Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Genet's Sacred Theatre: Practice and Politics

 by

Carl Lavery and Ralph Yarrow

Theater places us right at the heart of what is religious-political: in the heart of absence, in negativity, in nihilism as Nietzsche would say, therefore in the question of power. (Jean-François Lyotard) [i]

The sacred is a privileged moment […], a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled. (Georges Bataille) [ii]

Our concern here is to offer an alternative interpretation of the politics of Jean Genet’s theatre by concentrating on how that theatre actively provokes a disturbing mode of experience that is conventionally thought to have little political value. For reasons that will soon become evident, we call this experience, after George Bataille’s work on sovereignty and the impossible, the sacred. Although our argument is rooted in practice – we staged The Balcony (1955) and The Maids (1947) at the University of East Anglia Drama Studio in 1999 and 2002 respectively – this article makes no specific reference to these productions, and is unashamedly theoretical in its aim. While we fully intend to share the practical insights we have gained from working on Genet in future publications, it seemed crucial, at this stage, to write about an aspect of his theatre that continues to be ignored: its complex political agenda.[iii]  The sections that follow, then, will attempt:

(i)                  to describe how the sacred functions in Bataille’s thinking

(ii)                to show the similarities between Genet’s concept of the sacred and Bataille’s

(iii)               to examine how the sacred informs Genet’s theatre after 1955

(iv)              to outline Genet’s enterprise in terms of his desire to reinstate sacred experience as a necessary prerequisite to radical personal and political transformation

(v)                to explore in detail aspects of dramaturgy by which this project is delivered

                   ----------------------------

Bataille and the a/theological sacred

Unlike religious and secular discourses which generally understand the sacred as either spiritual truth or socialising principle, Bataille believes it to be an ambivalent and ultimately unclassifiable phenomenon. For Bataille, the sacred belongs to the realm of a/theology, a way of (un)thinking that deliberately sets out to suspend theological notions of totality and wholeness. Mark C. Taylor, a good interpreter of Bataille’s writing, supplies a useful definition of how a/theology operates:

The / of a/theology (which, it is important to note, can be written but not spoken) marks the limen that signifies both proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority. This strangely permeable membrane forms a border where fixed boundaries disintegrate. Along this boundless boundary the traditional polarities between which Western theology has been suspended are inverted and subverted.[iv]  

By insisting on liminality and impossibility, Bataille’s a/theology aims at re-vitalising religious experience, which, he contends, has been perverted and domesticated by theology’s dependence on an anthropocentric deity figure or logos.[v] According to Bataille’s more ecstatic – and ultimately more troubling – view of religion, the sacred belongs to a primitive, Godless economy rooted in eroticism:

The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. [vi]

In the erotic, Bataille argues, we embrace, willingly and absurdly, the dissolution of self. To consent to the erotic and/or the sacred is, then, to consent to death. In both cases, individuality or discontinuity is negated by, and thus becomes part of, indivisible oneness. Bataille calls this state continuity:

Beyond the intoxication of youth, we achieve the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity – that path is the secret of eroticism and eroticism alone can reveal it.[vii]

Where theology understands the sacred in terms of totality and fulfilment, Bataille associates it, instead, with incompleteness and loss. With everything, in other words, that disturbs the boundaries of self: sexuality, death, non-knowledge. Bataille has no interest in rediscovering some authentic, uncontaminated sense of self. For him, religious experience is a journey into loss, a recognition that the self can never return home or find a proper place. This leap into the abyss should not be seen as an endorsement of nihilism, On the contrary, the sacred, for Bataille, allows the subject to discover an impossible and paradoxical mode of communication uniting with him others, and, ultimately, with the mystery of the cosmos itself:

Communication, through death, with our beyond – […] not with nothingness, still less with a supernatural being, but with an indefinite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is: what can’t be grasped in any way, what we can’t reach without dissolving ourselves, what’s slavishly called God). [viii]

The impossible, then, is neither fullness (‘the supernatural being’) nor absence (‘nothingness’), but rather a liminal state in which absence and presence are combined. Contradicting, flagrantly, the laws of logic, the subject experiencing the impossibility of the sacred is simultaneously, self and not-self, same and different. In this state, he confronts alterity, that which lies beyond the borders of the known and familiar: ‘The sacred is really […] something that is from the first completely other’.[ix]

Although the sacred occurs in and to individual bodies, it is inherently social. In fact, it forms the basis of any society. For, as Bataille reminds us, the sacred is what produces authentic communication. Which is defined, by him, as the attempt to overcome our limits, and to express the anguish of existence to our fellow human beings. According to Bataille’s reading, the sacred, because it dislodges the foundations of the ego, is nothing less than the source of generosity (giving) itself.

The consideration that generosity and not self-interest is at the basis of the social relations is of fundamental importance. Self-interest varies in relation to circumstances. […] It is therefore necessary that in any association of interests a principle, embodied in generosity and stronger than self-interest, is needed for serious communication to take place.[x]

The sacred’s intimate relationship with the social means that it has important ethical and political consequences, too. The ethical dimension of the sacred is bound up with what Bataille terms the ‘the sovereign moment’,[xi] the moment at which the ego renounces its slavish dependence on self-interest and utility and affirms lack and loss instead. This celebration of dispossession and dissolution is ethical, for Bataille, because it is based on generosity and expenditure rather than conservation and accumulation: it encourages the self to give to the Other, and by extension, to discover an alternative form of community and social solidarity.

