ONE

The Scene of Silence

Sartre has said that Genet lived the life of a dead man, whose personal will or self-hood had been absorbed into the idea of himself as a being-for-others.¹ Though Sartre wrote primarily of Genet the novelist, whose celebrated writings for theater had not yet reached fruition, Sartre understood the poetic implications of Genet’s existential posture. To the extent that Genet confused his personal identity with his meaning for others, he played out the game of life and death like an actor on stage. Hence the title of Sartre’s book Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr.

The threat of spiritual death or non-being not only underlies the existential relation of subject and other, but constitutes the driving force of the process by which subjects become something for other subjects in linguistic performance. Thus Derrida says that the threat of death or non-being is a condition of possibility of the speaking subject’s relation to itself.² As soon as I utter the statement “I am,” I am also for another, by virtue of the system of shared conventions which make possible the articulation of being and meaning in speech. The process of signification implies the necessary separation of the signifier “I” from both a transcendental identity, the “pure, original and unchangeable consciousness” of Kant’s metaphysic, and an empirical or personal identity.³ On this level, “I” is a trace of the subject traced in the production and circulation of signifiers among speakers.

Since the word signifies in the absence of an empirical or transcendental subject of discourse, since this absence is indeed a condition of possibility of signification, non-being or death underlies every act of predication. Inner experience is always and already inscribed with the possibility of an opening onto the stage of discourse with others. To the extent that the speaking subject is “spoken” by the social conventions which make discourse possible, the subject is threatened with the possibility of non-being, or death-by-representation.

By viewing subjectivity in the framework of the staging of difference between the self and its other in inner speech, we are able to place the self-reflexive and solitary discourse of first-person narrative within a problematic of identity played on the scene of silence. This problematic immediately and necessarily engages the problem of death in Genet, both as theme and as a structuring of relations between the subject and its others in textual performance.

We could say that while Sartre describes a moment in Genet’s relation to others, one in which being-for-oneself is compromised by the experience of being-for-others, Genet is not simply or permanently a “dead man” in this figurative sense, but an author who has met death straight on. In his novels he plays out the drama of personal identity on the stage of literary representation, struggles with the problem of death along the lines of a problematic of performance shaping relations of intersubjectivity in literary discourse. This problematic would ultimately determine the meaning of Genet’s style of theatrical performance.

Genet negotiates the question of personal identity in terms of an economy of difference underlying relations between proper names, characters named, and the one who names in narrative. While the philosophical question of the production of the subject underlies every aspect of discourse, it is nowhere quite as apparent as in the formation and utilization of proper names. Proper names transcribe the existential problem of identity as it is posed in the statement “I am” into a problematic of identification and representation. Since an act of predication in the subject underlies naming, and since names are the means by which others define and identify the person named, proper names reveal the original division of the speaking subject into a self and its other, a division which ordinary words obscure. Proper names are therefore central to the study of how subjects become something for other subjects in language.⁵

In La Voix et le phénomène, Derrida examines not only how the act of being something for someone else, which I define here as a general problematic of performance, shapes the very idea of the sign and, by extension, the subject of discourse, but also how the difference between being and being-for-others shapes the notion of subjectivity itself. He begins by discrediting Husserl’s separation of speech into two moments: expression, which represents idealized impressions or perceptions to the mind as pure meanings, and indication, which situates these meanings in the empirical context of discourse and addresses them to other subjects.⁶ He furthermore discredits the notion of an internal unity of the subject in self-representation.

In Husserl any problems arising from the interaction of expression and indication would occur within one’s external representation for others, not within self-representation. Expression signifies idealized meanings; indication points to referents in the real world and implicates an interlocutor in discourse. In the communication of meanings to others through representation, the difference between expression and indication, between meaning and reference in purely linguistic terms, brings into play the problem of the speaker’s intentions and the interlocutor’s ability to read those intentions as they modify the standard meanings of the words. Self-representation would elude such differences, forming a unity of being which transcends external representation in speech.

Derrida claims that Husserl’s separation of speech into expression and indication obscures their interaction in every instance of discourse. To the extent that speech represents the thoughts of the speaking subject to another subject through language, all discourse, including the simplest act of predication concerning an object, produces a subject divided between the interplay of meaning and reference.

The movement between indication and expression in discourse produces a life-death struggle shaping the subject’s participation in textual performance. The personal pronoun “I” for example, is a trace for an absent subject, an index for the living consciousness which breathes life into discourse. On this level, “I” is a trace for the possibility of the presence of the subject to itself. “I” is also a sign for “the person who speaks in discourse,” an idealization of the transcendental which can be repeated indefinitely, shifting from one speaker to another. Derrida points out that the movement between expression and indication exemplifies the existential conflict underlying the predication of “I” in discourse.

Ironic discourse displays the complexity of this process. For example, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud mentions a play on the word “vol” (flight, theft) in the statement “C’est le premier vol de l’aigle,” to describe Napoleon’s seizure of royal property.⁸ Here a contrast between the literal and figurative meanings of the word “aigle” produces a movement between the two possible meanings of the word “vol.” The speaker’s ironic intention is clear only if we know that the eagle refers to Napoleon through symbolic displacement, and that the speaker means to condemn Napoleon’s takeover as an act of theft.

Irony exposes the vulnerability of signification, of the unity of being and meaning in expression, to the unpredictable course of indication shaping reference and subject-addresss in discourse. Irony betrays the fundamental division of the subject into a being-for-itself and a being-for-others, which logical discourse masks.

After proving an original intrication between expression and indication in the production of speech, Derrida moves on to disprove Husserl’s notion of a transcendental subject whose unity prefigures, indeed makes possible, the production of discourse. In Husserl the solitary subject thinking to itself, in silence, escapes the threat of division and non-presence implied in performance by eluding the conflict of expression and indication altogether. Auto-affection constitutes the immediate presentation of meanings to consciousness without the mediation of the physical side of language. Auto-affection therefore lacks a moment of indication which divides the subject into the self and its other.

In Derrida auto-affection is a kind of inner speech, prey to the movement between indication and expression which divides the subject in communication with others. Derrida claims that the process of idealization, which permits the infinite representation of phenomena to consciousness as meanings, implies an original difference between things and their representation in expression, between identity and non-identity in signification. Moreover, the movement between perception and representation submits inner speech to the force of indication, to a movement between the self and its other or self-representation. Derrida claims that this movement constitutes the condition of possibility of thought and being.

