12
Double Take: Acting and Writing in Genet’s “The Strange Word‘ Urb‘”

Acting

In fact, some authorities maintain that that is why plays are called dramas, because the imitation is of men acting [drntas, from drn, “do, act”). It is also the reason why both tragedy and comedy are claimed by the Dorians: comedy by the Megarians …. They use the names comedy and drama as evidence; for they say that they call their outlying villages kmai whereas the Athenians call theirs demes [dmoi]—the assumption being that the participants in comedy were called kmidoi, not from their being revelers, but because they wandered from one village to another, being degraded and excluded from the city—and that they call “doing” or “acting” drn whereas the Athenians designate it prattein. 1

WHAT HAS traditionally been called “theater” seems to be in a curious situation today. On the one hand, the emergence of electronically powered techniques of articulation and of transmission appears increasingly to marginalize theater. Insofar as it is considered to be a medium of representation, theater is at an increasing disadvantage with regard to the electronic media. Anything it can represent, film and television can show better, more vividly, more extensively, it would seem. On the other hand, despite such competing media and despite large-scale reductions in government subsidies, theater in its traditional institutional forms persists and in certain areas even flourishes, at least in terms of its ability to attract audiences. Music theater, for instance, whether “musical comedy” or “opera,” continues to enjoy considerable popularity, often teaming up with the media to reach audiences that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

The situation is complicated by the very different situations that obtain in different parts of the world. Without even considering the situation of theaters in non-Western countries, sharply divergent tendencies can be observed in countries such as the United States and Germany. In Germany, the extensive network of state-supported theaters, which formerly enjoyed wide access to television, has in recent years been increasingly excluded from the media. Operas, for instance, are no longer broadcast by either of the two national networks, but instead are relegated to regional “third programs.” At the same time, despite severe cutbacks, German and French theaters still enjoy state subsidies that would be the envy of their American counterparts. (Of course, there are few American counterparts, in the sense of repertory companies, precisely because of the lack of such subsidies).

The situation is even more complex when one recognizes that the word theater is also used in areas that at first sight seem to have little to do with the term‘s most familiar meaning. A “theater” is not only a place where plays or spectacles are performed: it can also designate a space of action in general, and of hostilities in particular, as in a military “theater of operations.” Like dramatic theater, the “theater of operations” designates a space not just of action but also of conflict. Moreover, one of the primary “themes” of classical theater, death, is also a determining factor in military theaters, as well. Finally, as the political and strategic significance of military conflicts becomes increasingly tied to the media, the element of spectacle—or, rather, the presentation of phenomena to a more or less public view—becomes difficult to separate from the purely military dimension of conflict. In this sense, military theaters have also become increasingly spectacular in a traditionally theatrical sense. Given the struggle for subsidies and the highly competitive situation in which drama theaters are forced to operate, their organization, for its part, is becoming increasingly “military” in turn.

Finally, at least one other instance of “theater” is worth mentioning in this context, as much for its differences from the foregoing as for its similarities: what is called “home theater.” In “home theater” the entertainment-electronics industry has assembled sets of video, audio, and television equipment designed to reproduce the effects of the movie “theater” within the more restricted space of one’s living room or den. With this move—and it remains to be seen just how successful or lasting it will be—theater loses the “public” quality that has distinguished it as the most social of all arts ever since its origins in ancient Greece. In “home theater” another quality that distinguished theater from the other arts is also lost, or at least radically transformed: its relation to bodies. To be sure, the bodies involved were not always or entirely human bodies: they could be inanimate bodies—puppets or marionettes, for instance, or even shadows cast on a screen. But a certain assemblage of bodies: whether of actors, puppets, musicians, or spectators, all sharing the same space, has always set theater apart from the other arts, such as painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, and music, which could be performed before isolated audiences and in which the mimetic medium did not require the simultaneous presence of actor and audience.

In the electronic audiovisual media of “home theater,” by contrast, no such co-presence is either required or possible. Yet “home theater” can be seen as continuing another distinctive feature of theater, the one associated with its etymology, thea, theatron, the site of a sight, because “home theater” defines a space in which sights are brought home to a spectator. The space is certainly neither public nor open: it is a contained, interior space with restricted access. Being a “citizen” will hardly be sufficient to gain admission. But neither restricted access to its space nor the quality of the visible as such distinguishes “home theater” from its less domestic predecessors.2 Rather, what is decisive is the specific configuration of bodies and space. What sets “home theater” apart from previous dramatic theater are two effects of the electronic media upon which it relies: those of decorporealization and delocalization. Electricity has no body and knows no locale. In the ideal “home theater,” which is often heir to the Bauhaus and Art Deco dreams of a functionalist interior design, the television set and screen ideally disappear into the wall, where they metamorphose into an electronic window that looks not simply outward but inward and at the same time away, somewhere else.

