Cocteau, Jean - Lindley Hanlon (essay date 1983)
Lindley Hanlon (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: Hanlon, Lindley. “Cocteau, Cauchemar, Cinema.” In The Anxious Subject: Nightmares and Daymares in Literature and Film, edited and introduced by Moshe Lazar, pp. 107-20. Lancaster: Undena Publications, 1983.
[In the following essay, Hanlon examines the influence of nightmares, somnambulism, and an obsession with death on Cocteau's films.]
Extending the analogy between the individual and the epoch, one can say that a literary trend is to its time what a dream is to man: an activity propelled by an unconscious design, which rebels against limits imposed by the conscience only in order to enlarge the scope of the conscience and the literature that inspires it. …
[Literature drawing on the orphic tradition] is diametrically opposed to realism. … These works therefore take advantage of everything in the dream that is undefined, ambiguous, in the sense...
[The entire page is 6600 words long]
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