[In the following essay, Durham explores the role of utopia and collective memory in the political rebellion described by Genet in Un captif amoureux.]

In Un Captif Amoureux, Genet describes the encounter of two conflicting figures of collective memory. Its site, a place once called Maaloul, is to be found in some olive groves near Nazareth. Every year, Israelis return there with their children to see the forest they have sown. Each tree, a memorial to those who made the desert bloom, bears the name of the one who planted it. But there are other visitors as well. These are Palestinians, the former inhabitants of Maaloul.

They, too, have come back to remember. Somewhere beneath the soil in which these trees are rooted lie the remains of their former houses. Above, these villagers will attempt to reinvent, through a sort of conjurer's trick, the place from which they have been uprooted. Using cans of paint they have brought for the occasion, they trace on scraps of cloth, on the ground beneath the trees, and even on the trees themselves, the outlines of the former village of Maaloul. “Réalité d'autrefois,” writes Genet, “fantaisie d'aujourd'hui.”¹ Led by their childish game through imaginary doors, up stairs that lead them scrambling into olive branches, these refugees raise an extinct collective from the shadows. Thus, concludes Genet, for at least one day a year, “l'état bien réel d'Israël se connaît doublé d'une survie phantomatique” (Captif 410).

What is most affecting in Genet's description, however, stems less from the utopian image of resurrection itself than from his suggestion that it is the childish dreamers, and not the victors, who offer the more lucid image of the forces, at once historical and libidinal, that are at play on this contested site. However moving we may find it, the image of collective memory figured by the Israelis in their olive groves is compromised by its amnesia with regard to the process of its constitution. In fulfilling their long-standing wish to be rooted in a memorial space, the Israelis efface the memory of those they have uprooted. The resurrected village, by contrast, does not appear in place of the memorial groves, but in their interstices. Like the Israelis, the former villagers invoke a vanished collective, but they do not attempt to legitimize their claim to this disputed territory by erasing the figure of their antagonist. The former villagers reinvent the vanished collective through a dream image—that of a tree-village, marking a point of passage from an actual world to a virtual one, from Israel to Palestine—but in doing so they incorporate into the space of phantasy the very figures of the collective's disappearance. The image that mediates their experience of this historically overdetermined space is thus a dialectical one. On the one hand, it extracts from the image of the vanished village a utopian power it had never realized in any present, marking the potential point of emergence for a new collective. On the other hand, even as it asserts the claim of a thwarted wish on collective memory, it awakens the resurrected village to itself as dream.

As with his earlier work, much of Un captif amoureux—Genet's book consecrated to the Palestinian resistance—is devoted to such dreaming. But the predominance given by Genet to the play of phantasy in an explicitly political work will not fail to arouse in some readers suspicions of excessive literariness. Couldn't this work be viewed—as some critics have viewed such plays such as Le Balcon and Les Paravents—as the mere projection of the writer's aesthetic preoccupations and private phantasies into a collective reality with which they would be incommensurate? Sartre long ago attributed the origin of Genet's writing to an imaginary operation charged with derealizing a social reality that excludes the dreamer: would Genet in this case have merely picked the Palestinians as his teammates in a game of “loser wins”? In this case, Genet would stand convicted of having substituted a false engagement for the real thing. Such a reading would, however, fail to address both the nature of the political conjuncture in which Genet intervenes and, more generally, the role of phantasy in mapping individual experience onto collective history. The implicit presuppositions underlying these questions—the opposition of historical truth to aesthetic falsehood, and of socially recognized reality to its phantasmatic derealization—are problematized in Un captif amoureux in two fundamental ways.

First, the work of Phantasy we find in Genet is, as we will see below, neither limited to a compensatory or corrosive operation, nor reducible to a merely private matter. On the contrary, as Félix Guattari has argued in his essay on Un captif amoureux, it serves a productive and immanently social function: that of mapping the place of individual and collective desires within and between incommensurate frames of reference.² Phantasy appears in Genet, to borrow a phrase from Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, as “the organizer of mediation.”³ Such is the case with the resurrected village of Maaloul, which concretely figures, within a single space, not only the relation between two imagined communities with their respective wishes, but the unstable relation between what Guattari might have described as two “univers de référence”: Israel and Palestine (see Cartographies 282).

