (August 2006): 317–330. Willingham, Ralph. Science Fiction and the Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Winegarten, Renee. “In Pursuit of Cocteau.” American Scholar 58, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 436–443. Wirtz, Otto. Das Poetologische Theater Jean Cocteaus. Geneve: Droz 1972. Wolter, Christoph. Jean Cocteau et l’Allemagne: Mythes et réalité de la reception de son théâtre. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007.

Selected Bibliography

191

Wyns, Marielle. Jean Cocteau, l’Empreinte de l’ange. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Yarrow, Ralph. “Ambiguity and the Supernatural in Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale.” In Murphy, Staging the Impossible, 108–115. Youssef, Ahmed. Cocteau L’Egyptien: La tentation orientale de Jean Cocteau. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2001.

PLAYS The following chronological list of selected plays is indicative of the use of the fantastic in modern Western theatre. The list does not include all the science fiction plays (Ralph Willingham quotes 328 in his study) and it cites only a few of the many Frankenstein, Dracula, doppelgänger, ghosts, and vampire plays. Titles are given in English. 1790 Faust I (Goethe) 1797 The Castle Spectre (Matthew Gregory Lewis) 1799 The Castle of the Apennines or The Living Ghost (Pixérécourt, based on Anne Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolph) 1812 Orra: A Tragedy in Five Acts (Joanna Baillie) 1816 Manfred (Byron) 1820 The Vampire (Charles Nodier) The Vampire (John Robinson Planché) The Vampire (Eugene Scribe and Mélesville) 1826 Frankenstein, or The Man and the Monster (Henry M. Milner, based on Mary Shelley’s novel) 1827 The Flying Dutchman (Edward Fitz-Ball) 1830 The Devil’s Elixir (Edward Fitz-Ball) 1843 The Burgraves (Hugo) 1850 The Vampire (Alexandre Dumas, père) 1867 Peer Gynt (Ibsen) 1874 The Temptation of St. Anthony (Flaubert) 1878 Coram Populo! (Strindberg) 1888 The Lady from the Sea (Ibsen) 1890 Axel (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam) The Intruder (Maeterlinck) 1892 Pelleas and Melisande (Maeterlinck) 1893 Death and the Fool (Hofmannsthal) 1894 The Death of Tintagiles (Maeterlinck) Little Eyolf (Ibsen) 1901 Sister Beatrice (Maeterlinck) Visitors (Stanislaw Przybyszewski) 1902 Riders to the Sea (Synge)

192

Selected Bibliography

1903 Oedipus and the Sphinx (Joséphin Péladan) 1904 Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie) 1905 Dream Comedy (Valle-Inclán) Oedipus and the Sphinx (Hofmannsthal) 1906 The Stranger (Alexander Blok) 1907 Ghost Sonata (Strindberg) 1909 The Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray (Cocteau and Jacques Renaud, based on Wilde’s novel) 1910 The Tidings Brought to Mary (Paul Claudel) 1914 The Dybbuk (S. Ansky) 1916 At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats) 1917 The Breasts of Tiresias (Apollinaire) 1920 The Emperor Jones (O’Neill) 1921 The Goat Song (Franz Werfel) The Golem (Halpern Leivick) Metushelah (George Bernard Shaw) RUR: A Fantastic Melodrama (Karel Cˇ apek) Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello) The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (Cocteau) 1924 Dracula (Hamilton Deane, adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel) 1926 Orpheus (Cocteau) 1928 Victor or Children in Power (Roger Vitrac) 1929 Amphitryon 38 (Giraudoux) Lazarus (Pirandello) 1930 The Public (Lorca) 1931 After Five Years (Lorca) 1932 Blood Wedding (Lorca) The Infernal Machine (Cocteau) 1934 The Knights of the Round Table (Cocteau) The Stranded Siren (Alejandro Casona) 1936 The Mountain Giants (Pirandello) 1938 Purgatory (Yeats) 1939 The Family Reunion (T. S. Eliot) Ondine (Giraudoux) 1940 The Shadow (Evgeny Schvarts) 1941 Dark of the Moon (Howard Richardson) Renaud and Armide (Cocteau) 1944 The Dragon (Evgeny Schvarts) No Exit (Sartre) Theseus (Gide) 1949 Cock-a-doodle Dandy (Sean O’Casey) Trees Die Standing Tall (Alejandro Casona) 1950 Waiting for Godot (Beckett)

