[In the following essay, Witt argues that Genet's works have a subtextual female presence, which serves as a source of destruction for the male-ordered world he presents.]

A feminist writer? It is not a label that interested Genet; it is not one that comes readily to mind in identifying the great poète maudit of our century, yet feminist theorists of the stature of Kate Millett and Hélène Cixous have so argued. Written in the heady early days of the women's movement, Millett's Sexual Politics presented Genet's work as an antidote to Lawrence, Miller and Mailer—a sign of hope that the literary “sexual counterrevolution” was at an end. Genet's homosexuality, according to Millett, allowed him an insight into the arbitrariness of sexual roles so that his queens and pimps become caricatures of heterosexual stereotypes.

Cixous, during the first wave of French feminism, emphasized the challenge to patriarchal values at work in Genet's texts. Again in relation to his homosexuality, she saw his work grafted onto the attachment of son to mother and infused with desire for an absent maternal space. Yet the mother figures also as a harbinger of death—l'assassein.¹ In Souffles (1975) Genet (spelled also Jenais and Genêt) appears as a character: the narrator's lover beyond sexual identity who figures sometimes as a son and sometimes as “l'amant maternel.” The title of La Jeune Née, published in the same year, appears to be another word-play on je nais/Genet. There Cixous specifically associates Genet, or rather Genet's texts, with both a deconstructive and a maternal function. “Ainsi sous le nom de Jean Genêt [sic], ce qui s'inscrit dans le mouvement d'un texte qui se divise, se met en pièces, se remembre, c'est une fémininité foisonnante, maternelle.”²

Taking as a pre-text Journal d'un voleur,³ where Genet identifies his maternal lineage with the plant genêt (broom), Derrida, like Cixous, identifies the double-edged nourishing space and phallic, castrating mother as the motivating force behind Genet's writing. In Glas Derrida plays on Genet's self-identification with genêt (“la recherche de la mère-plante, Genêt”) to equate decomposition into the vegetable realm with deconstruction of patriarchal symbols. Taking on his mother's name and making it a flower by means of a circumflex, Genet, for Derrida, magically becomes both the mother of his writing and his own mother. Speaking in Genet's voice, Derrida makes the same word-play as Cixous: “je nais une fois de plus, je m'accouche comme une fleur.”⁴ Using the two-column format of Glas to juxtapose Genet's flowers with Hegel's “natural religion” of plants and animals, Derrida envisions the flowers in his texts as bisexual or transsexual signs, evoking at once erection/castration/vagina, turning from one to the other as a glove turns inside out.

Aspects of the feminine in Genet's work have been discussed by critics—Lewis Cetta, Gisèle Féal, Jeanette Savona⁵—but there has not yet been a systematic exploration of the matter in Genet's entire œuvre. What I will propose here is a reading that sees a female (primarily matriarchal) principle as the unacknowledged power behind, and ultimate destroyer of, what appears to be a male-ordered world in each of Genet's texts. The female presence not only stands in dialogical opposition to the male world, but ultimately undermines and engulfs it.

The question as I see it may be approached on two levels. First, in terms of figures. Genet's fictional and dramatic personae, rarely conventional characters, tend toward masks of certain types. Those of interest to us here are the transvestite, the whore, the mother and the queen. Rather than demonstrating the fluidity of social sexual roles as in Millett's view, these figures postulate the domain of the feminine as archaic and matriarchal, both subversive and dominant, operating beyond and behind the political or active male world. Second, on the level of narration, the problem poses itself in terms of an opposition between spatiality and temporality. Although Genet, as Sartre remarked, wrote his way out of prison in a literal and figurative sense,⁶ imprisoning spaces, often signs of an absent, desired maternal space, continue to exert a primary, centripetal force in his narration. In the plays as well as the novels, narrative conflict tends to stem from a confrontation between the spatial and the temporal, between archaic and timeless female existence and (chrono)logical, linear male action. Genet has built on his embodiments of Feminine/Masculine both a mythology and a narrative methodology.

