The Theatre of Revolt

The theatre of revolt finds its most apocalyptic expression in le théâtre de la cruauté, an approach to the stage most effectively realized by the playwright, Jean Genet, but first conceived in the imagination of the poet and visionary, Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s theories of the theatre — expounded in a series of essays, letters, and manifestoes which he wrote in the early nineteen-thirties — were first published together in 1938 under the title Le Théâtre et son Double (The Theatre and Its Double); and this work continues to be one of the most influential, as well as one of the most inflammatory, documents of our time. Like the kind of theatre it propagates, The Theatre and Its Double has the quality of an exotic and frenzied dream, throwing out flashes of illumination with that hypnotic lucidity which is the hallmark of Artaud’s powerful style. A gifted poet himself, Artaud introduces into the theatre the feverish intoxication of the poètes maudits, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont. Like theirs, his poetic ecstasy is very close to madness, and his chaotic life is tortured by fits of insanity until his death in 1948. Despite the disordered quality of his career and the fragmentary nature of his contribution, however, Artaud exercises a tremendous impact upon the modern French imagination, belonging, in the words of Jacques Guichamaud, “to that breed of seers who leave trails of fire behind them as they pass through the world.” The most important of these fiery passages leads to the theatre of cruelty, even in its embryonic stage one of the most original movements in the modern drama. Yet, Artaud did not live to see it realized. In this movement, Artaud plays the role of a prophetic Aristotle, writing the Poetics of an imaginary theatre which Jean Genet, his posthumous Sophocles, will not begin to execute until after his death.

Before discussing the contributions of these two men, however, some brief preliminary remarks about their predecessors are necessary. For despite Artaud’s refusal to serve as a “funnel for everyone else’s ideas,” the theatre of cruelty is the logical culmination of the avant-garde movement in France. What Artaud achieves, and Genet after him, is to endow this movement with seriousness, depth, and commitment. These are qualities of which it is sorely in need, since, before Artaud, the nihilistic writers of the avant-garde produce works which are relatively sterile. Such writers, aroused by the lifelessness of the Boulevard stage and of the audiences who patronize it, begin with no greater purpose than to annihilate the bourgeoisie and all its works, pursuing this end through two related techniques: Dada and Surrealism. The literary ancestor of the Dada movement is Alfred Jarry, and though the movement doesn’t formally begin until the second decade of the twentieth century, no Dada play is more typical or more original than Jarry’s Ubu Roi, which was written as early as 1897. Ubu Roi is basically a Bohemian practical joke on the literary taste of the middle class, being a parody, in nonsensical form, of the best-loved works of Western literature. It is also a savage assault on middle-class man, for it has as its hero a brutal caricature of a père de famille, with a head like a turnip and a belly like a balloon. Lustful, venal, and gluttonous, Père Ubu represents what Catulle Mendès calls “the modesty, virtues, patriotism, and ideals of a people who have dined well.” And later, Tristan Tzara and his cohorts will continue the attack on this well-fed public in outrageous evenings of mischief, designed primarily to scourge and irritate.¹ The Dada movement, wholly dedicated to incomprehensibility (“Recounting comprehensible things,” said Jarry, “only serves to make heavy the spirit and to warp the meaning, whereas the absurd exercises the spirit and makes the memory work”), is one of the foundations of what Martin Esslin calls “the theatre of the absurd,” and is particularly influential on the work of Ionesco, whose hatred of middle-class conventions and ideals is channeled into inspired clowning and brutal farce.

Much the same kind of hostility towards the bourgeoisie can be found in Surrealism, just as playful as Dada but somewhat more coherent. The earliest work in this genre, Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (written in 1903, but not produced until 1917), is full of Bohemian mischief-making in the style of Jarry, but it does not break so violently with the traditions of Western literature. (It does, however, break with Western traditions of verisimilitude, since it is written in the form of a disjointed dream, with wrenched symbols and abrupt transformations.) Apollinaire’s play, in fact, anticipates much of the serious work to be done later in the contemporary novel, painting, music, poetry, and drama, since it employs (very freely, to be sure) a character from Greek myth — Tiresias, stranded in the land of Zanzibar. Under the leadership of André Breton, the Surrealists will later devote themselves exclusively to destroying the values of Christian civilization, declaring the simplest Surrealist act to be the firing of a revolver into a crowded street. But, occasionally, playwrights with Surrealist inclinations — Jean Cocteau, for example — will employ scenic strategies much like Apollinaire’s, extending his theatrical ideas by modernizing the Homeric mythology in the manner of Joyce, Eliot, Stravinsky, and Picasso.

Myth drama is quickly assimilated by the Boulevard, and, in the hands of such literary dramatists as Giraudoux and Anouilh, it becomes a highly verbalized form, designed to familiarize the audience with past heroic actions as if they were being performed today. In the hands of a clowning spirit like Cocteau, on the other hand, myth drama is a Surrealist spectacle in which the mythic action is superimposed upon a modern landscape for the sake of ironic contrasts. Cocteau favors “poetry of the theatre” over “poetry in the theatre” (a poetry visualized rather than heard); to him, the tirades and verbal debates of the Cartel dramatists represent the vestiges of a dead literary tradition. Similarly, since Cocteau is less concerned with flattering the spectator than with satirizing him for his spiritual inadequacy, he takes a much more radical approach to myth. Instead of identifying the heroic past with the unheroic present, he emphasizes their essential disparity; instead of merely updating the Classical protagonist, he minifies and denigrates him. In La Machine Infernale, for example, Cocteau presents us with Sophocles’s Oedipus as he might be seen by his valet or psychoanalyst — a treacherous, vain, self-conscious bully with a mother fixation. By bringing us inside the palace, and dramatizing his hero’s petty household affairs, Cocteau — like Joyce in Ulysses and Eliot in his “Sweeney” poems — attempts to highlight the drabness, meanness, and self-consciousness of twentieth-century urban man.

Artaud was associated with both the Dadaists and the Surrealists early in his career, and he shares their loathing of traditional art, of modern industrial life, and of Western civilization. But he turns these negative attitudes into positive acts, transforming the nihilism, sterility, and buffoonery of his predecessors into profoundly revolutionary theory. Artaud’s revolt is so radical, and so deadly serious, that it leads him into messianic conclusions. A Romantic who tolerates no boundaries, a prophet of rebellion who preaches “extreme action, pushed beyond all limits,” Artaud demands nothing less than a total transformation of the existing structure. And this revolution will begin in the theatre.

For the theatre, to Artaud, is not simply a place where audiences are entertained, instructed, or irritated; it is the very pulse of civilization itself. And one sign that Western civilization is decaying is that its theatre has enshrined such “lazy, unserviceable notions” as “art.” In place of these notions, Artaud wants to substitute what he calls culture. Western art is essentially divorced from the people and disperses them, but culture brings men together. Art is an excrescense; culture is functional. Art is the expression of one man; culture is the expression of all. For this reason, Artaud is drawn to primitive countries like Mexico, where “things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation.” Such cultures have not yet buried the instinctual life under layers of sophistication and refinement, and it is in such cultures that Artaud seeks the renewal of his race: “All true culture relies upon the barbaric and primitive means of totemism whose savage, i.e., entirely spontaneous, life I wish to worship.”

Thus, Artaud’s ideas about the theatre are inseparable from his feelings about the world in which he lives. Behind every theory he advances lies his messianic desire to change the face of the West. Artaud does not merely relax into alienation, like the Dadaist and Surrealists. His revolt is so acute that it has brought him full circle into a vision of communion. And although he declares that “I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to change in order for the theatre to change,” he immediately adds, “I do believe that the theatre, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things. . . .” If the theatre can create a cultural community, then the community at large will change.

Artaud’s idea of culture is based on primitive ritual which he hopes to reintroduce into civilized life. Like all messianic thinkers, he is trying to bring about change through a revolution in the religious consciousness. The religions of the West, however, are unacceptable, since they have emptied life of its magical content, and killed the instinctual side of man — killed, that is to say, his divinity: “I would even say that it is this infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine; for far from believing that man invented the supernatural and divine, I think it is man’s age-old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the divine in him.” Like D. H. Lawrence, whom he resembles in so many ways, Artaud is attracted by the rituals of the Aztec Indians, where the divine continues to reveal itself in sacrificial frenzy and barbaric joy. Artaud believes this archetypal, pre-logical, primitive spirit still lives in the unconscious of Western man, though deeply submerged under the dead skin of civilization. For it is linked to the sexual instinct itself: “We can say now,” Artaud affirms in Lawrentian accents, “that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom which is also dark. . . . And that is why the great Myths are dark, so that one can not imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation.”

Like the Surrealists, then, Artaud would like to build a theatre of myths, “to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves.” These myths, however, will come neither from the Greco-Roman nor from the Christian tradition, for the traditional myths, though once vital, have now become exhausted and tame, like the civilizations from which they sprang. In the course of his exegesis, Artaud supplies us with the kind of myth he has in mind, in that provocative essay where he compares the effect of his theatre to that of a plague. For Artaud, the beauty of the plague is its destruction of repressive social forms. Order collapses, authority evaporates, anarchy prevails; and man gives vent to all the disordered impulses which lie buried in his soul.² It is this delirium — so similar to Rimbaud’s “disordering of all the senses” — that Artaud wishes to introduce into the theatre. For like the plague, the theatre has the capacity to upset “important collectivities,” to create a “social disaster,” to turn an occasion into a conflagration. Artaud’s theatre, in short, is designed to have the function of a Dionysian revel, a Bacchanal, a sacrificial rite — relieving the spectator of all the wildness, fierceness, and joy which civilization has made him repress. “If the essential theatre is like the plague,” Artaud writes, “it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.” Thus, the theatre will be able to evoke that lost world of anarchy and danger without which there is neither humor nor poetry, without which freedom is a chimera and delusion prevails. “That is why,” declares Artaud, “I propose a theatre of cruelty. . . . We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.”

Artaud immediately proceeds to explain that by “cruelty” he does not mean “blood.” Nevertheless, his proposals have been widely misunderstood, expecially in Anglo-Saxon countries where Artaud has remained a suspect and unwelcome, if not largely unknown, figure. To cultures which prefer their sadism and masochism disguised (for example, in wars, prizefights, gangster movies, and television), the openly sado-masochistic thrust of Artaud’s thought has seemed pathological and perverse. Still, Artaud’s assumptions are no more unhealthy than Freud’s in Civilization and Its Discontents; both assume that men created neurosis when they suppressed their sex and aggression to live together in society. Artaud is less stoical than Freud about the sacrifice of these basic freedoms, and less inclined to accept such substitute gratifications as civilization and art; but the Nazi experience suggests that civilization and art are no obstacles to savagery and murder, and may even have helped to turn these impulses into the forms they took in Hitler’s Germany.

