SOURCE: Cook, Rufus. “Quest for Immobility: The Identification of Being and Non-Being in Jean Genet's The Balcony.” In Myths and Realities of Contemporary French Theater: Comparative Views, edited by Patricia M. Hopkins and Wendell M. Aycock, pp. 115-27. Lubbock, Tex.: Texas Tech Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Cook explores the connection between the form of The Balcony and the philosophical assumptions that underlie it.]

In the seventh scene of Jean Genet's The Balcony, the Court Envoy, speaking of Arthur who is now dead (“the way one dies here”), says: “He was, like us, haunted by a quest of immobility. By what we call the hieratic.”¹ On the next page, the Envoy attributes the same motive to the Queen: “She, too, is moving rapidly towards immobility” (p. 62). This quest for immobility—for what might be called the absolute or pure being—is a central motive in Genet's play and, in conjunction with some related concepts, helps to explain much that might otherwise seem enigmatic in its structure. The theme is acknowledged for the first time by the Bishop in the opening scene: “Stiff? I'm stiff? A solemn stiffness! Final immobility …” (p. 13), and it is reflected throughout the play, not only in its structure and the motives of its characters but also in its imagery: in the Bishop's description of his “rigid cope” as a “carapace” (p. 13); in Roger's description of Chantal as a “frozen” image (p. 57), “inflexible as a block of ice” (p. 59); in the Envoy's reference to Queenhood (or death) as “the providential fixity” (p. 65); in the Police Chief's description of the Judge and Bishop, whose dignity, he says, “has become as inhuman as a crystal …” (p. 82).

What the characters in The Balcony are after, apparently, is transformation into fixed ideas or images, release from their social and political functions. “But I'll make my image detach itself from me …,” the Police Chief declares in frustration at his long-delayed apotheosis. “Irma, my function weighs me down” (p. 48). The condition to which the characters aspire is the opposite of life, with its contingencies and contradictions, but, though it is identified on a number of occasions as a state of being, it is also a state of inaction and immobility, the equivalent of death. Thus the Police Chief, before his “apotheosis,” is “loaded with actions”; his role, unlike the Judge's or the Bishop's, is “in motion” (p. 84). Once his image has “detached” itself, however, once he “belongs to the Nomenclature” of the Balcony, all motion ceases for him, even the motion of the earth (p. 86). He has achieved a state of being indistinguishable from death, in which moral decision or action is no longer necessary: “My name will act in my place” (p. 53).

It is this identification of being, first with the idea of a fixed or frozen image, then with death, which I believe accounts, in part at least, for the peculiar structure of The Balcony: for the fact that every action in the play turns out, on inspection, to be a “scenario,” and for the fact that, at the end of the play, “the whole business is starting all over again” (p. 81). Once being has been equated with non-being, what ground is left for distinguishing reality from unreality or truth from falsehood? What is there to prevent the reduction of all experience, indiscriminately, to a state of fantasy or illusion? Similarly, once the concept of legitimate or defensible values has been eliminated, leaving process in its place, what basis is left for progressive organization in a literary work, particularly for a definitive conclusion, a final end? What other form is available to literature except a cyclic or episodic one, in which the whole business keeps starting over? It is my contention that Genet's play is based, philosophically, on such an identification and that, in these two respects at least, its structure is a logical consequence of that identification.

One purpose of this paper, therefore, is to demonstrate the connection between the artistic form of The Balcony and the philosophical attitude motivating that form, to show how the identification of being and non-being is arrived at and supported and what some of its aesthetic and ethical implications are. Another, and perhaps more important, purpose is to suggest some critical and philosophical objections both to the play's form and to the assumptions which seem to underlie it. Though he is probably more thorough than most writers in his repudiation of reason, Genet seems to me fairly representative of a general tendency in contemporary literature and criticism towards the erosion of literary form—towards the deliberate elimination or confusion of the intellectual standards and distinctions on which critical understanding and evaluation depend. Whether the reader will agree with me in regarding these “dissolutions” as serious objections to Genet's drama will depend, first, on whether he agrees to take the attitudes embodied in a literary work as serious philosophical pronouncements and, second, on whether he agrees that philosophical disagreement with an author should figure in our evaluation of his work or in our capacity to enjoy it. Differences of opinion on these points reflect fundamental disagreements about the social and intellectual functions of literature and theater, and while my approach to Genet in the following pages is based on a more or less coherent theory of literature, it is not part of my purpose here to defend or even to expound that theory.² I am interested instead in discovering what it can tell us about Genet and about the aesthetic and intellectual implications of his ideas and theories.

