FIVE

Passion: Between Text
and Performance

While Genet earned a certain succès de scandale from his early poems and novels, he won worldwide notoriety from his plays. Genet clearly did not develop his radical style of theater overnight, yet critics and scholars have failed to explain the development of Genet’s theater out of his earlier work with problems of subject-address and narrative point of view in the novels. Moreover, when critics discuss Genet’s film as a kind of side show to the main event of his theatrical career, they underestimate the continuities between the novelistic, the cinematic, and the dramatic modes in Genet’s work. These kinds of continuities characterize the work of Genet and his contemporaries, including Duras, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet, and place in question semiotic theories based upon the autonomy and specificity of any given mode of representation with regard to the others.

In this chapter, I challenge the philosophical and semiological assumptions underlying such theories in order to account for the evolution of Genet’s theater out of the novels and film. By examining the merging of text, theater, and film in the framework of a general semiotics of performance, I both place sign theory in a new philosophical key and advance the state of the semiotics of theater and drama. The heterogeneity of theatrical representation, which includes both text and mise-en-scène, eludes the ontological model underlying sign theory. As a result, this potentially rich area of semiotic study has been fraught with difficulties from the start.

My approach goes against the grain of semiotic theories derived from the Saussurian sign, theories which begin by delimiting the ontological and structural specificity of the mode under investigation. Since sign theory posits the marriage of signifier and signified as the origin of signification, the extension of sign theory to poetic systems such as literature and cinema perpetuates the assumption that each type of signifying system is discrete and self-sufficient.

The practice of separating representational modes for purposes of analysis and criticism shapes the structuralist tradition. The Czech esthetician Jan Mukarovsky, for instance, writing in the 1930s, defines structuralism as the investigation of the “possibilities [of every art form] provided by the character of its material and the way in which the given art masters it.”¹

In attempting to differentiate poetry from ordinary language, or drámatic action from everyday actions, the Prague School estheticians, including Mukarovsky, Otakar Zich, and Jiri Veltrusky, developed the notion of “foregrounding” or ostranenij advanced by the Russian Formalists.² They define the semiotic specificity of a given art form with reference to the means which that form employs to draw attention to aspects of language or other media as ends in themselves. Thus for Veltrusky, speaking about theater, “as soon as an act by itself attracts the attention of the perceiver, its properties become signs. It then enters consciousness by means of signs and becomes meaning.”³ The Prague School lacked a theoretical model for a general semiotics of the poetic text, however, and is characterized by positivistic descriptions of the means of sign production rather than by a scientific elaboration upon relations between signs and meanings in discourse. Thus the elements contributing to foregrounding in poetic discourse cannot be applied directly to drama, or vice versa, but remain tied to the specific material and mode of represenation under investigation.

In the 1940s Louis Hjelmslev formulated the question of the specificity of signifying systems in terms of a sign function producing a dialectical relation between the form of the expression and the form of the content of discourse.⁴ His theory has shaped modern semiotics by virtue of the scientific rigor of his approach and the broad implications of the notion of sign function.⁵ Since the Saussurian sign joins a phonetic element, the “image acoustique” and a concept, it is only by means of a metaphorical leap that the Saussurian sign can be used as a model for semiotic systems other than language.⁶ The Hjelmslevian sign function, however, defines relations between the expression plane and the content plane of a given system, whether the material be words, images, figures, or anything else.

In order to determine which sign functions are specific to a given system, the analyst must first articulate relations between the larger and smaller segments of the material under investigation (the first and second articulations). This articulation or segmentation would be governed by corresponding relations between the form of the expression and the form of the content. In other words, a relation such as the contrast between two phonemes would not be distinctive to a semiotic system unless it entailed a corresponding contrast on the content plane.

Hjelmslev’s dialectic influenced the semiotics of Christian Metz, who, in Langage et cinéma, examines the specificity of cinema in terms of codes structuring relations between units of the film chain.⁷ Nowhere is the inseparability of the expression plane and the content plane as clear as in the cinema, which does not merely stand for something else but produces a copy of the object seized by the camera. Cinema not only produces a mechanical reproduction of visual reality but interprets that reality by means of relations between images and sounds, and eventually between shots and sequences in the signifying system.

Rather than investigate the multivalent interpretations opened up by the structure of meaning in any given film, Metz focusses on an ideal set of codes shaping the cinematic signifier. He avoids reducing the abstract notion of cinema to its material properties such as cellulose, light, and movement, insisting on the role of codes in determining the semiotic specificity of cinema. For instance, a code such as the dissolve serving as a transition from one shot to the next requires certain manipulations of the film material. These include the superimposition of two layers of film and changes in exposure of the film to light entering the camera lens. Metz insists that such technical manipulations of the material define the system “cinema” only to the extent that they shape formal relations on the expression and content planes.

Furthermore, Metz goes to great lengths in Langage et cinéma to distinguish purely cinematic codes such as the dissolve, whose meaning is inseparable from the expression plane of cinema, from extra-cinematic codes such as the language of film dialogue. The result is a kind of ontology of the cinematic signifier, since the delimitation of the field of investigation leads to questions as to the relation of cinema to reality, to a metaphysical interpretation of mimesis, to the closure of meaning and being in cinematic discourse.

In The Imaginary Signifier (1981), which I discussed in detail in chapter 4, Metz moves beyond the linguistically oriented semiotics of the cinematic signifier to a psycho-semiotic study of the spectating subject’s relation to the film image. He nevertheless perpetuates the phenomenological assumptions of his earlier work, basing his theory of spectator identification on a delineation of the ontological and technical “apparatus” of cinema. Metz’s theory of the subject derives from a static conception of the image as origin, as minimal unit of signification and model for the subject’s closure with the cinematic signifier. Here, the “subject” constitutes a unifying function of an ideal, closed system rather than an effect or production of specific discourses or textual performances. As I demonstrated with regard to Genet’s film, Un Chant d’amour, Metz’s theoretical stance underestimates the philosophical implications of disruptions in the closure between spectator’s look and the look of the camera, disruptions produced by the manipulation of the codes of dominant cinema.

