Abstract
Twenty years after The Infernal Machine and its first performance, Cocteau would wonder whether he had been right in saying that The Infernal Machine was a much too rich and important play for its age, an age that was absent-minded and impervious to poetry.2 Yet, he did not comment on his play and its deeper implications. To do so, be it in 1934 or in 1954, would have been too dangerous for a poet who appreciated his status as an international celebrity. Such explication would have entailed a coming out of the closet that in the reigning homophobic atmosphere in France would have given rise not only to ridicule and social rejection but to opprobrium as well. A public—and for Cocteau, publicized—exposure of his undisclosed yet open secret would have been an act of self-immolation, and Cocteau was unable to commit it. He could not do it when he first published The White Paper, he could not do it after The Infernal Machine’s first performance, and he could not do it ever after. As Cocteau’s works repeatedly show, by using the monster as a trope or a concrete supernatural being—be it in his poems, in The Infernal Machine, or in his films Beauty and the Beast and The Testament of Orpheus—he was giving voice to an ordeal that he shared with the many whose sexuality was nonnormative and condemned as such by society. His personal crusade against homophobia began not in 1934 with the performance of The Infernal Machine but in 1928 and bore the stamp of its times, of its author’s self-image as a poet, and of its author’s socioeconomic class.
One has to understand that art, I repeat, does not exist for its own sake, detached, free, liberated of its creator, but that it exists only if it extends a scream, a laugh, a moan.
—Cocteau. La Difficulté d’être 1
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Notes
CocteauN, La Difficulté d’être (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1957), 282.
In 1928, the book did not bear the author’s name or that of the publisher and the first run had only thirty-one copies. In 1930, the book was again published, this time by the Editions du Signe in Paris, in a larger edition, and with Cocteau’s explicit color illustrations. See Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 413–414.
Vernon A. II Rosario, “Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederast’s Inversions,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157.
See also Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., eds. Homosexuality in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Laurence Senelick, “General Introduction,” in his anthology Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894–1925 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 10.
Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 169.
See Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 148.
Marcel Réja, “La Révolte des hannetons,” Mercure de France 13 (March 1, 1928): 334; quoted by Dean, 153.
Edmund White, “The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau,” Yale Review 81, no. 4 (October 1992): 37.
See, for example, Pierre-Marie Héron, “Demain je retrouve Jean Genet,” in Le siècle de Jean Cocteau, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Pierre-Marie Héron (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valery, 2000), 184–211.
See also Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature, (New York: Cassell, 1995), 49.
For a different reading, see Steegmuller, 347. He claims that Cocteau’s self-doubts were fundamental, “welling up from the deep sources of his sexual guilt.” See also Robinson, 49; Bertrand de Chambon, Le Roman de Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 265.
See, for example, Gilman, 59; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 47.
For a discussion of the homosexual aspects of the story, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Sex, Politics and the Nineteenth Century Novel, ed. Ruth Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 148–186.
André Gide, Correspondance André Gide — Roger Martin du Gard (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), vol. 1 (1913–1914), 78.
Fernando Arrabal, Plaidoyer pour une différence (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978), 22.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 63.
See, for example, Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet”; Showalter, 105–126;
Michael William Saunders, Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1998);
Kent L. Brintnall, “Re-building Sodom and Gomorrah: The Monstrosity of Queer Desire in the Horror Film,” Culture and Religion 5, no. 2 (2004), 145–160;
Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping,” in Gays in Film, ed. by Richard Dyer (New York: Zoetrope, 1984), 27–39.
On Cocteau’s films, see James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006),
Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot, Jean Cocteau, L’Oeil architecte (Paris: ACR, 2000).
On Cocteau’s play Orpheus, see also Kazuyuki Matsuda, “La métamorphose d ‘Orphée chez Cocteau,” Gallia (Osaka) 28 (1991): 51–58; on Cocteau’s film Orpheus, see her article “La Mort sous la forme d’une jeune femme chez Cocteau—sur la genèse du personnage de la Princesse du film Orphée,” Gallia (Osaka) 40 (2000): 219–226.
Bertrand de Chambon, Le Romande Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 191–192.
See Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality & Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 139;
Alain and Odette Virmaux, “La malédiction surréaliste et ses limites,” La Nouvelle Revue de Paris, no. 16 (1989): 49–54.
Peter G. Christensen, “Three Concealments: Jean Cocteau’s Adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Romance Notes 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 27–35.
Richard A. Kaye, “‘A Splendid Readiness for Death’: T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and World War I,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no.2 (1999): 124.
Charles R. Batson, Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater: Playing Identities (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005), 16, 21.
Nicholas de Jongh, Not in front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), 185.
See, for example, Ihab Hassan, “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust,” Angelaki 8, no. 1 (April 2003): 7.
Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980 (London: Routledge, 1989).
See also Judith Miller, 205–210; Schlumberger, 874; Paul Saegel, “La Semaine Dramatique. Comédie des Champs Elysées, La Machine Infernale, pièce en 4 actes de M. Jean Cocteau,” Le Ménestrel, April 20, 1934; René Salomé, “Chronique Dramatique. Sophocle et Jean Cocteau,” Etudes, August 5, 1934, 380–387; André Bellesort, “La semaine dramatique,” Feuilleton du Journal des Débats, April 16, 1934; R. K. (pseud.), “La Machine Infernale à la Comédie des Champs Elysées,” Vu, April 18, 1934; Georges Godchaux, “Les générales à Paris. Comédie des Champs Elysées, La Machine Infernale de Jean Cocteau,” Journal d ’Anvers, April 20, 1934; Lucien Dubech, “La Chronique des théâtres: La Machine Infernale,” L’Action française, April 21, 1934; and the anonymous review “Les pièces nouvelles,” Candide, April 26, 1934.
Lawrence R. Schehr, French Gay Modernism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 116.
Bert Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality) (London: Fusion Press, 2002).
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© 2008 Irene Eynat-Confino
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Eynat-Confino, I. (2008). Cocteau and His Monster. 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_7
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