Mirroring the Split Subject

Una Chadhuri defines avant-garde theatre as “performance under-erasure. . . . a radical, total disunity. In semiotic terms. . . it is a fall into the abyss between signifier and signified” (1990, 39). Jean Genet’s literary work celebrates the abyss as a parallel universe for the decentralized, and the socially subverse. While writing about this parallel world may negate its radical potential, Genet points to a necessary ironic tension co-existing between legitimate and subversive realms. According to Mark Pizzato, Genet’s subversive creations mark an autobiographical reconstruction where “the sole purpose of his writing would then have been to read it himself, to re-read himself and his imaginings, and to re-imagine himself through his written fantasies” (1990, 116). In Genet’s play The Balcony there is a continuous re-writing and re-reading of self by the characters. Genet shows that the individual’s desire to (re)create oneself using an other image, and in Genet’s case the desire to see his radical behaviour reflected in art, becomes the secret, collective dream of the masses.

The transformations that take place at the Grand Balcony are portraits of self-conscious disunity. Genet states in a letter to Roger Blin that “my books, like my plays, were written against myself. . . to expose myself” (Innes, 1993, 111). But they are also a postmodern manipulation of theatrical conventions exposing the audience to a self-reflexive, theatrical experience. Similarly, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theories also pose a postmodern interpretation of development whereby individuals re-imagine, re-write and re-read their subject positions. Genet’s avant-garde challenge to mimetic representation and Jacques Lacan’s deconstruction of the Freudian Subject, which he makes using theatrical metaphors and allusions, creates an interesting analogy between The Balcony and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Both show representation , on and off the stage, as a process determined by a discourse that is never truly one’s own. The Balcony’s thematic and structural masquerade place the audience in a carnivalesque world where everything is theatrical, or nothing is. Genet’s post-structuralist text parallels Lacan’s observation that individuals are immersed in their own psycho-masquerades. Both visions expose a psycho-theatrical process determined by the subject’s ability to ‘try on’ discourses. Genet and Lacan’s positions undermine the concept of power by showing us, through their distinct works, how everything that is meaningful also has the clownish potential to slide into the abyss of meaninglessness. Discourse(s), then, become life’s chief organizing principle while simultaneously destroying the boundaries between fantasy and reality, art and life, stage and audience, subject and ideal object.

The Balcony, in Genet’s play of the same name, is a brothel, a house of illusions; it is also a stage. Its liminality, or decentralized sacred space, belongs to both a fictional and a referential reality where characters and audience participate in transformative experiences. The dramatized space and the playing space position theatricality in the audience’s gaze; both performances require costumes, the creation of characters, the playing of roles. Inundated with mirrors, Genet’s stage accentuates the theme of theatrical masquerade. In 1962, he writes that the play is a “glorification of the Image and the Reflection” (Knapp, 1968, 119). The mirrors reinforce Genet’s challenge to subjectivity and assault on social theatricality by revealing that a “reflected image requires the pre-existence of a reflectable entity” (Chaudhuri, 1990, 46). According to Una Chaudhuri, the performance-as- mirror emphasizes the theatre’s split subjectivity since it occupies two spaces – the fictive and the referential – and would no longer exist if this spatial duality were broken. While optic devices decorate the walls, flesh and cloth ‘mirrors’ walk upon the boards. Without the play’s clients the fantasies would not exist; without the audience the performance would not exist.

The parallels between Genet’s theatre and Lacan’s psychology strengthens my reading of the play as a postmodern assault on society’s theatricality. The clients come to the Grand Balcony to live out power fantasies by playing with the tools of domination and submission. Their action presents a strong analogy to Jacques Lacan’s theories of subject-development. He asserts that all humans suffer from fragmented body-images, and desire to create a unified form even if it means acquiring “the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity” (Lacan, 1977,4). The clients’ desires to enter the brothel’s illusory satisfaction stems from their psychological need to move from an incomplete existence to one of unity. The elements required for Genet’s stage – a mirror which reflects an unmade bed, a costume and a woman – manufacture the drama that results in the temporary actualization of the clients’, and the audience’s, psycho-fantasies. In Genet’s world, according to Christopher Innes, “the usual equation between appearance and essence has been reversed. The artificial appearance is the essence” (1993, 109). The costume’s effect is believed to be ‘real’ because the client desires to become an ‘essential’ archetype:

The General: (He looks at himself in the mirror) Austerlitz! General! Man of War and in full regalia, behold me in my pure appearance. Nothing, no contingent trails behind me. I appear, purely and simply (62).

