The Infernal Machine by Jean Cocteau

First published:La Machine infernale, 1934 (English translation, 1936)

First produced: 1934, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées (Théâtre Louis Jouvet), Paris

Type of plot: Allegory

Time of work: Mythological era in ancient Greece

Locale: Ancient Thebes

Principal Characters:

• Oedipus, a young man, later King of Thebes
• Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead
• Tiresias, the high priest
• The Ghost of King Laius
• Jocasta, Queen of Thebes, the widow of Laius
• Creon, Jocasta’s brother
• The Sphinx, the goddess of vengeance
• A Theban mother
• Antigone, the daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus

The Play

Before the curtain rises on The Infernal Machine, a Voice tells the audience how Jocasta, Queen of Thebes, left her baby son, his feet mutilated, on a mountainside to die, in order to counter the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The child was rescued and adopted by Polybus and Merope, king and queen of Corinth, who treated him as their own. As a young man, Oedipus consulted an oracle and learned the same prophecy. Believing himself the son of Polybus and Merope, he fled that city in order to counter the oracle. One day, during a dispute at a crossroads, he killed a man; unknown to Oedipus, the man was Laius, King of Thebes, his father. Soon after, he heard of the Sphinx, which was killing the young men of Thebes, having first asked a riddle they could not solve. Queen Jocasta had offered her hand in marriage and the crown of Thebes to the conqueror of the Sphinx. Oedipus was victorious, married Jocasta—his mother—and became King of Thebes. The years passed. A plague struck, and the gods blamed an unnamed criminal. Having determined to find him, Oedipus discovered the truth about himself. Jocasta hanged herself with her red scarf, and Oedipus blinded himself with her gold brooch. Now, says the Voice, let the audience watch how a perfect machine constructed by the infernal gods encompasses the mathematical annihilation of a mortal.

Each act in The Infernal Machine has its own title. Act 1, “The Ghost,” takes place at night. The atmosphere is heavy and the sky riven with heat lightning. Two soldiers patrol the raised platform alongside the city wall, while the nearby sewers discharge a stench and the noisy rhythms of nightclubs are heard. Laius’s death is still recent. His ghost has tried to communicate with Jocasta. The soldiers discuss the apparition with their officer, who is more concerned about the way in which the matter was reported over his head than with the substance of the report. Jocasta arrives with Tiresias, the high priest. He treads on the end of her long scarf, and she comments that it is always trying to strangle her. She evinces an impatient insensitivity to the condition of her people, preferring to flirt with the young soldier (who reminds her of the son who would have been his age) than to take seriously the report of the ghost. She reflects that if her son were alive he would be handsome and brave (like the young soldier) and would conquer the Sphinx. The ghost comes again, but no one can see or hear him. Now the young soldier who reminds Jocasta so strangely of her son steps on her scarf. Only when she has departed does the ghost succeed in communicating again with the soldiers, but he cannot complete his message before he is dragged away by invisible underworld forces.

Act 2, “Oedipus Meets the Sphinx,” follows the shape of act 1 in that after much preparatory conversation, striking dramatic action occurs toward the end; again, there is a humorous element. The act begins at the same moment as act 1, but on a hill outside Thebes. The Sphinx (who has assumed the form of a young girl) and Anubis wait to catch young men. A mother with her children stops to converse and explains the domestic problems of Thebes, unaware that she is addressing the Sphinx. When Oedipus arrives, the Sphinx, in whom the form of the young girl has become dominant and who is tired of killing, falls in love with him and reveals in advance the answer to the riddle he must solve. Despite his initial bravado, Oedipus is a helpless coward in her hands, but he solves the riddle. He shows no gratitude but hurries off. After Anubis and the Sphinx discuss the fate that awaits him, he returns, seeking the body of the Sphinx as proof of his triumph, before going to Thebes to claim his reward.

Act 3, “The Wedding Night,” again begins on a stifling, stormy night. The bridal bed is the bed of Jocasta and Laius, the cradle is beside it, and the room is blood-red. Oedipus and Jocasta, in their heavy ceremonial robes, are exhausted and move as if drugged. Tiresias comes to warn Oedipus of danger, but Oedipus thinks that the high priest is in league with Creon against him and fails totally to penetrate his meaning. During the night, he dreams of his encounter with the Sphinx. Jocasta’s soothing response to his distress is quasi-maternal; this and many other hints of his real identity are placed before them, but they are ignored or explained away. A drunkard sings a satirical song about the difference in age between Jocasta and Oedipus, and while he is chased away by the young soldier with whom Jocasta had flirted in the first act, Oedipus sleeps with his head against the cradle, gently rocked by Jocasta.