The quest for immobility—for pure being—is the obvious motive of the impersonations in the opening scenes of the play. By immersing themselves in the symbolic roles (and robes) of Bishop, Judge, and General, the “visitors” to the Balcony are trying to transcend themselves and their functions, to attain a purity or perfection of being wholly distinct from everyday realities: “a function is a function,” the Bishop explains. “It's not a mode of being. But a Bishop—that's a mode of being” (p. 12). It is not the duties or activities of a bishop, judge, or general that attract the performers, of course, for these would interfere with their enjoyment of being a judge, a general, or a bishop: “in order to become a bishop, I should have had to make a zealous effort not to be one, but to do what would have resulted in my being one” (p. 11). What the visitors are after is the appearance, not the reality, of these roles: “Our ornamental purity, our luxurious and barren—and sublime—appearance …” (p. 80). They want the form without the function, the essence without the accidents, and this essence can be experienced only in a make-believe realm, insulated from the demands and distractions of reality. “And I wish to be bishop in solitude, for appearance alone … And in order to destroy all function …” (p. 12). It is this appearance—abstract form divorced from activity or function—that is equated in The Balcony with being.

The opening scenes of The Balcony, therefore, in contrast to the later ones, are explicitly presented as “scenarios”—as “secret theaters” enacted in the security of the studios and, with the apparent exception of the rebellion, carefully protected from the unsettling intrusion of external events. “Here,” as Irma observes, “Comedy and Appearance remain pure and the revels intact” (p. 36). Not only have the doors and window been “closed, shut, buttoned, laced, hooked, sewn” in order to ensure privacy, but the artificiality of the performances has also been deliberately underscored and exaggerated in order to emphasize their mythic and symbolic nature. The visitors themselves appear “larger than life” in their “tragedian's cothurni,” with their “inordinately broadened shoulders” and their “garish make up” (p. 7). In costuming the girls, care has been taken to include not only the “authentic detail” (the nun's wedding ring, for example), but also the “fake detail,” such as the whore's “black lace under the homespun skirt” (p. 35). In their quest for being, the visitors to the Balcony “all want everything to be as true as possible. Minus something indefinable, so that it won't be true” (p. 36). The scenario should be a reflection of reality, a convincing imitation, but as an escape from reality, it should also be sharply distinguished from it. “If your sins were real,” the Bishop reminds his penitent, “they would be crimes, and I would be in a fine mess” (p. 10).

Even in the studios, however, the visitors cannot quite achieve the purity of being which they desire, for even here their being is, in a certain sense, contingent, involved with other symbols and ideas essential to its definition. Thus the Judge points out to his uncooperative thief: “Look here: you've got to be a model thief if I'm to be a model judge. If you're a fake thief, I become a fake judge” (p. 15). The Judge's being as a judge is not inherent in himself, not a function of his own power: it is conferred on him from without. “My being as a judge is an emanation of your being as a thief. You need only refuse—but you'd better not!—need only refuse to be who you are—what you are, therefore who you are—for me to cease to be … to vanish, evaporated. Burst. Volatilized. Denied” (p. 19). In the logic of the scenarios, the supposedly higher or more positive function—that of the Judge or the Bishop—is dependent for its existence on the lower. Bishop and Judge are dialectical terms, social fictions defined by their opposites. The Judge must have his thief and the Bishop his sinner in order to be what (and “therefore who”) they are. “Hence: good born of [evil] …,” the Judge starts to say, implying that, in the dialectic of the Balcony, the good does not exist in its own right but is dependent for its definition on its opposite, on what has traditionally been regarded as its negation, as non-being. (In the same way, of course, evil depends for its existence or identity on a clearly defined, contrasting good: “One cannot commit evil in evil” [p. 20].)

A similar sort of symbolic dependence occurs in later scenes, with a similar inversion of values. Roger encounters it in his impersonation of the Police Chief near the end of the play, when he recognizes his dependence on the Slave: “Does he mean that my reputation will be kept going by his words? And … if he says nothing, I'll cease to exist … ?” (p. 90). In the same way, Chantal realizes that she is dependent for her being on the rebels who have transformed her into a symbol of the rebellion: “They don't care a rap about me,” she admits. “But without them, I'd be nothing” (p. 55). As a symbol, Chantal realizes, she does not exist in her own right, but only in the minds of those who have conferred symbolic meaning on her. Her being has been attached to her from without, like a word. Once again, the ostensibly higher function, the apparent source of power and purpose, depends for its being on the lower. Like the Bishop or the Judge, Chantal is a creation of those whom she appears to transcend, who seem to derive their purpose and meaning from her. Again, the traditional order of being and of meaning—the kind of hierarchy defined by Plato and Aquinas and traced in Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being—appears to have been inverted.