Unlike bourgeois and communist societies, Bataille’s sacred community is not grounded in Enlightenment notions of reason; and nor is it steeped in nostalgic myths of organic community as fascism is. On the contrary, its source is the experience of impossibility, the recognition that totality and harmony are unobtainable. Instead of rejecting the anguish caused by this knowledge, Bataille encourages us to accept and celebrate it. Paradoxically - and this concerns the political dimension of the sacred - the most effective way of achieving a more just, less violent social order is to affirm the destruction of that order through ritualised acts of dissolution. To this extent, the refusal of violence, the desire to create harmony, increases our capacity for violence, rather than assuaging it. In his analysis of war in volume one of the Accursed Share (1949), Bataille explains why:

If we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion.[xii]

Genet and a/theology

Initially, nothing seems to encourage a reading of Genet’s theatre through Bataille.  In the influential Literature and Evil (1957), for instance, Bataille attacked Genet’s work for its selfish failure to communicate:

I admit that Genet wanted to become Evil. […] No vulgar motive would account for his failure, but, as in a dungeon guarded more closely than real prisons, a ghastly destiny enclosed him within himself, at the depths of his mistrust.[xiii]

Instead of using literature to provoke a sacred encounter between author and reader, Bataille argues that Genet’s writing is limited, bourgeois, a betrayal of sovereignty:

‘Genet’s sanctity’ […] is sovereignty confiscated, the dead sovereignty of him whose solitary desire for sovereignty is the betrayal of sovereignty. [xiv]  

Bataille’s interpretation of Genet’s sacred quest is accurate as it pertains to his early period (the novels and plays written between 1940-1955). In these texts, Genet’s delight in transgression disguises, as Bataille correctly diagnoses, a conservative desire for self-preservation and identity. Problems start to arise with Bataille’s reading when it is applied to Genet’s work after 1955, particularly with regard to the great theatrical cycle of The Balcony, The Blacks (1958) and The Screens (1961). In these theatrical works, Genet abandons his obsession with theological inversion and invests in a form of theatrical communication, which ironically has much in common with Bataille’s view of sacred experience.  

To understand this revolution in Genet’s aesthetic and ethical project, we need to explore a disturbing event he experienced aboard a train in the early 1950s. According to Genet’s account of this incident in  ‘The Studio of Alberto Giacometti’ (1957) and ‘What Remained of a Rembrandt Torn up into Very Even Little Pieces and Chucked into the Crapper’ (1967), his view of the world and concept of self suddenly collapsed when he inadvertently caught the eye of a stranger sitting opposite him. Incredibly, Genet tells us looking at the man disclosed what phenomenal reality conceals: the abyssal identity linking all subjects:

Behind what was visible of this man […] I discovered, and was shocked by the discovery, a kind of identity common to all men.[xv]

Unlike the joy experienced by the religious mystic, Genet’s encounter with the universal provoked, at least initially, an intense bout of depression and abjection. He felt that the world was robbed of meaning and value:

What bothered me the most was that sadness with which I had been overwhelmed Nothing was certain or solid. Suddenly the world was a floating world. For a long time I remained sickened and disgusted by my discovery.[xvi]

In light of Bataille’s definition of the sacred, it is telling that Genet’s anguish is caused by the duplicity of his experience:

There exists and has always existed, but one single man in the world. He is completely in each of us, therefore he is we. Each man is the other and the others. […]. With the exception that one phenomenon, whose name I do not even know, seems to divide this unique man infinitely, apparently fragments him in an accident and in form, and makes each of the fragments unfamiliar to us.[xvii]

In the description here, the subject is simultaneously fused with, and radically estranged from, the other. This forecloses any nostalgia that subject might have for wholeness and totality. Even in continuity, Genet tells us, something always resists closure and oneness. The wound, the metaphor Genet uses to convey this liminal state, is well chosen. As well as suggesting physical and existential douleur, the wound is a tear or rupture that is neither inside nor outside the body. The wound is liminal:

And your wound, where is it?

Where, I wonder, does it reside, where does it hide, this secret wound that every man is quick to take refuge in when his pride is hurt, when he’s wounded? This wound – which then becomes the deep, centre of self – that’s what he’s going to inflate. Everybody knows how to find it, and to identify with it to the degree that they become the wound itself, a kind of secret, painful heart.[xviii]

Genet’s description of his experience aboard the train is strongly reminiscent of Bataille’s view of the sacred. In both cases, transcendence of self does not result in redemption, the experience of wholeness. Rather transcendence obliges the subject to confront the trauma and pain of the impossible. The parallels between the Genet’s vision of transcendence and Bataille’s are further strengthened when we look at the signifiers associated with wound in ‘The Studio of Alberto Giacometti’. Just as Bataille sees the sacred in terms of  ‘sovereignty’ communication’, so Genet identifies it with royalty and majesty, the source of a more obscure and subtle form of communication:

Each human being is revealed to me in whatever is newest, most irreplaceable about him – and it’s always a wound – thanks to the solitude in which this wound locates him, this wound of which he is barely conscious and yet which is the source of his entire being. […] Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more of less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.[xix]

In the same way that sovereignty is, for Bataille, the foundation of poetry, the Genettian wound is the source of creativity and self-expression. Speaking about the performer in the essay ‘Le Funambule’ (1958), Genet states:

It’s into this wound – untreatable because it’s part of the self – and into this solitude that he’s going to leap, for it’s there that he will discover the force, audacity and skill necessary for his art.[xx]

In the concluding lines of ‘The Studio of Alberto Giacometti’, Genet’s view of the sacred draws astonishingly close to Bataille’s on ethical grounds too. For if the wound is, according to Genet, ‘une incommunicabilité profonde’ (‘profound incommunicability’), it is also what drives us to communicate our solitude. Such an action is ethical for Genet, as indeed it is for Bataille, because it compels the subject to relinquish the ego and reach out to the Other:

Giacometti’s art, then, is not a social art that would establish a social link between objects – man and his secretions – but rather an art of superior beggars and bums, so pure that they could be united by a recognition of the solitude of every being and every object. “I am alone”, the objects seems to say, “hence caught within a necessity against which you are powerless. If I am only what I am, I am indestructible. Being what I am, and unconditionally, my solitude knows yours.”[xxi]

The view of the sacred, then, that emerges in Genet’s writing from the mid-1950s onwards not only disputes Bataille’s dismissive reading of his work, it reveals, ironically, a profound similarity between them. For both writers, the sacred is an event that negates and recreates identity and discloses alternative possibilities for individual and collective existence based on the impossible abyss that separates and unites subjects.

Genet’s theory of sacred theatre

Genet’s experience of the wound galvanised his work and resulted in an alternative, God-less view of sacred theatre. Where plays like The Maids (1948), Death Watch (1947), Splendid’s (1947) conform to the conservative neo-classical format favoured by existentialist playwrights such as Sartre, Camus and Anouilh, his theatre after 1955 evinces a new interest in ritual forms and mythical themes.

If they are able to accept the idea – assuming the idea is meaningful that the theatre cannot compete with the extraordinary means which television and cinema have at their disposal, then those who write for the theatre will discover the virtues inherent in the theatre, virtues which, perhaps, derive only from myth.[xxii]

The actor has a central role to play in this theatre of myth. Liberated from his Stanislavskian definition as an impersonator, a vehicle for representing a fictional character, the performer is encouraged, by Genet, to see himself as a secular priest or saint, an initiate able to transmit and communicate profound human mysteries:

This may not be an original thought with me, but let me restate it anyway, that the patron saint of actors is Tiresias, because of his dual nature. […] Like him, the actors are neither this nor that, and they must be aware that they are a presence constantly beset by femininity, or its opposite, but ready to play to the point of abasement that which, be it virility or its opposite, is any case predetermined.[xxiii]

The spectator, too, is expected to participate in theatre’s sacred purpose. In ‘The Strange Word ‘Urb…’’, Genet writes about the audience in a way that recalls Victor Turner’s analysis of rites of passage rituals in Africa in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969). Just as Turner sees the ritual process as an exercise in separation and liminality for initiates, so Genet strives to distance the spectators from their everyday identities, and to place them in contact with borderline situations and experiences. Appropriately, he wants his theatre to have the same solemnity and strangeness as a cemetery at night:

As for the audience, only those who know themselves capable of taking a nocturnal stroll through a cemetery, in order to be confronted with a mystery, will come to the theatre. [xxiv]

As with Turner’s definition of ritual performance, Genet believes that theatre can produce real effects. By distancing the audience from everyday reality, he hopes to change its way of seeing the world. He wants to reveal what society represses:

This procedure, a refusal of a natural sham, must not be carried out haphazardly: its goal, among other things, is to reveal and make heard what generally passes unperceived. Its real goal, of course, is a new joy, a new festivity.[xxv]

The intention behind Genet’s ritualistic theatre, this ‘new festivity’, is to liberate us from historical and theological notions of time:

Among other things, the goal of theatre is to take us outside the limits of what is generally referred to as ‘historical’ time but which is really theological. The moment the theatrical event begins, the time which will elapse no longer belongs to any calibrated calendar. It transcends the Christian era as it does the revolutionary era. […] It destroys the historical conventions necessitated by social life […] not for the sake of just any disorder but neither for the sake of a liberation – the theatrical event being suspended, outside of a historical time, on its own dramatic time – it is for the sake of a vertiginous liberation.[xxvi]

Like Bataille’s notion of the impossible, Genet’s festive theatre is violent and violating. Its aim is to tear us from discontinuity, to dissolve the distance separating spectators from each other. This undoubtedly accounts for one of his favourite themes: the relation he posits between theatre and death:

The spectacle, so limited in time and space, seemingly intended for a handful of spectators, will be so serious that it will be aimed at the dead. […] If you stage The Screens, you must always work with the notion of a unique spectacle in mind, and carry it as far as you can. [xxvii]

As a way of making death closer and more palpable, Genet urges town planners to build theatres and cemeteries at the heart of the city, instead of consigning them to the outskirts and suburbs:

Whether the strange word ‘urbanism’ comes from some Pope Urban or from the Latin root for the word ‘city’, it will probably no longer have anything to do with the dead. The living will dispose of their corpses, surreptitiously or otherwise, the same way one gets rid of some shameful thought. By dispatching them to the crematorium oven, the urbanised world will deprive itself of one important theatrical mainstay, and perhaps even the theatre itself.[xxviii]

For Genet, society’s attempt to surreptitiously deny the trauma that death and dying cause only increases the subject’s anguish. In a discourse reminiscent of Artaud’s theory of cruelty, Genet contends that theatre can soothe metaphysical anxiety by allowing the spectator to experience a form of symbolic death (defined here as the encounter with non-knowledge, the impossible, the wound) in and through the performance event itself. In this way, death, and by extension life, becomes lighter and more joyous:

In today’s cities, the only place […] where a theatre could be built is in the cemetery. The choice will be useful for both cemetery and theatre alike. […] Imagine for a moment what it would be like for the audience to leave after a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, making its way amongst the dead lying in the earth, before returning to the profane world. Neither the conversations nor the dead would be the same as one generally experiences after a performance at some Parisian theatre.