This convergence of theater and television, in particular, its effects in disrupting the clear-cut opposition between public and private space, fascinated Genet. In The Balcony, for instance, which is set in a brothel, Madame Irma keeps tabs on the goings-on in the different rooms by means of an elaborate system of televisual surveillance, an earlier version of “home video,” which, despite its name, includes audio as well. In contrast to the fantasy of being master of one‘s private space, the studios in The Balcony are subordinated to the view of a mistress who knows there is no final mastery, only a constant struggle for control. In its studios, fantasies of mastery and control are played out, but are also controlled and surveyed by means of the television camera, which permits rapid intervention when required.

The Balcony is, as has often been noted, a play about role-playing, theater that reflects on theatricality and reflects it theatrically. “Theatrically” as just used suggests exaggeration, an excess of gesture over signification, of appearance over being. This is one of the reasons why “theater” and “theatricality” have always been regarded with suspicion by guardians of public morals and of political order, from Plato on. Such suspicion, of course, was in turn predicated upon the grudging recognition that the tremendous power of theater could not simply be condemned but would have to be controlled and appropriated by any order that hoped to maintain its stability.

It is this subversive potentiality of theater that interests Genet, and not merely in his writings for the stage. His writing in general, whether explicitly for the stage or not, is per se theatrical, and not just in the sense of being excessive or provocative. His writing is theatrical in a more precise sense that goes back to Aristotle‘s emphasis on the importance of peripeteia in tragedy: that is, of the sudden, unexpected turn of events that interrupts an expectation and gives the material of tragedy, “action [praxis],” and its form, that of “plot [muthos]” a distinctively theatrical bent.

For Aristotle peripeteia consists, not just in a sudden shift of events or in consciousness, but in the supplanting of an erroneous expectation by a more accurate one or, as he puts it, “a shift from ignorance to awareness” (52a). This shift he calls anagnrisis, “recognition.” It is not the product of a gradual process of learning but rather consists in a sudden shock: that of recognizing that what one had expected, intended, anticipated does not correspond with what actually has happened.

The English word recognition thus tends to gloss over or at least to minimize what is most powerfully at work in peripeteia and anagnrisis: the shock of a double-take, defined in the 1989 edition of the O.E.D. as:

A delayed reaction to a situation, sight of a person, etc. rapidly following an earlier, inappropriate reaction; esp. a procedure in comedy, etc., in which an actor at first reacts unexpectedly or inappropriately to a given situation and then, as if more fully realizing the implications, reacts in an expected or more usual manner. Also, a second, often more detailed, look. Hence double-take, v. intr., to act in such a manner.

Of course, the comic and gestural connotations of the double-take go far beyond such a definition and thus also beyond the immediate implications of Aristotle‘s theory of peripeteia and anagnrisis. Both the notion and the practice of the double-take include an element of self-parody—the implicit suggestion that, having “missed” the point previously, one has no guarantee that this time one is “getting” it right— which would undercut the pedagogical value Aristotle (and much of the theatrical theory and practice that followed) sought to attribute to theater.

Nevertheless, what the Aristotelian emphasis on peripeteia shares with the theatricality of Genet‘s writing, and in particular with his writings on theater—and the juxtaposition of anagnrisis with the self-parodic double-take points us in this direction—is a concern with the spatial, and in particular scenic dimension of theater. To be sure, as we have seen, Aristotle does everything in his Poetics to reduce or marginalize whatever might be considered to be specific to the medium of theater: spatiality, materiality, visibility—everything having to do with opsis, translated, symptomatically enough, by Else as “visual adornment” or “visual effect” (p. 29) whereas Stephen Halliwell, following Ingram Bywater prefers “spectacle” (1450b).3 Aristotle performs this reduction through two interrelated moves: first, by considering theater primarily as the genre of tragedy (secondarily as that of comedy); and second, by defining this genre as the imitation of an action. He thereby reduces the specifically spatial and scenic aspects of theater to the status of mere material accessories and instruments employed to represent something that bears no necessary relation to theater as such, namely, action.⁴ Insofar as Aristotle considers the specificity of theater at all, it is strictly identified with the transformation of action into plot. But plot, too, bears no necessary structural relation to the medium of theater as such. This Aristotelian approach to theater, construed in terms of objects and structures that are not themselves specifically theatrical, pervades the Western approach to theater, which initially privileges action and then, increasingly in the modern period, character.⁵

