SOURCE: Homan, Sidney. “Genet, The Balcony: ‘You Must Now Go Home, Where Everything … Will Be Falser Than Here.’” In The Audience as Actor and Character: The Modern Theater of Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard, and Williams, pp. 57-77. London: Bucknell University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Homan examines the notions of truth and falsity and the audience's roll in creating meaning in The Balcony.]

In The Balcony, … Genet's inquiry into what role can mean both onstage and in the world offstage confronts us from the very start. To the side of a “Bishop,” who is theatrically arrayed in a cleric's cope and the tragedian's cothurni, stands a rather ordinary young woman washing her hands, preparing for the role she must play to complement the role already assumed by the figure centerstage.¹ Near this woman, who is in transition from person to stage character, stands Irma, our audience surrogate, silent, confined like us to watching the little drama about to unfold. Genet's stage direction requires that “throughout the scene she hardly moves” (p. 8). Further, by “standing very near the door” Irma defines the boundaries of the stage itself. In the Elizabethan drama her role would be that of the Presenter.

As the play expands from this initial tableau, as characters hurry in from battle-torn streets seeking protection or solace, or both, as the rebels themselves approach the balcony that is first made visible in scene 8, Irma's perspective as onstage audience is expanded by that televisionlike apparatus multiplying the number of stages she can witness. She is thus the ideal audience, aware of the “plays” being enacted in many more rooms than the one we observe. Indeed, her superior vision is in direct contrast to the situation in Genet's The Blacks where, ironically, the several onstage audiences prove irrelevant since the ultimate action occurs offstage and is only reported to us much later by messenger.

Accused by Carmen of being someone without feelings who “observe[s] it all from a distance” (p. 30), Irma is also dependent on her own passionate, private theater. Just when she has decided to abandon her position as observer, or playwright-in-the-wings, to assume the role of the dead Queen, her lover, Arthur, reminds her that his walking through the corridors looking at himself in her mirrors is “also for [Irma] to see [him]” (p. 45). If anything, her paradoxical role as an onstage audience, at once disengaged and engaged, is similar to that of the central characters in Genet's The Maids. Like Irma, they observe the scenario they have devised and attempted to control, and yet the purpose behind their public play is inseparable from their passion both for each other and for the milkman, or from their conflicting passions for Madame. And in her final speech, whose central line is this chapter's subtitle, Irma reminds us that we, too, are both audience and actors.

If we see Carmen as Irma's reflection or counterpart—she is, literally, the assistant director in the brothel—then both their past and present relationships, as well as their separate “stories,” further define this link, at once formal and psychological, between the audience and the actor. Carmen contends that although Irma's present “confidence” in her is a pale vestige of what must have been a former lesbian passion, both women are still “tied” together in their association with George, the Chief of Police (p. 29). The most immediate strain in their relationship, however, comes from Carmen's wanting “to see” her child (p. 30). Appropriately, as Irma charged her friend with (potential) betrayal she stands beside what Genet describes as “a curious piece of furniture at the left, a kind of switchboard with a view-finder and earphone.” For Irma, Carmen threatens to substitute an open-ended, hence “unreal” theater, where Carmen becomes the “fairy god-mother” observing Chantel who, in turn, sees (“pictures”) her as a saint “in Heaven” (p. 31), for the brothel's theater, dominated by Irma as both director and audience. But in Irma's more circumscribed theater Carmen has already played a saint at whose sight a leper was miraculously healed (p. 30). In a way, then, the real threat to Irma's brothel does not come from the revolutionaries, who, as they approach an “establishment” both literal and social, only begin to resemble their opponents. Rather, the assault takes the form of Irma's other self, Carmen, who would substitute for her own assigned roles as actor, audience to Irma, and assistant manager a real role as a would-be mother, a role at variance with that of her childless mistress and her “sterile” women. As her former lover, now consigned to being a business partner, Carmen only mirrors the conflict in Irma.

Genet's own well-known preference for a theater of symbols, or for one resembling a Catholic mass, requires an audience at once separate from but also psychologically involved in the onstage action. Irma is that audience—like us. She comes to the present play with a history, tries to sever that former self from her role as director, yet later abandons such would-be neutrality when she takes on the role of Queen, itself a mirror to her real self: as she says, in “the center of the Palace is a woman like me” (p. 63). Having been both actor and audience, she at length frees herself from this duality only to remind us, the offstage audience, that if we have thought ourselves dispassionate spectators, then we now must become actors in life's theater where, she insists, “everything—you can be quite sure—will be falser than here” (p. 96).

1

Centered in Irma, this complex notion of audience replicates throughout the play.² Real men or characters, like actors, impersonating exalted public figures, the three clients of the opening scenes also observe themselves playing roles. The character-turned-actor playing the Judge argues that his “function” is not to pass an ethical sentence on the sinner, but simply to observe, since to do anything more would risk becoming a real judge. Possessing the title without having the attendant responsibilities implied in the term “judge” allows him, in effect, to avoid the existential dilemma of his single self's being bifurcated into a “real” character and an “unreal” actor. Since he has consciously assumed a role made even more false or theatrical by its absurdity when measured in terms of his impoverished life offstage, the “Judge” seeks a wished-for projection of his self. Irma's television is thus a physical expression of this “self” audience. The General even tries to extend his vision beyond the already existentially liberted stage when he bends down to peer through what he hopes is a crack in the wall (p. 22). But jealous of her dominant position as audience, Irma intervenes. Still, the larger stage represented by those other rooms is exposed when cries of pleasure or pain intrude from backstage into the present set, despite Irma's efforts at soundproofing and covering the windows with hangings. Can those divided cries be our own?

In trying to lose their socially insignificant selves in a noble role, these first three clients, driven by unconfessed psychological needs, destroy the balance between self and other, character and actor. As Richard Coe comments, the way to self-revelation in Genet is always one of indirection or humiliation, such as the base role chosen by Said in The Screens: one consciously assumes a part divested of social or financial gain.³ Appropriately, it is the aristocrat, the nameless “man” of scene 4, who in dressing “as a tramp though neatly combed” (pp. 27-28) will survive as the ultimate audience to George's immolation. Indeed, as Walter Sohlich argues in a very perceptive article, the aristocrat-turned-tramp will be transformed to the beggar of scene 8, observing with us that moment when both clients and brothel mistress are “reduced” to real-life roles.⁴ In the final scene, this same character watches the Police Chief's “simulation” or “impersonation” (p. 47) before escaping unharmed from the play to “sing” (p. 92) of what he has experienced. We might then think of this man as four times metamorphosed—aristocrat to tramp to beggar to slave to singer—as Genet's onstage surrogate, the ultimate audience to life's own play, dwarfing Irma's more limited efforts. At length a singer or poet like his playwright, he has purposely chosen humiliation in a theatrical world that, in its fakery, its unreality, its estrangement from life, is more true because it is conscious of its fraudulence, and because, by definition, it frustrates any attempt at selfhood. Or, to invoke Genet's equation directly, we play roles both on- and offstage, but since we are unconscious of such role playing in life, it is, correspondingly, less “true” than the theater.⁵ Irma cannot control the rebellion outside the brothel, yet that counterforce offstage is as much Genet's creation as is the onstage play we observe. I reverse myself, then: The Balcony, like The Blacks, is a sham concealing the real action taking place offstage. And it is to this larger reality, now seen as unconscious “theater,” that the singer escapes.