FIGURES

The interviewer for Playboy magazine, naturally desirous to find out whether or not Genet had ever been interested in women, must have been somewhat taken aback by his answer: “There are only four women who have interested me: The Holy Virgin, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Curie.”⁷ An apparently motley assortment, these four correspond to some of Genet's deepest poetic preoccupations. The Virgin Mary, among other things, is the antipodal representative of Genet's own absent mother: fille-mère, lowly and glorified, humble and saintly, both divine plenitude and source of human history. Joan of Arc, on the other hand, represents the non-mother, the virgin warrior, feminine in her humility and saintliness, masculine as warrior, as carrier of a phallic sword, transvestite. Marie-Antoinette, most artificial of queens, the queen who seemed to reign by masquerade, the queen who was put into prison (where, Genet speculates, she must have learned eighteenth-century argot), is also the royal persona who signals the end and thus the artifice of royalty. Involved in scandals, accused of sexual misdeeds, one of the “Princesses de la Haute Impudeur” (Miracle de la rose 416), she represents as well the queen as whore. The inclusion of Madame Curie is somewhat more puzzling. She may represent for Genet a modern Joan of Arc, feminine by nature but engaged in a traditionally masculine activity, a synthesis of archaic female power and male action, a phallic mother. Genet's four women all exemplify aspects of his four significant figures of the Feminine: transvestite, whore, mother and queen.

Genet's most completely realized transvestite is Divine/Lou Culafroy in Notre Dame des Fleurs. From the time that Lou Culafroy disguises himself as a nun until she reigns as the dying queen of Montmartre, Divine surrounds herself with an increasingly theatrical paraphernalia of costumes, wigs, makeup, props and gestures that grow more complex and more artificial as she ages. Because of the theatrical nature of their creation, sexual roles always appear on the verge of metamorphosis, as when Divine undergoes a period of “virilization” catalyzed by the bisexual Notre Dame des Fleurs, or when another tante, Mimosa, suddenly speaks “male” language (“Fous le camp, sale putain” [57]), thus revealing her “other” nature. In an important passage analyzing the significance of “male” and “female” for Divine, Genet in fact defines the narrative function that the two states of being will assume in his work:

Si Divine sentait “femme,” elle pensait “homme”. … Sa fémininité n'était pas qu'une mascarade. Mais, pour penser “femme” en plein, ses organes la gênaient. Penser, c'est faire un acte. … Car, si pour définir un état qu'elle éprouvait, Divine osait employer le féminin, elle ne le pouvait pas pour définir une action qu'elle faisait. Et tous les jugements “femme” qu'elle portait étaient, en réalité, des conclusions poétiques.

(143)

The transvestite thus embodies within him/herself the dialogical tension between feminine and masculine, atemporal and temporal, static and active, central to all of Genet's work. It is for this reason that Genet in another context names “St. Tiresias” the patron of actors (Lettres à Roger Blin 62-63). Although transvestites as such do not play an important part in Genet's later work, the artificial nature of created sex roles and the possibility of “slippage” from masculine to feminine remains. In Miracle de la rose sexuality appears less as a series of theatrical roles than as a principle of social organization, the “males” of both the children's prison at Mettray and the adult prison of Fontevrault assuming the upper ranks, but with the potential of passing from female to male or of subversion of males by females always present. In Les Paravents transvestism, or “slippage,” seems to take the form of couples who present themselves as a single being with a masculine and a feminine side. “Le gendarme” and “La gendarme,” Monsieur and Madame Blankensee, and most prominently Said and Leila represent this phenomenon. In each case the female presents a threat to the male: “Tu n'es rien que mon malheur,” says Said to Leila (287). Perhaps the ultimate transvestite is Diouf in Les Nègres, in turn feminine, masculine, white, black, European, African, Christian, pagan, mother, father, priest, actor.

The polar states of masculinity and femininity appear throughout Genet's work as the mac, the dur, on top and in control (but always in danger of being feminized) and the whore, utterly subservient to the will and desire of the male, with no means of action of her own. It is by exalting her very abjection that the whore will ultimately triumph. Divine proudly proclaims herself “une vieille putain putassière.” Irma, in Le Balcon, advises Carmen to “exalter ton métier, tu n'as que lui.” Warda, in Les Paravents, fights to maintain the extraordinary style of her house of ill repute. Vertu, in Les Nègres, dominates the white establishment through the power of her sexuality. Representative of Derrida's figure of the penis inverted to vagina, the whore reigns through the undoing of patriarchy—the power, as we shall see, of the queen. Malika, in Les Paravents, reveals that “en français, mon nom signifie reine” (349).

The whore may also demonstrate certain maternal attributes—Irma is a mère maquerelle, and Mme Liane mothers Querelle and his brother. The figure of the mother is at the very core of Genet's work. The mythological implications of Genet's numerous and varied mothers have been studied in conjunction with the research of Ernst Neumann by Gisèle Féal and with that of Joseph Campbell by Lewis Cetta. A more fruitful source of comparison, in my opinion, lies in Bachofen's theories of Mutterrecht.⁸ In Bachofen's schema the stages of human social organization are basically three: (1) a state of sexual promiscuity or “hetaerism,” (2) an assertion of worship of the “Great Mother” and power in the hands of mothers and queens, and (3) patriarchal rule.

