Abstract
Cocteau’s encoded representation of nonnormative sexuality and his plea for tolerance in The Infernal Machine have gone undetected for another reason as well: the narrative mode employed, that is, the fantastic. The fantastic in its various manifestations takes the center stage, to the delight of the audience, and overshadows the deeper import of Cocteau’s strategy and techniques in the play. John Clum affirms that, with regard to Tennessee Williams and William Inge, “it is their rich response to the closet and their mastery of its evasions and projections that made [them], in differing degrees, successful writers.”2 For Cocteau, this “rich response” was double-sided: while it did bring him glory, it sometimes diverted the reader or spectator’s gaze from the “invisible” to the visible. He repeatedly complained in his private journals about the public’s inability to perceive his invisible “truth,” all the while inadvertently or perhaps not, contributing to this predicament.
Alice laughed. “There is no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass1
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Notes
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (London: Penguin, 1973), 257.
Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 20–21;
Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3–11.
For a psychoanalytic approach to the fantastic, see Louis Vax, La Séduction de l’étrange (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965).
Nancy H. Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 8–9.
Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996), 17–36.
Todorov, 25; Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1992), 14–15.
Attebery, 16–17; Colin N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Hume, 21. See also Patrick Parrinder, “Introduction: Learning from Other Worlds,” in Learning from Other Worlds, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 4–11.
For a detailed discussion of the prevailing symbolists theories on theatre and drama, see Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993);
A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885–1895 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968);
Jacques Robichez, Le Symbolisme au théâtre: Lugné-Poe et les débuts de L’ Oeuvre (Paris: L’Arche, 1957).
On the production of this play, see also Annette Shandler Levitt, “Jean Cocteau’s Theatre: Idea and Enactment,” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 363–372.
Evans, Arthur B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1977), 43.
Lydia Crowson, The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1978), 151.
Jan Hokenson, “Introduction,” in Forms of the Fantastic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 153.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 1–91.
In his article “Le Numéro Barbette,” published in Paris in June 1926 in the Chronique des spectacles, Cocteau paid tribute to “the magic light of the theatre” and the aesthetic pleasure it provides. The article, an aesthetization of a homosexual experience, is considered by critics as Cocteau’s Ars Poetica. See Jennifer Forrest, “Cocteau au cirque: The Poetics of Parade and ‘Le Numéro Barbette,’” Studies in 20th Century Literature 27, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 9–47;
Mark Franko, “Where He Danced: Cocteau’s ‘Barbette’ and Ohno’s ‘Water Lilies,’” PMLA 107, no. 3 (May 1992): 594–607;
Maité R. Monchal, Le Sacerdoce de la désobeissance. Création et séxualite chez Jean Cocteau. Suivi d’un entretien avec Jean Marais. (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1994), and her Homotextualité: creation et sexualité chez Jean Cocteau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).
Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction,” in Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 1–14.
See, for example, Bert. O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California, 1985);
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004);
Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
On the influence of popular traveling theatres on Cocteau, see Jeremy Cox, “‘Le théâtre forain’: Historical and Stylistic Connections between Parade and Histoire du Soldat” Music and Letters 76, no. 4 (November 1995): 572–592.
Sinfield, Alan. “Private Lives/Public Theater: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation.” Representations, no. 36 (Autumn 1991): 57.
On theatre and homosexuality, mostly in France, England, and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, see Laurence Senelick, “The Homosexual as Villain and Victim in Fin-de-Siècle Drama,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 2 (October 1993): 201–229; “The Queer Root of Theater,” in The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, ed. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 21–39; and Ibid., “General Introduction,” 1–14.
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© 2008 Irene Eynat-Confino
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Eynat-Confino, I. (2008). Visibility, Invisibility, and the Fantastic. 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_8
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