Abstract
One figure, used by Cocteau throughout his The Infernal Machine, dismantles the binaries that order the play as a whole and informs his interpretation of the Oedipus myth: monster. The monster, whether as a synecdoche or a metaphor, does not appear in Cocteau’s two adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos that precede The Infernal Machine. Nor is it found in Sophocles’ play, for the simple reason that the term “monster” as we understand it today first emerged during the Middle Ages.2 Instead of “monster,” the Sophoclean text employs the emotionally and ethically charged terms “impious” and “murderer” to describe the unsuspected author of parricide and incest, Oedipus.
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