Derrida posits a divided subject at the origin of speech in place of the transcendental subject of phenomenology. The movement of difference which divides the subject from its other in space and time defines a problematic of performance staged on the scene of silence, and is irreducible to a unity of meaning and being implied in the word “subject.” Thus Derrida names the movement of difference and its effects on subject production by means of a play on the words différer and différence, “la différance”.

Defining subjectivity in terms of a kind of spacing of the subject in relation to its other in inner speech, through time, we reveal the place of performance in the very constitution of subjectivity. Derrida himself employs a theatrical metaphor to describe this production.

Derrida’s theatrical metaphor for the movement of the subject between being for itself and being for others forms the philosophical ground on which I theorize about the divided subject of first person narrative. Neither transcendental “I” nor empirical identity, the narrating subject speaks from the scene of silence, engaging the reader in an act of performance shaping relations between “I” and “not-I”, between subject and others in narrative. Nowhere is the force of these divisions quite as marked as in the process of naming.

Since the question of performance shapes Genet’s work from beginning to end, and since naming is intimately related to this question, it comes as no surprise that a problematic of naming shapes relations between narrative discourse and story in his novels. It is less obvious why naming practices change from one novel to the next. The predominance of one type of name over others evolves from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs to Miracle de la rose and Pompes funèbres. For instance, the inclusion of baptismal names in Pompes funèbres, to the exclusion of sobriquets and the devalorization of patronyms, shapes an important contrast both with Notre-Dame-des fleurs, in which sobriquets predominate, and with Miracle de la rose, in which patronyms dominate. This pattern signals that naming has transcended its purely diegetic function of identifying characters, and shapes figures of narrative intervention into the story.

Naming practices in Genet trace an evolution of the problem of personal identity, including the question of the relation of Jean Genet, the author, to the narrator of the same name. In the early work, sobriquets name the other’s, the character’s, identity, by means of rhetorical reduction. Through naming, characters become figures for the narrator’s alter ego, the other side of a single identity. In the later work, the gradual disappearance of sobriquets, plus the predominance of baptismal names and patronyms, symbolizes the narrator’s gradual recognition of the other as that which he is not, and of himself as a double for another Jean Genet. As I follow the problem of difference from one novel to the next, I show the close relation between the question of personal identity and the theme of death in Genet’s work.

The staging of difference exposes the threat of death which the other represents. To the extent that I exist as an object for the other-as-another-subject, I cease to “be” for myself. I am a non-being. In his third novel, Pompes funèbres, Genet twists this problem into a grotesque masquerade destined to celebrate the death of the transcendental subject of the proper name.

In narrative the division of the subject can be represented in terms of differences between the subject of the enounced and the subject of the enunciation, or in the terms of Benveniste, between narrative voice and the voices of characters speaking in the narration. Benveniste distinguishes narration (histoire) from discourse on the basis of markings for the here and now of the speaking event.¹¹ The first-person voice and the imperfect and present tenses characterize the discourse, the instance of the narrator speaking in his own voice; the third person and past tense (the passé simple in French) characterize the narration. Adverbs referring to the “here” and “now” of the narrating event also trace narrative voice in narrative. To the extent that characters themselves utter “I” or perform acts of predication which imply their presence as subjects in the story, characters participate in a system of doublings between narrative voice and its other in narrative. Furthermore, to the extent that naming practices both identify a character in the story and trace the narrator’s imbrication with characters, naming practices perpetuate a play of différance in narrative, thus submitting the present and presence, the “here” and “now” of narrative discourse, to a movement of division and absence.

From a linguistic standpoint, sobriquets are traditionally motivated by some property of the individual named, and formed by means of metonymical and metaphorical associations. For instance, the famous family name “Plantagenêt” was derived from a sobriquet for Geoffroy, the Count of Anjou, who used to “plant” a “genêt” in his hat.¹² Moreover, sobriquets are often ironic, entailing a reversal of an aspect of the individual into its opposite and a pejorative intention on the part of the namer. Dauzat gives the example “Bois l’eau” (Drink water) for “buveur de vin” (wine drinker).¹³

Sobriquets belong to a category of proper names which expose the difficulty inherent in calling names “proper” at all. Derrida speaks of “the unity of the proper as the nonpollution of the subject close to itself.”¹⁴ Names are “proper” to the extent that they indicate individual subjects in a given context, rather than express conventional meanings which can be interpreted by others. Since sobriquets both express conventional meanings (consisting as they do of common nouns) and indicate individual subjects in the framework of discourse, sobriquets expose the difference between expression and indication shaping the act of naming. Sobriquets thus place in question the very notion of the “nonpollution of the subject close to itself” in proper names. The subject thus conceived would indeed be “unnamable,” because irreducible to an original unity of being and meaning in language.¹⁵

In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, Genet privileges the capacity of sobriquets to represent idealized meanings to the mind, over their indicative or referential function. He does this in order to blur the existential difference between namer and named. Sobriquets define characters in terms of their signification for an other, the narrating subject. When Genet describes characters as “des noms éclatés,” he destroys their individual identities and makes them figures of narrative discourse.

In Genet, sobriquets say a great deal more about the narrator than about the diegetic or objective reality of the character named. Unlike ordinary sobriquets, whose irony or humor derives from the namer’s associations around some property of the person named, Genet’s sobriquets lead back to a figure of the divided subject of narrative discourse and signify properties of the narrator himself, such as moral and sexual ambivalence. In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, sobriquets serve to mask the narrating subject’s difference from others in the narration, so that characters represent extensions of the narrator’s own struggle with the problem of personal identity.

In Glas, Derrida claims that when Genet borrows common nouns to create names for his characters, he forces language to conform to his personal ideolect by reducing the meanings of words to a single referent in the narration.¹⁶ Genet thus appropriates language by “making proper” conventional signs.¹⁷ From the point of view of textual performance, I argue that names based on common nouns allow Genet to appropriate the identities of others in the narration by reducing them to their meaning for him. “Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds,” “Divine,” and “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs” seem to lack diegetic motivation, that is, a relation of contiguity with the identities of the characters they refer to in the story.¹⁸ “Mignon” refers to a tough brute of a thief, Paul Garcia. (Frechtman translates this sobriquet as Darling Daintyfoot. I prefer the literal translation, Cutey of the Little Feet, because Genet later weaves a chain of associations around the word “little,” which have direct bearing on the development of this character.) “Divine” refers to Louis Culafroy, a drag queen and homosexual prostitute. “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs,” Our Lady of the Flowers, names Adrien Baillon, a bisexual murderer. In Genet sobriquets not only generate oppositions between the identity of a character and his signification for the narrator, oppositions which are eventually resolved in a play of identification, but sobriquets do violence to the difference and autonomy of characters by reducing them to figures for Genet’s own self-reflections.¹⁹ Thus even the contradictory meanings generated by sobriquets are resolved with reference to the unity of narrative voice.

