Irene Eynat-Confino's On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster promises the reader a much-needed examination of the fantastic in theatre, a genre already the subject of numerous studies in literature, notably by Tristan Todorov, Kathryn Hume, and Eric Rabkin, but only the subject of one work of sustained attention in theatre/performance: Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama (1992), edited by Patrick D. Murphy. Using the play The Infernal Machine “as an exemplar, to demonstrate and comprehend the import and scope of the workings of the fantastic in the theatre,” Eynat-Confino simultaneously argues that Cocteau fought for “sexual tolerance and for gay liberation” through the representations of nonnormative sexuality made visible in this mode of representation (4). Rather than using Cocteau's play to expand an understanding of the fantastic in modern theatre, Eynat-Confino narrows her study to a detailed and often repetitive textual analysis of The Infernal Machine with occasional forays into other Cocteau writings. A generalized notion of the fantastic, culled from medieval, early modern, modern, and postmodern scholarship, is applied to Cocteau's text, burrowing the reader ever deeper in Eynat-Confino's interpretation of The Infernal Machine and providing few opportunities to conceptualize the use of the fantastic in the modern theatre. It is not until her final chapter that Eynat-Confino widens the scope of analysis beyond Cocteau and his play, resulting in a hurried citing of the fantastic in plays as varied as Samuel Beckett's Not I, Goethe's Faust, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine.
Eynat-Confino enters into the fantastic through the figure of the monster in The Infernal Machine. This creature of the fantastic, she argues in her introduction, is both “trope and … actant” consciously deployed by Cocteau to destabilize the spectator's understanding of self (1). Scholarship on the monstrous has expanded in the past two decades, the monster illustrating a hybridity and alterity seemingly tailor-made for a postmodern understanding of self and culture. Eynat-Confino's reading of the monster in Cocteau as symbol of nonnormative sexuality, although not new, allows her to then trace Cocteau's subversive strategy to place his own marginalized and hidden identity on stage.
In Chapter 1 Eynat-Confino extracts and analyzes the monster as a fantastic element in The Infernal Machine. Cocteau's monster, she argues, is both the familiar mythic and supernatural creature (the Sphinx, Anubis, and Laius's ghost) and the human who, through her/his behavior becomes monstrous: Oedipus, Jocasta, Tiresias, and Laius (13–14). The next three chapters provide more detailed analyses of the monsters. Chapter 2 conceptualizes the Sphinx as monster through its hybridity (combining and dissolving the boundaries of species and gender). Chapter 3 (“Laius, Tiresias, and Jocasta”) articulates her argument for the monstrosity of the human characters: Tiresias as gender transformer; Jocasta as sexual predator and child abuser; and Laius as rapist. The last monster, Oedipus in Chapter 4, alerts us that “everyone, at some stage in his or her life, is or can become a monster” (74). Eynat-Confino draws on Cocteau scholarship to support and challenge her own claims, but primarily relies on her textual interpretation, rarely contextualizing the play in oeuvre, culture, or historical moment. The exception to this is Chapter 6, which aligns Cocteau's own life in twentieth-century France with that of his fictional monsters, the monster “giv[ing] voice to an ordeal that he [Cocteau] shared with the many whose sexuality was nonnormative and condemned as such by society” (93).
Chapter 5 analyzes the devices (cliché, pastiche, camp, and parody) that Cocteau uses in The Infernal Machine to deconstruct the audience's perception of monstrosity. Rather than following in the footsteps of Freud, Eynat-Confino argues, this Oedipal tale consciously challenges that discourse through these “distantiating” stratagems (79). The theatre, discussed in Chapter 7 as a site of the outsider, provided Cocteau with the perfect medium to make visible and validate nonnormative sexuality through the fantastic mode of representation.
Eynat-Confino's final chapter, “Ethics, Alterity, and Designed Emotion,” expands her analysis to the use of the fantastic on non-Cocteauian stages. Refusing to read the fantastic solely as sign, she argues that in performance, the fantastic, experienced as the uncanny, forces the audience to accept the nonreal as part of reality. This destabilization of “reality,” which is emotionally and not intellectually induced, allows alterity to emerge. Unfortunately, Eynat-Confino's definition of fantastic often reads as simply theatrical: is Jerry Lewis as the Devil in Damn Yankees really the same as Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers? (146). Moreover, her equation of all modern playwrights who use the fantastic as sharing an “anguished notion of their alterity and their sense of mission” (Samuel Beckett = Paul Claudel = Robert Wilson, with Tony Kushner winning the alterity prize for being both gay and Jewish) muddies rather than elucidates what the “fantastic” is and how it is used in “modern” theatre (150).
This study addresses a lack of scholarship on both the theatre of Cocteau and the “fantastic” as a mode of representation in modern theatre. What is needed, however, is a rigorous parsing of that term as it is used in its historical and cultural context. Eynat-Confino does, however, provide a detailed analysis of The Infernal Machine, provocatively challenging dominant interpretations of the play as either a Freudian illustration or as Cocteau's poetic debate on free will versus determinism.
