SOURCE: Lane, Christopher. “The Voided Role: On Genet.” Modern Language Notes 112, no. 5 (winter 1997): 876-908.

[In the following essay, Lane examines Genet's conception of his play The Maids as a failure in light of his belief that modern theater was too “reassuring” to audiences.]

Que je me vide!

—Genet, Les Bonnes 38

It wasn't easy, or any fun, being obliged
to live up to one's image.

—Genet, Splendid's 41

Genet criticism seems increasingly concerned with identifying the transgressive potential of Jean Genet's life and works. We now hear regularly that Genet critiqued authenticity and coherent identities; that he emphasized the volatile proximity between dramatic characters and figures of speech, and did untold damage to Western conceptions of role and ontology.¹ Occasionally, we also hear Genet denounced as a traitor, fascist, and pervert who flirted so egregiously with hostile and oppressive forces that he palpably undermined our political freedom.² All of these assessments would likely have pleased him, but that is not our immediate concern.³

Although some of these claims are warranted, Genet criticism has become so invested in the idea of transgression that critics often ignore the precise elements contributing to—and impeding—this phenomenon in his work.⁴ To put this contentiously, studies of Genet frequently reproduce a form of psychic idealism that magnifies the most “acceptable” dimension of his work (its irreverence, parody, and performativity) by downplaying Genet's accompanying—and related—interest in psychic negativity: abjection, disgust, negation, and death.

Following my contention, I want briefly to rethink a statement in which Genet presented his representational aims; critics often invoke this statement to endorse claims about his theater's radicalism. In an article written to accompany and interpret The Maids (1947), Genet claimed that verisimilitude is theatrically “complacent”⁵; it requires an audience only to identify with the events on stage, not to consider the startling disparity between life and theater. For Genet and others, modern Western theater has something “shoddy” about it (38): it reassures an audience by allowing it to suspend disbelief. “The spectacle that unfolds on the stage is always puerile,” he complained, because “all takes place in the visible world and nowhere else” (38).

Aiming to revoke this tradition, Genet tried to bring “theater into the theater” (38) so that his plays would “portend [tout pressenti]” (37), not demonstrate or display. He also tried to disassemble the actor by turning him or her into “a sign charged with signs … as remote as possible from what they are meant first to signify” (37-38). Instead of producing conventional characters, Genet wanted to stage “the metaphors of what [such signs] were supposed to represent” (38).⁶ Finally, by substituting “marionettes” for characters (39)—fractured and multiple metaphors that don't correspond with their signifiers, or types that can't always realize theatrically “adequate” subjectivities—Genet tried to push theater toward a form of “allusion” that makes mimetic fidelity quite impossible (39).

Critics of Genet's texts have largely accepted this summary as an overall statement of his literary and conceptual aims. My aim is not to reject it tout court; considering Genet's statement and his plays' evident fascination with allusion and displacement, this rejection would be foolish. I want instead to rethink Genet's interest in character—and Genet criticism's swift erasure of this category—in light of his pronouncement that The Maids was “a failure” (38). How should we respond to this admission? Did Genet simply misconceive the play's principle or execution? Or did the play's rationale shatter before he could realize its “risks or perils” (38)? I want to dwell on the implications of this “failure,” arguing that Genet's evaluation of this play profoundly affects how we interpret his other work. Let me add swiftly that I think Genet's related claim about his lack of courage as a writer (38) represents less an authoritative statement on creativity or performance than a profound meditation on the “character” of character.⁷ Additionally, that Genet forcefully demonstrates the limitations of “performative” arguments about identity underscores the wider conceptual difficulties of trying to represent identity only in this way.

Adding substance to Genet's interest in signs and marionettes, The Maids stages the rivalry, hatred, and desire of two sisters in a series of fantasmatic tableaux. Unlike the famous Papin affair of Spring 1933, in which Christine and Léa Papin, two maids, murdered their employer Madame Lancelin and her daughter, Geneviève, in a delirium of rage, Geneviève Lancelin doesn't figure in Genet's drama, and the murder his maids contrive is not successful, ending instead with Claire's suicide.⁸ For this and other reasons, The Maids has little interest in historical veracity.⁹ In what Sartre called a number of “whirligigs,” Claire and Solange exchange roles, assuming each other's identity to punish “themselves.”¹⁰ In the process, they brutally engage with—but can't entirely rescind—suggestions that they are unique and distinct. Although the sisters sometimes imagine they can replace each other or assume the place of Madame, their substitutions repeatedly fail. As we'll see, these failures result from important—but heretofore largely unexamined—reasons.

Since Genet prevents Claire and Solange's intersubjective antagonism from sublating into a higher, transcendent unity, or splitting into a pure opposition between similarity and alterity, The Maids is not Hegelian. For the same reason, Genet's plays are not simply performative: They don't extol repetition and displacement without examining their profound psychic repercussions. Instead, Genet's interest in his characters' fantasies and identifications interrupts what might seem an obvious oscillation between master and slave. The resolution of this movement is impossible in Genet's plays, however, given the complex legacy of these fantasies and identifications.

Before elaborating on Genet's interest in identification, I want to discuss various passages in The Maids that fall short of Hegelian arguments about sublation, political claims about transgression, and performative emphasis on role, gesture, and contingency. My essay tackles these claims in turn, paying most attention to the performative argument because it advances important—if insufficient—claims about identification in Genet's work.

The first argument about sublation (claiming that the play achieves a transcendent unity beyond the sisters' antagonism) is easiest to refute. Consider Claire's famous declaration to Solange: “Je grandis davantage pour te réduire et t'exalter” [I ennoble myself the more to diminish and exalt you].¹¹ Here, Claire and Solange's difficulty in unifying their aims exacerbates their sororal conflict. As Solange later declares, “Je n'en peux plus de notre ressemblance [I can't stand our being so alike]” (57; 60). In these passages, Genet insists that one maid can promote herself only by revoking this possibility in another: Claire and Solange oscillate in power and dominance, but the gains of one fundamentally deplete those of the other. Such depletion (“te réduire”) might “exalt” Solange, but she in fact experiences abjection; the result is not sublation. This drama expands beyond the sisters, proving representative of all object relations in The Maids, and even in the entirety of Genet's work. Indeed, Solange's disgust at Madame's jouissance is synecdochic of Genet's interest in pleasure and envy, and it helps us account for his characters' pleasure in gleefully betraying others:

SOLANGE:
Tu n'as donc pas vu comme [Madame] étincelait! Sa démarche dans l'escalier! Sa démarche victorieuse! Son bonheur atroce? Toute sa joie sera faite de notre honte. Son triomphe c'est le rouge de notre honte! Sa robe c'est le rouge de notre honte!

(96; my emphasis)

[SOLANGE:
Didn't you see how (Madame) sparkled? How disgustingly happy she was? Her joy feeds on our shame. Her carnation is the red of our shame. Her dress … it's the red of our shame.]

(80-81; Frechtman's emphases)

In translating this passage, Bernard Frechtman downplays Solange's perception that Madame's entire pleasure derives from shaming Claire and Solange. Such malice—and the sisters' reactive vengeance—moves the play beyond Hegelian dialectics and existentialist conceptions of mauvaise foi. Genet's conception of pleasure is closer to Lacan's argument that the subject's alienation places it largely at the mercy of the Other's jouissance.¹²

If we perceive hints of a dialectic in such pronouncements as “Solange, à nous deux, nous serons ce couple éternel, du criminel et de la sainte [We shall be that eternal couple, Solange, the two of us, the eternal couple of the criminal and the saint]” (60; 63), we should note immediately that Claire says this while pretending to be Madame, not when she is “herself.” Also, the sisters' ensuing fantasy of mutual salvation clearly doesn't last, given their intense rivalry and stymied social roles: “Je voudrais t'aider. Je voudrais te consoler, mais je sais que je te dégoûte. Je te répugne. Et je le sais puisque tu me dégoûtes [I want to help you. I want to comfort you, but I know I disgust you. I'm repulsive to you. And I know it because you disgust me]” (58; 61). Such claims highlight elements of excess—not union—that take the sisters beyond “love.” We witness this in Claire's ensuing speech about her sister's revolting smell, quoted below.

In his 1954 translation of Les Bonnes, Frechtman ignores Claire's remark about excessive love—“S'aimer dans le dégoût, ce n'est pas s'aimer [To love each other in such disgust is not to love]” (58; my trans.)—by converting the sisters' avowed antagonism into a generic conflict for all domestic servants: “When slaves love one another, it's not love” (61; translated edition). This claim is only partly faithful to Genet's interest in inter- and intrasubjective antagonism. And so when Frechtman binds the sisters' conflict to their status as “slaves,” he assumes that harmony could prevail between sisters of a different class. This rather limits Genet's understanding of ontological conflict.

