THREE

Semiosis as Performance

In one of the rare attempts to situate Genet’s writing style in a modern tradition, Joseph MacMahon has said that the generation of Genet’s narrative proceeds, like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, according to a process of memory and the reconstruction of a narrative past.¹ He also claims that Genet’s homosexuality shapes the synthesis of opposites, such as beauty and evil, in coherent symbols. To say, however, that in Genet “literary memory” actually recaptures the past by means of a chain of metaphorical associations is to miss the deliberately disjunctive style of Genet’s writing and his radical departure from the esthetics of synthesis which Proust, in some ways, represents.² Moreover, I contend that the overtly homosexual meaning of the form of metaphor in Genet’s work derives precisely from a movement of irreconcilable difference between elements of literary discourse.

Genet, whose sexual practices separate him from dominant, heterosexual society and the discourse of homogeneity, deploys metaphors in a way which works against the creation of a “proper sense” through which semantic difference can be contained. By this means, Genet focusses on the movement of the subject in narrative space, a kind of performance which metaphorical difference puts into play.

Paul Ricoeur suggests means of accounting for the performative dimension of metaphor in Genet, in terms of a general theory of semiosis modelled after the movement of the speaking subject in metaphorical discourse. In La Métaphore vive, Ricoeur shifts the focus of poetics from relations between words in tropes to relations between figures and the discourses producing them.³

In the same gesture Ricoeur challenges the primacy of the image fostered by the Aristotelian tradition. In the theory of tropes the proper sense is not a concept per se, but an image which hovers somewhere between the literal and figurative usages of a word, while moving the speaking subject from the logical plane of discourse to the realm of the senses.⁴ The image creates an illusion of the immediate presence of meaning to perception, masking the irreconcilable conflict between meaning and reference to the context.⁵

Ricoeur claims that theories which privilege the closure of form and meaning, including Roman Jakobson’s notion of the poetic function of language and Gérard Genette’s notion of the “signe poétique,” fail to account for the problem of the human being’s place in figurative discourse, a problem which can only be addressed with reference to an act of predication in the speaking subject. By circumscribing the relation of the figure to the discourse in which it occurs, trope theories avoid the difficulty posed by the disjuncture between the meaning and reference of metaphor, thereby ignoring philosophical differences between logic and rhetoric. This kind of disjuncture constitutes the metaphorical “force” of discourse, and originates in the paradoxical nature of the copula “to be” underlying metaphorical statements.

By locating metaphor in the verb producing metaphorical meaning, Ricoeur introduces the philosophical question of the place of the speaking subject in metaphorical discourse, a subject produced by an act of predication divided in its very function.

Before discussing Ricoeur in detail, I would like to point out that when Genette examines the metonymical “motivation” of metaphors in Proust (“Métonymie chez Proust”), shaped by the contiguity of two terms in the diegesis or fictional context, he does not theorize about the act underlying the formation of metaphors, but describes formal relations leading up to and justifying the final comparison between two terms in the figure. Genette concludes that the interaction of metaphorical and metonymical associations assure the “ ‘necessary’ cohesion of the text,”⁶ while Ricoeur emphasizes the inherently conflictual structure of poetic discourse.

In Ricoeur the speaking subject creates a new level of semantic “pertinence” on which to negotiate relations of difference and similarity joining/separating the literal meaning and the figurative use of a word. This process implies a shift between the structure of meaning and reference to the context. For example, the reference to Achilles in the statement “A lion walked into battle” constitutes the figurative use of “lion.” The “proper sense” or metaphorical meaning of the statement results from the isolation of those semantic traits common to both the idea of the lion and the idea of Achilles, such as courage and leadership. Ricoeur argues that the “proper sense” of metaphor resists assimilation into a coherent image or final concept, because the act of predication which produces metaphorical meaning is contradictory. Achilles both is and is not a lion.

Next, by showing that the movement between the structure of meaning and reference to the context is at the origin of all meaning production, Ricoeur is able to claim that the movement of metaphor can be generalized into a model for semiosis or sign production. In other words, the “to be or not to be” of metaphorical naming characterizes the very process by which the literal meaning of words comes into being in the first place. In this move Ricoeur both discredits the notion of a final interpretation of metaphorical discourse and places in question the assumption of an original, literal meaning of words from which figures seem to digress. Ricoeur echoes the point of view of Bakhtin, for whom

Metaphor would be a special case of the general movement of semiosis generated by the subject’s performance in discourse. The subject constantly negotiates differences between the semiotic plane of discourse, defining the relation between signifier and signified in conventional signs, and the semantic plane, defining the relation of signs to the context.⁸

Ricoeur clarifies distinctions between indexation (shaping logical relations of reference and subject-address in discourse), metonymy (shaping relations of contiguity between the lexical terms of a figure), and syntagmatic alignment (shaping relations between words in the sentence). Such distinctions allow us to move beyond semiotic questions as to the structure of discourse toward philosophical issues surrounding the construction of being and meaning through discourse.

