Abstract
Monsters disturb, the more so when they change their shape not once but often, only to finally vanish in a mist. Such a monster is the Sphinx in The Infernal Machine.
Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!
Who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust?
Which was the vessel of your Lust? What Leman had you, every day?
Or had you shameful secret quests and did you harry to your home
Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock crystal breasts?
—Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx”1
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Notes
Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx,” in Complete Works (London: Collins, 1973), 833–835.
Ahmed Youssef, Cocteau l’Egyptien: La tentation orientale de Jean Cocteau. (Monaco, Editions du Rocher, 2001).
James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 34.
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampire, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 73.
Jacques Scherer quotes a legend according to which the Sphinx was not only Laius’ illegitimate daughter but also Chimera’s sister, who had the body of a goat and a lion. Of all Chimera’s many attributes, the most often cited was her illusory nature. See Jacques Scherer, Dramaturgies d’Oedipe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 49. Scherer also quotes a still different version of the myth, mentioned by Léopold Constans in his La Légende d’Oedipe (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1880), where the Sphinx, a robber, was first seduced and then killed by Oedipus. See Scherer, 50.
Among the many paintings showing a chimera or a sphinx, Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864, 1888);
Max Klinger, Invocation (1879);
Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity (1891);
Aléxandre Séon, Le Désespoir de la Chimère (The Chimera’s Despair) (1892);
Jan Toorop, The Sphinx (1892–1897);
Charles Ricketts, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1891) and In the Thebaid (1894);
Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx (ca. 1895);
Gustav Klimt, Music (1895);
Fernand Khnopff, The Supreme Vice (1885) and L’Art des Caresses (The Arts of Caress) (1896);
Armand Point, La Chimère (The Chimera) (1897);
Frantisek Kupka, The Conqueror Worm (1900); and, closer to the writing of The Infernal Machine, Nicholas Kalmakoff’s Chimera (1926).
In 1932, the painter and stage designer Christian Bérard, one of Cocteau’s close friends, painted on a wall of his apartment at 9, rue Vignon a scene showing Oedipus and the Sphinx. Bérard’s Sphinx has an androgynous head, a pair of wings, an animal rump, and a snakelike tail. It has no female body and no breasts. See Pierre Chanel, Album Cocteau (Paris: Henri Veyrier-Tchou, 1975), 97.
Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm. Jean Cocteau: the Man and the Mirror (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), 126.
Roger C. Schlobin, “The Locus Amoenus and the Fantasy Quest,” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1984): 29.
Karelisa V. Hartigan, “Oedipus in France: Cocteau’s Mythic Strategy in La Machine Infernale.” Classical and Modern Literature 6, no. 2 (Winter 1986) : 93.
Romana N. Lowe, The Fictional Female: Sacrificial Rituals and Spectacles of Writing in Baudelaire, Zola, and Cocteau (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 351.
Jeffrey Burton Russell. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 79.
See also Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 93–94;
James William Jordan, “Wereanimals in Europe and Africa: Some Practical Observations on an Esoteric Role,” Ethnos 42 (1977): 53–68.
For a postmodernist approach to the vampire metaphor, see Veronica Hollinger, “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire,” in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 199–212.
Jacob for the film. In 1912, soon after it was founded, Cocteau became a member of the Société des amis de Fantomâs au Nouveau Monde (Society of Fantomas’ Friends in the New World). See also Robin Walz, “Serial Killings: Fantomâs, Feuillade, and the Mass-Culture Genealogy of Surrealism.” The Velvet Light Trap 37 (Spring 1996): 51–57.
Shoshana Felman, “Le Scandale de la Vérité,” in Discours et Pouvoir. Michigan Romance Studies, ed. Ross Chambers, 2 (1982), 24.
Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine, in The Infernal Machine and Other Plays by Jean Cocteau, trans. Albert Bremel (New York: New Directions Books, 1967), 3.
See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 179–184; Dijkstra, 90–91; Auerbach, 83–85.
Judith Butler brings out the correlation between the process of assuming a sex and the question of identification. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3.
For a discussion of the woman as monster, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 29–79, 241–242;
Patrice Petro, “The Woman, The Monster, and ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’” in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, ed. Mike Budd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 210–215;
David Williams, “Wilgefortis, Patron Saint of Monsters, and the Sacred Language of the Grotesque,” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Culture, Biography, Themes, Children’s Literature, ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 171–177; Dijkstra, 333–351.
Craig Owens. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 111.
Jean Cocteau, Tour du monde en 80 jours (mon premier voyage) [Around the World in Eighty Days (My First Voyage)] (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 49.
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© 2008 Irene Eynat-Confino
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Eynat-Confino, I. (2008). The Sphinx. In: On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre. Palgrave Studies Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616967_3
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