In this case, the subject, the inadequate being from beyond the balcony’s threshold, looks into the mirror and sees the object: the “pure appearance” of a general. The client gains a sense of completeness through masquerade. This pleasurable misidentification erases the separation between client and the ideal image, signifier and signified, referent and reference.

According to Lacan, the subject’s desire to rediscover an ideal image is rooted in his/her primary narcissism. Entry into the world of language terminates the subject’s blissful existence in the primal stage. The subject then displaces his narcissistic tendencies onto another, with the ‘other’ taking the form of a virgin or prostitute. But, while Genet’s Bishop, Judge and General love that which Freud says we all “would like to be” (Freud, 1984, 84), the anaclitic theme also occurs at the Grand Balcony: “this time it’s the baby who gets slapped, spanked, tucked in, then cries and is cuddled” (47). Here, the sought-after object is clearly a (m)other substitute. Since no sexual act is explicitly performed in the play, the brothel’s conventions encourage sublimation whereby the clients displace their ego ideals onto the reflections they perceive in the mirror. Consider how theatre’s conventions encourage audiences along the same path. Furthermore, the visual absence of sexual intercourse raises doubts to its actual occurrence. Genet’s decision to not toy with the audience’s morals by having the characters “perform” sexual acts introduces a more subversive message to the script. This gap in narrative expectations enables Genet to transform the Balcony’s deviant space – as a house of sexual pleasures -- into an acceptable arena performing empowerment rituals through the alienating techniques of the masquerade. And masquerade is neither deviant, nor against the Law. In essence, Genet’s erotic pleasure of theatricality is shown to also be the same pleasures not only sought by average men, but necessary to their normal functioning in society.

Trying to escape society’s decentring function, the clients re-create images that, nevertheless, are embroidered by social decorum and tradition and embossed by the power of fantasy-specific discourses. In Lacanian terms, language and discourse characterizes the symbolic stage’s fragmenting horror. Ironically, the Lacanian subject only recognizes the imaginary stage’s gratification once he has come under the power of Language and the Name of the Father or Law. Alienated and fragmented in the world of signifiers and signifieds, the subject seeks the impossible: a return to the Imaginary’s satisfaction. But satisfaction is known only upon “reflection”, so subjects play, in earnest, at misidentifying who they are. This Hegelian paradox is, as Mark Pizzato observes, evident in Genet’s life where in order to carry the identity of an outlaw, Genet subjected himself to the law’s authority by being caught and imprisoned. According to Jeanette Savona, Genet understood the oppressive power of symbolic naming: “accepting the condemnation of others, he attempted to become what the world saw in him, someone bound to be bad”(1983, 3). But to say one is this or that is not enough. A disguise, costume, or prop becomes essential for the subject’s

meconnaissance. The men masquerade as active ideals; the women play at being passive slaves to the ideal images. Here, Lacan's definition of "masquerade" is useful in understanding the paradox of play at the Grand Balcony: "the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal are represented in the psyche by. . . the term masquerade. . . [which] is precisely to play not as the imaginary, but at the symbolic level" (1981, 93).

Language’s power to name, while being the cause of the subject’s inadequate feelings, is the gateway to the subject’s return to an imaginary completeness. Genet’s characters willingly forfeit their everyday identities in order to focus on their ideal images. They want to experience their object-ideals in masturbating solitude: “I want to be general in solitude. Not even for myself, but for my image, and my image for its image, and so on. In short, we’ll be among equals” (27). The client misperceives the representational process since “ a reflected image requires the preexistence of a reflectable entity” (Chaudhuri, 1990, 46). He cannot be a General in solitude because identity requires the presence and validation of another even if that other is only a cloth replica.