Even when Metz analyzes filmic figures such as metaphor and metonymy, he chooses not to theorize about the place of the subject in specific textual figures, as I have in chapter 3. Metz focusses instead on the formal construction of such figures in theory. He therefore overlooks the subject’s moment by moment construction in the dynamic organization of sound and image in textual performance.⁸

The tendency to elaborate theoretical systems at the expense of a deep analysis of individual texts has led to the marginalization of writers such as Genet, who address the problem of spectator identification within the dialogue or the staging of a play, or within the organization of looks in a film, by disturbing the spectator’s hypnotic engagement in the psychosemiotic apparatus of the discourse. Rather than modify theory to account for such textual practices, critics such as Metz establish oppositions between conventional and avant-garde authors, the latter defined in terms of transgressions or violations of poetic norms.

The metaphysical bent of semiotics can be traced both to Saussure and to Hjelmslev, whose impact on current semiotic theory must not be underestimated. Hjelmslev excludes the question of the individual performance of a code, the “purport” or “substance” of discourse, from the realm of linguistic theory altogether, suggesting that this aspect of language be taken up by anthropology or psychology. He states:

In order to maintain an ideal of closure between the content and the expression in the notion of sign function, Hjelmslev must exclude questions raised by the speaking event, including the speaker’s intentions and the reference of discourse. Such context-bound features point to the vulnerability of language to the force of performance, a force which constantly threatens the meaning and coherence of discourse with the forces of passion, irony, and ambiguity.

One generally associates performance with the theater, specifically with the actor’s negotiation of a dramatic role on stage, or a director’s interpretation and mise-en-scène of a written text for an audience. Thus, in this sense, performance implies a movement between a more or less stable, transcendent element, the dramatic text, and a living, dynamic, and more or less contingent element, the theatrical interpretation of the text. In linguistic and poetic theories, the “performers” have changed, but the philosophical implications of their claims about textual performance have been handed down from the theater. In authors as varied as Otakar Zich, Jan Mukarovsky, Benveniste, and Austin, performance defines the speaking/spectating subject’s participation in the contract binding meaning to being in discourse. Linguistic codes make up the fixed, transcendent elements by means of which individual subjects participate in language. Semiotic codes govern the subject’s particpation in artistic representation.

In the 1930s Mukarovsky anticipated Benveniste’s focus on the subject of discourse when he defined theater as a set of “immaterial relations” and an “immaterial interplay of forces moving through time and space, pulling the spectator into its changeable tension, into the interplay we call a production, a performance.”¹⁰ Mukarovsky conceives the spectating subject as the locus of meaning, a transcendental “I” which shapes the performance by means of a dialectical movement between the system of the text and the spectator’s consciousness. Mukarovsky differs from his predecessor, Otakar Zich, for whom the dialectical relation between spectator and actor alone produced the unifying force of theater.¹¹ For Mukarovsky, the actor’s work constitutes but one element among many which the spectator assimilates through the unifying logic of perception.

Emile Benveniste led semiotics out of the structuralist impasse it faced in the 1960s when he introduced the philosophical question of the speaker’s relation to discourse into debates about the form of meaning.¹² “I” and “you” constitute codes for inscribing intersubjectivity in language and transcend any specific instance of textual performance. As in Kant’s metaphysic, the transcendental subject of Benveniste’s semiotic thus precedes representation as such, is a condition of the very possibility of meaning, without which discourse could not take place. Benveniste warns that any perversion of the contract binding “I” and “you,” such as the identification of “I” and “he,” would cause a break-down of communication and a misrepresentation of the speaker’s identity. Benveniste cites a line from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer as an example of this kind of perversion: “Je est un autre.”¹³ As I discussed in chapter 1, Benveniste overlooks the rich implications of this kind of statement by reducing it to a figure for alienation. When Rimbaud announces that I is an other, he not only creates a figure for the cleavage of the subject of poetic discourse, but sets the stage for a modern poetics of performance. As I prove in the course of my analysis of three plays by Genet further on in this chapter, the staging of the subject in a figure of the double constitutes a model for contemporary poetry and poetics.

John Austin’s notion of “performative utterances” would appear to have little in common with the theories of Benveniste and the Prague School estheticians, since Austin deliberately excludes poetic and dramatic discourses from the set of normative statements in question. In How to Do Things with Words,¹⁴ Austin criticizes metaphysical philosophy for marginalizing statements which are neither true nor false but derive their force from a reference to the speech act itself. Austin then defines the conditions a statement must meet in order to belong to the linguistic category of performatives, namely that the speaker’s intentions and the speaking situation must be “serious.” In his famous debate with the advocates of speech act theory, Jacques Derrida points out that Austin sustains the very kind of hierarchy he criticizes in metaphysical philosophy when he excludes certain kinds of speech acts from the category of performative utterances.¹⁵

For example, if a speaker performs a promise or enters into a contract with an interlocutor, the speaker’s intentions and the existential context of the statement must be compatible with the meaning of the statement. Thus a promise to wed uttered at a wedding rehearsal is not serious, nor is an ironic statement, since they both, in different ways, produce conflicts between the meaning of the utterance and the frame of reference or the intentions of the speaker. They constitute exceptions to, rather than examples of, the rule of performative utterances.