Death would be closer and lighter. [xxix]

As well as Artaud, Genet’s emphasis on theatre as a vehicle for existential transformation has undoubted parallels with the work of contemporary practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. Like them, Genet seeks a form of primal confrontation in which the ‘life-mask’ – to use Grotowski’s phrase – ‘cracks and falls away’.[xxx]  Nevertheless despite similarities, we need to exert caution here. Where Grotowski and Brook seek plenitude and wholeness, Genet is interested in evoking absence and liminality:[xxxi]

But what about the drama? If its origin is some dazzling moment in the author’s experience, it is up to him to seize this lightning and, beginning, with the moment of illumination which reveals the void, to arrange a verbal architecture – that is, grammatical and ceremonial – slyly suggesting that from this void some semblance is snatched which reveals the void. [xxxii]

Genet’s way of producing this troubling state, this void, is to set theatre and ritual in opposition. Theatre eats ritual and ritual feasts on theatre:

It seems to me that any novel, poem, painting or piece of music that does not destroy itself – I mean construct itself as a ‘playful massacre’, cutting off its own head – is an impostor.[xxxiii] 

The concrete outcome of this ‘playful massacre’ is a performance style that is marginal, ambivalent and constantly shifting: a kind of deconstructionist jeu. This deconstruction is particularly effective in The Blacks, a play in which ritual is theatricalized and theatre ritualized to such an extent that playwright, actors and spectators are lost in a dizzying vortex of perpetually changing performance modes. Initially, the Blacks is structured as ‘un clownerie’ or Black and White minstrel show: the Black actors strive to convince the White spectators that what they are watching is a piece of little hearted entertainment, simple fun. At the start of the play, the Archibald, the master of ceremonies, says:

ARCHIBALD  This evening we shall perform for you. But in order that you may remain comfortably settled in your seats in the presence of the drama that is already unfolding here, in order that you be assured that there is no danger of such drama worming its way into your precious lives, we shall even have the decency – a decency learned from you – to make communication impossible. We shall increase the distance that separates us […] for we are actors.[xxxiv]

As the play develops it becomes increasingly clear that this meta-theatrical reference is a survival technique, a piece of camouflage: it allows the Black actors to insult the White spectators, which they do to greatest effect in two mock rituals. In the first, Marie, a White woman, played by Diouf, a Black man, is murdered and raped by Village, her Black lover. In the second, the White court, who pass judgement on Village’s action from a gallery above, are enticed down from their elevated position and symbolically murdered by the Blacks. This produces a delicious, yet threatening, reversal of theatre conventions. The more the Blacks draw attention to the artificiality of the performance, the more their activity starts to appear real and authentic. During these moments, the play takes on the guise of a ritual, a symbolic activity that is intended to produce real results for the participants involved.

However, while this move to ritual certainly occurs, Genet never lets us forget that the event we are watching is still theatre. Towards the end of the play, a Black revolutionary, Ville Saint Nazaire (or Newport News in Bernard Frechtman’s original English translation) enters the stage and tells the actors to bring their performance to an end. In the process, he reminds us that the entire show was conceived as a diversion, a device for concealing the real action: the murder of a Black traitor. As a result of this formal confusion, this ludic collapse, the gap between ritual and theatre is dissolved. We no longer know if the performance is real or unreal. What is certain is that we have been powerfully affected by a drama that takes place on a border, somewhere between being and non-being and absence and presence. We are given a taste, in other words, of the ambiguous nature of the sacred.

Genet’s theory of performance in the trilogy is consonant with, and evolves from, his notion of the sacred. In the Genettian sacred, as in Bataille’s version, the subject is not completely dissolved in the impersonality of the sacred void: there is always something, some subtle layer of consciousness that continues to register the dissolution of identity as it takes place. His theatre is constructed to express and activate this impossibility. In doing so, it transcends – without reconciling in a higher synthesis – difference and sameness, self and other.   

Sacred politics/sacred theatre

From a common sense or orthodox perspective, it seems difficult to comprehend how Genet’s notion of sacred theatre could serve any political purpose. Not only does his vision of drama radically conflict with the utilitarian agenda of political theatre (liberation through aesthetic means), he has persistently rejected the possibility of politicised art on aesthetic grounds.  In ‘Strange Word ‘Urb…’’, theatre and politics are presented as mutually exclusive activities:

It’s possible that the theatrical art will disappear one day. That’s a notion you have to accept. If someday man’s activities were to become revolutionary, day after day, the theatre would have no place in life.[xxxv]    

If Genet were to heed his own advice, the necessity of arguing against this dualistic (and reductive) view of aesthetics, though still important, would be less pressing. While we might want to challenge his conclusions on dialectical grounds, we could simply define him, in orthodox terms of course, as an uncommitted playwright, someone who mistakenly opposes theology to politics, symbols to practice.[xxxvi] The difficulty here is that the content of Genet’s drama necessitates a more rigorous involvement with his argument. In short, it causes suspicion.

