Introduction

Jean Genet, the enfant terrible of the French theater, died on April 15, 1986, leaving a literary legacy which spans five decades and includes plays, novels, films, poems, and political essays. Though important criticism has addressed the originality of Genet’s theater,¹ and though Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a major study of Genet’s novels,² to date no one has traced the evolution of Genet’s famous “theater of the double” out of his early work with narrative or cinematic point of view, or negotiated relations between Genet’s poetics and his militant politics. Nor, moreover, has Genet been comfortably situated in any of the major trends in modernism, though he has been loosely associated with surrealism, existentialism, and postmodernism.³

The problem with Genet for literary criticism is that his work systematically calls into question discourses of authority, including those of scholars and literary critics. An hors-la-loi, Genet wrote from the margins of dominant, heterosexual culture about events and in a language which could ruffle the complacency of the most sophisticated reader. Genet’s work also eludes the classifications and definitions we use to make sense of literary history. Even the label “avant-garde” fails to account for the movement of Genet’s pen, since literary avant-gardes, by definition, prepare the ground for the future of mainstream literature, and are eventually assimilated into dominant styles of discourse. Genet’s work resists this kind of assimilation. From the early novels written in prison to his final prose-poem-journal, Un Captif amoureux, Genet consistently challenges the integrity and specificity of genres and representational modes, merging as he does the novelistic, the cinematic, and the dramatic in any given work.

While I maintain that no single formal grid or critical formula can contain Genet’s writing, I argue that his struggle to be heard beyond the borders of dominant culture raises, consistently and urgently, the question of the speaking subject’s place in socially constituted discourses. In order to track the effects of this struggle in Genet’s novels, plays, and film, I propose an approach which investigates the act which allows subjects to participate in dominant discourse, an act of performance. The notion of performance is posed here as a question rather than as a closed theoretical system, and puts into play relations between semiotics and philosophy while testing the limits of both disciplines with reference to the works themselves.

Mine is a rather broad approach, yet unlike the narrow theoretical models which structural poetics borrows from linguistics, it respects the complexity of the question of literature in the framework of a rigorous scientific investigation. By focussing on the question of how subjects become something for someone else in performance, rather than on the form and function of structural models, I discover a means of tracing the movement of the mask in Genet’s work, a figure which transcends the semiotic specificity of theater and drama and places in question the subject of Genet’s novels and film.

This kind of approach accounts for trends not only in Genet’s work, but in contemporary French literature generally. Other postwar writers, including Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Duras, move regularly between work in cinema or the novel and theater, while novelists such as Simon and Sarraute borrow semiotic operations such as montage or role-play from cinema or theater respectively, in constructing a hybrid form of the novel.⁴ Performance constitutes the main event with such writers, moving the subject of narrative, cinematic, and theatrical representation in a kind of philosophical or psychological mise-en-scène.

In the 1930s, Antonin Artaud, anticipating our contemporary concern for performance, called for a “theater of cruelty” which would overthrow the authority of the text over mise-en-scène and place the human subject on stage in the place of dramatic characters. He called for the devalorization not only of the dramatist, but of the very notion of authorship, including the controlling point of view of the metteur en scène. In Le Théâtre et son double, performance is never very far from the human body, from the staging of life in perpetual crisis, life which is irreducible to a semiotic system or “work,” whose spontaneity can only be described as a “happening.”⁵ Artaud offers no technical prescriptions for producing this kind of theater, except to say that the theater of cruelty destroys the borders between art and life and resists formulation into a prepared text or schema.⁶ He declares (guerilla) war on Western culture and the Aristotelian tradition, which define representation in terms of its ability to imitate universal truths about Man.

While Artaud claims to examine theater as a question, “philosophically and in its essence,” he also calls for the articulation of a purely theatrical “language” in terms of the material specificity of performance. “This physical and concrete language to which I allude is truly theatrical only to the extent that the thoughts it expresses elude spoken language”(p. 45, my translation).

In Le Théâtre et son double Artaud states something of the complexity of the issues at hand in my book, and suggests how semiotics and philosophy overlap in the question of performance. Artaud seeks a language of the stage which would privilege movement over mimesis, space over speech, spectacle over meaning, vision over voice. In the same gesture he poses a philosophical challenge to the means and ends of Western culture and the ideology of the “same.” He places in question metaphysical hierarchies which in Aristotle grant primacy to the closure of being and meaning in dramatic discourse and to the unity of poetic signifier and signified in the image.

Artaud seems to be unaware of the profound implications of the theater of cruelty for metaphysical philosophy. While he attacks the Aristotelian tradition in poetics, he praises oriental theater for its “metaphysical” dimension and calls for a substitution of metaphysics for the psychological approach to theater in the West. What Artaud seems to be addressing in the notion of “metaphysical” theater is theater focussed on the spectating subject’s response to mise-en-scène, which he defines as “a language in space and in movement” (p. 55, my translation). Unlike the spectator’s identification with the personal identities of characters, metaphysical theater would be the scene of the transcendental subject’s performance in the space of spectacle.⁷ Theater must “call into question, organically, man, his ideas about reality, and his poetic place in reality” (p. 110, my translation).

Moreover, Artaud’s writings transcend the realm of theater per se and point to the broader question of the subject’s performance in poetic discourse. In the following statement from La Cruelle raison poétique, Blanchot summarizes the implications of Artaud’s work for modern poetry and poetics:

Artaud did not finally articulate a “language of theater” in terms of semiotic codes or sign functions, nor did he bring philosophical tradition to bear on the question of metaphysical theater, but set the stage for investigating a general semiotics of performance. Moreover, Artaud instigated a revolution which is currently eroding the Aristotelian tradition in Western poetry and poetics. In Artaud we discover not only a radical poetics of modern theater, but a theatrical model for modern poetry.