Ricoeur reacts in part to Jakobson’s famous reduction of differences between grammar and rhetoric to a single binary opposition between associations by similarity and associations by contiguity, under the rubric metaphor/metonymy.⁹ While Jakobson made this move in the hope of defining a general semiotic of discourse which would transcend linguistics per se, he effaced ontological and epistemological distinctions between logic and rhetoric, pushing aside an entire category of association by contiguity formed by indexation. Indices, including, in the most rigorous sense of the term, personal and demonstrative pronouns, govern not so much the structure as the force of discourse, consisting as they do in the inscription of subject-address and reference in language. The question of semiosis as performance engages neither the structure nor the force of metaphor taken separately, but the interaction of the two in poetic discourse. By tracing the movement of indexation within metaphor, we can begin to approach poetics in terms of a staging of the subject in the literary text.¹⁰

When Ricoeur disintricates the structure of metaphorical meaning from the movement of subject-address and reference in metaphorical discourse, he also responds to debates fostered by speech act theorists concerning relations between rhetoric and performance. While structural theories privilege the form of meaning over the contract shaping communication between subjects in an empirical situation, speech act theorists, including Austin, Searle, and Strawson, privilege questions of reference and subject-address, at the expense of strictly semiotic concerns. When Austin first defines a new category of utterances, “performatives,” with reference to the meaning of the speech act itself, when he ultimately declares all utterances to be in some sense “performative” because of their implicit reference to the contract binding subjects in discourse, he excludes sentences whose meaning, i.e., the conventional signification of the words, might be at odds with the speaker’s intentions and the situation of the speaking event. For instance, a promise to wed uttered during a wedding rehearsal or a theatrical performance cannot be upheld in a court of law. Such statements are not lies, they are simply “unfelicitous”: they cannot be included in Austin’s category of everyday verbal contracts.

Performatives focus on the “here” and “now” of the speaking event and exclude the problem of signification per se, the realm of “locutionary acts.” Rhetoric would belong in the realm of locutionary acts and would seem to have nothing to do with performatives. When Austin delimits the category of performatives in terms of the sincerity of the speaker and the appropriateness of the pragmatic situation of discourse, he takes for granted a unified subject of everyday, logical discourse, a subject whose intentions transcend those accidents inscribed in language itself, including the force of irony, role-play, and word-play.

What is at stake here is not whether Austin correctly or consistently defines the form or function of performative utterances, or even the performative function of all utterances, but whether his taxonomy helps to address the question of the fundamentally “unhappy” situation of man in language, namely, that saying is fundamentally at odds with meaning. If, for example, someone says, “I’ll bet it rains today,” we do not necessarily expect him to pay up if he is wrong. The verb “to bet” can be intended literally or figuratively, depending on the context.

Thus while performative utterances seem at first to have nothing in common with the problem of metaphor, they both involve a conflict between saying and “meaning” (including the intentions of the speaker).¹¹ The “intended” meaning and metaphorical meaning (the proper sense of poetic discourse) intersect along the lines of a movement between the conventional meaning of words and the reference of discourse, the “semiotic” and “semantic” levels of language defined by Benveniste.

For example, if the speaker says, “I’ll bet,” in the course of a card game, his intention to stake money or some other property on his move is expressed in the literal meaning of the verb. Reference to the context helps to clarify the meaning of discourse, and the meaning of the speech act in turn, but does not provide a fool-proof guard against ambiguity. The gambler might be using the expression figuratively, and be held to his words by a strict enforcement of the verbal contract implied by the relation of “I’ll bet” to the speaking situation. Though this ambiguity could lead to a fight over the responsibilities of the speaker, communication can continue once the ambiguity is resolved.

Metaphor, on the other hand, produces a movement in the imagination between the figurative use and the literal sense of an expression, a movement which produces the “force” of metaphor and which gradually diminishes as metaphors are assimilated into conventional usage. If an author writes, “was this the face that launched a thousand ships,” reference to the historical events motivating the figures “face” and “launched ships” (i.e., the beauty of Helen provoked the Trojan War) helps to clarify the meaning of the statement without reducing the meaning to a concept. In this statement the movement between the figure and reference to the discourse remains lively, resisting assimilation into a logical, one-dimensional meaning. As Ricoeur says,

To some extent, metaphors cease to be “metaphors” as they lose their force through disambiguation, as the proper sense replaces the literal sense in common usage.

From the standpoint of interpretation, metaphorical meaning differs from the intended meaning of literal statements in that metaphors derive their force from the interaction of difference and similarity between two meanings, while the force of a verbal contract derives from the ultimate clarification of the speaker’s intentions. If however, following Austin, we distinguish between the effects of speech acts on the interpreter of the message, the “perlocutionary effects,” from the production of the intended meaning, we discover important parallels between the “metaphorical meaning” of poetics and the “intended meaning” of speech act theory.¹² On the level of their production, the notions of metaphorical meaning and intended meaning share a common origin in an act of predication in the speaking subject, who must negotiate differences between the conventional meaning of words and the reference of discourse. Thus Ricoeur claims that a movement of metaphor shapes the subject’s performance of all kinds of statements, including the meaning of verbal contracts, statements or dimensions of statements which focus on the “here” and “now” of the speaking event.

When Ricoeur uncovers a movement of metaphor generating speech acts, he states something of the difficulty of formulating a fail-safe category of statements defined by the verifiability of the contract binding subjects in discourse.¹³ Ricoeur places in question the very notions of the “here” and “now” of discourse, the immediate present and presence of the speaking event, by exposing the inevitable division of the subject in that space, that time. “The literal ‘is’ accompanies the metaphorical ‘is not’” (M. V.; 271, my translation). Thus Austin’s “performative function,” which calls into play the sincerity of the speaker and the felicity of the speaking situation, is always and already troubled by the not-here, the not-now of the subject to itself in metaphor.

By including both performatives and metaphorical statements in a general semiotics of performance, we not only isolate the act of predication shaping man’s place in language, but are able to discuss how subjects become something for other subjects in metaphorical discourse. It is at this juncture that we can examine how relations between poetics and performance shape the rhetorical space of Jean Genet’s novels.

In Genet analogical figures join terms which are either discontiguous in the diegesis, or so semantically incompatible or far-fetched as to resist assimilation into an image or “proper sense.” There is an indexical dimension to such figures which leads the narrating and reading subject between the time of the narration and the time of the narrating event, in the same way that it shapes interrelations between on- and off-stage space in Genet’s plays, which I discuss at length in chapter 5. Suffice it to say here that in the plays this kind of movement disturbs the mimetic closure of text and performance, holding the spectator in suspense as he tries to find himself (his projections) in the representation.