More revealing, however, is Frechtman's translation of the line I cited earlier, “Je grandis davantage pour te réduire et t'exalter” (27), which he transforms into an ontological lament: “All that you'll ever know is your own baseness” (43; translated edition). This statement ignores the interpersonal conflict sustaining—perhaps even precipitating—the maids' abjection. And it limits our grasp of the way Claire-as-Madame ennobles herself—and “advances herself” in class terms—by humiliating (and thus, for Genet, psychically “exalting”) her counterpart: Solange-as-Claire. Hence my emphasis, “I ennoble myself the more to diminish and exalt you.” As we've seen, Genet typically grants abjection perverse nobility: the joy that Solange-as-Claire experiences (at least here) from being downtrodden and despised gives her a fantasy of magnificence that is similar—but not identical—to Claire-as-Madame's regal power. Nonetheless, the play doesn't allow us (or its characters) to bridge this perceptual gap. Not only does Genet require this gap to stress his maids' material inequality vis-à-vis their madame, but he also emphasizes nobility's nonidentical forms to clarify why domination and subordination inhere in every relationship.

Literary critics often “absorb” Genet's interest in structural inequality by recasting it as a political concern.¹³ But while Genet's statements aren't reliable indicators of his work and politics, which aids our avoidance of the intentional fallacy, we should at least recall his famous remark: “I would like the world not to change so that I can be against the world.”¹⁴ We might also restate his relative uninterest in the plight of domestic workers: “Une chose doit être écrite: il ne s'agit pas d'un plaidoyer sur le sort des domestiques. Je suppose qu'il existe un syndicat des gens de maison—cela ne nous regarde pas [We should note one thing: (the play) is not a plea on behalf of maids. I suppose there is a union for domestic workers—that's not our concern]” (10; my trans.). Political readings of Genet arguably derive from his other statements on direct action,¹⁵ but critics often misread these statements in the hope of conflating his opinions and texts, so forgetting Genet's avowal: “Je crois que l'action, la lutte directe contre le colonialisme font plus pour les Noirs qu'une pièce de théâtre. De même, je crois que le syndicat des gens de maison fait plus pour les domestiques qu'une pièce de théâtre [I believe that action, the direct struggle against colonialism, does much more for blacks than a play can. In the same way, I believe that a union for domestics would do more for them than a play could].”¹⁶ These statements point up Genet's irrevocable distinction between text and activism; indeed, critics ignoring this distinction exasperated him: “Je m'en fous. J'ai voulu faire des pièces de théâtre, cristalliser une émotion théâtrale et dramatique. Si mes pièces servent les Noirs [et les domestiques], je ne m'en soucie pas. Je ne le crois pas, d'ailleurs [That (assumption) makes me mad. I wanted to write theatrical plays, to crystallize a theatrical and dramatic emotion. If my plays help blacks (or domestics), that's not my concern. I don't think they do anyway].”¹⁷

Other critics less concerned with Genet's politics nonetheless consider his interest in transgression and insubordination as an implicit political strategy.¹⁸ For these critics, Genet may complicate the social realm by noting the difficulty of revolution, the resilience of oppressive structures, or citizens' perverse attachment to hierarchy, but he nonetheless comes down firmly on the side of change: If his texts don't translate easily into transformative statements, they nonetheless provide alternative ways of perceiving reality. Such critics might balk at the conclusion to The Maids, in which Claire-as-Madame drinks the poisoned tea she intended to give Madame, for they use this scene to highlight the radical contingency of all identities. Allegedly, in this suicide, Genet frees his characters from a firm sense of tragedy or a doomed notion of repetition: Claire apparently kills only that aspect of Madame that lives precariously “in” her. According to such critics, Genet's characters' impersonation of each other without constraint highlights a gap among actor, character, and supplemental role that we must retain as the text's emancipatory motif.¹⁹

These readings gloss over more interesting and complicated dynamics in Genet's work. If the first reading of Genet as political radical founders when trying to explain his delight in the peculiar eroticism of betrayal (including the betrayal of political causes), the second tends to idealize Genet's interest in repetition and identification. In this respect, critics interested in The Maids' transgressive elements consider impersonation's effect but not its cause: By limiting interpretation to the sisters' substitutions, these critics reduce the play to a simulacrum of gender. All references to the sisters' hatred, envy, even suffering are eclipsed by claims that they perfectly emulate and then replace each other.

To speak of “suffering” in this context may seem anathema to Genet's project; such claims could reinscribe his work in humanist conventions he pointedly rejected. Yet The Maids does note the limits of substitution. Considering the play merely an exercise in human metonymy attributes to Genet a degree of psychic idealism that he carefully refuted. When critics conflate Claire, Solange, and Madame as fragmented—but largely equivalent—elements of consciousness, they misunderstand the precise degree of resistance distinguishing these characters. Consider the demand operating in these words by Solange: “Tu peux te ressembler, maintenant. Reprends ton visage. Allons, Claire, redeviens ma sœur …”; Frechtman inadequately translates these sentences as “Be yourself again. Come on, Claire, be my sister again” (34; 48; ellipsis in original). We might instead engage the effort and difficulty conveyed by “Tu peux te ressembler … redeviens ma sœur …” (my emphases). Indeed, we might consider the perils and possibilities of reading “character” in Genet in ways that are neither humanist nor devoid of affect. In this respect, we might ask whether Genet's interest in parody cancels those aspects of hatred and despair that have some purchase on Claire's and Solange's “ontology.”

To engage these concerns, I want to consider what is at stake when Solange exclaims, “Que je me vide!” (38), which Frechtman translates as “Let me get it out of my system” (50). (Perhaps “Let me annul myself!” would be more apt.) Frechtman's rather banal phrase grants the sisters an ontology that fury leaves unaffected: Solange's exclamation enhances, rather than jeopardizing, her being by seeming to rid her of obstacles and impurities. Genet's phrasing complicates this assumption, however. First, that Solange utters her statement as an imperative highlights the force of psychic demand that poststructuralist readings of The Maids ignore. Second, Genet clarifies an intimate rapport between speech and self-defeat: Solange's very wish to represent her thoughts seems capable of jeopardizing her “being.” In this context, speech determines the sisters' specificity and undoing. Solange and Claire seem to unravel—but not to merge—in their respective substitutions because language is not “of them,” instead emerging from without as an inadequate, but still insistent, approximation of their desires.

The Maids is replete with these moments. The following exchange, during the sisters' opening ritual, is another example:

SOLANGE:
Avouez le laitier. … Car Solange vous emmerde!
CLAIRE:
(affolée): Claire! Claire!
SOLANGE:
Hein?
CLAIRE:
(dans un murmure): Claire, Solange, Claire.
SOLANGE:
Ah! oui, Claire. Claire vous emmerde! Claire est là, plus claire que jamais. Lumineuse! (Elle gifle Claire.)
CLAIRE:
Oh! oh! Claire … vous … oh!

(29-30; ellipses in original)

[SOLANGE:
Admit about the milkman. For Solange says: to hell with you!
CLAIRE:
(panic-stricken): Claire! Claire!
SOLANGE:
Eh?
CLAIRE:
(in a murmur): Claire, Solange, Claire.
SOLANGE:
Ah! Yes, Claire, Claire says: to hell with you! Claire is here, more dazzling than ever. Radiant! (She slaps Claire.)
CLAIRE:
Oh! … Oh! Claire. … You. … Oh!]

(44-45; ellipses in original)

During this exchange, Solange-as-Claire humiliates Claire-as-Madame, but Solange forgets her supplemental role and briefly resumes her “proper” character, cursing Claire in her “own” name (and in words rather stronger than “to hell with you!” too). Without claiming that this slip reveals Solange's foundational character, we note that this slip recalls a prior moment in the ritual when Solange's attention wanders and Claire accuses her of not listening. As the ritual loses intensity, Solange briefly destroys the illusion surrounding the sisters' imaginary exchange. On one level, these moments appear unimportant: Since the ritual quickly resumes, the credibility of the sisters' secondary identifications renders doubtful any suggestion that their ontology is single and unified. Yet Solange's parapraxis makes Claire “affolée”—panic-stricken and bewildered. Claire's anxiety may highlight her wish to resume the fantasy, but it also shows us what is at stake for her in not being able to do so. To put this another way, the slip defaults on the seamless illusion of the sisters' exchange: Claire's drive toward suicide, at the play's end, connects intimately with her inability to tolerate the loss of this role.

Critics may accept that Solange's slip clarifies the sisters' reliance on illusions, but they disagree about the slip's impact on the sisters' primary and secondary identifications. For want of better terms, the “conservative” reading argues that Solange's slip complicates—but does not jeopardize—the ceremony's overall symbolism.²⁰ Conversely, the “radical” position argues that this and other moments disband The Maids' entire interest in character.²¹ These arguments may highlight Genet's interest in gender, role, and ontology, but they also reveal the conceptual inadequacy of the play's performative readings.

