Jean Cocteau: The Intersecting Identities of an Extraordinary Artist

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was a polymath and one of the most prolific multi-media artists of the twentieth century. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, designer, visual artist, composer, and an internationally acclaimed filmmaker (Steegmuller, 1970). From the late 1900s until his death in the early 1960s, Cocteau produced an impressive body of work that includes twenty-nine books of poetry, seven long fiction works, eleven nonfiction books, over twenty stage plays and librettos for operas and ballets, and eighteen screenplays (see Mambrol, 2019 for a list of Cocteau’s major works). He also made thousands of drawings and a few sculptures, as well as ceramics, paintings, murals, and tapestries. According to Williams (2006), his multidisciplinary versatility and sense of creative freedom bypassed linear thinking of time and space. Cocteau “escaped all genres and classifications” and is viewed as “the quintessential postmodern artist avant la lettre” (p. 318).

In his critical biography of Cocteau (originally published by Gallimard in 2003, on the fortieth anniversary of Cocteau’s death and published in English in 2016), Arnaud noted that for famous authors such as Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, or Ernest Hemingway, Cocteau was the embodiment of early twentieth-century France. Young American and Russian film directors cited Cocteau’s movies Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet) or La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast) among the works that influenced them the most. Furthermore, the contemporary New Queer Cinema acknowledged its debt to Cocteau (Hayward, 1996). Yet, as Arnaud (2016) observed, no major critic took the time to analyze Cocteau’s work. In France, “thanks to Cocteau’s homosexuality, his all too obviously bourgeois origins, and his intensive social life during his lonely formative years, rejection of his work has persisted like a class or racial prejudice” (p. 3). However, “the allergic reactions that Cocteau provoked for so long, did serve him in the end by keeping him alive even today,” concluded Arnaud (2016, p. 10). In 2003, a major exhibition (Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle) celebrating Cocteau’s contribution to the French culture has been organized at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Even though through this show Cocteau was resurrected and made visible to a wider audience, an effective imposition of a taboo on his explicit sexual imagery rendered Cocteau invisible as a gay male artist (Williams, 2006, p. 317).

Williams (2008) argues that Cocteau’s “multiwork” constitutes a radical project in gay modernism, which strongly influenced our contemporary understanding of being and subjectivity. Yet Cocteau directly addressed male homosexuality only in one of his books. Published anonymously in a limited edition in 1928, Le Livre Blanc (The White Paper), the book went through thirteen editions since. While Cocteau never acknowledged authorship, his “intimate relationship to the book” is documented by the homoerotic drawings he made for several editions and also by the short manuscript note added to the second French edition and the longer foreword preceding the English version of the manuscript (Canovas, 2007, p. 1). Even though Canovas (2007) noted that “of all Cocteau’s books, Le Livre Blanc is probably one of his most confusing” (p.1), the book “is still read, and not only as a precocious defense of homosexuality” (Arnaud, 2016, p. 10).

When examining Cocteau’s artistic output and his contribution to the arts and gender studies, the author’s family background, his sexual identity, and romantic attachments, as well as the social, historical, and political contexts that marked Cocteau’s life should be considered. Jean Clément Eugène Cocteau was born on July 5, 1889, at Place Sully in Maisons-Laffitte, a wealthy Parisian suburb. His birth occurred just a few hours before the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower, the main attraction of the World Fair celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution (Arnaud, 2016). In an autobiographic volume originally published in French in 1947, Cocteau remembered Maisons-Laffitte as an idyllic place. The “little inns with their arbors, the village fair, the fireworks (…), the Mansard chateau and its busts of Roman emperors, all made up a kingdom calculated to encourage the illusion childhood has of living places unlike any others in the world” (Cocteau, 2013, p. 8).

To one of Cocteau’s biographers, Cocteau’s life seemed “an oeuvre in itself, half novelistic, half-poetic”, and also detached from reality (Arnaud, 2016, p. 4). Cocteau, the youngest of three children, had a privileged upbringing. His mother, whom he adored, was the daughter of a stockbroker, his paternal grandfather was a lawyer, and his father was a lawyer and an amateur painter. Cocteau grew up in a family open to all artistic disciplines. His father taught him how to draw and his mother, an accomplished pianist, exposed Cocteau to the theater and the opera. In his youth, Cocteau was not only a good piano player and a talented caricaturist, but also a born storyteller and a child prodigy. At age sixteen, Cocteau completed his first full-length play. He was nineteen years old when he published his first volume of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin (Aladdin’s Lamp) (Arnaud, 2016).