Artaud himself never advocates perversity, sadism, or violence in daily life. What he proposes is that the theatre serve as a harmless “outlet for repressions,” in much the same manner as the analyst’s couch: “I propose to bring back into the theatre this elementary magical idea, taken up by modern psychoanalysts, which consists in effecting a patient’s cure by making him assume the apparent and exterior attitudes of the desired condition.” The theatre of cruelty, then, will evacuate those feelings which are usually expressed in more destructive ways: “I defy that spectator,” Artaud asserts, “to give himself up, once outside the theatre, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murder.” The sky is, indeed, preparing to fall on our heads. The world is rapidly moving towards suicide and destruction while continuing to mouth Christian ideals of peace and harmony. Using the theatre as a “beneficial action,” Artaud wishes to cut through these lies and deceptions, “for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of the world. . . .” Thus, Artaud would purge the spectator of those bloody impulses he usually turns on others in the name of patriotism, religion, or love.³

The primary function of Artaud’s theatre, then, is the exorcism of fantasies. Similar to the Great Mysteries — the Orphic and Eleusinian rites — it is based on sacrifice and revolves around crime; but in exteriorizing the spectator’s desire for crime, it acts as a catharsis, and drains his violence. And this is the ultimate meaning of Artaud’s plague analogy: “It appears that by means of the plague, a gigantic abscess, as much moral as social, has been collectively drained; and that like the plague, the theatre has been created to drain abscesses collectively.” Artaud, in fact, uses this analogy in the same way he would use the theatre — as an image-producing agency instead of as a literal fact. His theatre is a double, because it duplicates not everyday reality but rather “another archetypal and dangerous reality.” It is a kind of mirror held up to the unconscious. Elsewhere, Artaud compares his theatre to alchemy, since it arbitrates between real and fictitious worlds; elsewhere, he compares it to a mirage. But the meaning of all these analogies is that the Artaudian theatre will be an outwardly illusory world evoking an inner reality — the kind of reality usually revealed in dreams. For it is in the cruel content of dreams that Artaud’s theatre will find its true material: “The theatre will never find itself again — i.e., constitute a means of true illusion — except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of his dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.” ⁴

Artaud has a blood kinship with Rimbaud, Freud, and Lawrence, but his foster father, indeed the father of them all, is Frederick Nietzsche, who declared in Zarathustra: “Man is the cruellest animal. At tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions hath he hitherto been happiest on earth; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth.” It is the repression of this cruelty by humanitarian ideals that, according to Nietzsche, has made the world sickly and pallid; and, indeed, even the heroic savagery that Nietzsche looked for soon turned into a bureaucratic, systematic slaughter of the innocent. Like the messianic Nietzsche, the messianic Artaud is concerned with the rediscovery of man, and seeks his metaphysical remains under the rubble of two thousand years of Christianity. Both men are convinced that the soft Christian ideals have drained man’s psychic energy; both seek what Artaud calls “the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe.” For Nietzsche, the solution lies in a return to the Dionysian ecstasy of the pre-Socratic Greek world. Artaud’s nostalgia brings him even further back in history, to that primitive “time of evil” when man was sanguinaire et inhumain. But for each, the purpose of writing is to restore, to a world which has lost its feelings, “a passionate and convulsive sense of life.”

Artaud, thus, contributes a spirit and a drive to the modern theatre; but his theory has its concrete side as well. Some of his suggestions are positive, many are negative. Taken purely as a polemical document, in fact, The Theatre and Its Double is one of the most eloquent attacks on the existing theatre ever penned. What incenses Artaud especially is the theatre of the Boulevard, fit only for “idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets, and positivists, i.e., Occidentals.” For this theatre stinks unbelievably of “provisional, material man. I shall even say carrion man.” In a state of bloated decay, it imitates a dreary reality, and in producing human interest stories with “intimate scenes from the lives of a few puppets,” it turns the public into Peeping Toms.

Artaud is not much kinder to the theatre of the elite, which is to say, the theatre of Molière and Shakespeare.⁵ In his essay “No More Masterpieces,” he decisively repudiates all the great works of the past — not because they are artistically inadequate, but rather because they are culturally ineffective. Having lost their relevancy and immediacy, they are no longer “understood by the general public.” Artaud, therefore, is contemptuous both of highbrows and middlebrows; his “general public” are the great masses at large, without whom no renewal of culture is possible. Appealing primarily to aesthetes and logicians, the existing theatre has alienated these masses, who now frequent the circus, the music hall, and the movies; and the theatre will never find itself until it becomes equally vital and popular. “The public is still greedy for mystery,” he proclaims, and with this faith, he demands that dead poets make way for living priests who will speak as truly to their time as Sophocles, Racine, and Shakespeare did to theirs.

Artaud goes on to make some practical suggestions as to how this mystery will be evoked. For one thing, the theatre of cruelty will make war on language, for any theatre based on words is “fixed in forms that no longer correspond to the needs of the time.” With Rimbaud, Artaud might cry: Plus de mots. Actually, Artaud’s dislike of langauge is very Pirandellian, because, like Pirandello, he conceives words to be germs, carrying the diseases of civilization — theories, concepts, definitions, indeed any formulations “which work relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known.” For in this dissipation of mystery lies “the cause of the theatre’s abasement and its fearful loss of energy. . . .” Artaud’s attack on language is the most radical part of his theory and — some would say — the least influential, since even the most experimental French drama continues, to this day, to be a drama of words. On the other hand, Artaud never proposes suppressing language entirely, but rather “changing its role, and especially reducing its position. . . .” He wants words to be used in a new and shocking manner:

To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not ordinarily express; to make use of it in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock . . . to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say, alimentary sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider language as the form of Incantation.

Language, in short, will no longer be used for communicating social or psychological concepts, but rather for its emotional coloring and incantatory tone, as some of the Surrealists have used it. And it is precisely this metaphysical use of language that will distinguish Artaud’s great follower, Jean Genet, in whose plays, “language as the form of Incantation” finds its most expressive employment.

Along with conceptual language, Artaud jettisons theatre psychology and sociology — his is “an Oriental theatre of metaphysical tendency, as opposed to the Occidental theatre of psychological tendency.” This, in turn, alters the whole nature of dramatic characters, as well as the nature of the spectator’s response: “Renouncing psychological man, with his well-dissected characters and feelings, and social man, submissive to laws and misshapen by religions and precepts, the Theatre of Cruelty will address itself only to total man.” Such an ideal theatre Artaud discovered during a visit to Paris of a group of Balinese actors. Tremendously excited by their “vocabulary of gesture and mime” and by their plastic and physical use of the stage, Artaud himself had responded in the fullness of his being, as a total man. Artaud occasionally experienced this response in the movies also, especially in the films of the Marx Brothers, on whom he wrote a brilliant essay, praising their anarchy, their Surrealist antics, their destruction of language, and their “wholehearted revolt.”

As these models suggest, Artaud’s idea of theatre is primarily visual. It is a theatre in which character, plot, and diction are subordinated to mise en scène, or spectacle. Artaud’s Poetics eliminates, in consequence, the conceptualizing playwright and substitutes the visualizing director — not the conventional traffic cop or actor’s coach of Western theatre but rather a “manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies.” The director’s job is to create a “poetry in space” or, as he sometimes calls it, “a poetry of the senses,” quite similar to Cocteau’s “poetry of the theatre.” As Artaud describes it, “This very difficult and complex poetry assumes many aspects: especially the aspects of all the means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, scenery, and lighting.” In his more specific suggestions for dressing the stage, Artaud is inclined, however, to ignore stage scenery,⁶ emphasizing instead properties and accessories, such as “manikins, enormous masks, objects of strange proportions” — a ritual display with an essentially hieroglyphic character. Light will be used to evoke delirious emotions; musical instruments will be employed not only as a source of sound but also as visual objects; and the audience will always be surrounded by tumultuous action, and in direct communication with it. Thus, Artaud’s “poetry of the senses” is a poetry of ecstasy, designed to induce trance, transport, and paroxysms by distilling the savagery of dreams into the mystery of theatre.

Artaud’s proposals include a theatrical program made up of scenarios based on existing works, both dramatic and nondramatic, to be staged in an improvisatory manner without regard to text. Among these are the story of Bluebeard, a tale by the Marquis de Sade, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and a number of Elizabethan plays stripped down to their bloody action (Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore exercised an especial fascination for Artaud).⁷ In the theatre he founded with Roger Vitrac, in 1927, Artaud mounted the works of Strindberg and Claudel; and in his short-lived Théâtre de la Cruauté, founded in 1935, he staged his own adaptation of The Cenci — like Ford’s play, a tale of incest and murder. In one of his manifestoes, Artaud outlines an original scenario called The Conquest of Mexico, a conflict between the armies of Montezuma and Cortez in which the raging, clashing, whirling struggle of men and beasts is described as if it were apocalypse. And elsewhere, he expresses his desire to adapt a theatre to the vision of Goya and El Greco, of Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch. Aside from these suggestions, however, and the few plays Artaud staged before and after writing his essays, he left no practical applications of his theories.⁸ His theatre remained in his head, a vision he could transcribe only to the written page; and he died before its impact was really felt.⁹

If Artaud never achieved his theatre, then many of his successors partially did. Critics have seen his influence on almost every experimental dramatist after World War II. Artaud’s desire to theatricalize “the nightmare of Flemish painting,” for example, was realized by the Flemish playwright, Michel de Ghelderode in flamboyant, crowded, baroque plays, studded with Renaissance violence. This connection may be coincidental, but there are indisputable Artaudian influences (most of them mentioned by Guicharnaud) on Camus, Audiberti, Pichette, Vauthier, Ionesco, Beckett, Weingarten, and Adamov. Certainly, Ionesco’s disgust with conceptual language (“Oh words,” cries a character in Jack or The Submission, “what crimes are committed in your name”) owes something to Artaud; and his Surrealist diction, where one word is monotonously intoned and repeated, monstrous neologisms shake the senses, logic is wrenched, and foreign tongues become interchangeable, achieves Artaud’s dream of using language in a “new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion.”¹⁰ Furthermore, the French avant-garde continues to produce a savagely antisocial and antipsychological theatre, possibly as a result of Artaud’s strictures. In Beckett’s plays, society hardly exists at all, and man is in a void; in Ionesco’s, personality is disintegrated and identity destroyed. The “theatre of the absurd,” though not really a theatre of cruelty, does try to appeal to Artaud’s “total man.” Fashioning his plays in the shape of a dream, a fantasy, or a nightmare, the absurdist dramatist tries to evoke the metaphysical side of experience, with terror as his recurring motif.

This much can be ascribed to Artaud — but not to him alone. While his impact on the “theatre of the absurd” is strong, he is only one among a host of influences. As a matter of fact, Artaud’s central idea of a ritual theatre of cruelty, exorcising fantasies, is not picked up by the absurdists, who never stray too far from the limits laid down by Dada and Surrealism. Though Artaud would have liked his wild humor, a playwright like Ionesco, for example, would probably have seemed to him a little too frivolous, and much too self-conscious, since Ionesco’s satire on concepts is itself highly conceptualized, just as his attacks on language and logic are the work of an accomplished linguist and logician. As for the rest of the “theatre of the absurd,” Artaud might well have found it too nihilistic in its implications, too special in its appeal, too entrapped in that huis clos created by Jarry and his followers. Even the most gifted of these dramatists, Samuel Beckett, might have seemed to him a little too wan and listless for that vital, delirious theatre he envisioned. The messianic element in Artaud’s thought never infiltrates the “theatre of the absurd,” which remains a ferociously avant-garde movement with an exclusively existential vision.

