The Spirit of the Imagination

This chapter argues that, for Cocteau, imaginative thought does not occupy its own realm or exist in a vacuum; it is the lifeblood of the human predicament and the inner soul of love, beauty, and suffering. Cocteau might go as far as to say that to imagine is to exist: opinor, ergo sum, we might say (to misquote Descartes). Word, image, symbol, and metaphor, which stem from our imaginative faculties, are not mere draperies covering over the cold-hearted misery of our lives—they are intrinsic to our being. Cocteau is committed to bringing into focus the invisible through the formal textures of art in a way that is not simply committed to truth as an end in itself but the processes of thought and experience which are valuable to its illumination. Although Cocteau might have agreed with modernists like Joyce insofar as he thought that art should be treated as something completely independent of the artist and can contain thoughts, ideas, and practices which seem to elude those of its creator, he still very much believed that true imaginative thought may be the ideal for following that light towards immortality.