And yet the emphasis Aristotle places upon peripeteia and anagnrisis as constituting the decisive qualities of the tragic plot indicates—even against the most explicit intentions of his argument—that “spatial” elements continue to occupy a decisive if concealed place in his thinking about theater, even though he subordinates theater to tragedy and tragedy to action. What do the “brutal arbitrariness and finality” of the “tragic happening, “as Else puts it,6 entail if not the interruption of the temporal continuum of conscious intention by something unexpected, something that does not fit in —that can not be encompassed, comprehended, contained within the preexisting horizon or perspective, whatever these may be? What doesn‘t fit in, however, stands out precisely as a kind of spatiality: it makes us aware that our previous frame of reference, the configuration of concepts that we take for granted in perceiving and thinking, our familiar grid, fails to situate what is taking place before our very eyes, as it were. The shock that ensues entails, not the elimination of time by space, but the transformation of the way each is construed: space no longer appears to be self-contained, time no longer to be totalizing. Not by accident does Else, in the phrase just quoted, speak of the “particularity” of the tragic happening rather than simply of an event or an action, for the gerund here seems best suited to designate the ongoing, open-ended temporality of that which, despite or because of its very proximity, comes as an utter surprise, creating the sense both of wonder and of recognition that marks and divides the double-take.⁷

Although the aim of Aristotle‘s discussion of peripeteia and anagnrisis is clearly to reestablish order and unity in the face of unresolved conflict, his positioning of the unexpected and the unpredictable at the heart of tragic muthos indicates just how much the tension between spatial dislocation and scenic reframing remains at the heart of his discussion of theater, despite its being construed primarily as a temporal medium for the sequential representation of meaningful action.

Thus even in Aristotle theater seems inconceivable without a shock that fractures the established grids upon which perception and interpretation depend. Theater, in short, entails not just space but, more precisely, its disruption and rearrangement. In other words, theatricality emerges where space and place can no longer be taken for granted or regarded as self-contained.

Writing

These allegations of the “Dorians” are neither true nor to the point. “Comedy” is from kmos, “revel,” an Attic word, not from km, “village,” and drn is not an exclusively Doric word (it is true that prattein is Ionic and Attic).8

If Genet‘s writing is often theatrical, it is so in a sense that both exacerbates and transforms an insight already at work in Aristotle‘s Poetics, albeit, as we have seen, in a highly conflicted manner: an insight into the disruptive spatiality of the theatrical. No text of Genet stages such disruptions more powerfully than the short essay published in Tel Quel in 1966 and entitled “L’Étrange Mot d‘ …” (translated into English as “The Strange Word Urb … “). This text, which repeatedly addresses an anonymous addressee (vous), resembles in this respect the roughly contemporaneous Letters to Roger Blin, written by Genet to the director of the first Paris staging of The Screens during the months of rehearsals. Nevertheless, despite this stylistic connection between the two texts, the reasons why Genet decided to publish “The strange word Urb …” separately seem fairly evident.⁹ The text deals with theater, but in a general way, without any explicit reference to The Screens or to any other play. Instead, it touches on a number of matters, many of which would seem at first sight to have little to do with theater. These issues, however, turn out to revolve around nothing other than the very dimension of theater that the Aristotelian Poetics and the tradition it informs seek to efface: its spatiality. Genet‘s text suggests just why he has felt obliged to downplay everything connected with theater as a spatial, material, even corporeal ritual: The corporeality and materiality that characterize theatrical space involve the relation of society to death—more precisely, to the dead. Just as Artaud—to whom Genet here as elsewhere is profoundly indebted, although he does not mention him—in his lecture “The Theater and the Plague” transforms the human body dying of the plague into an extraordinary scene of theatrical peripeteia,¹⁰ interrupting not just a single, particular “action” or intention but the very process of living itself, Genet, at the other end of the spectrum, begins, not with the dissolution of society under the impact of a force it cannot control, but rather with its historical tendency to seek protection from such forces by placing them at a distance: a society of exclusion and segregation, seeking to divest itself of its dead as though “of a shameful thought [comme on se défait d‘une pensée honteuse]. “The medium of this attempted divestiture is language: “Whether the strange word urbanism comes from one of the Popes Urban or from the City, it will perhaps no longer be preoccupied with the dead. The living will dispose of corpses, surreptitiously or otherwise, as one divests oneself of a shameful thought” (p. 63).

