Genet: In the Language of the Enemy

194 Pages·1997·18.935 MB·

by  Scott Durham (editor)

NUMBER 91
Ya~
Frenc
Genet: In the
• Language
Stu
leS
of the Enemy
1 Editor's Preface: In the Language of the
SCOTT DURHAM
Enemy
7 Schoolteachers, Maids, and Other
KRISTIN ROSS
Paranoid Histories
28 Double Take: Acting and Writing in
SAMUEL WEBER
Genet's "L'etrange mot d' ... "
49 From Image to Event: Reading Genet
TOM CONLEY
through Deleuze
64 Prison Time
MICHAEL HARDT
80 Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs: Fantasy
MICHAEL LUCEY
and Sexual Identity
103 Genet's Open Enemies: Sartre and Derrida
ROBERT HARVEY
117 Ou ting Jean Genet
TAMES CREECH
141 The Politics of Enmity
PATRICE BOUGON
159 The Deaths of Jean Genet
SCOTT DURHAM
Yale French Studies
Scott Durham, Special editor for this issue
Alyson Waters, Managing editor
Editorial board: Denis Hollier (Chair), Ora Avni, Jean
Vincent Blanchard, Peter Brooks, Christine Cano,
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Copyright © 1997 by Yale University
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Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Trump Medieval
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ISSN 044-0078
ISBN for this issue 0-300-07175-2
SCOTT DURHAM
Editor's Preface:
I
In the Language of the Enetny
Upon receiving a presidential pardon in 1948, Genet makes his en
trance into literary history in what will become his most familiar role:
that of an officially sanctioned representative of marginality within
French literature. In their letter to the president of France, Sartre and
Cocteau do not attempt to excuse Genet's criminal past, nor do they
play down the scandal of a work whose "marginality ... prevents its
open distribution." On the contrary, they situate Genet's marginality
1
and criminality within a tradition of exemplary poet-criminals. "The
example of Villon and of Verlaine convinces us to ask you for your aid
for this very great poet" (White, 335). Yet if Genet's legitimacy as a
literary figure depends on his descent from this line of legendary poetes
maudits, his new career as a writer is cited by Sartre and Cocteau as
proof that he has left his criminality behind him. "All of Genet's
work, they write, "tears him from a past of glaring misdeeds .... We
JJ
beg you ... to save a man whose whole life will now be devoted only to
work" (White, 335). This letter already gives us the terms in which
Genet's work will most commonly be read from this point on. On the
one hand, his criminal case history will be invoked as the emblem of
t1;le authenticity of his work and the marginal experience that it repre
sents. On the other, literature will appear not only as what recuperates
that experience as an object of aesthetic value, but also as what re
deems the criminal himself, transforming him into a productive citi
zen of the republic of letters.
1. Cited in Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1993),
335. The original text of this letter may be found in Albert Dichy and Albert Fouche, rean
Genet. Essai de chronologie 1910-1944 (Paris: Bibliotheque de litterature franc;aise
contemporaine de l'Universite de Paris VII, 1988), 278.
YFS 91, Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, ed. Durham, © 1997 by Yale University.
1
2 Yale French Studies
Genet himself, however, speaks of his relation to French literature
and the language of official culture in more ambivalent terms. "What
I had to say to the enemy," Genet acknowledges, "had to be said in
his language .... I had to address myself, in his own language, to
the torturer."2 But literature for Genet will nonetheless not be the
domain where the deviant is reconciled with his antagonists through a
common language. Far from serving as a medium of communication,
literature will appear in Genet's works as the site of a series of ambig
uous encounters in which complicity and antagonism, "tradition and
treason," are "bound together" in their mutual distortion: "a war of
words, brotherly enemies, each tearing itself away from the other or
else falling in love with the other."3 From Genet's perspective, it will
thus be less a matter of creating a literature of theft than of perpetrat
ing a theft of literature; less a matter of representing a marginal subjec
tivity in the language of official culture than of making a subaltern or
perverse use of that language itself. "I couldn't change the world alone,
I could only pervert it: that is what I attempted by a corruption of
language, that is to say from within this French language that appears
so noble."4
Genet invites us to read his works as equivocal sites of this sort,
sites that do not so much attempt to overturn the monuments and
forms of the dominant culture as to corrupt them, putting them in
promiscuous contact with languages and practices that give expression
to other desires and antipathies, and that thereby draw from them
unintended effects. In Genet's novels and theater, all discourses, im
ages, and institutional spaces are placed in proximity and made to pass
into one another in "an orgy of words which mate, innocently or not";
words and images are made to straddle and devour one another "in an
infinity of tender and brutal mutations ("The Strange Word 'Urb' ... ,"
73). Thus, in Le balcon, the official orations of a general or a bishop are
allowed to resonate only once they have passed through the utterances
of a deviant or the fabulations of a prostitute. In Notre-Dame-des-
2. "Entretien avec Bertrand Poirot-Delpech," in Jean Genet, L'ennemi declare.