In Jean Genet, on the other hand, Artaud would unquestionably have seen his most promising heir. Genet has been wrongly classed with the absurdists; yet he goes well beyond the limited boundaries of the avant-garde to create an alchemical, primitive, messianic theatre, embodying many of Artaud’s precepts: an Oriental theatre of metaphysical tendency, the modern equivalent of the mystery religions. Genet pulls his myths from the depths of a totally liberated unconscious where morality, inhibition, refinement, and conscience hold no sway; at the basis of his work is that dark sexual freedom which Artaud held to be the root of all great myths. Genet’s sexuality, to be sure, is perverse, and his fantasies have been evacuated not only in theatrical myths but also in criminal actions. But while Artaud might have found Genet a less than healthy manifestation of the diseased Western consciousness, he would surely have admired his capacity to transform pathology into ceremonious drama through a rich, imaginative use of the stage. Genet’s plays take the form of liberated dreams, organized into rites. Through the open exaltation of crime, eroticism, and savagery, he hopes to exorcise his own, as well as the spectator’s, cruelty.

Genet, the dramatist, in short, is largely created by Artaud.¹¹ Indeed, their extra-dramatic utterances are sometimes so similar that it is difficult to tell which man is speaking. In his “Notes on the Theatre,” for example (published in 1954 as a foreword to The Maids), Genet writes of his distaste for the Occidental theatre in marked Artaudian accents: “What I have been told about the Japanese, Chinese, and Balinese revels and the perhaps magnified idea that persists in my brain make the formula of the Western theatre seem to me too coarse. One can only dream of an art that would be a profound web of active symbols capable of speaking to the audience a language in which nothing is said but everything is portended.” This dream, which was also Artaud’s, can only be effectuated by repudiating all the dramatic traditions of the West: “For even the finest Western plays have something shoddy about them, an air of masquerade and not of ceremony.”

No more masterpieces might be Genet’s watchword too. The Western masquerade must give way to the Oriental-type ceremony in which character — the psychological aspect of the drama — will dissolve into “remote signs.” For Genet, this will not come at once; and his failure with Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1948), as he tells us, stemmed from his inability “to contrive that the characters on the stage would only be metaphors of what they were supposed to represent.” For through this use of metaphor comes the Artaudian theatre of doubles, linking the real with the fictitious worlds, disguising and revealing reality. If metaphor and ceremony are the cornerstones of the drama, then for Genet the greatest metaphors and the highest form of ceremony are to be found in the Mass: “Beneath the familiar appearances — a crust of bread — a god is devoured. I know of nothing more theatrically effective than the elevation of the host. . . .”

What the Mass possesses, besides its splendid theatricality and metaphorical magic, is the power of unifying a religious collective in a moment of affirmation and belief. It is precisely this union of spectators that Genet seeks — and cannot find in the Western theatre: “I have spoken of communion. The modern theatre is a diversion. . . . The word somewhat suggests the idea of dispersion. I know no plays that link the spectators, be it only for an hour. Quite the contrary, they isolate them further. . . .” To bring these spectators together, Genet envisions a ritual theatre, drawing not on conventional religious sources but rather on the poet’s imagination: he will function, in Artaud’s phrase, as “a master of sacred ceremonies.” Thus, Genet inherits Artaud’s radical messianism. Alienated so completely from the modern world, he will be satisfied with nothing less than a new world, constructed on his own terms. What these unusual terms will be, Genet only hints at in his foreword to The Maids, but it is clear enough that his own role will be crucial: “No doubt, one of the functions of art is to substitute the efficacy of beauty for religious faith. At least, this beauty should have the power of a poem, that is, of a crime. But let that go.”

In his novels and plays — and especially in his autobiographical work Journal du Voleur (The Thief’s Journal, 1948) — Genet does not let the issue go at all, but rather worries it over and over until beauty, poetry, and crime become the foundations of a new religious faith. Genet is one of those French writers in the rebel tradition of Sade, Lacenaire, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud who extend their dreams of revolt into the waking world, acting out their fantasies, then turning them into literature. But Genet’s literary efforts (begun in jail in 1943) are devoted not only to justifying his life but also to sanctifying it. A notorious homosexual and thief, he exalts the underworld, and offers his own criminal experience as the exemplary life. “Saintliness is my goal,” he declares in The Thief’s Journal — though he admits that he is groping towards a definition of what that means: “Unable to arrive at a definition of saintliness — no more than of beauty — I want at every moment to create it . . . so that at every moment I may be guided by a will to saintliness until the time when I am so luminous that people will say, ‘He is a saint,’ or more likely, ‘He was a saint.’ ”

Saintliness, then, is a condition determined as much by the outer world as by inner qualities — a kind of glory imposed on you by others. Genet is anxious to attract the attention of the world (“I aspire to your recognition,” he says, “your consecration”), and it is this desire for glory which originally made him turn his life into literature: “It is what language offers me to evoke it, to talk about it, render it. To achieve legend.” Legend, however, lies outside conventional morality. For Genet, it is achieved through rigorous pursuit of the absolute — extreme action, pushed past limits — and may, therefore, derive from an excess of evil as well as from an excess of good. One becomes luminous, for example, through treachery or cruelty or sordidness, as long as they are fiercely pursued. It is for this reason that Genet interprets the scriptural phrase “taking upon Himself the sins of the world” to mean that Christ experienced these sins and subscribed to evil; and for the same reason, he rebukes Saint Vincent de Paul for taking the galley slave’s place in irons instead of committing the galley slave’s crime.

Genet’s idea of the saint, in short, is always coupled, and sometimes identified, with his idea of the criminal: “We shall be that eternal couple, Solange,” says Claire in The Maids, “the two of us, the eternal couple of the criminal and the saint. We’ll be saved, Solange, saved, I swear to you.” Said and Leila, for example, form that eternal couple in Genet’s most recent play, Les Paravents (The Screens, 1961) — the ugly Leila whose extreme fidelity to her indifferent husband sanctifies her, and the traitorous Said, made legendary by excessive treachery. What links these two is not the content of their actions, but their style, for Genet’s idea of moral heroism is based exclusively on the elegant manner in which an action is performed. Like Rimbaud, who “admired the intractable convict on whom the prison doors are always closing” because “he had more strength than a saint,” Genet sings the song of the criminal with a religious fervor, attempting to create a mystique and a liturgy of style.

Genet’s morality, then, has only one criterion of value — heroism — and only one measure of this value — beauty. Genet is fascinated with pomp, luxury, and vulgarity, and dredges for poetry even in the foulest sewers of life. But although he is infatuated with evil in its most excremental aspects, Genet doesn’t simply wallow in vileness. He tries to transform crime, vulgarity, and squalor into something elegant, lyric, and rhapsodic, a transformation he calls “rehabilitating the ignoble.” ¹² For him, “the beauty of a moral act depends upon the beauty of its expression,” and “the only criterion of an act is its elegance.” This is very close to aestheticism, and the aesthete in Genet manifests itself even more vividly when he describes his own ambitions:

I want to fulfill myself in the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have a graceful curve, slightly bent towards evening, but a hitherto unseen beauty, lovely because of the danger which works away at it, overwhelms it, undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty, I shall go quickly or slowly, but I shall dare what must be dared.

Oh let me be only utter beauty — the author could be Keats, demanding for himself the timeless immobility of a poem; but it is this that Genet means by legend. Much the same need animates Solange, in The Maids, who visualizes her luminous march to the gallows as if it were a heroic story; the Chief of Police, in The Balcony, who wishes to join the glorious hierarchy of the Nomenclature; Said, in The Screens, who becomes embalmed in the emblematic gesture of a traitor. Each discovers “a hitherto unseen beauty” — Genet, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, wants to embrace the beauty that has not yet come into the world. Though beauty lurk in the underworld of crime, it can create legends — “the act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song.” Thus, Genet’s criminal heroes escape from themselves into poems, emblems, and songs; and thus, beauty, morality, and saintliness become one.

This extraordinary aesthetic is the product of an even more extraordinary life; and Jean Paul Sartre has shown the genesis of these ideas in his exhaustive study of Genet, part biography, part philosophical exegesis, part literary analysis, part psychoanalysis. In this study, appropriately called Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1952), Sartre recounts how Genet, born a foundling and abandoned to the Assistance Publique, turned homosexual and thief through a combination of childhood events. Genet, according to Sartre, begins as “a good little boy . . . as good as gold” who is taught “an ethic that condemns him, for this ethic of ownership casts him doubly into nothingness, as ragamuffin and bastard.” Thus, Genet begins his criminal career, playing the games of “saintliness and pilfering,” out of inverted veneration for bourgeois laws and virtues: “Our future burglar starts by learning absolute respect for property.” Like the two servants in The Maids, Genet begins to defile the things he most reveres.

From this point on, Genet’s actions are completely regulated by the world from which he is excluded. An illegitimate among the legitimate, he turns to crime in a society of laws. “Abandoned by my family,” he writes in The Thief’s Journal, “I felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. Hence I resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me.” Genet, then, turns the world inside out; his life becomes a reversed mirror image of the lives of les honnêtes hommes. If the world is good, then Genet will be evil; if men are basically heterosexual, then he will express “a preference for boys.” Genet’s disposition towards crime is always accompanied by erotic feelings (“I was hot for crime”), as street urchins are aroused by mischief; and throughout his life, Genet, who always remained something of a gypsy, will be sexually stimulated by evil. But Genet’s homosexuality, like that of Camus’s Caligula, is also an extension of his revolt.¹³ He lives to discover boundaries and then to exceed them. Thus, Genet needs the lawful world in order to do violence upon it, and though he detests society, he always admires its “perfect coherence,” its diversity, and its fearful symmetry. To create his own order, he must reverse the established order, finding his heroic identity through immorality, vice, exile, and total opposition to whatever exists.

Genet is soon to learn that he cannot reach the nothingness he seeks. Nevertheless, he plans a brutal break with “your world” (as he frequently calls respectable society), casting off all civilized restraints and immersing himself in the destructive element: “It is by a long, long road that I choose to go back to primitive life. What I need first is condemnation by my race.” Before Genet, Rimbaud had mused: “Misfortune was my God. I laid myself down in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime.” Genet begins to dry himself in the same air, worshiping misfortune, pursuing heroic singularity, following the life of the outlaw. After spending his youth in reformatories, he joins the Foreign Legion, deserts, and wanders through Europe as a thief, derelict, and prostitute. Everywhere, he is met with disappointment. The life of the thief, for example, had seemed to him unique, but he is depressed to discover how common it actually is (his homosexuality is equally common). And in Nazi Germany, he is confronted with “a race of thieves,” where evil is institutionalized, and Police and Crime are one. His revolt becomes a travesty: “The outrageous is impossible. I’m stealing in the void.”

Genet, in consequence, returns to his home country, thinking “only my love of the French language attaches me to France,” but discovering he is also attracted by its coherent laws and regulations. These, he determines to break, along with the bonds of brotherhood and love, always seeking new, more shocking violations of the moral code. He becomes interested in espionage, because it allows him to pollute “through treason, an institution which regards loyalty — or loyalism — as its essential quality.” But even espionage can be a positive act, since the spy acts for a nation. Seeking the wholly negative, he decides to inform on his own kind instead, thus betraying evil with evil, for the criminal informer is a man truly alone. Genet desires utter solitude and utter nothingness. But the ultimate break with the outside world is possible only in fantasy: “Murder is not the most effective means of reaching the subterranean world of vileness. . . . Other crimes are more degrading: theft, begging, treason, breach of trust, etc.: These are the ones I chose to commit, though I was always haunted by the idea of a murder which would cut me off irremediably from your world.” Though he never commits a murder, Genet, by 1948, has been convicted ten times of theft, and is reprieved from life imprisonment only through a petition of French intellectuals and artists. He had tried to merit the world’s contempt by plunging into vileness, but he could not break with the world entirely; and his growing literary reputation was to bring him glory of a quite different kind.