Bachofen identifies the first two states with Africa/Asia and with vegetation, the night and the moon, and the third stage with the West (particularly the rise of Rome), the sun, division of labor and private property. While he has no doubt that Western “solar” patriarchy represents a higher and more spiritual stage in the progress of humanity, Bachofen is also fascinated by the remnants of the earlier mythology that remain in Roman civilization, testimonials of man's nostalgia for a “rule by mothers.” The sacred stone of Cybele, the Asiatic Magna Mater that was brought to Rome and worshipped with orgiastic rites, demonstrates that mother-power remains as a trace of the other within the heart of patriarchal institutions. Julia Kristeva, citing St. Augustine, comments on the same phenomenon, calling it in her terms an “absorbation de jouissance dans le symbolique.”⁹ The priests who presided at the worship of Cybele were required to castrate themselves. In this light, Roger's self-mutilation and the police chief's burial in the mausoleum of the “Grand Balcon” signify not only a return to childhood and the womb/tomb, but also an acknowledgment of the maternal power behind and beyond the phallic order, whether of the political left or of the right, a power of which Chantal's last words to Roger, “Je t'enveloppe et je te contiens” (97), are a harbinger. The Great Mother as a specifically non-Western force makes her appearance with Félicité in Les Nègres: Mother Africa, corn goddess, Queen of the Night. In Les Paravents, whose original title was Les Mères,¹⁰ the anti and anti-occidental Great Mother is variously embodied in Said's mother, Kadidja, Warda and Onmou. As in Bachofen's schema, Genet associates vegetation and the night with the matriarchal-oriental African as opposed to the patriarchal-occidental (the colonists, in the case of Les Paravents). Said's mother leads Leila into the night forest, shellfish and algae cling to the men who visit Warda, Warda (whose name means “rose” in Arabic) is covered with roses when she dies—and rose is the opening word of the play, pronounced by Said to greet the dawn. Genet's work is of course permeated with flowers—his “signature,” for Derrida. Particularly significant in this context is Genet's self-identification with flowers and the vegetable realm in general through his mother-name Genêt. “Si par elles [les fleurs] je rejoins aux domaines inférieurs [marécages, algues] je m'éloigne encore des hommes” (Journal 49).

As in the work of other homosexual writers, Cocteau, for example, the couple mother-son plays an important part among Genet's personae and in his mythology. Genet's couple, however, tends to take the form of the pietà—a mother mourning a dead son. References to paintings and sculptures of the pietà motif abound throughout Un Captif amoureux, but the precedent is established earlier. Notre Dame des Fleurs opens and closes with Ernestine in the role of mater dolorosa; Jean's mother assumes the role in Pompes funèbres, as does Said's in Les Paravents. In the posthumous Captif, ostensibly a kind of journal of Genet's experiences with Palestinian revolutionary groups, the encounter with, and subsequent attempt to refind, the young Palestinian Hamza and his mother constitutes the desire that sustains the circuitous narration. On the final page of the book, Genet asks himself: “Tout ce que j'ai dit, écrit, se passa, mais pourquoi ce couple est-il tout ce qui me reste de profond de la révolution palestinienne?” (504). In fact, it is not a couple, but the aged mother who remains at the end of Genet's narration—Hamza is either somewhere in Germany or, more probably, dead. As in Notre Dame, Pompes funèbres and Les Paravents, the son, who appeared to be the active half of the couple, is finally reabsorbed and contained in the eternal and static figure of the mother.

The figure of the Queen appears to be for Genet an allegorical aggrandizement of various aspects of the mythical feminine: Other, Whore, Mother, Goddess. His first queen is Divine, crowning herself in the depths of abjection with her false teeth. Claire, the maid, another make-believe queen in squalor, parades, according to Solange, as Marie-Antoinette in Madame's apartment. In Le Balcon and Les Nègres the queen, augmenting her theatrical attributes, has become head of state.

While it is clear that in both of these plays the traditional pillars of Western power are represented by the figures of Bishop (missionary in Les Nègres), Judge and General, no one seems to have asked why the supreme power of the fascist as well as the colonial regime is represented by a queen rather than a king. Here again, Bachofen offers an approach. In his theory the reign of queens coincides with the second, matriarchal stage of human history, the Afro-Asian predominance that will cede to, but, through mythology and religion, remain imbedded in, European patriarchy. Bachofen cites several examples of legendary or actual couples in which the dark oriental queen seduces the light European king: Candace and Alexander, Dido and æneas, Cleopatra and Anthony, Zenobia and Aurelian. Even though she is ultimately vanquished or abandoned by him, her trace remains. Furthermore, aspects of the oriental queen are found even in such exempla of Roman matronly virtue as the myth of Tanaquil. Kristeva perceives the same phenomenon: “La puissance maternelle, éprouvée et maintenue dans le noir, se réfugie dans l'autorité de l'Etat sous toutes ses formes” (490). In this light the European queen (when reigning alone rather than as the consort of a king) would appear to be a kind of double of the matriarchal and patriarchal. As an occidental sovereign, she must uphold “solar” or patriarchal virtues, while as a female she necessarily incarnates more archaic powers.

