TWO

The Discourse of the Other

The contributions of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin to the theory of the novel take the notion of performance outside the strictly linguistic realm and situate it within the broader question of man’s place in literary discourse. Bakhtin defines the “book”, i.e., the text, as a “verbal performance in print, . . . calculated for active perception, involving attentive reading and inner responsiveness, and for organized, printed reaction” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language; p. 95, Bakhtin’s italics). For Bakhtin the narrative text constitutes a performance in the sense that it brings together multiple voices speaking in dialogue, thus implicating the speaking and reading subject in a play of difference with its “others.”

Reading Genet with Bakhtin, we not only situate their discourses in a philosophical dialogue which transcends their historical and biographical differences, but discover means of accounting for the evolution of Genet’s famous “theater of the double”¹ out of his work with narrative point of view. Structural theories of narrative, modelled after the closure of signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, preclude considerations of relations between the cinematic, the dramatic, and the narrative modes of representation, since such theories are based on the material and semiotic specificity of each mode as autonomous system. It was Hjelmslev who claimed that a “scientific” (i.e., semiotic) approach to the text must begin with the segmentation of discourse into minimal units structured according to the dialectical imbrication of the form of meaning and the form of the material of the expression.²

While Bakhtin was not to obtain the attentive reading and “organized printed reaction” of others in his lifetime, his ongoing debate with Russian Formalism, from the 1930s to the 1970s, has profound and urgent implications for contemporary theory and criticism. The problem of the subject’s relation to others’ discourse places literary theory within larger debates concerning the ideological and psychological effects of social structures, including narrative, on the constitution of the speaking subject. A dangerous project indeed, one which exposed Bakhtin and his circle to the cruel and blatant censorship of Soviet authorities under Stalin.³

The danger of Bakhtin’s theory for totalitarian ideology lies in the subversive notion that discourse is the field of an ongoing struggle between subject and others in language, a struggle for personal freedom. While Russian Formalism and Socialist Realism negotiate relations between art and politics in terms of revolutionary form and socialist content, respectively, Bakhtin views literature in terms of the liberation of the subject of dominant discourse. Literature is revolutionary to the extent that it heightens awareness of the subject’s binding inscription in cultural and ideological discourses.

Dostoevsky remained an important preoccupation of Bakhtin’s throughout his career. Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, aimed to destabilize the authority of narrative voice over the narration by integrating the voices of characters, distinguished by contrasting speech styles, into narrative discourse. Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, invented the “polyphonic” novel, a new form in which the characters emerge as equal participants, as subjects, alongside the subjectivity of the author.⁵ In this way, Dostoevsky replaces the monologic order of single-voiced discourse with the dialogic interaction of voices speaking in heteroglossia. Heteroglossia in narrative

Jean Genet carries out Bakhtin’s project in the realm of literary creation. While Bakhtin wrote within the prison-house of political censorship, Genet wrote the early novels in prison, managing to publish them through friends on the outside. These novels, originally published by Marc Barbézat, were in turn censored by Gallimard in the later, standard edition of the (incomplete) Oeuvres complètes of Genet.

Furthermore, Genet is a kind of literary kin of Bakhtin’s because he struggled throughout his life with the existential problem of freedom by engaging the question of others’ discourse in the constitution of one’s personal identity. In the novels, Genet addresses the issue of freedom in the form of a problematic of reported speech. In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Pompes funèbres, Genet challenges the unifying authority of the author/narrator over the narration by replacing narrative voice with the doubled discourse of an actor playing narrator. Genet places the speaking subject on stage as the focus of literary discourse, destroying in turn a coherent representation of diegetic reality. Moreover, he threatens the linguistic authority of standard French by elevating subversive speech styles such as criminal argot and profane language to the level of poetry.

Bakhtin’s debate with the means and ends of Russian Formalism has important implications for the study of writers such as Genet. Bakhtin criticizes the metaphysical orientation of formalism, which privileges the study of morphology at the expense of contextuality. The critic’s task is to examine the production of the speaking subject in dialogic interaction with others’ discourse, rather than to describe the work as a self-contained, closed system.⁶

Russian Formalists, including Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and Jakobson, built a poetics around those aspects of language, such as sound patterns and rhythms, which contribute to the internal closure of form and meaning in poetry.⁷ Still other Formalists, such as Propp, strove for a scientific study of interrelations between the various levels of literary discourse, from the reiteration of sounds to the structure of plot to the global system of the work.⁸ In this framework, discourse is poetic to the extent that the form mirrors the content of the message.

Jakobson led the development of Russian Formalism into the great formalist movements of the twentieth century, including the structuralism of the Prague School in the 1930s, and a particularly French version of structuralism in the 1950s and 60s. It is worth noting that the “structuralism” of the Prague School estheticians contains threads of a problematic of the speaking subject of discourse, and that this problematic was gradually erased as structuralism reached the Cartesian fields of French intellectual activity.⁹ Structural poetics has come to be identified with French structuralism, whose debt to Jakobson cannot be overstated. Jakobson defined the “poetic function” of language with reference to structural linguistics, as the projection of the axis of similarity, the “paradigmatic” axis, onto the axis of contiguity or the “syntagmatic axis.”

Bakhtin and his circle criticized the monologic order of the poetics of formalism, of language turned in upon itself in a closed system. He replaced the linguistic model with a problematic of the socially constituted subject of literary discourse.

Moreover, Bakhtin shifted the focus of poetics and stylistics away from the structural system of the work to the interaction of voices speaking in narrative. Narrative, not poetry, becomes the model for a poetics which takes account of the speaking subject of discourse.

A major contribution of Bakhtin’s was to distinguish narrative from the Aristotelian categories of poetic discourse, including drama and epic poetry. In this sense Bakhtin diverged from the Aristotelian slant of Formalists such as Propp, who focussed on plot structure as a perfect system of interrelated parts, the basis of mimesis.¹⁰ Bakhtin focussed instead on the dialogical imbrication of the discourse of the narrator and the discourses of characters speaking in the story. “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (The Dialogic Imagination; p. 262). Bakhtin not only differentiates narrative from the mixed form of the epic, the Aristotelian category characterized by the alternation of diegesis and mimesis, but also places in question the very opposition of mimesis and diegesis as means of defining poetic forms.

