Jean Cocteau by James S. Williams

Author:James S. Williams [Williams, James S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-86189-591-2
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

13

Miracle or Simulacrum?

The debacle with Maritain reignited Cocteau’s appetite for work. He produced illustrations for a new edition of Thomas the Impostor; a libretto for Stravinsky’s new work Oedipus Rex, adapted from Sophocles (over which the two again fell out due to mutual suspicion); and a number of poems that would eventually form the collection Opéra, 1925–7, presented as the work of a self-confessed opium-eater. Cocteau considered Opéra as the first set of poems to capture his real essence, and we get a sense of just how far Radiguet’s death has transformed his imaginary universe. The poet is now a visionary and his poetry a mystical activity with existential stakes. If poetry had always been for Cocteau a matter of showing the existence of a reality hidden behind the appearances of daily life and thus rendering the invisible visible, he now provided clear theoretical lines to justify the idea, as in the opening poem ‘Par lui-même’: ‘Accidents of mystery and errors of celestial/Calculation, I’ve profited from them, I admit./ All my poetry is there: I trace the invisible (invisible to you)’. The atmosphere in which all this is generated is theatrical and tragic, for poetry is now a dangerous activity, a ‘boulevard of crime’, drawing together both the detective and the criminal. Cocteau introduced here a motley crew of ancient and mythological characters that would nourish all his future work, including the Sphinx, the pharaohs, a man in Oedipus costume surrounded by laughter, Orpheus, Titus and Berenice, and a myopic Venus de Milo. Some poems pursue opium fantasies with a certain light giddiness, others convey grief with detachment and restraint. In ‘Le Paquet rouge’, however, which turns leprosy into a metaphor to depict self-disintegration, and in which Cocteau suggests once again that he is not simply different and alien but an impostor and artistic fraud, there is a violent sense of shame:

I am leprous … I am uneducated, a dunce. I know no figures, no dates, no names of rivers, no language living or dead … Moreover, I stole the id of a certain J. C. born in M. L. on the … dead at 18 after a brilliant career in poetry … Let me be locked away and lynched.

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