In a certain sense, Genet’s essay begins even earlier than these opening lines, namely, with its title, which both repeats (or anticipates) the inaugural phrase and truncates it in a singular fashion: “L’Étrange Mot d’ … “The English translation of this title has the virtue of pointing up what is decisive in the French precisely by omitting it: “The Strange Word Urb. …” Unable to render the preposition de, much less its elided form d’, in English, Richard Seaver’s translation is compelled to provide a portion of the “strange word” itself: Urb. In so doing, he omits in English a certain process of omission itself: an omission that is also an emission. The mysterious linkage of word to word is marked in the French by transformation of the preposition de into a mere letter: d’. What is strange about the word is not just that it is absent, yet to come, but that its place is announced, or taken, by a letter and its punctuation: an apostrophe, indicating the elision, and three dots or points indicating an omission by effectively arresting the phrase in flight. In this sense, the title already says or, rather, does it all. In fact it says nothing much, but instead stages the process of linkage, coupling, gesturing in all of its enigmatic facticity: “The strange word” in French is not just the word that is missing, the word yet to come, but also and perhaps above all the word that is already there, albeit reduced to an ambiguously literal gesture. Left hanging, as it were, suspended in the title, the letter d’ recalls and foreshadows the unruly and unpredictable “war of words” that will later be said to constitute the attroupement of language to which the text at its end returns:

Words. Lived I don‘t know how, the French language dissimulates and discloses a war waged by words against one another, brothers and enemies, one wresting free of the other or smitten by it …. If tradition and betrayal are born of the same original movement and diverge only in order to live singular lives, by what, through the course of language, do they know themselves bound up [liés] with one another in their distortion?11

Why should a short text that deals primarily with theater and secondarily with death be framed by two such curious encounters with words, by two observations on language? Does the strangeness of language set the stage for the theater? Does it delimit its borders? Could it be that words, at war with one another (at least in French), “know” of their ties to one another precisely in and through their divergences and distortions? What is a “distorted” word? Would d’ be an example? And what of the singular lives of words, which seem to communicate with one another only through their differences? How does such singularity relate to their multiplicity? Can we ever hope to know for sure? What, in the face of such language, and its theater, would it mean “to know”?

If anyone hopes that by means of such a proliferation—or luxuriance—of monsters he will be able to cultivate a coherent discourse [soigner un discours cohérent], he is mistaken: at most, he can couple larval and crafty herds like processions of processionary caterpillars, who will exchange ejaculations spawning a carnivalesque litter [portée] without real import [sans portée], as unimportant as it is inconsequential, descended from the Greek, the Anglo-Saxon, the Levantine, the Arab, the Latin, the Gaelic, from some stray Chinese, three strange Mongolian vagabonds who talk but say nothing, but who by mating reveal a verbal orgy the meaning of which is lost not in the dark night of time but in an infinity of tender and brutal mutations. (p. 73)

If the “meaning” of words, and hence the possibility of understanding them, of making sense in and through language, gets “lost” not simply “in the dark night of time“—that is, not simply through historical change—”but in an infinity of tender and brutal mutations,” where does that leave the “singular lives” that the words engaged in those “mutations” are said to lead? Precisely this problematic relation between the singularity of isolated, divergent, and deformed words, on the one hand, and the orgiastic combinatorics of language, on the other, sets the scene and frames the stage for the discussion of theater that remains the primary focus of this short text. But this emphasis upon singularity suggests that no general account of the relation of language, meaning, and knowledge will suffice to account for theatricality. For that, we must follow a singular encounter: that with “L’Étrange Mot d’ … “We will now return to this opening phrase, taking the liberty, and pleasure, of re-citing it: “Whether the strange word urbanism [urbanisme] comes from one of the Popes Urban or from the City, it will perhaps no longer be preoccupied with the dead.”