When Claire adopts Madame's identity, for instance, she does so partly to receive insults from a source she understands to be “herself.” Arguing that these “real” and “fictive” relations operate simultaneously, Sartre claimed that Claire can humiliate Solange while “Madame” (i.e., Claire) punishes “Claire” (i.e., Solange).²² Yet he also simplified this drama by arguing that “the maids are relative to everything and everyone; their being is defined by its absolute relativity. … These specters are born of the dream of a master; murky to themselves, their feelings come from outside.”²³Contra Sartre's reading, Genet doesn't allow us to forget that these “official” and “substitutive” dramas hinge on powerfully aggressive drives: “Claire vous emmerde! [Claire says: to hell with you!]” (29; 44); “Solange: ‘Claire, je te hais.’ Claire: ‘Et je te le rends’ [‘Claire, I hate you.’ ‘Same to you and more!’]” (42; 53); and “Moi, je vous vomis [I vomit you!]” (100; 86).

We must dwell on this slight difference between Sartre's and Genet's approaches because aggression ruins claims that Claire and Solange mimic Madame or each other in “pure” repetition. I accept that The Maids formulates a metonymic link among maid, madame, and “mistress,” with considerable impact on the play's account of gender and sexuality. However, the ease with which critics forget the play's attention to primal—or at least ancillary—elements concerns me: These elements impede repetition and unravel each character.²⁴ Claire and Solange's ritual is self-defeating because it binds them to their abjection. This is the precise site of their enjoyment: As Sartre usefully remarks, they “hate each other with love.”²⁵ Solange also remarks about Madame: “Son visage se décompose [Her face is all convulsed]” (30; 45); she later fears that Madame “déchiffre … une foule de traces [unravels … a host of traces and clues]” (55; 59). These and other remarks confirm that repetition isn't benign in Genet's play; instead, repetition leads his characters toward self-dissolution and extinction. When advising directors on how to stage the beginning of The Maids, for instance, Genet recommended a type of “géométrie” that would resemble “une activité de vie … [et] une activité de mort” (35n.; not in English).

To complicate this scenario still further, the quality that Claire and Solange idealize—Madame's femininity—is adjacent, not oppositional, to their own. As Genet observes (but doesn't simply indict), “maids” and “madames” become “mistresses” when a monsieur pays them for their professional or sexual labor. That Genet combines three different women in this way may highlight the degree to which women's class is contingent on their attachment to men.²⁶ However, when Madame conveys this feminist point, she does so with Genetian masochism: “Monsieur n'est pas coupable mais s'il l'était, avec quelle joie j'accepterais de porter sa croix! D'étape en étape, de prison en prison, et jusqu'au bagne je le suivrais [It would be a joy for me to bear his cross. I'd follow him from place to place, from prison to prison, on foot if need be, as far as the penal colony]” (68-69; 67).

Though clearly hyperbolic, the masochism we glimpse here is not gratuitous, instead alerting us to a complex rapport between oppression and enjoyment. Thus Madame cannot “master” the maids because she is materially and affectively subservient to Monsieur (we later realize that he is also in prison). Solange alludes to this subservience, after Madame gives Claire one of her dresses, by punning: “Madame est trop bonne [Madame is too good/too much like a maid]” (78); Frechtman overlooks this pun by translating the remark as “Madame is very kind” (70).

While Claire and Solange enjoy compounding their misery with flagellation and “auto-accusation”—“Mais j'en ai assez de ce miroir effrayant qui me renvoie mon image comme une mauvaise odeur [I'm sick of seeing my image thrown back at me by a mirror, like a bad smell. You're my bad smell]” (58; 61; my emphasis); “Vous êtes nos miroirs déformants, notre soupape, notre honte, notre lie [You're our distorting mirrors, our loathsome vent, our shame, our dregs!]” (101; 86)—Genet represents Madame as also caught in this economy. When bemoaning her lost sense of security, for instance, she remarks to Claire and Solange: “Je me croyais si bien protégée de la vie, si bien protégée par votre dévouement. Si bien protégée par Monsieur. Et toute cette coalition d'amitiés n'aura pas réussi une barricade assez haute contre le désespoir [I really considered myself so well protected from life, so well protected by your devotion. So well protected by Monsieur. But all that strength of friendship could not build a high-enough wall against despair]” (79-80; my trans.). Though Frechtman ignores Madame's lament, he does represent her, in the lines I've just quoted, as gazing in a mirror, asking herself: “And what about you, you fool, will you be beautiful enough to receive him?” (75).

Genet's stress on masochistic pleasure, as on the psychic proximity between Madame and the maids, takes us beyond conventional accounts of human desire. Claire and Solange tirelessly repeat their mimetic confusion, but their exchange is never cyclical: There is always a missing term (even when Madame is present), whose absence fantasy endeavors—and fails—to replace.²⁷ Thus we can endorse Jeanette Savona's useful suggestion that The Maids “is based not so much on ‘normal’ human interactions as on the very impossibility of establishing any form of positive interrelations except in the world of fantasy and dreams.”²⁸ Yet Genet's emphasis on the troubled interface between fantasy and identification is a significant problem for critics arguing that the maids' “rituals” cohere (Coe),²⁹ or that they represent a simple flight of fancy (Goldmann, Ehrmann)³⁰ that is private and devoid of communal meaning (Bataille).³¹ That Claire and Solange's identifications repeatedly fail suggests something more at stake in their idealization of Madame. Since this failure is also cumulative, it forms a legacy of substitutions that haunt the intention and meaning of each subsequent ritual.

Several points support this argument: The play begins with a ritual already underway, Claire mimicking a “character” (Madame) that she and Solange idealize and hate but cannot properly incorporate. This is evident only when an alarm clock interrupts their projection. The maids' failure to internalize their ideal is also obvious from the signs they forget to conceal from Madame: the elements—perhaps symptoms—of femininity they covet (makeup, jewels, dresses) and the reminders of servitude they despise (washing-up gloves, teacups, and kitchen clock). Recall Claire's observation “Je vois une foule de traces que je ne pourrai jamais effacer. Et elle, elle se promène au milieu de cela qu'elle apprivoise. Elle le déchiffre. Elle pose le bout de son pied rose sur nos traces. L'une après l'autre, elle nous découvre [I see a host of traces I'll never be able to cover up. And she, she walks about in her tamed menagerie. She unravels the clues. She points to our traces with the tip of her pink toe. She discovers us, one by one]” (55; 59).

Considering this complex web of fantasy and speech, it seems necessary to recall Genet's comment about his “characters” being “signs charged with signs.” Solange and Claire ritually stage their identifications, but this overturns first the “social” demand for roles, and then the libidinal drives (which many critics forget) that realize or impede this demand. Sartre drew on Genet's interest in identification to argue that as “pure products of artifice, [the maids'] minds are inside out, and they are always other than themselves.”³² Oreste Pucciani also claimed, “In the best sense of the term, they are ‘possessed,’ for the ‘possessed’ are inhabited by a being not their own which nonetheless gives them being.”³³

We can use this idea of “ghosting” or revenance to complicate arguments about gender performativity.³⁴ Consider Genet's claim in Notre-Dame-des-fleurs (1944), in which the “lady” in question is a man: “If I were to have a play put on in which women had roles, I would demand that these roles be performed by adolescent boys, and I would bring this to the attention of the spectators by means of a placard which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets during the entire performance.”³⁵ This emphatic “demand” was not in fact an exclusive practice, Genet conceding that his directors could give roles to women.³⁶ However, the principle warrants attention, and not just because femininity and homosexuality are at stake.³⁷ The placard impedes audience identification by betraying both the spectacle's illusion (i.e., these are women performing as women) and the audience's disavowal (“I know the actors are boys but, for the duration of the performance, I'll convince myself otherwise”). The placard does more than remind us of sexual difference, paradoxically when biological women are absent: It emphasizes femininity's difficulty by rendering this phenomenon as a sign. If the audience “sees” femininity onstage, but underwritten by such a disclaimer, what “work” occurs?³⁸ What can femininity mean when visually it doesn't correlate with biological women?

These questions are central to feminist critique, and they have formed an often strained dialogue between feminists and (principally) gay men over the politics of camp and transvestism. For some, Genet's strategy would exemplify co-option, recalling, for instance, Elaine Showalter's nightmare of men in feminist drag.³⁹ However, Genet's placard underscores a psychoanalytic and feminist proposition: “The woman does not exist.” Some critics have assumed that this proposition means women don't exist; rather it means that “woman is not the realization of man's desire.”⁴⁰ If the placard didn't exist, I would share some of Showalter's concerns, for the result might suggest that men best represent women. Yet the sign insists that we take up a second proposition: Genet's stress on the asymmetry between women and femininity makes the latter elude representation. Femininity denotes an ideal to which no woman can—or should ever have to—comply.⁴¹

Endorsing this claim, Genet proposed a similar strategy in his later play Les Nègres (1958), forbidding black actors faithfully to represent the colonized. Instead, he wanted black actors to de-realize and challenge the colonial scene by performing in whiteface; that is, as partial objects of racist fantasy and “inadequate” or parodic versions of the European selfsame. Genet also forbade white actors to play European colonizers; he wanted black actors to demonstrate the effect of racism by partial familiarity with white people and partial self-strangeness. Finally, Genet requested that his directors focus a single spotlight on a white member of the audience for the play's duration.⁴² He wanted these factors to impede the “comfort” of identification by demonstrating colonialism's material and psychic violence. In ways that recall The Maids, Genet did not strip gender or race of their historical and cultural meaning, but he did interrogate the belief that this meaning is entirely reducible to history and culture.