Naming in sobriquets represents a stage in Genet’s struggle with the threat of death posed by the other. To the extent that I recognize the other as a subject, I also must recognize that I could become an object for him or her. The very act of speaking raises this possibility, the possibility of being something for another subject, a non-being. At this stage, Genet speaks in silence and produces a self-contained universe in which the other exists as an extension of the self.

In Genet’s homosexual universe, characters are identified as feminine or masculine according not to their biological reality or even their sexual orientation, but to the role they perform for others. There are queens (“les tantes”) and males (“les mâles”). Gender difference is based not upon physical differences between men and women as such, but between subjects and others in an economy of power and desire. Inasmuch as the “mâles” enter the narration by means of their signification for Divine, the main character, their sobriquets represent projections of her feminine orientation. To the extent that Divine herself represents the narrator’s alter ego, Divine and her entourage represent the narrator’s own sexual ambivalence.

The males do not use sobriquets among themselves in Notre-Damedes-fleurs. The granting of sobriquets is an act of endearment and a symbol of the individual’s initiation into the queens’ world. Sobriquets can also be objects of shame or embarrassment, since the males resent the feminine identification. Divine’s lover, Mignon, adjusts to Divine’s world with some difficulty.

In “Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds,” the namer is thus inscribed in the name. That is, the sobriquet contains an opposition between the diegetic reality of the character, a tough thug (“Mignon le dur, le froid, l’irréfragable,” [N.D.F.; 85]) and his meaning for Divine, cute or “mignon” (defined by Littré as “menue, gracieux, charmant; se dit en adressant la parole à des enfants, à de jeunes femmes”).

Doubling and sexual ambivalence are inscribed in the inflections for masculine and feminine in standard French. “Mignon” is grammatically marked for masculine, and semantically marked for feminine. Here the conflict between grammar and meaning reiterates the conflict of masculine and feminine in the discourse.

Perhaps the most telling feature of Mignon’s sobriquet is that it represents, by means of synecdoche, the total person by one of his properties, the property which is prized by the other, Divine. The complete name, “Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds,” is formed by word-play having an erotic fixation, Mignon’s genitals. The erotic meaning of “Petits Pieds” is camouflaged by a displacement of sexual interest from the genitals to the feet, the kind of displacement which characterizes the formation of fetishes.²⁰ The association of “Petits Pieds” with Mignon’s genitals is developed later on in the narrative, when Divine recites a litany of names for Mignon’s penis. These euphemisms contain the same marks of endearment expressed by the idea of smallness: “le Petit, le Bébé dans le berceau, le Jésus dans sa crèche, le Petit chaud, ton Petit frère” (N.D.F.; 30). Formal and semantic parallels created between these names and “Petits Pieds” motivate the erotic interpretation of Mignon’s sobriquet.

The sobriquet contains yet another reversal of the character’s diegetic reality. Judging from the narrator’s description of Mignon’s member, it is anything but “petit”: “Longueur en érection o.m.24, circonférence o.m.11” (N.D.F.; 18). The sobriquet reduces the character to an “alias,” an “other,” whose identity equals his meaning for Divine.

To the extent that Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds is a projection of Divine’s desire, Mignon exists as a reflection on the surface of her identity. Even when they make love, “Il plonge en Divine comme en un mirroir” (N.D.F.; 22). As Mignon buries his identity in Divine, he confronts the spectre of himself. This passage was totally tranformed in the Frechtman translation so as to miss the mirror figure completely (O.L.F.; 97).

Eventually, it will be clear that Divine herself is a projection of the narrator’s identity. A chain of rhetorical operations leads from Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds to Divine, from Divine to Genet in the discourse, reducing the other’s identity to another face of Jean Genet.

Another character, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, alias Adrien Baillon, enters the narration “par la porte du crime.” He earns his sobriquet by murdering an old man.

On the one hand, Notre-Dame is “queen” of the criminals (“des fleurs”) and a queen in Divine’s homosexual universe, just as, in Christian liturgy, Notre-Dame names the souveraine of Christians. Genet identifies “fleurs” with criminals in the very opening of the novel, thus motivating the second half of this sobriquet.

The association of dead assassins and flowers appears absurd and unmotivated, since it identifies values such as life and beauty with their opposites. This figuration is motivated in a roundabout way: there is a cause and effect relation between death by execution (the crucifixion) and beauty (Man’s redemption) in the discourse. Death by execution parallels the death of Christ by crucifixion, and constitutes a means of reparation for guilt through self-annihilation. The use of “fleurs” as a figure for eternal life gained through expiation reiterates the association of the sacred and the beautiful, the priest and the poet, in the discourse. Thus what originates as difference and oppostion is ultimately resolved in the narration.

“Notre-Dame-des-fleurs” also signifies the sexual ambivalence of the character named. Unlike Mignon, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs plays both the male and the queen in relation to others in the story. In the following scene, which was censored in the Gallimard edition of Genet’s Oeuvres complètes, and consequently in the English translation, Notre-Dame plays these two roles in a single feat of sexual gymnastics. As he penetrates Divine, he is penetrated by the supermale, Gorgui.

In Christian liturgy, Notre-Dame names not only the queen of the Christian realm but the mother of Christ. Since Christ’s life is only meaningful with reference to his death on the cross, the Notre-Dame figure is implicated in the violence of her son’s death. For Christ to perform his ultimate task of redeeming mankind, he must assume human dimensions, he must be born of woman. Since being born prefigures Christ’s crucifixion, the liturgical Notre-Dame could be viewed as the author of Christ’s death and suffering.

The implication of Notre-Dame in Christ’s death and the association of this venerable mother figure with a bisexual criminal also betray Genet’s usual irony and disdain toward women, especially mothers.²¹ He reiterates this attitude in every representation of women in the novels, from the Medusa-like figures of Ernestine, Divine’s mother in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, and the nameless mother of John D. in Pompes funèbres, to the complete elimination of women from Miracle de la rose. Genet reduces sexual difference to the other side of the same, to a male figure posing as a woman.

