Download LT 356 Politics and Performance - Listen Again

Clare Finburgh
Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies
University of Essex
LT 356 Politics and Performance
Jean Genet (1910-1986) The Blacks (1959. First performed at Théâtre de Lutèce, Paris.
Dir. by Roger Blin).
The following notes provide background information to our seminar session. They are
intended as a starting point from which you can conduct further and more detailed
research. They include questions (in BLUE) that encourage you to explore themes and
issues in greater detail. If you refer to the notes in essays or examinations, please
ensure that you quote your source clearly.
SET TEXT: Jean Genet, The Blacks (1959) (TB), trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove
Press, 1960).
INTRODUCTION: THE ROLE OF THE COMMITTED WRITER
 G. is a committed writer: the themes of all his plays concern the marginalised, oppressed,
outcast sectors of society: The Maids (1947) treats humiliated, downcast servants; Deathwatch
(1948) concerns prisoners sentenced to death; The Balcony (1957) condemns the arbitrary,
unjust mechanisms that empower figureheads of the state, church and law; The Blacks (1959)
explores racial stereotyping and the oppression of people of African descent; The Screens
(1961) illustrates the fight for independence of a colonised people.
 G. was also closely involved with real political struggles during his life: he worked with
Black Panther movement in the U.S.A. (a militant Black political party founded in 1965, that
fought for Black Civil Rights, and aimed to end the dominance of Whites)
U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos doing the Black Panther salute when they
won gold and bronze at the Mexico Olympics, 1968 (they were then given 48 hours to
leave the Olympic village).
G. was also involved with Palestinian freedom fighters, and supported the German terrorist
Baader-Meinhof Gang (West-German guerrillas dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalist
society).
 But G. was never affiliated to party politics, and was sceptical about any organised political
movement. The themes and style of his theatre are radical, but he refuses to contain
unequivocal political statements in his works:
The world has managed to get along without [The Screens]; it will continue to do so.
Political nonchalance will allow a problematical meeting between a few thousand
Parisians and the play (“Letters to Roger Blin”, in Reflections on the Theatre, p. 11).
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 G. is under no delusions that his theatre will change the world. He doesn’t believe acts on
stage are genuine political acts that effect direct historical change: “Actors’ acting is to military
reality what smoke bombs are to the reality of napalm” (“Letters to Roger Blin”, p. 50).
 He refuses to give works definitive meaning, because this would demobilise the perpetual
movement of revolutionary change:
It is not the function of the artist or the poet to find a practical solution to the problems
of evil …. The work must be an active explosion, an act to which the public reacts – as
it wishes, as it can’ (“Preface” (1960), The Balcony, p. xiv).
G. believes that once concrete political statements are made on stage, they become fixed, and
are no longer revolutionary:
A few poets, these days, go in for a very curious operation: they sing the praises of the
People, of Liberty, of the Revolution, etc., which, when sung, are rocketed up into an
abstract sky and then stuck there, discomfited and deflated, to figure in deformed
constellations. Disembodied, they become untouchable. How can we approach them,
love them, live them, if they are dispatched so magnificently far away? (“Preface”
(1960), The Balcony, p. xiv).
 Definitive political statements no longer take into account the moving subjectivities of life.
They become fixed, rigid, totalitarian, and distanced from actual citizens. G. alludes to and
criticises political theatre contemporary to him: in France, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Adamov,
Armand Gatti. Abroad, Brecht, John Arden, Peter Weiss.
 G. hopes to incite reflection on political issues in his audience by raising questions, and
refusing to provide answers.
 G. continually undermines the authority of his own texts:
People say that plays are generally supposed to have a meaning: not this one. It’s a
celebration whose element are disparate, it is the celebration of nothing (“Letters to
Roger Blin”, p. 14).
He points to the artifice of his own works, so as to avoid making irrefutable political statements
BLACK IDENTITY
 All identity in G.’s ontology (theory of “being”) is constructed from external social
influences.
 But this is all the more acute for oppressed members of society, like Blacks. The Black
activist Frantz Fanon writes:
Ontology – once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not
permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man
be black; he must be black in relation to the white man (Black Skin White Masks
(1952), p. 110).
 Black identity in this play derives partly from how Blacks perceive themselves, and partly
from how they’re perceived by Whites. It’s impossible to separate these two categories. They’re
reciprocal, confused, in tension.
 The Blacks have become a grotesque (the meaning of grotesque: strange hybrid of
conflicting genres/styles) combination of identities. Think about their “grotesqueness”
with respect to their costumes and their names.