Following this interrogation, can we still advance a notion of character by distinguishing drives from identifications? By steering a path between “conservative” and “radical” readings of The Maids, I am not advocating a reading of the “depth” of Genet's characters; this premise would be entirely off the mark. I am, however, concerned to ask what remains of ontology in Genet's characters, once we accept their absence of depth. We might redefine ontology here not by its coherence or authenticity, but by its complex formulation of drives, aims, and intentions. These constitutive elements of personality sometimes combine in Genet's characters, but they usually unmake and de-realize his characters as forces no organism could assimilate. Consider Claire's admission to Solange-as-Claire, at the start of their next ceremony: “Je frémis, je frissonne de plaisir, Claire, je vais hennir de joie! [I'm quivering, I'm shuddering with pleasure. Claire, I'm going to whinny with joy!]” (99; 85). Genet's interest in the vicissitudes of drives, and their impact on identification, brings him closer to psychoanalysis than to any critical presumption of “depth” in his work (such presumptions also misunderstanding Freud's interest in the ongoing “war” between ego and id).⁴³

To clarify this argument about the drives and aggression, let us consider a moment in The Maids when these vicissitudes seem especially prominent and unruly. Toward the end of Claire and Solange's ritual, Claire-as-Madame again breaks with her role by acknowledging her “fear” of her sister's enthusiastic violence:

CLAIRE:
Tu m'obliges à te parler de cet homme [Mario, le laitier] pour mieux détourner mes regards, Allons donc! Tu crois que je ne t'ai pas découverte? Tu as essayé de la tuer.
SOLANGE:
Tu m'accuses?
CLAIRE:
Ne nie pas. Je t'ai vue. (Un long silence.) Et j'ai eu peur. Peur, Solange. Quand nous accomplissons la cérémonie, je protège mon cou. C'est moi que tu vises à travers Madame, c'est moi qui suis en danger.
Un long silence. Solange hausse les épaules.
SOLANGE,
(décidée): Oui, j'ai essayé. J'ai voulu te délivrer. Je n'en pouvais pas.

(48-49; my emphasis)

[CLAIRE:
You're trying to put me off by making me talk about that man (Mario, the milkman). Hamph! You think I haven't found you out? You tried to kill her.
SOLANGE:
Are you accusing me?
CLAIRE:
Don't deny it. I saw you. (A long silence.) And I was frightened. Frightened, Solange. Through her, it was me you were aiming at. I'm the one who's in danger. When we finish the ceremony, I'll protect my neck.
(A long silence. Solange shrugs her shoulders.)
SOLANGE:
(with decision): Is that all? Yes, I did try. I wanted to free you. I couldn't bear it any longer.]

(55; my emphasis)

To justify herself further, Solange repeats her earlier statement: “Je t'aimais trop [I loved you too much]” (49; 55). This claim—irrespective of its psychic truth—doesn't belie that Madame operates for Solange as the cause of and appropriate detour for her sororal rage. Like Freud's endeavor in “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made By Men” to interpret a man's concomitant interest in two distinct but psychically related objects,⁴⁴ Genet steers us away from banal psychologization: His interest is not in asking what figure is central or supplemental to Solange's rage but rather in determining how both operate (often simultaneously) in fantasy. At these moments, Genet has no recourse to conventional understandings of motive or character. He does, however, focus on the hostile and aggressive traits that make Madame and Claire “appropriate” recipients of Solange's fury.

We cannot downplay Genet's interest in these traits by weighing how other characters partly repeat them. Such traits aren't distributed evenly in The Maids; indeed, this unequal distribution of affect—like the maids' asymmetrical turns at impersonating Madame and each other—ruins Hegelian arguments about sublation. True, Solange claims to unite with her sister in their shared hatred of Madame: “Nous ne vous craignons plus. Nous sommes enveloppées, confondues dans nos exhalaisons, dans nos fastes, dans notre haine pour vous. Nous prenons forme, madame [We no longer fear you. We're merged, enveloped in our fumes, in our revels, in our hatred of you. The mold is setting. We're taking shape, Madame]” (31; 46). But it scarcely needs mentioning that this imaginary “merging” never succeeds in the play. Solange's symbolic difficulty in incorporating Claire into her fantasy contributes to this failure, for Claire is already impersonating Madame. Accordingly, Solange's “nous” is speculative and inferential: The passage shows that psychic drives are the one factor brutally impeding equivalence in Genet's work.

Let us consider a final example endorsing this reading. The following passage anticipates the one I cited above, but it occurs within the same ceremonial episode. What interests me is the way hatred and retribution remove each sister from their respective roles:

CLAIRE:
Dans ses bras parfumés, le diable m'emporte. Il me soulève, je décolle, je pars … et je reste. … Tenez vos mains loin des miennes, votre contact est immonde …
SOLANGE:
Il ne faut pas exagérer. … Vous atteignez la rive. …
CLAIRE:
Quel langage, ma fille. Claire? tu te venges, n'est-ce pas? Tu sens approcher l'instant où tu quittes ton rôle …
SOLANGE:
Madame me comprend à merveille. Madame me devine.
CLAIRE:
Tu sens approcher l'instant où tu ne seras plus la bonne. Tu vas te venger. Tu t'apprêtes? Tu aiguises tes ongles? La haine te réveille?

(25-26; my emphases; first and sixth ellipses in original)

[CLAIRE:
By the devil! He's carrying me away in his fragrant arms. He's lifting me up, I leave the ground, I'm off. … (She stamps with her heel.) And I stay behind. … Keep your hands off mine. I can't stand your touching me …
SOLANGE:
There's no need to overdo it. Your eyes are ablaze. …
CLAIRE:
What language, my dear. Claire, … you're taking revenge, aren't you? You feel the time coming when, no longer a maid—
SOLANGE:
You see straight through me. You divine my thoughts
CLAIRE:
(increasingly carried away):—the time coming when, no longer a maid, you become vengeance itself, but, Claire, don't forget—Claire are you listening?—don't forget, it was the maid who hatched schemes of vengeance …]

(42-43; first ellipsis Frechtman's)

For Genet, hatred and epiphany (“La haine te réveille”) strikingly connect with the drives (figured here as “le diable”) by destabilizing the subject (“[il] m'emporte … je décolle). This emphasis is not simply psychological (for a start, Genet represents the subject at odds with its drives, as if these compulsions weren't entirely immanent to his characters); yet he does focus on his characters' volatile intentions and aims in a way that performative readings of The Maids do not.

Considering these debates about character and the drives, how should we interpret Claire's suicide? More generally, what are the implications of epiphany considering the play's pursuit of failure? I think the suicide magnifies a tension between ontology's formation and deformation in Genet's work; ironically, the suicide helps explain why critics reinscribe elements of “depth” and ontology in The Maids after upholding the play as the precise agent derailing these phenomena. In an important essay on Genet's Funeral Rites and The Maids, for instance, Leo Bersani argues:

In a sense, Genet is an out-and-out social constructionist. There is no margin of being to which Claire and Solange can retreat, no secret inner place that their social nature couldn't reach or violate, and that might reconcile them to being (but not entirely being) maids. In The Maids, social roles are inner essences, and the question becomes: how do you get rid of an essence (or as a pis aller, change essences)?⁴⁵

The question is certainly pertinent, but Bersani changes tack slightly when interpreting Claire's suicide. Having argued carefully that the maids cannot transcend or escape their “maidness,” he remarks: “Madame survives (since it is Claire who is poisoned) but Claire, in a sense, also survives since it is she who gives the drink to Claire-as-Madame. … This moving outside herself allows Claire to survive her own death” (15).

After emphasizing Genet's radical uninterest in character and depth, Bersani seems unable to avoid the “pull” of redemption here. It is true that Claire considers the possibility of outlasting her own death, but not in literal or transcendent terms: She speaks of a radical haunting, an incorporation in which she remains an internal alterity because Solange would be unable to absorb or expel her:

Solange, tu me garderas en toi. … Tu seras seule pour vivre nos deux existences. … Personne ne saura au bagne que je t'accompagne en cachette. Et surtout, quand tu seras condamnée, n'oublie pas que tu me portes en toi.