What characterizes the novel is neither the direct imitation of characters speaking in the story, nor the indirect narration of actions in the diegesis, but the dynamic of alterity produced by the interpenetration of multiple discourses. Thus narrative stages the performance of a divided subject engaged in the drama of self-representation. In his various works Bakhtin foregrounds the figure of the double as the major characteristic of the novel from its earliest forms.

The double is represented by means of heteroglossia, defining differences between speech styles of discourses brought together in narrative. Bakhtin distinguishes dialogism from dialogue per se, which, in everyday conversation or dramatic dialogue involves not the intrication of subject and other in a single, doubled discourse, but the interaction of two autonomous subjects in separate discourses.

The dialogic principle demonstrates the difficulty of situating narrative in the Aristotelian order of mimesis. Narrative discourse, inscribed in narration by means of figures of speech and markings for the first person and present tense of the verb, imitates the speech of the narrator. Narrative discourse, however, both imitates the narrator and includes traces of characters speaking in the story, either in the form of indirect discourse or reported speech. Likewise, reported speech and indirect discourse imitate character (speech), but also include traces of the narrator producing the narration. In this way direct discourse in the novel circumscribes mimetic closure between speech and speaker, and exposes a duality between the diegetic context of reported speech and the here and now of narrative discourse. The speaking subject of narrative, thus taken up in a movement between narrated space/time and narrating space/time, becomes a representation for another subject in narrative mise-en-scène. This movement constitutes a performative aspect of the novel which eludes classical poetics.

Bakhtin’s disintrication of the novel from the monologic order of classical mimesis both anticipates and resolves certain problems facing structural poetics in the 1960s. Structuralist debates foreground the difficulty of situating the novel in the framework of classical poetics, citing the problematic relation between mimetic and diegetic functions of narrative. In “Frontières du récit,” Gérard Genette examines the classical distinctions between narrative and dramatic poetry.¹¹ Genette points out that while Plato, in the Republic, and Aristotle, in the Poetics, diverge with regard to their classifications of diegesis and mimesis, they both oppose dramatic form to narrative and privilege drama with being more imitative than narrative. Plato defines mimesis and diegesis as two styles of discourse, the former consisting of the imitation of the discourses of characters in reported speech, the latter consisting of the narration of events by a narrator speaking in his own voice.¹² Aristotle defines diegesis as a form of imitation, the indirect imitation of nonverbal events in speech. Direct imitation consists of the dramatic representation of speech on stage.

Genette does not mention that while Aristotle recognized the performances of actors as a form of direct imitation, he excluded performance per se from the realm of poetics, since performance does not belong to the strictly verbal realm of the poet. Thus in Aristotle, mimesis defines the direct representation of speeches of characters, diegesis defines the indirect representation of actions by means of words. In both Plato and Aristotle the distinction between mimesis and diegesis not only serves to distinguish drama from narrative but distinguishes between the two aspects of the “mixed” or epic form, in which the narrator periodically quotes the discourses of characters in the diegesis.

Genette argues that the classical definitions of mimesis and diegesis obscure the ontological unity between reported speech and its object, speech. For Genette, since reported speech does not actually imitate speech (in which case there would be a dialectical relation between signifier and signified), but simply is speech, reported speech does not belong to the order of mimesis. Narrative “representation” is presentation. Genette concludes that the only form of representation which escapes the circularity of reported speech is narrative discourse, the verbal representation of nonverbal events: “Mimésis, c’est diégésis.¹³”

Thus Genette claims that speech transcends representation as such, by being ontologically bound to the voice of the speaker. In this and other essays in Figures II (such as “Proust et le langage indirect”), Genette’s approach to poetics reflects the monologic turn of French structuralism. Authors such as Genette, Todorov,¹⁴ and Barthes¹⁵ posit an original closure between sound and meaning in single-voiced discourse by modelling poetic systems after the structure of meaning in the sentence.

Since structural theories of narrative foreclose considerations of an original duality of the speaking subject as it performs for others, they fail to account for the philosophical slant of authors such as Genet, who posit an alienated, divided subject in the position of narrator. In Genet’s novels, narrative discourse not only creates an image of the narrator, but includes the discourse of characters. Reported speech not only produces an image of characters, but refers back to the narrator. Differences between speech styles of speakers in the narration represent the movement between the discourse of the narrating I and the discourse of the other, between the representation of the speaker and reference to the diegetic context. This disjunction systematically erodes any pretentions to narrative unity and reveals the masquerade at play in the reader’s inscription in narrative. If the narrator wears a mask in order to represent character, for example, the mask intrudes into the reader’s relation to the narrator. The doubled voice of the narrator is thus mirrored in the troubled identification of the reader with the narration. In this way Genet introduces the problem of the double into narrative.

In Genet, narrative is neither the representaton of nonverbal events by means of language, nor the direct imitation of living speech in direct discourse, but the staging of a dialogue between subject and others in narrative space. To the extent that representation constitutes the subject as something for another subject, representation, in the novel or in the theater, is a product of performance rather than simply a mirror for transcendent realities.

In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Pompes funèbres, the narrator calls himself Jean Genet, addresses the reader in the first person, and reflects upon his most intimate experiences in and out of prison, in the present and imperfect tenses of the verb. Such aspects are the most obvious instances of the narrator’s self-representation, but not the only ones. Narrative discourse is also marked in figures of speech and personal commentary about the characters or events of the story.¹⁶

In Genet, reported speech incorporates traces of narrative discourse in the same way personal commentary and figures of speech inscribe narrative discourse into third-person narration. The narrator focusses attention on the speech of characters as verbal constructs, as both traces of his creative hand in the production of character and seeds for the production of narrative discourse. In this way Genet defines narrative representation as a problematic of identification and imbrication between discourses, thereby challenging the Aristotelian ideal of mimetic closure between discourse and the speaking subject.

