The Plays of Cocteau by Jean Cocteau

First produced:Parade, 1917; Le Boeuf sur le Toit, 1920; Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, 1924 (The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party); Romeo et Juliette, 1926; Orphée, 1927 (Orpheus); Oedipe-Roi, 1928; Antigone, 1928; La Voix humaine, 1930 (The Human Voice); La Machine infernale, 1935; (The Infernal Machine); Les Chevaliers de la table ronde, 1937 (The Knights of the Round Table); Les Parents terribles, 1938 (Intimate Relations); Les Monstres sacres, 1940 (The Holy Terrors); L’Aigle a deux tetes, 1946 (The Eagle Has Two Heads); Bacchus, 1951

Critical Evaluation:

Cocteau, as poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, was a controversial figure in the avante-garde activities of French art; he also produced ballets, motion pictures, and drawings. Another facet of his multiple personality was the lengthy discussion, after his return to Catholicism, with Jacques Maritain, the great Thomist philosopher. Thus, there was no aspect of the modern intellectual world that he did not touch.

Beginning his career as a dramatist with the Surrealist movement of the 1920’s, Cocteau always practiced what has been called “the esthetics of astonishment”; that is to say, the purpose of each play was essentially not dramatic, as that word is generally understood. Its purpose was rather to surprise, to astonish the audience into seeing familiar situations in a new light or from an unexpected angle. In spite of what may at first appear to be merely a bag of clever tricks, Cocteau did have a real theory of the function of poetry. It was his purpose to show his readers things that they see every day, but to present them from an angle and at a speed giving the impression that they are viewing the familiar for the first time. Such a theory has both its good and its bad side: it can lead, as it often does, to a genuinely fresh kind of writing; but it can also be merely an excuse for a type of work that is only perversely eccentric. THE EIFFEL TOWER WEDDING PARTY, for example, seems to fall into this second category. The drama, if it can be called such, really accomplishes nothing; it is essentially a piece of clever foolishness, another round in the seemingly endless French game of shocking the bourgeoisie. Such a game doubtless gives satisfaction to the players, but it is hardly likely to produce great art.

This same kind of perverse humor flits through even those plays which may be regarded as more serious. Cocteau was preoccupied, as many modern dramatists have been, with the great stories from Greek mythology. Just as Eliot, in THE FAMILY REUNION, used the ORESTEIA in a modern setting, so Cocteau seemed haunted by the story of Oedipus and in THE INFERNAL MACHINE retold that legend in contemporary terms. The story, as Cocteau interpreted it, is a tightly wound machine, created by the gods for the destruction of a mortal. As the machine slowly unwinds, Oedipus is destroyed as surely as in the tragedy of Sophocles. Yet he is a very different Oedipus. Though his tragic end is physically the same as that of the Greek hero, he is not a great figure who “read the riddle-word of Death, and mightiest stood of mortal men.” He is, instead, only a brash youth, conceited rather than proud, who candidly tells Tiresias that he has been seeking a love that is close to the maternal. At the end of the play, when he has blinded himself, the seer says of him that he has not lost his pride: once he wanted to be the happiest of men; now he wishes to be the unhappiest. Thus a neat twist is given to the story; yet for all that, Cocteau’s king remains merely a conceited adolescent. And the dramatist has another trick up his sleeve: the ghost of Jocasta appears, visible only to the blinded Oedipus, to tell him that his wife is dead and that only his mother survives and has come to help him. The problem of the wife-mother relationship has been resolved, and Oedipus has, we might say, returned to the womb.

THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE is another example of this clever manipulation of traditional material. Here we have an elaborate mixture of all the elements dealt with by Jessie Weston in FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE. Again we have the impression of a conjurer taking rabbits out of a hat. Cocteau presents Merlin to us as a baneful magician who has cast a blight over Arthur’s kingdom so that no flowers bloom and no birds sing. He is accompanied by a minor demon named Ginifer, a kind of Proteus who assumes the shapes of Gawain, Guinevere, and Galahad. The powers of evil are defeated by those of good, represented by the Galahad-Parsifal figure; the sun shines again, and the birds resume their song. But the members of King Arthur’s household have lived so long in the shadow and the silence of Merlin’s evil that they cannot endure the sunlight and the songs of the birds. Galahad, the poet who cannot see the Grail himself but can only make it visible to others, rides away to fight Merlin again in some other kingdom. Thus the war between Good and Evil is endlessly waged. Here the figure of Galahad is crucial: it is the poet who breaks the spell and frees mankind from the power of evil, just as in THE INFERNAL MACHINE we are told that Antigone, leading her blinded father from the palace, is no longer under the power of Creon but belongs to mankind, to poetry, to all who are pure in heart. The poet is, therefore, both the white magician combating the forces of darkness and the ultimate possessor of all myths.

It is here necessary to make a very obvious point, that this use of ancient mythology by contemporary dramatists has one very bad feature. In a very real sense, the writer is evading a part of his responsibility as a dramatist, for a large part of his work has already been done for him when he brings Gawain or Oedipus onto the stage. These people are such a part of our literary heritage that our reaction to them is instinctive. And since the playwright can never hope to surpass or even to equal these towering mythological figures, there is an irresistible and often fatal impulse to be merely clever, to distort the characters, or to cover them with a slick and superficial veneer of modernism. The audience gets a certain surprise from this adroit manipulation, especially when, as was Cocteau’s practice, it is accompanied by clever stage devices; but in the process the characters lose their ancient grandeur and become rather petty contemporaries.

Of Cocteau’s plays over three decades, BACCHUS is possibly the most conventional. It was written after the letters on the subject of Catholicism had been exchanged between Cocteau and Maritain, and, according to the author, it deals with the same theme as did the letters, the conflict between kindness that is hard and that which is soft and yielding. The scene is Germany in the early days of the Reformation, and the main character, a peasant named Hans, is a young heretic. In the figure of Hans we are compelled to admit that Cocteau falls victim to a literary cliche: that of the naive child of nature who attempts to return to a primitive Christianity free from the institution of the Church. The arguments presented by Hans are more than a little confused, but Cocteau, as always, finds a way out, by asserting that the sixteenth century showed such confusion of mind that it allowed no really clear or convincing arguments. Yet the play does have a denouement, in which the Cardinal saves the heretic from being burned at the stake and by a pious lie permits him to be buried in consecrated ground.

In reading of Cocteau’s plays, it is difficult if not impossible to find any thread running through them all to which we can catch hold. Each seems an experiment, unrelated to the others. But then Cocteau was a sleight-of-hand artist, a juggler who kept a dozen glittering balls whirling through the air so that the bewildered audience could never be quite certain of what was going on. Just as in BACCHUS he could evade the question of what the characters really had in their minds, he was always ready with a neat reply to any protest against his work, such as his statement that if a work of art appeared to be ahead of its time, the true reason was that the time was behind the work of art, a reply which, while leaving the critic baffled, was simply no answer at all.

That there was in Cocteau a goodly admixture of the professional “enfant terrible” cannot be denied. Also, there was a strong dash of intellectual snobbery, which took the form of a lofty disdain of his audience. The audience is not there simply to enjoy the play. It must be lectured; it must be informed in no uncertain terms that it is not very intelligent and must be told what to think. He speaks with some pride of the public which has been so thoroughly trained that it can no longer be surprised into anger by anything. Therefore, the only possibility left for Cocteau was the “Call to Order” in the form of a relatively conventional play such as BACCHUS, for this was the only surprise left, the only rabbit the magician still had to pull from the hat.

After his return to Catholicism, Cocteau said, in writing to Maritain, that he had never created scandal except with the deliberate intention of arousing the sleepy or the complacent. Perhaps this statement sums up his life as an artist, and perhaps he performed a useful function. Perhaps, too, when all of his childishness has been swept away, a solid body of work may remain.