As the Judge “gets up and moves towards the wall,” he plaintively asks, “May I have a look?” (p. 16). His otherwise simple request admits, I think, multiple responses in this play constructed on our desire to see ourselves as we would have others see us or, for that matter, as others choose to see us. As Genet comments in “What Remained of Rembrandt Torn Up into Very Even Little Pieces and Chucked into the Crapper,” those “others” are ourselves: “His gaze was not that of someone else: it was my own that I was meeting in a mirror.”⁶

If Genet inherits from Pirandello and the existentialists the notion that individual validation comes from the perception of others, then, as Sartre observes, man also rebels against his personal inauthenticity by serving as an audience to the self.⁷ As offstage audience, we identify with the characters, seeing ourselves in them, precisely because the ultimate object of their perception is the same as ours, the self. Still, the self thus seen, as well as this act of perception, is an ideal. In truth, the people who enter Irma's brothel are inadequate because they seek to portray only a wished-for self. The rigid figure of the Bishop, centerstage, sees not his real self in the mirror, nor even an actor costumed for the role of Bishop, but the platonic or historical concept of Bishop. “The majesty, the dignity that light me up come from a more mysterious brilliance: the fact that the bishop precedes me” (p. 12). We will recall what is perhaps the most compelling point in Sartre's portrait of Genet, that is, the playwright's assumption of that role (the orphan turned homosexual thief) thrust on him by the “look” of society.⁸ In The Balcony the characters reverse that situation, taking on a role patently denied by the world outside the brothel.

Genet's theater, therefore, complements but does not duplicate life; in a way, it is at opposite poles from what passed as “naturalism” in the nineteenth century. If the playwright, as Sartre defines him, adopts a theatrical stance for self-preservation, here in Genet's theater the characters complement that stance with a role that is both creative (in the sense that they deny their literal selves) and dead. The artifice enacts an essence whose basis is inseparable from death or nonexistence: in Genet's binary terms, we construct a statue in our mind that would serve equally as “grave” or “pedestal” (p. 46). In theatrical terms, the “impersonation” and “simulation” (p. 47) are lifeless reflections of physical life, mere roles. Preferring the self-consuming artifice to reality, even if it be that of a potentate of the church, the Bishop abhors being a real bishop for then one “should have to be constantly aware of being one so as to perform [his] function” (p. 11). Even live actors onstage fall short of this “theatrical truth” that opposes life and has death as its goal; when the Bishop's eyes close for the last time, he will see not himself but rather the bishop's bonnet “behind [his] eyelids” (p. 8). If “costume drama” is a justly negative description for those nineteenth-century stage extravaganzas, Genet here rescues the term. That same opening tableau shows the “Bishop's” real-life black trousers, shirt, and jacket draped over the chair; like his two successors, he insists that such artifacts of a lifeless life be removed from the stage.

The mirror is here the “unifying agent,”⁹ the intermediary between an offstage world that is fraudulent because it lacks essence and the onstage world whose essence is meaningful precisely because it lacks the ennervating “life” of what passes for reality offstage. In his ballet 'Adame Miroir Genet gives that mirror a central position when the Sailor's reverse image, playing Domino, usurps his “reality,” thereby forcing him into the mirror as the Image. Disastrously liberated from inside, from living behind the mirror, his theatrical “reality” robbed from him by the Sailor-turned-Image, the Domino longs for his former reflected self. At the end, seeing only his reflection as Domino in the mirror, he dances with that image until the mirror opens so that, in Richard Coe's wonderfully ambiguous phrase, “the Domino is admitted back into reality.”¹⁰ That last word itself, like the mirror, includes both its customary and—at least in Genet's theater—its theatrical meanings. The clichéd fourth wall of the stage, supposedly admitting only the audience's vision, is here a two-way mirror. In passing through that mirror, however, one cannot regain the self as misperceived offstage.

2

Still, this enacted “self” as perceived by both others and oneself has a “double,” for there is always present an inner self beyond stage enactment, a self to which the owner alone serves as audience. This self is, properly, atheatrical, one for which the theater itself can only be a referent, an imperfect intermediary that, in translating this inner self to its stage, perforce loses something in the translation. Seemingly an indifferent audience to the wished-for selves enacted in her brothel, Irma also confesses that all the time she has been “probing” herself (p. 12), although she assiduously, however incompletely—as in her sexual and Platonic passion for Arthur and George, respectively—tries to subordinate that inner being to her (mostly) hidden role as director and playwright. However, Irma, too, will become “client” when she assumes the role of Queen.

If the history of the theater can be traced to the introduction of a second character, allowing for dialogue, and then a third character, allowing for plot, then Genet's characters long to reverse the process, to return to that inner stage beyond enactment. Although the Bishop wants to be by himself (p. 11), when he condescends in allowing Irma to “eavesdrop,” his “you” (in “I know you do, anyway”) expands to include us. Similarly, we recognize the irony in Hamlet's “Now I am alone” (2.2.549), said once the actor so effectively impersonating Hecuba exits from the stage. However superior to her clients, Irma, too, longs to be “alone, mistress and assistant mistress of this house and of myself” (p. 95). Her jealousy of Carmen betrays a recognition that the latter makes the more successful attempt to enact that inner self; the seemingly indifferent manager of the sterile prostitutes onstage also holds concealed within her a self that is correspondingly passionate and nurturing. And if the brothel allows the clients to stage a wished-for self, that both they onstage and we offstage can then perceive, once they exist from Irma's establishment there springs forth in them a “secret brothel, [a] precious pink cat-house, [a] soulful whore-house” (p. 31).

The entire onstage set, the world we witness, thus hides its opposite; conversely, when the men return to reality, to their wives, they “keep a tiny, small-scale version of their revels in [Irma's] brothel” (p. 34). Irma defines this inner theater as “a Chinese lantern left over from a carnival, and waiting for the next one”—that is, a nonpublic stage, known only to its owner, generated from a past performance, anticipating the next public staging, yet at present still a private “theater” challenging the stage's normal function. Beyond “enactment,” as that term is usually defined, this same theater is, in Irma's more expansive phrase, “an imperceptible light in the imperceptible window of an imperceptible castle” totally at the command of its inhabitant. This imperceptible, individual reality coexists with the stage's perceptible but, for that very reason, less than fully true reality, even as the stage, in Genet's equation, is itself superior to what passes for reality outside. Appropriately, Irma's three “imperceptibles” are spoken against a background of machine gun fire from backstage. The audience of The Balcony therefore witnesses three theaters: one present both visually and orally; an inner one only implied; and reality, here manifest savagely and also comically in the sounds of warfare.