As for the historical reality which is supposedly derealized by Genet, one must first take into account the fact that it was simulated before Genet himself came on the scene, since it has no ultimate ground which would precede its phantasmatic or aesthetic staging. The forest at Maaloul, for example, undoubtedly produces an effect of groundedness for those who planted it: nothing would seem more rooted in the real than this forest, which attests to a desired point of origin. But the grounding of their dream itself presupposes a movement of deterritorialization and derealization, which involves not only the displacement of the former inhabitants, but the effacement of the traces of their existence. It is, to borrow a line from Genet's Balcon, “une image vraie née d'un spectacle faux,”⁴ a surface effect, undisturbed by what may or may not be found beneath its roots. And yet, as Genet remarks, nothing prevents this simulacrum of a forest, once it has been reproduced in photographic form, from extending its effects far beyond the site where it has come to a momentary halt.

In this sense, it constitutes only one local example of a culture of the simulacrum that pervades not only the games of political and national legitimation evoked by Genet in Un captif amoureux, but the figurations of collective experience in postmodernity generally. The simulated forest resonates with the dominant culture of postmodernity, which is a culture of restoration in both the aesthetic and political senses of the term (even though it is usually a matter of restoring an original that never was). In this culture, as such critics as Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson have argued, the liquidation of a sense of palpable historical ground provokes a “passion for the real,” a nostalgia for the lost original identities and points of reference which can then, of course, only be simulated or reconstructed, in forms ranging from nostalgia films to theme parks and even mass-mediated fundamentalisms.⁵ The tree-village of Maaloul, on the other hand, does not merely restore an image of the past as if it were the present. Whereas the Israeli forest is a figure of a restored or simulated past consonant with the present culture of postmodernity, the Palestinian tree-village would best be termed untimely, since it turns a utopian effect extracted from the past against the present.

In either case, the question here will no longer be one of real and derealized, of truth and falsity, but, to use Foucault's phrase, “effects of truth, in themselves neither true nor false.”⁶ The question is not so much who is dreaming, as whose dream has the power to impose itself. It is no doubt for this reason that so much of Genet's dream-book dedicated to the Palestinians is occupied by the dreams of the Europeans, which put the very existence of the Palestinians into question. “Tu es rêve, surtout ne réveille pas le dormeur …” (Captif 206): Genet had no need to give this word of advice to those who invited him to stay in Palestine, since this fear of a sudden awakening already haunted the Palestinians themselves. They knew better than anyone that the West, dreaming of a millenial promise, could only vaguely imagine the current inhabitants of the land in question, casting them at best as not “tout à fait réel,” as more a “peuple de rêve donc d'ombres que peuple d'os et de chair …” (Captif, 377). Bit by bit, remarks one of Genet's Palestinian interlocutors, the Palestinians came to know “qu'ils n'étaient que personnages rêvés, ignorant qu'un brutal réveil les priverait à la fois d'existence et d'être” (Captif 377). Ultimately ungrounded in any territory of their own, and without real military power, they would be obliged—like the villagers of Maaloul playing at being the inhabitants of a place consecrated to the rebirth of another nation—to carry out their struggle in the domain of the image.

“‘L'Europe,’ remarks Arafat, ‘le monde entier parle de nous, nous photographie, nous permet d'exister par cela …’” (Captif 309). In this regard, at least, the European press came to a tacit agreement with the Palestinians: without legitimate claim to any place on the surface of the earth, they will be permitted to float above it, in the hyper-space of the televised image. Some of the more comic scenes in Un captif amoureux involve the journalists who, overrunning the Palestinian camps in Jordan, transform them into a vast television studio, where guerrillas, themselves excluded from the domain of the spectating public, nonetheless quickly master the production of images they cannot consume themselves.

Des stars, nous étions des stars. Du Japon, de Norvège, de Düsseldorf, des Etats-Unis, de Hollande, ne t'étonne pas si je compte sur mes doigts, d'Angleterre, de Belgique, de Corée, de Suède, des pays dont nous ignorions le nom, l'emplacement géographique, on venait nous filmer, photographier, télévisionner, interviewer. “Caméra”, “dans le champ”, “travelling”, “voix off”, peu à peu les fedayin se mettaient “hors champs”, apprenaient qu'on parle “voix off” … Nous apprenions des noms de villes insoupçonnées, nous savions nous servir d'appareils jamais vus, mais personne sur les bases ni dans les camps ne vit un film, une photo, une télé, un journal étrangers parlant de nous, nous existions, nous faisions des choses vraiment surprenantes puisqu'on venait nous voir de si loin, mais où était ce loin?