Derrida locates the weak point in Austin’s argument in the question of iterability. For a performative to have force and meaning in “serious” situations, it must conform to a set of conventions which the interlocutor recognizes based on previous experience. In other words, for a statement to be “serious” in a given context, it must also be recognizable and operative in “non-serious” contexts such as irony and role-play. If the compatibility between signification and reference is a condition of the force and meaning of an utterance, then the possibility of a disjunction between signification and reference is a condition of the serious statement. To paraphrase Umberto Eco, a sign is anything that can be used in order to lie, therefore the “non-serious” is inscribed in the very definition of signification.¹⁶

Another source of irony in Austin concerns the relation of serious (pragmatic) discourse to poetry and poetics. On the one hand, the very definition of performatives or the performative function in terms of a focus on the speech act itself, parallels Roman Jakobson’s definition of the “poetic function” of language.¹⁷ By projecting the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic axis, the poetic function derives its force from a focus on the form of discourse rather than from the truth value of the message. On the other hand, unlike Jakobson, who insists upon the importance of the poetic function as a linguistic feature of practical as well as poetic discourse, Austin excludes performative statements made within poetic discourse, such as drama, from the realm of linguistics. Where Jakobson’s poetic function “deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (separates the study of signs from metaphysical questions about reality), Austin’s performative function remains tied to the study of empirical relations between discourse and pragmatic reality.

Austin’s exclusion of poetics from linguistics not only perpetuates the very philosophical standard which he claims to circumscribe, the standard of truth vs. non-truth. It also discourages our extrapolating the question of performatives into a general semiotics of performance. Such a semiotics would resist formulation into the signifier/signified model shaping structuralism and structuralist poetics in its turn. A semiotics of performance would be based on those aspects of language which do not “signify” per se, but point to referents in a pragmatic or discursive context, along the lines of deixis.

In a recent attempt to define the semiotic specificity of the dramatic text, Serpieri et al. cite Austin among various theorists who focus on relations of subject-address and reference to shape a model for semiosis. The authors, setting aside Austin’s criterion of empirical validity for the moment, claim that “the theater is entirely performative: indeed, performativity, which is realized in deixis, makes up what might be termed the specific theatrical language.”¹⁸

Performativity would be characterized by the index, that category of signs Peirce defines in terms of aspects of language which simply point to referents in the discursive or pragmatic (“real”) context rather than signify transcendent meanings.¹⁹ An example of an index tied to the pragmatic context would be the demonstrative pronoun, accompanied perhaps by a gesture of the hand, in the statement “Look at that.” The interlocutor must look in the direction of the referent established by the gesture and the pronoun in order to infer meaning from this statement. In a literary text, indices point to referents which have been established by the discursive context. The statement “We did it!” can only move the plot forward if the context has clearly established the reference of the pronouns.

Benveniste identifies the philosophical implications of these kinds of markings in the notion of deixis. Deixis, shaped by indexical relations in discourse, traces the presence of the speaking subject of discourse, without which speech would not be possible. Thus the personal and demonstrative pronouns and adverbs pointing to the here and now of the speaking event not only raise the question of the semantic context of discourse, but put into play the complicity of speaker and interlocutor, of I and you, in the speaking event.²⁰

As it must be clear by now, theatrical performance can be defined as a play of indexical relations pointing both to a pragmatic and a discursive context and inscribing the spectator’s implication in the dramatic text. The spectator must not only be able to read the gestures of actors pointing to people, places, and objects on stage, gestures which are often included in the verbal text itself in the form of stage directions. The spectator must also infer referents for the dialogue, when characters on stage narrate information about people and events off-stage. Such information is provided by the context of the dialogue itself, rather than the immediate setting of the action. In both cases the force of the dramatic text derives from the speaking event itself, i.e., from dynamic interrelations between speaker and interlocutors on-stage, between the text performed and the spectator, between on- and off-stage space. In the notion of deixis as a poetic function which defies assimilation into the signifier/signified model, one discovers the basis for a poetics of performance, a poetics which would place the spectator in question as subject or consciousness whose production/deconstruction is “staged” in the dramatic text.

Unfortunately, rather than take poetics or semiotics in this direction, one which would question the very metaphysical foundations of structural linguistics, Serpieri et al. formulate a hypothesis which grants a signifying function to deixis in theatrical representation. That is, rather than question the ability of sign theory (à la Saussure or Hjelmslev) to account for the force of deixis in theatrical performance, the authors declare that in the dramatic text indices acquire an iconic dimension. That is, they not only point to elements in the pragmatic or discursive contexts, they display themselves as speech acts. Segmentation, the overriding criterion of structural analysis, can therefore occur along the lines of signifier/signified relationships produced by this display. “Utterances can be segmented at every change in performative-deictic orientation by one speaker with regard to the other.”²¹

Serpieri et al. thus add a new twist to Austin’s category of performative utterances. Rather than exclude “non-serious” performatives such as dramatic dialogue from the realm of linguistics, the authors grant them a signifying function! They are thus able to contain the deictic dimension of theater within structural poetics, built upon an ideal of closure between signifier and signified on every level of the text.²²

Seeking means of framing theatrical representation into a signifier/signified has been a main theme of semiotic theories leading up to Serpieri’s segmentation of the dramatic text. Benveniste explains the “véritable problème sémiologique” in the following terms: “The truly semiological question is how the transposition of a verbal enunciation into an iconic enunciation is achieved.”²³ For Eco, a semiotics of theater would center on the iconization of the body of the actor by means of “showing”:

For Hjelmslev the scientific validity of semiotics is based upon the practice of segmenting the text into units modelled after the sign function.²⁵ The “science” of performance has run into difficulties throughout the history of semiotics because performance resists the kind of internalization of meaning which sign theory demands. Thus, as recently as 1976, long after the semiotics of narrative, cinema, and other arts had advanced, Patrice Pavis underscores the urgency to articulate a semiotics of theatrical performance, heretofore fraught with blind spots.²⁶

When Serpieri et al. grant an iconic dimension to deixis in their semiotics of the dramatic text, they do not take into account the effects of staging on the constitution of the indexical icon, which delays and utterly defies static formalization into the structural linguistic model. Moreover, by insisting on the ontological specificity of the dramatic text, they foreclose investigation into the work of deixis in narrative and cinematic texts. As I proved ealier in this book, Genet’s novels and film are witness to the merging of different representational modes in contemporary literature.