The same principle of dialectical dependence continues even after the Bishop, Judge, and General have left the studios, after having consented to play their parts in the apparently real world of social and political events outside. “So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies. But once having exposed them, having named them, we're tied up with human beings, tied to you, and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility” (p. 79). Like Chantal, they have now had a symbolic significance conferred on them, an externally defined being. They are no longer free, as in the studios, to project their own identities. As for dialectical dependence, however, the only important difference between the “laws of visibility” and those of the studios seems to be the direction of the dependence, the source of emanation. Instead of being dependent on a thief or a sinner for their being, the Judge and Bishop are now dependent, as the Police Chief points out, on the Queen: “It's from her, for the time being, that you derive your power and your rights” (p. 82). The Chief acknowledges the same dependence in himself: “She's my support, it's in her name that I'm working to make a name for myself (p. 63). As in the imaginary realm of the brothel—the “house of illusions”—so also in the realm of social and political authority (supposedly the real world) identity and power are conferred, grounded not in the person actually exercising them but in some transcendent source, which is itself outside the realm of action, a symbolic being like the Queen who has achieved “final immobility.”

Nor is this denial of being limited to the Bishop and the Judge; for in Genet's view apparently all being is an emanation, all identity simply a reflection. Nothing exists in its own right, or acts by its own power, in its own name. The Queen, on whom the Chief and the Bishop depend (“for the time being”) for their authority, derives her own authority from a still higher source: above the Queen—“that to which she refers—is our standard, on which,” the Police Chief explains, “I've blazoned the image of Chantal Victorious, our saint” (p. 82). The Queen depends for her power on the symbol of the revolution—on her dialectical opposite, the negation of all that she represents. According to the Chief, not even God exists in his own right, by means of his own power; without the Bishop, Judge, and General, “God would be nothing” (p. 83). There is no absolute, no final source of being, just as there is no ultimate ground for political authority. There is, instead, only the process of symbolization, motivated by the human need for sanction, whereby a name is endowed with the prestige of being and thus acquires the capacity itself to confer power, authority, or being. Man projects his need for justification into unreality, into the “house of illusions,” and it is reflected back again, magnified and ennobled, as a Judge, a General, or a Queen. There is no substance in the world, nothing on which to stand, just as there is no reality in Genet's play, nothing by which to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the unreal. All modes of persuasion or justification are circular, dependent on sources of authority which they themselves project.

It is this dialectical dependence, this confusion or substitution of image for reality, that accounts, in part at least, for the symbolism of mirrors in The Balcony. Plato's ontology from the Myth of the Cave has been inverted here: the image is the reality, seeming is being. “If I come to your place,” the Police Chief tells Irma, “it's to find satisfaction in your mirrors and their trickery” (p. 50). The visitors are drawn to the Balcony by their desire to be transformed into images, into the sort of one-dimensional, exteriorized image that one experiences in a mirror. They want to exist, not as subjects with internal space and potentialities, but as objects, and it is their reflection, in a mirror or in the eyes of others, that confers reality on them, cementing their identification with their projected image. “And I get dressed up to stay here,” Arthur tells Irma, “to go walking through the corridors and look at myself in your mirrors. And also for you to see me dressed up as a pimp” (p. 45). He enjoys parading in his “classical pimp's outfit” (p. 42), playing “the mean, soft-hearted pimp” (p. 44), and, like the Judge or the General, he needs the mirrors to tell him what (“and therefore who”) he is. Esse est percipi: human beings have been reduced to objects, whose only mode of being is in being perceived.

The photographers in Scene Nine illustrate the same motive, for they are after “a shot of the Judge … a definitive image” (p. 73). It doesn't matter to them whether he is a real judge, whether the General's baton is a real baton, whether the host laid on the Bishop's tongue is really a host. What matters is the appearance, the reflection in the mirror or in the camera's eye, and for this “a true image born of a false spectacle” is preferable to an unconvincing reality (p. 75). For the photographers, appearance has replaced reality as a criterion of validity, or at least of persuasiveness.