(Captif 19-20)

Faced with the weariness of fedayeen obliged to assume a series of menacing, seductive and exotic poses, Genet ironically asks whether these photogenic revolutionaries, having survived the assaults of Hussein's Bedouins, will not finally succumb to exhaustion at the hands of an army of European photographers.⁷ But however farcical its staging, the spectacle transmitted to the far-off European public from bases on Jordanian or Lebanese soil produces an undeniable effect of national identity that their forebearers' labors on the soil of Palestine itself could not. “A qui les voyait à la télévision, ou leur image dans les journaux,” writes Genet, “les Palestiniens semblaient tourner autour du globe, et si vite qu'ils étaient en même temps ici et là-bas, mais eux-mêmes se savaient enveloppés de tous les mondes traversés par eux …” (Captif 33). Passing from country to country, from defeat to defeat, the Palestinians, moving forward in their flight, set about conquering the image-sphere.

That nothing could be more tenuous than such victories is as clear to Genet as it is to the Palestinians themselves. Arafat is quoted by Genet as expressing the fear that, once abandoned by European journalists and photographers, and hence by their international public, “la Révolution palestinienne n'existera plus puisqu'elle ne suscite plus d'images ni de récits” (Captif 372). Genet, on the other hand, gives voice to an anxiety which, curiously echoing the comments of the Chef de la Police in Le Balcon, is the symmetrical opposite of this: that the Palestinian rebellion, having been transformed into so many “chansons héroïques” (Captif 32), is being swallowed up by its own image.⁸ This anxiety haunts even Genet's most effusive descriptions of his time spent with young guerrillas in the forests near Ajloun. “Tout, tous, sous les arbres,” writes Genet, “étaient frémissants, rieurs, émerveillés par une vie si nouvelle pour tous, aussi pour moi …” (Captif 302-03). These young men—“si beaux qu'ils apportaient avec eux la paix” (Captif 134)—who inspired the last stirrings of utopian longing in the aging writer, would soon vanish into imprisonment, torture and death, leaving little trace of the revolutionary festival so tenderly evoked by Genet. The return of their image will thus undo Genet's attempts to resurrect their memory, marking little more than the point of their disappearance.

Cette image du feddai est de plus en plus ineffaçable. Il se tourne dans le sentier; je ne verrai plus son visage, seulement son dos et son ombre … Il semble que l'effacement ne soit pas seulement la disparition mais aussi la necessité de la combler par quelque chose de différent, par peut-être le contraire de ce qu'il efface. Comme s'il y avait un trou dans cet endroit où le feddai disparaît c'est qu'un dessin, une photographie, un portrait veulent le rappeler dans tous les sens de cette expression—. Voulut-il disparaître afin qu'apparût le portrait?

(Captif 32)

Genet knows that in the place of the guerilla an image will emerge, and that the production of this image—with all the performative political effects to which I have already alluded—may even be the goal of his sacrifice. But, in what might be taken as a melancholic echo of the dreaming villagers of Maaloul, Genet feels compelled to include the subject's disappearance in the portrait itself. It is as if the content of the portrait were momentarily invaded by the photographic negative which will henceforth be its only ground. One is reminded here of Jameson's remarks on Warhol's disaster series, where his washed-out images of car crashes and electric chairs thematize what his other works carry out only at the level of form. In these works, writes Jameson, “the external and colored surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deadly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them” (Postmodernism 9). For similar reasons, Genet will be reduced to dealing with floating shadows and cut-outs, comparing himself to the master of a “théâtre d'ombres,” in which the dead “personnages de carton … sont à des distances certainement infranchissables de cette voix qui raconte une histoire ou croit leur prêter une voix …” (Captif 411-12).

Tout spectacle est amputé de tous les autres … Les feddayin, les responsables, la révolution palestinienne, tout fut un spectacle, c'est-à-dire que je vis les feddayin, quand je les vis, sortis de ce qu'on nomme l'angle de vision, ils n'étaient plus. Pour le saisir le mot juste serait évaporés. Où partis? Quand revenir? D'où? … J'ai l'impression aujourd'hui d'être la boîte noire qui montre des diapositives non sous-titrées.

(Captif 407-08)

Deterritorialized and isolated as the dead they recall, all these images remain “muet[tes] dans [leur] entêtement de mort” (Captif 415), at an infinite distance from any voice that could bear witness to their story. In this, they resemble nothing so much as the images of dead toughs cut out from newspapers by the imprisoned narrator of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, which can only be fleetingly reanimated by his phantasmatic narratives. Reassembled like so many paper dolls on the back of the placard where the prison's rules are inscribed, these “têtes aux yeux vides”⁹ would seem to be merely the last imaginary solace of a prisoner who is excluded from the world of social praxis. But reworked in phantasy, they at the same time serve as the mediating links which permit this prisoner to think the distances and points of passage that constitute his place within that praxis.

