Toutes les images du langage: Jean Genet (review)

The 'images du langage' given particular attention in this essay collection relate to the notion of stereotype in institutional and ceremonial life. The book concentrates on Genet's plays and his final work Un captif amoureux, a quotation from which serves as the collection's title. In his perceptive essay, 'Le spectre, le neutre, le vide', René de Ceccatty argues that, something like the trace, a 'removal from temporal events' may create, to quote from Un captif amoureux, 'des images fabuleuses agissantes à long, à très long terme après la mort' (p. 33). He goes on to point out that this trace or spectre in Genet is also related to the secret of birth, and one suspects that this refers not only to the author's abandonment on coming into the world as Ceccatty mentions, but also to the less than nothing, neither being nor non-being, of fecundity, which generates images and language from the mysterious space of inception which is Genet's poetics. Michel Corvin in his pre-Socratic sounding 'L'être du non-être' looks at being, inversion, disappearance and persistence. Saïd, the traitor character in Les Paravents is described as falling through the cracks between being and non-being: disappeared and yet celebrated in song. Here, one can't help remembering Genet's wish to speak of Smerdyakov, the traitor from The Brothers Karamazov, of which Saïd is certainly an avatar. Corvin concludes that the problem of absence is more important than that of evil in Genet's theatre, contending that for Genet 'le non-être est' (p. 44). The discomfort of this state may well then invite along with Ceccatty's article a useful reading of Levinas's il y a or more generally the neutral, upon which Johan Faerber has elsewhere already worked. Sylvain Dreyer in 'Stéreotype et fulgurance' looks at the productive subject of comprehensibility in Un captif amoureux, and points out a new approach in Genet to the notion of dramatic action, one which denies easy cathartic outcome. While this is absolutely central, it does not quite square with Dreyer's claim that Genet partly curbs his poetic potency in his final work in order to be understood. Indeed, Dreyer avoids all mention of the nightmare irruptions of the Shoah in the text, which Guattari comments on elsewhere, and whose assault on the understanding and whose resistance to theodicy are key to Genet's universe. The volume as a whole explores the 'imaginaire social' billed in the preface, although the 'vaste intertexte littéraire' of major authors (p. 11) is really only hinted at through the most fleeting references to Claudel, Proust and Mallarmé. Four interviews with key figures in recent productions of Genet's theatre follow the articles. Especially those with Sébastien Rajon and Michel Fau provide insights into the problems of putting Genet's imagery on the stage. The volume ends with two unpublished Genet snippets, a letter and a short poem, which certainly whet the reader's appetite for more material from the archive.