Artaud had considerable influence on Genet. The theater of cruelty resounds in Genet’s ideal of “theater about theater,”⁹ a call for the destruction of characters, for a theater which places the spectator on stage. This concept of theater shows up in his novels and film in terms of dramatic spacing, role-play, and mistaken identity.

The structuralist bent of semiotics has been the greatest barrier to a theoretical account of this phenomenon, insofar as structuralism posits the autonomy of each representational mode with regard to the others as the condition of possibility of semiotic analysis. This premise derives from still another assumption, namely that a “scientific” study of discourse can only be achieved by segmenting it into minimal units structured according to a model for closure between the form, the meaning, and the material of the expression. In Saussure this model consists of the marriage of signifier and signified in the linguistic sign. In Hjelmslev it consists of the dialectical relation between the form of meaning and the form of the material in the sign function. In structural linguistics the speaking/spectating subject remains “backstage” as it were, taken for granted as the transcendental origin of meaning.

Benveniste changed the direction of structural linguistics in the 1960s by introducing the philosophical question of the speaking subject into problems of language. In Problems in General Linguistics, he insists that language is not simply an abstract system of signs, but a means of communication between speakers.¹⁰ The movement between these two faces of language in discourse, between “le sémiotique” and “le sémantique,” respectively, is made possible by an act of predication in the speaking subject, the origin and condition of possibility of meaning. For communication to occur, the subject is bound to an interlocutor according to social contract, taken up in the endless shifting of positions between “I” and “you” in deixis.

Benveniste not only opened up the study of language to problems of the subject’s performance in discourse, but provided means of advancing the state of the semiotics of theater and drama, which has not progressed very far since the 1930s. Theatrical representation cannot be reduced to a system of relations between the form and meaning of the dramatic text, consisting as it does of an intricate negotiation between the codes shaping discourse and the uncodifiable movement of the subject in the folds of representation. This explains why a structural approach fails to account for the complexity of the problem of theater. Theater is built entirely around deictic traces for reference and subject-address in dramatic dialogue which link the sense of speech to the space of spectacle in theatrical performance.¹¹

Benveniste conceives of the speaking subject as a unity which transcends its implication in any given instance of discourse, indeed as the origin and condition of possibility of meaning. A close look at Benveniste reveals the difficulty inherent in this metaphysical assumption. In Benveniste, “I speak, therefore I am.” How ever, when I speak I am for another, ruled by the social contract binding I and you in discourse. The division of the speaker into a subject for itself and a subject for others precedes its formation as a unity in discourse: I speak, therefore I am(not). This leads us to conclude that semiosis is inseparable from the question of how subjects become something for other subjects in performance.

The work of Jacques Derrida forms a frame of reference for the various essays in my book, since his critique of metaphysics aims specifically to shift the philosophical assumptions underlying theories of language and poetry. In Of Grammatology, for instance, Derrida points out that the claim to an original unity of the subject is but an ideologically determined construct, not a natural “essence” of being.¹² He argues that at the origin of being and meaning is a movement of doubling and division, an endless striving for unity across the medium of discourse.

In Dissemination Derrida addresses specifically the difficulty of classical poetics to account for trends in modern literature.¹³ The ontological interpretation of mimesis fails to engage the question of the subject’s production in literary discourse, focussing instead on the means of imitating transcendental reality. While Derrida does not discuss Artaud specifically in Dissemination, the theater of cruelty seems to shape his reading of Plato with Mallarmé.¹⁴ Derrida discovers in the mime-play a figure for expanding Artaud’s notion of pure mise-en-scène into an orientation of poetics which would transcend theater per se.

Artaud’s call for a “language of space,”¹⁵ for the demise of imitation,¹⁶ for the staging of passion in place of representation,¹⁷ is echoed in Derrida’s reading of a poetic revolution in Mallarmé. Thus by implication Derrida discovers the philosophical grounds for expanding Artaud’s program for theater into a modern poetics of discourse, focussed on the subject’s construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction in textual performance.

I contend that Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the metaphysical orientation of linguistics and poetics is not incompatible with semiotics per se. By placing the study of subjectivity in language in the framework of a critique of metaphysics, we discover means of accounting for those aspects of literature which elude the structural model while maintaining methodological tools such as distinctions between signifier and signified, enunciation and enounced, form and meaning.

The justification for this kind of approach stands with the creative works themselves. Genet and his contemporaries systematically challenge metaphysical notions of Man as an original, self-contained unity and demand a rethinking of poetics and semiotics from a philosophical standpoint. By studying those aspects of discourse which trace the subject’s movement in textual performance, I am able to account for the evolution of Genet’s famous “theater of the double”¹⁸ out of his early work with subject-address and reference in narrative. Genet takes up the question of the subject in a problematic of narrative, dramatic, and cinematic voice, exposing the double at the origin of speech and the lie at the origin of meaning.

Given the theoretical scope of my book, I chose not to analyze all of Genet’s works, but limited my corpus to texts which both characterize general trends in Genet and most clearly illustrate the theoretical issues at stake in a theory of performance. I will discuss in detail three novels, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs (1944), Miracle de la rose (1946), and Pompes funèbres (1947); Genet’s only original film, Un Chant d’amour (1950); and three plays, Les Bonnes (first produced in 1947), Le Balcon (first produced in 1957), and Les Nègres (first produced in 1959).¹⁹

In the essays which follow, I discuss philosophical and theoretical issues surrounding the question of performance, while attempting to account for the role of the double in Genet’s literary imagination. By reading Genet with his “others” in the the realm of theory, including Derrida, Benveniste, Bakhtin, Ricoeur, and Metz, I hope to come to grips with the overriding concerns of a man whose life in literature was never very far from his life as prisoner, as outcast, as self-proclaimed exile.²⁰