The sobriquet “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs” thus generates metaphysical oppositions such as male/female, beauty/evil, etc., which are resolved with reference to logical relations in the discourse. Just as being born of woman prefigures Christ’s death, so Christ’s crucifixion prefigures Man’s salvation. The author of Christ’s death is also the author of man’s eternal life. “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs” embraces this paradox. By committing a murder, Notre-Dame enters the divine realm of criminals who achieve saintliness on the guillotine; When Notre-Dame enters the narration “par la porte du crime,” he prefigures his own death.

In the following figuration, the substitution of “assassins” by the names of flowers and the analogy between flowers and bells reiterate the relation of cause and effect between the act of murder and the execution/redemption of the murderer, literally “announced” in the “ringing” of flowers:

Significantly, the narrator identifies with the murderer in the story, “hears” the reverberations of the murder, its implications for Notre-Dame. He is Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. Thus in an important way, “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs,” a sobriquet inscribed with murder, self-sacrifice, and redemption, symbolizes the ultimate meaning of naming practices in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. To the extent that naming in sobriquets destroys the other’s identity, reduces difference to the opposite of the self in an economy of the “same,” naming is tantamount to murder. Thus “ce meurtre va faire de lui, par vertu du baptême du sang, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs.” Adrien Baillon becomes Notre-Dame-des-fleurs by sacrificing his personal identity on the altar of mimesis. This might explain why this name, rather than the name of the central character, Divine, became the title of the book.

Ironically, when Genet murders the other, the other as alter ego, he destroys a part of himself. As the image of Notre-Dame-des-fleurs merges with the identity of Divine, alias Louis Culafroy, and as Divine merges with Genet, murder and suicide become two faces of the same gesture. (This figure would shape the ultimate meaning of murder in Genet’s play Les Bonnes.)

The name “Divine” is a complicated figure for the adolescent trauma of homosexual rape, which caused Louis Culafroy to renounce his masculine identity and identify with women. Ironically, Culafroy’s perversion also leads to his identification with the divine, but only after passing through the experience of death associated with violent sexual assault.

The story opens with the scene of Divine’s death. The rest of the narration consists of a retrospection on a life viewed through its violent end. Genet describes Divine’s death in a chain of far-fetched analogies which lead from sexual perversion to the divinity.

The image of a gutted violin is central to the series of figures, “ce sang”—“le trou noir”—“le violon éventré”—“le chancre doré de Jésus,” which leads to the association of Divine and the divinity. The term “violon” is also a condensation of several terms—viol, violer, and voile—which are formed by derivation and given specific meanings in other contexts in the narrative. These derivations also form a paradigm associating rape, castration, and death in the discourse.

The association of “violon” and the corpse of a child is implied later in a simile comparing a casket and a violin case. The argot term for casket, étui à violon, reinforces this association.

The comparison of two receptacles in the simile “boîtes comme des étuis,” motivates the comparison of their contents, “enfants mort-nés”—“violons” by metonymical extension.

Culafroy understands the violence of language. Elsewhere in the novel he avoids naming his violin in the presence of his mother, because of its implication in the word “viol”:

The anagram “voile” is motivated by the idea of innocence and anticipates the seduction of young Culafroy by Alberto, the village rake (“veils were falling”):

The phallic imagery of the snakes overdetermines the sexual content of this scene of “initiation.” The momentum and suspense created by the permutations of the word violon as one advances in the narrative culminate in the transformation of the noun form into the more aggressive verb form as Alberto “violates” Culafroy:

The act of rape reduces the victim to an object for another subject, robbing him of both his sexual identity and his being-for-himself in one violent action. Thus a complex figure of castration and death motivates the “divine” side of Louis Culafroy, who discovers that the road to saintliness is paved with self-renunciation.

The figuration comes full circle as the dying Divine is compared to the Sacred Heart: “En expirant elle eut l’illusion suprême que ce sang était l’équivalent visible du trou noir qu’un violon éventré . . . désignait avec une insistance dramatique comme un Jésus le chancre doré où luit son Sacré-Coeur de flammes.” The Sacred Heart symbolizes Christ’s self-annihilation before a terrible God willing to sacrifice his son for an idea. The Sacred Heart figure also condenses the themes of guilt, love, and expiation in the single figure of the crucified Christ. This is a moving symbol for the tragedy of Divine’s life, a life which she performed as a dead man.

When Culafroy renounces his identity to become an object for other men, he also buries his fear and hate of the other in a kind of passion play. Divine’s lovers transform into godlike figures providing sexual union with God himself.

The idea of homosexual rape is reiterated in word-play surrounding Divine’s patronym, Culafroy. Homological derivations from “afroy” develop into variations on a theme beginning with “cul” (ass). These include cul effroi (fear), cul à froid (chilled), (en)culé effroi (fear of buggering), and so forth, and lead to the idea of fear with a homosexual fixation. The movement leading from Culafroy’s sexual conversion to Divine’s saintliness reminds one of Freud’s famous case of Dr. Schreber, who hallucinated that he was having intercourse with God and being penetrated by sacred rays.²² According to Freud, such hallucinations, and the extremes of idealization and degradation they represent, derive from extreme fear of the other or paranoia. For Schreber, as for Divine, fear of homosexual violence activates the drives of idealization and denial which twist the threat (of castration, of death) posed by the other into a blessing of divine origin. Thus Divine seeks to master his/her own victimization by reducing the other to an actor in his/her private drama.

Ironically, the movement of identification which assimilates otherness into a reflection of the subject fails to win for the subject any real mastery over the other and the threat of spiritual death which the other represents. Thus Culafroy/Divine repeatedly turns to suicide as a means of escape. The narrator’s own drive to master the other by effacing difference parallels that of his character. Indeed, in the following passage, the narrator both destroys the difference between himself and the character, Culafroy, and plays at committing suicide:

In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, sobriquets establish conflicts between the meaning of the name (the “expression”) and the identity of the characters (the “indication”), a conflict which generates a series of paradigmatic oppositions such as good/evil, male/female, and so on. By tracing the path of associations leading from the name to the narrator, we discovered that rhetorical operations resolve such oppositions on the level of narrative discourse. Genet generates a synthesis of expression and indication by means of names, in order to force an illusion of the unity of narrative voice, a voice speaking in silence, immune to the threat of difference and death posed by the other. We discovered the futility of this strategy: the narrator directs the violence of metaphysical reduction in upon himself.

While in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs Genet speaks to himself in a kind of “inner speech,” he nonetheless stages a problematic of identification and personal identity on the scene of silence, a problematic which would evolve into a deconstruction of narrative voice in the later novels.