Selected Bibliography

193

1951 The Devil and the Good Lord (Sartre) 1952 Marie the Miserable (Ghelderode) Seven Screams across the Sea (Alejandro Casona) 1953 Amedeus or How to Get Rid of Him (Ionesco) Camino Real (Tennessee Williams) 1955 Damn Yankees (George Abbott and Douglass Wallop) Endgame (Beckett) 1957 Flood (Gunter Grass) Orpheus Descending (Tennessee Williams) 1958 Rhinoceros (Ionesco) 1959 Embers (Beckett) 1960 Happy Days (Beckett) 1962 Cascando (Beckett) Play (Beckett) 1964 Tiny Alice (Albee) 1965 Come and Go (Beckett) The Owl Answers (Adrienne Kennedy) 1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard) 1969 Metamorphosis (Steven Berkoff, based on Kafka’s story) The Unseen Hand (Sam Shepard) 1970 Deafman Glance (Robert Wilson) Operation Sidewinder (Sam Shepard) 1972 Macbett (Ionesco) Not I (Beckett) 1974 Geography of a Horse Dreamer (Sam Shepard) Seascape (Albee) Travesties (Tom Stoppard) 1975 The Dead Class (Tadeusz Kantor) That Time (Beckett) 1976 Angel City (Sam Shepard) Vinegar Tom (Caryl Churchill) 1977 Hamletmachine (Heiner Müller) Marco Polo Sings a Solo (John Guare) 1979 Cloud Nine (Caryl Churchill) 1980 Ohio Impromptu (Beckett) 1982 Nacht und Traume (Beckett) 1983 What Where (Beckett) 1985 Return to the Forbidden Planet (Bob Carlton) 1987 The Crossing of the Empire (Arrabal) Henceforward . . . (Alan Ayckbourn) The Piano Lesson (August Wilson) The Woman in Black (Stephen Mallatrat, adapted from Susan Hill’s novel) 1988 In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe (Eric Overmeyer)

194 Selected Bibliography

1989 1990

1991 1992 1993

1994 1997 1998

2000 2002

2004

2005 2006

Symphony of Rats (Richard Foreman) Tales of the Lost Formicans (Constance Congdon) Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Suzan-Lori Parks) The Black Rider (William S. Burroughs, music by Tom Waits) The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (Suzan-Lori Parks) Mad Forest (Caryl Churchill) Prom Night of the Living Dead (Brad Fraser) Angels in America (Tony Kushner) The America Play (Suzan-Lori Parks) The Dreaming Child (Hanoch Levin) Hubert Murray’s Widow (Michael Harding) Sheep’s Milk on the Boil (Tom Mac Intyre) The Skriker (Caryl Churchill) St. Nicholas (Conor MacPherson) 70 Hill Lane (Phelim McDermott) Comic Potential (Alan Ayckbourn) The Weir (Connor McPherson) Learning to Love the Grey (Jonathan Hall) Anna Bella Eema (Lisa D’Amour) A Number (Caryl Churchill) Shining City (Connor McPherson) Dracula, the Musical (Christopher Hampton and Don Black; music by Frank Wildhorn) Monster (Neal Bell) Miss Witherspoon (Christopher Durang) Argonautika (Mary Zimmerman) Candy and Dorothy (David Johnston) The K of D, An Urban Legend (Laura Schellhardt) The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Stephen Adly Guirgis)

Index

Ahl, Frederick, 68, 109 Albee, Edward, 151 Seascape, 146 Tiny Alice, 146 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 47 Albrechtskirchinger, Geneviève, 121 Amossy, Ruth, 81 Anouilh, Jean, 79 Anquetil, Georges, 94 Ansky, Salomon, The Dybbuk, 146, 148, 151, 174n12 Antigone, 10, 53, 59, 73, 86, 129 Apollinaire, Guillaume, The Breasts of Tiresias, 45–7, 104 Archer, Bert, 110 Archers de Saint Sébastien, Les [St. Sebastian’s Archers], 99 Armitt, Lucie, 112 Arnaud, Claude, 104 Arrabal, Fernando, 97 Artaud, Antonin, 149 Attebery, Brian, 112, 118 Auerbach, Nina, 27 Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 154n7 Bacchus, 104, 120, 133 Baldick, Chris, 22, 26 Barbette’s Show, see Numéro Barbette Barrie, James M., Peter Pan, 4 Batson, Charles R., 133 Beauty and the Beast, 21, 93, 96, 98, 120, 126–7