Textes et entretiens, in CEuvres completes, vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), ed. Dichy, 229;
my translation.
3. Genet, "The Strange Word Urb ... ," in Reflections on the Theatre and Other
Writings, trans. Richard Seaver (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 72; translation mod
ified; "L'etrange mot d' ... , "in CEuvres completes, vol. 4 (1968),17.
4. Genet, "Entretien avec Michele Manceaux," in L'ennemi declare, 56; my transla
tion.
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SCOTT DURHAM
Pleurs, a Proustian narrator unexpectedly appears within a prison cell,
but the fictive worlds generated by his narratives are placed in an
uncertain relation to the desires and "rituals thaYlink the scene of
,
,
writing to the eroticized body of the'prison. In Pompes funebres, the
heroic narratives surrounding France's Occupation and Liberation are
traversed by desires and images that call into question the collective
and individual identities-German and Frenchman, collaborator and
partisan, enemy and lover-that those narratives presuppose. In Les
paravents and Les negres, not only are the figures of European nation
hood and empire mimicked and refunctioned by a subaltern collective,
but the public is confronted with the movements of antagonism and
complicity that constitute its own uncertain relation to the theatrical
ritual itself.
In this light, we have been led to describe Genet's literary practice
less in biographical than in discursive and pragmatic terms. The orga
nizing fiction of Genet's work is to be found, not in a personal history
of deviation and transgression, but in the presupposition that is the
point of departure for all his writing: that literary language exists in
immanent relation to a discursive, libidinal, or historical outside that
can be made to pass into its interior, corrupting it even in its purest
forms and most elevated purposes. But what precisely is the nature of
this" corruption"? How is the relation of literature to its various" out
sides" figured within Genet's texts, with what effects and to what end?
What are the relations of dependence, complicity, or contestation that
link Genet's various writings to the" enemy" against whom they claim
to intervene? Finally, what place does Genet's work occupy within
official culture, and to what degree does it oblige us to rethink the
hierarchies, divisions, and functions governing the production, circu
lation, and reception of that culture?
The essays in this volume address these questions from a variety of
perspectives. A number of contributors take on the biographical and
ethical issues that have always figured prominently in the reception of
Genet's work, but which (in the wake of queer theory and Foucauldian
institutional analysis) are today likely to be posed in rather different
terms. Genet's status as "case history" has often been presupposed by
readers who interpret his works biographically, in terms of a criminal
or homosexual psychology that is supposed to ground their ultimate
truth. But what is the precise nature of the relation linking Genet's
wri tings to his existence as a prisoner or his desires as a gay man? To
4 Yale French Studies
what degree do Genet's prison novels stand in resistance to, or dialogue
or complicity with the various discourses and practices (whether popu
lar or institutional) concerning his existence as a criminal? To what
extent do Genet's erotic and fantasmatic narratives reinforce or call
,
.... .
into question the reigning interpretations of the" truth" of homosex-
ual desire or identity? Finally, to what extent can Genet's auto
biographical writings be said to intervene in the discursive field that is
their point of departure in order to confront their public with the
possibility of desiring and living otherwise, of inventing new forms of
s exu ali ty and sociality?
This leads to another set of questions that concern the relation of
Genet's singular voice and sensibility to the collective experiences of
the various publics to which (but also against which) his writings are
addressed. Many of Genet's works are written in explicit response to a
series of historical or political events. There is Pompes funebres, with
its ambiguous relation to fascism and the French Resistance. Later
comes the staging of Les paravents, which, by engaging the collective
passions and antagonisms ,aroused by the process of decolonization,
gives rise to demonstrations and riots both outside and inside the
theater. Finally, there is Genet's last work, Un captif amoureux, which
(rather disingenuously) claims to be a simple piece of journalism deal
ing with Genet's own relations to the Palestinian and African-Ameri
can revolutionary movements. But the formal complexity of these
works, along with their mingling of political and historical discourse
with fantasmatic and erotic elements, have led some critics to ques
tion the extent to which they are engaged with the realities of histori
cal and collective life, at least in any conventional sense. When consid
ered on a purely formal level, Genet's writings derive their most
striking effects from the juxtaposition of seemingly irreconcilable
genres and languages (his exploration of the relation of film to the
novel in Pompes funebres, and of theater to the mass media in Le
balcon are only two of the most prominent examples). But, as we shall
see, Genet also sometimes makes use of these juxtapositions to reflect
both on the different ideological and aesthetic effects produced by
these various forms, and on the shifting institutional and social func
tion of his own work, as the novel and the theater are increasingly
overshadowed by an emerging society of the spectacle. What, then, do
Genet's texts suggest about the possibilities and limits of imagining or
representing our individual desires and personal histories in collective
5
SCOTT DURHAM
terms? Through what narrative forms and rhetorical strategies do they
figure or intervene in their various historical conjunctures, and with
what political or aesthetic effects? Finally, to what extent do they
oblige us to rethink our notion of literary engagement?