3

These three stages and their corresponding audiences are inseparable from the playwright's well-known argument that the coexistence of actor and audience, or the person in motion and the motionless person witnessing that motion, is the means by which we achieve essence. In Genet's terms, or rather the Judge's, the fake thief validates the function of the fake judge; and, of course, the converse is no less true (p. 15).

Thus, even his reversal of the theater's metamorphosis from one to three characters takes a parabolic curve. If one's enacted self is ultimately a poor translation of that inner self, since the public self alone is validated in being perceived by an audience, even if it be an audience of one, then this same audience also unwittingly validates the presence of our invisible inner self. In the preface to The Blacks Genet can reduce the demands for an offstage audience of whites from many to one to a fake audience composed of many blacks in white masks, even to an audience of one black impersonating a white. But if the blacks refuse those white masks, still an audience of one white is necessary: “then let a dummy be used” (p. 4). If we cannot be an audience to our social or racial opposites, or if the insignificant man never encounters a man of significance, then the former must impersonate the latter so as to confer meaning on himself. We perforce must “love” our opposite, even our persecutor, for without him or her we are inauthentic.

In this sense the impoverished client acting the Judge's part ultimately represents not only wishfulfillment, as I suggested earlier, but rather—to adjust the phrase—fulfillment through the “image” that its impersonator can “touch” and therefore can “love” (pp. 18-19). This desire for the opposite of one's self defines the erotic pleasure to be derived from Irma's brothel. One can understand, therefore, the playwright's displeasure with the first London production, where the actresses, rather than the three male clients, were dressed seductively.

That little man of scene 4, perhaps an image of Genet himself, is also the most fully developed example of this adoration of one's opposite. In the fourth scene the three panels from the first three scenes change to three mirrors reflecting this tramp, who is the first “real” man of high station we observe in the brothel. The three mirrors used here are “fake” mirrors—and therefore more real than real mirrors, in Genet's reverse metaphysics—since the stage direction calls for three actors to stand behind empty frames impersonating the little man as he impersonates a tramp (pp. 27-28). At this moment the concept of audience overwhelms the theater: we watch an actor watching a triple reflection of his wished-for self, even as those three reflections, to perform their parts well, must watch every motion of the character and the actor they reflect. The little man is clearly us; our fourth wall is framed by the glassless mirror. Genet's more conceptual term for this situation of actor-audience and audience-actor is complements (p. 19), and the erotic nature of such complementarity is best conveyed in Roger's expression of love for Chantal: “You envelop me and I contain you” (p. 59). This is not mere physical love; rather, the “real” revolutionary can only be validated by the brothel's “unreal” actors and actresses—and, again, the reverse is no less true.

This mutual interchange between audiences and actors is not only erotic but creative, heightening the imagination rather than purveying sexuality. Although his real-life function is that of a death bringer, once George is transformed into the idealized Chief of Police, then he himself becomes an artist or creator, fashioning a static image that, to use his perversely reductive variation on “grow,” will then “go and rot in people's minds” (p. 84 [author's emphasis]). Here, even the word for growth must admit its opposite in decay.¹¹ Impersonated by Roger, George is or soon will be dead, while his image, or name, “reverberates to infinity” (p. 92). Carmen also argues that Roger, dismissed earlier as being, like all revolutionaries, “without imagination” (p. 39), now becomes the artist, prefiguring his opposite in the Chief of Police and giving him form. In becoming his opposite, in making the imaginative leap from enemy to lover, Roger avoids death or, rather, will now never cease to die: “you don't stop dying” (p. 92).

It is the slave alone, embodied earlier in the aristocrat impersonating a tramp, whose escape from the appropriately named Valley of the Fallen, from George's now eternal domain, and rise to the daylight above makes him the singer or poet of Roger's action. His song, like The Balcony itself, supplants a singular, unperceived, dead reality offstage with the stage's imaginative, perceived artifice, a mutually shared life where one encounters one's own validating opposite, where, like the Sailor in 'Adame Miroir who denies Alice's crossing back through the mirror world to reality, one lives forever in the paradoxically dead world of the theater. Here, life is not the person who existed, who once breathed, but the persona created by the playwright, sung about even as the slave, like Genet himself, will sing of Roger's emasculation, which in turn assures George's elevation, itself enacted on a stage unseen but “sensed” by us. The playwright of The Balcony “reverberates to infinity” by creating his onstage surrogate in this composite character, aristocrat-tramp-beggar-singer-in-reality. At once himself and the other, the praised and the humiliated, he passes from “dying” into the state of “nothing” (p. 90)—that is, death's correlative—and then into life itself as he begins “to crawl up the stairs” (p. 91). Like his playwright, then, he will sing of others created from the perception of one's self.¹² We ourselves are the subject for this ultimate audience, and of this playwright. As Roger, earlier a man of action rather than of words, now realizes, his “history was lived so that a glorious page might be written and then read” (p. 91). Whatever his source in Genet's own public or private life, Roger now resonates in the playwright's imaginative creation and in our witness of his play. The process parallels, I think, Shakespeare's portrait of the young man in the sonnets: the historical man dies yet lives in the poet's line, just as the father dies only to live in his progeny. It is imagination here, not prostitution, that is the procreative act, and I cite again the frequent observation that the French phrase for brothel is maison d'illusions.

The imaginative life illuminated by the theater of the theater of playwright, actor, and audience is at once fraudulent and radical, calling into question that lifeless life, unconsciously pretending to be real and, here in this party political play,¹³ trying to preserve its establishment of death. Roger exposes this radical fraudulence in his abrupt question to Chantal: “You know all the roles, don't you? Just now, you were reciting lines to me, weren't you?” (p. 59). The tramp-turned-singer finds his namesake in both Carmen and Chantal, and, appropriately, it is the latter's “cameo eyes” that will “comfort and enchant the rabble” (p. 57) since those eyes corrupt their practical mission with a symbol. Similarly, the revolutionaries corrupt themselves by transforming Chantal from a real person to a symbol to an abstract design on the revolutionary flag. The singer is the theatrical radical, or embodiment, of Genet's own radical theater, overthrowing the professed political radicals of life itself.

The “real” man, Roger, must be tutored in these radical acts of the imagination by becoming a regular client of the house of illusions. He starts, appropriately, in the Mausoleum Studio where, as Carmen observes, everything is prearranged for him so that, not having to “indulge [his] imagination,” he will not make “many” errors there (pp. 88-89). His role as apprentice actor, one not yet ready to go before an audience, is underscored when his first imaginative act, the illtimed and therefore theatrically nonproductive castration, is performed “with his back to the audience” (SD, p. 93), a stage position any accomplished actor would think unnatural. His amateur's status is satirized by Irma's comic “On my rugs! On the new carpet! He's a lunatic!” (p. 93). Note that Irma delivers this line not as the “real” Irma but as the Queen; her self-realized impersonation thus contrasts with Roger's beginner's effort. As the Chief moves to an inner theater, and the slave, having realized his opposite, is liberated to the daylight, Roger, the professed opponent of illusion and its house of illusions, begins his own journey into a world of fraudulent but comforting essence. Or, as Irma observes, “The more killing there is in the working-class districts, the more the men roll into my studios” (p. 31).