Who is the Queen in Le Balcon? First of all, as described by the royal envoy, an absence: she embroiders or does not embroider a (Mallarméan?) swan on a handkerchief, she stands on one leg and wanders in the secret rooms of the palace, she is dead or not dead (perhaps only a little “cooked”)—it is no wonder that the envoy's communications exasperate the police chief, for whom the queen must be someone. She is, he recognizes, the source of his power: “C'est sur elle que je m'appuie, c'est en son nom que je travaille à me faire un nom” (100). In accordance with the envoy's plan, the power structure will be turned inside out so that the theatrical appearances of the bordello will become its reality and the mère maquerelle the source of the state's power. Georges, to his initial annoyance, will be subject to Irma, his power dependent on the representation of his figure in her salons. Yet it is the police chief who admonishes “Bishop,” “Judge” and “General” that the Queen (now Irma) is the “sublime” presence to whom they are subject. Irma catalyzes the power of the bordello, for, as Roger remarks, “tout se passe dans la présence d'une femme.” The revolutionaries also create a Queen for themselves with the metamorphosis of Chantal from Roger's lover to Image. It is not because of lack of military or political strategy that the revolutionaries fail, but because Chantal is killed in the arms of Irma, her “queenly” power reabsorbed into the Grand Balcon.

The nature of the queen's power becomes more explicit in Les Nègres. No longer the absent, evanescent, narrated figure of Le Balcon, the “white” queen (theatrically created by a mask) seems a stylization of Madame in Les Bonnes—vain, silly, unaware of the gulf between her order and the Blacks (“Mais qu'est-ce que je leur ai fait? Je suis bonne, douce, et belle,” she says [143]). Her function as mother of European civilization (she “hatches” Chartres and Celtic ruins) gives her a power over the other figureheads of colonialism who say they “don't know how to hatch,” but white culture seems to have over-refined her both to ineffectuality and to the color of death, as evidenced by the “Litanie des blèmes.” The ritual chants in which the queen is juxtaposed with Vertu, and later with Félicité, indicate that the queen's whiteness (as the mask shows) is a state refined out of blackness, but that her power may ultimately return to blackness. Here is an extract from the first of these chants, between Vertu, Village and the Queen:

VERTU:
Je suis la Reine Occidentale à la paleur de lis! Résultat précieux de tant de siècles travaillés pour un pareil miracle!
VILLAGE:
… Nu? Ou l'épaule couverte d'une feuille? Mon sexe orné de mousse …
VERTU et la Reine,
ensemble:… Sauf qu'un peu d'ombre est restée sous mon aisselle …
VILLAGE:
… de mousse, ou d'algues?

(105-06)

The references to the traces of darkness and of the vegetable realm still borne by the over-refined white queen indicate the presence of the power of African matriarchy behind the institutions of patriarchy. The inevitability of re-absorption into the original source of power becomes evident in the duo with Félicité:

FéLICITé:
Si vous êtes la lumière et que nous soyons l'ombre, tant qu'il y aura la nuit où vient sombrer le jour …
LA Reine:
Je vais vous faire exterminer.
FéLICITé:
Sotte, que vous seriez plate, sans cette ombre qui vous donne tant de relief … nous étions la Nuit en personne. Non celle qui est absence de lumière, mais la mère généreuse et terrible qui contient la lumière et les actes.

(142)

The queen's power, like the corpse fed by the corn goddess, is eternal but cyclical. If it belongs to the realm of the vegetable and the night, it may be transmitted (as in Bachofen's theory) into the solar order while retaining traces of its origin, like dark hair under the arms. The white queen thus appears to be an aberrant, temporary mutant of the original, nocturnal Magna Mater, giver of life and death, birth and destruction, at once the “hatcher” of the paternal, symbolic order and its potential destroyer. The fact that the fascist and colonial states in Le Balcon and Les Nègres have as their head a queen is indicative of the male order's ability to absorb and contain the power of the Other (sexuality, jouissance, maternal energy) as well as its inevitable destruction from within by that Other. The subservience of whore to client is turned inside out when the whore-mother Irma plays the role of queen, as is the subservience of black to white when the queen removes her white mask. In neither case, it should be noted, does the extra-theatrical or, more accurately, extra-ritual “revolution” affect the course of events: it is rather a catalyst helping to incite a natural process. Even after the apparently successful revolution in Les Paravents, it is the mothers, in their eternal form, that have the last word.

