Jean Cocteau World Literature Analysis
Cocteau constructed for himself a complete aesthetic universe; he wrote the texts, designed the scenery and costumes, selected the dancers, arranged the choreography, wrote the music, directed, often performed in the production, and illustrated the published book. As much as any one since the composer Richard Wagner, Cocteau demanded that his productions and publications be “total artistic experiences,” under the control of a single aesthetic imperative, and that his audiences appreciate his work on its own terms, free from modish evaluations or conservative intolerance. There is a curious combination in Cocteau’s work of an intense insistence both on classicism and on artificial convention and upon radicalism and individualism. The most sustained exposition of his thoughts on art and literature is his late work La Difficulté d’être (1947; The Difficulty of Being, 1966).
Rather than allying himself with fashionable authors of the day, most notably the Surrealists, Cocteau designates as his inspiration the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, who described his own writings as being “consubstantial with their author”—both mystically and physically inseparable from their author. Cocteau persistently credits the contributions of his friends to his work and insists upon the direct relationship of his own lived experience to that which he artistically represents. Yet his work is not simply an autobiographical expression of a personal experience to be assimilated exactly to the copious personal remarks and records that the author has left behind. Indeed, critics have even accused Cocteau of a lack of artistic and theoretical originality. Even as familiarity with such biographical details as the artistic society of the Café aux Deux Magots, frequented by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the Parisian avant-garde, is necessary to the full appreciation of the satire that opens the 1950 film Orpheus, for example, so, too, a knowledge of Cocteau’s theoretical indebtedness is crucial. Cocteau never claims to be original and often attributes his theoretical and artistic borrowings, claiming in this scholarly respect, as well as in other artistic aspects, to strive for clarity and lucidity, to “show darkness in broad daylight.”
Cocteau’s emphasis upon neoclassical simplicity and order in works such as Orpheus and Antigone stands in apparent contradiction to his recurrent interest in many of the metaphysical questions raised by German Romanticism in particular. In many of his works, from The Blood of a Poet and Bacchus to Children of the Game, as well as Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, Cocteau develops commentaries upon, and versions of, central Romantic themes such as the inextricability of love and death, divine poetic intoxication, the inevitability of suffering for the artist, and the incomprehension and lack of appreciation of bourgeois society for radical art. Cocteau himself cites as inspirations the importance of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of Dionysiac poetic inspiration and of the unparalleled polymathy of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Perhaps the single most persistent theme in Cocteau is that love can only be perfected in death. Like his precursor the French Romantic poet and novelist Victor Hugo, Cocteau sees the poet as the écho sonore, whose voice echoes both the events of the external world and such intense internal orphic realizations.
If love and death is a central theme, then the conduct and destiny of the poet is his dominant theoretical preoccupation. For Cocteau, “poetry” encompasses all media, and his own corpus contains experiments in dozens of literary genres and artistic media. For Cocteau, poetry is not an esoteric preoccupation of an elite group of aesthetes. Although often criticized as being precisely such a precious enterprise destined for a marginal coterie, Cocteau’s “poetry,” like...
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the productions of so many artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century, insists upon the universal relevance and importance of poetry as that alone that makes life worthwhile in a materialistic age, as the only remaining “spiritual luxury.” Cocteau’s work is committed to the double imperative both continually to shock its audience and uncompromisingly to create a radically individualized system of its own artistic fabrication.
The phenomenon of Cocteau, patron of new talent, scintillating conversationalist, homosexual, opium addict, and grand maître of the French avant-garde, especially after his self-imposed exile from Paris, often obscures the substance of his artistic achievement. Perhaps more so than any of his extraordinary fictional poets, Cocteau himself has become one of his own monstres sacrés.
Antigone
First produced: 1922 (first published, 1928; English translation, 1961)
Type of work: Play
Antigone, the cursed descendant of Oedipus, must decide between familial duty and the laws of the state in order to bury her brother.
Cocteau chose in 1922 to translate Sophocles’ famous tragedy Antigon (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729) into French. Cocteau himself, in his diaries, declares that he was motivated by a feeling of sympathy with the heroine, who like Joan of Arc, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean Genet, shares the condition of being both persecuted and inspired. For Cocteau, the persecution of Antigone will be based on her purity, which distinguishes her from the rest of corrupt society. The first production of Antigone in 1922 was staged at the Atélier in Paris with settings by Pablo Picasso, music by Arthur Honegger, and costumes by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Charles Dullin and Antonin Artaud played the parts of Creon and Tiresias, Cocteau himself took the part of the Chorus, and Genica Atanasiou played Antigone. This collaboration of innovators in all fields of the arts is typical of Cocteau’s productions and films.
Cocteau’s text shortens Sophocles’ tragedy, adapting the Greek tragedy to a unified French dramatic form, and shifts many of the psychological and verbal emphases of the ancient play. Cocteau’s prose is itself shortened; it is often not only concise but abrupt, giving a feel of avant-garde modernity to the play’s language. Cocteau describes his effort as a reduction and “scouring” of language to the point at which the play “hurtles toward its conclusion like an express train.” At the same time that the play is accelerated by Cocteau’s streamlined language, it is transformed from the record of the majestic actions of kings, a traditional definition of a tragedy, to a minimalist melodrama that restricts and schematizes the characters and the scale of their actions. Even with stage directions, its text can never adequately record the rich visual and auditory experience of the play in performance. Many of the stage directions and costuming directions suggest, but cannot represent, the boldness of the play’s staging:beneath the masks one could make out the actor’s faces, and ethereal features were sewn onto the masks in white millinery wire. The costumes were worn over black bathing suits, and arms and legs were covered. The general effect was suggestive of a sordid carnival of kings, a family of insects.