There is first of all the distance in space and time separating the onanistic prisoner from the point of origin outside the prison of the image he contemplates. Second, there is the distance separating the narrator from the atomized collectivity of prisoners, who the narrator dreams of adding to his collection.¹⁰ Finally, and most importantly, there is the distance separating him from the various remembered or imagined worlds through which the image is repeated, recombined and refunctioned: the underworld of the criminals and tantes, the provincial world of his childhood, the world of the prison, and indeed even that of the bourgeois interior inhabited by Genet's reader, all haunted by the same images of “assassins enchanteurs” (OC2 [Oeuvres complètes] 9). Through a fictive reconstruction of the passage of these images across these distances and through all these worlds, the narrator of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs attempts at once to think their relations of convergence and divergence with one another, and above all to imagine the place of his own history and desires within them.

Throughout Un captif amoureux, Genet carries out a similar work of fictive reconstruction. As isolated traces of an unimaginable collective disaster, Genet's images might seem to bear witness to nothing beyond the insistent rhythm of their disappearances and returns in the dreams of the narrator. “La forme que j'ai donnée dès le commencement au récit n'eut jamais pour but d'informer le lecteur réellement de ce que fut la révolution palestinienne,” writes Genet. “Je vivais un rêve, duquel je deviens le maître aujourd'hui, en reconstituant les images qu'on lit, en les assemblant.” But reassembled by Genet and reinterpreted in light of his phantasmatic narratives, these “images mobiles mais à deux dimensions” (Captif 63) will not only serve to map the lines of convergence and divergence linking the incommensurate worlds and heterogenous codes composing the space of global politics, they will above all be constructed as a means of imagining his own place within them.

I cannot offer here much more than a glimpse of the extraordinary web of repeated and perpetually displaced images—drawn from the mass media, from history, from fragments of daydream and everyday experience, and even from theology—with which Genet composes his dream-book on the Palestinians. In the space remaining, I can only outline the itinerary sketched by one of those images, one that serves Genet throughout Un captif amoureux as the “point fixe” that guides him across Europe and the Middle East, “dans plus de seize pays, que je fusse sous n'importe quel ciel” (Captif 460). It is a composite image, linking Genet's last memory of Hamza, a Palestinian soldier then absent and presumed dead, with the figure of his mother.

Cette image s'imposait d'une façon curieuse: je voyais Hamza seul, le fusil à la main, souriant … et sa silhouette ne se dessinait ni sur le ciel ni sur les façades des maisons, mais sur une grande ombre, une ombre que je peux dire épaisse, aussi étouffante qu'un nuage de suie dont les contours ou, comme disent les peintres, les valeurs, sculpteraient la forme lourde et immense de sa mère.

Ou bien, si j'évoquais la mère, seule, … son fils était toujours, lui aussi, immense, et veillait sur elle avec son fusil à la main. Finalement, je n'imaginai jamais une figure seule: toujours un couple dont l'une était prise dans l'attitude quotidienne et avec ses mensurations réelles, l'autre géante, … ayant les proportions d'une figure mythologique … Evidemment, ces lignes disent mal ce qui se passa, car les images ne restaient jamais immobiles.

(Captif 241)

Here we find ourselves before a repetition of the image we discussed above—that of the soldier who risks being swallowed up by his shadow—but, having been transformed by the work of Genet's phantasy, this new realization of that image will be unexpectedly reinvested with a utopian power reminiscent of the resurrected specters of Maaloul.

On a first level, no doubt, this “symbole de la résistance palestinienne” (Captif 243) may be ascribed an immediately political function, as the bearer of a readily decipherable ideological message. The armed rebellion of the Palestinians is here legitimized as the protective action of mother and son, each alternately taking up arms in defense of the other's defenselessness: “chacun étant la cuirasse de l'autre, trop faible, trop humain” (Captif 242). But if this image can function as Genet's “étoile polaire,” it is, as Guattari points out, because, like other such “images fabuleuses” in Un captif amoureux, it is also endowed with “une capacité particulière de traversée—de transversalité” (Cartographies 276), allowing it to function in several parallel frames of reference at once. While the elements that form this image are drawn from a specifically Moslem and Palestinian context, once it has been deterritorialized and reconstructed in composite form this image can be drawn into a series of figures of grieving mothers and divinized sons, which are made to resonate with and pass into one another. Whether they are drawn from European renderings of the Pietà, from pre-Islamic and Asian traditions, or from contemporary Phalangist rituals, all these images appear, in their repetitions, displacements and metamorphoses, as so many alternative realizations of a single figure that is differently combined and renarrated by the inhabitants of the parallel worlds through which it circulates. In this aspect, the deterritorialized image functions here, as in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, as a means of thinking the distances and proximities of all these worlds to one another, through the articulation of their points of convergence and divergence.

