Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIESIN THEATREAND PERFORMANCE HISTORY is a series devoted
to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible,
and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more
t raditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden
the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms
as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical
theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies
are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a
study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analyt-
ical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other
types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed
in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no
geographical focus for this series, works of excellence of a diverse and international
nature, including comparative studies, are sought.
The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (EMERITUS, Brown University),
Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a
book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive e xperience
as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books
and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained
excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Also in the series:
Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley
Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus
Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow
Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato
Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water
Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson
Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time
and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim
Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing by
Wendy Arons
Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei
Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods
Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W.
Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith
Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject
by Alan Sikes
Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the
1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen
Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish-American Drama and Jewish-American Experience
by Julius Novick
American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance
by John Bell
On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster
by Irene Eynat-Confino
On the Uses of the
Fantastic in Modern Theatre
Cocteau, Oedipus, and
the Monster
Irene Eynat-Confino
ON THE USES OF THE FANTASTIC IN MODERN THEATRE
Copyright © Irene Eynat-Confino, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60821-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-37496-0 ISBN 978-0-230-61696-7 (eBook)
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. The Infernal Machine 5
2. The Sphinx 25
3. Laius, Tiresias, and Jocasta 45
4. Oedipus 57
5. Dramatic Strategies and Stratagems 77
6. Cocteau and His Monster 93
7. Visibility, Invisibility, and the Fantastic 111
8. Ethics, Alterity, and Designed Emotion 137
Notes 153
Selected Bibliography 177
Index 195
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Acknowledgments
Iwould like to express my gratitude to Don Wilmeth, the editor of the
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, for his knowl-
edgeable support in the publication of this book.
I also wish to thank Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Kristy Lilas, and Brigitte
Shull, at Palgrave, for their assiduous assistance in seeing the manuscript
through its different stages. My thanks are due also to the Newgen team, for
their attentive care in the production process of the book.
Part of the research for this book was carried on while I was a Fellow at
the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and I would like to
thank the Center and its librarians for their friendly and precious help. I also
wish to thank the Département des Arts du Spectacle at the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris for their prompt and willing assistance.
Finally, I want to thank my husband, Michael Confino. Without his
unfailing encouragement during all the years that I was working on this
book, this book would not have been possible.
Introduction
At the origins of this inquiry lies a text, written for the theatre. Its
n arrative, which employs mythological figures of men, women, and
gods, is supposed to be familiar. Yet it is not. Instead, it surprises
by its detours and raises unsettling questions concerning its use of myth
and fantastic elements, contemporary slang, and the theatre as a public
cultural institution. This is why a different reading was required. The text
is The Infernal Machine (La Machine Infernale), Jean Cocteau’s interpreta-
tion of the tale of Oedipus.1 That the hypnotic unease experienced when
reading or listening to the chant of the Sphinx in Act II is the effect of its
rhythmic structure, does not entirely explain the emotional response the
chant e licits. To fully understand this response, one has to look where the
chant comes from. Likewise, to understand the reason of the recurrent use
of the monster, both as a trope and as an actant, one has to comprehend
not only what a monster represents but also what a monster is, not only
its semiotic value but also its phenomenological impact. The Sphinx is a
visible monster and so is Anubis, while many others were still to be uncov-
ered. The monster belongs to the realm of the fantastic, as do the Sphinx,
Anubis, Laius’ ghost or Jocasta’s ghost. As a male who was briefly a female,
so does Tiresias. Other monsters, metaphorical this time, would emerge in
due course during my investigation. The recurrence of the monster was the
clue to a hidden meaning, encoded in the fantastic, or so it seemed at first.
For, as it will become clear, the monster was also the message. Form and
contents were one. The next step in my investigation was the deciphering
of the text.
The monster, an emotionally powerful trope or being that evokes the
realm of the fantastic, serves as the matrix of the play and embodies the
theme of visibility, invisibility, and identity as no other. A composite and
nonnormative creature, belonging and yet distinct from any known cat-
egory of beings, its hidden disparities publicly uncovered and exhibited, the
monster is the negation of binaries per se. The negation of binaries embod-
ied by the monster is reflected on the dramatic, aesthetic, and ethical levels
2 The Fantastic in Modern Theatre
in Cocteau’s play. Thus, Oedipus is at once a son and a husband; Jocasta
a mother and wife; Tiresias a male and a female; the Sphinx a flesh and
blood girl and a goddess, a ruin-come–to-life and Nemesis, a living human
being, a dead monster, and an evanescent light in the sky. The tragic is
mixed with the farcical, slang and clichés with poetic metaphors, realism
with fantastic elements, and realism with expressionism. Taboos are delib-
erately broken, by Jocasta for instance. If, at first, Cocteau seems to keep
and respect traditional binary notions, it is only to later deflate them. While
his previous reworkings of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos closely followed the
Greek tragedy, only the last act of The Infernal Machine, Act IV, recalls it.
The first three Acts of the play are of Cocteau’s invention and so are many
of the characters in his play. Cocteau displays an irreverent use of myth and
a cynical and ironic use of intertextuality, introduces cartoonish characters
taken from contemporary gossip columns, and uses Parisian slang. The par-
allel between modern “consensus reality” and the mythical times invoked
is easily inferred. The dialectical role of the monster is made evident by the
blurring of the boundaries between the mythological past and the present,
as between “real life” and the consensually fantastic realm—a blurring made
visible by the change of settings on the stage. While Cocteau used the mon-
ster in his previous works, it is in The Infernal Machine that it reaches its
most substantial expression and becomes a rhetorical weapon.
The Sphinx is the dominant monster in The Infernal Machine, a shape-
shifting monster, of indeterminate gender, and the possessor of a threat-
ening sexuality. Each of its visible transformations is misleading and not
one discloses its true identity: the Sphinx is none other than Nemesis, the
Goddess of Revenge. By creating this character, 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 invis-
ible. In this all-encompassing world, the borders between real life and the
fantastic are in constant flux and so are the various masks that Nemesis
will borrow. Beside the visibly defined monsters, the Sphinx and Anubis,
there are metaphorical monsters, such as the aging Jocasta who, according
to Cocteau, bears the burden of the incest, lusting as she is after younger
and muscular males. Oedipus too is a monster, an invisible monster that
will finally be brought to light. Young, conceited, and brash, he expects
to find in the Sphinx (a monster of indeterminate gender) his double.
And so he does, for, like the Sphinx, he is a scourge. When the Sphinx,
under the guise of a young girl, suggests that he marry her to escape the
oracle, he rejects her. His sexuality obscured, Oedipus will marry the older
woman who lusts for him. A closer look at the nonmonsters among the
