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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
It is as easy to dismiss (too much) with “parenthetical insults” as with intellectual assaults. Both tactics smack of arrogance. The end result, when the veil is rent, is usually rhetorical catastrophe. Nevertheless, can we afford not to dismiss Genet?
Whether rhetorical or not, all theatre is catastrophic (katastrophe, to overturn); bad theatre is rhetorically so to boot. This is certainly the case in the theatre of language and logic of which we have had too much and against which only the genius of the poet can prevail. However, should the theatre of linguistics continue to prevail, we will be forced to rewrite our poetics again, calling production and performance accidental to the essence of the play.
“Here I am, all present and complete in this instant of ever-lasting time … “ declares Gide in one of his few attempts at dramatic composition—intending, thereby, to assault the universe anew, firmly holding himself precludedly victorious.
1 George Watson's appropriate characterization of T. S. Eliot's critical stature in The Literary Critics.
2 The poetics of drama we have had so far—from Aristotle through Nicolai Hartmann, Aesthetics (Ästhetik), Friedrich Kainz, Aesthetics The Science (Vorlesungen über Ästhetik), Volker Klotz, Closed and Open Form in the Drama (Geschlossene und offene Form im Drama), Robert Petsch, Nature and Form of Drama (Wesen und Formen des Dramas), Arthur Pfeiffer, Origin and Structure of Drama: Studies Towards a Phenomenology of Poetry and Morphology of Drama (Ursprung und Gestalt des Dramas: Studien su einer Phänomenologie der Dichtkunst und Morphologie des Dramas), Emil Steiger, Fundamental Concepts of Poetics (Grundbegriffe der Poetik), Peter Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama (Theorie des modernen Dramas), to speak only of the most extensive works in the field of recent mintage—are caught up with its literary or verbal aspects which, granted, have to be accounted for, but not at the price of confusion with aesthetics of theatre. We well know that a performance is to be judged by different or, at least, some additional set of criteria. But when we speak of the ontological aspect of the literary work of art, here the play, we must be careful to avoid bringing in aesthetics. The most astute work we have that operates with these distinctions is still Roman Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art (Das Literarische Kunstwerk). Ingarden allows the psychologistic error to slip back in when he speaks of the utterance of the written work as an essential condition of the written play. Allowing confusion of categories, we, perhaps, have to accept Artaud's The Theatre and its Double as the only extensive work which has achieved the impossible—an aesthetics of drama. The price, of course, is drama reduced to spectacle, i.e.dominance of the theatre over drama, the written play. In the case of Genet's drama, however, we come close to being able to speak of an aesthetics of drama when we look at his plays as a physical action that is carried out on the stage having as its objective and intention the portrayal of an emotion and a state of being through bodies in motion with the spoken word as an extension in sound. The logical sequence and coherence of his speech obstructs this portrayal, though less for the actor than the audience which is accustomed to making “sense” out of verbiage. The drama that is asked for in the argument for an “aesthetics” of drama is one that will serve the physicalist theatre in which the only words are those which are used for the sound and music of the verbal extension. The logic of language and its grammar, which is the foundation of all poetics, of course, would be eliminated from such aesthetics.
3 André Gide, Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus, trans. John Russell.
4 For which indictment we do not need such ostensible remarks as Eliot's admission to Pound for support: “But IF you can keep the bloody audience's attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they ain't looking, and it's what you can do behind the audience's back so to speak that makes your play IMMORTAL for a while.” Townsman (July, 1938), n.p. Both Gide and Genet invite the questioning of their etiquette, though the latter is more pious and penitential because of his openhandedness. There is little that is oblique in Genet. The Lafcadian gentility of Gide, and abrasive immorality, compares with the “do I dare” morality of Eliot, a purple religiosity festooned with trinkets of tradition, while Genet's spitoon arrogance, a dire necessity for him, seems to show a penitence through resignation. There is little need to question the etiquette of Genet's works. He slanders to confess, whereas the other two confess to slander.
5 Max Frisch, Don Juan.
6 Ibid.
7 Jean-Paul Sartre's monumental work on Genet, Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr should be read with a knowledge of Sartre's mind and manner of approach. The difficulties of ascertaining lines of consistency in Sartre's thought are clearly evident in Eugene F. Kaelin's recent assessment, An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Sartre's study of Genet is a deceptive book: deceptive, in that it shuttles the reader between deterministic judgments and his own operations in “Cartesian freedom,” viz. “autonomous thinking which discovers by its own power intelligible relationships among existing essences“—“Cartesian Freedom,” Literary and Philosophical Essays. Using “facts” of Genet's life as springboards, like Proustian ‘madeleines,’ Sartre extends their single notes into philosophical overtures.