Analogous to psychoanalytical transference, the illusion’s construction is conveniently ignored by the client. Lacan points out that Freud “in touching on the feelings involved in the transference, insisted on the need to distinguish in it a factor of reality” (Innes, 1993, 109). Likewise, the play’s women realize that certain props are necessary in creating the imaginary transference:

The Balcony inverts the categories of reality and fantasy with only the Chief of Police recognizing that “brothel tricks are mainly mirror tricks” (48). Being excluded from the imaginary order’s satisfaction, the Chief arrogantly pronounces the brothel’s function only to ignore the theatrical machinery once his misidentification is eminent.

Genet’s other clients, the audience, undergo the same process. At the box office, they trade in their daily realities and willingly enter the rejuvenating, but illusional, space of the theatre. Not unlike the characters, they are confronted with inadequate reflections since their desire to enjoy the image in private can never be realized. For one, theatre is a collective art form. For another, the actors remind the audience that they are slaves to language and a discourse “in the universal movement in which their places are already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of [their] proper names”(Lacan, 1977, 148). Life and art is inscribed by the tension between signifier and signified, the symbolic and the imaginary. So, while the audience enjoys their temporary fall into the imaginary, the authentic detail – the ticket stub – burns in their pockets.

The tension between the authentic and the inauthentic is evident in the clients appropriation of authoritative language in order to create their scenarios. While the sessions belong to the imaginary realm, they are controlled and organized by the symbolic. Scene two demonstrates that the sessions are scripted and proceed along a course determined by the language of an elusive Author. The clients agree to use these fantasy-specific discourses because their transformations rely upon naming that which they desire. “Ornaments! Mitres! Laces! You, above all, of gilded Cope, you protect me from the world” (13): naming the items that create the object of desire indicates a revolution in language that releases the client from his oppressive discourse by paradoxically (en)trapping him in another representational, discursive structure. Thus, Genet is not against theatricality; in fact, he revels in it. His attack is aimed at society’s theatrical seriousness, or its inability to see its theatricality as anything but serious by depicting grown men playing “dress-up”.

Genet’s revolution in art, like Lacan’s in psychology, positions language as Janus-faced. It is language that disrupts the euphoria of the imaginary bond between subject and object. It is language that also allows the imaginary to be named and re-entered by the subject through a ficticious chain of signifiers. However, the signifier is always already beyond reach; it is part of “an essential encounter – an appointment to what we are always called with a real that eludes us” (Lacan, 1981, 53). Dramatically, the clients want to participate in a perfect illusion, and for the session’s duration, the image is not provisional. As the Envoy says: “It is a true image, born of a false spectacle” (75). The fantasy-specific discourse supports the improbable probability of the ideal image’s stability by removing it from the symbolic world, and ritualizing language’s metonymic function. This revolutionary stance toward language and subjectivity is reflected in the client/bishop’s voiced desires:

A function is a function. It’s not a mode of being. But a bishop – that’s a mode of being. It’s a trust. A burden. Mitres, lace, goldcloth and glass trinkets, genuflexions. . . To hell with the function! . . . The majesty, the dignity, that light up my person, do not emanate from the attributions of my function. No more, good heavens! than from my personal merits. The majesty, the dignity that light me up come from a more mysterious brilliance; the fact that the bishop precedes me. . . And I wish to be bishop in solitude, for appearance alone. . . (12).

The client wants to be the one and only Bishop because “priority in time is one of the very sources of the father’s power” (Bleikesten, 1981, 118). According to Lacan, “it is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which,. . . has identified his person with the figure of the Law” (1977, 67). Since the client desires to be the Law’s signifier, he is no longer subjected to Law’s castrating power.

The men erase their subservience to the Law by performing the functions that give power to the Law’s images. Twisting the priority principle, Genet takes the Hegelian master/slave relationship to its ultimate subversive end. The client-judge says:

We are bound together, you, he and I. For example, if he didn’t hit, how could I stop him from hitting? Therefore, he must strike so that I can intervene and demonstrate my authority. And you must deny your guilt so that he can beat you (15).

The thief, not the judge, has claim to priority because “[his] being [a] judge is in emanation of [her] being a thief” (19). Not unlike an audience agreeing with theatrical conventions, a contract must be made between those who represent the script and those who are submissive to its authority. However, like the breach between langue and parole, this contract is not infallible. Genet’s performers, mimicing referential performances, illustrate the signifier’s emptiness and the individual’s responsibility for impregnating the discourse with meaning; however, pregnancy is an illusion at the Grand Balcony.