As Genet's feminine figures tend to subvert and reclaim the world of action ostensibly controlled by males, similarly certain maternal spaces—the penal colony at Guinea, called a “sein maternal” in Journal d'un voleur, Mettray in Miracle de la rose—function as both the source and the termination of masculine action. It is this presence that undermines linear narrativity in Genet's novels and plays, causing these forms to tend toward ritual or poetic statement.

NARRATION AND SPACE

Julia Kristeva's concept of “monumental temporality,” a concept of time that is “all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space,”¹¹ the time of female subjectivity from which the male-oriented linear time (subject-verb, beginning-end, history) emerges, seems to describe what I would call the spatial temporality dominant in Genet's narration. Related also to what Mircea Eliade has described as mythological time (“in illo tempore”),¹² the space-time configuration that generates and finally reabsorbs the stories told by the narrator or the dramatic personae is originally the time of prison, the prison that figures as a maternal breast or womb, that resembles Kristeva's sense of Plato's chora. Prison, where one day is indistinguishable from another, seals itself off spatially, temporally and morally from the logic and history of “your world.” If Genet stopped writing “creatively,” according to one of his last interviews, it was because he had succeeded in finally freeing himself from the poetic powers of his maternal prison: “créer, c'est toujours parler de l'enfance.”¹³

Jurij Lotman's work on the role of space in mythological and artistic texts and Teresa de Laurentis's feminist adaptation of his theories help to clarify Genet's use of “monumental” time-spaces. Lotman postulates a type of original “mythological” text that is cyclical in nature and organized topologically so that places and characters are interchangeable. But whereas myth-texts dscribe the way things are, the birth-death-resurrection cycle of man and the universe, another kind of text was needed to tell “news” or to report anomalies or incidents that contravened the primordial order of things. Temporality in the former type of text is cyclical, in the latter linear. Lotman sees the origin of what he calls the modern plot-text in the development of the myth-text into a form of narration and the reciprocal influence of the two forms of texts. He suggests that the most basic form of plot structure in the myths that have broken from ritual and assumed narrative form involves a mobile character invading an immobile space:

The elementary sequence of events in myth can be reduced to a chain: entry into closed space—emergence from it (this chain is open at both ends and can be endlessly multiplied). Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as “a cave,” “the grave,” “a house,” “woman” (and, correspondingly, be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness) … entry into it is interpreted on various levels as “death,” “conception,” “return home” and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical.¹⁴

De Laurentis (who distorts Lotman's myth-text/plot-text somewhat) argues that this schema clearly postulates the subject, hero and human being as male and the non-transformable, maternal plot-space as female.¹⁵ Heroes act, transform culture, and are reborn by entering and emerging from female space.

This schema may describe the basis of the traditional Oedipal narrative, but what if the female space were to become an active principle in the plot, engulfing and entrapping the male rather than passively permitting his successful reemergence and return? In that case we might have plot-text struggling against more archaic forms of myth-text, and this is precisely what occurs in many of Genet's texts. I have shown elsewhere how spatial narration, a narrative that proceeds from a primordial space generating related spaces and returning to the original space, is the dominant strategy in both Notre Dame des Fleurs and Le Balcon, and how both a mythology and a spatial configuration of prison functions in Genet's entire œuvre.¹⁶ It is true that the domination of a “monumental” space-time configuration is most evident in the works that Genet wrote while in prison or immediately after his release (Notre Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, Haute Surveillance), but its presence as the female and lyric antagonist to linear action exercises an important function throughout his literary production.

In Genet's first two novels, Notre Dame des Fleurs and Miracle de la rose, the prison cell of the homodiegetic narrator¹⁷ functions as a frame with clear indications that the text is being written in prison. In Pompes funèbres the site of the frame becomes a fake stage-set monastery (10), and in Querelle de Brest the frame disappears altogether. In Notre Dame “Jean Genet” presents himself as spinning out tales from his cell and then bringing them back to their point of origin. After narrating some of the adventures of Mignon-les-petits-pieds, for example, Genet has Mignon arrested and put into the prison where he himself resides, so that “les détours les plus longs m'y ramènent enfin, à ma prison, à ma cellule” (162). Superimposed on Genet's cell is Divine's attic room to which Mignon always returns and which functions as the space of her feminine and timeless state, as opposed to masculine actions such as Mignon's petty thievery and Notre Dame's act of murder (see above, p. 175). Paralleling the cyclical movement of the narration away from and back into the frame (the dream-fantasy time-space of the narrator's cell) is the opening and closing of the narrated material with the funeral of Divine and the monumental, theatrical presence of her mother, Ernestine. Ernestine is also, like “Genet,” a spinner of tales, or perhaps a maternal space, a chora, in which tales originate: “Elle avait la bouche pleine de contes, et l'on se demande comment ils pouvaient naître d'elle, qui ne lisait chaque soir qu'un fade journal: les contes naissaient du journal, comme les miens des romans populaires” (175). The figure of Ernestine is perhaps another “signature” of the author, of Genet as “mother of his texts,” in Derrida's words. Similarly, as Genet-narrator prepares to tell the story of his dead friend Jean in Pompes funèbres, he describes himself as being “enceint d'un sentiment qui pouvait … me faire accoucher dans quelques jours d'un être étrange” (24).

