COCTEAU BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS: THE POTOMAK, THE EUGENES OF WAR, AND THE END OF THE POTOMAK

Open Access
- Author:
- Gotea, Claudia
- Graduate Program:
- French
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 04, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Monique Yvonne Yaari, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Norris Joiner Lacy, Committee Member
Benedicte Marie Christine Monicat, Committee Member
Sophie C De Schaepdrijver, Committee Member
Allan Inlow Stoekl, Committee Member
Jean Claude Vuillemin, Committee Member - Keywords:
- the two world wars
eugenism
parody
modernism
Cocteau - Abstract:
- One of the most prolific, admired, but also contested figures of the twentieth century, author, filmmaker, and painter Jean Cocteau, left a significant body of highly plurisemic works, some of which he claimed to have made deliberately obscure. To fully grasp the complexity of Cocteau's contributions to the arts as well as the ways he positioned himself within his time (not only aesthetically but also politically), one must penetrate that obscurity with the aid of the rare clues the artist himself provided and a keen awareness of cultural, artistic, and historical context. The three works that form the core of my dissertation are among the least known and most enigmatic in Cocteau’s multi-faceted oeuvre: Le Potomak (1913-1914); its first sequel, the album Les Eugènes de la guerre (1915); and La Fin du Potomak (1939). Spanning one of the most turbulent periods in French and European history, one that also revolutionized the arts, the Potomak triad constitutes an invaluable key to both the epoch and Cocteau’s originality. A tantalizing clue to the Potomak cycle is found in Cocteau’s 1922 essay, “Le Secret Professionnel”: “I masked the tragedy of the Potomak under a thousand farces.” This enigma prompts a series of questions: What is this tragedy covered by laughter? To what “professional secret” is due the aesthetic appeal of the Potomak cycle? What does Cocteau’s hermetic vision convey about the nature of war and society in the first half of the twentieth century? What can we learn from the Potomak cycle regarding the dynamic tensions involving modernism, the avant-gardes, text-image relationships, and the many faces of modernity (socio-political, economic, and technological) at a time when mass culture begins to irrigate learned culture? These are the questions to which my dissertation proposes detailed answers. All in all, it advances the idea that besides a peculiar use of parody and the tragic-comic, word and image relationships, and mass culture media, heterogeneity is Cocteau’s artistic response to a problematic modernity.