The women’s refusal to name the clients as Law emphasizes their position as the legitimizing (m) other. As long as the client is in his studio his desires reign: “here there’s no possibility of doing evil” (10). Seeming to be the master of his own desires, the client neutralizes the Law that precedes him through the cooperation of the women who take pleasure in disrupting the imaginary chain of signifiers by using anal language: a verbal simulation mirroring the psychological function of anal manipulation. The client’s gratification is orgasmically heightened by the threat of reality:

The Bishop: If your sins were real, they would be crimes, and I’d be in a fine mess (10).

The women defer the client’s gratification by refusing to accept the ideal object/ego’s authority and only later providing the client with their bodies’ metaphorical gifts. Delaying in telling the Chief of Police “the fact that his image does not yet conform to the liturgies of the brother” (47), the women derive erotic pleasure through suspending “the subject’s certainties until their last mirages have been consumed”(Lacan, 1977, 43). As archetypal mothers, the women nourish and sustain the client’s jouissance by epitomizing Lacan’s “woman as the possessor of man” (Lacan, 1982, 145). The women also derive pleasure from participating, at a distance, in the male’s fantasy’s. Carmen and Irma comment that “The revels that [we] indulge in. . . . are to forget theirs” (36).

Ironically, it the bought position of the women that stimulates their own fantasies. Irma is “The Woman. . . as an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy” (Lacan, 1982, 48). Ultimately, her deceptive love becomes narcissistic as she exerts her authority by remaining “alone, mistress and assistant mistress of this house and of herself” (95). As Jane Gallop points out, “the whore gives man all he wants without ever being broken, tamed, possessed” (1982, 89). Genet further plays with society’s patriarchal power structure by revealing what Lewis Cetta calls the Chief’s “ecstatically transcendent figure” (1974, 54) to be nothing more than Madam Irma’s finest and most comical travesty.

Through self-reflexive doubling, Genet spreads this narcissistic subversion onto the audience. The client loves what he sees in the mirror because it reflects how he wants to be seen: “Mirror that glorifies me! Image that I can touch, I love you. . . (The general bows to his image in the mirror. . . and bows to the audience)” (18-19, 27). The general’s bow to the audience draws us into the narcissistic pool by exposing our pleasure in quiet voyeurism. Like the women, the actors are props initiating the audience’s meconnaissance. However, the audience becomes voyeurs not of elicit sexual acts, but of the desire for such acts to occur. Thus, genet invites us into the play’s sacred ritual only to embarrass us for being there. Once the sessions end, the women’s indifference parallels representational art’s dispassion toward everything except its own perpetuation. Once the show is over, actors do not often hobnob with the audience. Through theatre’s trick mirrors, Genet recognizes the audience’s authority only to thematically drain them of power.

Genet completes his attack on realism through the character of Roger. This ideal voyeur insists on loving Chantel, the ideal whore. He exalts her as his sexual ideal and transforms her into an exotic figure incapable of physical love. Roger states his motivation for such reverence: “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy” (56). This self-reflexive statement enhances the problematic ideology behind realist representation. Audience identification with the other confuses or nullifies social-consciousness by forcing people to embrace false images. The psychological reasoning behind Roger’s castration can be explained in Lacanian terms: “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you” (1981, 268). Lacan’s equation of misidentified love leading to self-mutilation rather than political violence reinforces Genet’s vision of the dangers of mimetic identification. Without phallic power, Roger can not mutilate the symbol; therefore, in a sexually deviant act he mutilates the real object of his love – himself. Genet’s theatre suggests that realism hides ideological conspiracies by encouraging false identifications that lead to the audience’s socio-psycho self-mutilation. Such violence creates hollow subjects stuffed with realist straw incapable of revolutionary thought or action.