Genet takes advantage of differences between argot, standard French, foreign languages, and personal idiolects in order to show the participation of reported speech in narrative discourse. Contrasts between argot and standard French prevail. In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs and Miracle de la rose in particular, the world seems to be divided between speakers and non-speakers of the argot des malfaiteurs. Though criminal argot no longer constitutes an impenetrable linguistic “cover,” it remains an unmistakable indicator of social identity. The perversion of standard French through prefixing, suffixing, and semantic inversion and derivation follows rules available only to the initiate.¹⁷ Unlike French novelists of the nineteenth century such as Balzac, Hugo, and Sue, who used argot in reported speech mainly to add local color and plausibility to the representation of character,¹⁸ Genet exploits contrasts between the speech styles of characters in order to represent a struggle between the speaking subject and the discourse of authority. In Genet the quest for personal freedom is first and foremost a question of the power of language to form the individual as social subject. For this reason, very little happens in his novels. The drama of the subject is played out directly by means of a focus on the dialogic aspect of discourse, on discourse as action rather than as bearer of meaning.¹⁹

The relation between the narrator’s discourse and discourses of characters evolves from one novel to the next. In the early work, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, the narrator regularly integrates the speech styles of characters into his speech. In Miracle de la rose the narrator addresses the question of his autonomy from his characters, submitting his discourse less and less to the influence of other speech styles. By Pompes funèbres, the narrator has not only eliminated others’ speech from his own discourse, but periodically replaces character speech with his own speech style. In this way Genet reveals the play of masks underlying mimesis in the novel, just as he would later expose the double at the origin of theatrical representation.

In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs criminal argot characterizes the initiate of the fraternity of thugs (les mecs) and pimps (les macs). Far from marking the speaker as a social outcast, in the criminal milieu of this novel, argot constitutes an enviable linguistic gift, an ideal which the narrator, looking in on this world, hopes to attain. In the following passage, the narrator reports with awe the discourse of a prisoner describing his seduction by another man. The violence done to standard French in the argot passages has disappeared in the English translation. As Genet has said, the argot des mâles cannot be properly translated:

Argot is an extension of the virile dress and physical posture expected of a true mac, such as Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds. Contemplating his reflection in a department store window, Mignon sees the embodiment of an underworld hero.

Genet’s cast of male characters divides according to specific codes governing male and female role-playing. More than any of his physical trappings, argot in Mignon’s speech determines his virility. Argot is “la langue mâle” and a secondary sex trait.

Louis Culafroy, alias Divine, would not dare to speak like the macs, any more than Mignon would speak like the queens, “les tantes.” The virility of argot shakes Divine’s sensitive nature. She would not speak the male tongue any more than she would assume any of the other visible trappings of the pimps: “L’argot, pas plus que les autres filles ses copines, Divine ne le parlait. Cela l’eût bouleversée autant que pousser avec sa langue et ses dents un coup de sifflet voyou. . . .” (N. D. F.; 23). The identification of argot with the male sex also excites her. Unravelling Mignon’s speech, Divine seems already to be making love to him. “Il lui semblait qu’elle déboutonnait une braguette, que sa main introduite soulevait la chemise” (N. D. F.; 24):

The queens have their own speech style, which contributes to their travesties as surely as the costumes they wear and the poses they assume. In a typical conversation between queens, words are extensions of physical gestures, indeed substitutes for movement:

The constative function of such discourses is minimal.²⁰ Like religious litanies, whose cathartic function derives from a formula for redundancy which reduces the information of a given utterance to the barest minimum, so Divine’s “litanies” achieve orgasmic intensity as the words are reduced to a sort of chirping, ending only as Divine collapses in a state of divine exhaustion.

When Genet focusses on stylistic differences between discourses in the novel, he highlights the performative function of discourse, the speech act as such, rather than the message. As Bakhtin points out, this kind of focus constitutes the dramatic element of narrative, in that it replaces the monologic order of lyrical expression with the dialectical order of voices speaking in dialogue (The Dialogic Imagination; p. 266).

Once the difference between masculine and feminine speech styles has been established, Genet plays with these distinctions in order to represent the perversity of his only female character, Ernestine, Divine’s mother. Masculine argot in Ernestine’s speech symbolizes the virility Genet projects into his female characters, making them as sexually ambivalent as the homosexual men. Ernestine is tough, heartless, and capable of cruelty. Her doubled discourse symbolizes a deeper ambivalence in her character, as illustrated in the following passage:

Ernestine strikes one as a man in female travesty whose speech style betrays his true identity. Differences between sexual identity and gender identification shape the doubled figure of an actor playing a role. This figure originates in the novels and is fully developed in Genet’s plays. For instance, Genet requested an all-male cast for the staging of Les Bonnes, a play with only female characters.²¹

Ernestine’s doubled discourse symbolizes an ongoing struggle between two faces of her personality. The masculine side seeks to destroy the child of her feminine side. Ernestine brings to mind the Medusa figure of a female head coiffed with snakes. The Medusa does not simply symbolize a castrating mother, but combines symbols of the father and mother in a circle of Oedipal desire. This figure returns to the spectator a reflection of his own fear of reprisals by the father. Hence any man who looks directly at the Medusa is rendered impotent or “petrified.”²² Ernestine performs a kind of verbal castration on her imaginary lover by uttering repeatedly, “une prise de couilles à la Tartare,” a phrase suggesting both a grasp and a conquest of the male genitals which leaves them in the state of raw, ground-up meat.

Genet endows language with the materiality of flesh. Thus argot not only symbolizes Ernestine’s masculine side, but is a displacement of the man she dreams of devouring. In a narrative style which equates speaking with acting, the interpenetration of Ernestine’s speech and male argot constitutes a heterosexual act occurring in the dramatic present of the narrative. Savouring argot behind locked doors, Ernestine performs illicit acts with her mother tongue.

The narrator’s commentary, including the comparison between smoke and sperm, highlights the ironic contrast between Ernestine’s social and sexual identity and her virile speech style, a contrast directly related to her verbal performance. Current theories of irony focus on a performative aspect of discourse which accounts for the role of the referent in determining the meaning of an utterance.²³ For instance, if a speaker says, “What a beautiful day!” to refer to a blizzard, irony is produced by a contrast between the meaning of the statement (“a beautiful day”) and reference to the context (a blizzard). The irony of Ernestine’s speech also derives from a performative focus of narrative discourse. Unlike the irony of “What a beautiful day!”, however, the irony of Ernestine’s speech is shaped by a dialogic interaction between subject and other in a single, doubled discourse. This type of irony in Genet derives precisely from a grotesque game of dissimulation which undermines the mimetic function of reported speech.

Though the very structure of irony poses the philosophical question of the unity of the speaking subject, the irony of double-voiced discourse in the novel poses this question as the problem par excellence of narrative representation. Bakhtin traces this problem back to the ancient Menippean satire, structured as a dialogue which integrates the comic and tragic faces of man in grotesque role-play. The satire mocks the claims of official ideology to an ideal unity between word and voice, the ideal of monologic discourse.