This brings us to a last set of questions, which concerns the relation
of Genet's works to the act of interpretation itself. As I have said, Genet
imagines the work of art as an erotic or agonistic site, where we mingle
and vie with one another in the domain of language. But to what extent
can lovers or enemies be said to encounter one another within lan
guage? Don't our most essential encounters take place (as Genet sug
gests in the opening pages of Un capti! amoureux) between contending
and noncommunicating languages, in an ambiguous space where each
would appropriate, distort, or betray the language of the other? Isn't the
real drama of desire and enmity played out in this "blank space be
tween the words"s where each, hastening to interpret the absences and
silences that punctuate the other's discourse, dreams of speaking from
the other's place?
These questions, as the essays in this volume show, are posed in
various forms throughout Genet's work; but they also underscore the
trap that Genet has laid for us, as his readers and interpreters. For the
same problems posed by the relation of lover to beloved, of prisoner to
guard, of occupier to occupied, are also posed by Genet's ambivalent
relation to his public. To what extent is it possible or desirable for us to
speak on behalf of Genet's writing, to offer it a place of honor within a
canonical (or perhaps a counter-cultural) pantheon? Are we to legiti
mize his works by discovering in them the rehearsal of this or that
psychological, philosophical, or social "theme"? Are we to celebrate
them in purely formal terms, for the brilliance of their prose style or
the originality of their theatrical technique? Are we to canonize"
/I
Genet in another way, by making him the hero of a gay or subaltern
hCJ.giography? Or does the power of attraction that Genet's work con-
-.....--.., • ...,~ '-~I
tinues to exert upon us derive, on the contrary, from its irreducible
heterogeneity and extraterritoriality, from its continual betrayal of our
desires to domesticate or contain it within the limits of any given
generic, discursive, or institutional space? It is perhaps this paradox
that constitutes the permanent scandal of Genet's work, a scandal
5. Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Hanover and London: Wesleyan
University Press, 1989), 3.
6 Yale French Studies
with which (as Cocteau himself acknowledged) no lover or enemy of
Genet could ever completely come to terms: "The Genet bomb. The
book is here, in the apartment, extraordinary, obscure, unpublishable,
inevitable. One doesn't know by which angle to approach it. It is. It
will be. Will it lorce the world to become as it's portrayed in its
pages?"6
6. Jean Cocteau, cited in White, 197.
KRISTIN ROSS
Schoolteachers, Mqids, and Other
Paranoid Histories'
1. With effort, the small woman manages to turn the large metal
crank that controls the flood slue, unleashing a torrent of water to
gush down the stream below her. She is wearing a high-necked formal
dress, fingerless fishnet gloves, and shiny high-heeled shoes that
make her lose her footing from time to time on the rough terrain. Later
we will learn that she is the village schoolteacher, and that the flood
she has unleashed is designed to drown the livestock belonging to the
villagers below while they are attending a funeral. We will also see
Mademoiselle-for this is what she is called, the only name the film
gives her-donning again and again before the mirror, with ritualized
precision, the same dress, patent leather shoes, and net gloves in a
ceremony of her own design. But for now, as the film opens, the
woman's appearance in the still country landscape, her hair elab
orately swept up, her stiletto heels sinking into the mud as she walks,
is merely incongruous, out of place. Why is she
there~
Mademoiselle, Genet's first significant encounter with cinema, was
directed by Tony Richardson in a Franco-British coproduction and re
leased in 1966. Genet provided the screenplay. The film starred
o~iginal
Jeanne Moreau as a pyromaniacal provincial schoolteacher who perpe
trates a series of catastrophes on the village where she lives and works:
fires, floods, poisonings. The assaults are blamed by the peasants on a
handy scapegoat, an itinerant Italian woodcutter called Manou, who is
the focus of a great deal of sexual attention from the village women
(including Mademoiselle, who will consummate her passion in an
extended night of love with the woodcutter), and sexual rivalry on the
YFS 91, Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, ed. Durham, © 1997 by Yale University.
7