Jean Cocteau’s Stained Glass: A Hymn to Immortality

The stained-glass ensemble created by Jean Cocteau for Saint-Maximin Church in Metz unquestionably belongs among the masterpieces that express the quintessence of his art. More insistently, perhaps, than any other work by the artist, it reveals a powerful attraction to the supernatural and to eternity. It is therefore hardly surprising that this small church in Metz should contain some of the most eloquent clues to Cocteau’s quest.

The rebirth of myths

Cocteau’s constant need to invoke Greek mythology and myth in general reflects his ultimate desire to reveal timelessness. Nietzsche had already spoken of the element of eternity bestowed upon beings by Greek tragedy, which “briefly tears us away from the whirlpool of changing forms”. For him, a rebirth of Antiquity offered real hope of renewal by breaking with the certainties of Socratic rationality and the purely scientific spirit of modern humanity.

Freud later demonstrated the close relationship between dream and myth, exposing desire for the mother and rejection of the father through the story of Oedipus. Cocteau took up this Freudian legacy, notably in Act IV of The Infernal Machine (1934). French theatre in the 1930s and 1940s sought to revive Greek tragedy, while the rewriting of ancient myth became a defining feature of twentieth-century poetry, theatre and cinema.

Cocteau stood at the forefront of this movement and greatly amplified it: everything in his work became mythological — poetry, plays, films and drawings. He has even been called a “mythographer”, someone who writes myths. Yet he went beyond simply reviving ancient stories and made them his own. Although he retained familiar characters and plots, he often redirected their symbolism to address the modern world.

Three mythological figures were particularly important. Antigone inspired his first mythological play in 1922. Oedipus appeared in Oedipus Rex (1928) and The Infernal Machine. Orpheus was central to the film Orpheus (1949), and ten years later Cocteau himself took Orpheus’s place in Testament of Orpheus.

At Saint-Maximin, Orpheus appears in the central light of the east-facing triple bay, alongside many other mythic figures: Hyacinthus in the left light of the north transept; the Minotaur in its central light; Demeter in the second window of the second south-side bay; and Minerva in the second window of the third south-side bay.

Beyond Greek mythology, Cocteau drew on ancient civilisations to summon other mythical forms. The man with raised arms in the axial window of the apse probably recalls Mircea Eliade’s shaman, who assumes this posture during ceremonies and exclaims: “I have reached the sky. I am immortal.” Other civilisations are evoked more or less explicitly. The leafy cross near the top of the same window appears Aztec in inspiration and recalls Quetzalcoatl, god of vegetation, fertility, death and resurrection. Egypt is suggested by the profusion of plants and floral arrangements in the second window on the south side of the apse; flowers, also placed on mummies, express the hope of life.

African art is celebrated in the equatorial forests filling the three bays of the south transept. Cocteau immerses us in a world resembling Wifredo Lam’s jungle, inhabited by horned heads and half-vegetal, half-human totems. Faithful to Eliade’s thought, he uses myth in all its forms to transcend history and reach each of us: myth restores humanity to an atemporal, auroral and paradisal illud tempus beyond history.

Challenging historical time

Myths often present the innocence of humanity’s first age. The shamanic man with raised arms seeks to recover paradisal time and attain immortality. Yet this motif was not new in art. Marcel Duchamp used it in Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), where, according to Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp and his sister Suzanne appear as two androgynous beings raising their arms in a Y.

Cocteau was very probably brought into contact with Duchamp through their mutual friend Jean Crotti, who later married Suzanne and became Duchamp’s brother-in-law. The two artists also shared a sexual orientation that was difficult to assume: Duchamp painfully experienced an incestuous attachment to Suzanne, while Cocteau had to contend with his homosexuality. In the complex painting of 1911, Duchamp combined incest, homosexuality, Kabbalah and alchemy.

Duchamp may well have introduced Cocteau to alchemy, which he presented as the physics of resurrection: a way of recovering androgynous Adam, or the rose as symbol of life and eros. The myth of the original androgyne encouraged the Orphic poet to revisit the past with a nostalgia for the sacred. This stands against modern humanity’s determination to rationalise everything and the reign of desacralised Socratic man.

Pasolini likewise rejected this modern society: “I am allergic to technological civilisation, to our excessively rational world. What remains for me, then, except to express the reflection of the past?” Like Nietzsche, he believed dialectical knowledge had sounded the death knell of Greek tragedy.

