Tragedy in the Plays of Cocteau

Author(s): Wallace Fowlie

Source: The French Review, Vol. 15, No. 6 (May, 1942), pp. 463-467
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/381361
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 THE

FRENCH REVIEW
VOL. XV MAY, 1942 No. 6

TRAGEDY IN THE PLAYS OF COCTEAU*

WALLACE FOWLIE

Yale University

Despite the legend which has protected him for some y

Jean Cocteau appears now as one of the few writers of our
who have understood the meaning of tragedy. It is solely i
literary work that we wish to analyze his treatment of tra
and we leave to posterity the tempting speculation of what
there is between his writings and his life.
While in the theatre of Cocteau there is in evidence a v
cruel fatality and determinism, in his critical writings and p
there is an aphoristic expression and jumbling of terms wh
make hazardous any assurance about his dramatic or lit
theory. The lesson of equilibrium which Cocteau refers
constantly in Le Rappel a l'Ordre is the lesson he learned at
Cirque M6drano with Picasso, Apollinaire, and Max Jaco
seems first to have been a lesson of simplicity in formal s
ture. But more than that, it appears now to have been a les
of simplicity in a spiritual sense: the meaning of the cr
process, the value of a work of art as contrasted with the
of man, the whole psychological and religious problem of "
the artist", which has become for our century the most tena
of literary themes.

* Paper read at the Modem Language Association, Boston, Dec.,

463

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 THE FRENCH REVIEW

Two phrases, found in Cocteau's celebrated letter to J

Maritain, will be the basis for our discussion of Cocteau's
dies. The first is a literary comment, a call to arms of the
of about 1920. "11 s'agissait de d6niaiser quelques genres."
is, Cocteau felt it incumbent upon himself to make less s
some literary genres, among which he lists tragedy. And t
ond phrase is one in which he defines men as being gawk
ants from heaven, lourdauds du ciel que nous sommes.
The barest tragedies of Cocteau, those in which he
depends on melodramatic magic, are the ones which repr
his operations on Greek tragedies. In Antigone, for exam
gives a rapid reduced picture of Sophocles. Much is lost p
in the cutting, but something also is gained: a tempo wh
that of our age and a clarity of action which is a lesson f
age. Cocteau has described himself as being above the
text and looking down at it as though from an airplane.
brought out new colors for us to see in it, new blocks and
but he has above all composed a work which unfolds i
with the absolute, in accordance with the function of the a
This new order, discovered for an ancient structur
already a creative act for Cocteau, but his Machine In
shows his fullest development in handling a Greek the
though the new IEdipe slightly resembles a gigolo who
doxically, has preserved his chastity, he feels all the awk
nesses of living which are implied in Cocteau's definiti
man is an impotent angel exiled from heaven. The light o
sun which Antigone had sung of, is now replaced by a
world in which the devil reigns. Tir6sias, in both plays, i
priest who understands all the legends without always
standing reality. The chorus in Antigone and Tir6sias in
chine Infernale speak for the poet whose constant warning
to be that man has no proportion with nature.
CEdipus is the proud hero who is bent upon deceiving
stars and at the same time he is a man sufficiently gr
Destiny to heed. For Jocasta the queen, he is always the c
be caressed, and for Tir6sias the priest, he is the one ine
able mystery in the realm. Cocteau has maintained in CE
the dual focus of magnitude and fraility. As did his Antigo

464

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 TRAGADIE IN THE PLAYS OF COCTEAU