In The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens, Genet deals with complex historical and political issues candidly and presciently. The Balcony is an allegorical work suggesting that the success of fascism and failure of socialism between the wars is tied to deeper onto-theological factors; The Blacks focuses on the attempts of newly emancipated nations in Africa to produce an alternative, post-colonial form of identity as decolonisation was occurring in the 1950s and 1960s; and The Screens, perhaps his most prophetic work, analyses the depressing movement from revolt to reaction in the Algerian revolution.

How can we account for this astonishing contradiction between the theory and practice of an artist who was always sensitive to how his work would be received? Since naivety is, obviously, out of the question here, we need to adopt a different hypothesis. A valid interpretation is to argue that Genet is not opposed to politics and history per se; rather he is opposed to how they have been conventionally represented. His target is thus more the history of dramatic representation than history itself. The plausibility of this reading is underlined by his comments in the 1960 edition of The Balcony, a text in which he grapples with an alternative and complex theory of political theatre.[xxxvii]

The preface starts by drawing attention to a dilemma that most committed artists, working within a realist or naturalist tradition, prefer to repress: the relationship between dramatic representation and catharsis:

The imaginary representation of an action or an experience usually relieves us of the obligation of attempting to perform or undergo them ourselves, and in reality.[xxxviii]

To justify his critique of political realism, Genet returns to Aristotle, the founding father of Western theories of drama. In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that tragedy provokes fear and pity for the spectators through the mimetic representation of an action: ‘The imitation is not just of a complete action, but also of events that evoke fear and pity’.[xxxix] According to Aristotle, mimesis manipulates and produces emotions, which, as his celebrated theory of catharsis maintains, results in purification and cleansing:

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete, and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.[xl]

Using Aristotle’s theory of drama as his basis, Genet argues, like Brecht and Boal, that political dramas investing in mimesis for utilitarian ends (naturalism, socialist realism, documentary drama) are seriously flawed.[xli] Instead of producing social change and transformation, their commitment to realism maintains the status quo, because, in keeping with Aristotle’s aesthetics, the theatrical representation of an action is intimately related to the catharsis of anti-social emotions, the very stuff of revolutionary desire.

Genet’s rejection of realism is particularly applicable to political and pedagogical plays that ‘offer’ ideological solutions to complex social problems: 

When the problem of a certain disorder – or evil – has been solved on stage, this shows that it has in fact been abolished, since, according to the dramatic conventions of our time, a theatrical representation can only be the representation of a fact. [xlii]

Here, he argues that because mimesis assumes a reality existing independently of and prior to representation  – the object is literally re-presented – it conflicts with the intentions of the politically radical learning play, which, if taken at its word, is committed to creating a nascent revolutionary consciousness for a pre-revolutionary society. This is contradictory in Genet’s opinion. For if the learning play purports to represent dramatic solutions to real problems, then does not this assume, according to the logic of re-presentation, that these problems have already been solved? (‘Theatrical representation can only be the representation of a fact’). Such conservative logic is, of course, counter-productive. Genet’s conclusion is simple but brutal: realism is politically redundant and thus must be avoided:  

We can then turn our minds to something else, and allow our hearts to swell with pride, seeing that we took the side of the hero who aimed – successfully – at finding the solution.[xliii]

Genet’s rejection of realism does not lead him to endorse a political theatre based on Brechtian principles either. For Genet, Brecht’s intimate relationship with Marx’s meta-discourse of liberation betrays a theological dependence, which is neither revolutionary nor subversive, but, on the contrary, a mere displacement of conventional bourgeois aspirations and desires. In an important interview with Hubert Fichte in 1975, Genet compares the ‘alienated’ attitude of the Brechtian cigar-smoking spectator with the behaviour of the Rothschild family discussing art after dinner:

Personally, I don’t know the Rothschild family, but I imagine that you would speak of art at the Rothschild mansion while smoking a cigarette.[xliv]

Brechtian alienation is too rationalistic for Genet. Instead of wrenching us from the safe haven of the ego and disclosing the mysteries of the sacred, it reinforces our sense of self by underlining the capacity of consciousness to master the world. In Genet’s view, this does little to disturb the traditional Judæo-Christian world-view. Otherness is still reduced to the same. Like Roger, the revolutionary commander who identifies with his rival, the fascistic, Chief of Police towards the end of The Balcony, Genet believes that Brecht remains part of the world he professes to despise.

If he rejects both realism and critical formalism, what type of political theatre does Genet endorse? In the preface, he anticipates the politicisation of Artaud that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s by arguing that the social impact of theatre is most keenly felt when rational solutions are avoided and evil (extreme negativity) is allowed to explode on stage: 

[No] problem that has been exposed ought to be solved in the imagination, especially when the dramatist has made every effort to show the concrete reality of a social order. On the contrary, the evil shown on stage should explode, should show us naked, and leave us distraught, if possible, and having no recourse other than ourselves. […] The work must be an active explosion, an act to which the public reacts – as it wishes, as it can. If the ‘good’ is to appear in a work of art it does so through the divine aid of the powers of song, whose strength alone is enough to magnify the evil that has been exposed.[xlv]

To be effective politically, Genet argues that theatre needs to reject rational and conciliatory messages and provoke disturbing experiences and emotions that resist representation and language. In other words, it ought to target the sacred.