By accounting for the indexical function of metaphors in Genet, we are able to describe the implication of the speaking subject in the production of metaphorical meaning, since the indexical function, by definition, introduces questions of reference and subject-address into problems of semiosis. In this context, “reference” does not name relations between words and empirical reality as it does in Austin’s speech act theory, but between words and the context or world shaped by literary discourse.¹⁴ The problem of subject-address is inscribed in the reference of discourse, since reference is produced by an act of predication in the speaking subject.

For instance, in the following figure from Pompes funèbres, the semantic disparity between a matchbox and a casket conceals a transference of desire from one object to the other in the narrator’s imagination, while tracing a movement in time and space between the present of the narration and the narrator’s memories. Sitting in the apartment of Jean D.’s mother, Genet remembers how he came to associate the matchbox with the casket of his dead friend during the funeral. We move from the narration of the funeral scene back to the present along a trajectory traced by a displacement of the matchbox:

The displacement of the matchbox between the funeral and the scene with Erik ultimately generates the substitution of “matchbox” by “casket.” The figure toward the end of the passage, “j’ai un petit cercueil dans ma poche” (“I have a little casket in my pocket”), results from a series of associations beginning with the somewhat fortuitous comparison of the matchbox with a package or “colis”:

“Colis” serves as a semantic transition between the two more disparate terms, matchbox and casket. It also diverts attention from the psychological importance of this substitution by focussing on the physical similarity of the two terms. As the association of casket and matchbox is repeated, the superficial point of comparison, “colis,” disappears and the matchbox takes on the funereal meaning of the casket.

Thus, “coffin” is not merely a metaphor for “matchbox,” but also an index for the transference of desire from one object to another. As the casket is closed over the body of Genet’s friend, the transference follows the movement of the narrator’s look, from the body to its receptacle. The metaphorical substitution of the casket for the matchbox brings the lost love object into the symbolic possession of the narrator: if the casket contains the body of Jean D., and if the casket is identical to the matchbox, then the matchbox contains the body of Jean D.:

Then follows a kind of montage sequence moving between the funeral and Genet’s encounter of the German officer, the lover of Jean D.’s mother. Genet lets go of the matchbox as his eyes take in the aura of Erik’s sexuality. Desire has moved from Jean D., to the casket, to the matchbox, to Erik, carrying death in its train.

While such figures anchor the relation between narrative past and present, they place in question the unity of narrative voice by submitting the proper sense of metaphor to the pull of indexation.

I must insist that by “indexical function,” I do not mean the “metonymical motivation” of metaphor described by Genette.¹⁵ Genette’s use of “metonymy” to describe the spatial proximity of the two terms of metaphors in Proust, derives from Jakobson’s reduction of all associations by contiguity to “metonymy.”¹⁶ Genette, like Jakobson, confuses the discursive and rhetorical levels of language. Metonymy, and for that matter, synecdoche, are defined structurally in terms of the replacement of one word by another. Metonymical contiguity defines a relationship inherent in the signifieds themselves. In the statement “Sails appeared on the horizon,” the word “sails” evokes the idea of a ship because sails constitute highly visible parts of sailing ships. No such “natural” contiguity exists between a casket and a matchbox. This relationship depends entirely on spatial and psychological associations established by the context of discourse.¹⁷

Eco suggests something of the effects of indexation on the production of metaphor when he discusses the movement of the trace in iconic signs.¹⁸ He reformulates Peirce’s semiotic to show the complexity of the notions of iconic and indexical sign functions, claiming that these types of sign function interact in every instance of discourse. He names the relation of the trace to its content ratio difficilis, since “the form of the expression is motivated by the form of the content one gives it: it has the same visual and tactile marks as the sememe corresponding to it, even if the trace does not represent them identically.” Eco gives the example of the trace left by horses’ hoofs on the ground: the hoof marks are both similar to the hoofs they represent, though not identical to them, and are indices for the event that left them on the ground. The trace “digitalizes” iconic signs by means of reference. Though the relation of hoofprints to hoof is metonymical and derives from the conventional meaning of the word, the relation of hoofprints to the event which produced them is indexical. Its meaning requires a reference to the discourse: “Horses passed by here in x direction x number of hours ago.”

The indexical aspect of metaphor is not dictated by linguistic code, as it is for conventional indices such as proper names and personal pronouns. Whereas the name “John,” for instance, signifies nothing, pointing rather to “the person named John” in the context, digitalized metaphors both struggle with the meaning of words and point to referents in the context. As a result we cannot reduce this kind of metaphor to a category of linguistically coded indices, but can describe a “pointing function” of metaphor created by the speech act in which it occurs.

In Genet, the indexical pull of metaphor joins two locations and two levels of narration, the diegetic event and the narrating event. Take the following example from Pompes funèbres:

Isolated from the context, the association of “fleuves” and “colère” can be justified semantically: the idea of a violently flowing river reminds one of the violent pulse of an angry man. Moreover the word “fleuves,” by means of similarity with “torrents,” acquires something of the conventionalized meaning of that fluvial metaphor for forceful agitation. The agitation wells up in the narrator acting the part of one of his characters, Erik. The geographical indications, “du nord au sud,” could refer to the circulation of the blood through the body (in an unscientific way), but they also concretize the idea of the river as a real location in the narration:

Metaphors are supposed to allow the reader to apprehend meaning immediately by painting a mental image.¹⁹ The indexical function of metaphor in Genet causes the reader to see double by pointing to the prismatic intrication of different moments of the narration in the uncertain present of the narrating event. Thus, rather than simply creating an image of anger in terms of a torrent, the “fleuves”/“colère” figure shifts the reader between two locations in narrative space.