The irony of double-voiced discourse in the modern novel both introduces the grotesque into narrative and exposes the difference between subject and other as a condition of possibility of speech. While the figure of the mask appears in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, Genet would not develop this figure into a general problematic of reported speech until Pompes funèbres, in which characters freely alternate speech styles in order to perform for others.

In Genet the double shapes not only reported speech but spills over into the narrator’s self-representation. If performance defines the act of being something for someone else, then Genet is indeed an actor, if not a comedian, since he borrows the discourses of others in the narration in order to chide the seriousness of official discourse. Such verbal performances are also means of coming to grips with his own ambivalent relation to the discourse of authority. Genet writes from prison. He occupies a kind of no-man’s-land between the discourse of proper society and the discourse of the underworld. As Jean-Paul Sartre points out in Saint Genet (p. 425), Genet has stolen the language of proper society to write his novel. In the criminal milieu he borrows the language of the underworld. Genet not only imitates criminal argot in reported speech and indirect discourse, in which case he would simply mirror the discourse of the other, but he copies the means of formation of argot, including suffixing, prefixing, and semantic derivation, in order to produce a hybrid speech style, the speech of a double-voiced narrator.

In the following example, the reported speech of Mignon generates the narrator’s comments about language and fashions the narrator’s own linguistic elaborations:

The focus on Mignon’s speech as a verbal construct, as material for creative interpretation by the narrator, erodes the mimetic function of reported speech and makes narrative the scene of textual performance.

Unlike Divine, who is seduced by the “argot des mâles,” the narrator feels himself “virilized” by manipulating argot. Inventing an erotic meaning for “making the beds [les pages],” an expression uttered by two pimps in prison, Genet imagines himself in the virile stance of a medieval guard, “making” the boys (the pages) of the palace.

Argot is “la langue mâle.” In perverting argot by the same means that the thugs and pimps pervert standard French, the narrator participates in others’ discourse, he feels like a man among men. This initiation into the underworld is, of course, an illusion, a charade. Ever an outsider, Genet borrows the discourse of others only to twist it into literature.

When Genet introduces the discourse of the underworld into standard French, he perverts the proper (the conventional and the respectable) meaning of words into sexual transgressions of language. In this final example from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, the discourse of the other generates a homosexual fantasy built upon the expression “être envergué” (to get fucked). Here narration is not primarily the verbal representation of nonverbal events, as Gérard Genette claims, but a verbal event performed at the expense of a coherent representation of action. As a result, Genet’s perversity must be viewed primarily as a stance toward official discourse. Unfortunately most of the word play on the words “verge” “vergue” has been lost in the English translation.

“Vergue” is a nautical term referring to the horizontal bar on the ship’s mast which supports the sail. The sailors change “vergue” into a sexual term, “envergué,” by shifting attention from the nautical meaning of “vergue” to its argot meaning, motivated by similarity with “verge” (= an erect member), and by prefixing and suffixing “en” and “é.” The narrator, excited by the erotic possibilities of “vergue,” adds his own analysis of the formation of “envergué.” He interprets the word as a condensation of “empalé” and “vergue,” which associates sexual penetration with the violence of an impalement.

This figure occurs again in Miracle de la rose, Genet’s second novel, where it develops into a full-length sexual scenario. Here reported speech transcends the diegetic context of one novel and generates narrative discourse in another novel.

The passage develops into the following paradoxical figuration, in which the narrator is both immobilized and climbing the mast, completing the idea of violent sexual assault. Here the association of monter and pénétrer is motivated by the inversion of the active and passive sides of a gang rape in which the narrator is victim. As he proceeds to “monter,” he is “monté”:

The erotic meaning of this passage becomes explicit as the crew pull out their “verges.” This line is missing from both the Gallimard edition and from the English translation.

Furthermore, just as we begin to seize upon a coherent diegetic action, a gang rape in which the narrator is held captive, the narrator shifts the focus of the passage from the reference of the discourse to the creative power of the words themselves. Drawing attention to the homological attraction of “vergue” and “verge,” Genet creates the outrageous image of a ship’s mastpole, “la vergue,” in the act of coming.

As Sartre argues so persuasively in Saint Genet, Genet was not a thief by inclination but by existential choice. Crime was an act of liberation from the rules of a society to which he could not belong (pp. 402-23). Genet’s pornographic treatment of language is also a crime of liberation, a perversion of the discourse of authority. By pushing standard French to the limits of semantic polyvalence, by forcing it into perverse (speech) acts with others’ discourses, Genet not only aims to shock his reader, but to test the limits of his own declaration of independence from proper literary tradition. As Pierre de Boisdeffre has said, not without a certain scorn, “Pour décrire son abjection il use du langage de Racine.”²⁴

When Bakhtin shifts the focus of poetics from the formal unity of the poetic text to the polyphony of voices speaking in dialogue (in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; pp. 78-100), he suggests a political ideal of literature: to improve communication among subjects in spite of their linguistic or ideological differences. In Dostoevsky, for example, speakers interact according to a balanced give and take between subjects, rather than a monologic relation of the subject to its reflection or “other”:

Bakhtin clearly describes a utopian state of discourse. As Todorov explains in a recent book inspired by Bakhtin, communication is usually achieved at the expense of one voice or another, as the discourse of power assimilates the discourse of the weak.²⁵ Thus what speakers gain in communication they lose in heteroglossia. Communication requires that speakers agree on the meaning and reference of discourse. Communication thus improves as the process of standardization increases. However, standardization reduces differences between the languages of speakers and risks containing difference in the monologic order of the “same.”

For Genet communication is impossible between society and the outlaw, be it a thief or a political dissident. Communication, implying standardization, would symbolize a kind of abdication, in the realm of language, of the other’s subjectivity. Differences between speech styles in Miracle de la rose perpetually destroy communication between prisoners and figures of authority such as priests and prison guards, creating a permanent state of violent confrontation.

In Miracle de la rose, the production of narrative discourse with reference to character speech is even more evident than in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. The novel unfolds in the virile world of Fontevrault prison. Even characters who are suspected of a feminine posture “play tough.” The narrator’s reflections and extrapolations on the language of prisoners are shaped by creative oppositions between the narrator Genet’s literary style, described by de Boisdeffre as “le langage de Racine,” the argot of the toughs, and the speech of the law (including clergy and guards). These contrasts lead to breakdowns in communication which provoke the characters to violence, shape the narrator’s irony, and represent Genet’s isolation from his entourage. As in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, reported speech in this novel contributes to the representation of the narrator as well as the characters. This dialogic function of reported speech is more important than communication between characters.

