The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett (review)

David Houston Jones's well-researched book makes a convincing argument that a viable reading of the texts of Genet and Beckett can be made through the concept of the abject, which he associates with marginality. In the Introduction, Jones explains the abject through Julia Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur l'abjection, which argues that identity can be derived from expulsion in which the Self, no longer constituted as an object in the eyes of the Other, becomes abject. The marginality of Genet's petty criminals, beggars, and traitors or Beckett's tramps is exacerbated by bodily breakdown, thereby further accentuating the abject.

Jones's first chapter argues that in Beckett's fiction, pregnancy is linked to revulsion and birth to the creation of the disabled or dysfunctional, while Genet's writings link mother figures to objects of extreme disgust and shame. In chapter two, Jones explains how Genet's concept of sainthood is synonymous with acts such as theft that are glorified as offenses to bourgeois society, thus elevating the condemned criminals as pariahs in abjection. Beckett's characters are depicted as saintly (Jones changes the emphasis to Christlike) in a type of passive abjection in which they lose their individual will. Thus, in both Beckett and Genet, a perverse embracing of poverty and degradation becomes a source of strength; moreover, the fetishizing of bodily filth seen in Genet and Beckett is compared to the Christian models of saints, who, when caring for the sick, immersed themselves in disease and decrepitude.

In chapter three, Jones argues that Beckett and Genet use the abject as a means to denigrate their own texts. Art for Beckett and Genet thus becomes part of a culture of failure in which the impossible, unreachable predicament of writing develops into an aesthetic of abjection. Beckett and Genet enact failure in their work: they claim to write about art but then fail to do so through absent meaning and self-annihilating narratives; Jones uses Genet's fragmentary essays on Rembrandt and Alberto Giacometti, as well as Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Le Dépeupleur, as his prime examples.

Chapter four compares Beckett's culture of failure to Genet's culture of waste through images of ingestion and excretion, which act as forms of degradation and abjection. Jones discusses images of ingestion in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs as a refusal of the normative social world, self-poisoning in Les Bonnes as a means to contest oppression, vomiting in Notre-Dame and L'Innommable as abjection of the Self in opposition to the Other (similar to the underlying psychological causes of anorexia), abjection as a rejection of Self as an object of tyranny in Comment c'est, and anality and cannibalism in Pompes funèbres as a glorification of waste.

Chapter five, which is perhaps the most intriguing part of Jones's study, equates self and text in the works of Genet and Beckett. Jones claims that Genet never finished writing many of his projects, which evolved into fragments. Genet thus associated literary expression with formal disintegration—the equivalent of a breakdown in the body of his own work. On the other hand, Beckett, who translated his own works, thus produced variants or "residua," an endless flux of prose that fails to achieve wholeness as a result of an expulsion of texts, which is similar to the celebrated goal associated with abjection. In short, Beckett's own translations annihilate stylistic presence, marginalizing texts, which constitutes the dynamics of abjection.

The major flaw in Jones's study is that the book fails to address abjection in the plays of Beckett and Genet; if Jones chose to ignore the dramas, he should have included "fiction" in his title to make it more precise. Although Jones pays obligatory homage to several of the plays, there is...