4

We are, of course, the only real audience present during the production of The Balcony, although even that assumption will be challenged by the play and, in particular, by Irma's closing remarks.¹⁴ In Genet's words, the play and its audience constitute a “problematic meeting.”¹⁵ Our presence is acknowledged early, as in Irma's question to the Bishop's demand for privacy: “Won't anyone be able to witness it?” (p. 8). She also confesses to feeling “uneasy … professionally” if nobody but she and the woman are allowed to observe the opening scene (p. 9). If the play is concerned with imaginative rather than sexual union, still the characters would commit their actions in private, beyond enactment; like the Bishop, the Judge asks, “Are all the doors firmly shut? Can anyone see us, or hear us?” (p. 16). He expecsts a negative answer. From the characters' perspective, we are voyeurs, present for a play whose main set has cracks in its walls, along with electronic spying devices encouraging such voyeurism. But if we can identify with our onstage surrogates, then, like them, we are more properly “visitors.” Irma herself underlines the importance of that word by breaking it into syllables: “And I demand respect for the visitors. Vi-si-tors!” (p. 29). The house “watched” (p. 43) or later “beseiged” (p. 8) by the rebels is the theater we ourselves have entered and now observe. George surely speaks as much for us as for himself when he defines his purpose in coming to Irma's “place”: “It's to find satisfaction in your mirrors and their trickery” (p. 50). As the play progresses, its metadramatic awareness of us, the offstage audience, can apply without any loss of translation to those assembled onstage; what seems like threatening “roars” from the audience observing the royal procession turns out to be “cheering” or applause (p. 71). Roger's petulant “They give you the rush in this place!” (p. 93) will have a special meaning for the audience uninitiated in the tightly packed complexities of Genet's self-conscious theater. The Police Chief's “Think of me” (p. 94), like Hamlet's “You [that] are mutes or spectators to this act” (5.2.334-335), effortlessly includes those on- and offstage.

Yet The Balcony's awareness of us is as much physical as verbal.¹⁶ The play actually “waits” for us, or, rather, the brothel, its field of play, anticipates our presence in the “unmade bed” (p. 7) that is visible in the first three scenes through the onstage mirror's reflection. The stage direction notes that “if the room were arranged logically, [the bed] would be in the first rows of the orchestra” (p. 7). By scene 5 that reflected bed, earlier housing the audience only by a mirror's “implications,” makes its way onstage, for we see that the bed and its surroundings are Irma's room, the “same room that was reflected in the mirrors in the first three scenes” (p. 28). In similar fashion, in scene 4 our presence, only implied during the first three scenes, is actualized or reenacted in the figure of the “little old man.” We enter this play at first indirectly and then directly; the cycle completes itself when Irma, in her epilogue, comments on our fate once we leave the theater. Even this exit has been anticipated in the Bishop's concern “about getting home” (p. 8).

The reaction of real-life audiences to The Balcony has ranged from unthinking ardor (the Emperor's-New-Clothes syndrome, in effect) to equally unthinking dismissal of Genet's work. Yet if we are seduced, as Roger will be, by its illusion, we are theatrical rivals become converts. Just before the first scene that introduces Roger and the revolutionaries (scene 6), we hear a “window-pane” and a “mirror near the bed” “shivered” by gunfire, and I would make a connection between this attempted destruction of Irma's theater (the window)—and its modus operandi (the mirror)—and Murray Krieger's definition of art as being at once a window through which we look back out into reality and a mirror, or self-contained world operating by its own autonomous aesthetic principles.¹⁷ As it assaults our social or aesthetic bias, we, outside the play like that unwilling guest unable to escape before being seen by the host, are recognized and invited inside.

With open minds, eager to experience Genet's elimination of the boundaries between life and art, between off- and onstage, we can respond “No, not at all” to the Envoy's question, “Would it perturb you to see things as they are. To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?” (p. 64). At the very least we can “eavesdrop” (p. 11), becoming voyeurs on the stage of our own wish-fulfillment.¹⁸ At best we are willing participants in a radical theater that, in forcing us to challenge the standard definitions of reality and illusion, forces us to “doubt” ourselves (p. 85).¹⁹ Anticipating his “apotheosis” (p. 84), George speaks of his future self, and, by implication, the present theater when he defines his image as “a pool in which they behold themselves” (p. 86). Thus stimulated, the “eyes” of this audience can develop “astounding qualities” (p. 89). In seeing our surrogates onstage, we can cultivate what one observer calls “consciousness,” and another, “self-recognition.”²⁰ In this sense, we are not only the ultimate audience, but also the ultimate actor; the play's final concern is our own identity.²¹

Of course, we never physically make it to the stage, except indirectly by that reflection of an unmade bed. However, two graphic statements of our presence are to be found in scene 8 and in the closing moments of the final scene. In the former, the stage becomes the balcony itself; as the shutters facing the audience are opened, the characters step to the edge of the balcony, which the stage direction locates as “at the very edge of the footlights” (p. 70). That sometimes hackneyed blocking of the modern theater, where the character standing on the periphery of the stage speaks his lines to some imaginary member of the audience, is here restored, enhanced by Genet's more pervasive concern for the “real” audience. Appropriately, the only dialogue in this otherwise silent tableau is that of our audience surrogate, the Beggar: “Long live the Queen!” His clichéd welcome contains Genet's symbolic theater: the mortal Queen dies even as the essence of her role, although not her inner self, is ratified by the stage enactment. The intrusion of that nonessential reality existing outside the house of illusions underscores the point: a shot is heard, Chantal falls, and the General and the Queen carry her away “dead.”

Yet, the most significant challenge for us to be more than eavesdroppers can only occur once the play has enacted itself, once it has had, to rework Virginia Woolf's eloquent phrase, its own vision.²² Like Pirandello's Henry IV, as he gathers his actor-courtiers about him to fend off the real but inconsistent offstage world, Irma's final speech defines both the accomplishment and the failure of her illusory world in terms of the greater cost to her clients once they leave the brothel. Clearly, she addressed us no less than the onstage characters. Like a director, she will now be occupied in closing up the theater for the night, covering the stage set (“put the furniture-covers on”), and preparing for the next production when once again the lights must be turned up, costumes and disguises resumed, the set (“studio”) readied, and roles distributed. She knows that her function, its “truth,” lies both in its consistency and in her awareness of her role. But we “must now go home, where everything—you can be quite sure—will be falser than here” (p. 96). As actors in life's seemingly greater but potentially more fraudulent stage, our roles are now beginning, once we have observed its simulacrum on the theater's more circumscribed stage. Irma's instructions verge on the practical as well: “Leave by the right, through the alley.” Then, just when we think we have been delivered back into reality, the theater, the illusion, reasserts itself. The sounds that literally end the play, the machine-gun fire, are of course not real, but only an illusion created by the sound crew. Irma's reference to morning—“It's morning already”—is, like the theater itself, a lie: if the production began at eight in the evening, then, even given its long running time, it is still dark outside.

