The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking by Gene A. Plunka (review)

140 Book Reviews (1937), originally written as living newspaper sketches when Williams attended the University of Iowa in the late Thirties, were sociaJ(ist) plays that he would later use to apply for the WPA Federal Writers' Project, first in Chicago, then in New Orleans. Though they predate the Cold War by nearly a decade, these plays, like his curtainraiser Headlines (1936), offer some insight into Williams's political (and therefore gender) schooling during the Depression that surely had some effect upon him and his dramaturgy after the war. Savran's decision to ignore these formative years in Williams is unfortunate. In all, though, the good in Savran's book far outweighs the bad. as he succeeds in giving us an insightful, readable, and enjoyable look at two of America's most prominent playwrights, while avoiding many of the ideological agendas so common in poststructuralist studies. JOHN S. BAK, BALL STATE UNIVERSITY GENE A. PLUNKA. The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1992. Pp. 357. $45.00. This is a very substantial and important contribution to critical examination of the whole of Genet's work. It features a new approach to some of his well-known ritualistic techniques, an approach inspired by Victor Turner's ethnographic research on rites of passage in African tribes. Gene Plunka shows how Turner's findings help us to understand the rites of passage, best seen in Genet's plays, from degraded outcast to the artist who discovers a new sense of being, free from colonial paternalism. Some kind of metamorphosis occurs, Dr. Plunka believes, in Genet's novels, essays, and films, as well as in his plays. In all of them we witness "the transition from game playing (which includes sexual charades, politics, narcissism, performance rites and rituals) to establishing one's identity, through a state of risk taking that develops from solitude (which includes artistic creation, degradation, theft, murder, betrayal, and revolt)"{I8). Thus, as far as the plays are concerned, in The Balcony, for example, the much discussed event of Roger's self-immolation is seen as comparable to the actions of celebrants in certain African tribes, which are designed to separate them from the dominant social order. For "the castration enhances Roger's solitude and completes his metamorphosis from game playing to degraded outcast free from external control" (214). In The Blacks, a rite of passage enables the protagonists to transcend their servile condition. The blacks purge themselves of white values of love, kindness, and pity, in order to become the very image that whites have of them: savage, cruel, vile, and primitive. Then, again like Victor Turner's celebrants, they can be born anew after this process of degradation. The very quintessence of degradation in solitude is to be found, Plunka believes, in The Screens, where Said achieves "his own sainthood through a rite of passage that takes him from outcast through degradation in solitude and finally to a Book Reviews 141 dependence on his own inventive talents as a pariah rejecting all remnants of social norms and values" (266). Of course, by no means all critics would attach such a positive outcome to Lheir interpretation ofGenet's plays, particularly the early ones. Most have not seen Lefranc, for instance, as Plunka does. as Genet's alter ego, the daring protagonist of Deathwatch who proceeds in a rite of passage from solitude to sainthood. They see his venture rather as a useless gesture. and many of them would not go so far as Plunka either in regarding the fatal game played by Claire and Solange, in The Maids, as a triumphant progress towards "sainthood." One might be forgiven for protesting. moreover, that there is much more to Genet's art and aesthetics than "risk taking," and that almost exclusively thematic interpretation tends to make light of his more poetic qualities, such as his lyrical prose and visionary creative powers. However, the author docs at least pay passing tribute to these, even if his main intention, in the case of the novels as well as the plays, is clearly to "unravel...