This aspect of Genet’s style cannot be explained by structural theories of narrative. While structural poetics, modelled after the Saussurian sign, focusses on relations between poetic signifier and signified,²⁰ a theory of performance would highlight an act of predication in the speaking subject, an act which negotiates metaphorical difference and similarity, creating a new level of semantic pertinence. When Ricoeur insists on the contradictory structure of the verb “to be” producing metaphorical meaning, he leads us to an understanding of metaphorical discourse as an act of dissimulation or disguise, a performance shaping the subject’s (mis)representation for other subjects through language.

The effects of this performance can only be described with reference to the rhetorical style or philosophical slant of a given author or esthetic movement. Genet not only understands the importance of disguise for the outsider to perform on the inside of dominant culture, but discovers an act of dissimulation at the origin of dominant, heterosexual culture as well. Refusing the plenitude of the poetic image, Genet deploys metaphors which display the underlying cleavage of the subject in language, introducing the violence of his “difference,” his homosexuality, into narrative representation.

In Genet’s spatial metaphors, those which articulate dynamic relations between moments of the narrative, reference to the context does not permanently resolve the disparity between the literal meaning and the figurative usage of a word according to a truer sense of things. Paradoxically, the reference reinforces a disparity between the two by anchoring them in the physical reality of the fiction. For example, in the sentence “J’ai un cercueil dans ma poche,” the casket and matchbox stubbornly resist assimilation into a third meaning, the proper sense of metaphor, because they insistently refer to the events in which Genet found them.

Ordinary metaphors usually combine a concrete, diegetic term with a signifier of something else, motivated or not by their contiguity in the diegesis.²¹ The assimilation of the two terms into a poetic meaning or image is facilitated by the very abstract nature of the signifier. (Saussure, after all, defined the signifier as an “image acoustique.”) In Genet, metaphors trace the intersection of two moments of the narrative. The referential pull of the two terms toward opposite directions in the narration subordinates the poetic image to the force of difference. In Genet, analogical figures are characterized by a dialectical movement between the outside and inside of metaphorical meaning, between the spacing of disparity and the melding of a juncture.

Likewise, the comparing agents comme and pareil in the following figuration from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs function primarily to trace the dynamic interaction among the narration, the narrating event, and the narrator’s memory, by means of a displacement of the word “perles.” This movement is more important than similarities between the various terms of the association. The story of this novel takes place in Paris; the speaker narrates it from a prison workshop, while his memory refers to the provincial cemetery of his childhood.

The traditionally analogical function of comme and pareil thus serves to trace dynamical relations between the various moments of the narrative, rather than to assimilate the various terms of the comparison into a new meaning of “pearls.”²² In Genet the indexical function of metaphors and similes reveals the division of the speaking subject in the not here and not now of narrative discourse, exposing a game of dissimulation at work in the art of imitation. For this reason, metaphorical figures in Genet do not generate a synthetic, analogical, “Impressionist” or Proustian vision of the world, but a kinesthetic, geometric, almost “Cubist” vision, shaped by the force of difference separating things in time and space.²³ This stylistic tendency in Genet reflects, even more than Gérard Genette imagined, “contemporary man’s preference for space, after the Bergsonian inflation of duration.”²⁴

Sometimes the resistance of “difficult” metaphors to semantic resolution contributes to the indexical focus of the figure. Take the association of “head” with the (implied) metaphorical term “airplane” in this passage from Miracle de la rose, in which the narrator describes a vision of the condemned man, Harcamone:

The absurd association of the diegetic term, “tête,” with the source of the airplane noise, “moteur d’avion,” shapes a relation of participation between two events occurring simultaneously in the narration. Miracle de la rose is a chronicle of the narrator Jean Genet’s incarceration in Fontevrault prison during the German occupation. The prisoners experience the reality outside the prison indirectly, in metonymical fragments. We know, for instance, that “Genet” works in a prison shop making camouflage nets for the German army occupying France, and that the war outside caused a reduction in the food supply (M. R.; 10, 27). The fortuitous passage of an airplane over the prison furnishes another trace of the war outside on the prison scene inside and provides sound effects for the narrator’s erotic hallucination about Harcamone, the “miracle” of the rose. Whereas the relation of airplane noise to airplane motor is metonymical, the relation of a head to an airplane motor is indexical. It can only be understood in terms of the movement between two events, including the private drama of the narrator’s desire and the public drama of World War II, in a single moment of the narrative. This kind of figure resembles a piece of evidence left at the scene of a crime or an objet trouvé in a contemporary painting.²⁵ It transcends its metaphorical function (i.e., to enrich the meaning of “head” by means of comparison with an airplane motor) in order to point to the participation of one event in another in the narrative. Unlike the traces mentioned earlier, this figure is not “motivated” by simple analogy, but by coincidence. In the same way, Eco’s example of the denture found at the scene of a crime is not a metaphor for the agent that left it there, but a pure index for his or her implication in the scene.²⁶

In Miracle de la rose, analogical figures impress the feudal history of Fontevrault abbey on the present of the narration, when Fontevrault is used as a prison. Upon arriving at Fontevrault after his arrest, the narrator evokes the distant past by means of analogy:

Like the traces of Baroque and Renaissance renovations still visible on the prison walls, such figures are traces for the past. While they are “motivated” by similarity (valets, like guards, hail the guests at the gate; criminals and knights both have inhabited the buildings of Fontevrault), they function within the narrative to point to the former presence of valets and knights in the current location. “We used to cross through courtyards with infinite sadness, sad because of the neglect which condemns to death the facades of an admirable Renaissance” (my translation). “Nous tráversions des cours d’une tristesse infinie, tristes par le fait déjà de l’abandon qui voue à la mort des façades d’une Renaissance admirable” (M.R.; 13).