As Michel Foucault observes, a mythology of death and resurrection is frequently associated with prison cells, closed spaces analogous to the caves in which young initiates are sealed to be reborn.¹⁸ Genet specifically associates his cell and other closed places with a symbolic womb, a preparation for rebirth. In the early poem “Marche funèbre” his mourning for the young Pilorge leads him to seek consolation in his cell:

Où sans vieillir je meurs je t'aime ô ma prison.
J'ai trop de place encore ce n'est pas mon tombeau
Trop grande est ma cellule et trop pure ma fenêtre
Dans la nuit prénatale attendant de renaître
Je me laisse vivant par un signe plus haut
                                        De la Mort reconnaître.

(Poèmes 48)

Similarly, in the prison in the former convent at Fontevrault, site of Miracle de la rose, on rainy days “la cellule n'était plus qu'une masse informe d'avant la naissance, avec une âme unique où la conscience individuelle se perdait” (319). In this case the desire for rebirth takes the form of the conjuring of the children's reformatory (colonie) at Mettray, a maternal space surrounded by flowers that contains the inmates as brothers. In thinking of his former “brothers,” Genet muses: “Ce mot [frères] m'écœure parce qu'il me rattache aux hommes par un cordon ombilical, il me replonge à l'intérieur d'un ventre. C'est par la mère que le mot nous lie. C'est à la terre qu'il appartient. … Il fallait que j'aime ma Colonie pour que jusqu'à présent son influence me nimbe encore” (317). Clearly, the colonie functions as the only mother that the “brothers” have, but it is nonetheless only a sign of Mother, a sign that elicits desire for the eternally absent: “Notre tristesse appelait obscurément, désespérément une femme dont la tendresse serait une consolation à notre malheur …” (353). It is this desire that informs the entire narrative movement of Miracle—the painful evocation of Mettray, the reunion with Divers, the mystic ascension of Harcamone and the “miracle of the rose.” If the text on one level recounts the narrator's evolution from female to male, from môme to casseur, it is not, finally, the story of a liberation (Lotman's entry into a closed space and emergence from it—the elemental plot-text), but one of a regression into the closed, maternal space and a rebirth within that context. This becomes explicit towards the end:

Je chargeai la Colonie de tous ces ridicules et troublants attributs du sexe, jusqu'à ce que … entre elle et moi s'établît une union d'âme à âme qui n'existe qu'entre mère et fils. … La mère se précisa. En cellule, je retrouvais pour de bon son sein qui palpitait et, avec elle, j'engageai de vrais dialogues et peut-être ces avatars qui faisaient de Mettray ma mère aggravèrent-ils du sentiment d'inceste l'amour que je portais à Divers, sorti du même sein que moi.

(387)

Pompes funèbres (1947) would seem to mark a clear break with Genet's first two novels in that prison no longer figures as either the frame or the space from which stories are generated and to which they return. Yet the stories Genet tells, worlds superimposed on each other, all become reabsorbed into the rite of mourning, itself encapsulated in the figure of the little maid holding a daisy, alone in her room, with which the text ends. In Querelle de Brest the dominant maternal space returns in a new form, one that will become obsessive for Genet, the brothel. All of the major characters come and go from “La Feria,” and it is the site of two important events: Querelle's decision to expiate the murder he has committed by submitting himself sexually to the brothel's owner, Norbert, and his subsequent coupling with his brother's mistress and Norbert's wife, Madame Lysiane.

