The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  ON DREAMS

  A SESSION AT DR B’S, WITH NITROGEN PROTOXYDE, comes to my mind. The nurse is giving this to me. The door opens. Another nurse comes in and says the word Madame. I leave our world, not without believing that I am countering the gas with a superior lucidity. I even seem to have the strength to make some very subtle remarks. ‘Doctor, take care, I am not asleep.’ But the journey begins. It lasts for centuries. I reach the first tribunal. I am judged. I pass. Another century. I reach the second tribunal. I am judged. I pass, and so it continues. At the fourteenth tribunal I understand that multiplicity is the sign of this other world and unity the sign of ours. I shall find on return one body, one dentist, one dentist’s room, one dentist’s hand, one dentist’s lamp, one dentist’s chair, one dentist’s white coat. And soon I must forget what I have seen. Retrace my steps before all these tribunals. Realize that they know that it is of no importance, that I shall not talk about it because I shall not remember. Centuries are added to centuries. I re-enter our world. I see unity reforming. What a bore! Everything is one. And I hear a voice saying at the door: ‘… wishes to know if you will see her tomorrow.’ The nurse is finishing her sentence. Only the name of the lady has escaped me. This is the duration of the centuries from which I’m surfacing, this the expanse of my dizzy journey. It is the immediacy of the dream. All we remember is the interminable dream that occurs instantaneously on the brink of awakening. I have said that my dreams were usually of the nature of caricatures. They accuse me. They inform me of what is irreparable in my nature. They underline organic imperfections I will not correct. I suspected these. The dream proves them to me by means of acts, apologues, speeches. It is not like this every time, unless I flatter myself, not having unravelled the meaning.

  The swiftness of the dream is such that its scenes are peopled with objects unknown to us when awake and about which in a trice we know the minutest details. What strikes me is that, from one second to the next, our ego of the dream finds itself projected into a new world, without feeling the astonishment which this world would rouse in it in a waking state, although it remains itself and does not participate in this transfiguration. We ourselves remain in another universe, which might suggest that when falling asleep we are like a traveller who awakes with a start. Nothing of the kind, since the town, where he did not believe himself to be, surprises this traveller, whereas the extravaganzas of a dream never disconcert the waking man who falls asleep. So the dream is the sleeper’s normal existence. This is why I endeavour to forget my dreams on waking. The actions of a dream are not valid in a waking state, and the actions of the waking state are only valid in the dream because it has the digestive faculty of making them into excrement. In the world of sleep this excrement does not appear to us as such and its chemistry interests us, amuses us or terrifies us. But transposed into the waking state, which does not possess this digestive faculty, the actions of the dream would foul life for us and make it unbreathable. Thousands of examples prove this, because in recent times a good many doors have been opened to these horrors. It is one thing to look for signs in them and another to allow the oil stain to spread over to the waking state and extend there. Fortunately our neighbour’s dream bores us if he recounts it to us and this fact stops us from recounting our own.

  What is certain is that this enfolding, through the medium of which eternity becomes liveable to us, is not produced in dreams in the same way as in life. Something of this fold unfolds. Thanks to this our limits change, widen. The past, the future no longer exist; the dead rise again; places construct themselves without architect, without journeys, without that tedious oppression that compels us to live minute by minute that which the half-opened fold shows us at a glance. Moreover the atmospheric and profound triviality of the dream favours encounters, surprises, acquaintanceships, a naturalness which our enfolded world (I mean projected onto the surface of a fold) can only ascribe to the supernatural. I say naturalness, because one of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing in it astonishes us. We consent without regret to live there among strangers, entirely separated from our habits and our friends. This is what fills us with dismay at the sight of a face we love, and which is asleep. Where, at this moment, stirs the face behind this mask? Where does it light up and for whom? This sight of sleep has always frightened me more than dreams. I made the verses of Plain-Chant about it.