The digitalization of metaphors in this manner fulfills the narrator’s fantasy of participating physically in the pomp and virility of the chevalrèsque world by staging an experience of continuity between an imaginary past and the present. In the following figuration, the narrator establishes a new order of knighthood whose members are thugs and assassins:

The power of metaphor to shape the movement between past and present also shapes the interference of the narrator’s hallucinations into the reality of the diegesis. Caught up in the magic of metaphor, the narrator sees his prison cell transform with the wave of a magic wand and finds himself holding a knight instead of his friend, Bulkaen.

This kind of “poetic hallucination” in Genet,²⁷ is created by metaphors which do not simply make images or make meaning visible, but refer to an act of performance shaping the interpenetration of diegetic and extra-diegetic events. Unlike Nerval’s visions in Aurélia or Proust’s description of Swann’s dream in La Recherche, which appear as parenthetical departures from the immediacy of the narration, Genet’s hallucinations occur on a continuum with diegetic reality: now you see it, now you don’t. Describing a hallucination in Pompes funèbres, Genet says:

The metaphor I discussed earlier from Pompes funèbres comparing anger and a torrent recurs later in the narrative, again with reference to the double figure of the narrator playing Erik. It is used as an index not only for the participation of the narrating event in the narration, but as a trace for the participation of both the narrating event and the narration in a poetic hallucination. Here Genet is the chief participant in a cannibalistic feast:

The image of a river refers to three locations in narrative space: the place of the narrating event (next to a “torrent”), the place of the narration in which the metaphor occurs, and the place of the narrator’s cannibalistic hallucination. The movement of reference here destabilizes the unity of narrative voice in the immediacy of narrative discourse. While this figure leads to the comparison of Hitler’s Germany to a country of cannibals, the construction of these parallel scenes turns the movement of metaphor in opposite directions.

In Miracle de la rose the commonplace association of melancholy with an autumn day shapes the participation between the outside and the inside of the narrator’s prison cell.

Here, use of a commonplace metaphor in lieu of a fresh association is the site of the indexical, spatial movement of the figure. Though “autumn” has not replaced “melancholy” in the lexicon, this association has been virtually codified by lyric poets. Statements such as “Those years were the autumn of his life” excite little in the way of an image. The reduction of the visual force of this figure allows it to function as a juncture between reality, fantasy, and memory in the narrative, submitting the metaphorical meaning of “automne” to the staging of difference. Moreover, just as the metaphor takes the narrator outside the prison to a country scene, so the indexical pull of the figure establishes a play between the inside and outside of language, between language turned in upon itself in the poetic sign, and language opened up to the movement of reference in narrative discourse. The prison motif thus becomes itself a metaphor for the prison of linguistic convention which the poet-criminal dares to escape.²⁸

Genet uses metaphorical figures to expand the space of narrative, while submitting the present and presence of narrative discourse to the disturbing effects of difference. While critics who comment on the disjunctive nature of Genet’s style tend to place him among the surrealists, they fail to distinguish between the role of difference in Genet’s metaphors and its role in surrealist metaphors.²⁹ Surrealist poets destroy conventional associations between things and ideas in order to construct fresh meanings around familiar objects. Surrealist discourse produces a new level of semantic pertinence on which the proper sense of metaphor can be located.³⁰ When André Breton calls for the creation of a new world order by means of automatic writing, he counts on the unifying force of analogy to build that order.³¹ Genet, on the other hand, uses metaphor in ways which expose the very difficulty of producing a “proper” sense of homosexual discourse, a discourse muttered on the margins defining the “improper” of dominant, heterosexual discourse. In an important way, the movement of difference in metaphorical figures is itself a metaphor or a model for the movement of homosexual desire in Genet’s discourse.

In heterosexual discourse, relations of difference demarcate first and foremost the sexual opposition between male and female from which all other differences are derived, including relations between subject and object, master and slave, active and passive. Inasmuch as the “female subject” defines the “other” of the male subject, the feminine is always and already shaped within an economy of the “same,” a being whose ontological difference has been reduced to a figure of negation defining “that which the male is not.” This ontology is derived from a biological model defining woman as a man lacking a penis, as the lack itself, which can be recuperated in an image of Man which transcends sexual difference.³² In heterosexual discourse, the movement of desire translates into a move toward the reduction of difference, toward the unifying coherence of the “proper” sense. In other words, heterosexual discourse, including surrealism, reduces difference to the dialectical opposition of I and not-I, rather than recognizing the relation between male and female as one of irreconcilable difference. Hence the importance of the image in surrealist poetry, which masks semantic conflict in a synthesis of the senses, thus linking surrealism with Romanticism. Moreover, surrealist artists and poets translate the violence of metaphorical reduction into images of women being blinded, dismembered, raped, and otherwise subjected to the violence of dominant discourse. Buñuel’s and Dali’s film, Un Chien Andalou, illustrates my point.³³

The subject of metaphorical discourse in Genet cannot be conceived as a fixed identity but as a trace for the movement of difference destroying/producing relations of intersubjectivity in discourse. This means that the categories of masculine and feminine, master and slave, active and passive, are not properties stemming from natural, biological differences between the sexes, but positions determined by the psychological stance the characters, all men, assume in Genet’s fantasies. For example, the passive male is “feminized” by the virility of the more dominant male.

Romantic literature profits from a certain degree of blindness to problems of sexual difference, in order to celebrate an ideal of spiritual unity between men and women in romantic love. Genet both displaces difference from the biological realm to the realm of the subject’s performance of/in erotic discourse and lifts the veil of censorship masking difference in Romantic literature. Furthermore, Genet rejects the reductive coherence of Romanticism by replacing the unity of the subject to itself in the poetic image with an endless play of reflections between subjects in masquerade.

In the following “hallucination” from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, a metaphorical play between masculine and feminine symbols produces the doubled figure of the female impostor. Here, Notre-Dame, alias Adrien Baillon, confesses his crime to Mignon, who turns out to be his father. By revealing his feminine sobriquet, Notre-Dame also exposes his bisexuality.