Finally, like their counterparts in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, these images also have what Guattari describes as a “subjectivizing” or “existential” function (see Cartographies 285-86). As points of passage between alternative worlds, they also mark the possible point of emergence of a subject who is implicated in several of those worlds at once. In this aspect, the sanctified “couple” of Hamza and his mother functions for Genet as the site of an originary phantasy where he constructs relations of identification and filiation with the Palestinians, experimentally occupying in succession the various roles—son, mother, martyr, creator, etc.—that this constellation permits him to articulate.¹¹ The author of Un captif amoureux thus appears as a more politicized incarnation of the child Culafroy, “le re-créateur du ciel et de la terre” of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, who composes from the faded images he has scavenged from newspapers and picture-books the potential site of “une autre naissance” (OC2 75-76).

The constellations assembled in Un captif amoureux chart Genet's passion for the Palestinians, mapping the impasses and points of passage—between Israel and Palestine, but also between Mettray and Ajloun, between Paris and Chatilah—through which Genet is led by his dreams of being reborn into a new collective. This is not, of course, to say that Genet imagines he can realize his desires through these images, any more than he would wish to derealize the world in them. The constellations of Un captif amoureux are not hallucinatory but utopian. Assembled from the debris of the image-sphere, they assert the claim of a thwarted wish on collective memory, but the site in which that wish is figured remains, like the village of Maaloul, only a virtual one. Persisting only in the interstices of the images it refunctions and assembles, it is a map as yet ungrounded in any territory.

The site Genet invents in Un captif amoureux, for what can only be a posthumous reunion with the Palestinians, is thus best summed up, not by the radiant images of young soldiers in the forests of Ajloun, but by another image which, without effacing the utopian desires that give rise to it, nonetheless bears witness to the untimeliness of these desires. Before the eyes of Genet's memory float a group of five old Palestinian women, lingering in a space that incendiary bombs had recently made into a tabula rasa. Laughingly, they invite him to join them.

“Nous sommes dans ma maison.”
“Quelle maison?”
“Tu ne la vois pas?”

(Captif 382)

The aging writer, who will here play the role of guest, is drawn by the oldest of these women into a theatre of hospitality (Captif 383). Tea is offered; a porcelain cup, which has somehow survived the bombardment, is produced; and from the gestures of the old women, the outlines of a house begin to emerge. Like the villagers of Maaloul, Genet finds himself momentarily in Palestine: “c'est-à-dire à l'intérieur d'une fiction” (Captif 206). But rooted only in “la gaité qui n'espère plus” (Captif 384), this phantasmatic scene does not claim to fulfill the utopian wishes that are remembered in its gestures. These refugees can manage no more than to simulate what was already a makeshift life of poverty and exile, on a ground that Genet describes as threatening to give way beneath their feet. But like Un captif amoureux itself, they dream a space where wishing might still be imaginable.

Notes

1. Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 409.

2. Félix Guattari, “Genet Retrouvé,” in Cartographies Schizoanalytiques (Paris: 1989), 269-90. For a more general discussion of this point, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 72-76.

3. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, “The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections,” October, 46 (Fall 1988): 80.

4. Jean Genet, Œuvres complètes 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 113.

5. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulations (Paris: Editions de Galilée, 1981), and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1-54.

6. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 118.

7. “Certains artistes croient voir autour de l'homme photographié cette solitude des grands, qui n'est que l'air extenué, la mine défaite, subissant la danse du photographe. Fallait-il qu'un Suisse fit monter sur un baquet renversé le plus beau des fedayin afin d'en avoir la silhouette sur fond de soleil couchant?” (Captif 42).

8. “Le Chef de la Police: La révolte s'exalte et s'exile d'ici-bas … Elle va vite s'évaporer et se métamorphoser en chants. Souhaitons-les beaux.” Genet, Œuvres complètes 4, 88.

9. Jean Genet, Œuvres complètes 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 10.

10. “Eux aussi, je veux les mêler, têtes et jambes à mes amis du mur, et avec composer cette histoire d'enfant.” Jean Genet, Œuvres complètes 2, 13.

11. On this point, see Cartographies 287.