Reading Order
La Machine infernaleLa Machine infernale Reading Order
La Machine infernale (The Infernal Machine, 1934) by Jean Cocteau is the most successful of Cocteau's theatre rewritings of classical myth — a retelling of the Oedipus story in four acts, in which the gods are presented as engineers of an infernal machine designed to destroy a human being over a lifetime, and in which the dramatic irony of Sophocles (we know what Oedipus does not know) is intensified by showing the machinery of fate in action from the beginning. Cocteau's rewriting is both witty and genuinely disturbing: the Sphinx falls in love with Oedipus and gives him the answer to her riddle out of pity, trying to free him from the machine — but the machine is too well-designed and Oedipus's triumph leads exactly to his destruction. Cocteau was the most versatile French artist of the twentieth century — poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, painter, visual artist, librettist — and his connections to surrealism, the avant-garde, the Ballets Russes (he wrote the scenario for Parade, 1917, with Picasso and Satie), and the literary establishment were simultaneously intimate and ironic. His other major plays include Orphée (1926) and Les Parents terribles (1938).
Where to start
Read La Machine infernale for the fullest theatrical statement of Cocteau's vision — the gods as engineers, fate as a machine, love as a mechanism that cannot save its object. Then read Orphée (1926) for the myth rewriting in a modern Parisian setting; and Les Parents terribles (1938) for the bourgeois family drama that is the most conventionally powerful of his plays.
Complete La Machine infernale Book List
- 1Buy
La Machine infernale
Jean Cocteau·1934·Start here — the Oedipus rewriting; the gods as engineers of fate; the most formally complete and theatrically powerful Cocteau play - 2Buy
Orphée
Jean Cocteau·1926·The Orpheus myth in a modern Parisian setting — a poet, his wife, Death, and the underworld; the earlier myth rewriting before La Machine infernale - 3Buy
Les Parents terribles
Jean Cocteau·1938·Intimate Relations — the bourgeois family drama; no myth, no gods; the most conventional and in some ways most powerful Cocteau play - 4Buy
La Voix humaine
Jean Cocteau·1930·The Human Voice — a woman alone on the telephone with her former lover; a forty-minute monologue; one of the great solo theatrical pieces - 5Buy
Les Enfants terribles
Jean Cocteau·1929·The novel rather than a play — the brother and sister in their room; the claustrophobic world of childhood; essential Cocteau prose
La Machine infernale — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 'infernal machine' of Cocteau's title?
The infernal machine of the title is the gods themselves — the divine mechanism designed to destroy a human being over a lifetime, efficiently and completely, with the maximum of suffering and irony. In Cocteau's retelling, the gods are not capricious or malevolent in the human sense; they are engineers who have constructed a perfect machine for destroying Oedipus, and the machine works flawlessly. The Sphinx falls in love with Oedipus and tries to give him the riddle's answer to short-circuit the machine; the gods have anticipated this and designed the machine to use the Sphinx's love as one of its components. The vision is bleaker than Sophocles: the Greek gods could be petitioned, appeased, or tricked; Cocteau's gods are pure mechanism.
What is Cocteau's relationship to surrealism?
Cocteau's relationship to surrealism was complex and ultimately hostile: he was associated with the movement in the early 1920s, knew Breton and Éluard, and shared many surrealist concerns (the unconscious, dreams, the transgression of everyday reality), but Breton expelled him from the movement's official history in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, dismissing him as a superficial commercial artist. The enmity was personal as well as aesthetic: Breton's austere, serious movement had no room for Cocteau's wit, elegance, and love of spectacle. Cocteau responded by cultivating his own distinct position as the artist of multiple media — the argument was not about who was more radical but about what radicalism meant.
What was Cocteau's role in the Ballets Russes?
Cocteau's association with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes was formative for his aesthetic development. In 1917 he wrote the scenario for Parade — the ballet with sets by Picasso, music by Satie, and choreography by Massine that is generally taken as the founding event of modernist performance art — and thereafter collaborated with the major figures of European modernism: Stravinsky, Picasso, Milhaud, Poulenc, and the group of French composers known as Les Six. The Ballets Russes experience taught Cocteau that art was a collaborative, multi-media spectacle — a conviction that shaped his subsequent work in theatre and film (Orphée, 1950; La Belle et la Bête, 1946).
What are Les Parents terribles and why are they considered Cocteau's best play?
Les Parents terribles (1938) — Intimate Relations in the English translation — is a three-act bourgeois family drama entirely without myth, gods, or surrealist devices: a mother obsessively in love with her son discovers that he is in love with the same woman as his father. The play works in the tradition of Racine (incestuous desire destroying a family from within) and of Feydeau (the mechanisms of farce driving characters to catastrophe). Critics who dismiss Cocteau's mythological plays as too clever sometimes consider Les Parents terribles his masterpiece because its formal convention allows the emotional power to emerge without the distancing of myth or allegory. It was filmed by Cocteau himself in 1948.
Why is Cocteau important for understanding twentieth-century French culture?
Cocteau is important precisely because he was everywhere at once: he was simultaneously the poet of the avant-garde, the librettist of the Ballets Russes, the playwright of the Comédie-Française, the filmmaker of La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, the novelist of Les Enfants terribles, the graphic artist of drawings that appeared in literary magazines, the friend of Picasso, Stravinsky, Apollinaire, and Proust. His importance is not the importance of a single masterpiece but of a node in the network of twentieth-century French cultural life — a point through which many of the most significant artistic developments passed. Understanding Cocteau means understanding how the different strands of modernism — cubism, surrealism, the Russian ballet, the new cinema — were connected in practice.
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