As Kristeva argues so forcefully in Desire in Language,²⁷ structuralism obscures the philosophical question of the speaking subject of discourse by modelling semiosis after the closure of meaning and being in the sign. By taking for granted the presence and unity of the speaking subject in the present of theatrical performance, Serpieri et al. lose sight of the drama being staged in the spaces between the segments of discourse, the drama of the spectator’s identification with the representation.

In Dissemination²⁸ Jacques Derrida shifts the focus of poetics from the metaphysical closure between representations and their objects in mimesis, to the reading/spectating subject’s “performance” of a poetic text. Particularly in the section titled “The Double Session,” Derrida brings to light those aspects of representation which structural poetics obscures. In his critique of the ontological interpretation of mimesis, Derrida raises the issue of performance in the context of a deconstruction of the poetic sign. He twists the mirror joining poetic signifier and signified to reveal the endless movement of the subject in a play of reflections in the poetic text. While Derrida, in this essay and in Of Grammatology,²⁹ would seem to discredit the semiological enterprise by insisting on the fundamentally unscientific and contingent nature of man’s performance of discourse, there is a point at which deconstruction and semiotics intersect. As I have argued throughout this book, by expanding the notion of semiosis to a general theory of how subjects become something for other subjects in discourse, we trace the movement of the subject in textual performance along the lines of semiotic codes shaping the speaker’s inscription in socially determined discourses. We change the philosophical framework of semiotics, while making use of distinctions such as enunciation and enounced, index and icon, signifier and signified, and so forth.

The mime-play is a useful model for describing Genet’s work, since the mime suspends the traditional primacy of the written text over performance and reveals a weak point in the classical interpretation of mimesis as the imitation of living speech. Since the mime does not breathe life into dramatic discourse but creates meaning by manipulating contortions of his body and face, his performance suspends the ideal closure between being and meaning in speech, placing in question the unity and the identity of the speaking and spectating subject.³⁰

Mallarmé, the focus of the “Double Session,” describes this movement as a play of passion, “tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present.”³¹ The mime-play thus serves as a model for a semiotics of performance. This kind of staging also symbolizes the violence of passion joining/separating narrator and character, characters and actors, camera eye and narrating I, in Genet’s novels, plays, and film.

As I now examine three of Genet’s plays, Les Bonnes, Le Balcon, and Les Nègres, I shall focus on the semiological and philosophical issues at stake in the texts themselves, including Genet’s directions concerning the performance, rather than on the stage productions of individual directors. Though it is important to note the variety of styles which directors as different as Roger Blin, Peter Brooks, and Richard Schechner have brought to bear on the problem of the double in Genet, it is simply beyond the scope of this essay to describe or judge the quality of one production or another.³²

Sartre proposed a relation between Genet and the Passion, the suffering and crucifixion of Christ, even before Genet produced the plays. But Sartre, commenting on Genet’s novels, considers only the theme of violent crime in the story and Genet’s existential experience as author/criminal/homosexual, rather than the philosophical issue of the subject’s construction in discourse. For Sartre, “Creation will then really be a Passion: a passion because the author suffers, in the realm of the imaginary, with the sufferings of his heroes and because his characters’ crimes will entail further persecutions in real life.”³³

Applying Sartre’s observation to the plays, we might say that Genet performs a kind of passion by creating characters whose rage pushes them to extremes of self-effacement and violence. In Les Bonnes Claire and Solange love one another and share their hate of Madam. Their role-play fails to free them from the social and emotional prisons which hold them, leading instead to the ritualistic murder/suicide of Claire. In Le Balcon Genet stages the sadomasochistic fantasies of clients in a bordello. Characters play out their private scenarios of desire behind borrowed identities. In Les Nègres Genet exposes murder as the ultimate gesture of the slave revolting against his master. A cock crows three times to signal the transformation of slaves into masters, judges into accused, and spectators into victims.

Looking closer at the plays, we observe an intimate relation between plot and theme and Genet’s radical interpretation of the notion of passion as a process of dramatic metamorphosis.³⁴ This modern passion rewrites the Christian Passion in terms of our contemporary concern with the ritualistic function of drama. Genet shapes this passion by deconstructing, rather than abandoning, the classical unities of time, place, and action.

In the “Discours des trois unités,” Corneille debates the value of the unities of time, place, and action for French theater of the classical period.³⁵ The action must occur within twenty-four hours, the location of the action should be limited to the space which could be travelled within the time of the action, and the action itself should not digress from a single dramatic event structured according to the initiation, the climax, and the dénouement of a conflict. The importance of such prescriptions for classical French writers reflects not so much a respect for classical Greek poetics in seventeenth-century France, as an interpretation of that poetics which served the Cartesian ideal of closure between thought and being.

This philosophical stance explains, moreover, the problematic assimilation of the three unities (governing the believability of the performance) into Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy (governing the structure of the verbal text). As Corneille points out, Aristotle discouraged references to the performance in the text of the play: “Aristote veut que la tragédie soit belle et capable de plaire sans le secours des comédiens et hors de la représentation.”³⁶ Yet in seventeenth-century querelles about theater, the question of the purity of the dramatic text comes up in the framework of the discussion of the three unities.

Aristotle’s exclusion of performance from his defense of tragedy not only achieves for dramatic poetry the “purity” of the epic form, but it betrays the same kind of distrust of representation which Derrida finds in Plato.³⁷ Though written dialogue is one step removed from spoken discourse, in the realm of poetry dialogue constitutes the most immediate form of imitation because it mirrors living speech. Performance would threaten the inner coherence and transcendence of the verbal text with the exteriority and contingency of representation, of textual “writing” in the sense named by Derrida.