Psychological transference and the artistic transference encouraged by realist theatre are parallel dangers since both are based on false premises. In the psychological transference the synchronic intersection of the diachronic fantasy is, in Lacan’s thinking, the “moment in which the symbolic and real come together” (1977, 95). In Genet’s psycho-theatre, the client’s donning of the disguise unites his fragmented existence with the fantasy’s eternal power. The monetary exchange insures the client the privilege of time to experience this encounter with the desired object. However, the symbolic does not play fair; it terminates the possible encounter with the real. At the play’s beginning, Irma interrupts the bishop’s fantasy: “It’s time. Come on! Quick! Make it snappy!”(9). The client, like the audience, participates in the fantasy with the imposing foreknowledge of its termination. Michele Piemme observes that “the ceremony in the Grand Balcony does not have a chance to unfold as it should since everyone is preoccupied with events on the outside” (1979, 165). But while machine gun fire punctuates the fanstasy it also intensifies the client’s pleasure by reminding him of the situation he has temporarily escaped, and the titillating possibility of its intrusion. That is, if the machine-gun fire isn’t merely a sound track!

Likewise, audiences can not ignore theatre’s punctuating traces. No matter how perfect the spectacle, theatre/brothel is a business that requires a quick, patron turnover. Although Irma does limit the time, she does not rush the men. They are given time in relation to their scenarios’ individual progress. The sessions’ various lengths indicate that the Balcony does not adhere to routine time. Multiple time schemes are at work in the theatre and at the brothel, and are measured by the individual’s capacity to uncover the scenario’s truth: “Everything was carefully planned long ago. It’s all been worked out. The rest is up to you” (88). This line places the responsibility of a successful encounter on the audience/client’s deciphering capabilities and suspension of disbelief.

Each scenario brings the audience closer to Genet’s revolution against representational art and language. Once the client inaugurates his fantasy, the significant points are scripted and the time limit determined. Exchanging one language system for another, the men reveal their desires through fantasy-specific discourses. Once Roger advances through the discourse, the session is over. Going beyond the allotted time is in accordance with Lacan’s warning for the psycho-therapist: “The punctuation, once inserted, fixes the meaning; changing the punctuation renews or upsets it; and a faulty punctuation amounts to a change for the worse” (1977, 99). The brothel’s statute book fixes the scenario’s ritualized time and action. Once the ritual is complete, the client must get dressed and go home: “It’s late. And the later it gets, the more dangerous it’ll be. . . “ (11) for the client.

Violating time is dangerous for the discourse because it introduces the unexpected into the scenario.. This may take the form of love, a contradiction to the brothel’s goals, or fixation. In Ecrits, Lacan discusses the transference in a manner that parallels the Balcony’s situation:

The indifference with which the cutting up of the ‘timing’ interrupts the moments of haste within the subject can be fatal to the conclusion towards which his discourse was being precipitated, or can even fix a misunderstanding or misreading in it, if not furnish a pretext for a retaliatory ruse (1977 96).

Carmen’s faulty punctuating allows Roger to rebel against his inadequacy by taking the scenario’s discourse beyond the imaginary identification. He misrecognizes the transformation and believes he has merged with his ideal object/ego: “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. . . (93). In his case, he does attain the impossible: he makes the signifier, his castrated body, correspond to the signified that promotes the emptiness of all signifiers. Here too, Genet attack’s bourgeois assumptions concerning sexual theatricality by showing power to reside in a mutilated sexual body. The scenario’s complexity, mock-power, and faulty punctuation leads the discourse on a dangerous path by giving the client too much unchecked independence. Carmen says, “you wouldn’t be the first who thought he’d risen to power” (93). Now it is too late to reverse the grammatical error. Once again, Lacan’s description of the transference is helpful:

We re-establish in the subject his original mirage in so far as he places his truth in us, and that if we then give him the sanction of our authority, we are setting the analysis off on an aberrant path whose results will be impossible to correct (1977, 96).

But Genet’s doubling self-reflexivity complicates even this reading by suggesting that Roger’s scenario, and its violent castration, is not his own, but the Chief of Police’s script. The Chief’s rise to power is part of the audience’s script, and their script part of the realist conspiracy that is part of . . . and so on.

Nevertheless, the clients’ inabilities to return to the symbolic ‘on time’ strand them as ideal object/egos. Disguised as the Queen, Irma tells the bishop that he “happens to be wearing that robe this evening simply because he was unable to clear out of the studios in time” (81). The men, trapped in their fantasy-specific discourses, should be in a euphoric state. But they are not:

So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our own fantasies. But once having exposed them, having named them, having proclaimed them, we’re now tied up with adventure according to the laws of visibility (79).

