The myth of Theseus and Jean Cocteau’s Le discours du grand sommeil: Towards a mythocritical approach to this book of poems

Abstract

Cocteau’s interest in myths is well known. In addition to Orpheus and Oedipus, which have haunted his writing throughout his career, in all artistic fields - poetry, theatre, film, drawing - the myth of Theseus often appears in his work to represent the ordeal of the creative act that takes place halfway between the ordinary world and a mysterious beyond (the labyrinth), where the poet may meet death, or between consciousness and the inner dedalic abysses. But in Le discours du grand sommeil, a collection of poems inspired by the Great War and his time on the Belgian front, myth emerges more or less implicitly to express not only the poet’s bitterness and his denunciation of the conflict, but also his compassionate view of the unjust and cruel sacrifice of so many dead soldiers.