(110-11)

[Solange, you will contain me within you. … It will be your task, yours alone, to keep us both alive. You must be very strong. In prison no one will know that I'm with you, secretly. On the sly.]

(96-97)

Bersani quotes these lines without acknowledging their impact on his prior reading of character. He writes, “We should emphasize that [the sisters] have not simply switched essences. … No: the social world of essences has been replaced by a private domain of fractured and multiple identities” (16). It is difficult to see how this passage and Genet's alleged replacement of essences with “a private domain of fractured and multiple identities” correspond with Bersani's prior claim that “there is no margin of being to which Claire and Solange can retreat” (14).

I don't dispute Bersani's doubts about the “inviolate” dimension of privacy—indeed, I want to iterate his suggestion that Genet violates privacy with compelling force. But we should also consider why a dimension of immanence, not privacy, recurs in Genet's texts precisely when we seem able to rescind all further attention to character. This dimension may not prevail in The Maids; indeed, the point—if not the “tragedy”—of the play is that character can't endure or be credible, for its sentiments are already partly delirious. Nevertheless, this dimension greatly influences the play's end, allowing us to question how far we can trust Solange's wild conviction that she, her sister, and “all the maids” “serons belles, libres, et joyeuses [will be beautiful, joyous, drunk, and free!]” (111; 100).

Contrary to triumphalist readings of the play, I think this statement is bathetic and antiredemptive. Further, the bathos prevails because there is a limit to the fulfillment of Claire's desire to survive that her fantasy clearly does not recognize. We need scarcely remark that death represents a point beyond which transposition and substitution basically can't function. In this respect, Claire's death is central to interpreting the sisters' prior identifications: Her death is the cause and expiation of the sisters' dual—but scarcely mutual—transferences.⁴⁶

Critics extolling Claire's suicide as Madame's death “in” her curiously elide the psychic consequences of self-annihilation. They invoke the performative qualities of Genet's work to cancel suggestions of character. However, since Genet seemed unconcerned with the precise events of the Papin affair, transforming Christine and Léa's psychotic murder of Madame and Geneviève Lancelin into suicide and suggestions of masochism, why didn't he conclude his play redemptively? To put this differently: What was at stake for Genet in formulating this suicide, given its historical irrelevance—and for critics, given his apparent uninterest in character? And what do critics make of Solange's exclamation “La morte aura poussé jusqu'au bout la plaisanterie [Death will see the joke through to the bitter end]” (105; 91-92)? To answer these questions in more detail, we must return to Bersani's claims about Genet's antiredemptive project.

“The Gay Outlaw” is by far the most intelligent reading of Genet to have surfaced in years. By focusing carefully on what critics have found most exasperating and unattractive about Genet—his interest in betrayal—Bersani argues persuasively that those most interested in Genet's transgressive potential read him only as engagé—that is, as locked into humanitarian or political commitment. Bersani remarks, “This is the best-known Genet, frozen in fussily obscene, self-theatricalizing postures, the Genet wondering as he writes if he has found the perfect ‘gesture’” (9). This reading concerns Bersani because it “leaves Genet socially positioned” (9; original emphasis); for him, such accounts misunderstand Genet's “antirelational” use of sexuality, which reconceptualizes the emotional and social tie (10, 12).

Bersani focuses extensively on Funeral Rites (1947), in part because treachery and sexual collaboration coalesce in that novel in fascinating ways; arguably Genet's most solipsistic text, Funeral Rites is also the strongest vindication of Bersani's argument.⁴⁷ While betrayal recurs in some form, however, in almost all of Genet's plays, novels, and essays (if less frequently in his poems),⁴⁸ it does so in profound tension with his account of group and intersubjective relations. In other words, while Funeral Rites demonstrates an astonishing congruence between sexual and personal/group betrayal, other texts by Genet (excepting The Thief's Journal [1949]) seem less nihilistic about the future of emotional and group ties.

Bersani concedes that Genet's “antirelational” focus aims not to disband, but rather to rethink, the affective tie: “What interests Genet is not the way society distributes predicaments but rather the way it assigns identities. It is the taking on—or attempted refusal—of those identities that determines the possibility of effective rebellion” (14). Here, we can appreciate why the antirelational perspective of someone like Beckett lacks (despite Bersani's concluding remarks) the tension we observe in Genet's writing between the desire to betray and the willingness to redefine group identification. Indeed, betrayal is piquant in Genet's work because it foregoes that type of solipsism prevailing in such texts as Molloy, Watt, and The Unnamable. Were Genet as uninterested in the social tie as Beckett was, the recurrence of treachery and collaboration in his work would be far less compelling.

To rescind the subversion/complicity binary that has stymied Genet criticism for so long, Bersani focuses on Genet's argument in The Maids and The Balcony that social structures outlast their proponents and that revolutionary zeal can paradoxically endorse the formations it aims to dismantle.⁴⁹ Seeming to break with theories of transgression, Bersani usefully confronts Genet criticism with an argument it has fiercely resisted; he finds in betrayal not the tawdry, self-protective aims of the collaborator but rather a complete break with social affiliation: “This is Genet's revolutionary strength … his fundamental project of declining to participate in any sociality whatsoever” (12; original emphasis).

This argument has two consequences, the second an extension of the first. First, we cannot limit the fantasies Genet's characters have about each other to the agents of those fantasies. According to Bersani, Genet urges us to consider the asymmetry surfacing antagonistically among his characters. Second, these breaks constitute “antirelationality” in Genet's writing: His characters withdraw, resist, and betray because they have no interest in the community fantasies sustaining others.

Bersani is most convincing when advancing the first argument. He writes, “Funeral Rites is constantly reminding us that identities and convictions can't be assigned, in fantasy, to particular persons, that the subject responsible for the fantasy is nowhere to be located among its dramatis personae” (12). This argument seems irrefutable; The Maids alone attests to this problem of assigning and controlling fantasy. Yet Bersani's second argument raises obvious objections, not least a conceptual tension between his claims that Genet “declin[es] to participate in any sociality whatsoever” (12) and his proposition that “the taking on—or attempted refusal—of … identities … determines [for Genet] the possibility of effective rebellion” (14). Since his interpretation hinges on the intention of rebellion, not its success or failure, Bersani can modify the subversion/complicity binary—but he can't escape it. To break entirely with this binary, Bersani would have to refute Genet's interest in “effective rebellion,” which would mean ignoring not only his statements about political activism (which, we quickly recognize, often conflict with Genet's conceptual enterprise), but also his fascination with betrayal, which for Genet usually serves an antisocial—rather than asocial—purpose.

The second problem with Bersani's analysis, which connects with this difficulty in reading intention and rebellion, concerns his desire to fuse Genet's “antirelationality” with “radical homoness” (16). These terms, however, seem scarcely compatible: “Homoness” defines the similarity—and perhaps also equivalence—that interests Bersani in homosexual desire.⁵⁰ Yet whenever homosexual desire surfaces as an object relation or fantasy (and by dint of being oriented toward the “same,” homosexuality constantly raises this suggestion of relation), it would seem to defy sociality and antirelationality.⁵¹ Accordingly, Bersani seems most idealistic when speaking of “the antirelationality inherent in all homoness” (10); such claims don't become clearer when presented as a “relationality [that] … takes place [in Funeral Rites] only within sameness” (13). If Bersani seems partly to concede his “antirelational” argument here, he doesn't convincingly distinguish the “relationality … [specific to] sameness” from that recurring within heterosexuality. Even Genet insists in Funeral Rites that the act and place of sex are considerably more interesting than the subjects performing it. If Eric and Riton had had sex face to face, for instance, in the scene Bersani finds most suggestive of asocial desire, they would also have reproduced the “oval” that Genet finds problematic: “Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them [une ivresse qui ne sortait pas d'eux-mêmes] in a kind of oval that excluded all light …”⁵²

Bersani also presents The Maids as a radical account of “antirelationality.” When interpreting Claire's urging of Solange “n'oublie pas que tu me portes en toi” (111), he claims that such fantasies may seem irrelevant because “no one will know that Solange is harboring Claire within her …” (16). The point, however, is surely that the audience knows. This reminder is neither gratuitous nor naïve. The audience not only breaks the hermetic dyad paralyzing the sisters (Madame and Monsieur break the sisters' dyad more effectively: Madame by her presence and absence; Monsieur entirely by his absence), but also functions as the Other to Claire and Solange's obsessive mimesis. The audience witnesses Claire and Solange's alienated behavior; it also interrupts their fantasies of intersubjectivity by attesting that Claire and Solange's speech can return to themselves only as the discourse of the Other. In this respect, the audience qua Other brutally disturbs the maids' anticipation of ecstatic union.