The studios create a unifying pleasure between subject and object. According to Chaudhuri, a performance, like that enacted in Genet’s text, does not offer an “absence from the self, [nor] escape into a center of pure otherness, but an experience of ‘in-between-ness’ of the process of self-loss” (1990,67). Unfortunately, once the narcissism is publicized the individual no longer enjoys the process because Law crystallizes the private process into a public product featuring collective escapism. The above speech parallels Lacan’s theory that individual’s enjoy the search for rather than the conquering of the desired object. The subject can never attain real, solitary power because power involves an inter-dependent dialectic between master and slave, ego and image, character and audience.

Genet’s attack on representation and bourgeois society is furthered by the audience’s reflection in the clients’ dissatisfactions. Both Genet and Lacan recognize that the subject’s submission to the system heightens his insignificance; the brothel’s scenarios continue even in his absence: “If the gentleman doesn’t fit the bill, then get a dummy” (Chaudhuri 1990, 67). The audience is forced to see the ideal image’s impotence, especially when the clients voice their dissatisfaction with the game:

We shall go back to our rooms and there continue the quest of an absolute dignity. We ought never to have left them. For we were content there, and it was you who came and dragged us away. Fore ours was a happy state. And absolutely safe. . . we were general, judge and bishop to the point of perfection and to the point of rapture! (79).

Dissatisfaction motivates rebellion; but, the clients’ empowerment is based on the false premise that they can unite their inferior egos with their ideal object/egos. Using theatricality as a weapon, Genet shows power to be anti-thetical to the notion of self because it requires an aphanisis, or fading, of the subject. By extension, the psycholanalytical explanation is as follows:

They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene. . . they are supposed to represent something whose signification, while constantly changing is, beyond their own persons. (Lacan 1981, 220).

When the client’s persona still pokes through the image, the necessary fading is disrupted and the ideal ego looses its authority. Stripped of its exotic pleasure, the bishop states the banality of their new entrapment: “as for my lace, I no longer look forward to it – it’s myself. . . I’m just a dignity represented by a robe. . . . By Jove, I no longer dream” (Genet, 1981, 364). Pure power, solitary authority and rebellion are impossible.

While the priority principle endows the roles with authority, it is the costume that signals that authority to the world. Likewise, in describing the acting process, Bettina Knapp says the actor embodies the Creator and the incarnator, and is a “sign charged with signs” (90). The actor is a paradox: real and unreal, concrete and abstract, one yet multiple. In order to create a character, the actor must fade into the scenery; however, in Genet and Lacan’s world the split between actor and character is always already present and visible, and a challenge to oppressive, ideological structures.

In effect, the clients become truly powerful only in the illusory misidentifications created by the women who cunningly transform themselves into tricks/mirrors. Irma says, “Their seed never ripens in you, and yet. . . if you weren’t there?” (31). The female’s sterility makes her the Mother-object and not a penetrateable, sexual entity. The male’s ecstasy is evoked through his false reunion with the object; the child with the mother; the masculine external with the feminine interior. According to the Lacan, the masquerade is the very definition of femininity because it is constructed with reference to a male sign. The clients masquerade as feminine ideals because they both desire and lack the phallus. To be the symbol of power, the phallus and the Other of themselves, is only possible in the illusory role of the Law. The masquerade connects them with the hidden power of their own interior femininity because it is the Mother gives the father power by naming him. This suggests that real power can only be achieved through the reunion of the feminine and the masculine. But how to achieve this?

The setting implies that sexual intercourse precedes the masquerade. The unmade bed is a reflection suggestive of the scenario’s main focus: “The scenarios are all reducible to a major theme. . . Death” (87-88). Like the Surrealists, Genet and Lacan view the business of sex as the business of the mortuary. Lacan says “sex and its significations are always capable of making present the presence of death” (1981, 205). The clients play our their death scenes while also experimenting with the false possibility of producing bastard children, an idea that intensifies their lack to the point of ecstasy. By playing with a social death, the clients attempt to destroy their social egos and (re)produce the imaginary bond. However, the prostitute’s sterility, as stated by Irma, makes the issue of sex and death a mockery that defers the subject’s ecstasy to the scenario:

If I went through wars without dying, went through sufferings without dying, if I was promoted, without dying, it was for this minute close to death. . . where I shall be nothing, though reflected ad infinitum in these mirrors, nothing but my image (26).