For my purposes, though, the important question is whether this substitution of image for reality is a symptom of contemporary disorientation which Genet is exposing, or whether Genet himself shares in it. Is The Balcony intended as a warning about the gradual dissolution of reality and value in modern culture, or does it contribute to that dissolution through the ideas and attitudes that it purveys? It seems to me that the latter is more nearly the case, that in Genet's view all roles and functions are inherently groundless, all sources of authority and rational justification ultimately fictitious. Despite his ironic attitude toward the photographers and their image-conscious emphasis on form, Genet himself does not seem to possess a conception of reality or substance that would justify his irony. In Wayne Booth's terms, his irony is “Unstable-Covert-Infinite.”³ Indeed, Genet's repudiation of the idea of being seems to imply precisely the same attitude as the photographers', for unless there is some defensible distinction between reality and appearance, between a real judge and a fake one, there is simply no basis for attacking the distortions of the media. The only viable distinction left is the one offered in The Balcony, between those images that have been “consecrated by the brothel” (p. 72) and those that have not, those infused with symbolic significance and those still “in motion”—and this distinction, apparently, is an emotional rather than a rational one, a matter of feeling and style instead of substance. Genet's repudiation of being has reduced all experience (and knowledge) to a matter of perception. If the self-conscious fictions of the theater, and of literature in general, still refer to life, as they did in traditional mimetic theories of art, they do so only because life itself has been reduced to a fiction, seen merely as a theatrical performance.⁴

But Genet's equation of being with appearance represents only the first step in his elimination of the concept of being, as his characters' efforts to perfect their images represent only one aspect of their aspiration towards pure being. What the characters really long for is death, complete immobility and inaction; and what the term being really means in The Balcony is non-being. To become a pure image—“nothing but my image,” as the General puts it (p. 26)—requires a complete loss of consciousness and will, so that one's only being is in being named or perceived.

Genet's identification of being with non-being bears some resemblance to the insight of negative theology—the belief that the absolute can be described only in negative terms, as invisible, intangible, infinite, immortal—and, of course, immovable. In negative theology, however, there is no attempt to deny the reality of the absolute, only to emphasize its freedom from the limitations that define particular existents, while in The Balcony the paradox concerning the nature of ultimate being is employed to vitiate the concept not only of an absolute but also of any order or gradation of being or reality. The paradox is reflected most obviously perhaps in the Envoy's descriptions of the Queen, who, as the apex of the social order, must incorporate all antinomies, including that of being and non-being. “I mean the Queen is embroidering and that she is not embroidering,” the Envoy explains. “She is snoring and she is not snoring.” The Queen has become “entirely what she must be: the Queen” (p. 62), and in becoming a pure symbol, in attaining pure being, she has ceased to be anything definite or delimited. “She makes herself unfindable and thus attains a threatened invisibility” (p. 64). Like God, she is everything and therefore nothing, attaining “her reality when she withdraws, absents herself, or dies” (p. 85). The Supreme Being is, by simple equation, the Supreme Non-Being; reality equals unreality.

This identification of being with non-being explains why, when the Envoy tells her that she is about to become Queen—“about to penetrate into the providential fixity”—Irma thinks he means she is about to die, is “at my last gasp” (p. 65). “But that's death?” she says in response to his description of the Queen's function (p. 82). It also explains why death is the central theme to which all the scenarios in the Balcony are reducible (pp. 87-88), why the Funeral Scenario, the Mausoleum, is “the ultimate adornment, crown of the edifice … (p. 87), and why the final glory to which the Police Chief looks forward is a tomb—“a room where mirrors will reflect to infinity … the image of a dead man” (p. 69). Though they refer to it as being, it is actually towards non-being that the characters in the play aspire. The Bishop, in the opening scene, ponders his “skilful, vigorous course towards absence. Towards Death. God?” (p. 7). The General feels himself “… close to death … where I shall be nothing, though reflected ad infinitum in these mirrors, nothing but my image …” (p. 26). And the Judge, in one of several passages equating the Balcony with the idea of hell, pure evil, or pure negation, thinks of himself as Minos, the judge of dead souls: “I, King of Hell, weigh those who are dead, like me” (p. 17).