If Genet heralds the political theatre of avant-garde practitioners from the 1960s to the present, he also anticipates the major themes of left-wing postmodern politics. From this perspective, politics is not just about the art of statesmanship and/or ideological identification, it has a more fundamental, existential meaning, inseparable from the subject’s capacity for accepting difference and the non-identical. As contemporary theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy stress, this is ultimately related to the way we respond to lack and loss, the moment when we realise that organic notions of community rooted in identity and self-presence are metaphysical fictions. Nancy is aware of the dangers involved in such communities:

Fascism was the grotesque or abject resurgence of an obsession with communion; it crystallised the motif of its supposed loss and the nostalgia for its images of fusion. [xlvi]

For Nancy et al, politics are progressive when they avoid prescribing positive or transcendent notions of community and civilisation and leave us free to negotiate the anxiety created by foreignness, transformation and change. In this context, dealing with the negative, confronting the void, is ethical: it reminds us that the nostalgic dream of oneness is impossible to achieve. Julia Kristeva makes a similar claim in Strangers to Ourselves when she re-interprets Freud’s notion of the uncanny from a political perspective:

Delicately, analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us. […] Such a Freudian distraction or discretion concerning the ‘problem of foreigners’ […] might be interpreted as an invitation (a utopic or very modern one?) not to reify the foreigner, not to petrify him as such, not to petrify us as such. […] The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics.[xlvii] 

According to this deconstructionist viewpoint, politics are negative when they insist on filling absence and gaps with representations and strive to actualise utopia by investing in theological notions of language, race, territory. Here, as we know only too well from contemporary history, otherness is considered as a threat, which must be destroyed before it destroys you (‘the pre-emptive strike’). The neo-Lacanian philospher, Slavoj Žižek underlines the political dangers of metaphysical thinking in his critique of fascism’s dream of/for totality:

The dream is that since the excess was introduced from the outside, i.e., is the work of an alien intruder, its elimination would enable us to obtain again a stable social organisation whose parts form a harmonious corporate body.[xlviii]

Interpreted in this way, Genet’s desire to invoke the sacred – what we could term, in reference to the preface of 1960 edition of The Balcony, ‘the explosion of evil’ – is, undoubtedly, politically progressive. By placing us on a/theological borderline, he uses theatre to puncture mythologies and ideologies of sameness and identity (what Žižek calls fascism’s ‘harmonious corporate body’). What we are left with instead is the disgusting and anguished awareness of the remainder – the paradoxical sign of incompleteness, radical otherness and difference.  For Genet, this remainder is produced in performance when theatre deconstructs its own representational foundations and places us in the heart of absence, ‘ the one we sometimes find near the confines of death’.[xlix]

Genet’s deconstructionist attack on theatricality, and by extension the Symbolic order outside the theatre, has a distinctly utopian quality. Particularly when read in tandem with the Giacometti essay written during the same period. His suspension of metaphysical, or theological, notions of identity is intended to produce an alternative notion of community, which, like Bataille’s sacred community, is founded on difference rather than sameness. For Genet – as indeed for Bataille – this awareness of the strangeness of the other, his impossible closeness and distance, constitutes a new ethical undertaking:

The visible world is what it is, and our action upon it cannot make it radically different. Hence our nostalgic dreams of a universe in which man, instead of acting so furiously upon visible appearance, would attempt to rid himself of it – not only to refuse any action upon it, but to strip himself bare enough to discover that secret site within ourselves that would capacitate an entirely different human adventure. More specifically, an altogether different moral enterprise.[l]

If we think, as Nancy et al do, that the political is ethical and vice versa, then politics, for Genet, is more than an utilitarian balance sheet of ends and means: it is about living ethically, learning to respect otherness and coping with absences and gaps. According to this definition, politics is radically opposed to totalitarian ideologies and theological meta-narratives purporting to fill the abyss and offering existential plenitude. Like theatre, that ‘semblance which reveals the void’, politics is about learning to cope with absence and lack, that is, the sacred.  

Sacred politics in the trilogy

In The Blacks, The Balcony and The Screens, Genet manipulates dramaturgical practice in quite specific ways in order to deconstruct metaphysical identity, and thus produce sacred experience. His reason for producing such experience, as Beckett also makes clear, is that any other basis for behaviour collapses action into ideology’s obsession with endless Wiederholung. It is, quite precisely, a question of life or death.

Nowadays it is commonplace for aspirants to power to employ an image consultant. 40 years ago Genet perceived the distinction between image and function, and the inherent escalation of self-regard. If the clients of Irma’s eponymous brothel, le Grand Balcon, in The Balcony literally erect their image, the ‘nomenclature’ of the world outside (or is it ‘really’ ‘outside’?) is also composed of those who spend time polishing theirs: their activity, in Genet's vision, is no less masturbatory and perhaps more deadly. For what they seek is the ultimate narcissistic stasis of an ‘unimpeachable’ image, for which they are prepared to do anything and which clearly bears no relation to their acts.