Bersani certainly is aware of alienation and division in this play. Yet for this reason his interpretation of alienation's effect appears to contradict his earlier claim that there is “no margin of being to which Claire and Solange can retreat” (14): “Claire is Solange,” he writes here, “but at a certain inner distance from Solange's consciousness of their sameness” (16). This point refers to Claire's fantasies of being incorporated, but how do these fantasies square with Bersani's claims about death and anality in Funeral Rites: “Relationality having been eliminated, values can be remembered posthumously and reversed without the risk of the reversal being contaminated by transgressed terms” (17)? Additionally, how do Bersani's claims about partial internal distance and eliminated relationality endorse his closing remarks about The Maids: “Once again, it is perhaps Genet's homosexuality that allowed him to imagine a curative collapsing of social difference into a radical homoness in which, all relations with the other having been abolished, the subject might begin again, differentiating itself from itself and thereby reconstituting sociality” (16; my emphasis)?

Bersani's argument leads us into a paradox, in which the “antirelational” precipitates a “curative collapsing of difference,” so that the subject—and thence sociality—“might begin again.” This promise of anaphora, or rebeginning, recurs in every redemptive motif. What matters for us is the astonishing rapport between these fantasies of rebirth and the type of psychic idealism that allows many theorists and subjects—if rarely Genet's characters—to imagine they can excise the past and reinvent themselves in entirely new ways. By repeating this fantasy in a modified form, Bersani ironically supports the triumphalist and performative readings that selectively interpret The Maids. Under the guise of taking what Genet seemed to promise as greater psychic freedom, he downplays those elements of psychic negativity that stall our capacity for redemptive fusion with other bodies, groups, and nations. Indeed, Genet's stress on his characters' lack, or “castration,” really is the most antiredemptive dimension of his work. In this respect, it is odd that Bersani uses Genet's “curative collapsing of social difference” to emphasize not separation—the brutal cut alienating the subject from sociality and its being—but rather an anticipation of union in another, homosexual form.

I suggest that antirelationality is an extension, not the flip side, of Hegelian and constructivist arguments. According to Bersani, for instance, Genet's “dépassement of the field of transgressive possibility itself” (10) is designed to reconstitute sociality. Yet for important reasons, Genet never sustains this fantasy. Antirelationality fails in his work because of his characters' demands: The gap between the subject and its object creates the “dépassement,” or self-“surpassing,” that interests Bersani. We cannot but underscore this claim's irony: The vehicle Bersani imagines Genet using to “declin[e] to participate in any sociality whatsoever” (12; original emphasis) necessarily prevents Genet from limiting difference to a form of “radical homoness” (16). To put this more simply, Bersani asks desire to serve two incompatible projects: to attenuate the subject and to reformulate the subject's relation to sociality. The paradox is simply that Bersani forgets the desire of desire by turning desire into a static, desireless formation.

I think Bersani alights on a significant dilemma in Genet's work: Genet vacillates between fantasies of attenuated and replete subjectivity, which stage the subject's deficient relation to the Other. Yet Bersani seems to forget that antirelational fantasies derive from the subject's barred relation to the Other: These fantasies derive from the subject's radical incompletion and asymmetry, rather than its antirelationality. As Beckett repeatedly illustrated, the subject stalls in its desire to retreat, but it is also limited in its capacity to advance: Recall the famous pronouncement, “I can't go on, I'll go on.”⁵³ Like Beckett, Genet tries to surpass the subject's deficiency by voiding its diverse roles,⁵⁴ yet the second endeavor never translates into the first. Hegelian and performative readings forget that Genet offers us neither the one nor the Other: His subject moves in a state of constant vacillation between these conditions.⁵⁵

To highlight this vacillation, I'll conclude with a brief reading of Genet's 1948 play, Splendid's. This play was not recovered until 1993, but Genet completed it only one year after publishing The Maids. Both plays display significant tensions between the performative and the ontological, also exploring related themes: Splendid's highlights the travesty of sexual identity as masculinity's fraudulent “parade,” not femininity's masquerade.⁵⁶ Edmund White has also noted that Splendid's “seems caught halfway between realism and stylization,” its characters gradually unraveling in their complex identifications.⁵⁷ Finally, recalling Claire and Solange's opening ritual, Splendid's also begins in medias res: “Voix de la radio: … car peu de chance qu'un tel événement subsiste. Si je décompose cette aventure, chacun des éléments, à la fin, se résorbera dans les autres [Voice of the Radio: … since such an outcome now seems highly unlikely. If I take this whole episode apart each of its elements will, in the end, blur into the others]” (15; 5).

In Splendid's, The Glory Boys (La Rafale) has kidnapped the daughter of an American millionaire and taken refuge in a luxury hotel. In an “accident,” however, one of the gangsters strangles the young woman; the men are also surrounded by police. At the end of Act One, Jean (“Johnny”) dresses as the millionaire's daughter and is led onto a balcony to convince the police and spectators that the young woman is still alive. This buys them some time, but ultimately they are betrayed by one of their fellows, an ex-cop, who becomes so disgusted by the gangsters' cowardice that he hands them over to the law.

Since Splendid's and The Maids engage with authenticity and masquerade, we might accept the radio's judgment and explore the play's interest in substitution and resemblance. As the voice promises: “If I take this whole episode apart each of its elements will, in the end, blur into the others.” However, Genet undermines this external judgment: The radio can report only the information it receives from the police. While a policeman collaborates with La Rafale, he does so quite loyally until the closing scene.

The radio's prediction is thus only partly correct: La Rafale unravels from the force of external pressure and internal antagonism, but its constitutive parts don't “blur into the others” (“se résorbera dans les autres”); instead, the gangsters confront the impossibility of shedding their criminal roles. Thus while the play begins, like The Maids, with self-conscious jokes about shattering mirrors (22; 8) and performative integrity, it ultimately engages a more compelling drama about the group's endurance and internal dynamic:

SCOTT:
Il joue. Nous jouerons tous. Lui à faire revivre son frère. Sur lui-même, il va nous l'apporter.
JEAN:
Moi, je ne joue pas.

(20)

[SCOTT:
He's playing. We're all playing. He, at reviving his brother. He's taken it on himself to bring him back to us.
JEAN:
I am not playing.]

(7)

In addition to Pierrot's vain endeavor to revive and emulate his dead brother, Splendid's carefully notes its characters' different ontologies. For instance, Scott avows of La Rafale's crimes: “Ceux qui nous réunissaient, que deviendraient-ils si tout à coup on les biffait par un trait de loyauté? En nous, nous porterions des morts. Il faut que nos crimes fleurissent [(They) brought us together again—what happens to them if we erase them with one sudden stroke of loyalty? We'll all be carrying corpses around inside. Our crimes must flourish]” (23-24; 8). This perspective recalls Claire's fantasy that she will haunt Solange after death. However, while Scott's fantasy gives coherence to La Rafale, it also impedes the gangsters' confrontation with death—at least until the play's end, when death surfaces as a pressing interest:

LE Policier:
… Il nous reste à nous faire tuer? Tu n'as pas envie … de connaître le bourreau?
SCOTT:
Pourquoi pas? De lui aussi nous avons tous rêvé. Il a assez longtemps fait partie de nos conversations et de nos plaisanteries pour être devenu notre plus cher désir.

(95; second ellipsis in original)

[THE Policeman:
… All we can do is kill ourselves? Don't you want to … get to know the executioner?
SCOTT:
Why not? We've all been dreaming about him too. He has been part of our conversations and our jokes for so long that he's become our deepest desire.]

(39; second ellipsis in original)

This scene's affective turbulence clarifies why La Rafale partakes less of individual loyalty than of group loyalty to the death drive: Like Claire and Solange's anticipation of Madame's death, the gangsters use this drive to intensify their treachery and crime.⁵⁸ Until its imminent defeat, for instance, La Rafale treats this drive with ascetic respect. As Bob remarks, “Il y a deux ans qu'on a cessé de vivre la vie du monde. On était entré dans l'aventure comme on entre au couvent [It's been two years since we stopped living the life of the world. We entered into adventure as one enters a convent]” (41; 16).

Bravo later explains that this “adventure” inaugurates in him a demand for greater cruelty, his love for Riton surfacing as a conscientious push toward their mutual self-destruction: “Je ne suis pas un homme, Riton, qui en aime un autre, mais un homme amoureux d'une aventure qu'ils n'avaient ni l'un ni l'autre le pouvoir de mener seuls. C'est pourquoi, j'ai voulu, et toujours, et dans tous les cas, que tu ailles jusqu'au bout de mes forces [I am not, Riton, a man who loves another man, but a man in love with an adventure that neither of them could ever go on alone. That is why I wanted, and always wanted, every single time, you to go right to the limit]” (70; 28). Here, Genet uses ascesis to valorize masculine rituals; he also blurs distinctions between homophilia and homosexuality in Splendid's, making the play analogous to Querelle of Brest (1947), Deathwatch (1949), and Funeral Rites (Riton is an obvious connection). However, while Bravo advances an anti-identitarian stance that places Genet conceptually at odds with most forms of gay politics, he (like Genet) also fosters a stronger commitment to homosexual desire than gay politics is usually able to countenance.⁵⁹ This point iterates Genet's interest in the tension and psychic incompatibility between identity and desire.