Unlike sobriquets, highly indicative names such as patronyms, whose semantic motivation has been reduced through usage, open up the relation between namer and named to the spacing of two subjects in deixis.²³ To the extent that patronyms fail to create an image of the person named and point to the person named in the empirical context of discourse, patronyms expose more readily the difference between two autonomous subjects interacting in dialogue. By extension, this kind of naming practice looks death in the face rather than repressing it in an economy of identification.

Patronyms dominate naming practices in Genet’s second novel, Miracle de la rose. Of all types of names, patronyms entail the greatest degree of reference to the code, since they involve the least amount of personal choice in the naming process and are not motivated by the idea of the person named. Since patronyms are inherited from the father and serve to register the individual in official records, patronyms symbolize the subject’s existence for the state and society, rather than for specific individuals. Genet exploits this aspect of patronyms in Miracle de la rose in order to separate the narrator from the identities of characters in the story.

To some extent the setting of the narrative motivates the use of patronyms in this novel. At the central prison of Fontevrault, the prisoner has lost his personal identity and exists as a name on the registration books. It is noteworthy, however, that the characters use sobriquets and hypocoristics (names of endearment) with each other, and that only the narrator refers to them by their official names.

The avoidance of sobriquets in Miracle de la rose is particularly noticeable, not only because the narrator says that sobriquets abound in the prison, but because this avoidance contrasts sharply with naming practices in the first novel, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. The preference for patronyms symbolizes the narrator’s disengagement from the feminine orientation of the earlier period, and a renunciation of his former infatuation with the beaux voyous who people the underworld.

Significantly, it is only to the extent that Genet has separated others from his personal fantasies that he can both become “a being living solely on earth” and realize his own masculine identity.

In Miracle de la rose, the kinds of rich rhetorical oppositions created by sobriquets in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs have been reduced to the single opposition of male and female. The males use patronyms, the effeminate types use sobriquets. Sobriquets, which served as tokens of passage in the queens’ world, mark characters as targets of abuse in the virile world of this novel. The tough guys or “casseurs” dominate the narration and scorn the “cloches” or “females.”

Genet recognizes differences between his and others’ identities in the narration. The rare sobriquets in this novel describe some diegetic aspect of characters, an aspect recognized by other characters in the narration, rather than signify the narrator’s projections. For example, “La Guêpe” refers to a thin, effeminate prisoner, Charlot. “Lou-du-Point-du-Jour” refers to a pederast. “Bijoux” names a jewel thief and “Bois-de-rose” names an effeminate guard. Genet nonetheless twists the meaning of sobriquets to conform to his own ideas about characters. In other words, he “remotivates” names according to their function in narrative discourse.

When Genet uses “La Guêpe,” The Wasp, to refer to Charlot, he develops not only the idea of a “fairy” having wings and “une taille de guêpe,” but the idea of Charlot’s sarcastic “sting,” which provokes Genet to a fight.

Genet gives the name “Bijoux” to his friend Bulkaen when they first meet. Since he does not know the man’s official name, Genet creates a name which identifies him with his crime. The granting of a sobriquet also symbolizes the character’s sexual ambiguity (“Portait-il au fond de lui un pédé honteux et frétillant pareil au clodo piteux que tout le monde méprisait?” [M.R.; 19]). Genet elaborates upon an erotic meaning of “jewels”: “Je vais t’en coller autant que tu voudras des bijoux” (M.R.; 89). Bulkaen pretends he likes this name only because it serves to disguise their clandestine correspondence from the guards. But in fact he enjoys the web of intimacy which the name creates with the namer, Genet.

“Bijoux” occurs only twice in the narrative, when the narrator explains its origin and when he explains he stopped using it for being “whorish”: “Ça fait un peu catin” (M.R.; 48, 89). Thus on the level of discourse, Genet refuses the kind of intimacy that the name implies by referring to the character by his patronym.

Bulkaen gives himself another name, signing his love notes with “Illisible,” Illegible. Genet in turn writes to Bulkaen as “Mon Illisible.” While Bulkaen is referring to his own limitations as a writer, Genet pinpoints an aspect of his friend which describes their relationship. Since Bulkaen dies trying to escape from prison, his past life, his current allegiances, even his body remain a mystery to Genet. “Pierre Bulkaen restera pour moi l’indéchiffrable” (M.R.; 51).

Genet also targets an aspect of his friend which sums up the problem of naming in Miracle de la rose. Genet has discovered that others cannot be reduced to a meaning for the subject. While sobriquets permit the namer to appropriate the other by means of language, patronyms symbolize the distance between the namer and the person named. The “other,” as subject-for-itself as well as for others, constitutes an unnamable movement of intersubjectivity. Thus Genet says he has no more names for Bulkaen: “Je ne le nomme plus.”

The refusal of sobriquets in this novel parallels the more mature Genet’s refusal to idealize the criminal world in poetic fantasy. Patronyms trace the pure difference separating subject and other along the lines of indication.

By refusing to appropriate the other in sobriquets, Genet exposes the the danger of the other for the subject. To the extent that Genet admits the subjectivity of the other, he must submit to the possibility of being an object for the other, a non-being. This explains the recurring identification of Genet with the fate of the condamné à mort, a character in the story and a symbol for the threat of death which the other represents.

The two other sobriquets “Lou-du Point-du Jour” and “Bois-de-rose” figure in this theme. “Lou Daybreak” is first of all a kind of feminine travesty veiling the character’s thorny personality:

This name also refers to the time of day when the condemned man, Harcamone, is executed. Genet gives the name this meaning after Lou disturbs the solemnity of Harcamone’s death with a sarcastic remark.

“Bois-de-rose” exists, as a name and as a character, with reference to the destiny of the condemned man. Since the narrator mentions “cercueils de bois de rose” elsewhere in the novel (M.R.; 174), the association of rosewood with caskets suggests death and burial. Moreover, the guard who acquires this name exists in the narrative primarily as a vehicle for sealing Harcamone’s fate. Harcamone kills “Bois-de-rose,” “le gaffe insoient de douceur et de beauté qui l’avait fait le moins chier à Fontevrault” (M.R. 43) and so condemns himself to the guillotine. The name “Bois-de-rose” prefigures not only the death of the person named but the execution of his murderer.

The condemned man himself remains an untouchable symbol of pure difference. He has no sobriquet and no baptismal name. He is “Harcamone.”