  A woman sleeps. She triumphs. She need no longer lie. She is a lie from head to toe. She will give no account of her movements. She deceives with impunity. Taking advantage of this licentiousness, she parts her lips, she allows her limbs to drift where they will. She is no longer on guard. She is her own alibi. What could the man watching her blame her for? She is there. What need has Othello of that handkerchief? Let him watch Desdemona sleeping. It is enough to make one commit murder. It is true that a jealous man never ceases to be one and that afterwards he would exclaim: ‘What is she doing to me there among the dead?’

  Emerged from sleep the dream fades. It is a deep sea plant which dies out of water. It dies on my sheets. Its reign mystifies me. I admire its fables. I take advantage of it to live a double life. I never make use of it.

  What it teaches us is the bitterness of our limitations. Since Nerval, Ducasse, Rimbaud, the study of its mechanism has often given the poet the means of conquering them, adapting our world otherwise than according to the dictates of good sense, shuffling the order of the factors to which reason condemns us, in short making for poetry a lighter, swifter and newer vehicle.

  ON READING

  I CANNOT READ OR WRITE. AND WHEN THE CENSUS form asks me this question, I am tempted to answer no.

  Who knows how to write? It is to battle with ink to try to make oneself understood.

  Either one takes too much care over one’s work or one does not take enough. Seldom does one find the happy mean that limps with grace. Reading is another matter. I read. I think I am reading. Each time I re-read, I perceive that I have not read. That is the trouble with a letter. One finds in it what one looks for. One is satisfied. One puts it aside. If one finds it again, on re-reading one reads into it another which one had not read.

  Books play us the same trick. If they do not suit our present mood we do not consider them good. If they disturb us we criticize them, and this criticism is superimposed upon them and prevents us from reading them fairly.

  What the reader wants is to read himself. When he reads what he approves of he thinks he could have written it. He may even have a grudge against the book for taking his place, for saying what he did not know how to say, and which according to him he would have said better.

  The more a book means to us the less well we read it. Our substance slips into it and thinks it round to our own outlook. That is why if I want to read and convince myself that I can read, I read books into which my substance does not penetrate. In the hospitals in which I spent long periods, I used to read what the nurse brought me or what fell into my hands by chance. These were the books of Paul Féval, of Maurice Leblanc, of Xavier Leroux, and the innumerable adventure books and detective stories which made of me a modest and attentive reader. Rocambole, M. Lecoq, Le crime d’Orcival, Fantômes, Chéri-Bibi, while saying to me: ‘You can read’, spoke to me too much in my own language for me not to get something, unconsciously, from them, for my mind not to distort them to its own dimensions. This is so true that, for instance, you often hear a tubercular patient say of Thomas Mann’s book The Magic Mountain: ‘That is a book one couldn’t understand if one hadn’t been tubercular.’ In fact Thomas Mann wrote it without being this and for the very purpose of making those who had not experienced tuberculosis understand it.

  We are all ill and only know how to read books which deal with our malady. This is why books dealing with love are so successful, since everyone believes that he is the only one to experience it. He thinks: ‘This book is addressed to me. What can anyone else see in it?’ ‘How beautiful this book is,’ says the one they love, by whom they beli
eve themselves to be loved and whom they hasten to make read it. But that person says this because he or she loves elsewhere.

  It is enough to make one wonder if the function of books, all of which speak to convince, is not to listen and to nod assent. In Balzac the reader is in his element: ‘This is my uncle,’ he tells himself, ‘this is my aunt, this is my grandfather, this is Madame X …, this is the town where I was born.’ In Dostoievsky what does he tell himself? ‘This is my fever and my violence, of which those around me have no suspicion.’

  And the reader believes he is reading. The glass without quicksilver seems to him a true mirror. He recognizes the scene enacted behind it. How closely it resembles what he is thinking! How clearly it reflects his image! How well they collaborate, he and it! How well they reflect!

  Just as in museums there are certain pictures with legends—I mean that give rise to legends—and which the other pictures must consider with distaste (La Giaconda, L’Indifférent, Millet’s Angelus, etc.…). Certain books give rise to legends and their fate is different from that of other books, even if these are a hundred times finer.

