Conclusion

While the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a blossoming of the visual arts, especially film and video, the 1980s belong to the arts of performance. The proliferation of performance events in urban theaters and lofts, in rural fields and roadways, testifies to a revival of the spirit of medieval carnival and challenges the boundaries between art and life, representation and reality, performers and spectators, in contemporary culture.¹ The current interest in performance is not limited to theater, nor does it exclude film, video, or painting. Performance, in theory and in practice, defines a focus of the arts on the human subject as participant in a speaking, spectating, or reading event. Performance, in this broad sense, has far-reaching philosophical implications and accounts for trends in the arts which elude traditional categories naming genres, styles, and forms of representation.

Richard Schechner, director of the Performance Group and editor of the Drama Review, recently underscored both the importance of performance studies for humanistic and scientific inquiry, and the difficulty of containing performance within any given theoretical or esthetic framework:

Performance has always tested the limits of theater built around the dramatic text, but in recent years the theory and practice of performance have expanded beyond the realm of theater and drama altogether, touching on problems of the subject’s inscription in ideological and political discourses and engaging the studies of psychology and philosophy. By bringing together the discourses of Genet, Derrida, Bakhtin, and others, I have staged a kind of dialogue whose meaning should not be reduced to a simple thesis, but open onto larger debates concerning the place of representation in modern culture and the arts. Many of these issues are taken up by Genet himself in his final, autobiographical essay Un Captif amoureux (1986).

Though this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of Un Captif amoureux, published just after Genet’s death and some twenty-five years after his last play, I mention it here to emphasize the continuity between Genet’s properly literary work and his work of nonfiction with reference to the question of performance. Un Captif differs fundamentally from the works I discuss in my book, consisting as it does of a compendium of personal impressions, documentary reportage, and memories of Genet’s experiences with the Black Panthers and the Palestinian guerillas, the Fedayeen. The discourse focusses on historical referents, including political events in the United States and the Middle East, and contrasts sharply with the closed fictional reference of literary discourse. Genet seems to have abandoned literary hallucination for political commentary, weaving a tale of autobiographical reflections with journalistic documentation and detailed, eye-witness accounts of torture, human misery, and personal triumph.

In spite of these differences, Un Captif amoureux forms a whole with the early work, extending Genet’s ongoing preoccupation with the question of man’s place in literary discourse into the broader question of the staging of political and historical discourses. Genet not only underscores the political meaning of marginal language and speech styles within the predominantly white European power structure; he questions the very relation between the meaning of words and the reference of discourse, placing in question the unity and coherence of the subject and signified of Western philosophy.

The book opens with a remark reminiscent of Derrida or Mallarmé, about the original division of signs into ideal signifiers of meaning and physical traces on the surface of representation.

To the extent that the referent of discourse is as elusive as the movement of black traces on paper, the speaking subject struggles in a kind of ontological quicksand for a grip on reality. This existential dilemma explains the hold of the mass media on the imaginary of modern man. The media, especially film and video, replace empirical knowledge with an illusion of perceptual mastery over an image of absent realties.

Genet describes the Black Power and Palestinian resistance movements as spectacles built upon the duplicities of theatrical performance and having the ephemeral quality of mechanically produced images.³ He documents how film, video, and photo-journalism create such movements, propagating an image of marginal culture which reflects the fears and desires of dominant culture and ideology—“a true image of a false spectacle,” as he would say in Le Balcon. Representation obscures ideological difference under the guise of imitation, reducing the movement of political resistance to a performance without substance, to a mime-play turned in upon itself.

The mime-play forms a central figure of Genet’s book. He says that the Fedayeen leaders denounced card-playing as a pastime of the bourgeois enemy. The soldiers play nonetheless, miming the gestures of a poker game right down to the last glance and grimace of competition without cards (C.A.; 38-39). Genet describes this staging as a metaphor for the Palestinian resistance, which plays at war without holding the cards of power, trading political change for a répétition, a rehearsal of representation.

While many critics view Un Captif amoureux as a confirmation of Genet’s political engagement and a kind of liberation from the yoke of Saint Genet,⁴ it is also a work which questions the very notions of engagement and liberation. Though the “captive” of the title refers to the narrator, who admits to being a prisoner of his own love for the Palestinian people, the book returns time and again to the notion that modern man is the captive of representation, held hostage by the reflections of his own desire. In his final work Genet eludes the lure of representation by staging political discourse between speech and writing, between the text of history and the voice of lived experience, troubling the force of the image with the movement of performance.