8 “Hermeneutic” has generally been reserved for the science of interpretation, particularly of Biblical texts. However, seen as literary exegesis, hermeneutics of literary works of art, here including the drama, must go beyond the mere interpretation and understanding of them in their textual and alleged contextual terms. Our use of hermeneutics here is in concurrence with such approaches as Tillich's in reactionary theology and Hans-Georg Gadamer's in philosophical methodology where it is argued that aesthetics must be subsumed by hermeneutics (“Die Ästhetik muss in der Hermeneutik aufgehen,” Truth and Method. Fundamentals of a Philosophical Hermeneutics [Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik]) since the distinction ‘aesthetic’ is an abstraction that takes the work of art out of its time and world. This last objection, viz. of aesthetically taking the work out of context, is not merely the usual argument of time and place (history and biography), but also involves a revision of the notions of history, consciousness, and experience (as Erlebnis, not Erfahrung) along Diltheyan lines. Unfortunately there is no adequate presentation of Dilthey's mode of thought in English apart from a recently completed, soon to be published, doctoral dissertation by Kurt Müller-Vollmer, Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Literature: A Study of Wilhelm Dilthey's Poetik (Stanford University, 1962).
9 See Saint Genet in this issue of TDR, p. 19, paragraph starting with “To say ‘instant’ is to say fatal instant….”
10 Solange's soliloquy, The Maids and Deathwatch, trans. Bernard Frechtman, p. 90ff. The French for the same passage reads more plainly but with no lesser grandeur as Solange strives for a state of being in which no power is out of her reach: “Mais j'ai conquis la plus sauvage…. Madam s'aperçoit de ma solitude. Enfin. Maintenant je suis seule.”
11 “In order to arouse her, to attract her, I had to dance my nuptial flight. I beat my wing sheaths. When it was over, I died, completely exhausted. My body was abandoned, and perhaps she entered while I was resting from my dance—or while I was dancing, who knows?” The Blacks, trans. Bernard Frechtman. But Village retracts and retreats and approaches again: “So there I was, nestling in the shadow. And I whispered to her: Listen to the singing of my thighs. Listen. That sound is the mewing of panthers and tigers. When they bend, that means leopards are stretching. If I unbutton, an eagle of the Great Empire will swoop down from our snowy summits to your Pyrenees.”
12 For the theological concept of kairos, see Tillich in the introduction to his Systematic Theology 1, p. 6ff; and, “Philosophy and Theology” in his The Protestant Era, p. 83ff. Though the Christ as kairos is the fulfillment of history or all time and, as such, does not return again as the same event, the damned kairos—the criminal saint—is bound to the eternal return, the perpetual striving after grace in his darkness. The end is destruction, self-consumption; not salvation, transformation. When Solange cries out to Claire, “Let's get right into the transformation. Hurry up. Hurry up. I can't stand the shame and humiliation any longer … I'm quivering, I'm shuddering with pleasure,” we know that only destruction lies at the end, that what is sought is not merely satisfaction, but the total dissolution of the self. The concept of kairos has also been introduced in psychotherapy by A. Kielholz, “Vom Kairos” (Schweizerische Medizinische Wochenschrift, Vol. 86 (1956), pp. 982-984) who uses it in designation of the moment in which the patient is close to despair and in which time seems to have a different qualitative value.
13 The salvation demanded here again is destruction through dissolution.
14 Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers.
15 Friedrich Nietzsche's hero of Thus Spake Zarathustra. For a discussion of the ‘sacred disease’ of this criminal see Thomas Mann's introduction to Six Short Novels of Dostoevsky.
16 Weinberg's, Herman G. fortunate neologism in “Coffee, Brandy & Cigars XXXVI,” Film Culture, 24 (Spring, 1962), p. 7.Google Scholar
17 Gaston Bachelard's characterization of Narcissus, quoted by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.
18 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénomenologie de la perception; “Sexuality, it is said, is dramatic because we engage in it our entire personal life. But precisely why do we do so? Because our body is for us a mirror of our being, not only because it is a natural self, a stream of given existence, of a kind in which we never know whether the forces which support us are theirs or ours—rather, because they are neither theirs nor ours entirely. There is no excelling of sexuality as there is no sexuality closed upon itself. No one is saved and no one is entirely lost.
19 André Gide, Corydon. We need not dispute the circularity of the argument.
20 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double.
21 Ibid. “Like the plague the theatre is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction. In the theatre as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible suddenly become our normal element.”