Thoroughly Modern Oedipus
...que...n'importe quel chef-d'oeuvre ancien pouvait reprendre une incroyable jeunesse entre les mains d'un artiste.
-Jean Cocteau
Whenever Jean Cocteau chooses a legend from antiquity for a play, he interprets and rejuvenates it. La machine infernale is one of Cocteau's most original and important dramatic works. The Oedipus legend had always held enormous fascination for Cocteau, and his La machine infernale, while retaining a basic skeleton of the traditional Sophoclean story, is an updated modern version of the ancient myth. Sophocles' vision of the Oedipus story emphasizes the fate of a noble family. Oedipus, son of Laius, is induced to kill his father, whom he did not recognize; to guess the riddle of the Sphinx; and to marry his mother, whom he did not recognize. The revelation of his crimes moves him to blind himself and go into exile. On this subject matter Cocteau invents modern variations and allusions to our age.
Why reinvent a story that had been handled by many other authors and psychologists? Cocteau was dealing with used goods. Did the public really need yet another retelling of the incestuous and murdering Oedipus? How then does one explain the remarkable resurgence of interest in the ancient Greek mythology found in French theater during the early half of the 20th century? Above all, the themes dealt with in mythology are universal and permanent. Myths deal with the greatest, eternal problems. They deal with love, war, pain, sin, and courage. Myths also deal with human struggle against the irrationalities of life. The classical description of the struggle against fate, transposed to the modern stage, had a special appeal for this particular audience: the series of events transpiring during the 1920's and 1930's in Europe provided them with an all too immediate vision of the abstract classical concept of destiny (Page...
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