  Le Grand Meaulnes is typical of such books. And one of mine: Les Enfants Terribles, shares this strange privilege. Those who read it and read themselves into it became, through the fact that they believed themselves to be living my ink, the victims of a resemblance that they had to keep up. This resulted in an artificial confusion and the putting into conscious practice a state of affairs for which unconsciousness is the only excuse. The works that say to me: ‘I am your book’, ‘We are your books’ are innumerable. The war, the post-war, a lack of liberty, which at first sight seem to make a certain way of life impossible, do not discourage them.

  In writing this book in the Saint-Cloud clinic I drew inspiration partly from friends of mine, a brother and a sister, whom I believed to be the only people living in this way. I did not expect many reactions because of the principle I was affirming. For who, I thought, will read themselves into this? Not even those with whom I am dealing, since their charm lies in not knowing what they are. In fact, they were, as far as I know, the only ones not to recognize themselves. For from their counterparts, if any exist, I shall never learn anything. This book became the breviary of mythomaniacs and of those who like to daydream.

  Thomas l’Imposteur is a legend, but it is a book which does not give rise to legends. During the liberation it all but had the same effect as Les Enfants Terribles. A number of young mythomaniacs lost their heads, disguised themselves, changed their names and took themselves for heroes. Their friends called them Thomas l’Imposteur and told me of their exploits, when they did not do so for themselves. But mythomaniacs who become identified with their own fable are very rare. The others do not like to be unmasked. Moreover, it is very simple. A book gives rise to legends at once or else it never will. Thomas l’Imposteur will never share the fate of Les Enfants Terribles. What would a mythomaniac make of a mythomaniac? It is like an Englishman playing the part of an Englishman.

  The death of Thomas de Fontenoy is mythological. A child plays at horses and becomes a horse. A mythomaniac reads Les Enfants Terribles. He plays at horses and thinks he is a horse.

  ON MEASUREMENT AND MARCEL PROUST

  PERHAPS I KNOW TO WHAT EXTENT I CAN GO TOO far. Yet this is a sense of measurement. Of which I have very little. Rather I pride myself on a sense of balance, for this need be no more than the skill of a somnambulist moving along the edge of the rooftops. This leaves me if something wakes me or if, as can happen, through foolishness I wake myself. It is not this sense I am talking about. I am talking about the sense of measurement that perplexes me because it relates to methods with which this book deals, methods which I record without analysing them. I am quite at sea in the world of figures. They are a dead language to me and I do not understand them any more than I do Hebrew. I count on my fingers. If one has to work anything out on paper I am lost. All sums are beyond me. Any calculations I make are resolved as if by magic. I never set them out. I never count my lines, nor my pages, still less my words. When I write a play the act imposes its curve upon me. I have a little trouble over the descent. A click in my mind informs me that it is the end. So far I have never asked myself: ‘Is it too long?* Is it too short?’ It is what it is. I cannot judge. In practice it turns out to be as it should be.

  A film, to be used, must be at least two thousand four hundred metres long. This is not a satisfactory length. It is too long to suit a short story. Too short to suit a novel. No matter. That is the set length. One must keep to it. While I was shooting La Belle et la Bête that was the management’s great anxiety. I would be too short. In vain I countered this by my own methods; the figures contradicted me and they are law. The film grew shorter. The faces grew longer. I continued to go my own way.

  A film is made up of longs and shorts. It has an internal rhythm. Figures do not know this rhythm. The counter’s figures were correct. So were mine.†

  When, on the last day, I questioned my script-girl about the balance between the script (which is one thing) and the action (which is another) she replied, in amazement, that I was right on the mark. I was entitled to two more shots held in reserve. In fact, without knowing this, I had decided the evening before on two further shots. There remained the length of the film, which I refused to extend. End to end, cut up, cut, recut, it had its two thousand four hundred metres. Not one more, not one less.