 The Blacks in the ritual put black boot polish on themselves. Are they reaffirming
and celebrating their colour, or taking the Whites’ image of them to a logical extreme?
Do they enact the killing of the white woman to prove the Whites right? To prove that
they’re savages, cannibals? Or do they act in anti-colonial, political defiance of white
dominance by killing a white woman?
 The Blacks in the play revel in portraying themselves as “savages”. There are
multiple examples of this. Find them in the dialogue and action.
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The Blacks, at Salle Roger Blin, Paris (2002). Directed by Alain Ollivier, scenography
Patrick Bouchain.
 The Blacks also exaggerate the white stereotype of the “black race” by exaggerating
their own sexuality. Find examples of this.
 In what ways is it dangerously racist to describe Blacks essentially in physical,
sexual and sensual terms?
The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1999) by Chris Ofili,
winner of the Turner Prize, 1998. Ofili exploits images of Black stereotypes from 1970s
blaxploitation films - drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes – and exaggerates them, to
challenge the viewer’s construction of these stereotypes.
 Are these exaggerated caricatured acts and statements by the Blacks satirising
white image of Blacks?
 Fanon writes, “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered
down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships”
(Black Skin, p. 112).
 Find examples, notably in Archibald’s speeches, of Fanon’s sentiment.
 Fanon says, “I shall demonstrate elsewhere that what is often called the black soul
is a white man’s artefact” (Black Skin, p. 14). Are the Blacks in G.’s play caricaturing the
white image of them as athletic, musical, sexual, in other words physical, and not fit for
the mental, cerebral domain?
Black musicians and athletes celebrated by the white community – Miles Davis, Maurice
Green.
Fanon writes, “Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these
statements were false … We had physicians, professors, statesmen” (Black Skin, p. 117).
 Or do these descriptions of Black constitute a black refusal of white values of
propriety, beauty, morality, rationality? Are these Blacks creating their own identity out
of everything that contravenes white propriety?
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 The Blacks appear to attempt to forge their own, non-white identity. Archibald says, “Invent
not love, but hatred, and thereby make poetry, since that’s the only domain in which we’re
allowed to operate” (p. 26). Poetry represents revolution, rebellion, because it evades the
conventions and limitations of everyday language. It’s creative and inventive. The Blacks refuse
conciliation, reasoning, negotiation with the Whites, because they know this’ll only take place
on white terms: “We know your argument. You’re going to urge us to be reasonable, to be
conciliatory. But we’re bent on being unreasonable, on being hostile” (p. 29). Only Diouf, who’s
a Christian priest, preaches love, reconciliation. The other Blacks therefore reject him.
 G. heralds the collapse of the European project of Enlightenment that supposedly
advocated freedom and equality, but persisted in the slave trade. In the 18 th century, the new
values of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and the Declaration of the Rights of Man didn’t apply to
Blacks or slaves, whose position of subjugation was maintained because of its clear economic
benefits for the colonies. Christian values of kindness, charity, equality and fraternity never
resulted in Blacks being treated as “men”, equal to white men. Therefore, in The Blacks Blacks
perhaps reject white “values”. Fanon, too, refuses conciliation: “ ‘Get used to me, I am not
getting used to anyone’” (Black Skin, p. 131). The Blacks won’t negotiate with Whites, because
it’ll only be on the Whites’ terms.
 So instead, Village and Virtue appear to attempt to invent “black love”
 Find examples of how they attempt to do this.
 G. shows how authentic identity is impossible, because all individuals are shaped by the
influences that surround them. But this absence of origin and authenticity means that G. avoids
the trap of removing the white stereotype of the Blacks, and replacing it with another
stereotype. Early founders of the black négritude movement – Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire
– perhaps fell into the trap of attempting to create “black identity”, and therefore fixing Blacks
yet again in a stereotype. Senghor writes,
This is rhythm in its primordial purity, this is rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art,
especially sculpture. It is composed of a theme – sculptural form – which is set in
opposition to a sister theme, as inhalation is to exhalation, and that is repeated. It is not
the kind of symmetry that gives rise to monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free… This is
how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to
the spirituality of the object; and that character of abandon which is ours is itself
rhythmic (quoted in Black Skin, p. 123).
Twin figure, Babanki, Cameroon. Wood.
The problem is that Senghor now defines Blacks being as in touch with primal rhythms, and
therefore confines them to yet another stereotyped image. Fanon expresses scepticism: “one
had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal marriage of the group and the
cosmos” (Black Skin, p. 125).