As we saw earlier, Genet does not disband or redeem ontology: He represents the subject at odds with its constitutive drives. Granted, this desire finally sacrifices the subject, but Genet's conception of this force and pleasure takes us beyond simple accusations of self-hatred. In Splendid's, as in The Maids and many other texts, Genet displays the profound stakes of identification: He indicates that the task of maintaining an identity is often incomparable to the joy of trying to relinquish it. In the closing scene of Splendid's, Genet offers two perspectives on this drama, the Policeman taking the more conventional path: “Je me détruis pour devenir un autre [I'm tearing myself apart so I can turn into someone else]” (101; 42). However, Scott's perversion of this dilemma returns us to a more interesting and familiar motif in Genet's work: “Il nous reste encore un luxe à nous offrir … Et qui pourrait peut-être nous servir. … Nous offrir le luxe d'être lâches [There is one final luxury left us … and one that might perhaps fulfil our need. … We're left the luxury of cowardice]” (97; 40; first ellipsis in original).

Considering Scott's epiphany, Splendid's doesn't conclude with a simple act of treachery. Although the Policeman betrays La Rafale, he does so because the group's cowardice disgusts him. Here, we glimpse an interesting tension between the simple act of betrayal and Genet's respect for the gangsters' willing pursuit of something less admirable:

SCOTT:
On n'abandonne jamais sans regret, mais ça ira mieux quand vous aurez fait comme moi
RITON:
Les gars! Essayez de tenir jusqu'au bout!
BRAVO:
Tu flanches même dans la frousse. Incapable de la mener jusqu'à sa limite. … On se fera petits. Tous petits. Et on finira par sortir tout à fait des géants que nous étions. On mènera une autre vie ailleurs.

(103-4)

[SCOTT:
One abandons nothing without regret, but it'll be better when you've done it too.
RITON:
Guys! Try and hold on to the end!
BRAVO:
You haven't even got the nerve to be shitless. Incapable of going the whole way. … We'll become small. Really tiny. And we'll end up crawling right out from under those giants we used to be. We'll lead another life. Elsewhere.]

(43)

In highlighting Genet's vacillation between repletion and alienation, Bravo clarifies my argument about performative and transgressive criticism. If Genet promotes cowardice, not treachery, it is because the former allows him to stall—rather than dissolve or rethink—identification. Like the traitor, though with much less courage and strategy, the coward may jeopardize existing identifications, but only insofar as he blissfully paralyzes his subjectivity.⁶⁰ There is no glory here, even in pursuing antirelationality: the coward stymies his personal identifications, without damaging society's overarching demands. By engaging a psychic dimension that is not reducible to the subversion/complicity binary, Splendid's offers a way out of this deadlock. Cowardice doesn't transgress or simply promote complicity: it is the only option for Genet's protagonists because utopia advances idealism, and political strategy seems too deliberate a statement of conviction. Instead, Splendid's abides by a different maxim: “[On] flanche … même dans la frousse.”

Notes

1. See Laura Oswald, Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), xiii-xvii, 39-40, 137; Richard Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968), 3-25, 215-16; Gisèle A. Child Bickel, “Genet et ses critiques,” Jean Genet: Criminalité et transcendance, Stanford French and Italian Studies LV (1987), 1-22.

2. François Mauriac may have waged the most famous attack on Genet for religious reasons. Jean-Paul Sartre recounts this attack in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 502. Political denunciations of Genet—especially in print—are now less common, but as Leo Bersani has convincingly argued, they nonetheless recur because of Genet's commitment to betrayal (see Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw,” diacritics 24.2-3 [1994], special issue on “Critical Crossings,” ed. Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, 5-6). Hans Mayer has accused Genet of profound conservatism: “This author has no intention of making accusations or unmasking society. He is a true believer in the bourgeois order, not a critic. From the depths of the social hierarchy he legitimates its structure and upper reaches” (Mayer, Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis M. Sweet [Cambridge: MIT, 1982], 255). Mayer also notes Walter Heist's claim that Genet is “permeated with fascism,” but argues that this is “based on uncareful reading and a misapprehension of the aesthetic play, the luxuriating provocation of Genet's works” (255). For detailed summaries of the hostility French critics have vented on Genet, see Coe, “Unbalanced Opinions: A Study of Jean Genet and the French Critics,” Proceedings of the Leeds Literary and Literary Society XIV, part II (1970), 27-64. Finally, for an example of quite astonishing prejudice and misreading, in which Genet is pathologized as a pervert and erotomaniac, see Maurice Chevaly, Genet: L'Amour cannibale (Marseilles: Temps Parallèle, 1989), 102-6, 110-22.

3. Sartre, Saint Genet, 502.

4. See Jonathan Dollimore, “The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic,” Critical Quarterly 28.1-2 (1986), 188-89, and “Knowledge and Pleasure in Jean Genet,” Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 313-15.

5. Genet, “Lettre à Jean-Jacques Pauvert” (1954), reprinted in Genet: Fragments … et autres textes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 102, and translated by Frenchman as “A Note on Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963), 37. Subsequent references continue representing pagination to the English version in main text.

6. See Laura Oswald, “Toward a Semiotics of Performance: Staging the Double in Jean Genet,” Poetics Today 8.2 (1987), 261-83.

7. I am alluding to Hélène Cixous's important essay “The Character of ‘Character,’” New Literary History 5.2 (1974), 383-402.

8. I have elaborated on the public and intellectual consequences of this murder in “‘The Delirium of Interpretation’: Writing the Papin Affair,” differences 5.2 (1993), 24-61.

9. This would partly refute Philip Thody's claim that the play symbolically mirrors the context of 1940s Europe. See Thody, Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 172.

10. Sartre, “Introduction” to The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays by Jean Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1962), 7.

11. Genet, Les Bonnes (Paris: Barbezat-L'Arbalète, 1947, 1976), 27, my translation. As I discuss below, Frechtman omits this sentence and conflates Claire's preceding and following statements. See The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays by Jean Genet, 43. Unless indicated, subsequent references to The Maids give pagination first to the Barbezat-L'Arbalète reprinted edition, and then, whenever possible, to Frechtman's 1954 translation.

12. See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), 236, quoting and translating Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XX: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 13: “The superego … (the commandment ‘Enjoy!’) is the correlative of castration, which is the sign that adorns our admission that the jouissance of the Other, the body of the Other, is only promised in infinity.”

13. See Lucien Goldmann, “The Theater of Genet: A Sociological Study,” The Theater of Jean Genet: A Casebook, ed. Coe (New York: Grove, 1970), 220-38; Bickel, “La société criminelle,” Jean Genet: Criminalité et transcendance, 23-48.

14. Genet, interviewed by Hubert Fichte, in Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. 1, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1978), 79.

15. See, for instance, Genet's May Day Speech at Yale University, 1970 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1970); “Introduction” to George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970), 1-8; “Violence et brutalité,” Le Monde (2 septembre 1977), 1-2; “Quartre heures à Chatila,” Revue d'études palestiniennes 6 (1983), 3-19; “L'Art est le refuge …,” in Genet et al., Les Nègres au port de la lune: Genet et les différences (Bordeaux: La Différence, 1988), 99-102.

16. Genet, “Entretien avec Madeleine Gobeil,” Jean Genet: Œuvres complètes, VI: L'Ennemi déclaré: textes et entretiens, ed. Albert Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 23, my translation.

17. Ibid.

18. See, for instance, Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 351-56.

19. See Jeanette Savona, “The Maids: Slavery and Absolute Desire,” Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983), 68; Jean Gitenet, “Profane and Sacred Reality in Jean Genet's Theatre,” Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 176.

20. See Ihab Hassan, “Genet: The Rites of Death,” The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971; Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982), 199; Lawrence Leighton, “Ecstasy through Compulsion,” Kenyon Review 17.4 (1955), 639-40; and Mark S. Weinberg, “The Maids by Jean Genet,” Theatre Journal 33.2 (1981), 253-54. See also Dollimore's critique of this argument in “The Dominant and the Deviant,” 189-90.

21. See Oswald, Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance, 126-27, 137; Sylvie Debevec Henning, “The Ritual Im-plications of Les Bonnes,” boundary 2 10.2 (1982), 219-43; Dan Popa, “Les Bonnes de Jean Genet: L'axe de la combinaison,” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 14.2 (1976), 301-15. For a more complicated reading of “character” in Genet's work, see.Herbert Blau, “Disseminating Sodom,” The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 123-28.