Since mise-en-scène affects the meaning of the dialogue, theatrical representation cannot be said simply to copy the unity of being and meaning in mimesis, but to determine its formation. For this reason the question of performance and all that it implies, including exteriority, supplementary, and difference, take center stage in a semiotics of dramatic discourse. Furthermore, the importance granted to mise-en-scène in the theater of Genet and his contemporaries challenges the metaphysical ideal of closure between voice and meaning in speech, an ideal from which the Aristotelian tradition in French theater derived.

In one sense Genet’s plays conform rigorously to the letter of the three unities. The action unfolds in a time period which almost matches the real time of the performance, and even transcends the unity of place by foregrounding the stage as the primary locus of the action. Les Bonnes takes place in Madam’s bedroom and the time of the action parallels the time of the performance. Le Balcon begins at night in a bordello and ends in the same place as the cock’s crow announces the dawn. Les Nègres resembles a primitive ritual in which the stage transforms before our eyes into a courtroom, a funeral parlor, and an African jungle. The time of the action matches the time of the performance.

Though the three unities structure the time and space of the action, Genet disturbs the ontological mission of the three unities by revealing the interdependency of speech and “writing,” between text and performance, at the origin of mimesis.³⁸ The effects of this “deconstruction” produce what has been referred to as the “structure of the double” in Genet’s theater.³⁹

Les Bonnes opens on a play within the play. Claire and Solange, two maids, go through a routine they have evidently rehearsed before, in the absence of their Mistress. In a game of role-play which clearly parallels the merging of I, you, and he/she in the novels, Claire plays Madam and Solange plays Claire. “Claire” attends to “Madam,” dressing her in an extravagant gown and acting as a mirror in which Claire projects herself. Claire directs this play, occasionally dropping her role to give directions to Solange on how to play Claire.

The scene not only reveals the sadomasochistic tone of the maids’ relationship to one another, but exposes the situation of the action. Claire and Solange have conspired to denounce Madam’s lover to the police by means of anonymous letters. In the course of this scene the lover phones, announcing his release from prison, and, by implication, the inevitable discovery of Claire as the author of the letters.

The mask falls as the maids prepare for Madam’s return and scheme to murder her by poisoning the tilleul. Madam returns, but upon hearing of her lover’s release, departs without drinking the poisoned brew. Thus caught in their own conspiracy and trapped in a play of mirrors which binds Madam to Claire and Claire to Solange, the maids give a fatal twist to their theatrics which breaks the circle of desire. Claire, playing Madam, directs Solange, playing Claire, to serve the poisoned tilleul. Thus “Claire” murders Claire. We might say that Claire’s reflection transcends Claire by both murdering and surviving the original.

In Le Balcon our sense of time and place is mystified by the absence of an anchoring of the action in a coherent diegetic framework. The play is divided into nine tableaux, including four opening “plays” within the play which depict the sadomasochistic dramas enacted by clients and prostitutes in different salons in the bordello. The connection between passion and ritual is explicitly marked in this play. The clients, and by implication, the spectators, act out their erotic fantasies by means of identifying with fictional roles. The travesties they assume elevate the clients to roles of social power unknown to them outside the bordello and allow them to assume masterful roles with the prostitutes. Like the maids, the clients and girls in Le Grand Balcon transgress the boundaries of their social and sexual identities in theatrical games. Unlike Claire and Solange, however, the Bishop, the General, the Judge, and other figures in Madam Irma’s house of illusions do not renounce their lives but merely lose track of their identities in the fields between reality and illusion, between on- and off-stage, between the inside and the outside of the bordello.

The scenes in the salons all contain references to Madam Irma’s center of operations, her bedroom. Genet suggests that the stage be set with mirrors reflecting an unmade bed placed in the first few rows of the audience. We recognize this bed as a fixture in Madam Irma’s bedroom, as the action changes locations in the fifth and ninth tableaux. Madam’s bedroom contains, in turn, references to the salons. A small control board registers images of the events in those rooms, giving Madam a controlling look on the performances of her girls and clients. Moreover, two panels of mirrors form the back wall of the set.

The staging of looks connecting actors and spectators by means of mirrors and screens resembles the montage of looks implicating viewer and viewed in Genet’s film, Un Chant d’amour. As I explained in chapter 4, cinema transcribes the implication of I and you in terms of the spectator’s primary identification with the look of the camera, which permits secondary identification with the looks of characters in the fiction. In the film, Genet stages an intrusion of the Other into the dialectical closure of I and eye by unmasking the presence of the camera behind the looks (i.e., the “discourses”) of characters. In this way Genet perverts the spectator’s drive to merge with the film.

In Le Balcon the intrusion of off-stage space into the present and presence of the performance on stage interrupts the closure between spectator and spectacle by doubling the reference of indices shaping subject-address and contextuality. The place of the performance becomes confused with the place of the spectator viewing the performance, and leads to a general breakdown of the limits defining on- and off-stage space, spectator and spectacle, and the meaning and reference of the dialogue.

Verbal clues and sound effects refer to another dimension of the action, to a revolution raging outside the bordello. We hear machine guns firing off-stage. Clients interrupt their performances to inquire about the political situation. Madam Irma advises her clients about safe means of leaving the bordello. Characters enter from locations outside and report that the Royal Palace has been taken over and that the royal family has been arrested.

The only time the action moves outside the bordello occurs in tableau 6, in a scene between one of Irma’s girls, Chantal, and her lover Roger, who apparently have taken sides with the revolutionaries.

In the fifth tableau, the merging of outside and inside begins to develop. The Chief of Police, a friend of Irma’s, takes refuge in the Grand Balcon and exposes his plan of action. He will wait for the revolutionaries to oust the Queen and then try to assume power himself. His fate will be sealed in a matter of hours: either he will die at the hands of the revolutionaries or will become emperor of the realm.