Beckett, Samuel, 151 Endgame, 146 Happy Days, 146, 148 Not I, 131 Waiting for Godot, 146, 148 Bérard, Christian, 28–9, 72, 99 Berkoff, Steven, 146 Biaggini, Olivier, 23 Blood of a Poet, The, 9, 20–1, 124 Böcklin, Arnold, 144 Boissy, Gabriel, 49 Bonadeo, Alfredo, 17 Bouhélier, Saint-Georges de, Oedipus, King of Thebes, 53 Brée, Germaine, 105 Bremel, Albert, 41 Brémond, Mireille, 64 Breton, André, 99, 104–5 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 112 Brosse, Jacques, 48 Browning, Tod, Dracula, 27, 41 Butler, Judith, 43, 160n45 Camus, Albert, 79 Cˇapek, Karel. R. U. R, 137 Carroll, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], 111 Chambon, Bertrand de, 99, 166n17 Chanel, Pierre, 158n16 Chaperon, Danielle, 19, 121 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 94 Christensen, Peter G., 99, 170n11

196 Index Churchill, Caryl, Cloud Nine, 146 Cixous, Hélène, 49 Claudel, Paul, 151 The Tidings Brought to Mary, 145 Clum, John M., 86, 111, 151 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 112, 115, 119–20, 126 Crowson, Lydia, 73–4, 121 Cujec, Carol A., 154n5 Daniélou, Jean, 5, 153n4 Dargelos, Pierre, 99 Daudet, Lucien, 99 De Jongh, Nicholas, 101, 151 De Maré, Rolf, 163n49 Dean, Carolyn J., 95 Décaudin, Michel, 153n3 Diaghilev, Sergei, 81, 99, 106 Dieudonné, Serge, 19, 169n66 Dollimore, Jonathan, 151 Donohue, Joseph, 174n10 Duncan, Isadora, 8, 11–12, 51, 154n12 Evans, Arthur, 121 Fantomâs, 159n38 Felman, Shoshana, 41, 54, 107 Feuillade, Louis, 40–1 Figes, Eva, 51 Fisher, James, 151, 174n11, 175n21 Flaubert, Gustave, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 16 Forbes Irving, Paul M. C., 46–7 Forry, Steven Earl, 156n23, 150n36 Foucault, Michel, 20, 43, 97, 109 Freud, 7, 91, 95, 98, 106–7, 109 reading, 9, 32, 53, 92, 109, 120 refutation of, 7, 14–15, 50–1, 92, 102, 106–9 unheimlich, 14, 63 Gide, André, 97, 104, 106, 109, 114 Corydon, 94–5, 166n12

Oedipus, 79 Saul, 94 Theseus, 18 Gilbert, Sandra, 51, 160n47 Gilman, Sander L., 68–9 Gilmore, David D., 29, 96 Girard, René, 32, 68, 70, 109, 147 Giraudoux, Jean, 79 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 139–41, 142 Gould, Eric, 8 Gubar, Susan, 51, see also Gilbert, Sandra Hahn, Reynaldo, 99 Halberstam, Judith, 97–8 Hartigan, Karelisa V., 32 Helbo, André, 156n21 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 94 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 16, 26, 65–6, 156n24 Hokenson, Jan, 124 Hollinger, Veronica, 159n30 Hugo, Valentine, 81 Hume, Kathryn, 13, 112–13, 117 Hutcheon, Linda, 87 Ibsen, Henrik, 141, 151 Little Eyolf, 142–4 Peer Gynt, 142 Inge, William, 111 Ionesco, Eugene, 141, 151 Amedeus or How to Get Rid of Him, 146 Macbett, 146 Rhinoceros, 146 Jackson, Rosemary, 125 Jacob, Max, 47, 99, 159n38 James, Henry, 97 Jarry, Alfred, Ubu Roi, 5, 115 Jejcic, Marie, 49, 161n13 Jones, Colin, 68 Jouvet, Louis, 6, 67, 154n7

Index

197

Kaye, Richard A., 99 Kennedy, Adrienne, The Owl Answers, 146 Khnopff, Fernand, 30 Kihm, Jean-Jacques, 108 Kristeva, Julia, 163n48 Kushner, Tony, 151–2 Angels in America, 146

Monleón, José B., 137–8 Montesquiou, Robert de, 99 Mortier, Gérard, 174n17 Murat, Violette, 81 Murphy, Patrick D., 4, 129

Laurenti, Huguette, 155n19 Le Corsu, Soraya, 112, 170n4 Leadbeater, Lewis W., 62, 72 Leavy, Barbara Fass, 68 Leivick, Halpern, The Golem, 4 Linares, Serge, 17 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 151 After Five Years, 146 Blood Wedding, 146 The Public, 146 Yerma, 146 Lowe, Romana N., 32 Lucas, Ian, 84