22. Sartre, “Introduction” to The Maids and Deathwatch, 27.

23. Ibid., 27. We can appreciate this simplification when Sartre writes: “in order to hate and to love, there must be two; hence, Claire can hate only a phantom of herself embodied by Solange. But we again fall upon a whirligig: for at the same time the feelings are true; it is true that Claire hates Madame, true that she hates Solange and that, through the mediation of Solange, she tries to hate herself” (original emphasis). While these points are significant, Sartre also cannot conceive of self-hatred without the presence or intervention of another; that is, he cannot consider intrapsychic splitting in nonmaterial terms. I contend that Genet can, and that this is what renders his play so complicated.

24. For related readings of Genet's play, see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Jacques Lacan, Literary Theory, and The Maids of Jean Genet,” Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Freudian Dissidents and Non-Freudians: A Casebook, ed. Joseph Natoli (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984), 100-19, and Guy Vogelweith, “Le Désir d'être bonne,” Obliques 2 (1972), 7-10.

25. Sartre, “Introduction,” 20.

26. See Christine Delphy, “Our Friends and Ourselves: The Hidden Foundations of Various Pseudo-Feminist Accounts,” Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984), 119-28; Luce Irigaray, “Des marchandises entre elles,” Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 187-94.

27. See Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom” (1975), Analysis 1 (1989), special issue: “Papers on the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis,” ed. and trans. Russell Grigg, Leonardo Rodriguez, and Diane Wieneke, 7-26.

28. Savona, “The Maids: Slavery and Absolute Desire,” 46. For a comparable reading of Genet and fantasy, see Jerry Aline Flieger, “Dream, Humor, and Power in Genet's Notre-Dame-des-fleurs,” French Forum 9.1 (1984), 69-83.

29. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet, 258.

30. Goldmann, “The Theater of Genet: A Sociological Study,” 220-38; Jacques Ehrmann, “Genet's Dramatic Metamorphosis from Appearance to Freedom,” Yale French Studies 29 (1962), 33-43.

31. Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 224-26.

32. Sartre, “Introduction,” 18.

33. Oreste F. Pucciani, “Tragedy, Genet and The Maids,” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963), 47.

34. For instance, Gay McAuley, “Paradigmatic Structures in Text and Performance: Movement and Gesture in Four Performances of Les Bonnes,” Ars Semeiotica 10.1-2 (1987), 3-25. For discussion of gender performativity, see Judith Butler, “Lana's ‘Imitation’: Melodramatic Repetition and the Gender Performative,” Genders 9 (1990), 1-18, and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). For astute psychoanalytic critiques of Butler's claims, see Tim Dean, “Transsexual Identification, Gender Performance Theory, and the Politics of the Real,” Literature and Psychology 39.4 (1993), 1-27, and Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” Read My Desire, 201-36.

35. Genet, as quoted in Sartre, “Introduction,” 8.

36. With Genet's permission, Les Bonnes was first performed in Paris, 1947, by three women.

37. For references to Claire and Solange's incestuous desire for each other, which Louis Jouvet deleted from the French version, see Savona, “The Maids: Slavery and Absolute Desire,” 61-62.

38. See Joan Rivière, “Womanliness As a Masquerade” (1929), and Stephen Heath, “Joan Rivière and the Masquerade,” both in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 35-62, and Craig Owens, “Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, Men in Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987), 219-33.

39. Elaine Showalter, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,” Men in Feminism, 132.

40. See Copjec,”Response,” Camera Obscura 20-21 (1989), 123, and Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 105, 108-9. Catherine Clément has similarly interpreted the proposition, “The woman does not exist”: “Wave after wave of feminists have been saying the same thing for a century […] When women rise up against the myth of women that men have foisted upon them in our cultures, they too … are denying the existence of the eternal Woman, age-old and immutable, half of a Totality whose center is Man” (The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. A. Goldhammer [New York: Columbia UP, 1983], 62).

41. For endorsements of this argument about Genet and femininity, see Cixous, “Rethinking Differences: An Interview,” trans. Isabelle de Courtivron, Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 76, 78-79; Kate Millett, “Jean Genet,” Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 341, 350.

42. Genet, “Pour jouer Les Nègres” (1958; Paris: Folio, 1963), 15. In this preface, Genet also asks polemically: “Qu'est-ce que c'est donc un Noir? Et d'abord, c'est de quelle couleur? [What then is a Black? First of all, what is his color?]” (15). See also his “Letter to a Would-Be Producer,” trans. B. Frechtman, Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963), 80-81, where he opposes a Polish production of The Blacks: “Except for miners, there are no Negroes in Poland. But this is not a play about miners” (81).

43. See Sigmund Freud, “Resistance and Repression” (1916-1917), Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVI, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 218.

44. Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made By Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I)” (1910), Standard Edition, XI, 166-67.

45. Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw,” 14. Subsequent references give pagination in main text.

46. See Jacques Guicharnaud (in collaboration with June Guicharnaud), “The Glory of Annihilation: Jean Genet,” Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, 101. Despite Guicharnaud's provocative title and valuable argument about identification and aggression, he ultimately places a redemptive demand on Genet's plays: “They are quite simply a search for personal salvation—his own and that of his characters—and while the terms are very special to him, it is a really modern salvation: asserting one's authenticity within the social and political world” (103).

47. Bersani carefully acknowledges that the novel is exceptional in this respect:

    “More boldly than any other of Genet's works, Funeral Rites raises the possibility of an escape from the spectacular transgression itself, and, as we shall see, in so doing it also sketches an antimonumental aesthetic at odds with Genet's apparent cult of gestural beauty. In his most original move, Genet imagines a kind of nonrelational betrayal.”

    (9; original emphasis)

48. A possible exception is “Le Pêcheur du Suquet” (1953), in which Genet likens betrayal to an internal forgetting, caused by the reorientation of fantasy and dream:

    “Mais il fond dans ma bouche. N'est-ce qu'un vers. Pour quelle fille et quel jardin? Quel rêve l'assoupit, le roule en lui-même, délicatement le tourment, lui donne cette lente, molle colique?—Tu me dédaignes?. … Ainsi je reste seul, oublié de lui qui dort dans mes bras

    [But he's melting in my mouth. Only one verse. For what girl and what garden? What dream makes him drowsy, rolls him up within himself, delicately torments him, twists his stomach lingeringly, gently?—Do you reject me?. … Thus I remain alone, forgotten by him who is sleeping in my arms]”

    (Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet, trans. Steven Finch [San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1981], 113, 119).

49. See Blau, The Eye of Prey, 19; Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw,” 15.

50. For elaboration on this and related arguments, see my review article on Bersani's work, “Uncertain Terms of Pleasure,” Modern Fiction Studies 43.4 (1996), 807-26.

51. For a comparable reading of Bersani's interest in the redemption of subjectivity, not art, see Dean, “Sex and Syncope,” Raritan 15.3 (1996), 14-15.

52. Genet, Funeral Rites (1947), as quoted in Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw,” 11.

53. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1958), Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 414.

54. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit offer an astute reading of this compromise in “Beckett: Inhibited Reading,” Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 54-55. For related discussion, see E. M. Cioran, “Thinking against Oneself,” The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard, and introduced by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet, 1987), 33-47, and my essay “The Hunger for Death: Giacometti's Immanence and the Anorexic Body,” Discourse 19.3 (1997), 13-42.

55. This vacillation underscores Lacan's conception of aphanisis, in which the subject “fades” when it substitutes meaning for “Being.” Basing his account on the highwayman's command, “Your money or your life!,” Lacan clarified the subject's castration by demonstrating the subject's inability to hold onto “money” and “life.” If the subject chooses money, for instance, it loses both. In this way, Lacan argued that castration is not voluntary; rather, it partially resolves the threat of losing Being and meaning. See The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 212, 218; and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), 168-73. For an example of aphanisis in Genet that also restages an imaginary correlation between homosexuality and narcissism, consider Bob's exclamation in Splendid's: “Monsieur est seul avec lui-même, Monsieur se mire dans son image. Il la fixe dans les yeux et il s'y noie [Sir's all alone with himself, Sir's admiring himself in his own image. He's staring it straight in the eye and he's drowning]” (Genet, Splendid's [1948], [Paris: Barbezat-L'Arbalète, 1993], 83; Splendid's, introduced by Edmund White, trans. Neil Bartlett [London: Faber, 1995], 34). Subsequent references give pagination in main text to the French edition, followed by the English.

56. See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 37 and 227.

57. White, “Introduction” to Splendid's, xi.

58. For instance, Scott declares “La trahison est douce” [treason tastes sweet] (Splendid's, 25; 9).

59. Bersani elaborates on this argument in “The Gay Outlaw,” 9.

60. For a comparable—and amusing—account of this paralysis, consider Sagoe's ideas about the philosophy of “Voidancy” in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970), 71.

I am grateful to Jacqueline Rose, Herbert Blau, Jane Gallop, Gerald Prince, Jerry Aline Flieger, and especially Jason Friedman for comments on an earlier draft.

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