Whores and actors, on the other hand, although they may (like the pimp, Arthur in The Balcony) be fatally seduced by their own images too, acknowledge their illusory and equivocal status. They play, and they know that they play: and their playing mirrors the truth that we are only things which play, roles which flicker across the void which underlies and undermines our pretensions. The truth in The Balcony, as in The Blacks and The Screens, is not in the images constructed inside or outside the brothel; it is in the revelation of their falsity, of the void at the heart of the Symbolic order. As the theatricality of all our props is revealed, that sinking feeling is the guarantee of the sacred experience of theatre.

The ideological universe, on the other hand, which the Trois Figures of Bishop, Judge and General strive to symbolise, is what stakes out the territory of the known: it is a hedge of thorns. Here, it proclaims, are the signs which mark the outer limit of the world. It is a theatre of high status and static highs, where the phallic goal is ‘Ritual stiffness! Final immobility’.[li] The most you can hope for is to become one of those signs: to erect your image and leave it as a beacon for posterity, so that, like the Chief of Police, the subject can exclaim ‘I’ve arrived! My image! I belong to the nomenclature. I’ve got my simulacrum’.[lii] This theologically-based value system is the epitome of ‘all that is dear to us’ and the form of its crystallisation is the same throughout Genet’s trilogy: the embalmed notation of a fixed order in which Queen, Judge, Bishop, General, Blacks and Whites, and Coloniser and Colonised play out their allotted roles. This repetition of an eternal substance is achieved by rites of origins and presence which must be performed exactly, faithfully, without hurry or disturbance in a hermetically sealed space-time. In The Balcony, Arthur fears that he won’t be able to cope with the atmosphere outside the brothel; in The Blacks, the Blacks are anxious in face of life without Whites; and in The Screens the revolutionaries are terrified by ‘a little heap of rubbish’.[liii] The remainder, in this case the physical weight of a gun, bullets, the touch of the air, the feel of mud and rain, a little heap of shit, is a potent threat to the purity of the Symbolic order used to veil absence and negativity and thus represent ideology’s eternal truth.

For Genet, however, the sacred as transformational impetus is dependent on the transgression of Symbolic ‘propriety’: it is not the ideal, nor is it physical death, but it is the real as a/theological liminality: tearing apart, breaking down, bewilderment, the encounter with otherness within the self.[liv] Here the sacred is spelt scared, the explosions and gunfire in The Balcony, like the cockerel’s crow in The Blacks, signal not an inversion (the familiar turned upside-down) but a dissolution and an ungraspable something else, which lacerates, disfigures, decomposes, cuts into the roles we play and shreds pretensions to permanence. Here I am not that which endures, I am a vulnerability which changes and decays, committed to what Bataille calls sovereignty.

Conversely, the onto-theological ‘I’ that can be thought is a list of attributes and roles. But if these attributes are suddenly sucked empty, I experience myself not as a fullness, a presence; but as an emptiness, an absence. ‘I’, however, am still the experiencer. So I am something else, I am other. Corresponding to Genet’s notion of the wounded self, If I am both myself and other, I am an ambiguity, a fuite, a continual making and unmaking. Actors are more accustomed to this situation, in Genet’s view: they are always asked to be neither their everyday roles nor, entirely, the character they are embodying: they are always somewhere in between - and Genet, in his writing about performance, makes it clear that he wishes them to live this alterity and alternation to the full: ‘ The thing is to discover a narrative tone that is always equivocal, always shifting’.[lv] The requirement to do so is of course embedded in the role-within-role and character-within-character frameworks which he sets up: virtually no character in his work is not at the same time adopting a role (revolutionaries and reactionaries in The Balcony, Blacks and Whites in The Blacks, colonizer and colonized in The Screens); but additionally their ‘basic’ identity is anonymous or problematic, or they are acting a character who is acting a further role (actor acts Roger the revolutionary leader acting the Chief of Police; actor acts Village acting stereotypical white expectation of black lover, which is itself a role intended to conceal a further role as agent of the revolution). So identification in Genet’s late theatre is always double, triple, undermined by extreme uncertainty. The effect on the audience is intended to be vertiginous, pulling them towards experiencing this void at the centre of their own consciousness as it fails to locate any certainties; it is equally demanding for actors, who are asked continually to play someone who is faking and are never in possession of a set of recognisable criteria in which to ground themselves. They are thus forced to undergo a kind of continuous Stanislavskian nightmare, since there can be no recourse to ‘authentic’ experiences at all. Instead, they are asked to draw on a continually renewed immersion in the provisional, silent space beyond ‘truth’.

In Genet’s dramas, ideology, like theology, repeats; the sacred fragments. Both the attempt to cling on to the status quo (acted out in the brothel, staged as White Court judging Black crimes, present in the colonizer’s attempt to harness the image of cultural superiority) and the proposal to invert it in an ‘offstage’ insurrection and/or anti-colonial revolution, are equally real and unreal, and equally wedded to the profane. They simply replay the same Order of dominator and dominated, coloniser and colonised, bourreau and victime. This much we can grasp, though we may have to take a step beyond the more usual reality/illusion paradigms in which theatre deals to do so. What is at issue is not whether one (apparently aesthetic) order is preferable or superior to another (apparently political) order. Much more pertinently, both are orders – Symbolic orders – firmly rooted in the domain of the thinkable (what Robbe-Grillet, frequently illuminating as a parallel to Genet, calls ‘the last guardians of order’).[lvi]

