Genet's originality stems from the fact that he has cogently chosen to refuse society's values and has set about to reverse, if only for himself, the moral code of our time. His "Jansenism of Evil," as Sartre calls it [in his illuminating study Saint Genet], is, in reality, a search for identity in an atmosphere of uncertainty. For Genet, as for Shakespeare, the world is a stage, and you and I, the players.

In his massive biography of Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre states that the key to understanding this admired criminal's self-imposed bastardy can be found in an incident taken from his adolescence: discovered with his hand in a purse, the youthful Genet was market for life by the accusation: "You are a thief." At least he became convinced, according to Sartre, that he should become "Another than Self." Since this child of ten did not view himself as an absolute criminal yet was extremely intimidated by the unflinching judgment of others, he chose for himself a mode of being which posits its justification in the look of others…. [Genet] seems to view literature as a fabric of lies which veil the truth. By means of the mystification called literature, he is able to swindle and rob the public. Genet abandons himself to literature because the fictional world he creates becomes the evasive object of an often credulous body of admirers. He thereby confirms, both to himself and to us, that the world is a stage. The most salient confirmation of his views on the subject, as one might expect, is to be found in his theatre. For his plays, as Leonard Pronko has rightly observed, are rituals where "Genet's characters perform their sacraments." The images we find there are indeed alarming; for they are meant to unmask the duplicitous nature of man's behavior, to reflect our grimaces and masks back to us. (pp. 33-4)

[Genet endeavors to show] the public that the spectator is as deeply involved with role-playing as the actors on the stage. Carried to its logical conclusion, this means that one cannot differentiate between the world outside the theatre and the world within. Genet's theatre must then be seen as an image, or, more exactly, as the reflection of the world. His characters are puppets whose actions are controlled and whose existence can be defined only in terms of the roles assumed, or the function the actors fulfill with relation to each other. For Genet, we, like his actors, are no more than the image or reflection which we see in the eyes and opinions of others. (p. 34)

In assuming the ecclesiastical, judicial and military images of society as their own identities, the three clients [of the brothel in The Balcony who travesty a Judge, a Bishop, and a General] find themselves in a situation very similar in nature to the illusory and pleasurable task they fulfilled in the brothel. Now, rather than using prostitutes as the foil of their imaginations, they can rely on the whole of society. The General will have his soldiers, the Bishop his sinners, and there will be criminals for the Judge. The thus-prostituted world becomes a stage where the travestied plays enacted in Irma's brothel are to be re-enacted on a social plane. It is the Bishop who grasps the idea: "As long as we were in the bedroom of a house of prostitution, we belonged to our own fancy: for having exposed it, for having published it, here we are bound together with all men … and compelled to continue this adventure according to the laws of visibility."…

The so-called "laws of visibility" are precisely those rules by which we exist. The dilemma of man, it is implied, is that he cannot exist as an individual in society, for in order to remain in society, man must relinquish his individuality. This is so because we are what others see in us. They exist, on the other hand, because we see and recognize the roles they play. We expect them to act in a given way and they, in turn, act according to our expectation. This Jeu de glaces is nothing other than the condition of man.

Genet's theory, in summary, is this: "Those things which are most beautiful on the earth, we owe to masks."… While we dispose of two sources of information by which we know things and ourselves—our intimate sense, which furnishes us with subjective information, or the persons around us, who furnish all other information—most of us are satisfied with living in a manner which others expect of us…. Thus the theatre of Genet poses the basic question of man's existence—not with relation to the universe, since there is no search for God or transcendent meaning in life—but rather with regard to man's complicitous relationship to man. Genet's theatre leads us to question whether we, any less than the clients of Irma's brothel, are impersonators in a world of dreams and phantasmagorial convention. (pp. 35-6)

Genet's theatre stresses the thesis that because the world is a stage and life itself an inescapable hall of mirrors, one must reveal one's own being, as well as that of all men, as duplicitous or multifarious. In Baudelairean fashion, Genet consents to be trapped by the look of mankind, if only to reflect that look, now deformed and hideous, back to its source. (p. 40)