Pure being, therefore is death, “final immobility,” and in order to attain it, one must be transformed into a fixed image—dressed up in the “classical pimp's outfit” like Arthur; captured in the definitive pose like the Bishop, Judge, and General; blazoned on a flag like Chantal; or incorporated into “the nomenclature” like the Chief. Life is to be lived, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the image—“so that a glorious page may be written and then read. It's reading that counts” (p. 91). Every scene in The Balcony, therefore, follows a script, a fixed text, which the performers are reprimanded for violating (p. 59). “That means,” the Police Chief tells the Bishop, Judge, and General, “you've never performed an act for its own sake, but always so that, when linked with other acts, it would make a bishop, a judge, a general …” (p. 82). The Envoy's description of the Queen's role—“Everything will be written for you with a capital letter” (p. 82)—describes the other roles in the play as well. The definitive image implies a final literary form, a definitive text, in which every word and gesture is carefully prescribed. Such a text is the stylistic counterpart of the absolute, and in Genet's view, of course, the equivalent of death.⁵

Since being is equated by Genet with non-being, it is hardly surprising that every action in The Balcony turns out to be a scenario, every character a player. In the absence of some positive conception of being, all reality must eventually be reduced to fantasy or illusion. Even the rebellion, which in the early scenes of the play appears to provide a background of reality and value against which the other scenarios can be understood and evaluated, is dissolved in the end. “The rebellion is a game,” according to the Police Chief, “… every rebel is playing a game. And he loves his game” (p. 50). Irma is afraid the rebels might become so carried away that, ignoring the “false detail that reminds them that at a certain moment, at a certain point in the drama, they have to stop …,” they will leap—“without realizing it”—into reality (p. 50). Near the end of the play, however, when the machine-guns are sputtering again outside the brothel (“Who is it … Our side? … Or rebels? … Or? …”), the Envoy reassures her: “Someone dreaming, Madame …” (p. 95). At most, therefore, reality is represented in the play only by the occasional vague references to the real identity or occupation of a brothel visitor. Roger's despair in the final scene results from his recognition of the impossibility of establishing anything as real or true: “And outside, in what you call life, everything has crashed. No truth was possible” (p. 93).

Whether it is intended primarily as a warning about the deterioration of values in modern culture or as a contribution to that deterioration, the effect of such a dissolution of points of reference within the literary work seems the same: to confound the audience's understanding, to render impossible a complete or final evaluation of the characters or actions. Even if one assumes that Genet is a moralist, that his purpose is to protest instead of promote the erosion of reality in modern culture, the technique he has adopted, of reflecting that erosion in the form of his play, seems self-defeating, for it eliminates any perspective from which the nature and causes of the erosion could be recognized and understood, any standard by which its degree could be measured. The only standard of ethical choice left in The Balcony, once the reality of the rebellion has been undermined, is a personal aesthetic one—whether, for whatever reason, a character happens to enjoy playing “the mean, soft-hearted pimp” or “a bawd, boss of a whore house.” And since the characters have been stripped of identity, of personal history and social place and function, the play provides no means by which their personal motives can be understood and evaluated. In other words, Genet has simultaneously withheld both the normative standard necessary to judge his problem and the specific historical and social context necessary to understand it. What he has given us instead, apparently, is a dramatic imitation of the problem, an immersion in it.

But Genet does not stop at eliminating standards of understanding and judgment from the play itself. At the end of the last scene, Irma, shucking off her role as the Queen and resuming that of whorehouse madam, turns to the audience, addressing them—“judges, generals, bishops, chamberlains, rebels who allow the revolt to congeal” (p. 96)—as though they too were visitors to the Balcony. With her words, of course, the boundaries of the play dissolve, as those within the play between scenario and apparent reality have already dissolved. “You must now go home,” she instructs the audience, using the same words she has just addressed to the Envoy. “You must now go home, where everything—you can be quite sure—will be falser than here … You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley …” (p. 96). She dismisses the audience the way she dismisses the Bishop, Judge, and General, sending them home by the same exit: “the narrow door that leads into the alley” (p. 95). Thus Genet dissolves whatever standards of reference, whatever norms of understanding and evaluation, the audience has brought with them to the theater in the same acid he has applied to realities within the play. Life is less real and meaningful even than art, which has the advantage at least of being able truthfully to describe the unreality and meaninglessness of life.