In Genet's fantasy (projected onto the viewpoint of a “sailor,” since the narrator has become an editorial “nous”) femininity and luxuriousness conflate in the closed space that generates desire because the brothel appears forbidden to all but initiates from the outside (mobile and male) world. Protected by a door armed with metal spikes, ugly and sordid on the exterior during the day, it incites dreams of luxury by night: “A la seule vue de sa lanterne et des persiennes tirées, on la croyait pleine du luxe chaud, fait de seins, de hanches laiteuses sous des robes collantes de satin noir, gorgée de gorges, de cristaux, de glaces, de parfums, de champagne, auxquels rêve le matelot …” (220). Like the prison in Haute Surveillance, and the brothels in Le Balcon and Les Paravents, it is protected against the outside air (221). As the reader is never privileged to visualize the interior of the brothel except through fantasy or through metaphor, the space is derealized. Its inner sanctum, Madame Lysiane's room, is metaphorized as an oyster, but the reader is permitted a glimpse of the objects in it as metonymical extensions of what Genet terms her “opulent” femininity: “C'était son huître et le doux éclat de la nacre dont elle était la perle royale: la nacre des satins bleus, des glaces biseautées, des rideaux, du papier, des lumières. La perle de sa gorge et … la double perle de sa croupe” (341).

Reminiscent of another oyster-woman whose room appears as a part of her intimate self—Sartre's Marcelle in her pink room in L'Age de raison—Lysiane's maternal-sexual being, though portrayed with a tinge of irony, does not inspire the disgust evident in Sartre's representation. On the contrary, Genet succeeds in bringing the reader to experience Lysiane's sexual feelings and her fundamental solitude as well as the desire she inspires in Robert. The latter is unquestionably more that of a son than of a lover: his desire resembles the reveries in the “sweet cell” in Notre Dame and the dreams of a maternal Mettray in Miracle: “Il laissait la maternelle fémininité de cette femme forte et tendre à la fois l'envahir. Il nageait dans cet élément où parfois il était tenté de s'oublier” (292).

Lysiane's desire to make love to Querelle is engendered solely by her obsession with the resemblance of the twin brothers: “Pour mêler sa vie à la vie ridiculement confondue des deux frères, son amour avait compris qu'il devait descendre lui-même aux époques les plus caverneuses, afin de revenir à cet état indécis, protoplasmique, larvaire, afin de se couler mieux entre les deux autres …” (349). Lysiane and La Feria play a role homologous to that of Mettray in Miracle—the maternal space to which the brothers return in a primordial incest, although the latter is suggested rather than explicit in Querelle. Querelle is unique among Genet's “heroes,” in that he enters the closed (woman) space and emerges from it, off on his ship and ostensibly free; however, the novel, like Pompes funèbres, ends with the woman alone in her space. Madame Lysiane fantasizes burning down the brothel because it and she have been the catalyst for the indissoluble reunion of the twins. Through a spelling mistake she not only inscribes the brothers in the eternal, poetic domain, but fuses them into a singular/plural: “Songeant à ses amants, elle voyait: ‘ils chante’” (415). This sentence, along with the text's last words, “Elle était seule” (415), fixes the brothers in the evanescent and imaginary, rather than the active sphere, and the point de repère in the domain of the eternal and female.

La Feria, as several commentators have pointed out, is a prototype for Le Grand Balcon, as is Madame Lysiane for Madame Irma. In Genet's dramatic texts more consistently and more concisely than in the novels, the closed, female space both generates “plot” and reabsorbs all stories into itself. The maids, despite their fantasies, can never leave Madame's room, the only stage space and the only space in which they can exist. Yet whereas in Les Bonnes we are led to believe that “real” power in the “real” world lies outside the female sphere with “Monsieur,” in Le Balcon, as we have seen, the power relations are turned inside out so that the sphere of dream, fantasy and eternity dominates the sphere of both police-state and “revolutionary” political activity. The mausoleum in which the police chief entombs himself resembles, as Gisèle Féal was the first to point out, female genitalia. At the end of the play, which, typically, does not close but rather affirms its cyclical nature, Madame Irma reveals not only her solitude (like Madame Lysiane) but also her complete control: “Et toutes ces représentations pour que je reste seule, maîtresse et sous-maîtresse de moi-même” (135).