We exit Genet's theater only to enter the real world's more public stage. Still, if we fellow clients carry within us our own “secret theater” (p. 35), even as in entering Irma's brothel “each individual [has brought] his own scenario, perfectly thought out” (p. 36), then our human task, our burden, will be to compare these inner and public theaters. Once we have done that, we can bring into enactment for our own audience, both as constituted by our sole self and by those others who interact with that self, what would otherwise die with the individual. If Irma's closing reference to “morning” is a tribute to the theater's spell, its figurative implications are anticipated when she speaks of her clients' pain in leaving a theater that starts only to finish as an “awakening [that] must be brutal” (p. 35). The reverse works as well: our entry into Genet's theater is also an awakening, a moment to see ourselves as another, the other, sees us. Irma tells us she can detect the clarity of the minds thus awakened through the eyes: “Suddenly they understand mathematics. They love their children and their country. Like you” (p. 35). That “you” seems at once singular and plural, simple and complex.²³

5

This movement from the onstage to the offstage audience mandates a return to life itself. There, The Balcony implies, the concepts of theater and audience bifurcate to the extremes of shallow commercialism and, conversely, to a mysterious level beyond the comprehension of Genet's own complex theater.

When that shallow commercialism takes the form of the three photographers searching for the “definitive image” (p. 73), what is seen through the camera's lens has little to do with the truth, platonic or theatrical, but rather with what will sell in the tabloids. From the photographers' perspective, the outside world wants “to be bombarded with the picture of a pious man,” and hence the end justifies the means: the General's monacle serves as the communion wafer, a rolled-up sheet of paper doubles as a marshal's baton. Such art is indeed fraudulent, yet not productive in the sense that the word otherwise has in Genet. In this reductive definition, their art presents “a true image, born of a false spectacle” (p. 75). Society's insistence on order, a rationale at variance with the playful, more relative mode of our modern theater that Genet epitomizes, is also at fault here. Carmen anticipates such commercial art through her pun: when she views that outside where “men show their naked selves” unrelieved by artifice and hence embodying no meaning beyond that of physical existence, then “it has all the unreality of a film” (p. 42). A Sartrean upside down saint achieving salvation through damnation, Genet equates the film's unreality with that of a picture showing “the birth of Christ in the manger.” Loren Kruger speaks of The Blacks in terms that apply, I think, to the present situation: their beliefs assaulted by Genet's radical portrait of life as both shallowly and as deeply perceived, the “audience is not allowed simply to consume the myth in the manner of the photograph.”²⁴ In The Balcony Chantal, who existed meaningfully when she worked in Irma's studio, is also reduced by the revolutionaries to something akin to a photographer's false symbol.²⁵ Again, the incompatibility between life uninformed by serious theater and theater as informed by Irma or Genet is underscored when Chantal is slain by the revolutionaries' own bullets.

However, when understood in a more relative context, life seems as mysterious to us as it had been reductive to the photographers. The Judge, who has now experienced both the theater's and life's realities, observes that “what you call outside is as mysterious to us as we are to it” (p. 85). The alternatives, therefore, are to acknowledge the world outside the theater as so relative or mysterious that it is beyond the reach of any clarifying metaphor, or to hammer it into the photographers' predictable and therefore false images. One can also explain it by the self-defeating allegory of the pious: the Bishop's affirmation of his authority “before “God Who sees me” (p. 11) reduces the concept of audience so far defined, and the Judge's equation of himself with the Devil, with the “King of Hell [who] weigh[s] those who are dead” (p. 17), is undercut by the Thief's sarcastic “You frighten me, sir,” and further undercut by Genet's stage direction that the Judge speak “very bombastically.” Reality as generally understood, although indispensable to the theater's illusion—the “authentic detail” (p. 35) required at every performance—is also an irritant, hostile to the circumscribed actor-audience circuit of the stage.

Still, in Genet's symbolic, nonnaturalistic theater,²⁶ the parameters of actor and audience themselves constitute a significant presence. Through the metaphor of multiple audiences, the Judge and George define the arena of the play: above her attendants is the Queen, about the Queen herself is the image of the kingdom, above that image is God, above God are his subjects (“without whom God would be nothing”), above the people are the photographers, who are “on their knees before the people who are on their knees before God,” and so on (pp. 82-83). For Genet, therefore, the Renaissance metaphor of the stage as a little world would deny the theater's literal presence.²⁷

Because for Genet this stage usurps reality, it is in flux, a world of revolution, or what the Envoy calls a palace or theater of “continuous explosion” (p. 65). The principles of the theater, its “Comedy and Appearance,” remain “pure,” its “revels intact” (p. 36), but the mirror, The Balcony's central image as well as the avenue of perception for the audience, is a “reality” without fixity (p. 41). Carmen's earlier criticism that Irma is too given to her “sober ceremonies” and lacks a sense of “irony” (p. 30) is well taken, for Irma will forsake her “destiny” (p. 67) as the director and indifferent observer to her clients' spectacles to become a real-life queen, temporarily abandoning illusion for the “useful” (p. 80). As the bishop recognizes, at any moment the stage's “ornamental purity, [its] luxurious and barren—and sublime—appearance” can be “eaten away” (p. 80).

When this destructive thrust toward the world outside the brothel meets the intrusion of reality, comically in the form of the three photographers, less so in the revolution outside the brothel, the collision admits multiple interpretations. Roger's castration is one such instance; is it his self-punishment for seeking power,²⁸ or a capitulation to the principle of illusion,²⁹ or his victory over the Chief in driving him into the aesthetic fixity of the tomb?³⁰ As it mediates what passes as reality outside, Genet's theater is too fluid to admit a single reading. Even that supreme moment for the onstage audience, when the little man sees himself and, with three actors impersonating his reflection, is in turn seen in three mirrors, must coexist with life as it is absurdly represented by the “three almost simultaneous flashes” of the photographers' cameras (p. 94).

Like a molecule, this theater has the physical stage at its core, around which revolve actor and audience. Furthermore, it is vulnerable, existing only to deconstruct: the telemachine that works so well earlier later breaks down. If tragedy requires implacable values,³¹The Balcony can offer none, but only what one critic calls a “becoming,” and another calls a “process” in which its metaphor of the mirror continually mediates, but does not resolve, the conflict between art and reality.³² We can identify the audience with life and the actor with the theater, yet what are we to do when the roles are reversed? Carmen longs to see her daughter alive in a real garden, preferring this anticipated role as audience to that of actor playing the martyred Saint Theresa. Yet once Irma reminds Carmen that her daughter is dead, the mother becomes both audience and actor, playing the saint in “flaming robe,” under which is her heart, in which is an artificial garden where she can view her child's grave (p. 40). If appearance or illusion seem preferable to function or reality, the former are dependent on the latter, and even if they are capable of “consol[ing]” (p. 47) us as dreamers (p. 95), that consolation is itself an illusion. Irma's own pleasure in becoming the Queen who literally “acts” in the real world is undercut by her realization that she impersonates only herself: “In the center of the Palace is a woman like me.” The Envoy, “imperturbably,” reduces the picture further: that same woman is “standing on one foot in the middle of an empty room” (p. 63).