For the reader who has been made curious by the truncated, enigmatic title, these first lines provide at least temporary relief: the strange word is spelled out, we recognize it, but it does not, for all of that, appear any less strange or any more transparent: urbanisme. Why just this word? And what, after all, is it doing here? As the worried House-father in Kafka’s story can attest12 and Genet’s text confirms, the strangeness of a word is not necessarily diminished by the etymological search for origins that its enigmatic obscurity can easily invite. Knowledge of the past, even if accessible and reliable—concesso non dato —does not necessarily provide knowledge of the present, much less of the future. No matter where the “strange word … comes from,” whether from “one of the Popes Urban or from the City,” it still seems strangely out of place at the beginning of a text that is expected to be on anything except urban affairs. Moreover, this word is doubly out of place: not only is its appearance here puzzling, but its linguistic behavior is, to put it mildly, suspect, for it is said that “perhaps” it will no longer “be preoccupied” with the dead. “Perhaps.” But, as a critic and biographer of Genet, Jean-Bernard Moraly, has astutely observed: “‘A word’ (albeit urbanism) ‘is not preoccupied’ with anything. Genet knows that better than anyone else …. Rather, it’s a deliberate miscue [un “à côté” voulu]. “¹³ In support of this assertion, Moraly cites the following passage from a letter of Genet to Antoine Bourseiller:

Every theatrical representation, every spectacle is a magic show [féerie]. The show of which I speak does not need sumptuous costumes or baroque furniture: it is in the voice that breaks on a word—when it should break on another—but both word and voice must be found; the magic is in a gesture not in place at the right time, in the pinky-finger that’s made a mistake [qui s‘est trompé]. ¹⁴

Theater, for Genet, entails not just an écart —a deviation from the norm—but something less formal and more violent: what he here refers to as a cassure, a break. This is precisely what Aristotle understood as peripeteia: an interruption of an intended project, the deviation of a gesture that no longer expresses a deliberate, conscious desire but rather the unconscious of the Freudian Fehlleistung, “parapraxis, slip.” Such “breaks” are always singular, which is why their performance requires not just a general readiness but also the greatest precision in the selection of details. That demands both a profound knowledge of tradition (that is, of the determining factors of expectation, of what is likely to be taken for granted) and an acute sense of situation. Only when one is thoroughly aware of what is expected can one look for the unexpected. It is not enough to state the principle “both word and voice must be found,” nor that this is a matter of timing and of spacing in general. Only at a particular time and place—“at the moment”— can a gesture go astray.

The Aristotelian notion of peripeteia, then, is continued but also altered: it interrupts not so much the continuity of an action (a praxis) as the integrity of an act. It no longer focuses upon great sequences of events so much as upon minuscule details. Theatrical acting, for Genet, breaks, interrupts, suspends the intentional unity of acts prior to any determination or division of these into “mental,” “physical,” “emotional,” “political,” and so forth. Theater involves, therefore, neither the constitution of order out of chaos nor the solving of problems. It does not communicate contents or produce positive knowledge. Nor is it “performative” in the sense usually understood, which is to say, that of accomplishing an intention through an act. Rather, by isolating acts and gestures from their intentional context, it points to established frames of reference—and also to the conditions and contexts that those intentions suppose—but only in order to dislocate them.15

Those conditions and contexts are never simply arbitrary, which is why it cannot be sufficient to describe the mere fact of an à coup —a jolt—or to speculate about its being deliberate (voulu). Genet’s essay, without elaborating anything like a comprehensive theory of theater—indeed, it explicitly and repeatedly eschews just that— nevertheless points its readers toward the established and problematic frames that have to be disrupted if theater is to retain a place in a world increasingly dominated by media whose representational resources far exceed those over which theater traditionally disposes.

Genet was well aware of the threat posed by the media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to traditional forms of art. He reacted to this situation, however, much as did Walter Benjamin three decades earlier, judging the challenge posed by the new media to be a salutary one, a necessary impulsion for “art” to change its ways. This meant for Genet above all abandoning the servile project of reproducing a reality from which it held itself to be excluded, and instead concentrating upon elaborating the distinctive reality of its own medium.¹⁶ Like Benjamin, Genet traces this historic challenge to the emergence of photography, which forced painting to look for resources and criteria other than those of “stupidly perceptible similitude [ressemblance sottement perceptible]”:

It is possible that, confronted with the results of photography, painters were at first stunned. After they had gotten hold of themselves again, they discovered what painting still could be.