Theatre, for Genet, moves us beyond orders and into the terror of unknowing and the realm of disordering. Where what is left, is neither this nor that. Where what we can hold in mind (and body) at this moment is precisely the ebbing away of what we know and who we are. In The Screens, the Cadi defines this state as a form of sleepwalking, a condition in which we are neither conscious nor unconscious, but in-between and on the way to becoming something new: ‘I need to sleep, I need to wander… I’m changing into something else’.[lvii]

Ritual either sustains (onto-theologies or ideologies) or unleashes (the sacred). Genet theatricalizes the former in order to expose and explode it; inflated to the extremes of ‘parade’ by cothurni, costume and rhetoric, it suddenly crumples and implodes into the void which always threatens: the void at the centre where being should be. In order to reveal this nothingness, theatre is theatricalized and used against itself.

In Catholic practice the Mass is ‘elevated’ in order to function as visible and sustaining ritual. But if it is elevated too far, it starts to comment on its own artificiality: in Gombrowicz’s Pornografia (1960), Ferdinand ‘dispatches’ it precisely by taking it ultra-seriously, and Witold has a sudden vision of it disappearing into the stratosphere, taking its congregation along with it and leaving them all ‘suspended in the cosmos...like monkeys grimacing into space’.[lviii] Dravidian or Yoruba rites may, as ideal repetition, confirm social hierarchy and belief systems; they also have the visceral power to engage the unformulated, to leave the participant in no-man’s land, by suddenly presenting him/her with an unrecognisable but inescapable reality: a more-than-human force incarnate, a shift into a different space-time. In Genet, ritual as social performance disintegrates to provide the spectator with an experience of the a/theological sacred, which begins in the place of non-identity. All fictions of the self dissolve, since identity itself is presented as role, as fiction; what is left is not differentiated ‘identity’, but the identity of sacred indifference. Here performance (the encounter with what is not as yet known, which comes into being as it is performed) passes through and reveals the void at the centre of narcissistic identity and of the socio-political structures built upon it. This apparently mystical revelation is however both achieved by physical (actorly) means and imbued with material (political) consequence.

In Genet’s theatre, the stitching is undone, the gap left open. What we are presented with is not a character who conforms to a realistic subject; but a theatricalized character, a false identity. In The Balcony, for instance, any talk about the dramatic reality of the Bishop is superfluous. The most that can be said is that a character whose identity is never revealed is playing the role of a Bishop. Since we, the spectators, have nothing positive to identify with, the reality of the character remains a mystery, an ambiguous sign, ushering in a massive sensation of anxiety and uncanniness for the audience. This liminal ambivalence is exploited to greatest effect in The Blacks. In this vertiginous play, Genet confuses denotation (what is there) with connotation (what is being represented) to disturb the standard, transparent mode of theatrical communication. We are unable, even as we leave the auditorium, to tell if the Black actors are really acting or using the cover of theatre as an alibi to express real hatred for us, the White audience.

The aura of doubt and uncertainty frames sound effects too: just as some of the bells which punctuate scenes in the The Balcony are explicitly ‘fake’ (operated by Irma herself or rigged up as part of the scenario), so we may wonder about the status of the bursts of machine-gun fire or the explosions. The Envoy laconically and confusingly attributes the second explosion to the Royal Palace, after having already done so for the first: he explains that the essence of such a building is to go on being blown up. This ironic witticism hardly helps to sort out any ‘facts’, which exasperates the Chief of Police to the point of apoplexy. In short, it is increasingly difficult for anyone on or off stage to orientate themselves according to expected channels of information. A similar effect is produced in The Blacks, when, towards the end of the play, an off-stage detonation is heard, which may or may not be the ‘execution’ of a Black traitor, whose trial the play is constructed to conceal.

The aim of this dramatic deconstruction is to produce a state of ontological anxiety, allowing the spectator to experience the liminality of sacred experience. At the end of The Balcony, for instance, the actress playing Irma steps out of character (or does she?) and reminds the audience that: ‘You must go home now, – and you can be quite sure that nothing there will be any more real than it is now.’[lix] ‘Home’ here is both the comfort of familiar domesticity and the desire for ontological security.

Through this collapse of the borders separating theatre from reality, Genet attempts to use performance to found a different mode of action upon a different sense of the self. He suggests an initial ‘turn’ of focus or mental energy away from the realm of external action towards an internal situation of ‘nakedness’. This nakedness implies a recognition of the insubstantiality of visible appearance: the known self is ‘undone’, ‘stripped naked’. The traditional active, egoic western subject is suspended in favour of a hollowness, an unknowability, whose absence (of the previously known configuration of self and world) is a dynamic nexus for potential political and ethical reorientation.

Conclusion

Reading Genet’s theatre through Bataille’s notion of the sacred radically alters the conventional approach to Genet’s drama. Almost unanimously, critics working within this field have tended to see his search for the sacred as something intensely apolitical and asocial. What we have hoped to show, by contrast, is that, the political significance of Genet’s theatre does not lie in the solutions it offers or the representations it gives; it is found in how it suspends ideas of totality and presence. Appropriately, this celebration of impossibility and incompleteness leads to the following paradoxical conclusion: namely, that the most politically committed theatre is the one which is the most radically disengaged, that is, the most sacred.