  If I recount this anecdote, in which I appear to have come off so well, it is to give an example, drawn from life, of a victory gained over arithmetic by those figures which dwell within us and work themselves out of their own accord. Poetry is only figures, algebra, geometry, workings-out and proofs. However neither figures nor proofs can be seen.

  The only proofs that poets can give are the kind which I record. Accountancy imputes them to some devilish luck. The Inquisition would have made us pay dearly for them.

  A long work may not be long. A small work may be big. The measurements that govern them are of our own calculation. Adolphe is a big book. Proust is short.

  At Marcel Proust’s apartment, boulevard Haussmann, the figures which I set against those of the mathematicians were proved true. It was their very hive. One could follow their work under a pane of glass. One could almost touch them with one’s finger. The cork hood to the brass bedstead, the table crowded with phials, with a theatre-phone (a device enabling one to listen in to certain theatres), with a pile of exercise books and, as on the rest of the furniture, a pelt of dust which was never dusted off, the chandelier wrapped in brown holland, the ebony table on which are piled, in the shadows, photographs of cocottes, of duchesses, of dukes and of footmen of grand houses. The chimney-piece with its tarnished looking-glass, the covers, and that dust and that smell of anti-asthmatic powder, a sepulchral smell, this whole Jules Verne room was a Nautilus cluttered with precision instruments for the working out of our figures, our numbers, our measurements, and where one seemed fated to see Captain Némo appear in person: Marcel Proust, slight, bloodless, with the beard of the dead Carnot.‡

  That caliph’s black beard—Proust would put it on and take it off as quickly as those provincial comedians who impersonate statesmen and orchestral conductors. We knew him bearded, we saw him beardless, just as Jacques-Emile Blanche portrays him, an orchid in his buttonhole and a face like an egg.

  We were talking about Marcel Proust one evening in the presence of my secretary, who knew little of the man or his work. ‘Your Proust,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘makes me think of the brother of the sequestered woman of Poitiers.’§ Astonishing remark. It sheds a light on this boulevard Haussmann apartment. One pictures that brother, his big watery eyes, his policeman’s moustache, his stiff collar, his bowler hat; he goes into his sister’s room and, in the voice of an ogre taking part in a ceremonial: ‘Ho! Ho! This goes from bad to worse.’ It must have been these words endlessly repeated that the wretched girl distorted in the course of time from her dream and which bec
ame Malempia. How could one not think of this ‘dear deep sanctum’ of ‘this dear little grotto’ in that fusty room where Proust would receive us lying on his bed, dressed, collared, cravatted, gloved, terrified by the fear of a scent, a breath, a window ajar, a ray of sunlight. ‘Dear Jean,’ he would ask me, ‘have you not been holding the hand of a lady who had touched a rose?’—‘No, Marcel.’—‘Are you sure?’ And half serious, half in jest, he would explain that the passage in Pélleas, where the wind has passed over the sea, was enough to give him an attack of asthma.

  Lying stiffly and askew, not among that sequestered woman’s oyster shells, but in a sarcophagus of the remains of personalities, of landscapes, of all that he could not use in Balbec, Combray, Méséglise, in the Comtesse de Chevigné, the Comte Greffulhe, Haas and Robert de Montesquiou, looking, in short, very much as later we were to revere, for the last time, his mortal remains beside the pile of note-books containing his work which, for its part, continued to live to his left, like a dead soldier’s wrist watch, Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du côté de chez Swann.

  These sessions added to the noxious disorder of the room a chaos of perspectives, for Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. ‘It’s too silly,’ he kept saying, ‘no … I won’t read any more. It’s too silly.’ His voice once more became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. ‘It was too silly. He was ashamed of making us listen to such silliness. It was his fault. Besides he could not reread himself. He should never have begun to read …’ And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl, and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurin household. After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again. He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly. Sometimes he would get up, take off a short jacket, run his hand through the inky locks that he used to cut himself and that hung down over his starched collar. He would go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall. There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, a purple waistcoat on the torso of a mechanical toy, holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.