Dream is inseparable from Cocteau’s life and work; it recurs so constantly that it seems part of his deepest being, almost his DNA. My own book, As in a Dream: Jean Cocteau in Metz in 1962, therefore confronts a question everyone asks: why did the dream world matter so much to the poet from Maisons-Laffitte?
To speak of dream or dreams is to approach Cocteau’s innermost self. “I have always dreamed my life more than I have lived it, and that assumes rather terrible proportions,” he once said. Without exaggeration, Cocteau is dream just as much as dream is Cocteau.
In The Lay Mystery he writes that dreams are the literature of sleep. Even the strangest are composed from memories. Their best part evaporates in the morning, leaving only the sensation of a volume, the ghost of an adventure, the memory of a memory and the shadow of a shadow.
Far from vanishing, dreams became increasingly present, even invasive, like symptoms of an obsession. Yet Cocteau’s oneirism was less destructive: as time acted upon him, it produced what the philosopher François Jullien calls a “silent transformation”.
Like mirrors
Perhaps dreams act like mirrors, to which Cocteau drew a striking parallel in the play and film Orpheus: “I give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you will see death working like bees in a glass hive.”
The comparison may seem morbid. Yet dream has already done its work: death is no longer truly death, but merely a passage, a vague memory, a fiction. Oneirism frees the poet from everything. Through dream he reaches another dimension and another space, explaining the endless game of hide-and-seek in which he passes simultaneously between different worlds and continually crosses doors.
The result is striking. The poet’s life is transformed almost as love transforms life in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Through dream, Cocteau “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (13:7). Following an almost mystical path, Cocteau’s oneirism makes a more absolute knowledge possible. We understand why he used dreams to teach him about art: he needed to study their mechanism in order to appropriate it in his work.
His study of dreams
In Clair-obscur, Cocteau writes: “If the traveller plunges into his own night, he cannot reach its end. A sphinx guards the door and gives no answer other than its owl’s eyes.” What does the poet see inside that night? A universe of enigmas.
Dream fascinated him as a machine that manufactures and combines real and unreal images. Out of discretion he refused to publish his own dreams, but he delighted in their poetic and literary power. For him, the interpreters of dreams could only be poets and artists — and the most gifted among them were those who possessed the eye of a child.
The child’s eye is the most candid and therefore the most able to see the supernatural and marvellous. Cocteau asks us to remember the mysteries of childhood: landscapes secretly discovered in a stain, stereoscopic views of Vesuvius at night, Christmas chimneys and corridors glimpsed through a keyhole. Such memories reveal the soul of a décor made only from grey cloth and a house for performing dogs.
Cocteau soon found a second child’s eye, perfectly new: the lens of his camera, fixed upon images to be made immortal. Cinema became a fountain of youth through which he could preserve the child’s gaze. It also turned him into a magician and a poet-hypnotist, sharing the dream so that audiences might dream and tremble in turn.
Like dream, the camera encouraged extraordinary movements through space and time. As a visual artist, Cocteau could establish these two personal symbols — space and time — at the centre of his creative process.
Movement through space: magical stage sets
In the theatre, Cocteau used dreamlike sets to deceive Cartesian reason and logic. He said he had long employed sets that “act”. Theatre had caught him in its trap like a gambling room: one swears never to return, yet inevitably does.
Christian Bérard, designer of The Human Voice and The Infernal Machine, arrived at precisely the right moment. Without renouncing splendour or the almost human presence of scenery, he brought youth and an intimidating knowledge to Cocteau’s method of creating something “truer than true”. His anti-decorative sets served and acted like performers; no detail was useless.
For Pelléas and Mélisande in Metz in 1962, Cocteau used the same principles to create the supernatural and the invisible. To produce a sense of unreality, he drew scale models and traced the old 1902 Opéra-Comique sets by Jusseaume and Ronsin. The tracing paper used in Metz gives full meaning to his famous declaration: “I trace the invisible.”
Two curtains based on his models were then made in tulle by the Italian craftsman Simonini. Light passing through the fabric made the symbol of passage tangible. The audience was immersed in unreality, in a world no longer entirely its own. The scenery therefore enabled movement through space into an imaginary and unreal place.
At his first meeting with Jacques Griesemer, a designer at the Metz theatre, Cocteau made his intention explicit: “I would like the sets to be as in a dream. I want there to be walls and no walls…”
Still in Metz, he then drew designs for an equally important project: the windows of Saint-Maximin Church. Again he played with movement, but in a wholly different setting. This dream would disrupt time rather than space.