In either case, the Police Chief’s death is imminent. As a figurehead of state, his individual being will be replaced by endless representations of his being, including his picture and his name. His image has already been disseminated on posters and banners and will end up on coins and stamps. The Police Chief not only recognizes the relation between representation and death, but draws our attention to that relation as it structures the representation being performed for us. In language which reminds one of Derrida’s reply to Austin about iterability and death, the Police Chief reminds us that the possibility of the extinction of the real is a condition of representation, in the same way that the possibility of representation is a condition of the real. Nothing can escape this permanent intrusion of representation into the inner spaces of being.

Between pleasure and death, between the illusion of closure and the recognition of division, the play turns the question of mimesis into a drama of the subject of desire. The death-by-representation of the Police Chief obeys the same rules that govern the erotic performances of characters in the brothel, since the clients and prostitutes must renounce their personal identities for the sake of their passions. Following the perverse logic which joins politics and prostitution, the revolution referred to off-stage moves on-stage, into the Grand Balcon. Madam Irma’s bedroom becomes the headquarters of the new political regime, and Irma becomes Queen of the realm, with the Police Chief at her side. Thus the inside and the outside of the brothel, like the inside and the outside of representation, fold together in the difficult present and presence of the performance.

In a final stroke of theatrical genius, Genet deconstructs this promise of closure between text and performance, between the presence and absence inscribed in references to on- and off-stage space, by revealing a mirror there where we expect the presence of a stable diegetic “reality.” As the ninth and final tableau opens, the Bishop, the General, and the Judge, who have tried to forget their personal identities in order to become ministers in the new government, pose for some photographers. By fixing their images in photographs, photographs aimed at seizing archetypical representations of religious, military, and judicial authority, the photographers produce “une image vraie d’un spectacle faux” (p. 113). The image is true because of an ontological fallacy which grants objectivity to mechanical reproductions, but dangerously false, because it conceals the possibility of the lie which is inscribed in the reference of the photographic image. A sign of a sign, the photograph says something of the instability of the transcendental signified of metaphysics.

Moreover, photography stages a scene of violence tantamount to murder. The photograph not only produces a likeness more perfect than the work of the human hand, but guarantees the symbolic destruction of the individual identity of the subject because of the possibility of infinite reproductions of the likeness. The photograph fixes on paper a moment which has ceased being as soon as it is recorded on film, and therefore anticipates the death of its referent.⁴⁰

A sign of the lie and symbol of murder, the photograph forms a model for the ultimate theatrical figure in Le Balcon. The Queen/Irma invites the Police Chief to witness his own “death,” that is, to witness his incarnation by an actor in Irma’s Mausoleum salon. The Bishop, the General, and the Judge join the Police Chief as he watches the performance through an opening in a wall in Irma’s bedroom. The voyeuristic staging of viewer and object of the look opens up into a metaphor for the spectator’s own implication in the events on stage, as the wall opening widens and the salon scene occupies center stage. The set turns inside-out, as it were. The play-within-the-play replaces the original setting and engages the spectator directly as a voyeur.

Ironically, the actor playing the Police Chief is none other than Roger, the revolutionary from the sixth tableau, once again in Irma’s employ (or had he ever left it?). Disguised as the Police Chief, Roger possesses powers he never knew as a mere revolutionary. Though he misses the revolution and his mistress, Chantal, he is mesmerized by the charm of the brothel and the force of his disguise, and would play out his borrowed identity indefinitely were it not for Irma’s rules. Irma steps in and kicks him out of the brothel, preventing illusion from becoming a permanent presence.

The Police Chief understands this staging of himself as a metaphor for his own death by representation. Playing the part to its necessary end, he descends into the Mausoleum salon, not, however, without pausing to pose for the photographers:

His exit through the floor of the stage signals the end of the revolution “routine” and leaves the Bishop, the General, and the Judge hanging precariously between two histories and two identities, between life and death. Irma shows them the way out of the brothel and contemplates preparations for the next evening’s performance. Machine guns fire and a cock crows off-stage, reminding us that the outside of the brothel is but another fold of its inside, another dimension of make-believe in which the spectating subject is held.

Just as Genet’s novels incorporate an actor/narrator wearing the masks of characters in the story, so his plays incorporate actors speaking behind masks in the name of an absent narrator. The question of “who speaks?” in theatrical representation can be explored along the lines of the representation of narrative “voice” in theater and narrative. For Benveniste the voice of discourse is articulated in personal and demonstrative pronouns shaping subject-address and reference in discourse, and in verbs and adverbs signalling the present and presence of the speaking event.⁴¹ The time and place of discourse shape the movement of deixis in performance—on stage or in the folds of textual writing. The time of discourse is the time of desire, since the implication of “I” and “you” in performance symbolizes the wrestling of two subjectivities to transcend the limits of their individual identities. Since Lacan and Derrida, we recognize that the present and presence of desire, of discourse, is an illusion. I am never there where “I” is objectified in language. The “now” is but a trace of a signified trying to catch up with a signifier in semiosis. As Derrida puts it:

When Genet subordinates the time and place of the story to the present and presence of textual performance, only to reveal the troubling duality of that place, that time, he makes performance the scene of a crime. Genet introduces passion into representation as a violent transgression of the authority of narrative voice. In Les Nègres Genet brings the question of passion to bear on the traditionally dialectical structure of didactic theater.

Genet’s own sympathies with revolutionary groups such as the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been documented in statements published in political pamphlets, newspaper articles, and in the recent essay/novel, Un Captif amoureux.⁴³ In Les Nègres Genet proposes a political theater which exposes the master-slave relationship in terms of the inscription of authority in language and theatrical representation. The discourse of authority structures meaning around a transcendental “I” and organizes visual representation around the unifying center of monocular perspective. The I and eye of bourgeois art therefore nullify differences —between white and black, or between male and female, for instance—by relegating blacks and females to the margins of otherness, of supplementarity, in the order of the “same” of classical dialectics. Dialectical discourse is always a discourse of exclusion and reduction of difference. Therefore even Marxist theater, which, after Brecht, exposes the processes of its own production, presents revolutionary ideas in the form of a dialectical closure between the means and ends of theatrical representation, posits the marriage of poetic signifier and signified in the dramatic text. In other words, dialectical materialist theater employs the discourse of authority to combat institutions of authority.