Though he cannot achieve this for himself, then, Genet’s ideal is l’impossible nullité (the Impossible Nothingness) which rests in the negativity of pure evil. If good is an illusion, then evil is reality — absolute freedom from moral, canon, and statute law. Reality and nothingness, however, remain beyond the reach of man, since most forms of evil are only the reverse of good. Unable to achieve the nonbeing he seeks, Genet determines to achieve the alternatives: legend, martyrdom, and sanctity, which are links with the world of men. “Genet not only wants to will Evil,” writes Sartre, “he wants to be the martyr of the impossibility of willing it. . . . When Evil seemed possible, Genet did Evil in order to be wicked; now that Evil is shown to be impossible, Genet does Evil in order to be a saint.” Pecca fortiter was the injunction of Luther, and Genet, detesting middle ways in good or evil, summons up the great sinner who defies the heavens and steals the crimes of the gods: “If you can’t find any more crimes,” screams Kadidja in The Screens, “steal crimes from heaven, it’s bursting with them! Wangle the murders of the gods, their rapes, their fires, their incests, their lies, their butcheries. . . .”

Genet himself occasionally identifies with Lucifer, and struts with Satanic pride: “If pride is the boldest freedom —” he writes in his autobiography, “Lucifer crossing swords with God — if pride is the wondrous cloak wherein my guilt, of which it is woven, stands erect, I want to be guilty.” Genet’s pride, however, is always derived from his guilt (“My pride,” he writes, “has been colored with the purple of my shame”), and, therefore, needs the order which produces it. Like his morality, Genet’s theology is inverted, and he cannot do without the idea of God: “It would seem logical to pray to the devil,” he remarks in The Thief’s Journal, “but no thief would dare do so seriously. To come to terms with him would be to commit oneself too deeply. He is too opposed to God, Who, we know, is the final victor.”¹⁴ Only the murderer comes close to breaking with God and achieving reality; but although he admires the murderer, Genet cannot follow him to this ultimate destiny. Accepting God, Genet enters God’s kingdom backwards, breaking universal laws that he believes in, and thereby toughening the fibers of his integrity. “Will anyone be surprised,” he asks, “when I claim that crime can help me insure my moral vigor?” ¹⁵ Stealing as an act of moral adventure, seeking misfortune as a sign of grace, Genet plays a game which he knows full well is lost in advance. But then he wishes to lose. Only through earning his punishment can he find his identity and merit the martyrdom he seeks.

Genet’s desire for martyrdom, as Sartre has shown, has homosexual-masochistic overtones: the world which punishes him is the Male by whom he wishes to be raped and killed. His admiration for murderers (“I want to sing murder, for I love murderers”) stems from the same pathological desire: for if Genet sometimes dreams of committing murder, he more often dreams of being the murderer’s victim. Genet admires murderers for the same qualities he admires in policemen — for their cruelty, courage, indifference, and virility. But this admiration is not wholly sexual. For Genet, the murderer is not only an aesthetic hero, but also a moral one — not only a beautiful brute, but also a “joyous moral suicide,” a true victim of misfortune. Like Lefranc in Haute Surveillance (Deathwatch, 1949), Genet desires misfortune for himself, but he has learned, as Lefranc must learn, that misfortune cannot be willed. Hoping to join the mystical fraternity of the murderer, Green Eyes, Lefranc kills the young Maurice, but Green Eyes says he “didn’t want what happened to me to happen. It was all given to me. A gift from God or the devil, but something I didn’t want.” Genet awaits the same unwanted gift.

Green Eyes, being illiterate and instinctual, is close to reality and non-being; Lefranc, being conscious and literate, enacts a masquerade. Genet’s personal dilemma is similar to Lefranc’s. Although he wishes to enter primitive life, he is too self-conscious to refrain from playacting; and his role is determined by the civilized world he is trying to escape. Thus, outrageous as Genet’s revolt may seem, it still demands the existence of a traditional social, moral and religious framework. As Sartre puts it, somewhat too strongly: “Rimbaud wanted to change life, and Marx society: Genet doesn’t want to change anything. Don’t count on him to criticize institutions; he needs them as Prometheus needs his vulture. . . .” Actually, Genet wants to change everything, and every word he writes is an implicit criticism of institutions. But he is also aware that even his desire for total change is conditioned by the established order. For Genet to rebel, the Church, the Army, and the Magistracy must remain inviolate. For Genet to commit sacrilege, there must be belief.

Genet, therefore, is compounded of paradoxes and inner conflicts. Seeking nothingness, he is pressed into a quest for legend. Loving anarchy and freedom, he also finds he worships organization and order. Devoted to reality, he cannot escape from illusion. Frustrating in life, such contradictions, however, are the very stuff of drama — and especially of the theatre of revolt, where the conflicts between reality and illusion, being and nonbeing, anarchy and order, have provided the subject matter, and determined the forms, of a large number of superb plays. Like the other rebel dramatists, Genet puts his personal conflicts at the service of his drama, with revolt as the theme, and order as the principle, of his art.¹⁶ And indeed art proves to be his deliverance, for only by creating a world of the imagination can Genet transcend the conflicts of his life.

What also attracts Genet to the theatre, as Sartre informs us, is “the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality” — for him, it is the place of ceremonious masquerade. Genet is frank enough about his love of deception. “What’s going to follow,” he interjects at one point in Notre-Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers, 1942) “is false, and you are not to accept it as gospel truth. Truth is not my strong point. But ‘one must lie in order to be true.’ And even go beyond.” External truth is certainly not his strong point. And although he is preoccupied with much the same subjects as the realists and naturalists (crime, murder, prostitution, squalor, etc.), he lacks their interest in the tangible world: “He hates Matter,” observes Sartre. “Matter is unintelligible; the insurmountable outrage, it bodies forth the reality of his exile.” Scorning external truth and physical reality, Genet, therefore, creates a drama of appearances through which a deeper reality is evoked — an art of being and seeming built around the illusion-making faculty of man.

This sounds Pirandellian, and, indeed, after Artaud, Pirandello is the strongest influence on Genet’s theatre. Genet himself, in fact, is what Pirandello would have called a costruzione. Like that character in Our Lady of the Flowers, who, when asked why he stole, replied, “Because the others thought I was a thief,” Genet had built himself up in an image provided by others: J’ai décidé d’être ce que la crime a fait de moi (“I decided to be what crime has made of me”). And so it is with his dramatic characters, most of whom play the roles imposed on them by others. Imprisoned in definitions, caught in a reflected mirror-image, they take their parts in an infinite comedy of illusion, chafing against these restrictions at the same time that they submit to them. Thus, Claire, in The Maids, hates her sister, Solange, because she is the reflected image of her own servility (“And me, I’m sick of seeing my image thrown back at me by a mirror, like a bad smell”), just as she imagines Madame detesting them both for reflecting her (“You’re our distorting mirror, our loathsome vent, our shame, our dregs!”).

Genet, therefore, is tortured by illusion, and wishes to annihilate the world which pressed the mask of thief so firmly on his features. He wants to be a man without a mask — in Pirandello’s term, a nobody — and plunge through appearances into reality, which is the negation of roles. But reality is also l’impossible nullité; the nobody invariably finds himself becoming somebody, and acting out a role. Genet idealizes the purity which lies beneath appearances, but it always somehow eludes him: “His initial desire is realistic,” writes Sartre. “He wants what exists. But the very object of his desire soon changes into a dream. Genet without ceasing to desire the real embarks into the imaginary.” Unlike Pirandello, however, Genet is charmed by impersonation (“I love imposture”) and finds the possibilities of heroism in illusion. For if it is impossible to cease from playacting, then the only alternative is to play one’s role to its very limits. “If he has courage — please understand,” Genet writes, “the guilty man decides to be what crime has made him. Finding a justification is easy; otherwise how would he live? He draws it from his pride.” Caught in the act of stealing, and driven by pride and shame, Genet determined to be an ideal thief, pursuing absolute evil. In the same way, Claire and Solange follow their playacting to the point of suicide and martyrdom, and the Negroes in The Blacks “persist to the point of madness in what they’re condemned to be.” The condemnation provides the definition; the condemned provide the moral acts. “We are what they want us to be,” observes a character in The Blacks. “We shall therefore be it to the very end, absurdly.” For in this extreme of role-playing lies Genet’s definition of the hero, “the beholding of our own ideal image in an ideal mirror which shows us eternally resplendent.”

Genet, in short, conceives of life as a perpetual masquerade, and les honnêtes hommes, without knowing it, are playing a game of appearances: “You must go home now,” says Madame Irma, dismissing the audience at the end of The Balcony, “where everything — you can be quite sure — will be even falser than here. . . .” All of life is a game, and the origin of the masquerade is in Creation itself: “For Genet,” writes Sartre, “the origin of the world is in play, and society is organized when the rules of the game are fixed.” A nation, therefore, is an entity which has “perpetuated an image” over centuries. The established order consists of roles in a national drama. And “the rules of the game” are a nation’s laws and regulations. To break these laws, however, is only to engage in another kind of game, with another set of rules (the “code of the underworld,” which Genet finds absurd). Genet’s criminals are role-players too, and he is attracted to convicts because they are so much like children in their love of masquerade. Everyone plays his part, policeman and murderer, functionary and rebel, saint and sinner. “My characters are all masks,” write Genet. “How do you expect me to tell you whether they are true or false?”

Thus, as Sartre puts it, “In Genet’s plays, every character must play the role of a character who plays a role.” And thus, the Negroes, in The Blacks, are “like guilty persons who play at being guilty,” and the customers, in The Balcony, impersonate the Great Figures of a nation in a brothel. If this imposture is heroic enough, then the gates of legend are broken, because if all of life is histrionic, then the greatest men are only the greatest actors. And the greatest playwright will be he who reveals and celebrates the imposture of the masquerade. Although Genet continues to feel anguished over his inability to attain reality, he makes marvelous use of his imprisonment in illusion. Like a joyous prestidigitator, he transforms the game of life into a ritual celebration, turning his masked figures into saints, martyrs, and heroes, reflecting back a criminal beauty. “Let the profiles reflect profiles back and forth,” says the Lieutenant to his forces in The Screens, “and let the image you offer the rebels be of such beauty that the image they have of themselves cannot resist.” It is much the same profile that Genet offers the spectator, hoping to make himself irresistible through the image of his art.

Genet creates a drama of transformation — the metamorphosis of one object into another. Nothing is what it seems; everything is in the process of becoming something else. As we have seen, his model for this is the Mass (“Beneath the familiar appearances — a crust of bread — a god is devoured”), which is a ritual based on metaphorical conversions. If the Mass is dedicated to sacred good, however, Genet’s ritual is dedicated to sacred evil. His drama, as Sartre has observed, is a kind of Black Mass through which the playwright invokes, not God, but himself. Artaud proposed a theatre of sacrifice and exorcism, and Genet responds. But as Artaud also proposed, Genet transforms these ritual crimes into their magic equivalents. Just as the eating of the Host invokes a primitive act of cannibalism, so the constituent elements of Genet’s drama — murder, rape, cannibalism, slaughter, cruelty, suicide, savagery, and eroticism — are transformed into ceremonious acts and hieratic gestures. “Genet cheerfully plays on two levels,” writes Sartre. “The greatest crime in the first system will be the most beautiful gesture in the second; the abominable act of the murderer is at the same time the tragic gesture of the sacrificer.”