Traditionally, baptismal names symbolize the individual’s inscription in the Christian faith and claim him or her as a child of God. The absence of baptismal names from Miracle de la rose symbolizes God’s absence from the prison world. In Genet’s reminiscences of childhood at the state institution of Mettray, the effacement of baptismal names symbolizes the utter depersonalization of the individual by the state. Boys are wards of the state, ignored by God and men. They are grouped together in artificial “families” according to the arbitrary order of the alphabet. The narrator argues that Mettray shaped the boys for lives of crime and destined them to perpetual incarceration at central prisons such as Fontevrault. Thus Genet mourns the absence of God from his adult world. “A Dieu je porte le deuil” (M.R.; 180).

As God is impossible in Miracle, so is love. Genet has ceased to people his world with gods and queens, has recognized the other as a dangerous reality. Thus desire takes the forms of cruelty and denial.

In reported speech, Genet calls Bulkaen “Pierrot,” a hypocoristic implying intimacy and affection. Genet usually names him by his patronym, however, in narrative discourse. The substitution of the hypocoristic by the patronym calls attention to a change in the narrator’s affections from the time of the story to the time of the narrating event.

When the narrator occasionally refers to Bulkaen as “Pierrot” in narrative discourse, such slips manifest a kind of Freudian return of the repressed and betray Genet’s lingering yet denied attachment to his dead friend. Such slips and slides reflect the gradual breakdown of narrative voice into a being-for-itself and a being-for-others in the narration. The narrative no longer constitutes a mirror for the narrator’s self-representation, but a play of reflections. As soon as we attempt to seize upon a profile of the narrator, the profile takes on the contours of another Jean Genet.

The difference between Genet’s new identity and his identity for others in the narration, in prison, creates an insurmountable void between the here and now of narrative discourse and the non-present past of the narration. Genet is neither here nor there. He is “dead.”

Genet raises the question of death as a function of representation when he names the narrator of his novel “Jean Genet.” Genet, the writer, is not the same as “Genet,” the narrator, a semiotic function of narrative discourse. The identity of the names for author and narrator renders more acute the difference between these two sides of being, a difference masked by the traditional procedure of giving the narrator a fictional name.

The author of narrative is never equal to the “I” of the narrator.²⁴ Genet, the author, traces differences between the historical moment of writing the novels and “Genet’s” experiences of narrating the action, in order to expose the difficulty inherent in self-representation. For example, while the narrator “Jean” produced the narration of Notre-Dame-des-fleurs in a single, continuous writing while awaiting his prison sentence, the author Jean Genet had to begin writing Notre-Dame-des-fleurs twice. The first fifty pages of the original writing were destroyed by a prison guard.²⁵ Moreover, Miracle de la rose was written at La Santé, Tourelles, if we are to believe the “author’s” inscription at the end of the manuscript. The narration was produced, ostensibly, at Fontevrault. The narrator says he has just been transferred there from La Santé.²⁶ Pompes funèbres is narrated in the country, “auprès d’un monastère”; it was written in Paris. Is the autobiographical authority of the narrator thus a lie, or is the lie an essential ingredient of autobiography?

By using the autobiographical format within the narrative mode, by naming the narrator after himself and all the while leaving visible the artifices separating literature from biographical reality, Genet expands the figure of the divided subject beyond the limits of the doubled voice of narrative to a problematic of authorship. Just as the absence of the speaking subject is a condition of possibility of the utterance “I am,” so the death or non-being of the author is necessary for the production of narrative discourse. (“My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of I.”) Thus Genet describes the narrative as a hall of mirrors in which the subject speaks as a condemned man.

There are no sobriquets in Pompes funèbres, and most of the characters are named by their baptismal names or derivations of them, such as Paulo or Pierrot. Baptismal names are “empty signs,” which signify nothing and merely point to their referents in the manner of indices. They resemble personal pronouns in this regard, and have a built-in reference to the subject and context of discourse. Moreover, unlike patronyms, which claim the individual for the state and the family, baptismal names trace a kind of pure intersubjectivity between individuals.

Since sobriquets are motivated by properties of the person named and shaped by the ideas of the person naming, it would appear as if sobriquets were more “poetic” than baptismal names or patronyms, and that naming therefore had a poetic function in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, a novel dominated by sobriquets, but not in the other two novels. Though sobriquets may have a more obvious relation to poetry than other types of names, since they combine naming and meaning in a single rhetorical operation, sobriquets do not have an exclusive claim to the poetic function of naming in narrative. We saw that patronyms in Miracle de la rose opened up the question of authorial voice by exposing differences between the official identity of the writer and the semiotic function of the narrator. The poetic function of baptismal names and personal pronouns in Pompes funèbres will only be evident by first taking a new look at the very notion of “poetic function.”

Structural theories concerning the literary uses of proper names focus on sobriquets and “motivated” patronyms, in which the name both indicates and signifies the person named. In critics such as Barthes, Genette, and others, names are poetic to the extent that they transcend their indexical function and mirror the signified.²⁷ Barthes calls this the “cratylean” character of names (and signs) in Proust.²⁸ It is noteworthy, moreover, that even Derrida, in his staging of Genet with Hegel in Glas, highlights names which signify meanings, in particular the sobriquets in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs.²⁹

Structural poetics, modelled after the marriage of signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, privileges the closure of indication and expression in the poetic image, taking for granted the transcendental subject of poetic discourse.³⁰ As I show with regard to naming practices in Pompes funèbres, proper names, in conjunction with personal pronouns, have a poetic function by virtue of their very nature as indices. Genet’s manipulation of proper names in this novel opens up the possibility of a new focus of poetics, a poetics built upon problems of subject-address and reference in deixis, a poetics of performance.

Jakobson situates baptismal names and personal pronouns in the group of duplex linguistic structures, because they not only serve to convey a message or “énoncé,” but refer to the speech act or “énonciation.”³¹ Unlike the conventional signs which make up sobriquets (i.e., “fleurs”) and which can usually conjure up some sort of mental image of a thing, baptismal names and personal pronouns are indices for the inscription of “person” in discourse. For instance, the referent for the name “John” is simply “the person named John” in the context. Personal pronouns are even more unstable since, within a given discourse, the referent can shift from one person to another. “He” might refer to John in one case and refer to some other character in another. The pronoun “I” defines the position of the speaker or subject of discourse and is defined by contrast with “you” the addressee of discourse. Since “I” and “you” are dialectically implicated in one another and can refer alternately to one or the other of two subjects engaged in communication, Jakobson calls them “shifters.” While Jakobson excludes shifters from his discussion of the poetic function of language, a semiotics of performance would focus precisely on these aspects of discourse.³²

In Pompes funèbres a system of baptismal names and personal pronouns moves the narrating subject through a series of masquerades, along the lines of deixis. Genet furthermore upsets the metaphysical assumptions of the present and presence of the subject to itself in deixis, by submitting subject-address and reference to the force of difference. Genet exploits the referential instability of indices in order to shift the position of the narrating subject from one identity to another in the narration. “I” becomes “he,” “he” becomes “she,” “she” becomes “I.” Such shifts engender sexual, political, and existential conflicts in narrative discourse.

