The Greek Drama

Describing this trap would be difficult. Firstly, who has seen it? Nobody. According to us (and certain signs prove it) an assemblage of living pieces necessitating a discipline or a complicity of several centuries, the trap was rather one flat thing alone folded with a magisterial sense of space.

At that solitary streetcorner, so as to be able to place oneself around the wretch and obtain depth, it is probable that it made use of the phenomenon thanks to which the feet of a walker by night on the right sidewalk are heard on the left sidewalk, and employed, like the double photography of the stereoscope, these two parallel sidewalks, of inoffensive aspect. Always in the twinkling of an eye, the man was grabbed, dragged, stripped, scalped, castrated, flayed alive, blinded, and covered with an Œdipus costume, amidst innumerable laughter, dominated by a clear voice shouting: That’s well done!

Jean Cocteau