The narrator’s commentary on the impossibility of communication is also represented in the clash of speech styles between characters, which leads to violent misunderstanding. The narrator’s commentary is colored with irony, a discursive operation nourished by the incompatibilities between what is said and what is understood by the characters.

Irony can be shared by the speaker and receiver (encoder and decoder) of a message or can be enjoyed by an outside observer at their expense. If irony is shared, it means that the interlocutors agree about the code used and the context referred to in the speech act. Communication occurs even if “communication” is restricted to the expression of an ironic mood. For instance, if the speaker and receiver agree that a blizzard is raging out of doors (agreement about the context), the statement “What a beautiful day!” commmunicates the speakers’ indirect derision of the weather. However, disagreement about the code or the context results in an ambiguous message and a breakdown in communication.²⁶ The consequences may be a source of confusion for the observer who is unaware of the dual codes and contexts included in the speech act. For instance, if the speaker, referring to the blizzard outside, says, “What a beautiful day!” and if the receiver is unaware of the storm, the latter will “read” a different message, and may even act upon the misinformation (leave the house without an overcoat). Consider the following confusion about the code. If a speaker says, “This tea is bitter,” and the receiver hears “better,” the latter might proceed to fill his interlocutor’s cup with the undesirable brew.

In everyday discourse, in which the emphasis is on communication, the goal is to clear up the ambiguity and restore communication. In Miracle de la rose, a novel about the impossibility of comunication, ambiguity in reported speech is an end in itself. While characters themselves are unaware of the source of misunderstanding, the narrator reports their discourse in order to underscore the irony of a speaking situation in which speakers seem to be performing two distinct texts at the same time. In the following passage, the Bishop of Tours speaks to the boys in the reformatory at Mettray:

The irony of this passage derives from a focus on the puerile speech style of the speaker. Both “petits pioupious” and “petits agneaux” refer to the boys who are anything but childlike, cute, and innocent. The “little soldiers” spend the night masturbating in the trenches, while the “little lambs” do the same in their pews at Mettray. As the Bishop continues, the utter failure of his speech to convert these poor lost souls is painfully obvious. The boys turn from thoughts of salvation and turn to violent action.

If Mettray reformatory is “an oasis of religious calm,” it is a Mettray which eludes the inmates, who know only depravation, loneliness, and violence. The sad irony of this passage derives from a focus on the dialogic structure of discourse. Unlike the irony of Ernestine’s speech in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, the irony of the Bishop’s statement derives from conflicts between the frames of reference of speakers and interlocutors in the speaking situation. The ideological framework of the speaker has nothing in common with that of his interlocutors. He clearly does not “speak their language.” Lacking any voice in the Bishop’s monologic discourse, the boys respond with physical violence, making it impossible for the Bishop to continue speaking.

Bakhtin describes linguistic standardization as an act of violence perpetrated on the individual by discourses of authority:

The speaking situation at Mettray is a fit model for social revolt provoked by the utter incapacity (unwillingness) of authority to acknowledge the discourse of others, to recognize the other as a subject. Throughout Miracle de la rose the failure of priests and guards to speak the discourse of others, and the refusal of prisoners to speak the discourse of authority, lead to violent misunderstandings.

For example, the guards at Mettray fail to understand the codes forming erotic meanings in the discourse of inmates. The narrator describes the evolution of an argotism, “faire un doigté,” as it passes from inmate to inmate. “Faire un doigté,” as the narrator defines it, means to be poked in the derriere by one of the tough guys or “marles.” Though the verb “faire” is in the active form, it actually means, according to the narrator, “se laisser faire,” meaning that the verb “faire” in this expression marks the subject as the receiver of the gesture. The active form of the expression, referring to the man who performs the finger job, is “prendre un doigté.”

The active and passive forms of this expression are marked for gender identification; thus a “marle’s” virility would be insulted if someone accused him of “faire un doigté.” The problem is that only the initiates are privy to the codes determining the active and passive markings. A well-meaning guard, attempting to penetrate the prisoner’s world by speaking their language, improperly uses the expression “faire un doigté” and incurs the wrath of a “marle.” Thinking it means “s’être branlé” (masturbate), the guard jokes with Villeroy, a tough brute.

His masculinity insulted, Villeroy responds quickly and terribly: he jumps on the guard, knocks him to the floor and beats the life out of him. The narrator explains, in a passage which was cut from the Gallimard edition and the translation,

For the narrator, argot represents a secondary male sex trait since it symbolizes the eroticization of language on an individual, idiosyncratic level which escapes standardization.²⁷ The speech of clergy and guards in Miracle de la rose lacks this sexual, virile dimension. These characters either speak like old ladies or misread the sexual expressions uttered by the prisoners.

The erotic code governing the encoding and decoding of argot symbolizes linguistic creativity. Ignorance of the sexual code symbolizes the castration to which standardization submits language. Genet typically describes clergy, prison guards, lawmakers, and other speakers of official language in effeminate terms. For example, the chaplain at Mettray has a feminine verbal tic, the habitual use of “si,” “expression of a sigh and common in feminine conversation and literature” (M. R.; 230). “On se sentait si heureux,” ‘Je fus si loin de tout’” (M. R.; 150).

It goes without saying that argot terms normally fall into conventional usage as they pass from person to person, generation to generation. As Guiraud points out, however, secret codes governing the formation of argot cause the lexicon to undergo constant renewal, playing with the context, as Bakhtin would say, the “borders” of language, submitting language to “spontaneously creative stylizing variants.²⁸” The narrator of Miracle de la rose is interested in the parallels between argot and poetry, between the criminal and the poet as militant renovators of language.

For Genet argot and standard French are at odds because of the different priorities determining their formation. The goal of standardization is communication—among the greatest number of speakers, with greatest efficiency of effort. Standardization reduces the natural polyvalence of words and limits personal creativity according to codes. Argot shapes language to fit the needs of the speaking subject by exploiting the polyvalence of words and the plasticity of their sounds. As a result,

For Sartre speakers of argot are indeed criminals, since they transgress the official code governing linguistic homogeneity in order to sustain a subculture which thrives on the systematic corruption of society:

Sartre does not point out that speakers of argot in Genet do not succeed in communicating among themselves any better than with the lawmakers. The plasticity of the words and the instability of their meanings cause endless misinterpretation of discourse among prisoners. Even a special inflection or intonation of the voice can twist the meaning of words. The narrator shows how an innocent exclamation, “Oh, dis!” can be interpreted as an invective. Spoken by the prisoner Beauvais, the expression incites Villeroy to violence.