In a like manner, or in a similar fashion, dramatists are stunned by what television and cinema make possible. If they accept to see—in case it can be seen—that theater cannot compete with such excessive means—those of TV and film—writers for the theater will discover the virtues proper to the theater, which, perhaps, derive only from myth. (p. 67)

The “myth” to which Genet refers here has little to do with Aristotelian muthos, that is, with a “plot” representing the unity of a praxis. Rather, it is related to the féerie of the Fehlleistung, the slip that escapes the control of the logos, of reason, of communicative discourse and consistent argumentation. Here “theater” has something distinctive, perhaps, to defend against the competing media of film and television—something that has to do with an experience of bodies separating as they coexist in a determinate site.

None of this is explicitly elaborated in “The Strange Word Urb …” but much of it is adumbrated there, in particular in the opening gambit. The strange word urbanism is, in the first clause, linked to a proper name, Urban, which is anything but simply proper. It designates no fewer than eight popes of the Catholic Church (hence the qualification whether it comes from “one of the Popes Urban.” The linking of “proper name” and “common noun” does not eliminate the latter’s “strangeness” or clear up its “meaning.” Rather, it opens a multiplicity of possible connotations, often at odds with one another. These extend from the proclamation of the Crusades by Pope Urban II, consolidating the position of the Papacy as the leading institution of Western Christendom, to the double schism of the Church, first between East and West, then between Rome and Avignon. The reference to “one of the Popes Urban” thus overlaps in multiple ways with the alternative etymological option, that of “the City.” This it reduces to paraphrase, as Seaver does in his translation: simply, “the Latin root of the word city. “Far more than just “the Latin root,” urbs, is suggested by “La Ville” in this opening phrase. Also connoted is one particular City, for centuries the capital of Western Christendom, object of struggle involving many of the popes bearing the name Urban: the city of Rome. One of the popes bearing the name Urban, namely, Urban V, initiated an ambitious project of urban renewal during the three years he was able to reside in the Eternal City before he was forced to return to Avignon in 1370.

“La Ville,” then, can refer as much to “the City” of Rome as to the Latin word urbs. Indeed, toward the end of this text “Rome” returns in a less universal, less “catholic” context as the site, not of the popes but of a tradition presented as emblematic for the theater envisaged by this text. That is the tradition of the “funeral mime”: “Where? Rome, I‘ve read, possessed—but perhaps my memory deceives me—a funeral mime. His role? Preceding the procession, he was charged with miming the most important fact that had composed the life of the dead man when he—the dead man—was living” (p. 72).

We will return to this funeral mime, who, interspersed in a staging of language as a wild war of words, will provide the text with an appropriate finale. But before we reach that part of “the City,” we must first return to the essay’s opening phrase, which, after naming the “strange word” and offering two possible yet equally enigmatic etymological origins, makes a brief and surreptitious detour via yet another city (Vienna, “qu‘il vienne d’un pape Urban”) before finally arriving at its destination, indeed, at its raison d’être: the question of how “urbanism” “is preoccupied,” or not, with “the dead”: not, it should be noted, with “death” in general, but with “the dead,” and more particularly, with their corpses.

The strange word urbanism is perhaps going to cease being preoccupied with “the dead.” But if this happens, Genet argues, it will put an end to theater. Theater requires a certain proximity to the dead, which is to say, to their mortal remains. To remove those remains from the life of the City, even if they are then recycled as fertilizer for state-run collective farms, for “kolkhozes or for kibboutzim, “is for “the urbanized world to deprive itself of a great theatrical mainstay [secours] and perhaps of theater itself” (p. 63).

The strangeness of the word, to be sure, is hardly attenuated by such references to recent history and politics, references that become all the more explicit and insistent as the paragraph unwinds:

All the same, if the cremation takes a dramatic turn [allure] —be it that a single man is solemnly burnt and cooked alive, be it that the City or the State should desire to rid itself, at one fell swoop as it were, of another community—the crematorium, like that of Dachau, evokes a very possible future architecturally escaping from time, from the future as well as the past, its chimney constantly maintained by clean-up crews who, around this sex erected obliquely out of pink bricks, sing Lieder or whistle tunes from Mozart, servicing the open mouth of this furnace where ten or twelve corpses can be inserted [enfournés] at once, a certain form of theater will be able to survive [se perpétuer] ; but if in the cities the crematoria are hidden or reduced to the dimensions of a grocery-store, theater will die. (pp. 63–64)

Seldom has an “if … then” clause been made as interminable a framework for such monstrous thoughts or, rather, scenes. “After Auschwitz,” Adorno declared, in a phrase that was to become famous, “there can be no poetry.” Genet’s implicit response is: No poetry, perhaps, but “a certain theater.” Despite its unmistakable historical overtones, this response is anything but simple nostalgia. The Nazi crematoria, for instance, were almost always far removed from urban population centers. Rather, through a series of horrendous but captivating peripeteia —but without redeeming “recognition”—the disposition of the bodies of the dead becomes the touchstone for the life or death of theater as Genet conceives it.