Out of these gestures comes the Artaudian exorcism. Genet purges himself of crime, and purges the spectator too. “By infecting us with his evil,” writes Sartre, “Genet delivers us from it. Each of his books is a crisis of cathartic possession, a psychodrama. . . . Ten years of his literature are worth a psychoanalytic cure.” It was this “magical idea” that Artaud, too, proposed to borrow from psychiatry: to exorcise the spectator’s fantasies by exteriorizing the “truthful precipitates of his dreams.” On the other hand, not everyone agrees that Genet’s fantasies have this universal quality, and critics have found his exotic dream world, in which everything is possible, too personal to be meaningful. Jacques Guicharnaud, for example, has complained that the universe of his plays is “Jean Genet’s private Hollywood,” adding that “the spectator’s consciousness of a universe in which he does not participate outweighs the communion. Although relatively free in his use of subject matter, Genet is more imprisoned within himself than any of the contemporary playwrights.” It is certainly true that Genet’s fantasies have been colored by his sado-masochistic imagination; and even his most enthusiastic partisans have been bothered by the homosexual perfume which occasionally hangs over his plays. I cannot agree, on the other hand, that Genet’s world is rare or inaccessible. After his early novels, and after The Maids and Deathwatch, which take place within relatively enclosed scenes, Genet’s dreams have become progressively more open until in The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens, he has enlarged his vision to include world politics, racial struggles, history, and religion.

And done so with tremendous verbal and theatrical skill. Genet’s love of appearances leads him into dazzling stage effects. Sharing Artaud’s taste for theatrical spectacle, Genet prepares a rich visual feast with the aid of settings, properties, and accessories. In The Screens, for example, he juxtaposes real objects with objects drawn in trompe-l’oeil on mammoth screens, at one point suggesting a giant conflagration through stylized flames painted before the eyes of the audience. And Genet’s use, in all his full-length plays, of dummies, masks, tragic boots, and padded costumes realizes Artaud’s vision of a theatre equipped with “manikins, enormous masks, objects of strange proportions.” Genet, similarly, uses dance, mime, and gesticulation, particularly in The Blacks, creating that Artaudian “poetry in space” through “all the means of expression utilizable on the stage.”

Genet transforms through verbal poetry as well. It is through language, in fact, that he achieved his own transformation. “My victory is verbal,” he writes, “and I owe it to the sumptuousness of the terms.” Having ordered his chaotic life by means of language, Genet uses it to order his plays as well. And because it transformed him from a criminal into an artist, language, for Genet, always remains an agency of metamorphosis. Again, this metamorphosis is derived from Christian ritual. For if bread and wine are the magical equivalents of flesh and blood, then words are the magical equivalents of things and can be made to have the same symbolic power. For Genet, the justification of art is “the task of images, that is, of correspondences with the splendors of the physical world.” These correspondences, however, are not fixed. Accepting the artificiality of words, Genet wrenches their meanings, somewhat in the manner of the Surrealists. Words lose their function as descriptive symbols and become more like ciphers and heraldic signs, transformed into whatever Genet wants them to mean. “Anything can become a woman,” observes Sartre in discussing The Maids, “a flower, an animal, an inkwell.”

From the dislocation of the thing and its verbal symbol comes Genet’s rich, baroque style — often obscure, often the source of stunning effects.¹⁷ For if words can mean anything, then objects, too, can be willfully transformed. In Deathwatch, for example, Green Eyes describes the shapes he tried to assume to avoid being a murderer: “Tried to be a dog, a cat, a house, a tiger, a table, a stone! I even tried, me too, to be a rose.” In his later plays, Genet actually attempts this varying of shapes on the stage. The Missionary, in The Blacks, literally turns into a cow; and Leila and the Mother, in The Screens, share a moment as barking dogs. Sartre relates how Genet confided to him that he hated roses, but loved the word rose; for Genet, therefore, the word is no longer connected to the object. Similarly, in The Thief’s Journal, Genet tells us “there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.” By the same token, there is a close relationship between steel and spiderwebs — and between all the objects in the animate world. “For Genet,” writes Sartre, “poetry reveals nothing.” And yet, Genet’s rhetoric of transformation is crucial to his art. Through such verbal effects, he creates what Artaud called “a metaphysics of spoken language,” considering it, in Artaudian fashion, as “the form of Incantation.”

In Genet, then, two strains of the modern theatre converge — the primitive and the self-conscious. In the manner of Artaud, Genet forges a theatre of cruelty, fashioning rites of sacrifice and exorcism designed to bring about that cathartic possession in which the spectator’s taste for crime is purged. On the other hand, these primitive rites have been organized by a highly sophisticated mind which provides them with a meaning beyond their surface hieroglyphics. For Genet is not only an instinctual rebel, pouring out criminal fantasies, but also a rebel philosopher, reflecting on rebellion and crime. He not only dreams, like Artaud, but also, like Pirandello, analyzes his dreams.

It is this self-conscious analysis that makes Genet so complicated and ambiguous. His myths invariably revolve around revolt, and reveal the author’s anarchistic desire for total liberation. But the rebellion which proceeds throughout his plays is almost always ineffective. Genet wishes to annihilate the established order; at the same time, he knows that order is ineradicable and absolute rebellion impossible. Just as he learned that his own way of life was only a reversed mirror image of existing laws and conventions, so he knows that all rebellions are doomed to take on, if only negatively, the characteristics of the old order. It is for this reason that the established regime, in Genet, usually takes the credit for the revolution: “At least say to them,” observes the White Queen in The Blacks, “that without us their revolt would be meaningless — and wouldn’t even exist,” while the Colonials observe of the Arabs in The Screens, “What can be said with a certain amount of justice is that we were a pretext for their revolting. If not for us . . . they’d have gone under.” For it is a tragic fact, in Genet, that even if a rebellion succeeds in the short run, it always fails in the long run; rebellion and order are merely two roles in the same masquerade.

Thus, while Genet always sympathizes with his rebel characters (maids, murderers, anarchists, Negroes, and Arabs), he knows, too, that they are doomed to futility by a love of playacting; their reality is swallowed up by illusion; their sacred negativity ultimately gives way to the positive need for emblems, banners, and heroes. Genet’s work, therefore, is not accurately described, as some have described it, as a drama of “social protest.” It is a denial, and at the same time an affirmation, of the fundamental conditions of life.¹⁸ Stripping away the lies, deceptions, and impostures of the respectable world, Genet concludes that these are, nevertheless, essential to existence. The Impossible Nothingness remains his ideal, but an ideal never to be realized except in the imagination. Genet thus imposes Pirandellian concepts on Artaudian chimeras. He both rebels and criticizes revolt; and since he loves beauty, he poses his dialectic with elegance, power, and style.

Genet has written two masterpieces of revolt — Le Balcon (The Balcony, 1956) and Les Nègres (The Blacks, 1958). Les Paravents (The Screens, 1961), though theatrically spectacular, is too diffuse to be effective, and adds nothing especially new to the other two plays. Both The Balcony and The Blacks are interpretations of rebellion, the latter concentrating on the rebels, the former on the established order against which the revolt takes place. Of the two, The Balcony is a more coherent work of art, for this probing philosophical drama embodies Genet’s most impressive theatricalization of the sham and artificiality on which he finds life to be based. It is, besides, one of the richest and most complex works in the modern theatre, and despite occasional borrowings, one of the most original. Dazzling in its twists and turns of thought, The Balcony begins as a piece of theatrical pornography, then enlarges into a theatricalized view of society, and concludes as a conception of history and religion by a subversive and audacious mind.

The opening scenes of the play seem like an actualization of one of Artaud’s scenarios, because — in their unification of power, cruelty, and sex — they owe a good deal to the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The play opens on a sacristy, adorned with a Spanish crucifix. There, a Bishop, in miter and gilded cope, is confessing a half-naked penitent. This Bishop, we are to learn, is an impostor, and the penitent is a whore, confessing make-believe sins. The whole setting, in fact, is sham. The sacristy is merely one studio in a brothel called the Grand Balcony, run by Madame Irma, who presides over the erotic revels and supplies the costumes, props, and supernumeraries, while the customers provide the scenarios.

The “Bishop,” then, is not a cleric but a gas man, dressed in an exaggerated version of episcopal garb, with cothurni to give him height and padded shoulders to give him authority. And the ritual he conducts with the penitent is merely an elaborate prelude to sexual intercourse. He has chosen a sacred function in order to commit sacrilege against it, defiling the Church through its official costume. “And in order to destroy all function,” he says, “I want to cause a scandal and feel you up, you slut, you bitch, you trollop, you tramp. . . .” His sacrilege, however, remains a fantasy; his revolt against function is without real effect. In this house of illusion, there is always something fake amidst tho authentic details, and reality never breaks through. “Reality frightens you, doesn’t it,” says the penitent, to which the Bishop replies, “If your sins were real, they’d be crimes, and I’d be in a fine mess.” The atmosphere of evil is titillating as long as it is not wholly genuine. The appearance of crime and sacrilege must never become a reality.

It is much the same for the other customers, who include an Attorney General, judging, condemning, and licking the foot of a fleshly thief; a General, taken on a tour of his battlefield by a pulchritudinous horse; a lice-ridden tramp being whipped by a girl in leather boots; and a leper who is cured by the Virgin Mary. As always in French erotic literature, sex in The Balcony is accompanied by some artificial stimulation of a sado-masochistic nature, and also by the desecration of some sacred office. But Genet gives these scenes the distance of ritual (they should be presented, he stipulates, “with the solemnity of a Mass in a most beautiful cathedral”), and they are always a form of fantasy. The brothel is a reflection of the outside world, but the two worlds are kept distinct. “In real life,” says Madame Irma, the sacred costumes of the official figures are “the props of a display that they have to drag in the mud of the real and commonplace. Here, Comedy and Appearance remain pure, and the revels intact.” Thus, her costomers can playact to the limits of their sexual imaginations; and even Christ can be imitated, and defiled, with all his “paraphernalia.”

These pornographic scenes, however, are only a prologue to the play proper. Genet soon proceeds beyond the titillations of the erotic masquerade to its philosophical implications. Upon the entrance of the Chief of Police — Irma’s failing lover, and Hero of the Republic — we learn that the Grand Balcony is an ally of the established regime, and that the blasphemous revels are not only tolerated by this regime but absolutely essential to its survival. For at the same time that the sacred offices are being desecrated in the brothel, they are also being preserved there. To imitate a function, even by defiling it, is to assume its power and accept its authority. Genet, who played a criminal role written by society, remembers the inverted veneration for society which his criminal acts implied. Blasphemy hinges on belief; sacrilege keeps the system in power.

The real threat to the system, in fact, comes not from this whorehouse imposture but rather from a rebellion which is raging in the streets of the city. For the rebellion is dedicated to destroying the whole artifice of government, clergy, magistracy, and army, the masquerades through which the system perseveres. This is the purpose, at any rate, of one of the rebel leaders — the proletarian Roger — who wants the rebellion to adhere to a chaste Puritan ideal and put an end to role-playing. Genet has already discovered this to be l’impossible nullité, and he articulates his discovery through the mouth of the Chief of Police: “The rebellion itself is a game. From here you can’t see anything of the outside, but every rebel is playing a game. And he loves his game.” For the Chief of Police, however, the danger is that the rebels will be carried away by their game, and leap, without realizing it, “into reality.”