The modern world is founded on progress and a linear history in perpetual change, in which things disintegrate and disappear. Myth, the arts of the first peoples and occult sciences — especially alchemy — contradict this view. They obey a desire to regenerate the world. Eliade even understood human sacrifice, however barbaric and shocking it appears to us, through the archaic theory of the periodic regeneration of sacred forces.

Myth asks us to abandon faith in a historical movement ending only in death and to embrace cyclical time, an eternal return. Belief in cyclical time often accompanies the quest for the sacred; the two are intimately linked. The West is ruled by practical reason and pragmatism, while the mythical world calls the sacred back as a symbol of eternity.

Cocteau understood this when he built his entire stained-glass work around the axial figure with raised arms. He immortalised the shaman’s quest to recover primordial time and the paradisal state — the eternity of androgynous Adam — lost in our profane world. Every other window at Saint-Maximin recurrently evokes rebirth or another life after death through a pattern that may be called death/rebirth.

Death marks the ultimate destination of historical time. Rebirth, often in the form of metamorphosis, escapes that logic through a cyclical movement that permits the hope of another life after death.

Death and rebirth in the windows

The theme originates in the central window and unfolds throughout the church:

• Hyacinthus dies and is reborn as flowers in the left lancet of the north transept.
• The Beast in Beauty and the Beast dies and becomes Prince Charming in the central lancet.
• The Minotaur’s death at Theseus’s hands allows the powers of reason to triumph.
• The rose in the right lancet symbolises eternity and regeneration.
• In the south transept, Wifredo Lam’s jungle becomes animal and human beings turn into trees animated by multiple eyes.
• Orpheus’s head lives on despite the disappearance of the poet’s body in the east-facing triple bay.
• A pictogram attempts to escape the nets of death.
• The praying mantis gives life by killing the male with which it has mated.
• Arachne is transformed into a spider after Minerva puts her to death.
• Demeter, goddess of agriculture and harvest, celebrates return to life and the cycle of seasons in the Eleusinian mysteries.
• Minerva kills the poet with her spear and enables his rebirth, metamorphosed and endowed with irradiated eyes.

A variation on Duchamp’s “law of retaliation”

The death/rebirth pattern may also be regarded as a variation on another pair — rejection/rehabilitation — developed by Marcel Duchamp. In 1912, the creator of the readymade discovered a principle that would transform both his art and his life, which he called “talionism”. It closely resembles death/rebirth.

Nude Descending a Staircase was rejected from the Cubist room in Paris because it caused a scandal; the following year, the same painting brought Duchamp glory at New York’s Armory Show. He recognised a proportional relationship between initial rejection and deferred success. To make one’s mark and create a true work, one must pass through rejection before being accepted or even adored: a symbolic death followed by a more intense rebirth. This resembles a sacred rite: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Mark 12:10). The Large Glass, built in opposing sections, immortalised this principle.

A structure close to Spinoza’s conatus

Death/rebirth is a dual structure that also recalls Spinoza’s conatus because it takes the form of a particular regime of desires and affects. Conatus can be defined as the power of being, the striving by which each thing endeavours “to persevere in its being” (Ethics, III, 6). It is first and foremost a desire to live and survive.

Cocteau’s pattern is very close to this Spinozist concept, since it combines fear of death and desire for life. Death and rebirth are elemental forms established by desires and affects. The power of conatus is precisely the overcoming enacted by Spinozism: an impulse of power, an ontology of activity. Psychic life is governed by a balance of forces in which things confront one another and the stronger prevail. “An affect cannot be restrained or removed except by an opposing and stronger affect” (Ethics, IV, 7).

For Cocteau, this means believing that the affect of life will ultimately be stronger than Thanatos, the death drive. His personal path resembles Spinoza’s being because he constantly listens to sensation and believes that the only way to reach the absolute is to remain as close as possible to oneself: “the closer one is to oneself, the closer one comes to God.” His right is, in a sense, the self — like conatus in its raw state, a will for oneself without restraint or moderation.

As in Spinoza, ideas do not lead the world: affects do. People are driven by passions while remaining ignorant of the causes that determine them. Whenever a person can pursue what appears good, the affective balance inclines towards joy and hope. This joyous version predominates in Cocteau, whose death/rebirth pattern forms the cornerstone of his conatus.

His testament of light

With his final masterpiece in glass — like the Large Glass of his friend Marcel Duchamp — Cocteau used myth to reveal the sacred and eternal element inherent in every being. In the evening of his life, he found inspiration in the silence and solitude of a small church in north-eastern France, undistracted by Parisian agitation or the atmosphere of the century. There he went to the heart of things and established immortal forms.