If Roger's castration or his impersonation of the Chief admits a number of conflicting yet equally valid interpretations,³³ then the relation between illusion and reality in Genet does no less: the two are in suspension,³⁴ or reality estranges an audience given to illusion,³⁵ or both reality and illusion are denied,³⁶ or both coexist as part of our larger existence.³⁷

6

The relativity of this theater, its continuous implosion, its “life,” in turn admits or, more properly, leads to, its opposite—death or fixity. In the Chief's tomb, as the Envoy reminds us, there are mirrors that “will reflect to infinity … the image of a dead man” (p. 69). Our own audience's eye itself a mirror, our living retina is imprinted with the stage's own image of death. The Bishop's line, “Here I stand, face to face with my death,” is thus no less relevant to the offstage audience (p. 13). The most radical tenet of Genet's theater is not that it effaces life. Rather, Genet posits a third phase to theatrical presence and the metaphor of life as a stage—a pure stage at once avoided and sought by us, one of fixity or death, or what the playwright calls the “hieratic” dedicated to our “quest of immobility” (p. 61), or our “final immobility” (p. 13). Codependent, reality and illusion are therein perfectly balanced. Even when the theater's integrity is temporarily assured, such as by covering the windows with padded curtains (p. 8), its inhabitants still seek the nonintegral life offstage. As one of the characters exclaims, “You think we're going to be satisfied with make-believe to the end of our days” (p. 77). The liberation from such flux or relativity must be found in stasis, immobility, of which death itself is its most perfect expression.

Still, the conflict of opposites, although halted by immobility, is reactivated. As George goes to his death, in a theater of fixity beyond any stage representation, in a tomb made of a plasticized penis mocking the real-life agent of regeneration, the static darkness itself is opposed by the very onstage audience witnessing his immolation. The Bishop, Judge, and General, the first visitors to the brothel, yearn for the daylight world, one of action and “visibility” (p. 79). No longer dreamers but real men with political power, “dragged [from] … a happy state” of illusion, they will now “continue the quest of an absolute dignity” (pp. 79-80). Soon they will emulate the Police Chief who, when like them, emulated the pure image that they now both willingly and unwillingly fulfill as their function (pp. 79-80).

If Irma represents the principle of the Imagination,³⁸ she is also the audience that, even while accepting the stage's two hours' traffic as a patent falsity questioning any fixity we claim offstage, takes up the theater's challenge to “play” with life, to refashion it, to be what life denies us or, as in Genet's case, to usurp as our own an image that life has thrust upon us. We may enter Genet's theater curious and open-minded about what passes as reality, yet as the stage's seductive illusion verges on the real, it also becomes binding, lifelike, while life, in contrast, now seems new, fresh, an awakening from the confines of the stage. The theater's momentary therapy becomes a burden. One critic astutely observes that whereas in The Tempest Prospero with his epilogue frees us from Shakespeare's theater, Irma in her final lines only delivers us to our chains, to another theater,³⁹ to our illusionbound world.⁴⁰ If it is always the next illusion we want,⁴¹ then life in turn becomes a stimulant, part of the process. Jonas Barish eloquently captures this sense of equipoise between the modern audience and its theater that Genet in turn enacts in The Balcony:

If the day ever dawned when men became truly able to “live in themselves,” like Rousseau's imagined savages, if the dangers of theatricality ever ceased to threaten us in our daily lives, then perhaps our special need for the theater as an art form might also vanish: it would no longer confront us with an account of our own truth struggling against our own falsity.⁴²

7

As the third of Genet's five plays, The Balcony seems central not only chronologically but also philosophically to the issues I have raised. In Deathwatch the onstage audiences are comparatively static, ranging from the three inmates “circling around” (p. 121) each other to our most graphic surrogate, the Guard who more than any other character is “in the know” (p. 140). Even when Lefranc's “inauthentic” crime in killing Maurice isolates him from such concentric audiences, the principle of the onstage audience remains inviolate. As Lefranc utters his “I really am all alone!” Genet's stage direction instructs the Guard to appear “smiling” as he “leers” at Green Eyes, the “object” for whom Lefranc has unwittingly sacrificed himself.⁴³

Seen in this light, The Maids is a more sophisticated play, for the sisters carry to the extreme, to death itself, the dualities of audience and actor. Finding their selves each in the other, as well as their combined idealized self in their mistress, they finally purify their inner theater by murdering the world, one embodied in the melodramatic story of the mistress and her lover. Playing her sister, Solange observes Claire playing both Madame taking the poison and, by extension, the despised counterimage of themselves.

In The Blacks, that despised “other” is “represented” upstage by blacks dressed as white colonials who serve as judges of the play performed by blacks playing blacks centerstage. Ultimately not a chauvinistic piece celebrating blacks, let alone whites, the play is so pervaded by the notion that we act the role given us by our audience, or by the audience socially dominant at the time, that here, where the audience-judges are also the judge, every metadramatic reference works equally well for the action offstage as well as on. Village can thus address both his fellow actors and us by switching a single pronoun: “Are they following me? … Are you following me?” (p. 74). Indeed, by this point those two pronouns seem interchangeable.⁴⁴ The final long scene of The Screens multiplies such onstage audiences to a factor of nine, with the transitions among them represented literally and figuratively by the porous screens themselves.

The character's complementarity as self-audience has an equally wide range. In Deathwatch the inmates are primarily aware of their physical selves; after some hesitation, perhaps even embarrassment, Green Eyes confesses that he likes “to cuddle up in [his own] arms” (p. 137). Because the lesbian twinship of the maids makes them a single, composite character, the focus of that play is essentially psychological. Claire's wish for Solange, “If only you could see ourself” (p. 54), becomes redundant when the servants' coequal self-love and selfhatred is also simultaneously played and observed by the sisters. Conversely, the blacks, although also servants, cannot initiate the self but can only imitate and thereby parody a self assigned by their white audience.⁴⁵ In The Screens the oppressed (the Algerians) also must assume a role established by their oppressors (the French Colonials), and it is only through the egalitarian nature of death that the stultifying, formative “look” of others can be mollified. Here, though, even Said's denial of the self, his attempted indifference to all those who perceive him, fails to free him when the Algerians threaten to convert him to a symbol of nationalism. In doing so, however, they become, as the blacks threaten to become, indistinguishable from the French audience who had earlier judged and thereby formed them.

Those larger implied offstage audiences in The Balcony parallel the historical audience that Green Eyes describes, the “terrific crowd of people in the streets” waiting like a theatrical audience for him “to show [himself] at the window” after the girl's murder (p. 135). In The Blacks it is this offstage audience who witness the black traitor's trial, for which the onstage play has been a diversion.

As the “real” offstage audience in The Maids, our role changes from that of dupes—until the alarm rings signaling the end of the sisters' dress rehearsal, we have assumed that we are observing Madame and a single servant—to coparticipants, as we form the crowd assembled, by implication, for Claire's funeral and Solange's imprisonment.⁴⁶ This elevation in our own role is underscored by Genet's curious stage directions that Claire, as she listens to Solange “speak” to an imaginary Madame, be “visible” only to us (p. 94), or at the end when, playing both herself and her sister, Solange faces “the audience, [and] delivers the end of her speech” (p. 99).