Genet refuses the dialectical closure of didactic theater, replacing dialectics with an ironic staging of “différance,” Derrida’s term for the slippery movement between signifier and signified in textual writing. In Genet performance constantly erodes mimesis as soon as it promises to present a transcendental signified in the immediate presence of representation. In Les Nègres and in the later play Les Paravents, Genet comes closest to realizing Artaud’s vision of a “theater of cruelty,” theater which reverses the Aristotelian tradition of privileging text over mise-en-scène, and stages the spectating subject in a play of passion which eludes representation as such.⁴⁴

Les Nègres opens on a frankly artificial setting with few indications for the location of the action.⁴⁵ Some iron scaffolds support platforms above the stage and create a spatial hierarchy which corresponds to relations of power between characters on stage. The white Court, including the Queen, her Valet, the Governor, the Judge, and the Missionary, sit on the platform surrounding the stage and look down on the actions performed by black characters. Typically Genet creates this hierarchy only to destroy it. All of the actors are black, and those who play whites in the Court wear white masks which reveal the black skin and frizzy hair of the performers. At some point in the play the masks fall and the Court descends to the stage level of the Blacks.

Throughout the play a white casket covered with flowers occupies center stage. It supposedly contains the corpse of a white woman supposedly murdered by a black man named Village before the beginning of the play. It is difficult to summarize the action, since the play does not represent anything as much as it struggles with the question of how to represent the murder of a white woman by a black man for a white audience. Genet states something of the difficulty facing a white author writing about blacks for a white audience in the preface to the play.

The structure of the play is equally difficult to summarize, since there are no traditional divisions between scenes. From beginning to end, characters move in and out of roles, in and out of fictional locations, in and out of costumes, without so much as pausing to reflect on the passages. Moreover, as so much of the force of Les Nègres derives from the performance itself, including the play with masks, sound effects, and the dances and mimes of characters on stage, Genet’s instructions for the performance constitute an integral aspect of any written account of the play. As Corneille judged even in the seventeenth century, the author’s remarks about the performance of the text are not mere intrusions into the original unity of dramatic dialogue, but contribute to an original tension between text and performance in theatrical representation.

In the opening scene, three black men and four black women, all in European evening dress which artfully exudes bad taste, dance a minuet to music by Mozart. A fourth black man, barefoot and dressed as a shoeshine boy, joins them. The music stops and Archibald, a kind of master of ceremonies, steps forward and introduces his troupe of actors to the audience by colorful sobriquets. These names, like the names in the novel Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, contribute to the masquerade as surely as the costumes, gestures, and dialogue of the actors. We meet Dieudonné Village, Adelaïde Bobo, Edgar-Hélas, Ville de Saint-Nazaire, Augusta Neige, Félicité Gueuse-Pardon, Dioup, and Etiennette-Vertu-Rose-Secrète. They have all come from daytime jobs among whites in order to stage this spectacle for a white audience.

Actors and spectators thus divide, in a first instance, along racial lines. This opposition is so important for the realization of the ritual that Genet insists, in the introduction to the play, that for every performance there be at least one white spectator in the audience. In the unlikely case that the play is performed for an all-black audience, at least one spectator should wear a white mask. If such a spectator cannot be found, Genet proposes placing a white mannequin in the audience.

A sharp irony tinges Archibald’s opening address. He declares that the troupe has taken precautions to amuse rather than assault the white audience, but this entertainment turns around the savage murder of a white woman:

and killed her violently,

Archibald continues the litany of crimes they have committed, presumably to entertain the audience. Liars, they have given false names; thieves, they have stolen the French language.

In the Aristotelian tradition, drama entertains an audience by providing catharsis, the curative effects of emotional release, by means of the perfect coherence of plot structure. By identifying with the victims or victors of the play, spectators are moved to pity, sorrow, or wrath and form judgments about the characters. So indeed does the Court, in farcical imitation of the white audience, demand a good representation of the murder and an emotional catharsis of their own guilt. The Judge says,

If they could only see the crime, identify with the victim, and resolve racial difference by means of oppositions such as us and them, good and evil, black and white, the Court (= the white audience) could justify their preconceived condemnation of the black race. In the same way, white spectators demand a mirror of themselves along the lines of the unity of meaning and being in mimesis. Not only must representation erase difference in the production of a good copy, it must employ the language of power, the language of whites. A play about blacks written and performed for a white audience is, therefore, first of all a lie, since blacks must mask their difference to achieve anything like a representation of themselves.

In the play the Blacks, like Genet, expose the lie by resisting the kind of representation the white Court demands. First of all, the players keep straying from the prepared text of the play-within-the-play to comment on their performances. In this way the players introduce the disturbing effects of staging into the closure of spoken dialogue and challenge the primacy of the dramatic text in classical poetics. Archibald constantly reminds his cast of their duties toward the written text:

The actors, especially Village, claim that they can submit the text to their whims of the moment:

Village also stumbles onto his real passion for a black woman, Vertu, and is promptly told that love has no place in this play.

This kind of preoccupation with the effects of performance on the ideal closure of text and voice in dialogue shapes the evolution of Genet’s theater. From Les Bonnes to Les Paravents, the primacy of the written text over the staging of performance gradually declines. In Les Nègres the theater of violence constitutes, in an important sense, the submission of the word to the physical demands of mise-en-scène, the exposure of speech to the exteriority of spectacle.

