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• W2080046083 abstract "The Voided Role: On Genet Christopher Lane Que je me vide! —Genet, Les Bonnes 38 It wasn’t easy, or any fun, being obliged to live up to one’s image. —Genet, Splendid’s 41 Genet criticism seems increasingly concerned with identifying the transgressive potential of Jean Genet’s life and works. We now hear regularly that Genet critiqued authenticity and coherent identities; that he emphasized the volatile proximity between dramatic characters and figures of speech, and did untold damage to Western conceptions of role and ontology. 1 Occasionally, we also hear Genet denounced as a traitor, fascist, and pervert who flirted so egregiously with hostile and oppressive forces that he palpably undermined our political freedom. 2 All of these assessments would likely have pleased him, but that is not our immediate concern. 3 Although some of these claims are warranted, Genet criticism has become so invested in the idea of transgression that critics often ignore the precise elements contributing to—and impeding—this phenomenon in his work. 4 To put this contentiously, studies of Genet frequently reproduce a form of psychic idealism that magnifies the most “acceptable” dimension of his work (its irreverence, parody, and performativity) by downplaying Genet’s accompanying—and related—interest in psychic negativity: abjection, disgust, negation, and death. Following my contention, I want briefly to rethink a statement in which Genet presented his representational aims; critics often invoke this statement to endorse claims about his theater’s radicalism. In an [End Page 876] article written to accompany and interpret The Maids (1947), Genet claimed that verisimilitude is theatrically “complacent” 5 ; it requires an audience only to identify with the events on stage, not to consider the startling disparity between life and theater. For Genet and others, modern Western theater has something “shoddy” about it (38): it reassures an audience by allowing it to suspend disbelief. “The spectacle that unfolds on the stage is always puerile,” he complained, because “all takes place in the visible world and nowhere else” (38). Aiming to revoke this tradition, Genet tried to bring “theater into the theater” (38) so that his plays would “portend [tout pressenti]” (37), not demonstrate or display. He also tried to disassemble the actor by turning him or her into “a sign charged with signs . . . as remote as possible from what they are meant first to signify” (37–38). Instead of producing conventional characters, Genet wanted to stage “the metaphors of what [such signs] were supposed to represent” (38). 6 Finally, by substituting “marionettes” for characters (39)—fractured and multiple metaphors that don’t correspond with their signifiers, or types that can’t always realize theatrically “adequate” subjectivities—Genet tried to push theater toward a form of “allusion” that makes mimetic fidelity quite impossible (39). Critics of Genet’s texts have largely accepted this summary as an overall statement of his literary and conceptual aims. My aim is not to reject it tout court; considering Genet’s statement and his plays’ evident fascination with allusion and displacement, this rejection would be foolish. I want instead to rethink Genet’s interest in character—and Genet criticism’s swift erasure of this category—in light of his pronouncement that The Maids was “a failure” (38). How should we respond to this admission? Did Genet simply misconceive the play’s principle or execution? Or did the play’s rationale shatter before he could realize its “risks or perils” (38)? I want to dwell on the implications of this “failure,” arguing that Genet’s evaluation of this play profoundly affects how we interpret his other work. Let me add swiftly that I think Genet’s related claim about his lack of courage as a writer (38) represents less an authoritative statement on creativity or performance than a profound meditation on the “character” of character. 7 Additionally, that Genet forcefully demonstrates the limitations of “performative” arguments about identity underscores the wider conceptual difficulties of trying to represent identity only in this way. Adding substance to Genet’s interest in signs and marionettes, The Maids stages the rivalry, hatred, and desire of two sisters in a series of [End Page 877] fantasmatic tableaux. Unlike the famous Papin affair of Spring 1933, in..." @default.
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• W2080046083 date "1997-01-01" @default.
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• W2080046083 title "The Voided Role: On Genet" @default.
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• W2080046083 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.1997.0078" @default.
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