If we are collaborators in The Maids, we are, if whites, the opponents of the onstage actors in The Blacks. Not so much a diatribe against whites, I think, as against the more general notion of the domineering audience, The Blacks tries to “increase the distance that separates” actor from audience (p. 12). When we are asked to participate directly, the request is for the most trivial of actions; looking at the audience, Village asks if anyone would like to come onstage to hold Diof's (the Mask's) knitting (p. 69). Here we are denied seeing not only the real play, the execution and trial of the black traitor, but also a play in which blacks can be blacks since, still dependent on the discredited vocabulary of whites, Village and Virtue are at present deprived of a stage suitable for enacting their love.⁴⁷ If deprived of a meaningful role in The Blacks, we are, conversely, omniscient in The Screens, for the “spectacle's worth a look,” as Said's Mother informs us (p. 161).

Opposed to the world of “solid accomplishment,” as that phrase would be defined by those in power, by those for whom the theater is often a mere plaything, the theater for Genet, then, becomes the “home” of the powerless others, whether they take the form of socially insignificant clients, inmates, servants, oppressed minorities, or, as in the case of The Screens, an oppressed majority. Yet as this arena of play becomes serious business for those others, its actors lose their craft and venture into life itself, which in turn, generates a need for the theater.

8

There is a wonderful, childish innocence in Archibald's lines in The Blacks: “They tell us that we're grown-up children. In that case, what's left for us? The theater! We'll play at being reflected in it, and we'll see ourselves—big black narcissists—slowly disappearing into its water” (pp. 38-39). Locked in her self-chosen house of illusion, after a disastrous flirtation with being a real Queen, Irma also gleefully consigns her audience of adults to their own world. This same mood is echoed by Solange as she plays the Presenter in her closing lines: “We are beautiful, joyous, drunk and free!” (p. 100). The playwright himself is not regressive; rather he underscores the basic impossibility of remaining homo ludens even as he exposes the basic falsity of homo sapiens. That outside audience, as in The Screens, would “bottle” or confine Said (p. 138) just as it would the theater in making it the servant, the “reflection” (in the most pejorative sense of that word) of what passes as reality. Ommu realizes this: “To be their reflection is already to be one of them” (p. 135). Yet this child's existence is only defined by the presence of that same adult audience and its world.

There is a telling moment in The Blacks when the seeming opposites, black Virtue and the white Queen, or the worlds of play and of the playless reality of the powerful, realize their kinship as they recite in unison lines normally assigned to the dominant audience: “I am white, it's milk that denotes me, it's the lily, the dove, quicklime, and the clear conscience. … It's innocence and morning” (p. 45). For a moment, opposites—life and death (milk and lily), childhood and adulthood (innocence and morning)—are combined. Still, this is at best an interlude, and it is the tension between these two irreconcilable worlds, brought into the momentary and harmless confrontation onstage, that generates the dramatic energy in Genet. Similarly, the confrontation among real persons is displaced, mitigated, when some agree to be actors and others the audience to those actors, or when on our own inner stage we experience that moment of liberation as we play audience to our own actor.

Genet's theater is thus an attack on a self-assurance of which we would be unaware had we not entered his theater. Awareness, I think, and not change, is his object, despite the tantalizing political or social commentary that seems to inform his final two plays.⁴⁸ Art and life indeed may be irreconcilable or—conversely—may be interchangeable.⁴⁹ Yet theater is made possible by a stage where persons of flesh and blood become symbols, and where the audience, those clients entering this house of illusions, see patent imitations of themselves as meaningful precisely because they are imitations.

Notes

1. I am especially indebted to the masterful analysis of Genet by Richard N. Coe, The Vison of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968). For a psychological and mythical study see Lewis T. Cetta, Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973). For detailed commentary on production see Richard Schechner, “Genet's The Balcony: A 1981 Perspective on a 1979/1980 Production,” Modern Drama 25 (1982): 82-104; and Peter Zadek, “Acts of Violence,” New Statesman 53 (4 May 1957): 568-70. Jerry L. Curtis observes that unlike Genet, Sartre doesn't believe that others' looks paralyze or that we can free ourselves from play, in “The World Is a Stage: Sartre versus Genet,” Modern Drama 17 (1974): 33-41. On Irma, Gisela Feal suggests that the female embodies the unconscious, the male the conscious, and yet the revolutionaries replace a male-reality with a myth dominated by negation that is at one with the matriarchal cult, in “Le Balcon de Genet ou le Culte Matriarchal, une Interpretation Mythique,” French Review (1948): 897-907. My texts for Genet's plays are those published by Grove Press, New York, and translated by Bernard Frechtman: The Maids (1954), Deathwatch (1954), The Balcony (1966), The Blacks (1960), and the The Screens (1962).

2. In “The Psychological Universe of Jean Genet,” Drama Survey 3 (1964): 386-92, Thomas B. Markus comments that “all the individual sees is a reflection of himself” (p. 387), and yet if we see ourselves as others see us, we become “schizophrenic” (p. 390).

3. See, particularly, the chapters “Heads down, Feet up” (pp. 31-65) and “Murder and Metaphysics” (pp. 170-209) in Coe, Vision.

4. W. F. Sohlich, “Genet's Drama: Rites of Passage of the Anti-Hero: From Alienated Existence to Artistic Alienation,” Modern Language Notes 89 (1974): 641-53.

5. Jean Genet, Reflections on the Theater, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 79.

6. David K. Jeffrey, in “Genet and Gelber: Studies in Addiction,” Modern Drama 11 (1968): 151-56, argues that the spontaneous characters in Genet “improvise rebellion from the rituals” and thereby “rebel against the ‘addicts,’” with the result that they become “moral” (p. 156). In “The Image and the Revolutionary: Sartrean Relationships in the Work of Jean Genet,” Southern Review (Adelaide) 11 (1978): 57-71, L. A. C. Dobrez sees the playwright finding himself in this maze of mirrors (p. 64). But for J. M. Svendsen, Genet is too much his own audience, “captivated by his own creation: hedonistically, punitively, or curatively” (p. 105).

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint-Genet Comedien et Martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).

8. See Sartre's “Introduction” to The Maids and Deathwatch, pp. 7-31, extracted from his Comedien et Martyr.

9. Harry E. Stewart, “Jean Genet's Mirror Image in Le Balcon,” Modern Drama 12 (1969): 197-203. Stewart calls the mirror “an agent of unification” (p. 198). Also, see Thomas P. Adler, “The Mirror as Stage Prop in Modern Drama,” Comparative Drama 14 (1980): 355-73; and Y. Went-Daoust, “Objets et Lieux dans Le Balcon de Jean Genet,” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 23-43.

10. Coe, Vision, pp. 9-10.

11. In Holy Theater: Ritual and the Avant Garde (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1981), Christopher Innes argues that in Genet truth comes from the negation of the false self as defined by reality and is thereby linked with death, that “absolute negation of reality” (pp. 144-47).