The leap into reality is Roger’s goal, for he knows that if the rebellion does not begin by “despising make-believe,” it will soon come to resemble the other side: “Instead of changing the world, all we achieve is a reflection of the one we destroy.” To change the world in deed, he wants everything aimed at utility. Skirmishes must be fought without gestures, elegance, or charm. Sexuality is forbidden, along with anger, frenzy, or excitement. Reason must prevail, for only through the cold exercise of the rational faculty can sham and duplicity be expunged from the world. For the same purpose, he orders that when the Great Figures are captured, their costumes are to be ripped off, and neither their names nor their functions are ever to be mentioned again: “If the heavens are studded with such constellations as that of the Archbishop and Hero, then we’ve got to tear heaven down.” Roger desires absolute revolt and total nothingness — the end of compromise, the annihilation of illusion, the conclusion of the masquerade.

But Roger is an impossibilist. Even as he is formulating his ideals, the rebellion is getting out of hand and turning into a carnival. The men are fighting with a sexual pleasure (“one hand on the trigger, the other on the fly”), killing for the fun of it, instead of rationally, earnestly, gravely. As another rebel leader tells Roger: “You’re dreaming. Dreaming of an impossible revolution that’s carried out reasonably and cold-bloodedly. You’re fascinated by it, the way those in the other camp are by other games. But you’ve got to realize that the most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.” Absolute revolt, then, is a dream, and even Roger is becoming a kind of functionary — a Justicer — engaged, against his will, in playing a game.

The rebellion is entirely doomed when the rebels begin to demand emblems, heroes, and banners. Looking for a legendary figure to worship, they fix on Chantal, whom Roger rescued from the brothel; she will become the female saint of the revolution, “the glorified whore who sings an anthem and is virginified.” Excited by an historical role which only a few women have been permitted to play, Chantal agrees to embody the revolution, becoming “an emblem forever escaping from her womanliness.” In the brothel, she had learned “the art of shamming and acting.” Now she applies this art to a higher role, while Roger, who wants her to nurse the wounded, begins to realize she has merely reentered the whorehouse (“She’s flying into the other camp!”). There is no escape from the masquerade. The revolution is, indeed, reflecting the world it had wanted to destroy.

Genet has modeled this revolt on the French revolution, which also began by despising artifice before developing its own ceremonies; and the Puritan Roger, with his love of Reason and Virtue, is obviously patterned on Robespierre. Genet, however, generalizes his drama to include most of the revolutions of modern history. The impulse to change is subverted by the need to play a role; rebels adjust themselves to limits already defined; and the revolutionary leaders become enshrined as new kings, their chaste and simple dress serving as another kind of costume. Thus, Robespierre introduces a terror far worse than the atrocities of the ancien régime; Stalin creates a bureaucracy to rival the feudal hierarchy of the Romanoffs; Castro assumes many of the repressive characteristics of his archenemy, Batista. All progress is a dream, because reality is unattainable. For if real time moves forward, illusory time moves in circles. And men are doomed to an eternal repetition by their love of masquerade.

The scene in the rebel camp is the most “realistic” in the play; but it is also the scene in which “reality” is defeated. From this point on, the dream quality of The Balcony intensifies, and its outer logic dissolves. The actual fate of the rebellion, for example, becomes highly ambiguous. It is historically successful, philosophically a failure. The rebels have achieved their immediate goals insofar as the Queen, the Judge, the Bishop, and the General have been killed. But having failed to destroy the ideas these figures represent, or their own love of playacting, they have lost the game. A Queen can die, but the idea of Queen has not been killed; and the hieratic sanctions of two thousand years of Christianity have kept the Church, the Army, and the Magistracy very much alive. Thus, when the Court Envoy comes to the Grand Balcony to say that the Queen is dead, he can speak only inferentially, through a series of obscure metaphors. The Queen is embroidering a handkerchief which will never be completed. She is engrossed in an infinite meditation. “She makes herself unfindable and thus attains a threatened invisibility.” One Queen is threatening invisibility; another must become visible. And so the Envoy suggests that Madame Irma play this role, and that the other brothel impostors assume the parts of Bishop, Judge, and General.

The impersonation of a Queen by an actress is a device used by Yeats in The Player Queen and by Ugo Betti in The Queen and the Rebels. But in The Balcony, Genet transforms this borrowed device into a mocking commentary on the whole nature of function. To him, men not only impersonate the Great Figures in the brothel of their imaginations; the Great Figures are themselves impersonators. Whatever intrinsic qualifications they may possess are immaterial; their function is defined by clothes and gestures, and by an ability to create reverence in the common people. As for the masses, they recognize only outsides and ornaments. And so, when they wear the proper ornamental costumes and make the proper gestures, the four impostors are able to pass before the crowd for the real thing (“No one could have recognized us. We were in the gold and glitter. They were blinded”). Thus, the rebellion is quashed, and Chantal is killed. And thus, Genet attempts to show that all the sacred offices are the manufacture of sham. The artifice of the outside world is identical with that of the brothel. If the whorehouse is a mirror of society, then society, in turn, reflects the whorehouse.

Genet, however, goes beyond even this mordant conclusion. Through the character of the Chief of Police, he delivers a scorching attack on the very structure of the heavens. Unlike Roger, the Chief of Police thrives on make-believe; through artifice, he hopes to attain to immortality. He has already been hailed as a Hero of the Republic, with a gigantic mausoleum being constructed in his honor.¹⁹ But his ambitions are large, and, before long, he is demanding to become a part of the Nomenclature, with greater authority even than the Bishop, Judge, and General. Like Cocteau’s Oedipe, the Chief of Police longs for le gloire classique; like Genet himself, “He insists on breaking open the gates of legend.” His legendary function, however, has yet to be invented. As Madame Irma sympathetically remarks: “In his effort to win renown, he has chosen a more difficult path than ours.” For if the Government, Church, Army, and Magistracy are functions of an established order, and draw their sanctions from tradition, the function conceived by the Chief of Police has no precedent in Christian history.

The Chief of Police will know he has achieved legend when he is impersonated in the brothel; for simulation, as we have seen, is the proof of sacredness. In order to develop legendary dimensions, the Chief of Police casts about for a suitable emblem — one adviser suggests that he appear as a bloody executioner, another as a gigantic phallus. Despite these graphic emblems of sex and power, however, glory continues to give him “the cold shoulder.” His studio remains vacant and his image relatively small. Irma advises him to keep on killing — perhaps excessive cruelty will make him luminous, as it brought an evil fame to Hitler and Stalin. But the Chief of Police aspires to be much more than a secular dictator. He wants authority not only over the Nomenclature, but even over God: “Well, gentlemen,” he says to the Great Figures, “above God are you, without whom God is nothing. And above you shall be I, without whom. . . .” The exhausted functions of the Nomenclature will receive new strength from the Chief of Police. For he will be both secular and divine, “both legendary and human,” having created a function that will haunt men’s minds.

The Chief of Police, in short, longs to be supreme. And the supremacy he imagines for himself, I think, is that of a god — the Man-God, whose life sets a pattern for the multitudes: “I shall not be the hundred-thousandth-reflection-within-a-reflection in a mirror, but the One and Only, into whom a hundred thousand want to merge.” In Genet’s scheme, even God is an impersonator, with a part in the masquerade. When it is finally announced that he is about to be impersonated, the Chief of Police realizes he has achieved his goal: “Gentlemen, I belong to the Nomenclature.” The proof comes in the person of Roger. Mourning the revolution, convinced finally that reality was inaccessible and “no truth was possible,” Roger has determined to become an actor in the comedy of illusion, and the chief actor, too: “If the brothel exists and I’ve a right to go there, then I’ve a right to lead the character I’ve chosen to the very limit of his destiny . . . no, of mine . . . of merging his destiny with mine.” In the Mausoleum studio, where he has come dressed in a padded replica of the Chief of Police’s clothes, Roger proceeds to act out his supreme role: “Everything proclaims me! Everything breathes me and everything worships me! My history was lived so that a glorious page might be written and then read.” And he climaxes the impersonation by castrating himself, thus proving the divinity of the Chief of Police — for mutilation is the destiny of the Man-God, whether he be Christ, Osiris, or Dionysus.

Irma screeches about the mess on her rugs, but the Chief of Police, after some momentary terror, accepts the implications of his Godhead: “Though my image be castrated in every brothel in the world, I remain intact.” Like his divine predecessors, he has been mutilated and remained whole; like them, he has been imitated, and will continue to be imitated. He achieves his apotheosis, ordering food for the next two thousand years, and descends into his tomb, as the sound of machine guns signifies that a new rebellion is beginning outside. The acts of men continue in their cyclical way, but the Chief of Police has been immobilized in legend. The God of love has been replaced by the God of sex and violence, that rough beast Yeats saw slouching towards Bethlehem to be born; and this God, too, will reign for two thousand years. Irma turns out the lights and sends the audience away. But in the course of this sacrilegious masquerade, religion, revolution, and the cycles of civilization have been redefined as purely erotic phenomena, while the Grand Balcony has become society, the universe, and the entire stage of history as conceived by a cunning and diabolical mind.

In his next play, The Blacks, Genet again invokes a theatre of cruelty in a messianic play revolving around revolt. But here the philosophical note is more subdued, and a primitive, ritualistic quality is more accentuated. In The Balcony, Genet was occupied with interpreting the past of the West; in The Blacks, he is more concerned with predicting its future — and that future is annihilation. The Blacks, like Artaud’s image of the plague, is pure metaphor — a dream of pandemonium. As such, it is the myth towards which all the previous work of Genet has been pointing. In the foreword to The Maids, Genet had tried to imagine “a clandestine theatre, to which one would go in secret, at night, and masked,” adding:

It would be sufficient to discover — or create — the common Enemy, then the Homeland which is to be protected or regained. I do not know what the theatre will be like in a socialist world; I can understand better what it could be among the Mau Mau, but in the Western world, which is increasingly marked by death and turned toward it, it can only refine in the “reflecting” of a comedy of a comedy, of a reflection of a reflection which ceremonious performance might render exquisite and close to invisibility. If one has chosen to watch oneself die charmingly, one must rigorously pursue, and array, the funeral symbols.

In The Blacks, Genet discovers and creates “the common Enemy,” arranging Western funeral symbols in a ceremonious performance which is probably close to his idea of theatre among the Mau Mau. The play is a rite of murder, sacrifice, and revolt, enacted by Negro supremacists, and culminating in the ritual slaughter of the entire white race.

The Blacks, of course, is written by a white man — but one who hates the color white. Genet identifies with Negroes, as he identifies with servants, Arabs, beggers, and thieves, because they are rebels and outcasts. Rimbaud, who loathed his Christian heritage, made the same kind of identification in Une Saison en Enfer: “I am a beast and a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger. . . .” And Artaud expressed much the same contempt for the fake superiority of the white race: “If we think Negroes smell bad,” he writes, “we are ignorant of the fact that anywhere but in Europe it is we whites who ‘smell bad.’ I would say we give off an odor as white as the gathering of pus in an infected wound.” In The Blacks, it is the absence of white odor which offends the nostrils of the Negroes (“you, pale and odorless race, race without animal odors, without the pestilence of our swamps”), but the infection of the white race is just as advanced. The whites are exhausted, and paling into invisibility; soon they will vanish from the earth. Genet’s purpose is to dramatize, in advance, the obliteration of the color white through the liquidation of the Great White Figures, at the same time defining the color which is to supersede it. The Blacks originated in his mind, he tells us in a note, when an actor asked him to write a play for an all-Negro cast — “But what exactly is a black?” he asks. “First of all, what’s his color?”