But does he “conceive” anything at all? “I offer you this advice without undue solemnity, with the active nonchalance of a child who knows the importance of theater” (p. 64). The curiosity of the reader, whetted by the truncated title, exacerbated by the word that fills in the gap without making it transparent, is finally captivated by a scene that twists and turns on itself: “Cremation” far from the city means the demise of theater, but cremation publicly embraced and celebrated as a phallic and parodic ritual can save theater. Theater requires the proximity of the dead, of their material remains, even if those remains are constantly consumed by fire and volatilized. The “argument” of the “scene” shifts with each new clause while expanding the limits of a sentence beyond what can be taken in at one sitting. (Was it not precisely this that Aristotle demanded of tragedy and that, in his eyes, distinguished it from epic?)17

Theater of the Holocaust? Holocaust as theater? Not entirely. Rather, the Holocaust as a grisly provocation to rethink the place of theater in relation to the dead—to rethink its strange and ambiguous corporeality in relation to corpses: “Do you see what I‘m driving at? The theater will be located as close as possible, in the truly tutelary shadow of the place where the dead are kept or of the sole monument which digests them” (p. 64).

Why are the shadows of the crematorium, or of the cemetery, tutelary for theater? Quite simply because they derange time: a certain time and a certain history, the time and history whose domination the Popes Urban strove to consolidate. The timeless architecture of the crematorium chimney, for instance, challenges the temporal perspective informed by that “mythical or controversial event also called the Advent [Avènement]” (p. 64), which promises the triumph of life over death and the temporal overcoming of time. By contrast, the graves in the cemetery or the crematorium chimney—after its initial exploitation, the crematorium is “dropped” in favor of the cemetery—resist such promises. In place of “the hypothetical Incarnation” they mark the disincarnation of physical decay or disintegration. When a city is built around a cemetery, history ceases to be simply the promise of resurrection and serves as a reminder of mortality. It becomes what Benjamin, in his study of the German baroque mourning play, calls “natural history”: in a world devoid of grace, it is natural for history to serve as medium for “the production of corpses.”18 In this perspective, an urbanism that continues to be preoccupied with—and by— the dead organizes living space around the possibility of separation and of its correlative, contact. This, perhaps, renders this space such a great aid—un grand secours —to theater.

In the shadow of the cemetery and of the crematorium, separability and detachment are rendered visible. Hence their importance in situating theater, a theater that is already “detached” by seeking its point of departure, not in any particular object or theme, but in a certain “isolation”:

Th[e] theatrical act cannot be just anything at all, but in anything at all it can find its pretext. In fact, it seems to me that any event whatsoever, visible or not, can, if it is isolated, I mean fragmented in the continuum, if well handled [bien conduit], serve as a pretext or even as the point of departure and arrival of the theatrical act. (p. 68, my emphasis)

The fact that “the strange word urbanism “starts out, in this text, by preparing to relinquish this preoccupation is part of a “history” to which the names of the Urban popes are anything but foreign. The institution and tradition with which they are associated, that of “the Christian West,” entails a temporality and spatiality informed by what Genet calls “the Very Debatable Nativity” (la Très Contestable Nativité) (p. 65). One of the many ways in which the “urban” culture of the West, which aims to extend its domination over the entire world, has broken with rural traditions—and it is this that is of interest in this text—is by relegating the institutionalized place of the dead to the periphery of social life, concentrated increasingly in cities constructed around monuments to the resurrection and triumph of life rather than memorials to the dead. This separation of church from churchyard marks what can be called a detachment of the living from the dead, if not, indeed, from detachability as such. This menaces theater, but theater can also respond to it.