(Edipus represents both a sublime individual and a self

hilated fate.
Thus, in the work of Cocteau, tragedy emerges in its purest
state, with its fullest meaning. It is the dual vision of grandeur
and fraility, the sole vision which will permit the spectator to be
moved by disaster and to accept it in art. It is in a way a new
incarnation of man whom Pope defines as "the Glory, Jest and
Riddle of the world."
In his last two plays, Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde of
1937 and Les Parents Terribles of 1938, Cocteau seems to have
broken off with Greece. He continues, however, to be as oracular
in these dramas as he was in his Greek tragedies. Les Chevaliers
de la Table Ronde has little mediaeval exactitude. Cocteau ex-
plains in a preface how the story was dreamt by him and then
composed as a play two years after the dream. He further ex-
plains that it is only by chance that his play is moral. It does
appear to us to be Christian in tone, and even faintly resembles
Shakespeare in its confusion and complication. Galahad is Coc-
teau's pure hero who disintoxicates a castle drugged with vice
and falseness. At the end of the play Truth is reinstalled in the
castle of Camelot by means of murder and Arthur does not hesi-
tate to say: "J'aime mieux de vrais morts qu'une fausse vie." As
in Cocteau's Antigone, where the chorus is recited by a single
voice echoing the struggle of the One against the Many, so in
Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Ginifer, the principle char-
acter, who is the demon controlled by Merlin, enters some of
the true characters only to make them false. The struggle of
man with himself remains the same. It is somewhat more medi-
eval in the sense that it is more of a dance, or more of a super-
natural nightmare.
A rapid examination of Les Parents Terribles might lead one
to see in it an old fashioned melodrama. It is much more. In addi-
tion to being one of the most skillfully constructed plays of Coc-
teau, it is one of the most poignant, in a tragic sense. The theme
of "order", apparent in all of Cocteau's writings, is here more
dominant than ever. The character L6o is a new Electra who
has the passion for establishing order everywhere. Yvonne, the
mother, is the tragic heroine who refuses to see herself and who

465

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 THE FRENCH REVIEW

therefore succumbs to the domination of disorder. It is a

about the triumph of order and, as always in Cocteau, ord
that state which is attained after a clear understanding of
self. As Maritain has pointed out, Cocteau is profoundly th
tic. From the reading of this single play, Les Parents Terr
one realizes that the poet is saying: evil is blindness; evil r
from the willful refusal to see.
These last two plays of Cocteau are not Greek therefore in
any obvious way. But they are Greek in their depiction of tragedy
as being the working out of laws, irrespective of whether they
be right or wrong.
The portrayal of emotion, in any romantic sense, is prac-
tically absent from the work of Cocteau. There are many mo-
ments in his plays, filled by entire scenes, when his writing has
that elegance of diction which may easily be called classical.
"J'apprendrai que l'art est religieux," he wrote some years ago
in his letter to Maritain. Cocteau has learned this lesson better
than any other dramatist of our age. The almost child-like seri-
ousness of his plays, their tension, and above all, perhaps, their
implacable logic, mark them as feats in artistic strategy. At
times they appear almost akin to some primitive witchcraft. His
film, Le Sang d'un Podte, is a mixture of imagery and abstraction
of such subtlety that it is also a metaphysical explanation of the
modern artist. The purification of the senses and their renewal,
needed by the modern artist: Antigone descending to her tomb
and (Edipus inflicting blindness upon himself, - seem to have
been the point of departure in ideas for Cocteau. The oesthetics
of the tight-rope may be interpreted as being the aesthetics of
the new liberty. Cocteau is as jealous of liberty as are the char-
acters in his plays. And he is tragic in the same sense that Gala-
had is tragic, - Galahad who is able to show the Grail to others,
but who is unable to see it himself.
In his dual r6le of author and producer, Cocteau has parti-
cipated both in the fabrication of his text and the technique of
its projection in the theatre. I use advisedly the verb "partici-
pate", because Cocteau has appropriated in his credo a part of
the conviction of his surrealist friends when he assigns to the
creative process a certain amount of automatism. One is amazed

466

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 TRAGEDIE IN THE PLAYS OF COCTEAU

at the number of deep-sea divers who appear in his early

and at the number of angels suspended over his later wor
abritons un ange, que nous choquons sans cesse. Nous
^tre gardiens de cet ange." The Greek tragedy of fate
the hero is blinded by an all-powerful force crushing hi
become a very natural concept to this modern artist who
tent with composing a work and then abandoning it to i
fate, and who prefers the obscurity which may come
simple denuded work of art to the falseness which disfig
verbose over-stuffed one.

The facile appearance of Cocteau's text may cause it for

time to be scorned by the public. (The public is always
to an art that seems at once simple and profound.) B
tragedy of his exercises is precisely this same tragedy: t
people who cannot see the world because it is too sim
luminous to be seen.

467

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