To answer this question, Genet sets up a mortal conflict between black and white; and to refine his play into a “reflection of a reflection,” he places these conflicts on a number of parallel planes. The most obvious of these are reminiscent of the inner and outer conflicts in Pirandello’s theatre trilogy, for they take place both on the stage and in the audience. The first level of conflict is between the actors (black) and the spectators (white). A group of Europeanized Negroes, who work for whites either as servants, professionals, or prostitutes, appear before the audience in disguise — and in attitudes of open hostility.²⁰ This hostile confrontation is so essential to the play that Genet stipulates that a symbolic white should always be present in the audience, even if the work is being performed before Negroes. For the white spectator is “the common Enemy” — a respectable bourgeois who is spotlighted as the potential victim of the blacks. This ominous implication, however, is possible only in the theatre — which is to say, in the world of “play.” Outcasts and outlanders among the whites, Negroes are permitted to communicate with them only by playing a role: “They tell us we’re grown-up children,” says the Negro “master of sacred ceremonies,” Archibald. “In that case, what’s left for us? The theatre.” Like licensed jesters, the Negro performers have certain privileges, denied to other Negroes. Because they appear in the role of subordinates, entertaining paying customers and laboring to gain their approval, they can express certain feelings which are ordinarily suppressed.

For this reason, Genet subtitles his work Un Clownerie, which means not only “A Clown Show.” but a farce or practical joke; it is not to be taken seriously. The Negroes’ anger is sham; their insolence is artificial; the play is just a play. We are soon to learn that, beneath their histrionic disguise, the Negroes are deadly serious, and that what they are enacting is the end of subordination. But in the theatre, their violence is constrained and ritualized, and the audience left serenely undisturbed. As Archibald says:

This evening we will perform for you. But in order that you may remain comfortably settled in your seats in the presence of a drama that is already unfolding here, in order that you may be assured that there is no danger of such a drama’s worming its way into your precious lives, we shall have the decency — a decency learned from you — to make communication impossible.

The spectators will be allowed to maintain their sense of supremacy. The anger of the performers is actually genuine, but they will conceal their real feelings in opaque metaphors and obscure ceremonies. Thus, the Negroes appear before the whites in Pirandellian fashion, both as fictional characters and as living people. And to intensify the Pirandellian atmosphere of reality in the midst of artifice, the outer action is presumably improvised, and the play proceeds without act breaks, in one long scene.

The second level of conflict is placed inside the play itself, and it takes the form of a make-believe ceremony in which Negroes enact ritualistic roles. Like the Pirandellian play-within-the-play, this ceremony — though it can be altered slightly if the actors find “a cruel detail to heighten it” — is fixed and rehearsed. And the audience is mute, functioning only as a silent witness. The audience, however, is still implicated in the action, because the audience is impersonated by Negroes — Negroes who have masked their faces “in order to live the loathsome life of the Whites and at the same time to help you sink into shame.” These white masks represent the “Court,” and include all the Great Figures of European colonialism — Rimbaud’s “sham niggers” (Merchant, Judge, General, Emperor) now transformed into Queen, Queen’s Valet, Judge, Governor, and Missionary.²¹ Caricaturing white attitudes, satirizing white achievements, reviling white paternalism, the Negroes impersonate the postures and manners of the world which has condemned them to servitude, thereby attempting to destroy the idea of white, in conception and in fact. The Court has come to attend its own funeral rites, and the Governor even has his death speech in his pocket.

The destiny of the whites is dramatized in a ritual ceremony; and it begins when a group of Negroes, dressed in the height of fake elegance and bad taste, dance a Mozart minuet around a catafalque covered with flowers. Resting on the catafalque, we are told, is the corpse of a white woman, freshly killed for each performance; the ceremony is a Black Mass, witnessed by the Court. While it reflects reality, however, the ceremony is not real. The corpse doesn’t exist, and the ritual celebrants are wholly involved in pretense. Introduced by fictional, melodious names, the actors are careful to keep their true identities, as well as their true feelings, concealed. What they portray are not the servile Europeans they have become, but the primitive Africans they wish to be; they will reveal not their individual lives but a collective racial identity.

“The tragedy will lie in the color black,” says Archibald. “It’s that that you’ll cherish, that that you’ll attain and deserve. It’s that that must be earned.” In order to transform their guilt into saintliness, their taboo into totem, the Negroes try to purge themselves of all the emotions and attitudes they learned from whites: tenderness, pity, gratitude, love. If man is an animal who imitates, then their image must be cruel: “I order you to be black to your very veins,” shouts Archibald. “Pump black blood through them. Let Africa circulate in them. Let Negroes negrify themselves”:

Let them persist to the point of madness in what they’re condemned to be, in their ebony, in their odor, in their yellow eyes, in their cannibal tastes. . . . Let them invent a criminal painting and dancing. Negroes, if they change towards us, let it not be out of indulgence, but terror.

To prove themselves worthy of their color, the Negroes must pursue it to its very limits. This, too, is imposture and playacting, for their color is determined not only by their tribal past but also by the white’s conception of this past. Nevertheless, this kind of playacting is, at least, heroic, and it has a meaning: the annihilation of the whites. The color black — formerly a source of loathing and contempt — will become a source of beauty, evil, and terror. By choosing their destiny, the Negroes will grow into sacred figures, becoming, in Genet’s terminology, saints of savagery.

The stage ritual, then, is a celebration of a future event — a kind of homeopathic magic through which the Negroes hope to achieve their victory. But this future event — the murder of the white race — is symbolized in a past event — the rape and murder of a white woman. The ritual consists of a reenactment of the crime, and the trial of the criminal — the Negro, Deodatus Village. Like the play proper, which is judged by white spectators, Village’s crime is judged by the White Court. In each case, the guilty condemn the judges. Village reenacts his crime in startlingly beautiful imagery, with swagger, arrogance, and pomp, and in this crime lies the meaning of the color black. Despite his studied cruelty, however, Village is unable to prevent his real feelings from breaking through his playacting. He is too infected with white emotions — and especially love, which he feels for the prostitute, Virtue. Yet, it is precisely this emotion, as Archibald tells him, which must be suppressed: “Invent not love, but hatred, and thereby make poetry, since that’s the only domain in which we are allowed to operate.”

While Village invents his poetry of hatred, the White Court attempts to keep its courage up (“Have confidence, Madame, God is white”) — at the same time, covertly admiring the beauty, sexuality, and spontaneity of the criminal it has come to indict. Invoking the past triumphs of the West (the Parthenon, Chartres, Byron, Chopin, Aristotelian principles, heroic couplets), reading stock market quotations, uttering colonial clichés, the Court manages only to expose the bankruptcy of its civilization — a civilization now involved in a “long death struggle” from which nothing can rescue it. One of the Negroes, however, the Clergyman Diouf, is an integrationist, and is disposed towards nonviolence. Having learned brotherhood and kindness from the white religion, he pleads that the ceremony “involve us, not in hatred . . . but in love.” But for his pains, he is transformed into a “straight man” (or scapegoat) for Village. Equipped with a blonde wig, a pasty carnival mask, pink knitting, and gloves, he is made to impersonate the woman Village raped and killed. When Diouf gives birth to a number of dolls representing all the Great Figures of the Court, it becomes clear that Village’s victim was none other than the Mother of the White Race — and Village’s crime, therefore, is symbolic of the massacre of all the whites. “He killed out of hatred,” remarks the Court. “Hatred of the color white. That was tantamount to killing our entire race and killing us till doomsday.”

Genet extends this black-white combat to a third plane of action, which moves it out of the theatre and into reality. For while Village’s crime is being reenacted before the Court, and the entire play before the audience, a serious Negro rebellion is being organized behind the scenes. The theatrical ritual, in fact, exists only to mask the secret preparations for this uprising, which will make the stage events not metaphorical but real: “Our aim is not only to corrode and dissolve the idea they’d like us to have of them, we must also fight them in their actual persons, in their flesh and blood.” The ritual, therefore, is designed to disintegrate the white image, the uprising to disintegrate the whites. But the stage events reflect, disguisedly, the events occurring behind the scenes; the illusion of the theatre both conceals and reveals the reality outside.

This third conflict, in fact, is a parallel action, because it also takes the form of a trial, conducted offstage and cryptically reported by a Negro messenger — the condemnation and conviction of a Negro traitor before an all-black Court. Unlike the other trials in the play, therefore, this one is attended exclusively by Negroes, and since they must assume responsibility for the death of one of their own, it is an intensely serious affair. Ritual blood is metaphorical, but the Negro’s blood is real: “It’s no longer a matter of staging a performance.” Negroes can sham before whites, but “we’ve got to stop acting when we’re among ourselves.” Again, like Roger’s rebellion in The Balcony, the revolt will put an end to playacting. But when the traitor is executed, and a new Negro leader is elected to carry on the fight, the actors continue their ritualistic masquerade. The moment for open conflict not having arrived, the Negroes are not yet permitted to plunge into reality, and the artifice proceeds. As Archibald says: “As we could not allow the Whites to be present at a deliberation nor show them a drama that does not concern them, and as, in order to cover up, we have had to fabricate the only one that does concern them, we’ve got to finish this show and get rid of our judges . . . as planned.”

The extermination of the judges on stage, however, predicts the outcome of the actual rebellion; and it constitutes the concluding scenes of the play. The White Court, in order to try the Negroes, has pursued them to Africa. They enter this dread region of “leprosy, sorcery, danger, madness . . . and flowers” drunk and walking backwards, as if retreating dazedly through history into the primitive heart of darkness. The Judge arraigns the Negroes, making them whimper and tremble before him — but the trial quickly turns into combat. In their homeland, the guilty criminals have turned into savage heroes, and, as Genet is to write in The Screens, “There are no more judges, there are only thieves, murders, firebrands. . . .” The Negro force is increasing, called to the rescue by the sorceress, Felicity (“Negroes of the docks, of the factories, of the dives, Negroes of the Ford plant, Negroes of General Motors”), and the whites are hugely outnumbered. About to be overrun by the black masses, the Queen invokes Dr. Livingstone, Kipling, the white man’s burden — but to no avail. As Felicity tells the Court, “You are pale, but you’re becoming transparent. . . . You will vanish utterly.” The metamorphosis of color begins; black begins to usurp all the privileges of white. “Everything is changing. Whatever is gentle and kind and good and tender will be black. Milk will be black, sugar, rice, the sky, doves, hope, will be black.” Even the color of slavery (despite the Queen’s refusal to take any position lower than a governess) will change from black to white.

And the whites do vanish utterly. Each member of the Court makes a rhetorical death speech, and is shot to the accompaniment of crowing cocks and clapping hands — the Missionary being castrated and turned into a cow. The last to be exterminated is the Queen, who declares, as she goes to join the others in hell, that the whites will lie torpid like larvae or moles, to rise again in ten thousand years and renew the struggle for the Homeland. And in Genet’s mind, they will, for his geometry of revolt is circular. One cycle of civilization has ended, its conclusion signified, in Vico’s images, by the crowing of cocks and ominous thundering. But just as inevitably as night gives way to day, the cycle will repeat itself again, like an Eternal Recurrence, when the blacks become the “common Enemy” against whom the white outcasts will eventually rebel.