 G., conversely, leaves Blacks without any single, clear definition. He writes, “This play is
written not for the Blacks, but against the Whites” (“Preface to Les Nègres”). Fanon, too,
strategically avoids describing what Blacks “are”. He describes what they aren’t: “Many
Negroes will not find themselves in what follows” (Black Skin, p. 12); “Negro experience is not a
whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes” (Black Skin, p. 136).
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 So, can you sum up the reasons why G.’s definition of Blacks in the play is elusive,
shifting and constantly evades definition?
THEATRICALITY
 Central to G.’s dramatic theory, is the concept of self-conscious “ceremony”,
“masquerade”.
 Theatre must constantly highlight its own artificial status as theatre, and in turn indicate the
artificial status of the roles everyone plays in everyday life.
 G. states that he bases his theory of theatre around Catholic Eucharist, which he defines
as “the highest modern drama of the past two thousand years” (“Lettre à Jean-Jacques
Pauvert” (1954), p. 817): a crust of bread becomes body of Christ.
 For G., all theatre must evoke in the spectator this dual sense of belief and disbelief: “A
representation that does not act on my soul is vain. It is vain if I do not believe in what I see,
which will cease – which will never have taken place – when the curtain falls” (“Lettre à JeanJacques Pauvert”, p. 818).
 G. provides examples of what he means. He recounts the story of boys playing a war game
in park. They decide it’d be more scary to play during the night, but it’s broad daylight. So they
decide that one of the boys – the youngest and weakest – will play Night. He goes off, and then
approaches the other boys very slowly, like dusk. As he nears, the other boys become nervous
and worried. They then decide he’s approached too quickly, so they scrap Night. The boys
showed their simultaneous total belief and total disbelief.
 G. was very influenced by theatre from Japan, China, Bali. He explains the theatrical thrill
derived from Japanese Nô theatre, where the leading lady, fluttering her fan, is played by
burley taxi driver (“Lettres à Antoine Bourseiller” (?1962), p. 903).
Japanese Nô theatre, where women are played by men.
 The religious belief in the Eucharist, is replaced in theatre with poetic beauty, which
encourages the spectator to believe in what is seen on stage, despite its falsity.
 There are many, many examples in TB of this kind of suspension of disbelief. E.g. the
court of white dignitaries – Queen, Missionary, Judge, Governor, Valet – is played by black
actors.
The Blacks, at Salle Roger Blin, Paris (2002). Directed by Alain Ollivier, scenography
Patrick Bouchain.
Find other examples of self-conscious theatricality in the play.
 Note that the ceremony the Blacks enact on stage supposedly masks a real act off-stage,
where a Black is being tried and executed for betraying the black cause. BUT of course the off-
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stage action is also artifice, play-acting, theatre too – it’s part of the play. So does G. indicate
that ALL life is role-play?
THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THEATRICALITY
 Theatre renders the spectator powerless: s/he can’t change script; answer back; act. This
serves as a metaphor for the treatment of Blacks both in the colonies, and in Europe and the
U.S.A., where they’re dictated to, but have no right to answer back. Blacks in this play subject
the White Court watching their play to this powerlessness:
We shall even have the decency – a decency learned from you – to make
communication impossible. We shall increase the distance that separates us – a
distance that is basic – by our pomp, our manners, our insolence – for we are also
actors (pp. 12; 69).
 The white political and economic power is demystified as no more than that of ordinary
people (who could even be black actors) playing roles.
 White supremacy is exposed as non-permanent, and the White Queen soon loses
her power. Find instances of this.
 The Blacks show that they can play at being a white Queen, Governor, etc. If they
can play at being in power on stage, why not do the same in real life? The ritual they
enact on stage becomes a rehearsal for assuming real power. Does it not therefore
contains great political potential?
The Blacks, at Salle Roger Blin, Paris (2002). Directed by Alain Ollivier, scenography
Patrick Bouchain.
 The ritual the Blacks enact is modified, changed, improvised. What does this say
about their roles in real life, and how they can transform?
CONCLUSION
 The narrative in this play isn’t linear or easily explained: is it a story about Blacks
killing a white person and White Court trying them? If so, who did they kill? A white
tramp (p. 20)? An old down-and-out vaudeville singer (p. 40)? Marie sitting at her
sewing-machine? (p. 51).
 The whole reason for the ceremony is for the White Court to try the Blacks for the
murder of a white person. But the catafalque is empty (p. 94). There’s no body. So are
Blacks innocent after all? Is the white image of them exposed as wholly fallacious, if it’s
based on a crime they never committed?
 Fanon writes, “All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong.