Movement through time
Dreams produce a powerful movement through time, taking the form of a vertical journey backwards through the depth of centuries. For Cocteau, dream is truly a time machine and joins humanity’s desire to escape time.
He turned to ancient human history. In the twenty-four windows of the small parish church — which he affectionately called the chapel — he distilled an original art transformed by mythology, the arts of the first peoples and occult sciences such as alchemy and Kabbalah.
His use of non-Christian ancient history in a church was neither sacrilegious nor disrespectful of Christian faith. Cocteau simply knew Greek mythology better than the Bible and felt more at ease using ancient legends to express dreams that sought freedom from time. His constant invocation of Greek mythology and myth in general reflects his ultimate desire to reveal timelessness.
Nietzsche likewise spoke of the eternity Greek tragedy gives to beings, tearing us momentarily from the whirlpool of changing forms. A rebirth of Antiquity offered hope of renewal and an escape from Socratic rationality and the purely scientific spirit of modern humanity.
Freud subsequently showed the close relationship between dream and myth, exposing desire for the mother and rejection of the father through Oedipus. Cocteau took up this legacy in Act IV of The Infernal Machine (1934). French theatre of the 1930s and 1940s sought to revive Greek tragedy, and the rewriting of ancient myth became a central characteristic of twentieth-century poetry, theatre and cinema.
Cocteau became the movement’s leading figure and amplified it: everything in his work became mythological. He has been called a mythographer, one who writes myths. Yet he did more than repeat old stories. He appropriated them, retaining their characters and plots while redirecting their symbolism towards the modern world.
Antigone inspired his first mythological play in 1922; Oedipus appeared in Oedipus Rex and The Infernal Machine; Orpheus dominated the film Orpheus, and in Testament of Orpheus Cocteau himself assumed the poet’s role. The Saint-Maximin windows again include Orpheus, Hyacinthus, the Minotaur, Demeter and Minerva.
Greek mythology was not his only source. Other ancient civilisations supplied mythical forms, especially the man with raised arms in the axial apse window. The figure probably evokes Mircea Eliade’s shaman who, adopting this posture during ritual, exclaims: “I have reached the sky. I am immortal.” Behind him we can also discern the androgyne, image of paradisal humanity and primordial Adam before the separation of the sexes.
Marcel Duchamp had already used this motif in Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911). Arturo Schwarz identified Duchamp and his sister Suzanne as two androgynous beings raising their arms in a Y. Cocteau probably knew both the painting and its author through their mutual friend Jean Crotti, who married Suzanne.
Cocteau and Duchamp each faced a difficult sexuality: Duchamp’s painful incestuous attachment to Suzanne and Cocteau’s homosexuality. Duchamp’s painting combined incest, homosexuality, Kabbalah and alchemy. He may have initiated Cocteau into alchemy as a physics of resurrection, a means of recovering androgynous Adam or the rose as symbol of life and eros.
The original androgyne strengthened the Orphic poet’s pursuit of the past and nostalgia for the sacred. This vision opposed modern humanity’s desire to rationalise everything. Pasolini similarly declared himself allergic to technological civilisation and an excessively rational world, leaving him no choice but to express the reflection of the past.
Modernity is founded on progress and linear time, in which things disintegrate and disappear. Myth, the arts of the first peoples and occult sciences contradict it through a desire to regenerate the world. Eliade explained even human sacrifice through an archaic theory of the periodic renewal of sacred forces.
Myth therefore rejects a movement of history ending only in death. Cocteau instead affirms cyclical time and eternal return. Cyclical time and the sacred are intimately linked: practical reason and pragmatism rule the West, while the mythical world restores the sacred as symbol of eternity.
Cocteau built the entire Saint-Maximin ensemble around the central man with raised arms. He immortalised the shaman’s search for primordial time and the lost paradisal state of androgynous Adam. Every other window reiterates rebirth or another life after death through the pattern of death/rebirth.
The significance of the work created in Metz
Everything Cocteau created in Metz in 1962 possesses immense symbolic significance: both the scenery for Pelléas and Mélisande and the stained glass, a tapestry of light forming the ultimate paradigm of his thought. These two works perfectly express the dream that inhabited the poet-artist. He carried it so high and so powerfully that it seems to have become a song still resounding beneath the vaults of the small church in rue Mazelle.