Already, in fact, Genet is beginning to suggest that the Negro revolt will fail to achieve its goals; reality will remain elusive; the masquerade will continue till doomsday. For in the last dialogue of the play, Village — trying to make love to Virtue — has not been able to invent a wholly original language of love. Still impersonating the whites, he is still caught in their web. And the negativity of black remains only an inverted image.

VIRTUE: All men are like you: they imitate. Can’t you invent something else?

VILLAGE: For you I could invent anything: fruits, brighter words, a two-wheeled wheelbarrow, cherries without pits, a bed for three, a needle that doesn’t prick. But gestures of love, that’s harder . . . still, if you really want me to . . .

VIRTUE: I’ll help you. At least, there’s one sure thing: you won’t be able to wind your fingers in my long golden hair.

But this is not much consolation. The “criminal painting and dancing” demanded by Archibald has not yet come into existence. And, as Genet is to observe in The Screens, “If there’s no art, there’s no culture. Are they therefore doomed to decay?” The question is barely suggested in The Blacks; the play simply ends with the completion of the ritual. The dance around the catafalque is repeated (this time without the White Court, the Negroes having removed their masks) to give cyclical form to this cyclical play. But the absence of the whites signifies that the black prophecy has been fulfilled, and that the ceremony is no longer a forecast of the future but rather a mythic rite in memory of a past historic event.

Like all of Genet’s work, then, The Blacks is a depth charge of evil which plunges through the placid surface of rational discourse and social benevolence to the dark sea floor of the unconscious, where myths of danger, sado-masochistic fantasies, and primitive sacrificial rites explode on us unaware. Taken as a programmatic essay on relations between the races, it is, of course, intolerable — but Genet’s art never functions programmatically. It is, rather, imaginative and metaphorical, creating a world contiguous with our own but not identical with it. Appealing to whatever has remained unconditioned and uncivilized in the spectator’s soul, Genet fashions his plays as cruel purgative myths — deeply subversive in their implications, profoundly liberating in their effect.

No art, however, is totally self-contained. And Genet, whose criminality and depravity not only attack but exemplify the degeneration of our culture, may well go down as the dramatic artist who presided over the disintegration of the West. Unlike Artaud, whose theories of cruelty were animated by a robust spirit and a healthy conscience, Genet is sick with evil, impregnated with it, consumed by it. His art, however, is his health, and he has managed to wring from his pathology myths which are beautiful, spontaneous, and profound. If he can cure himself, then he may help to cure us, and the dying civilization he chronicles may again revive.

And, in a sense, this is his purpose. For like Artaud, Genet is profoundly implicated in the world against which he revolts, and earnestly seeks to animate its consciousness. Through sex and cruelty he has tried to still the bleating of the community and give it a strong voice, if only for a moment; through art, he has tried to recreate the collective ecstasy, hitherto granted only to the faithful of a religious sect. Genet’s messianic theology is compounded of crime and sacrifice, but then these are the elements found in all primitive religions, and Prometheus himself was really a thief for man. In the works of Artaud and Genet, the theatre of revolt has come full circle; its messianism has been revived and its religious implications made more manifest. Indeed, the drama seems to be returning to its original roots in ritual and belief. The radical solutions each man proposes for a regeneration of Western culture may have come too late — and some would say, may even contribute to its end. But if practical solutions are no longer possible, and we are all imprisoned in our destiny, then our imaginations are still free, and imaginative revolt remains the most creative and most lasting kind. We may not be able to transform our fate, but our fate can still be stirring. And this has been a function of dramatic art — to celebrate our possibilities even in defeat: in Artaud’s words, to make us look “like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

¹ In a typical entertainment of this sort, Tzara appeared before an audience reading a newspaper while a bell was rung so clamorously that not a word could be heard.

² Artaud’s plague analogy may have been suggested to him through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he was a great admirer. In a letter to Abel Gance (1927), in which Artaud begged the producer to let him play the leading part in a staged version of The Fall of the House of Usher, Artaud wrote: “I do not make many claims for myself, but I do claim to understand Edgar Poe and to be myself the same kind of person as Mr. Usher. If I do not have this person under my skin, no one in the world has. . . . My life is that of Usher and his evil house. I suffer from a plague in my soul and nerves” (my emphasis).

³ The purgative function of Artaud’s theatre may become the most controversial feature of his theory, for there are many who hold that, instead of dissipating repressed feelings, a theatre of cruelty would release further violence into the body politic. This opinion is based on the assumed relationship between lurid comic books or television shows and juvenile delinquency. Few critics, however, have considered the idea that violence in the mass media may be a reflection rather than a cause of violence in daily life; and since the mass media invariably moralize cruelty while exploiting its sensationalism, such forms block up a total release of impulses. America is one of the few countries in history to have no socially approved outlets for the wilder instincts; and we are currently paying the consequences in Cold War pugnacity, political paranoia, assassinations, delinquency, and madness. Artaud’s theatre has yet to be proved, either way.

⁴ Artaud’s desire to create a dream theatre illustrates his affinities with Strindberg; and, as we might expect, Artaud admired Strindberg extremely. He drew up a production plan of The Ghost Sonata, remarking, “We have lived and dreamed everything this play reveals, but we have forgotten” — and he was particularly fond of A Dream Play about which he wrote, “In it is found both the interior and exterior of a varied and quivering mind. The loftiest questions are dealt with, evoked in a form that is at once concrete and mystical. . . . The false in the middle of the true — that is the ideal definition of theatrical production.”

⁵ Artaud’s letters reveal his profound distaste for the kinds of plays being produced by Jouvet, Dullin, Pitoëff, and, especially, the Comédie Française. To the director of the latter, Artaud wrote in 1925: “Your brothel is too greedy. Representatives of a dead art had better stop rattling their bones in our ears. . . . There’s enough arrival and departure in your legalized whorehouse. We aim higher than tragedy, cornerstone of your filthy structure, and your Molière is a stupid bastard. . . . The theatre is a Land of Fire, a lagoon of Sky, battle of Dreams. Theatre is a Solemn Ceremony. You crap on a Solemn Ceremony as an Arab does at the foot of a Pyramid. Make way for the theatre, Gentlemen, make way for the theatre of those who will be satisfied only with the unlimited domain of the spirit.” It is interesting that Artaud’s word for the theatre of masterpieces and the theatre of the marketplace was the same as Brecht’s: culinary.

⁶ In an early essay, “The Evolution of Scenery” (1928?), Artaud indicated that he did not think the external paraphernalia of the theatre to be very important: “Stage sets, theatre must be ignored. All the great playwrights thought outside the theatre. Look at Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare.”

⁷ Artaud’s admiration for the Elizabethan drama was surpassed by his admiration for the Roman dramatist who influenced the Elizabethans so profoundly — Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Artaud called Seneca “the greatest tragic author of history,” adding that “One cannot find a better written example of what is meant by cruelty in the theatre than all the tragedies of Seneca, but above all Atreus and Thyestes” This opinion may seem rather eccentric to us, considering Seneca’s fustian diction, but Artaud obviously responded strongly to the external action of his plays, and saw in Seneca’s tragedies of blood the “boiling of forces of chaos.”

⁸ Artaud did leave behind a short play, written in 1924 and called The Spurt of Blood. It is a Surrealist work of horror and phantasmagoria, originally included in Artaud’s The Umbilicus of Limbo. Those who are interested can find it translated by Ruby Cohen in the Winter 1963 number of Tulane Drama Review.

⁹ Summarizing his life, Artaud has left us his own, touching epitaph: “In one of my first theatrical roles, I played a man who appeared in the final scene of an act which was insipid, smug, lifeless, dramatic, overloaded; in two clashing tones, he said: ‘Can I come in?’ And then the curtain fell.”

¹⁰ For a more extended discussion of Artaud’s influence on Ionesco’s style, see Jean Vannier, “A Theatre of Language,” Tulane Drama Review, Spring 1963. For a hostile view of Artaud’s influence on the modern theatre, see Paul Arnold, “The Artaud Experiment,” Tulane Drama Review, Winter 1963 (“our avant-garde has learned from Artaud only his vehemence, his scandalous aspect — flinging bile and excrement at all institutions, beliefs, ideas, feelings, without having any substitute ideas or feelings to offer us”).

¹¹ Many critics see the similarities between the two men, but I should mention that Roger Blin, Genet’s gifted director, denies them entirely. In an interview with Bettina Knapp, Blin remarks that Genet “read little of Artaud’s work,” and proceeds to draw the following distinction between them: “Artaud’s cruelty resembles in many ways religious cruelty as practiced by the Aztec Indians. Genet’s cruelty is more classical and closer to Greek theatre. . . .” This distinction is too precise, since Artaud embraced all primitive religious rites, including the Dionysian; and Genet’s theatre does not seem “Greek” to me at all. If Artaud did not exercise a direct and lasting influence on Genet, we must put this down as one of the most extraordinary coincidences in literary history.

¹² On this Genet remarked, “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance,” and elsewhere, explaining his interest in scatalogical imagery, “Poetry is the art of using shit and making you eat it.” But, as Sartre observes, “In order to make us eat shit, he has to show it to us, from afar, as rose jam.”

¹³ Sartre explains Genet’s homosexuality differently: “Genet, who was born without parents, is preparing to die without descendants. His sexuality will be sterility and abstract tension.” This analysis seems to me too cerebral, as does so much of Sartre’s book. Trying to prove that man is totally free, Sartre makes out each one of Genet’s characteristics to be a self-conscious, philosophical choice.

¹⁴ Sartre writes: “He might have been able, like certain demoniacs — and like Baudelaire and Lautréamont — to put himself under the protection of Satan. But he is too involved in his situation to fall into Manicheism. The wicked man is not a Manichee: Manicheism defines the thought of the respectable man.”

¹⁵ Cocteau, one of those most instrumental in securing Genet’s release from prison, wrote: “Sooner or later it will have to be recognized that he is a moralist.”

¹⁶ Genet’s ambiguous attitude towards order is expressed in the very shape of his plays. The content is anarchy and freedom; the form is coherence and organization. “Beauty,” says Genet, “is the perfection of organization.” Genet takes his revenge on the “good” social order by creating his own aesthetic order of “evil.”

¹⁷ Not to be overlooked, either, is Genet’s stunning use of French argot, which he partially derives from Céline, partially from his own experience among criminals. About argot, Sartre writes: “To talk argot is to choose Evil, that is, to know being and truth but to reject them in favor of a nontruth which offers itself for what it is. . . . For that very reason argot is, in spite of itself, a poetic language.”

¹⁸ “The radical criticism which Genet levels against society,” remarks the French critic Marc Pierret, “is strictly apolitical, but profoundly disturbing and subversive. It strips bare the foundations of existence.”

¹⁹ In his article “The Balcony and Parisian Existentialism” (Tulane Drama Review, Spring 1963), Benjamin Nelson suggests that Genet got his idea for the Chief’s mausoleum from Franco’s tomb in the Valley of the Fallen. Mr. Nelson also points out a number of other striking historical parallels in the play.

²⁰ Ionesco is said to have left a performance of The Blacks before it was over, because he felt that he was being attacked, and that the actors were enjoying it.

²¹ The resemblance to the Great Figures of The Balcony is obvious. In The Screens, Genet again puts on stage some representatives of the established order: Judge, Banker, Academician, General, etc. His theatre of revolt is always presided over by images of authority.