The sexual symbolism of the Medusa’s head coiffed with snakes, a condensation of male and female figures in a single image, is translated into literal terms as Genet compares the snakes to phalluses sticky with semen.

As the scene progresses, Notre-Dame’s body transforms into a religious reposary revealing an apparition both human and celestial, Our Lady of the Flowers:

The paradoxical substitution of “Notre-Dame-des-fleurs” for the male name Adrien Baillon, plus the comparison of the male body to a receptacle containing a female body, represents the implication of masculine and feminine in the figure of the beau mâle, Genet’s anti-hero. As the vision comes to a close, we move from the realm of the subject’s performance of metaphorical discourse to the sexual performances of Mignon and his son in the narration.

In Aristotle, the art of imitation comes naturally to Man, indeed distinguishes Man from animals.³⁴ Genet forces us to ask who is this man, and how does the metaphysical claim to the unity of Man exclude differences separating outsiders from the insiders of dominant culture? Aristotelian poetics fails to account for voices speaking from the margins of dominant discourse by reducing difference to the ontological order of “the same.” Genet, whose difference excludes him from the Aristotelian category of Man, has mastered the art of imitation only to use it against the violence of metaphysical reduction.

The political dimension of Genet’s art is especially clear in a type of figure which twists symbols borrowed from liturgical and literary tradition into metaphors for crime and sexual perversion. Conventional symbols are signs which present meanings to the mind by way of concrete images. For instance, the cross refers to Christianity without the help of long explanations about the relation of the crucifixion to Christian theology. Genet typically constructs analogies between contradictory terms which, taken by themselves, are conventional symbols for beauty or evil, sacred or profane. Analogies comparing flowers to murderers, for instance, upset normal relations between the symbol and its referent. In the process, Genet exposes the power of representation to reduce the difficulty of moral and social questions by fostering an illusion of the “natural” relation between signs and culturally determined meanings.

The distinction between metaphor and symbol is crucial for understanding relations between rhetoric and philosophy and for clarifying relations between symbol and metaphor in Genet. In “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Derrida sheds light on the place of metaphor in symbolic discourse, while creating new problems over the meaning of the word “metaphor” in his own argument.³⁵ Derrida claims to examine the problem of conventionalized metaphors, while returning time and again to the nature of symbols as tools of metaphysical philosophy. The confusion of metaphor with symbol not only presents technical difficulties, but threatens to undermine the very philosophical issue at stake in Derrida’s argument. He states that “metaphors” (symbols) do not expose the difference underlying their formation, thereby claiming a natural affinity with the meanings they embody. Derrida’s claim about “metaphors” clearly would seem to go against the grain of Ricoeur’s argument, which highlights the movement of negativity producing metaphorical statements, until we realize that Derrida is not debating the status of metaphor per se, but the rhetorical function of symbols in philosophical discourse.

On the one hand, Derrida refers to Aristotle’s definition of metaphor as “ ‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species, from species to genus, from species to species, or on grounds of analogy’ ” (W.M.; 31). On the other hand, Derrida supports his own claim about the place of “metaphor” in philosophical discourse with reference to symbols, which by definition assign sensorial qualities to abstractions. Thus Derrida can state that “abstract notions always conceal a sensible figure” (W.M.; 7). Symbols produce a natural or “motivated” link between the sign and its referent which masks the dichotomy between signifier and signified in ordinary signs, the material of metaphors. While the structure of signs leaves room for the possibility that truth is a function of meaning production, and that meaning is a product of culturally codified discourse, symbols function rhetorically to represent the “truth,” meanings which appear to transcend culture and discourse.

Metaphors play on the relations of signs to each other, while symbols involve the relation of signs to universal meanings. The difference between metaphor and symbol is not simply a question of the formal structure of the two. This difference implies profound distinctions between the truth value of discourses shaped by each kind of figure. While metaphors produce meanings by way of dissimulation, “giving a thing a name that belongs to something else,” symbols claim to bear witness to the absolute, to truths which transcend the very act of giving names.

When Derrida states, in line with Ricoeur, that “metaphor is the moment of possible sense as a possibility of non-sense” (W.M.; 42), he raises the possibility that a movement of metaphor within symbolic discourse could place in question the natural affinity between symbols and their conventional meanings, undermining the very substance of metaphysical discourse. However, by confusing symbol and metaphor throughout the essay, Derrida presents something of a tautology, claiming that the movement of metaphor deconstructs metaphor. While this kind of “deconstruction” might be of interest in describing the rhetorical style of a given poet, it does not aim directly at the larger question of the truth value of the signs of philosophical discourse. Since symbols have a stronger claim to the truth than metaphors to begin with, presenting, as they do, meanings in the immediate present and presence of a thing, it seems that the main interest would be to show how a movement of metaphor shaping all discourse can place in question the epistemological weight of symbols, not metaphors themselves.

Derrida’s reference to the text of Anatole France has direct bearing on my discussion of the philosophical status of symbols in Genet. He quotes a passage between Polyphilos and Aristo on the question of symbols:

The symbols in question are not those which might be produced in the train of the production of individual discourses (such as the association of Proust’s madeleine with the narrator’s spontaneous memories), but conventional symbols such as the cross for Christianity, whose meanings transcend both the discourse in which they occur and the material in which they are represented. (The cross has the same meaning whether it is represented in the form of language, pictures, or sculpture.) Such symbols provide metaphysical philosophers means to construct epistemological categories for naming and ultimately mastering the unknown or unknowable. Symbols are the means by which ordinary men master each other by building ethical and moral systems of inclusion and exclusion, the inside and outside of dominant discourse. “The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute.”