As soon as a referent for a name and its corresponding pronoun is established in the narration, it is undermined by a conscious shift in the referent from the objective position of a character to the subjective position of the narrator. “Je,” the narrator Genet, trades places with “il,” a character. For instance, “Erik” is the name of a German soldier sitting across from the narrator at the opening of the novel. Erik has murdered a boy, raped a militiaman, and lived with Hitler. The narrator at first clearly stages himself separately from the character in narrative space. Eventually, his fascination with Erik, the embodiment of evil, compels him to trade places with Erik in his imagination.

The narrator suddenly becomes the referent for the name “Erik” and refers to Erik as “I” rather than “he.” In other words, the referents for the name “Erik” and the personal pronouns “I” and “he” shift between two distinct identities in the narrative, the character and the narrator. This process becomes even more complicated as Genet proceeds to change places with first one and then another malevolent character in the narration.

The movement of the narrating subject between two identities, mapped by deictic indications in discourse (relations of reference and subject-address), contrasts sharply with the identification of the narrator with characters along the lines of rhetorical assimilation in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. While the sobriquets in the earlier novel reduced characters to the other of the same, i.e., the narrator, baptismal names and personal pronouns in Pompes funèbres sustain the difference between subjects engaged in dialogue and permit the kind of role-playing so characteristic of Genet’s theater. In the plays, characters are asked to assume the roles of others in the story while making clear the autonomy of their own identities. Thus the original duality produced by the autonomy of the actor from his role is doubled when the character him/herself adopts still another travesty.

The very notions of masquerade and travesty imply a doubling of identity into a subject for itself and its representation for others. To the extent that otherness is simply an extension of the “same” the work of artifice or masquerade disappears, leaving the figure of a unified, albeit ambiguous, subject of discourse. As I showed with regard to Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, ambiguity in and of itself does not constitute a divided subject, since ambiguity can be resolved by means of dialectical synthesis in narrative discourse. In Pompes funèbres, the articulation of difference between two subjects struggling for a place on the scene of silence anticipates Genet’s unveiling of the masquerade forming theatrical performance.

Perhaps the distinction between Notre-Dame-des-fleurs and Pompes funèbres would be clearer with reference to Benveniste’s categories for the tracing of “person” and “non-person” in narrative. The pronouns “I” and “you” belong to the first category and trace the movement of subject-address in discourse. “He” and “she” belong to the category “non-person” and refer to characters in the story. The movement between discourse and story is thus characterized by a movement between the categories of person and non-person, subject and other. In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, sobriquets blurred distinctions between person and non-person in rhetorical figures. In the later novel, Pompes funèbres, Genet trades places with others in the narration, thus perverting the “normal” (dialectical) relation of subjects in discourse without reducing their difference.

In Pompes funèbres, the first person singular pronoun is situated in two time periods—in the discursive present, as the narrator refers to his experience of writing the story (“Je ne sais pas pourquoi il est nécessaire ici qu’Erik accomplisse un meurtre” [P.F.; 79]), and the historic past, as the narrator refers to his participation in the events of the narration. Shifts in the reference of “I” from the narrator to a character he names in the story are accompanied by shifts from the present tense of the discourse to the historic past of the narration. As Genet writes himself into scenes of crime, including murder, prostitution, and treason, he performs these actions as an other, acts “in the names of” characters in the narration. The theatricality of his masquerade helps him to conquer the fear of death which the other represents.

Take, for instance, the scene in which Erik shoots and kills an innocent boy. The narrator describes the action in the third-person objective voice; then he suddenly assumes the position of Erik by referring to him as “I” and, through Erik’s persona, commits the murder himself.

Just as abruptly, the position of the narrator shifts back to an objective view of Erik leaving the scene of the murder:

The movement between “je” and “il,” between I and he, generates a movement between the subject of narrative discourse and the subject of the narration, creating a paradigm of oppositions such as good/evil, male/female, which is extended into the discourse. The figure je/il originates early in the novel when the narrator renounces his hate of Erik, the symbolic murderer of Genet’s friend, and relates to him on a first-name basis.

The scene occurs four days after the burial of Jean D., the narrator’s lover, whose death serves as a pretext for writing the novel. Jean D. was a Resistance fighter killed during the Liberation of Paris. His mother has invited Genet to pay a visit. Significantly, she is nameless and exists in the novel only as “la mère de Jean.” In a discourse joining being and naming so intimately, the absence of a proper name signifies the narrator’s supreme negation of this woman’s existence, a negation of being more terrible than death. She is described as a mother who never loved her son. Moreover, she has the audacity to present to Genet her lover, Erik Seiler, a German soldier hiding from the liberating army. The narrator imagines him to be Hitler’s lover as well. Jean D.’s mother forces an air of false amitié on the encounter by insisting that Genet drop the formal mode of address.

The narrator agonizes over a situation which would force him to surrender his hate and accept the other, by means of the name.

Being on a first-name basis usually indicates a relation of familiarity, if not friendship, between namer and named in the France depicted in this story.³³ According to this convention, use of the first name, along with the devalorization of the patronym in discourse, should signal a rapport of intimacy between the narrator and the people he calls by name in the diegesis. This is indeed the case with Jean D. In this name the abbreviation of the patronym to a single initial is a deliberate effacement of the official identity of this character. The act of naming symbolizes Genet’s intimacy with the person named.

As the use of baptismal names and their derivations is extended to include other characters in the narration, such as Erik and Paulo, Jean D.’s half-brother and a traitor, an ironic contrast is created between the narrator’s (and the reader’s) true appreciation of these characters and the intimacy implied in the use of first names. These characters are not friends of the narrator’s, to say the least. Nor do they excite any sympathy in the reader. They personify the collective enemy who killed Jean D., a French patriot and the narrator’s lover.

The polite masquerade which initiated the narrator’s false intimacy with Erik generates a series of travesties in which Genet trades places with Erik, Paulo, and Hitler.