The survival of theater, then, depends upon redefining its position with respect to the dead and to their institutionalized place, the cemetery. Only in the shadow of the grave can the possibility of detachment, and detachment as the possibility of theater, perhaps be recovered. To be thus recovered by theater, such detachment must be understood or, rather, practiced as an act of disjunction that is something other than a mere moment or station on the way to salvation. In short, such disjunction must be practiced spatially, involving the linkage of theater to a fixed site:

The site. To an Italian who wanted to construct a theater whose elements would be mobile and whose architecture changing, depending on the play to be performed, I replied, even before he had finished his sentence, that the architecture of the theater remains to be discovered, but that it must be fixed, immobilized, so that its responsibility may be recognized: it shall be judged by its form. One can, if one wishes, turn toward the perishable, but only after the irreversible act for which we shall be judged or, if one prefers, the fixed act that judges itself. (pp. 65–66, my emphasis)

The notions of peripeteia and anagnrisis echo silently in a passage that once again continues the Aristotelian conception of theater while transforming it. The fixity of theatrical space is the condition of an act of recognition. But what is recognized is the responsibility of theater itself. Only by immobilizing, by arresting a movement that would otherwise be taken for granted as a temporal transition, does theater become responsible. In what does such responsibility consist? In the obligation to “judge itself.” Such self-judgment, we may assume, as in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, can only result in a suspended sentence, for the fixity of the theatrical act strikes a counterblow against “the ‘coup du calendrier’ that the West seeks to impose upon the entire world” (p. 65). By interrupting that calendar through its “fixity,” the theatrical “act” does not merely open the possibility of “a multitude of calendars”—it also introduces “another time … having neither beginning nor end” and thus irrevocably at odds with the archeo-teleological time and space that inform Western historical consciousness. At the same time, such a theater finds itself caught in a contradiction. By fixing itself, albeit in the introduction of a new calendar, it also inevitably instantiates itself, thereby furthering the illusion of the very eternity and sameness it seeks to disrupt.

Such a theater can only survive as a parody of itself: neither as tragedy nor as comedy, but rather as farce, as what Kierkegaard describes, in Repetition, as Posse. The theatrical possibility par excellence, the Posse gestures toward a time and space of inauthentic cohabitation, of quasi-simultaneity, of irreducible anachronicity and heterogeneity. In this space of disjunction, the theater and the cemetery mirror each other: “Death would be both closer and lighter, theater graver” (p. 68).

The “tutelary” shadow of the tomb teaches theater to recognize its responsibility as parodic detachment. Theater makes this detachment visible: not the shape of the thing itself, but its shadow, not its phenomenality, but its outlines. Not bodies, simply, or even corpses, but machines, masks, apparatuses: stage “properties” that belong to no one or to no thing. The funeral mime is an exemplary embodiment of such detachment—and therefore an exemplary theatrical figure:

    And the funeral mime?
    And the Theater in the cemetery?

Before the dead man is buried, let his corpse be carried to the front of the stage in its coffin; let friends, enemies, and the curious gather in the part reserved for the public; let the funeral mime who preceded the procession divide and multiply himself [se dédouble, se multiplie]; let him become a theater troupe and let him, before the dead and the public, allow the dead to live and die again [remourir]. (p. 73)

Theater is the repetition of detachment, of division and of multiplication, by which the singular becomes many and the many singular; the troupe isolated and the isolated a troupe; the dead resuscitated and the resuscitated die again: not to be reborn but to remourir. Whether words or mimes, what repeats and reproduces itself never returns as the same. In returning, recurring, repeating, everything detaches itself. That is the death before all death, the detachment that goes on before our eyes. We “know” this all the time and yet, at the same time, rarely think of it:

As for me, faced with this enraged herd encaged in the dictionary, I know that I‘ve said nothing and that I never will say anything: and the words couldn‘t care less.

Actions are hardly more docile. (p. 74)

Unless, that is, the “actions” are those of the funeral mime. His acts are quite special: in a certain sense, they never take place, for they are impossible. That is the Posse, the farce that his gesticulation embodies. And with this strange act, which is more a gesticulation than an action, the text, strangely, concludes: “if he wants to make the dead live and die again, [the mime] will have to discover, and dare to say, those dialectophagous words which, before the public, will devour the life and death of the dead” (p. 74). But a funeral mime who would “dare” to say “dialectophagous words” would thereby celebrate his own funeral. Those words would devour him along with the (other) dialects. For a mime that dares to speak is no longer a mime—unless, of course, he mimes speaking. Is it such mimicry of language—language as mimicry—that devours “the life and death of the dead” theatrically?

There are other reasons. They‘re subtler. It’s up to you to discover them in you without defining or naming them. (p. 69)