The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau, Jean. The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) [1929]. Trans. Rosamond Lehmann. New York: New Directions, 1957. ISBN: 0811200213 (pbk), $11.95.
This short novel is inexorably linked to films in my mind. It is the first book I’ve read by Cocteau (though not the first I own) who I am firstly familiar with for his films (Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast). Having recently seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film The Dreamers twice, I was driven to read Les Enfants Terribles by it’s connection to the source text of the film, Gilbert Adair’s The Holy Innocents (which is out of print and so far, after more than a month, the library has not been able to find a copy for me to read — the first time I have been let down so by interlibrary loan (though I have not given up on them yet)). I’d like to compare the two novels, but am stuck thinking of the film and the novel (I believe I will have to rent the film version of Les Enfants Terribles).
I read the novel in translation, as my French is not such that I indiscriminately read in it, and I will go on faith that the translation is accurate to the text. This edition features twenty drawings by Cocteau: black line drawings lacking in tone, any black spaces at all, or even line variation. The drawings are perhaps the main delight of the book. I have a preference for this sort of simple illustrative style (done with genius by Picasso in many drawings and etchings), and the ones in this volume add an aesthetic interest to the book.
The novel itself is the story of a brother and sister, Paul and Elisabeth, who are soon orphaned by the death of their mother (their father having already passed away). They live in an enclosed world inside their room (often referred to, almost mythically, as the “Room”) and play at something they call the “Game”. Early on Paul is hurt by a stone-centered snowball thrown by a schoolmate he has a passion for. He is never well after that, though one often wonders why one blow was such a damage to him. The siblings are joined early on by Gerard, who seems in love with both of them, and later by Agatha, a girl Elisabeth works with as a dressmaker’s mannequin.
Not much happens in the book. There is much explication in a broad manner of the characters’ situation and little by way of direct apprehension. The language is what many would call “poetic” and what I most often call “trying too hard”, producing abstraction and little feeling.
Cocteau seems to be trying to set up a personal mythology with the “Room”, “Game”, and the “Treasure” they keep, but it remains so abstract that I found it hard to ever make any connection with the myth as a whole. It remains too personal to the characters, and the reader is not allowed to see past the curtains that block the view. The story becomes a sort of Greek Tragedy in the end — not surprising considering Cocteau’s work often recreates such myths (Orpheus and Oedipus most famously) — but lacks the power a tragedy. Without having felt the myth and understood the situations of the main players, I was left uncaring and unmoved by their deaths (it is no secret to give away that the story ends in death).
Perhaps there was a longer, stronger, more interesting novel hidden within this short novel, but it would have required something more… a stronger centering to the narrative (the narrator is distant and jumps around without ever really getting us into any of the characters) or a better showcasing of the personal mythology that lingers in the background. In the end, for me, it boils down to the narrative reliance on summary for too much of the story. Almost everything seems glossed over.
Interestingly, in one of the last pages, as the siblings head to their deaths, incest is invoked, while strengthening the Greek Tragedy image:
“They don the buskins of the Attic stage and leave the underworld of the Atrides behind them. Divine omniscience will not suffice to shrive them; they must put their trust in the divine caprice of the Immortals. Courage, one little moment longer and they will be where flesh dissolves, where souls embrace, where incest lurks no more.” (181)
I actually expected more of an incest story between the brother and sister in this novel (mostly going back to The Dreamers and what I have read of Adair’s novel), but it is directly evoked only in that one passage. Otherwise, the siblings seem close but only the sister seems at times exceedingly interested in her brother. The evocation of the Atrides myth in the end is also rather out of place for what goes on the novel.
Comparing it with The Dreamers, I find definite similarities and the novel does not show well next to the film. Bertolucci and Adair more successively showcase the personal myth of the siblings (in this case, the cinema) and provide the viewer with a clearer focal point, the third protagonist who becomes friends with the siblings. In the end, the film is less tragic but more powerful. (More on this when I can get a video and watch the film more closely.)
I feel like I should reread this novel to give it a real critique, but, on the other hand, it displeased me so that I have no desire to go back to it. I’ll wait for that copy of The Holy Innocents to turn up, instead.
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