Ironically, Genet’s determination to “s’enfoncer” into the pasts of Erik and Paulo has distinctly erotic motives which are clear in the double entendres in this passage (which escape the English translation) and in other descriptions of characters’ erotic physiques. Experimenting with the masquerade, Genet enjoys imagining himself in sexual postures with the men that he hates (P.F.; 27).

Genet stages himself in erotic scenes involving Erik and a nameless “bourreau de Berlin,” Erik and the milicien Riton, and Paulo and a pathetically comic figure of Hitler. These fantasies involve the narrator in even more complicated travesties, as he shifts positions between Erik and his partner, or between Paulo and his partners—between subject and object in an economy of desire. The movement between I and he also engenders oppositions between him and her. Homosexual desire submits the relation male/female to a dialectic of power in which the feminine constitutes the other of the “same”, a castrated male. The narrator, who represents himself as the male in relations with Jean D., submits to this kind of castration as he projects himself into the lives of his characters. Erik is raped by the executioner of Berlin, Riton is raped by Erik, Paulo is raped by Hilter, and Hitler himself, forced into a “solitude glaciale et blanche,” was literally castrated in the First World War (P.F.; 95).

While stepping into the shoes of another person usually symbolizes one’s sympathy toward him or her, in this novel role-play allows the narrator to flirt with a kind of death or non-being. On the one hand, Genet claims to have realized the banality of crime and the necessity of virtue.

On the other hand, by trading places with Erik, Paulo, and other personifications of evil in the novel, Genet implicates himself in a moral and political stance contrary to his own. Such shifts cannot be reduced to a figure for the psychological ambivalence of the narrator, since they move the narrating subject between two separate identities in narrative performance. These shifts articulate the difference between I and other in terms of conflicting names and personal characteristics. In a similar fashion, costume, gesture, and voice help us to distinguish the various layers of travesty at work in Genet’s theater.

In Pompes funèbres Genet has moved beyond the existential problem of death as the erasure of the author in narrative voice, and stages the game of life and death along the lines of a problematic of masquerade. By stepping into the shoes of his characters, Genet plays at being a dead man in order to celebrate death as a condition of possibility of life. By acting out the dangerous game of being and non-being on the stage of first-person narrative, Genet discovers a means of putting to rest his dead friend, of whom he says, “Je suis son tombeau” (P.F.; 24). But more importantly, he discovers means for engaging the spectre of death by means of performance.

When Genet transgresses the distance separating subject and object of discourse, when “I” suddenly becomes confused with “he,” Genet exposes an original division of the speaking subject into a being-for-itself and a being-for-others, a division which precedes its identification by means of the name. By perverting deictic markings for subject into traces for the object of discourse, Genet stages the endless movement of difference between the self and its other which is, indeed, “unnamable.”³⁴ He thus performs a kind of funeral rite on the transcendental subject of metaphysics.

In Pompes funèbres Genet also discovers the power of literature to implicate the reader in the narration.³⁵ Taking advantage of the intersubjective contract binding “I” and “you” in discourse, Genet implicates the reader in the masquerade. Early in the novel, Genet scorns the French for the righteousness of their outrage following the Liberation.

“Que d’ autres appellent sadiques. . . . ” Here Genet subverts the traditional opposition between good and evil in the discourse and questions the historical distinction between the innocent and the guilty parties in the atrocities of war. In the various references to “vous,” the reader of the narration, the reader is associated with the side of righteous bourgeois morality and is placed in the position of judge before the events of the narration. The narrator posits his own morality as something apart from that of the reader, when he says, for instance,

Ironically, as Genet says elsewhere, “The times have accustomed us to such rapid transformations of gangsters into cops, and vice versa” (P.F.; 127), that the difference between judge and accused has been blurred. Likewise, the reader is no longer in the position of judge reviewing the events of the narration as the actions of others, but of the accused, implicated in those events by means of the intrication of “I” and “you” in narrative discourse. When Genet points out the private acts of treason performed by the French themselves, as he “pays homage” to the champions of evil and commits crimes in their names, he makes the reader both a witness to the irony of the discourse and a target of that irony. Genet addresses the reader in the second person in order to expose the reader’s complicity in his experiments with crime and his intercourse with the devil.³⁶

In his literary travesties, Genet both perverts normal relations between “I” and “you” and suspends the presence and present, the “here” and “now” of discourse, by placing the other there where “I” ought to be. Genet thus stages the masquerade in first-person narrative by means of a problematic of deixis. This kind of problematic would ultimately shape relations between actors, their roles and the roles played by characters in Genet’s theater.

The question of deixis has received considerable attention in recent semiotic research, mainly with reference to theories of theater and drama.³⁷ Keir Elam, summarizing the prevailing scholarship, says,

In such statements, Elam and other scholars obscure something of the difficulty of deixis within a theory of performance, since performance challenges the very notion of the presence of the subject to itself in the immediacy of representation. Furthermore, when semiologists insist upon the particular importance of deixis for a semiotics of theater, they overlook the role of deixis in staging the subject of contemporary fiction.

This oversight stems from the philosophical assumption that a unity of “I” and “you” in the “here” and “now” of discourse transcends the spacing of deixis in poetic discourse—a metaphysical stance which underlies the seminal work of Emile Benveniste. When Benveniste charts current directions in semiotics by considering “Man’s place in language,” he privileges the moment in which the speaking subject is held as a unity in discourse. I speak, therefore I am. Benveniste also overlooks the problem of gender difference in the constitution of “I” in his discussion of the human dimension of discourse. Furthermore, this philosophical position shapes Benveniste’s rapprochement of linguistics and poetics. Take, for instance, his interpretation of the poetic structure of difference in Rimbaud:

By reading Rimbaud’s statement as a figure for mental alienation, Benveniste eliminates the spatial dimensions of the subject/other relation in favor of a single, albeit ambivalent meaning which transcends this relation. He thus reduces the movement of difference between I and what I is not to the dialectical synthesis of two sides of the “same.”

By defining semiosis as an act which negotiates the division of the subject into a being-for-itself and a being-for others in discourse, we begin to understand both the meaning of Rimbaud’s statement and its implications for poetic theory. When Rimbaud declared that “I is an other,” he shook the metaphysical foundations of Romanticism and the cult of individual creativity by exposing a movement of performance in poetic discourse. I speak, therefore I am immediately taken up in a representation for others: I am-not. It is with reference to this original division of the speaking subject on the stage of silence that Rimbaud anticipated the place of performance in Genet’s poetics, and signalled something of the importance of theater and drama for situating “Man” in language.