Focus on ... The relationship between Cocteau and his mother Eugenie

September 17, 2014

Focus on ... The relationship between Cocteau and his mother Eugenie

When he published in 1912 his third book of poetry, The Dance of Sophocles, Jean Cocteau, young prodigy, 23, is adored by artistic and literary circles. Proust intimate friend of Jacques-Emile Blanche, Nijinsky and Diaghilev faithful and disciple of Anna de Noailles, his ambition is to unite in his person all the talent around him ... [Full story]

When he published in 1912 his third book of poetry, The Dance of Sophocles, Jean Cocteau, young prodigy, 23, is adored by artistic and literary circles. Proust intimate friend of Jacques-Emile Blanche, Nijinsky and Diaghilev faithful disciple and Anna de Noailles, his ambition is to unite in his person all the talent around him.

Dance Sophocles reference to dance "the young and divine Sophocles' executed naked in Athens after the naval victory at Salamis, reflects the ambition and enthusiasm of the young Cocteau novelist, painter, dancer, poet, he feels truly "worthy to approach the table [of] God [x]".

"At par with the best artists, he was an intermediary between God and Earth. "In his biography, Claude Arnaud devotes a chapter (" The Living God ") to the psychology of the poet at the time:" It was a detached fragment of the creator. One of terrestrial bodies through which this Being evolving deliberated and finally contrasted to improve its inception. ".

Thus, it is a freedman of his illustrious models Cocteau and fully assuming his artistic divinity is revealed in this ecstatic like the eponymous poem collection:

Thanks to you, my pride, I wore the halo
Hosted by the charming speech God
[...]
Thanks to you, I have experienced the frantic struggles
Where the pen and the paper and the ink bleak
Are the links that we would like to shout,
We would shout, sing, sigh, laugh,
[...]
And it takes us and when we feel it,
Let them run off as a superb blood.
...

The dedication to his mother on the first copy of the Dance of the seven Sophocles single major paper, reflects the only real upward Cocteau Cocteau Eugenie.

Sacred mother by her son, she had an influence deeply on the poet's life as in his work, marked by the ubiquity of Oedipal figure.
Claude Arnaud describes at length the "filial momentum coupled with an almost loving attention (...)" it is only my love for you to cling to something real, the rest seems like a bad dream. "
One can not also fail to see the choice of the quotation from Virgil extracted Bucoliques he chooses to decorate sending the trace of this incestuous ambiguity that binds Cocteau to her mother. :

"INCIPE, parve puer: cui non Risere relatives, nec deus hunc mensa, dea ultimate dignity is cubili / Virgil / Jean.."

("Child, admit it: the son to whom his parents have not smiled is unworthy to approach the table of a god, or to be admitted to the bed of a goddess.")

Eugenie Cocteau, sacred mother by her son, had an influence deeply on the poet's life as in his work, marked by the ubiquity of Oedipal figure.
In his biography, Claude Arnaud describes this "filial momentum coupled with an almost loving attention (...)" it is only my love for you to cling to something real, the rest seems a bad dream. " [After the suicide of his father, and his mother Cocteau] sink into an emotional spiral from which they emerge as an additional shared love. Is it "more gentle and cruel household, household more proud of yourself, this couple a son and a young mother?" asked Cocteau in "The Infernal Machine"; there was little in so accomplice, nor so stuffy. "(C. Arnaud, p.28-29).

He wrote more than 900 letters passionate (sometimes daily) to his "dear one" loyal confidante but disturbed by the life and "dissolute" manners of the son she "feared for not quite finished" (ibid.).

On the death of Radiguet in 1924, Cocteau into a deep depression that led him, through opium, to the hospital with dismay as his helpless mother. His mystical revelation reflected in its "Letter" sent to apologetics Jacques Maritain was both a resurrection for man and for the son, one of the few moments of real communion with the mother, a devout Catholic who remain women her life. It also dedicated to him a copy of this letter in the following terms:

"A mom, this test of love and Improvement. John."