O’Casey, Sean, Cock-a-doodle Dandy, 146 Odagiri, Mitsutaka, 53, 66, 162n33 Oedipe-Roi, 5, 9, 20, 58 Oedipus Rex, 5, 9, 133 Orpheus, 17–19, 87, 98, 116–17, 125–6, 133 Owens, Craig, 43 Oxenhandler, Neal, 75, 103

Mac Intyre, Tom, Sheep’s Milk on the Boil, 146 Macris, Pierre, 19, 121 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 151 The Blue Bird, 141 The Death of Tintagiles, 144, 174n9 Pelleas and Melisande, 114, 170n13 Sister Beatrice, 114 Magnan, Valentin, 94 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 19 Manlove, Colin, 112 Martin, Claude, 121 Martin du Gard, Roger, 97 Mauriac, François, 104–5 Max, Edouard de, 97, 99 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 166n19 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 174n9 Millecam, Jean-Pierre, 168n62 Miller, Judith G., 49, 65 Milorad [pseud.], 17–18, 120–1, 169n39

Numéro Barbette, Le [Barbette’s Show], 172n40

Péladan, Joséphin, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 26 Perloff, Marjorie, 87 Petro, Patrice, 51 Peyre, Henri, 8 Picasso, Pablo, 104 Polignac, Edmond de, 99 Pollard, Patrick, 156n36 Porché, François, 95 Potomak, The, 16–18, 49, 98 Poulenc, Francis, 99, 133 Proust, Marcel, 94, 99–100 Rabkin, Eric, 112 Racine, Jean, 7, 12, 79 Athalie, 7 Radiguet, Raymond, 99 Raffalovich, Marc-André, 94 Redon, Odilon, 20 Réja, Marcel, 95 Renaud and Armide, 119–20, 125, 128, 133 Renaud, Jacques, 97, 113, 167n27 Reverdy, Pierre, 47 Richardson, Brian, 78

198

Index

Rimbaud, Arthur, 19 Robillard, Monic, 19 Rocher, René, 99 Rokem, Freddie, 150 Ronen, Ruth, 148 Rose, Margaret A., 86 Rose, Sir Francis, 99 Rosen, Elisheva, 81 Rubinstein, Ida, 99 Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 35 Saegel, Paul, 107 Salomé, René, 107 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 79 Scherer, Jacques, 158n14 Schinz, Albert, 165n33 Schlobin, Roger C., 29 Schlumberger, Jean, 49–50, 54, 107 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 167n23 Segal, Charles, 54, 164n3 Seneca, 43–54, 64 Senior, William A., 4 Séon, Aléxandre, 30 Shakespeare, 16, 111, 133 Hamlet, 7, 11, 14–15, 53, 82, 85, 91, 108 Shaw, George Bernard, 111 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 16, 141 Silver, Kenneth E., 164n8 Sinfield, Alan, 135 Sontag, Susan, 68, 84 Sophocles, 13, 68 Oedipus Tyrannos, 5, 7, 72, 106, 109 reworking of, 38, 59, 68, 108, 133 Sphinx, 7, 26 St. Sebastian’s Archers, see Archers de Saint Sébastien Steegmuller, Francis, 126, 166n18 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 35, 97, 141, 173n5 Stravinsky, Igor, 5

Strindberg, August, 4, 141, 151 Dream Play, 37 Ghost Sonata, 143–4 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 71 Supernatural Portrait of Dorian Gray, The, 97–9, 113, 126, 149 Testament of Orpheus, The, 18, 21, 93, 98 Todorov, Tzvetan, 13, 42, 112, 126, 150 Tonelli, Franco, 92 Touzot, Jean, 53, 105, 121 Traill, Nancy H., 112 Twitchell, James, 26, 40 Valette, Bernard, 8, 121 Verlaine, Paul, 19 Wagner, Richard, 7, 84 Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, The, 8, 87, 102, 126–7, 129 Preface, 73, 80, 102, 114–15, 133 White, Edmund, 95 White Paper, The, 3, 93–100, 105 Wilde, Oscar, 97, 99 The Portrait of Dorian Gray, 70, 97, 113–14 The Sphinx, 25, 101 Williams, David, 54 Williams, James S., 167n32 Williams, Tennessee, 111, 151 Camino Real, 146 Orpheus Descending, 18, 146 A Streetcar Named Desire, 85–6 Willingham, Ralph, 153n3 Wilshire, Bruce, 35 Wilson, August, The Piano Lesson, 146 Wilson, Robert, Deafman Glance, 146 Wyns, Marielle, 19 Yarrow, Ralph, 61 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 146 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 64