In the next passage, the narrator not only illustrates Villeroy’s propensity for violence, but points to the power of another argotism, “Il lui vola dans les plumes” (“He tore into him” or literally, “flew into his feathers”), to move the character to action.

Genet then expands this same expression into his own discourse and is similarly moved to violence. Using “il lui vola dans les plumes” to describe the action of Villeroy, the narrator remembers another incident when he himself engaged in a fight with a fag, Charlot. The fight was incited by a verbal challenge, a play of wit leading to the narrator’s own statement, “I’m going to tear into him.” Word-play on the words “voler” (to fly) and “plumes” (feathers), which engenders this passage, is lost in the English translation. Referring to his sexual prowess with women, Charlot declares,

A metonymical chain of semantic derivations, surnaturel—anges—[ailes]—plumes, leads to the battle cry, “J’vais lui voler dans les plumes!” Repeating this expresion in a sort of incantation moves the narrator to violence.

The free-associations generated by Charlot’s speech not only produce the narrator’s discourse but shape the direction of the action. Charlot meant by “surnaturel” his greater-than-average sexual prowess with women, literally, supernatural. The word makes the narrator think of celestial, winged beings, a likely image for Charlot’s true sexual ambivalence. Associating Charlot with the idea of a fairy, Genet in turn remotivates the expression “voler dans les plumes.” To the extent that Charlot has “wings,” so will his flight be curtailed as the fight ensues.

Reported speech not only forms a semiotic model for the narrator’s transformations of another’s discourse through derivation, condensation, prefixing and so on. The remotivation of “voler dans les plumes” and its expansion into the narrative demonstrate the power of dialogic interaction to produce actions as well as verbal performances.

In Miracle de la rose the slippery movement of the narration between a focus on the speech act and reference to a diegetic context reveals a disjuncture between speaking and being in narrative discourse and allows the narrator to elude representation as such. While standard French and criminal argot define the speaker according to his social milieu and his gender identification, the dialogic interaction of these speech styles in Genet constitutes a mise-en-scène of the existential problem of freedom. Genet struggles to escape the prison-house of language which holds the subject in a dialectic relation to the discourse of authority.²⁹ A re-formed prisoner (not “reformed” according to society’s laws, but his own), the narrator speaks neither the language of prisoners nor the language of the law. Genet has ceased his former complicity with the other’s discourse, traced in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs by the fragile boundaries separating his discourse from the discourses of his underworld characters. In Miracle de la rose the narrator’s growing separation from the criminal milieu is traced by quotation marks which distinguish argot from his own speech style.

Quoted argot usually occurs within the narrator’s descriptions of himself as a participant in the narration. In these cases the narrator seems to be quoting his former self rather than highlighting someone else’s speech style.

Here the quotation marks separating narrative discourse from reported speech lack the ironic distance which characterized the narrator’s earlier commentaries upon characters’ speech. They are traces, rather, of the narrator’s rejection of his underworld heroes, a renunciation of his former self. The discourse of the other in these passages is the discourse of another Jean Genet.

The disintrication of the narrator’s speech from the speech of others in Miracle de la rose marks a stage in the realization of his personal identity.

Genet even takes advantage of his distinct, literary style to keep others at a distance.

Genet concludes Miracle de la rose with a somewhat pessimistic solution to the dialogic problem of personal freedom. Refusing both the discourse of authority and the discourse of the outlaw, the narrator condemns himself to silence.

In this passage, Genet brings to mind his namesake, San Juan de la Cruz, who founded, with Santa Teresa d’Avila, the Carmelite order of the frères déchaussés. Like Genet, San Juan de la Cruz was poor, was imprisoned, and was led to merge mysticism and eroticism in his poetry. Robert Graves points out a homosexual component to his mysticism: the ideal, sexual union of Man with God the Father.³⁰

Marguerite Duras has said that to write is to be no one, to be “dead”; “Ecrire, c’est n’être personne. ‘Mort’, disait Thomas Mann.”³¹ Unlike San Juan de la Cruz, Genet did not ultimately pursue literary mysticism as a way out of his silence, but chose writing as a means of being “no one.” In his future work he wrestled with the problem of speaking one’s mind while eluding identification with one discourse or another. In Pompes funèbres Genet discovered the mask.

Bakhtin describes the mask as the most important element of medieval folk culture, since it permits the subject to draw a line between his official, serious life and his carnival, instinctively humorous life.

The mask constitutes a social convention signalling the suspension of social sanctions and the free play of creative, transforming laughter. Bakhtin insists on the constructive function of laughter in folk culture.

Carnival laughter is intimately related to the subject’s scorn of censorship, including internal restraints such as fear (of death, of evil), and is inseparable from grotesque imagery which integrates the extreme oppositions of human existence, such as male and female, the spiritual and the physical, beauty and evil, comedy and tragedy. The mask symbolizes man’s fundamental cleavage into a subject for itself and a subject for someone else. The mask also permits the human subject to face the terror of death (of hell?) behind an assumed identity.

The figure of the mask originates in Genet’s novels and ultimately shapes his style of theatrical performance. As I mentioned ealier, Bakhtin excludes theatrical dialogue from the realm of dialogism per se, since the latter is characterized by the doubling of narrative voice with reference to other voices in the narration, rather than by the one-dimensional speech of characters engaged in dialogue on stage. Though Bakhtin him-self does not theorize about the place of folk culture in contemporary theater, his study of medieval carnival suggests means of locating a dialogic movement of discourse in Genet’s theater, which resurrects the mask of medieval carnival. It is along these lines that Genet’s novels and theater overlap.

While the narrator and characters in Genet’s third novel, Pompes funèbres, lack the droll aspect of medieval fools and clowns, and while the masks they wear consist of linguistic impersonations rather than theatrical disguises, their use of the mask resembles carnival laughter by giving free play to the contadictions within being. Genet twists reported speech into grotesque disguises which permit him to confront the pain and horror of death in a personal and literary form of funeral rite.

