 Introductory pages to Jean Cocteau essay:
Jean Cocteau, toward the end of his life, concluded
that genius was an unknown form of the memory. Saying that man was born with a monkey on
one shoulder and a parrot on the other, he felt he sufficiently accounted for process in
creative art. He had, then, to account for originality. He said (with Picasso and others
of the Paris School) that it resulted from error. By the end of the second decade
of the century, he had formulated the dictum which, apocryphally or not, he attributed in
essence to his young friend Raymond Radiguet: "The genius tries to do what others do
and fails." It remained to determine why the genius kept the failure. Deep brooding
on this brought him, shortly before his death in 1963, to the disorienting belief that the
genius, remembering forward across contiguous time, which Cocteau called the intemporel,
stopped at the point at which it would subsequently prove he had stopped.
The use Cocteau made of
ideas of this sort, which were essentially articles of faith, is revealing. In The
Impromptu of the Palais-Royal, a curtain-raiser for the Comédie-Française published
the year before his death, the action takes place in nontime, but hardly the nontime of
science fiction. We find Molière lunching with Louis XIV and discussing such things as
the scandal of Cocteau's last full-length play, Bacchus (1951), on which François
Mauriac walked out. We may interpret the spectatrice who constantly and
disrespectfully interrupts from the audience as an instance of stage technique, of which
Cocteau was too much past master for his own good, except, finally, in one way, or as
mockery of the play, evidence of a much deeper reflex of the spirit.
If The Impromptu of the
Palais-Royal seems to us marred, exactly as was his first play Orpheus thirty-seven
years earlier, by the graceless intrusion of C.O.C.T.E.A.U. (see page 32), in the earlier
play significantly as "the accused," and in the later as the mocked author, what
strikes us more is that he does convey his sadness at the use of bad taste. He felt, not
without reason, that "bad taste" was necessary to the art of the twentieth
century, and his particular quality, found so pervasively in no other, stems from the fact
that he regretted it. He was in advance of currents which are just now surfacing—he
obeyed, and deplored—and it may be to this more than to overt rebellion and to
homosexuality, blazons of freedom carried reluctantly except in sex about which he was
amusing by being delicately oblique, that is owed his increasing relevancy. A decade has
passed since his death, and, unlike any other French writer of his period, his image is
more alive in the public mind, in France, than when he was alive.
It is strange, because his
presence was considered to be the cause of his fame. "Reading his plays, he projects
into them the fire of his spirit. Away from his presence, they lose their color—like
road marker buttons which cease to glitter when the car has passed." Written in 1943
in Theatre of the Mad Years, this expressed the prevalent opinion. And yet his
works seem to have metamorphosed with his death.
There were, in fact,
evidences at the time. In the late l930s, he was taxed with being the cause of immorality
and French youth-in-revolt. But few saw that his novel Les Enfants Terribles (published
in 1929, but taking its effect with slow momentum through a decade) indeed was the very
text for the sentiment to come: "my own closed (somewhat incestuous) world and to the
devil with yours." His popularity was reduced by an ambiguous position during the
war: though two of his plays, in particular Les Parents Terribles, were banned as
immoral by the puritanical German Occupation, a certain "aroma" attached to him
which caused him to remark ruefully later, "That I happen to like a large blond
soldier does not necessarily make me a Nazi, does it?" Meanwhile, underground,
something else was going on—perhaps it was merely that time was catching him up. A
surprisingly long time ago, he had expressed the total loneliness of the anarchist
position of whole freedom to which contemporary creation has won, and it is perhaps the
wistfulness and delicate irony of his advocacy that gives him increasing currency. His
diffidence caused him to take what he thought a truth, toss it in the air, and by
legerdemain (aptest of words when taken apart in its original French) make it come down as
a dove. The apostle of unreason now appears to have possessed reason of the senses, so
that he had all along for us what progressively seems to be all that is left us. |
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