12. Again, see Sohlich, “Rites of Passage,” for an especially insightful analysis of this man/beggar/slave: at the end the “cop … copies the gesture of a prostitute who pleases a timid client who fulfills his destiny as a poet” (pp. 651-52).

13. On the political and sociological implications in Genet see Lucien Goldman, “The Theater of Jean Genet: A Sociological Study,” trans. Pat Dreyfus, The Drama Review 38 (1968): 51-61.

14. For the Renaissance equivalent to this questioning of the audience's reality, see Anne Barton (née Righter) in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964).

15. Genet, Reflections, p. 11.

16. Ronald Hayman speaks of the play as making “a metaphysical assault on the audience,” in Artaud and After (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 153. And Rima Drell Reck observes that in blurring the lines between reality and illusion the play establishes a complicity between the stage and the audience, in “Appearance and Reality in Genet's Le Balcon,” Yale French Studies 29 (1962): 20-25.

17. Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

18. In Contradictory Characters: An Interpretation of the Modern Theater (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), Albert Bermel comments that a “play is a dream filled out, a schematic arrangement of a dream” (p. 8).

19. Speaking of The Blacks, although surely the same observation is relevant for the present play, Jacques Ehrmann argues that Genet establishes “illusions on both sides of the footlights” (p. 41), in “Genet's Dramatic Metamorphosis: From Appearance to Freedom,” Yale French Studies 29 (1962): 33-42.

20. Tom F. Driver, Romantic Quest and Modern Query: A History of the Modern Theater (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), p. 454. And see Jonas A. Barish, “The Veritable Saint Genet,” Wisconsin Studies in Comparative Literature 6 (1965): 285.

21. Contrasting Peter Weiss and Genet himself, Norman A. Rasulis argues that whereas in Weiss the issue is what is to be done, in Genet it is one of questioning identity, in “Identity and Action in the Revolutionary Worlds of The Balcony and Marsat/Sade,” Theatre Annual 30 (1974): 60-72.

22. The last line in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955): “I have had my vision.”

23. In Theater of Protest and Paradox: Development in the Avant-Garde Drama (New York: New York University Press, 1964), George Wellwarth calls us all prisoners of illusions, all inauthentic; when all layers of illusion are stripped away, the audience stares at an empty stage, at nothingness (pp. 113-33). This is how Genet disturbs our conventional suspension of belief in the stage illusion, as Michèle Piemme notes in “Espace Scenique et Illusion Dramatique dans Le Balcon,” Obliques 2 (1972): 23-31.

24. Loren Kruger, “Ritual into Myth—Ceremony and Communication in The Blacks,” Critical Arts 1 (1980): 63.

25. See the commentary on Chantal as an image and a reflection by Harry E. Stewart, “Jean Genet's Saintly Preoccupation in Le Balcon,” Drama Survey 7 (1967): 24-30.

26. Charles Marowitz defines Genet's goal as “to reach that realm of psychic myth and instinctual poetry which is the only alternative to a debilitating, mind-dwarfing, sense-dulling, repulsively predictable naturalistic theater,” in “The Revenge of Jean Genet,” Encore 33 (1961): 24. Without the theater as defined by Genet, without its meaningful presence, life itself is incomplete, its inhabitants less than human. John Elsom argues that in Genet “no man can resign himself to being human,” in “Genet and the Sadistic Society,” The London Magazine 3 (1963): 61-67.

27. In “The Balcony and Parisian Existentialism,” Tulane Drama Review 7 (1963): 60-79, Benjamin Nelson suggests that in Genet the alternatives are incoherent existence or a lifeless image controlled by the social hierarchy, or what he calls “the coincidence of contraries” (p. 61).

28. Jean-Luc Dejean, Le Théâtre français d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Nathan, 1971), pp. 92-95.

29. Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller, Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 155.

30. Joseph H. McMahon, The Imagination of Jean Genet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 174.

31. Lionel Abel, “Metatheatre,” Partisan Review 27 (1960); 239.

32. Martin A. Bertman, “A Metaphysical Analysis of Genet's Le Balcon,” Argora 4 (1979-1980): 82; and Christina Howell, Sartre's Theory of Literature (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979), p. 85.

33. I adjust the term “complementarity” as used by Norman Rabkin in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1964).

34. Bernard Dort, “Le Jeu de Genet,” Temps Modernes 171 (1969): 1875-84.

35. Alfred Simon, “La Metaphore Primordiale,” Espirit 338 (1965): 837-44.

36. Jacques Petit, “Structures Dramatiques dans Le Balcon et Les Negres de Genet,” L'Onirisme et L'insolite dans le Theatre Francasis Contemporain, ed. Paul Vernois (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), pp. 231-51.

37. George G. Strem, “The Theatre of Jean Genet: Facets of Illusion—the Anti-Christ and the Underdog,” Minnesota Review 4 (1964) 226-36.

38. Tom Driver, Jean Genet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 37.

39. Leslie Epstein, “Beyond the Baroque, the Role of the Audience in the Modern Theater,” Triquarterly 12 (1968): 213-34.

40. F. H. Mares, “Jean Genet's The Balcony,” Meanjin 24 (1965): 354-56.

41. Thomas R. Whitaker, Fields of Play in Modern Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 113. David I. Grossvogel offers a brilliant analysis of Genet, and particularly of his virtues and limitations as a playwright, in The Blasphemers: The Theater of Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 135-74, although I would disagree with his final assessment that Genet's theater is magnificent inside, on its own terms, but weakens once it is applied to the world outside the stage (p. 174). Along with Coe's, one of the most insightful and balanced analyses of Genet is Robert Brustein's seminal The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama (New York: Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 361-411.

42. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 477.

43. Ruby Cohn observes in Currents in Contemporary Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969) that in Deathwatch hell is solitude, not other people (p. 65).

44. In The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, ed. Mary Miriam (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), Nicola Chiaromonte defines this audience as judges who are judged (p. 168). For a good analysis of The Blacks, with a special focus on its multiple audiences, see Susan Taubes, “The White Mask Falls,” Tulane Drama Review 7 (1963): 85-92.

45. In “Sculpture into Drama: Giacometti's Influence on Genet,” Drama Survey 3 (1964): 378-85, Robert Nugent observes that the audience of The Blacks “have undergone suffering, terror, solitude; the experience is total and therefore has such purity” (p. 384).

46. For an insightful structural analysis of The Maids see Oreste F. Pucciani, “Tragedy, Genet, and The Maids,” Tulane Drama Review 7 (1963): 42-59.

47. John Cruickshank speaks of the “utter futility” of the audience in The Blacks. “Jean Genet: The Aesthetics of Crime,” Critical Quarterly 6 (1964): 202-10.

48. In The Imagination, McMahon puts it more bluntly: Genet's failure is in thinking that art can stimulate rather than reflect feelings (p. 259).

49. See Edith Melcher, “The Pirandellism of Jean Genet,” French Review 36 (1962): 32-36; and R. B. Parker, “The Theory and Theatre of the Absurd,” Queen's Quarterly 73 (1966): 421-41.