We might say that ordinary men have access to the absolute, to knowledge and the power which knowledge confers, in proportion as they participate in the symbols of dominant culture. Genet, a homosexual and a thief, participates in these symbols, but participates in a manner necessarily different from that of ordinary men. This difference shapes, in turn, Genet’s relation to God, to truth, to the categories of good and evil which guide the lives of ordinary men. Genet participates in the dominant orders of beauty, morality, and sanctity as an outsider, as a man whose voice has already been divided by his difference from other men.

While the metaphysical identification of Man with the idea of consciousness masks the difficulty posed by the forces of desire and history in the constitution of the subject, the identification of homosexual men with the movement of their desire for other men immediately takes one out of the realm of ontology and into the realms of psychology and ideology. Homosexual discourse raises the question of personal identity as a conflict between being for society and being for oneself—as a performance—and poses a threat to the transcendental subject and meaning of dominant discourse. When Genet submits the conventional meaning of religious and poetic symbols to the effects of homosexual discourse, he in turn twists traditional epistemological categories for goodness, beauty, and godliness into contradictory figures which discredit the very grounds for shaping such categories.

Take, for instance, the following association of flowers and murderers from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs:

The traditional symbolic association of flowers with beauty and innocence is contravened by the identification of flowers with the personifications of evil in the discourse. A shift in gender complicates the figure further: “fleurs” is marked for feminine in French, “assassins” is marked for masculine. A term marked for masculine, “fragments,” forms a transition between the two. Genet reiterates this metaphor shortly thereafter, eliminating the transitional term. The parenthetical reminder that “flowers” refers to thugs is so casual as to insinuate the reader’s own complicity in this crime against language.

Such “analogies” resist assimilation into a poetic image or metaphorical meaning, leaving bare the movement of difference implied in metaphor, while submitting the “natural” meaning of symbols to the effects of that difference. In other words, Genet uses a symbol for one thing to name something else, thus introducing a movement of metaphor, the “to be or not to be” of metaphorical naming, into the symbols of dominant culture. He in turn places in question the claims of dominant discourse to truth, knowledge, and power.

In Miracle de la rose Genet pushes the creative power of metaphor to its limits. The association of his anti-hero, Harcamone, with a rose, initiates a process of metaphorical transformation which finally destabilizes the very difference between reality and hallucination.

Eventually we discover that the “rose,” symbol of beauty and mystery, refers to Harcamone’s member, marked for feminine in argot terms such as “la queue,” “la verge,” and “la bite.”

By naming Harcamone’s sex in terms marked for feminine, then identifying him with that part of the body, the narrator is able to address his hero in the feminine, as the object of his own virile desire. Since Harcamone is in reality untouchable, Genet uses metaphor to create a fiction about Harcamone and to place himself in that fiction.

The analogy between “rose” and “murderer” violates the traditional association of flowers with innocence and beauty, while creating a new order of the beautiful with reference to the underside of society. The narrator even composes a poem in praise of Harcamone’s member, perverting the sacred symbolism of romantic love in figures for homosexual desire. In the translation I have italicized words marked grammatically for the feminine in French. (This poem was censored from the Gallimard edition of Genet’s Oeuvres complètes, and consequently from the English translation as well.)³⁶ I quote the third and sixth quatrains:

As I said before, Genet has mastered the art of metaphor. In Aristotle’s terms, Genet has acquired rhetorical skills which separate men from animals and distinguish poets and philosophers from ordinary men. In his sexual orientation, however, Genet is both a man and not a Man, and this paradox shapes his performance of poetic discourse. He thus borrows the language of Romantic poets only to twist it into figures which violate the underlying values separating male and female in romantic love.

Critics such as Pierre de Boisdeffre recognized the danger posed by Genet’s work for French culture.³⁷

Boisdeffre seems not to criticize Genet so much for paying homage to the devil as for doing it in the language of mainstream culture. Genet typically attacks conventional morality and the sanctity of “our literature” by employing sacred symbols in displaced representations of homosexual desire. Furthermore, and perhaps more dangerously, Genet challenges the very notion of universal truth, the cornerstone of the “great works,” when he submits the symbols of dominant culture to the violence of metaphorical difference.

The “miracle” scene from Miracle de la rose is a case in point. The movement of metaphor perverts the symbols of heterosexual discourse, including references to Catholic liturgy, female sexuality, and courtly romance, into figures for homosexual acts. The miracle begins as the narrator describes the transformation of Harcamone’s chains into a garland of white roses.

Once again opposites attract. Guilt and crime are associated with innocence and beauty as roses replace the murderer’s chains. This figuration differs from that mentioned earlier, in that metaphorical substitution here produces poetic metamorphosis, moving the speaking subject between reality and fantasy. The chains both are and are not roses, implying that the speaking subject both is and is not seeing what he “sees.” Included in this passage is a metaphor comparing Harcamone’s curly locks to the crown of thorns, a figure which sanctifies the suffering of a common thug by means of implication with the crucified Christ.

In the course of the transformation, the symbol “roses” acquires a new, sexual referent. The “miracle of the rose” veils the narrator’s fantasy of deflowering his hero.

The rose-cutting symbolizes, by means of convention, the violation of feminine innocence. This meaning is reiterated in the implied allusion to the erotic climax of the Roman de la rose, no doubt inspired by the medieval history of Fontevrault prison. By staging a scene whose symbolic meaning has even been codified in the lexicon (to “deflower” a maiden), Genet makes the stock symbol an obvious target of irony. The “miracle de la rose” culminates in the narrator’s homosexual fantasy, bringing down an entire philosophical and literary tradition which places virtue, beauty, and innocence on the side of women; strength, sexuality, and experience on the side of men. Ironically, the “rose” in Genet’s fantasy refers to Harcamone, a man convicted of raping and killing a little girl.