In Pompes funèbres Genet has not really abandoned the prison motif but displaced it onto society at large. The novel is narrated in Paris during the German occupation of World War II and the Liberation of France. While this novel contains elements of the previous novels, the dialogic participation between reported speech and narrative discourse is traced not so much by differences between argot and standard French as between a multiplicity of speech styles, representing a plurality of voices clamoring to be heard. Thus, in one sense, Genet escapes the dialectic of power which opposes the discourse of authority and the discourse of the outlaw by blurring distinctions between the prison and normal society, between the law and the outlaw, between the judges and the accused in the story.

The narrator, Jean Genet, is mourning the death of Jean D., a Resistance fighter killed on the eve of the Liberation. Other characters, who seem to enter the story only to contribute their speech styles to the polyphony of voices, include Erik Seiler, a German soldier who is also the lover of Jean D’s mother, and Hitler. Both Erik and Hitler speak French as well as their native tongue. Only Riton and his pals, recruited into the Milice, or secret police, from the Parisian underworld, speak argot.

The narrator has less occasion to free-associate on argot spoken by characters in Pompes funèbres than in the other two novels, but when he does so he uses reported speech to pull together the major threads of the novel. In this novel Genet seems to have discovered the political meaning of others’ discourse and the relations among sex, death, and representation which the dialogic structure puts into play.

Early in the novel, Genet visits the mother of his dead friend, only to be greeted by Erik, a German officer. Though Erik is a personification of the enemy that killed Jean D., and though he might even have pulled the trigger himself, his virilty excites Genet. Faced with the difficult irony of this situation, the narrator Genet borrows another’s discourse to speak about his desire. Once again, the narrator’s transformations of reported speech are the moving force of narrative discourse. Looking at Erik planted uncomfortably in his chair, the narrator fantasizes about buggering him up his “oeil de Gabès.” Then he remembers hearing this expression spoken by a soldier in the street, boasting about his sexual exploits in Tunisia. This word-play is lost in the English translation.

“Oeil de Gabès” (“eil deug Habès”) condenses a sexual argotism, oeil, and a place-name, oued Gabès, a waterway in Tunisia which is too shallow for large ships to enter. Exploiting the ambivalence of this expression, the narrator, still speaking inwardly, discusses the exotic world of North Africa and the various synonyms in argot for the homosexual aim.

Contemplating the profane discourse of others in the narration leads Genet to thoughts of love-making with Jean D. and to his “oeil de bronze.” Though he is still seated in front of Erik, this linguistic and erotic fixation is the vehicle for moving in time and space from the street scene to the scene of Jean D.’s funeral. Genet recalls still another man’s discourse to describe the interior of the church, “noir comme dans le trou du cul d’un nègre.” His memory of the funeral ends and the narrator returns to the diegetic present and his erotic fixation on Erik’s “oeil de bronze.”

Genet, like Bakhtin, recognized that monologic discourse subjects the individual to institutionalized terrorism by silencing, overtly or covertly, others’ discourse.³² Thus Genet blurs distinctions between war and theft, the warrior and the thief. It is not a matter of indifference that the novel begins with a long digression on the various argot terms for the homosexual aim, a digression which ties together the themes of politics, death and desire along the lines of a (mis)-representation of the discourse of others. By weaving the narration around a pornographic fixation of language, Genet not only establishes the grotesque as a model for the narration; he plants a bomb in the French literary pantheon.

If argot constitutes the permanent “rape” of standard French, this act is normally rendered impotent by the fact that bourgeois society marginalizes speakers of argot, assimilating their discourse into dominant culture as the opposite of the “same,” as the dark side of monologic discourse. Genet, an author/narrator standing on the border between both worlds, an author both recognized for his literary prowess and scorned for his “abjection,” uses others’ discourse as a political weapon. In Genet, the dialogic structure of discourse represents the complicity between the discourse of authority and the discourse of the outlaw, exposing a permanent movement of perversion in the construction of official discourse.

In Notre-Dame-des-fleurs and Miracle de la rose, double-voiced discourse serves mainly to represent the author/narrator’s struggle to learn his own identity. In Pompes funèbres, Genet poses the question of other’s discourse in terms of a politics of representation. Representation is political in the sense that it constitutes a moment in the production of (historical, ideological) truth, not simply a means of mirroring universal truths. While Socialist Realism avoids the question of the ideological production of the subject by masking the means of this production, and while Russian Formalism eludes this question by highlighting the technical and material structure of literary discourse, Bakhtin asks us to examine the lie at the origin of representation. Jean Genet seems to fulfill this project when he exposes an act of dissimulation underlying narrative discourse, producing a subject always and already divided in language. The political setting of Pompes funèbres allows Genet to project this problematic onto the representation of history.

The German occupation of France did not dismantle the monologic order of bourgeois society but placed it within the political hierarchy of a police state. Difference, in this order, is less a function of linguistic contrasts between the speech of one, dominant group and its “other,” than of structural oppositions between subject and other in a dialectic of power. Thus, for example, Riton speaks argot with other militiamen, German with the occupying army, and occasionally falls into a speech style which suspiciously resembles the narrator’s. Throughout Pompes funèbres this kind of performance undermines the claim of any one social group to the discourse of authority.

Jean D.’s mother usually whines in an inflected version of standard French, but occasionally slips into argot. Putting argot into her mouth, the narrator takes a typical stab at motherhood. The sexual symbolism of argot is not as important here as in the other novels. Argot in Madam D.’s speech is not a figure for her virility as it was for Ernestine, but a means of humbling her aristocratic pretensions.

In such speech, “Madame” resembles her maid. Genet would later develop the irony of this speaking situation in his play Les Bonnes. In the play, Madam’s speech betrays her inferior social origins, while the maids speak like poets.

Contrasts between German and French, as well as those between standard French and argot in reported speech, are the primary means for tracing the dialogic participation between character and narrator in Pompes funèbres. Erik’s foreign nationality figures in his spoken French in the pronunciation, syntax, and vocabulary he uses in this scene with Genet:

The representation of Erik’s speech changes with respect to the different characters with whom he speaks. With Riton he commands discourse and speaks German more than French.

These changes in Erik’s speech represent changes in the power structure of the various speaking situations. In other words, characters speak for other characters in their entourage according to a political “economy.” French is the language of authority in the apartment of Jean D.’s mother. Since the liberating army has occupied Paris, Erik relies on Madam D. for his very life. Thus, with her, Erik speaks French to the best of his ability.

