- Travailler pour les morts: politiques de la mémoire dans l’œuvre de Jean Genet
Melina Balcázar Moreno’s first monograph negotiates peculiarly dense prose to give important insights into death and memory throughout virtually the whole of Genet’s œuvre. She traces numerous new routes into his ethico-aesthetic texts, notably those on plastic art, although also ‘L’Étrange mot d’ . . .’, ‘Le Funambule’, and the letters, with judicious use made of theorists and philosophers infrequently employed in Genet studies, including Adorno, Benjamin, and Levinas. The politics of memory Balcázar Moreno discerns is one that eschews the mnesic trace, one recalled to memory, in favour of the trace left by the irrevocable absence of the dead. While this may still render the past quotable, it is not limited to the rememoration or mourning of particular times. Such a trace may be found in highly charged images delegated from the past, described in Un captif amoureux as ‘des images fabuleuses, agissantes à long, à très long terme après la mort’. Balcázar Moreno distils this into the term ‘image agissante’ (pp. 26, 57, 236) to convey the active role assumed by the remnants of defunct worlds producing ‘de nouveaux événements très anciens’ (p. 27). In Part I the errant relation of the artist to a Polis founded on fratricide is followed by a description of the reader’s role in producing the author’s absence-filled texts. Genet avoids becoming just another eloquence, as the signatures crowding in his work are at once full of affect and yet so dense as to be individually almost illegible. This effect behaves as a substrate, recalling plastic art in which the muddiness of the paint in Rembrandt or the whiteness of the paper in Giacometti are rendered as significant as the thing represented (pp. 96, 97). Part II discusses mourning and spectral calling (p. 114), whereby dominant metaphors of victory and grief are decomposed and made to perform subversively. We examine Decarnin in Pompes funèbres, before turning to the maternal figure more generally. Balcázar Moreno sees the Islamic-Christian depiction of Hamza and his mother through a Palestinian pietà in Un captif amoureux as going from a symbol of mourning to one of resistance that establishes ‘un lien qui se placerait en dehors de toute hostilité’ (p. 178). It might have been useful in this section if the author had added some commentary on Genet’s treatment of Judaism, an area on which she fails to expand in this adaptation of her thesis. Part III, on the immemorial, reframes Genet’s lyric voice within epic concerns, moving him from the beginning of the text, in which the role of chance and pleasure in writing ‘mettent en danger l’autonomie de l’écrivain’ (p. 31), to a situation in which it is not ‘la personne de l’auteur [. . .] qui donne la configuration du texte’ but ‘la mémoire qui prescrit rigoureusement le mode de tissage’ (p. 239). This erring on the side of the author as conduit for memory constructing and transforming itself within language before Genet’s self-avowed role as artificer nevertheless leads Balcázar Moreno to a fruitful paradox, which should further concentrate critical attention on the truquages and tamperings through which configured memory is dramatized. While a number of lengthy quotations are used twice, this useful book is closely argued, wide-ranging, and has no direct equivalent.