With the inclusion of the audience in his theme, Genet's elimination of being appears to be complete. It might still be argued, of course, that in order to achieve his understanding of it Genet himself must be situated outside the “house of illusions” and, further, that we, as readers or spectators of his play, are permitted to assume the same position of detached critical understanding. From the thoroughness of his attack on reality and being, however, it seems to me unlikely that Genet would accept such an interpretation of his intentions, that he would admit the possibility of a vantage point from which genuine understanding could be attained.

Consider, in particular, the note on which The Balcony concludes. It is dawn, as indicated by the stock device of the cock's crowing (p. 96). There are some suggestions, following the ritual sacrifice of Roger and the Chief's apotheosis, of resurrection and renewal. “Life's starting up again little by little … as before” (p. 88). Outside the brothel (or the theater doors), the machine-guns, possibly the rebels' guns, are again sounding: “the whole business is starting all over again” (p. 81). These suggestions of renewal and rebirth offer no reason for hope, however, no possibility of progress or improvement; for the idea of progress (whether it can actually be achieved or not) depends on a meaningful ordering of truths and values, and Genet's dissolution of being has effectively eliminated any such order. The only structure, either of human affairs or of literary works, that Genet's denial of being seems to permit is the one suggested at the end of The Balcony: a pattern of cyclic repetition in which the whole business keeps starting all over again.

Carmen has already observed, earlier in the play, that this business of the Balcony is always starting over: “No sooner is it finished than it starts all over again … starts all over again, and always the same adventure” (p. 35). Now, at the end of the play, as she extinguishes the stage-lights, Irma repeats the line, with the same feeling (it seems to me) of weariness and futility: “In a little while, I'll have to start all over again … put all the lights on again … dress up … Distribute roles again … assume my own …” (pp. 95-96). The implication of this cyclic structure seems clear: the problem described in The Balcony is insoluble. Since there is no reality or truth outside the house of illusions by which it could be understood or criticized, there is no possibility of escape from its deceptions. Man is a hopeless dreamer, living not in an objective reality but in a fantasy world of symbols, a prison-house of language, disqualified by his very nature as a symbol-user from detached critical evaluation.

It is still possible, of course, in spite of Genet's apparent intentions, for the individual viewer of The Balcony to profit from its insights. Though I would insist, in opposition to Genet, that language and symbolism can be used to reveal as well as to conceal the truth, it is no doubt the case that symbols have the power he suggests to delude and that his play can thus serve to make us more conscious of that power and more resistant to it. But Genet himself scarcely invites such a critical response to his work. Though he is apparently a moralist of sorts—one, that is, who realizes that his own being depends on clearly articulated distinctions between good and evil—his moral absolutism is so inverted that it leads him to dissolve the very categories on which his identity depends. Man's thinking, and all his longings and desires, are directed by and towards symbols, and the realm referred to by these symbols—the realm of being—is an illusion. Though literature remains, in Genet's equation, a commentary on life, it remains so only because life has been assimilated to the condition of art, because both have been rendered unreal and meaningless.

Notes

1. Jean Genet, The Balcony, rev. ed., trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 61. Subsequent references to this translation appear in the text.

2. For the point of view of this paper, I am indebted for the most part to Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1947). Winters' conception of the literary work as “a defensible rational statement about a given human experience” (p. 11) led him to reject the procedure sometimes adopted by the New Critics of treating the work's philosophical content merely as a “representation of a belief” and concentrating only on its form and style. He maintained that “the thought of a poem must be in some sense acceptable; that the thought is of the greatest importance as a part of the poem itself” (p. 479).

3. A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 257-267. Though the irony in this scene has a specific satiric target, my point is that, unlike such traditional (and “stable”) ironists as Swift or Twain, Genet never constructs a base of defensible and coherent values from which to attack the various manifestations of value-erosion presented in his play. In Winters' terms, he is an example of the “romantic ironist”: one whose “irony is simply the act of confessing a state of moral insecurity which the [writer] sees no way to improve” (p. 70).

4. According to Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 8-29, contemporary literature and literary theory have become the unconscious allies of the capitalist economic system in the erosion of reality and of stable cultural values in western society. I would, of course, regard Genet as a prime example of this unintentional alliance, for, whatever his final rhetorical motives, his methods have the effect of dissolving any sense of reality or value.

5. Philosophically, of course, Genet is closely allied to contemporary deconstructionist approaches to criticism. This alliance is generally evident in the tendency of his text to “self-destruct” or to “cancel” itself, and it is specifically evident in his attacks on the authority of the theatrical script. Genet would probably find my concern with authorial intention in The Balcony contemptible and slavish.