For Riton, speaking argot symbolizes a basic refusal of bourgeois values and allegiances, and therefore precipitates his recruitment into the Militia, whose password is betrayal.

Equally symbolic is the fact that in this novel members of the Resistance speak flawless French.³³ They represent proper bourgeois society.

In Erik, Riton recognizes his master’s voice. From this moment on there is no turning back, no means of escape from this web of enmeshed discourses.

Soon Riton himself speaks the enemy tongue, thereby betraying his mother tongue while sealing his pact with the devil.

Ironically, the very qualities which serve Riton in the Militia—ruthlessness, unscrupulousness, eagerness for a weapon—render him suspicious in the eyes of the occupying army. Moreover, his ability to serve the French government separates him from the “pure crook,” by nature an anarchist (P. F.; 158). Hated by patriots, alienated from the underworld, suspected by the Germans, Riton adjusts his speech to conform to others’ discourse, losing his own voice in the process. Riton thus embodies the theme of social and psychological alienation which figures so prominently in Genet’s treatment of speech acts.

Differences in speech styles distinguish the narrator from characters in the narration. These same differences permit Genet to represent the narrator speaking from the mouths of his characters. From time to time characters drop their habitual speech styles and speak in the narrator’s literary style. These changes correspond to the shifts in position of the narrating subject, the “I” of the discourse, from the narrator to one of his characters, discussed in chapter 1 of the present book.

We first read the narrator Genet’s voice in Erik’s speech in a scene where Erik grants sexual favors to the executioner of Berlin. Rather than speak with his usual German inflection and syntax, Erik speaks flawless French. Finally, the narrator reveals himself by inserting narrative “I” into the scene. The executioner asks Erik,

Likewise, Riton’s use of standard French in several brief dialogues with Erik, rather than argot or German as usual, reveals the presence of the narrator speaking through this character.

and

Notice the contrast with Riton’s usual speech. Here again the grammatical and semantic transgressions of standard French by argot are not as marked in the English translation.

and

The dialogic interaction of voices in Pompes funèbres culminates in a kind of role-playing which anticipates Genet’s theater, where the speaking and spectating subject is staged in a play of reflections between the actor, his character, and his character’s role. The narrator of Pompes funèbres even refers to theatrical performance as an ideal mode of creative transformation.

Like an actor in search of a character,³⁴ the narrator breathes life into Hitler. Only now can Hitler in turn play the role of actor perversely embodying another Jean Genet.

By substituting his own speech for the speech of characters, the narrator places a mask there where the subject appears to speak. Reported speech, traditionally a means of representing character, becomes a vehicle for representing the narrator in disguise. The imbrication of reported speech and narrative discourse in Genet evolves from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs to Pompes funèbres into a doubled figure of the narrator-actor playing the roles of his characters.³⁵

It might be asked why the narrator goes to the trouble of replacing character speech with his own discourse, rather than speaking directly to the reader without disguise. By developing an esthetic of dissimulation, Genet seeks to create a tension within narrative representation which transforms the narrative into a kind of mise-en-scène. Neither a mirror of transcendental reality—the signified of Kantian metaphysics, nor an image of universal truth—the object of Aristotelian poetics, narrative representation shapes a hall of mirrors in which reality itself is redefined as an illusive imitation of an imitation.³⁶

When Genet exposes the mask underlying the production of narrative discourse and reported speech, he shifts the focus of poetics from mimetic relations between speech and being to dialectical relations between subject and other in textual performance. This kind of performance marks both the erasure of individual identity (such as the identity of the author) and places in question the notion of an original unity of the speaking subject of poetic discourse (the identity of the narrator), by defining the subject as something for someone else. Thus being is endlessly doubled in textual performance, threatened with death in the moment of its externalization in representation. The “funeral rites” of Genet’s novel not only refer to the narrator’s mourning for a dead friend, but celebrate the death of the transcendental subject and signified of narrative discourse.

The work of contemporary authors, including Genet, Duras, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, demands a rethinking of poetry and poetics to account for passages between text, theater, and film in any given work. To the extent that poetic theories focus on semiotic performance rather than on the closure between the form, the substance, and the material of discourse, they free representations from their ontological destinies and focus instead on the movements between modes and genres. Bakhtin himself saw the relation between performance and the merging of genres in his study of medieval carnival.³⁷ Carnival performance mediated humankind’s temporary liberation from the social constraints of monologic authority and transcended the boundaries between the arts of song, dance, and theater.

The figure of the mask originates in Genet’s novels and ultimately shapes his style of theatrical performance. Genet could more fully realize his ideal of the double in theatrical representation because theater includes a vast repertory of semiotic systems, including gestures, voice, and movement, as well as language. In the plays, role-playing occurs not only along the lines of borrowed discourse, but by means of borrowed costumes, vocal intonation, and decor. No doubt the theater’s greater possibilities for the representation of difference and doubling influenced Genet’s decision to turn to the theater. After publishing a fourth novel, Querelle de Brest (1948), which is considerably more “diegetic” or focussed on the story than the other three novels, Genet would quit the narrative form as such.³⁸

In a letter to Pauvert, the publisher of Les Bonnes, Genet writes:

As I discuss in chapter 5 of the present book, Genet’s theatrical characters are fictional creations, but might also be means for representing the “author,” a sort of narrator playing the role of another Jean Genet. Characters seem to speak “out of character”: maids speak like poets, prostitutes like bankers, blacks like aristocrats. Though an ideal of theatrical performance shapes narrative representation in Genet’s novels, the opposite is also true. The dialogic interaction between narrative voice and the discourses of characters in the novels shapes Genet’s ideal of theatrical performance. The figure of the mask opens up critical differences between the actor, the fictional role, and the roles characters themselves play in Genet’s theater, reinforcing a doubling of dramatic “voice.” This process both “destroys” character in the traditional sense and points to the reader and spectator as participants in the performance.

Genet’s work, like Bakhtin’s, is nourished by the discovery that discourses of authority do violence to the individual by containing racial, social, and sexual difference in an order of the “same.” By exposing representation to the dangers of performance, Genet, a homosexual and a thief, not only challenges the Aristotelian tradition in poetry and poetics, he commits acts of terrorism against the French literary establishment.