SOURCE: Connon, Derek F. “Folded Eternity: Time and the Mythic Dimension in Cocteau's La machine infernale.” Forum 29, no. 1 (January 1993): 31-45.

In the following essay, Connon addresses the critical reaction to Cocteau's La machine infernale and considers the treatment of time in his play.

André Gide, wryly responding to the proliferation of works by Cocteau on the same theme as his Œdipe, proclaimed an ædipémie.¹ The first performance of Œdipe-Roi in 1937, closely following that of La Machine infernale in 1934, meant that Cocteau had produced two plays on this subject since Gide's creation of his own version of the Oedipus myth in 1930. Gide was here expressing a prejudice about Cocteau which has still not been entirely revised: that his principal talent lay in jumping on bandwaggons. And yet, to a large extent, the laugh was on Gide: Cocteau wrote three versions of the tale, and it would be difficult...