Almost half-way into the play the troupe manages to pull together a recreation of the murder scene. They choose Diouf, a black man, to play the white woman, disguising him in a blond wig, an extravagant white mask, and a borrowed skirt. Village resists his part as long as possible. Every time he tries to reenact his crime, his discourse assumes the distance and mediacy of a narration. He tells of how he entered a bar, saw the white woman knitting behind the counter, ordered a drink, two drinks. Village, the narrator of his own crime, then imitates the speech of his victim in a high falsetto voice. Why does he speak in place of Diouf, the actor dressed as the white woman? What better way to stage the lie of representation than to present reported speech, presumably the mimetic element par excellence of narrative, as a function of the mask worn by the narrator! Here Genet applies his discoveries about narrative directly to his concept of theatrical performance. In the novels and the film, Genet disturbs the traditional transparency of narrative voice behind the representation of character, in reported speech and in the organization of looks, respectively. Genet introduces this difficulty into theatrical representation in terms of a movement between narration and imitation, between diegesis and mimesis, a movement caught up in an endless doubling of reflections.

Moved by the insistence of his cohorts, Village assumes his role and finally speaks to the “Mask,” Diouf masquerading as the white woman. In this speech he instructs Diouf/the white woman to move behind the screen for the murder scene.

In the stage directions Genet states his respect for the traditions of Greek tragedy and reminds the actors to assume the grandeur and allegorical stature of classical performers (p. 15). Like the Greeks, Genet stages violent scenes out of the sight of the audience, while the Blacks, in chorus, narrate the action. Instead of the full representation of the seduction and murder, the Blacks chant about the splendor of this crime of black against white. Félicité calls for nothing less than the uprising of the black continent.

The violence of non-representation gives voice to the silent rage of blacks, which white culture and representation have tried to contain. The crescendo of these chants signals a turning point in the play. The Blacks denounce their European identities and turn the stage into an African jungle. The Court, having left the stage in order to prepare the execution of the murderer, enters the jungle and meets not with the obedient reflections of white culture, but with blacks seeking revenge. One by one the Court members fall victim to this violence and die in a heap. Village and Vertu remain on stage and make plans for a new world according to a black model.

Throughout the play the Court mirrors the white ruling class and sends back to the audience a contorted image of itself. Not only do members of the Court wear white masks which betray their own blackness, but they employ staccato rhythms and artificial tones to render their performances as contrived as possible. Their gestures and their politeness and condescension to the Blacks form a caricature of official, white culture. Their attention to the play within the play is periodically interrupted by reports on the progress of their capital investments in Africa—in tobacco, coffee, and rubber.

If, as I have argued before, the movement of imitation effaces the existential identity of the referent, then white culture has petrified into extinction the moment it can be reduced to a caricature, a copy of a copy. The Governor thus speaks for the audience when he declares that the white Court has come to the performance to attend its own funeral, its own suicide:

In Genet’s theater, as we have already seen, death consists of the effects of representation on the personal identity of the subject of mimesis. Perhaps more troubling than a physical death, murder-by-representation is not limited to the destruction of an individual life, but does violence to dominant culture and the order of mimesis.

The representation of blacks by a white author is thus posed as a question and staged as a masquerade. This strategy twists the spectating subject’s drive to identify with the play. If the audience identifies with whites on stage, and if these characters obviously betray their true identities as blacks (whatever a black is), then the spectating subject enters the play only to find his own image duplicated infinitely. As the play unfolds and the Blacks assassinate the white Court, the spectator is drawn into a kind of ritualistic suicide, much on the order of Claire’s or the Police Chief’s in Les Bonnes and Le Balcon, respectively. What began as the murder of white culture by representation turns into the annihilation of the subject of dominant culture by means of performance. As oppositions between right and wrong, black and white, victim and victor become blurred in the constantly shifting roles and identities of characters on stage, the spectating subject is snared into a modern sacrifice which denies the participant catharsis and places him or her on the altar instead.

Since the question of black identity has formed the dark side of European history, both in the moral sense and in the sense that the question has inhabited the shadows of dominant white culture from the beginning, it eludes representation as such. White man invented the mirror in order to reduce difference to an endless return of the same, of the image, the copy. Classical mimesis is thus an instrument of power, since it defines black in terms of the underside of white culture, as a supplement to the primacy of white male discourse. By resisting the discourse of power, by approaching theater from the angle of performance rather than dialectics, Genet dismantles mimesis in order to present the color black, or rather the difference between black and white, as a force in the construction of being, and to present being as the endless pursuit of an illusion.

Derrida points out the moral implications of difference for linguistic theory in Of Grammatology. In Saussure the inversion of the hierachy which grants primacy to speech over writing and causes the troubling intrusion of the outside, the material representation, into the inside of meaning and being in spoken discourse, constitutes nothing less than a criminal act, a crime against nature, against the “natural” (metaphysical) balance between body and soul: a crime of passion (p. 34). Extending this notion to problems of literary and dramatic representation, we begin to understand the meaning of passion as the ritualistic deconstruction both of the present and presence of dramatic discourse and of the unity of speaking/spectating subject of mimesis. This interpretation of passion parallels the Biblical Passion, which names the struggle of Christ to quit his physical nature, with its flaws and limitations, with its promise of death, before returning to the Spirit, the Father and Origin of Being, the Word-Made-God.

On the way to find God, metaphysical philosophy, and structural poetics in its turn, have contained the violence of desire and textual performance by granting primordial importance to the interior closure of body and soul in spoken discourse. Confronted with the work of Genet and his generation, we are forced to reconsider poetics and semiotics in terms of a staging of the subject as a question. Such a shift in the philosophical key of critical theory not only takes into consideration the force of desire in poetic texts, but challenges traditional boundaries separating representational modes. In Genet, the movement of the subject in the folds of textual performance transcends the material and ontological specificity of theatrical representation and traces the participation between text, theater and film in his work. Theater is thus both a model for the movement of the subject in semiosis and a figure shaping the triumph of passion in Genet’s literary imagination.