Nonetheless, Cocteau’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood were marked by several tragic events. When Cocteau was nine years old, his father committed suicide and years later, his uncle, a father figure for Cocteau at the time, took his life as well. In 1923, the twenty-year-old Raymond Radiguet, a talented young novelist, who was also Cocteau’s protégé and lover, died unexpectedly after contracting typhoid fever (Arnaud, 2016). Moreover, in an interview published posthumously, Cocteau said he “never felt any connection with [his] family” (Fifield, 1964). All the fortunate and unfortunate events Cocteau experienced during his formative years as well as Cocteau’s “knot of chosen people”, which included some of the century’s leading artistic lights, such as Picasso, Proust, Hemingway, or Stravinsky, shaped Cocteau’s artistic vision. Arnaud also stressed Nietzsche’s influence on Cocteau’s artistic output and argued that Nietzsche helped Cocteau develop his aesthetic versatility. Nietzsche saw the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles as the apex of artistic creation, the true realization of tragedy. Cocteau shared these ideas as well. He used to say that “history is made of truths that become lies, and mythology is made of lies that eventually become truths” (Arnaud, 2016, p. 65). However, in theater, as well as later in his films, Cocteau offered his own interpretation of the Greek myths, which often represented a strong departure from the original source. Cocteau believed that the work of any creator is autobiographical, representing a reflection of the artist’s self. In Cocteau’s view, “art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” Referring to his own work, Cocteau recommended that it should be “read as indirect spiritual autobiography” (Fifield, 1964).

In 1934, Cocteau’s play La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine) premiered in Paris. The play is based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and is considered today Cocteau’s best play and one of the best French pieces of theater of the twentieth century (Eynat-Confino, 2008, p. 9). By subtly displacing and replacing the Sophoclean narrative, Cocteau uses the fantastic not only to question modern values, philosophical notions, or aesthetic standards but also to challenge cultural taboos and to criticize the consensus reality about nonnormative sexuality (Eynat-Confino, 2008). In her detailed analysis of The Infernal Machine, Eynat-Confino (2008) argues that by creating the Sphinx, “a character of indeterminate gender” and “the possessor of a threatening sexuality”, Cocteau “blurs the borders between the human and the nonhuman, the normal and the nonnormal, as between man and beast, man and monster, and the visible and the invisible” (p. 2). As in The White Paper, the main message Cocteau wanted to convey was that “sexuality is inborn”, it is “a mystery of the nature that had to be accepted as such. There is no normative sexuality, sexuality may be shapeshifting, regardless of one’s will” (Eynat-Confino, 2008, p. 3).

One critic noted that Cocteau’s modernist imagination is marked by a tragic acceptance of one’s fate (Thiher, 1979, p. 49). And this is visible not only in Cocteau’s dramaturgy but also in his movies. In 1930, Cocteau scripted, directed, and edited his first film, Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet), which alongside Orphée (Orpheus, 1950) and his final movie, Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus, 1959), formed the Orphic trilogy. The series explores the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations.

Using the myth of Orpheus as a departure point, Cocteau’s trilogy represents an inquiry into the nature of art, particularly poetry. In “the figure of Orpheus, Cocteau found the ultimate expression for his poetical sentiments, after imaginatively transforming the ancient singer into a poet” (Walker, 2022). In The Blood of the Poet, Cocteau used a self-conscious experimental style, demonstrating a secret knowingness of male characters by means of objects (Williams, 2001). Images of mirrors and keyholes, statues and severed heads, and blood will recur in Cocteau’s future projects. Walker (2022) contended that sexuality is an inextricable, moral element of Cocteau’s art. This sexuality is queer and is concerned with masculine beauty. When decoding Cocteau’s interpretation of Orpheus’ legend, Walker (2022) argues that by innovatively using in his films the “mirror motif”, Cocteau synthesized into one poetic narrative the stories of two disparate mythic figures – Orpheus and Narcissus. According to Walker (2022), the Freudian theory that linked homosexuality to narcissism “infiltrates Cocteau’s œuvre and marks these Orphic films in particular, as decidedly queer.”

In 1946, Cocteau directed his first narrative film, La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast). Based on the well-known children’s story by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, the fable traces its roots to the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche written by Apuleius in the second century AD. While not well received by the critics at the time, this cinematic poem is probably Cocteau’s most famous work. In this film, Cocteau’s message was a radical one. Stressing the novelty of the movie, Hayward (1996) noted that “the psychology of the unconscious, sexual awakening and the female agency of desire were images not seen on screen since the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s” (p. 47). Moreover, different from other movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cocteau’s film advocates gender equality in sexual relations.

Although as film director and man of the theater Cocteau “veered at times from excellence to catastrophe” even his failures remain surprisingly personal (Arnaud, 2016, p. 3). In an interview conducted a few months before his death, Cocteau confessed “I am nothing—another speaks in me. This force takes the form of intelligence, and this is my tragedy—and it always has been from the beginning” (Fifield, 1964).

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