The irony of the rose-plucking symbolism derives in part from a reflection upon the gesture as a commonplace literary symbol, a reflection foregrounded by a metaphorical perversion of the referent, which slides between male and female. The movement of reference has a curious effect on the rhetorical function of metaphor. Rather than signify something new about the context (the association of Harcamone with the rose does not alter our opinion of his virtue), the symbolic image refers back to the figure as an end in itself, as an imitation of an imitation. In this kind of figure we discover yet another philosophical dimension of Genet’s performance of dominant discourse. The self-referential movement of metaphor turns the symbol into an empty trace for the movement of semiosis, forming a tautology of the sort, “a rose is a rose is a rose.” The cancellation of the meaning of poetic discourse in this kind of figure exemplifies what Sartre has remarked, that “Genet’s poems draw their substance from famous poems whose blood they suck.”³⁸

Genet has discovered the power of metaphor to move the speaking subject between reality and fantasy, logic and desire, meaning and nonsense. He shows that metaphor not only disguises the literal meaning of one thing behind a signifier for something else, but constitutes an act of performance, a means by which subjects represent themselves for other subjects in discourse. To the extent that the “to be or not to be” of metaphor cancels out meaning as soon as it emerges, metaphor constitutes an act of pure performance, a kind of mime-play which transcends the imitation of meaning in the form of language.³⁹ It is this very suspension of the reference of representation which would later characterize Genet’s style of “theater about theater” and shape the spectator’s implication in the events on stage.⁴⁰

In the following example from Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, analogy creates an image of something only to erase it by means of another, contradictory image:

“Capitales” can either mean cities or letters of the alphabet. The commonplace expression, “cities sprout up” initially leans in the direction of the first interpretation, cities. However, the “desert” in which the capitals emerge is not a geographical location but a metaphor for a state of mind. Therefore, we must suspend our first interpretation and think of “capitales” in less concrete terms. As the passage continues, the movement between two ideas—the aridity of a desert and the emergence of language as a creative resource—focusses attention on the less obvious meaning of “capitales,” letters of the alphabet.

The series of analogies beginning with “des capitales comme des cactus” (“capitals like cactus beneath the sky”) and ending with “trempés de curare” (“steeped in poison”), the first, fairly accessible analogy between sprouting capital letters and cactus is upset by the next comparison between cactus (and by extension, the “capitales” to which they are compared) and green suns. In reality, suns do not “sprout up” from below but cast down life-giving light from above. Genet’s suns contradict our expectations: they are green and cast poisonous rays.

The commonplace comparison of a desert with existence recurs in the next sentence in a simile: “Son enfance, comme un sahara.” The paradoxical indications for the size of the desert, “minuscule ou immense,” and the substitution of a giant magnolia for the sun, upset the analogical relation between the two terms of the original simile, since “desert” has lost its conventional semantic make-up in the process. Once more the magnolia, which should grow under the sunlight, surpasses the height of the sun and casts down its own light, odor, and charm. Moreover, the sky into which the magnolia rises is “deep as a cave.”

The work of analogy in this figuration inhibits the rhetorical function of the symbols, namely to give sensorial qualities to abstract states of being, by reducing the symbols themselves to abstractions. The sun exists (it is “present”), but we cannot see it directly without being blinded (it is “invisible”). It casts down rays, but is sheltered by the shade of a giant magnolia. In other words, the movement of metaphor works against the immediate presentation of meaning to perception in symbols, replacing representation with the tracing of semiotic performance.

The third segment of the passage begins with a repetition of the existence/desert metaphor: “Cette enfance séchait sur son sable brulé” (“This childhood was withering on its broiling sand”). It then continues the reference to vision begun in “invisible” with the words “un aperçu sur le magnolia invisible et présent.” The magnolia parallels the sun, since it symbolizes those “presences” which disappear as soon as we attempt to apprehend them by means of perception.

The “unseeable,” in this case, has the “lumière, le parfum, le flux de charme personnel” which we associate with Baudelaire’s synesthetic visions. Unlike the figuration in this passage, Baudelaire’s metaphors usually create parallels between concrete experience, like the perception of a woman’s hair, body, or perfume, and consistently developed imagery depicting a fantasy.⁴¹ The perception of light, perfume, and charm in Genet’s vision occurs in “instants,” rapid moments which cannot be fixed on the retina. They occur in flashes (“traits”) across the mind’s eye. They also resemble pencil strokes (“traits”), marks inscribed by the poet on the blank page, since they evoke no signified, no concrete image. These “instants” trace a movement of poetic imagination in search of a new language.

Genet evokes Baudelaire’s poetics of synesthesia in a type of language which defies synthesis in a poetic image. The contradictory work of analogy in this passage reduces the figure to an empty trace for the work of metaphor, without producing the substance of metaphorical meaning. In place of synesthesia, Genet’s manipulation of metaphor produces kinesthesia, a playful staging of the subject in the folds of figurative discourse. In this regard Genet’s poetics reverberates with Antonin Artaud’s cry for the triumph of mise-en-scène over speech in contemporary theater and culture.⁴²

In borrowing Baudelaire’s imagery only to “suck its blood” in this way, Genet pushes aside a tradition of poetry based on the metaphysical ideal of the “proper sense” of metaphor, making room for a new poetic order based upon the politics of non-sense.

Throughout my discussion, I have returned to the idea of how an author speaking from the margins of dominant culture and ideology manages to be a man though excluded from the notion of Man universalized by metaphysical philosophy. Genet’s difference—his homosexuality, his marginality—prevents him from appropriating the language of dominant discourse, much less the privileged language of the French literary canon, as an ordinary man. Genet’s strength, his “man-hood,” rests in the fact that he chose neither to remain silent nor to mask his difference behind the discourse of heterosexual culture, but to impose his difference on the signs and symbols of dominant discourse. By using metaphor against metaphor, Genet exposes cracks and crevices in the monolithic order of Man, while opening poetry and poetics to the rich plurality of voices speaking for our humanity.