In an interview with Claude Arnaud, author of the recent Proust Against Cocteau (Grasset), Télérama adopted the same theme in its December 2013 special issue, Cocteau: The Poet with a Hundred Faces. Writing about the two authors, Nathalie Crom divided their relationship into two periods: initial complicity followed by an irreconcilable conflict.
They met around 1909, when Proust was forty and Cocteau twenty. They had so much in common that Proust saw in Cocteau himself twenty years younger. Both were hypersensitive, homosexual and extremely close to their mothers. Yet two different creative machines could already be discerned: Cocteau’s was earlier and more delicate, while Proust’s took longer to start but eventually assumed an arachnid dimension.
Claude Arnaud finds here the seeds of a true divorce between Cocteau’s thin, skeletal, fragmented and dispersed output and Proust’s work. Télérama adds that Cocteau was not well placed to understand In Search of Lost Time as we do a century later; the novel would become increasingly foreign to him. The conclusion is that the two men quarrelled, just as their radically opposed works did at a deeper level.
To support this argument, however, Arnaud and Télérama consider only the familiar literary work of Cocteau. They ignore his graphic and pictorial creations, which would give a more nuanced view. Above all, they overlook the stained glass he designed during the final three years of his life, from 1961 to 1963, for the small church of Saint-Maximin in Metz. Was it through ignorance or simple omission that they never mentioned this last masterpiece?
Far from minor, the ensemble is astonishing in both scope — fourteen bays comprising twenty-four windows — and artistic quality. It would also have enriched the debate between Proust and Cocteau, because its essential meaning is a powerful hymn to immortality and immortal time, an undertaking very close to Proust’s Search.
The whole scenario begins with the axial choir window and its man with raised arms. Mircea Eliade tells us that, when a shaman adopts this posture during ritual, he exclaims: “I have reached the sky. I am immortal.” The central window in the apse stands directly behind the altar and above the crucifix. Everything there celebrates fulfilment, eternity and primordial unity.
Like a repeated signal, this image initiates a magnificent return to the beginning of the world. Here begins the relentless search for lost time. The symbolic re-enactment of origins first extends to the four other apse windows, arranged in pairs on either side of the central bay. Each evokes a movement outside time and a return to beginnings.
To attain immortality is always to travel backwards towards the beginning of the great Whole, to the birth of Time. It means repeating creation and recovering the state before cosmogony: the original chaos and the paradisal condition of a world not yet created. This pre-creation state produces the symbolic forms in the four windows: egg, embryo and phases of the moon. Exuberant vegetation fills the second window on the right, proclaiming a new birth of the natural world.
Cocteau thus gives visual form to Proustian truths about plural time, adopting the distinction between lost and regained time. For him too, everything interpenetrates. As Gilles Deleuze explains in Proust and Signs, regained time is first found within lost time and offers an image of eternity; but it is also original and absolute time, a true eternity affirmed in art.
Beyond the apse, Cocteau extended his quest for eternity across a further ten windows. Like Proust, the seeker of truth must interpret, decipher and explain. His search for eternity is indeed a search for lost time, because truth always has an essential relationship with time.
Contrary to Télérama’s claim, the Search was not foreign to Cocteau’s art. He truly incorporated it into his work, even if this took place in a final and singular creation. Claude Arnaud contrasts Proust’s cathedral with Cocteau’s proliferation; I would temper that judgement by describing Cocteau’s own work as a lasting construction, an actual church. This restores some justice and recalls what he achieved in the evening of his life at Saint-Maximin in Metz.