Madame Lysiane, as far as we know, does not set fire to La Feria; Le Grand Balcon, despite the attacks on it, remains intact. But Genet's last brothel, Warda's house in Les Paravents, is destroyed onstage. A microcosmic anti-world to the white, male, colonial order, the brothel, although in subservience, preserves the “purity” of female and non-Western values. It is not the European colonizers, but the Algerian revolutionaries, with their “Cartesian” logic and occidental practicality, that destroy it. Yet if the revolution is this time victorious, in the end it collapses theatrically along with the colonial world as the screens are carried offstage. What remains is the dominion of the “dead” ruled by Warda (in her eternal form), Kadidja and the Mother, with Ommou still in the realm of the living to preserve an archaic, poetic and female order of things. Ommou defends herself against the soldiers with: “Il y a des vérités qui ne doivent jamais être appliquées. C'est celles-là qu'il faut faire vivre par le chant qu'elles sont devenues … Vive le chant!” (370). The Mother, who is last to leave the stage, wonders if Said is “dans une chanson” (375). Once again, the linear plot does not end in closure, but rather is absorbed into a cyclical, lyric time and in this case the apotheosis of the Mothers.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay—whether or not Genet should be called a feminist writer—may now well seem irrelevant. Certainly we cannot call anyone who appears to believe in an archaic and unchanging order of mothers and queens a feminist in any conventional, modern sense. While it is, on one level, true that Genet's texts demonstrate the artificial and created nature of sexual roles, as well as the constant humiliation of “female” by “male,” in what we might call Genet's mythology an eternal and immobile female principle rules as Alpha and Omega. In this light it would seem that it is not sexual “roles” that are created, but the male that is created from and reabsorbed into the female, as in the figure of the pietà. If “your” world—on the left as well as on the right—is clearly ruled by men, the hidden or erased source of power is feminine. This source may be rediscovered when “your” world is viewed through the mirror of the anti-world, as in the figures of the queens in Le Balcon and Les Nègres. Even the most ferociously male characters in Genet's works are in constant danger of being feminized, and in the all-male worlds of prison and penal colony, the sole subject matter of the early works, the desire that sustains the narratives is the desire for ritual death and rebirth in a closed space which functions as sign of the mother's body. All of Genet's texts sustain his observation on the transvestite Divine: actions are masculine, states are feminine. While this is hardly a feminist attitude, in that it denies any ability to act on the part of women, it locates the ultimate source of life and death and of social power in the female. The brothel becomes a microcosm of the paradox of enclosure and humiliation, on the one hand, and, on the other, absolute control.

Genet's main reason for leaving “literature” seems to have been a desire to abandon stasis for action, poetics for politics, the “power of prison” for the outside world, the female for the male. Certainly his advocacy of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian cause was much less ambivalent than his treatment of revolution and “song” in Les Paravents. But why, then, in his posthumous journal of his revolutionary activities and observations, is the couple of the present mother and the absent son “tout ce qui reste de profond”?

Notes

1. See the interview with Cixous in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, ed., Homosexualities in French Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979) 76-79. In “Le Rire de la Méduse,” L'Arc 61 (1975): 39-54, Cixous suggests that Genet's work is an “écriture marquée par la fémininité.”

2. La Jeune Née (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 154.

3. The editions of Genet's works cited in the text are Poèmes (Lyons: L'Arbalète, 1947); Notre Dame des Fleurs and Miracle de la rose, in Œuvres complètes, 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Pompes funèbres and Querelle de Brest, in Œuvres complètes, 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); Le Balcon, Les Bonnes, Haute Surveillance, in Œuvres complètes, 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Les Nègres and Les Paravents, in Œuvres complètes, 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Journal d'un voleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); Un Captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986); Lettres à Roger Blin (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

4. Jacques Derrida, Glas, Coll. 10/18 (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1975) 203. See also the excellent article by Jane Marie Todd, “Autobiography and the Case of the Signature: Reading Derrida's Glas,” CL 38 (1986): 1-19.

5. Lewis Cetta, Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1974); Gisèle Féal, “Le Balcon de Genet ou le culte matriarchal: Une interprétation mythique,” FR 47 (1974-1975): 897-907; Jeanette Savona, Jean Genet (New York: Evergreen Press, 1984).

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).

7. Playboy (April 1964).

8. Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967) esp. 181 ff.

9. Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974) 487.

10. In L'Express 395 (January 8, 1959) we read: “Jean Genêt [sic] corrige les épreuves d'une pièce de théâtre qui sera prochainement éditée sous le titre ‘Les Mères’” (3).

11. Julia Kristeva, “Woman's Time,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. N. Keohane, M. Rosaldo and B. Gelpi (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 42-53.

12. Mircea Eliade, Naissances mystiques: Essai sur quelques types d'initiation (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

13. Libération (October 16, 1984): 25-26.

14. Jurij M. Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” PoT 1 (1979): 168. See also his Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1976).

15. Teresa de Laurentis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London, 1984) ch. 5 (“Desire in Narrative”) 103-57.

16. See my Existential Prisons (Durham: Duke UP, 1985) ch. 5, 155-98, and “Spatial Narration in Jean Genet's Notre Dame des Fleurs and Le Balcon,” in Myths and Realities of Contemporary French Theater, ed. Patricia Hopkins and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1985) 129-39.

17. Gérard Genette's term for a narrator who is also a character. See “Voix” in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 255-67.

18. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) 242.