The theatricality of the performance, such expressionist stage directions as “Antigone . . . braces herself for the day ahead,” and all the mentions of musical interludes indicate the multimedia nature of this piece of “performance art.” This version of Sophoclean theatricality, which also relied upon masks and music, both insists upon the connection between Cocteau’s piece and the Greek original and emphasizes the degree to which it has transformed the classical material that it invokes. Cocteau emphasizes both the translation of the Antigone myth by time and the persistence of the importance of myth and its accompanying spectacles.
In scenes such as the encounter between Creon and Antigone, Sophocles himself carefully presented and questioned the nature of legal justice and its relationship to human emotions and familial duty. With Cocteau’s treatment of the myth, another issue emerges clearly, however—that of Antigone’s nature as a poet. Other playwrights, notably Cocteau’s contemporary Jean Anouilh, insist upon the defiant heroism of Antigone in the face of political oppression in their adaptations of Sophocles’ play. In Cocteau’s version, such political, or even religious or familial, defiance gives way to an emphasis upon Antigone’s autonomy and her status as a poet. She does not present an elaborate defense of her actions; instead, she offers the spectacle of her demise as the gesture that will testify to her innocence. Creon corroborates the theatricality of the drama, when, in the last moments of the play, he describes his plight as the cause of three deaths, as “not knowing where to look.”
Children of the Game
First published: Les Enfants terribles, 1929 (English translation, 1930; best known as Children of the Game)
Type of work: Novel
Two children, Paul and Elisabeth, play a dangerous and amoral game that substitutes fantasy for reality and finally kills them.
Much of Children of the Game is drawn from Cocteau’s experiences from 1900 through 1903 as an unhappy student at the “Petit Condorcet,” a college in the rue Amsterdam. Indeed, the opening description of a visit to the Cité des Monthiers, a hidden courtyard of artists within an international diplomatic neighborhood of Paris, is a recollection of many such visits that Cocteau himself made with school friends. Cocteau uses the same autobiographical material in his The Blood of a Poet, which represents a development of ideas raised by Children of the Game, and in the famous film noir version directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The symbolic meanings that will be assigned to the later cinematographic versions of the story are already present in the story of these children, who, Cocteau will say later in his journals, did not recognize their own poetry, who “were not playing horses but actually became horses.”
Written in three weeks in 1929 while Cocteau was being treated for opium addiction, the novel focuses on the theme of the adolescent, a new creation of the years following the end of World War I, whose sense of prestige and freedom in the first half of the decade would decay into disenchantment in the second half. The plot of the novel itself is simple and absolute in its construction, revolving around the promise made between Paul and Elisabeth to adhere to a pact, which excludes the rest of the world and love. They are “angelic,” in the sense of being both innocent and uncompromising. For a few years, they are granted a carefree life in their world of childish, if nightmarish, performances and images before the encroachment of a race of adults perverts and destroys them. The novel opens and closes with snow scenes, which establish the emotional coldness of the life that it depicts. Like the falling snow, which blocks out the world, the children’s game substitutes their nocturnal performances and an absolute code of rules for all the accepted ways of ordering reality.
The novel opens with the school bully throwing a deadly snowball at Paul. This childhood rite of initiation, which is repeated in the autobiographical The Blood of a Poet, forms an ominous frame for the whole novel. Although scarcely present in the novel, Dargelos remains a haunting threat, an avenging angel, from whom the children retreat into their symbolic world of the game. He finally sends poison, a more incontrovertibly lethal symbol than the snowball, into that children’s room, whence the rules of the game originate. Only with Paul’s death, Elisabeth’s suicide, and the poisonous invasion of their sacred, and yet horrendous, magical space, the “theater of the bedroom,” will the curse be lifted. Cocteau consistently emphasizes the theatricality of their game through a careful attention to stage lighting for their vignettes, an attention that slowly seeps beyond the room to alter the balance of light and dark in the real world outside the room. Even natural phenomena are subject to distortion in this ever-expanding theater of cruelty. The unnerving combination of perversion and order within the constructed security of the children’s game-world will be accompanied in the film version not only by chiaroscuro lighting but also by the deceptively soothing music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.
Elisabeth’s suicide appropriately ends the game, for she has always been the stronger player, controlling both Paul’s behavior and that of his friend Gerard. Although brutalized and terrified by her brother, Elisabeth finally causes the death of her brother when he breaks their childhood contract and falls in love with Agatha. Elisabeth, in a fever both jealous and physical, shoots both her already poisoned brother and herself in the head with a revolver. As an avenging Electra, she brings a final terrifying consummation of the tragic ritual, on a white and snow-covered stage, by playing the horror absolutely according to the rules.