Act 4, the shortest, is titled “Oedipus the King.” Seventeen years have passed; Oedipus and Jocasta have two sons and two daughters. The prophecy has been fulfilled, and the consequences emerge. The action speeds up appreciably as the “infernal machine” completes its process. A plague has hit Thebes. A messenger from Corinth announces the death of Polybus but also reveals that Oedipus was not the natural son of Polybus and Merope. Oedipus determines to discover the truth, despite the warnings of Creon and Tiresias, who have known for a long time but have kept their knowledge secret. Jocasta, and then Oedipus, are brought to realize Oedipus’s identity. Jocasta hangs herself with her scarf; Oedipus puts out his eyes with her brooch. As Creon begins to take over the reins of power, the ghost of Jocasta—Oedipus’s mother rather than his wife—fusing with the person of their daughter Antigone, leads away the blind Oedipus, who accepts the blind Tiresias’s stick and thus at last acknowledges the old man’s integrity.

Dramatic Devices

Jean Cocteau in The Infernal Machine parades his genius for combining elements from different genres, by unifying the bawdy hilarity of bedroom farce and the solemnity of classical Greek tragedy. To this he adds burlesque (not only Oedipus’s mock-heroic triumph over the Sphinx, when the powerless youth is a craven coward and shows no generosity in victory, but also the affectionate parody of the ghost scenes in the first act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, pr. c. 1600-1601), drawing-room comedy (Jocasta’s flirtation with the soldier, Oedipus’s outrageous misapprehension of Tiresias’s motives), comedy of morals (the soldiers and their preoccupations, the garrulous mother), deft touches of characterization (the impatient Creon, straining to take the reins of power), and especially the striking irony of visual devices (the metaphor of the blood-red bedroom, the cradle, Jocasta’s maternal response to the sleeping Oedipus as she tiptoes about the room so as not to wake him, the scarf that so often nearly strangles her, the brooch). Another aspect is the bathing of the entire action in lurid violet light from mercury lamps, a device achieved in the first performance and often re-created in modern performances. In addition, the unseen Voice is to some extent a modern-day realization of the classical Greek chorus, summarizing, pointing out the moral, and above all emphasizing the theatrical locus of the action.

All of this, together with the many verbal prefigurations of what is to come, constitutes what Cocteau regarded as “the poetry of the theater,” by which he meant the process of making apparent the theater’s very specificity as theater. This concept was something Cocteau emphatically contrasted to the mere employment of poetry in a play, a method left over from before World War I and one he condemned as jaded and inappropriate to the world of the 1930’s. For him, playwrights were wrong to use the theater as a vehicle for what was poetic rather than dramatic. Cocteau believed that the visible (both static and active) was the essential part of the spectator’s experience of theater—not simply as a decorative addendum but as a living part of the drama. Thus, for example, stage properties such as the scarf, the brooch, the bed, and the cradle (even the stairs) seem to take on a life of their own and are invested with sinister significance; at the end of act 3, Jocasta’s mirror comes to be identified with the audience itself, which knows the hideous immoral act she has committed. Indeed, Cocteau is never satisfied with a verbal account when visible action can be presented. Just as the audience witnesses Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, so too, unlike Sophocles, who permits himself little more than a coy reference to the crime of incest, Cocteau takes the audience right into the bedchamber and almost confronts the spectator with the very act, at once challenging prudish responses and repudiating Freudian explanations, which might seek to foreground the purely symbolic aspect of the crime.

Critical Context

Jean Cocteau’s earlier plays Antigone (pr. 1922, pb. 1928; English translation, 1961) and Orphée (pr. 1926, pb. 1927; Orpheus, 1933) had been among the first of the impressive series of dramas on classical themes produced by a dozen writers, including also Jean Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh, and Jean-Paul Sartre, over three decades and more of French theater history. It was The Infernal Machine, however, that both consolidated the success of the form and showed how classical drama could be adapted to reflect aspects of contemporary life. Indeed, as is well known, in the following decade covert political comment embedded in certain neoclassical plays of the Occupation was able to pass unchallenged by the German censors. However, although by its confrontation of the supernatural with the everyday The Infernal Machine reminds its audience of the indissoluble link between the petty concerns of people as individuals and the wider spectrum of the politics of power, the meanings of this play are all on the surface, and this is where Cocteau intends them to be. There is no profound philosophy of life, no latent social or political message that cannot be readily apprehended by anyone familiar with the critical and historical context. There is, rather, an ironic but somewhat helpless commentary on events, the work of an elegant intellectual skeptic whose first priority was always to dazzle with his versatility.

Cocteau’s career also embraced poetry, novels, ballet (and collaborations with some of the great composers of his day), cinema, criticism, painting, and illustrating, and in all of these one is aware of the guiding hand of the consummate master of showmanship. Still, there is also a profundity, though not where one might first expect to find it. It lies in the commentary on the merits of live theater, so that even were there no other reason, The Infernal Machine must not be dismissed as superficial, merely sensational, or merely a modern reworking of an ancient theme. It is one of the handful of greatest examples of twentieth century French neo-Greek drama.

Sources for Further Study

Crosland, Margaret. “The Infernal Machine.” In Jean Cocteau. New York: Knopf, 1956.

Crowson, Lydia. The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1978.

Fifield, William. Jean Cocteau. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

Knapp, Bettina L. Jean Cocteau. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Mauriès, Patrick. Jean Cocteau. Translated by Jane Brenton. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Oxenhandler, Neal. “Liberty and The Infernal Machine.” In Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957.