I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good” (Black Skin, p. 139). But
off-stage, they’ve killed one of their own, for treason. Is this an act of political
commitment intended to cause rebellion, or just another manifestation of savagery,
“cannibalism”?
 Brecht and Sartre depend on dialectics to display each value and its opposite. G, explodes
simplistic binaries (one thing and its opposite) into myriad confusing, shifting, dispersed
perspectives. Dialectics assume that one thing’s conveniently the opposite of another. This
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depends on value judgements. G. destabilises all hierarchies. By the end of the play,
reader/spectator can no longer see black and white as opposites. Felicity says, “Walk gently on
your white feet. White? No, black. Black or white? Or blue? Red, green, bleu, white, red, green,
yellow, who knows, where am I?” (p. 77).
 G. leaves the spectator with myriad shifting perspectives, that only she/he can construct
into a coherent picture. The spectator’s attention and effort is therefore solicited to a maximum,
since G. refuses to explain, clarify, define:
It seems to me that the public does not know how to listen. It tends to confuse two
words: one hears with both one’s ears, but one listens – or strains one’s ears – with
one’s toes (“Letters to Roger Blin”, p. 41).
FURTHER READING
Odette Aslan, Jean Genet : Points de vue critiques - témoignages - chronologie bibliographie - illustrations (Paris: Seghers, 1973).
*Claude Bonnefoy, Genet (Paris: éd. Universitaires, 1965).
*Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern, Genet : A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1972).
*Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw,
Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill and Genet (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1964)
Lewis Cetta, Profane Play, Ritual and Jean Genet: A Study of his Drama (Alabama: The
University of Alabama Press, 1974)
*Richard Coe, The Vision of Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
*The Theatre of Jean Genet. A Casebook (New York: Grove Press, 1970).
Bernard Dort, Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1979).
Tom Driver, “Jean Genet”, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966).
Martin Esslin, “Jean Genet - A Hall of Mirrors”, The Theatre of the Absurd (Middlesex: Penguin,
1980).
Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York:
Grove Press, 1967).
Jean Genet, “Preface to The Blacks”, trans. Clare Finburgh, in Spaces of Revolution: The
Politics of Jean Genet’s Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008)
Préface inédite des “Nègres”’, in Jean Genet: Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard,
2002), 835-43.
Les Nègres au Port de la lune (C.D.N. Bordeaux: Editions de la différence, 1988).
Preface” (1960), The Balcony, trans. Barbara Wright and Terry Hands (London: Faber,
1991), p. xiv
“Letters to Roger Blin”, in Reflections on the Theatre and Other Writings, trans. Richard
Seaver (London: Faber, 1972).
* “Lettre à Jean-Jacques Pauvert” (1954); “Lettres à Antoine Bourseiller” (?1962), Jean
Genet: Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Genet explains his concept of
theatricality, notably via myth of Christian Eucharist.
*Frantz Fanon, “Introduction”; “The Fact of Blackness” (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann
(New York: Grove Press, 1967).
Sidney Homan, The Audience as Actor and Character: The Modern Theatre of Jean
Genet (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989).
Hédi Khélil, Figures de l’altérité dans le théâtre de Jean Genet: Lecture des Nègres et des
Paravents (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).
Bettina Knapp, Jean Genet (Boston: Twayne, 1968).
*Jean-Marie Magnan, Jean Genet (Paris: Seghers, 1966).
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*Arnaud Malgorn, Jean Genet, Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988).
Joseph Mc. Mahon, The Imagination of Jean Genet (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1963).
*J.P. Little, Les Nègres (London: Grant & Cutler, 1990).
Barbara Read, ed., Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet (London:
Middlesex University Press, 1997).
Marie Redonnet, ‘Une déflagration poétique’, in Jean Genet: le Poète travesti (Paris: Grasset,
2000).
*Jean-Paul Sartre, “Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized”, in Colonialism and
Neocolonialism: Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Azzedine Haddour (London: Routledge,
2001).
‘Black Orpheus’ (1948), trans. S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence africaine, 1976).
Jeanette Savona, Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Philip Thody, Jean Genet: A Study of his Novels and Plays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968).
*Edmund White, Genet (London: Picador, 1994). Genet’s definitive biography.
*Highly recommended.
When looking for materials in the university library, think laterally: search not only under
the author’s and text’s names, but also under key words related to the text. E.g. for
Bertolt Brecht, you could search under “German drama”; “twentieth-century German
theatre”; “art and war in Nazi Germany”; “political theatre”, etc. You can also conduct
online searches for materials using Literature Online and Jstor (available via the
university library website – click “Databases”). Again, think laterally if you don’t
immediately find relevant resources.
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