Undoubtedly, death is linked to sex. However, while in the illusion, death is a fantasy because the general can die only figuratively. Irma’s characters are immortal Others. Likewise, Lacan’s Other is immortal, thus making any risk for the subject inoperant since “death is present only in jest” (1971, 290). The general participates in his own funeral ritual and revels in the fact that as the client he can get up and go home.

Genet’s ultimate challenge to realism’s ideological construction comes in the form of the Chief of Police. While the other clients are ordinary men who desire to be Father archetypes, the Chief is always already a signifier of Law. Yet, even the Law desires an imaginary return: “for me, the Queen has to be someone. And the situation had to be concrete” (63). His need for validation undermines the existence of a pure Signifier. Once he is assured that his image will be perpetuated in men’s fantasies the Chief becomes a symbol in waiting and wins the right to eternal life. He wins the right to die by provoking the image’s ritualized death. The Chief stresses his independence by constantly asserting that the “people fear him more and more” (48).

Although the Chief continually asserts his power, the meconnaissance would be impossible without Irma. Like Genet, she transforms ordinary prostitutes into mother substitutes; she transforms empty spaces into theatrical dreamscapes. Everything she does is for the ultimate scenario, the Mausoleum Studio. For example, scene four’s tramp prepares to be the Hero’s slave. The Balcony’s economical use of clients as employees strengthens Genet’s thematic destabilization of self. Everything is theatrical in order to foreground “a becoming rather than a being” (Chaudhuri 1990, 71). Everything and everyone, including the audience, becomes part of the theatrical process. The Chief immortalizes his identity; however Roger’s castration of the “Chief” emphasizes his powerlessness. Robert Brustein asserts “the mutilation bestows godhead upon the Chief of Police, for, like the ancient gods, ‘he has been mutilated and remained whole’” (1964, 401). The Chief endorses this view by mistakenly thinking he can still separate himself from his image: “though my image be castrated in every brothel in the world I remain intact” (94). Earlier, he contradicts this idea by saying, “I’ll know by a sudden weakness of my muscles that my image is escaping from me to go and haunt men’s minds” (82). In fact, this discrepancy parallels the audience’s fluctuating engagement between their total fading into the theatrical experience and their self-awareness of realism’s artifice. I suggest that the castration, performed by one who plays the duo role of powerful father and power-seeking son is analogous to Lacan’s interpretation that all individuals seek a return to an imaginary completeness with the Other while knowing such a return is impossible.

Ultimately, Genet’s characters become playful shifting signifiers in a never-ending process of (re)discovery and loss. Una Chaudhuri states that Genet’s theatrical world is a liminal time and space marked by make-believe. The literal activity of mirroring, and its metaphorical connection to art, is presented as a subconscious necessity in transgressing the symbolic’s divisive power. Interestingly, it is Irma, not the Chief of Police, who exerts Genet’s final blow against society and its privileging of representational ideology. Directly addressing the audience as she would a client, she says: “You must now go home, where everything – you can be quite sure – will be falser than here. . . . You must go now. You’ll leave by the right, through the alley. . . ” (96). Pointing to the theatre’s sacred space and the audience’s communion with its ritual offerings, Bettina Knapp enhances Genet’s belief that the desires of the individual are not private and personal, but the collective dreams of the oppressed masses. Lacanian psychology also posits this notion. Knapp comments that the audience’s participation in the theatrical ritual, even if it is a passive one, is one where “he renounces his individual existence and becomes part of the collective body (1968, 93). Emphasizing theatre’s scared function, Saint Genet’s radical splitting of self through doubling self-reflexivity parallels the Lacanian, post-structural challenge of self and representation. Genet’s theatre and Lacan’s psychology invites audiences/clients to an aggressive carnival presented in a hall of mirrors where no one is real, all is theatrical, and everything reflects empty images drowning in narcissistic desires.

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