Genet and Gelber: Studies in Addiction

GENET AND GELBER: STUDIES IN ADDICTION BOTH JEAN GENET'S The Balcony AND JACK GELBER'S The Connection use the same dramatic device, the play-within-a-play, to express similar moral positions. Both playwrights use the device to erect a "hall of mirrors," which becomes the central image of the condition of mankind. Genet's hero in The Thiers Journal~ Stilitano, trapped in its inmost maze, is the prototype of the heroes of both plays. Whether Stilitano can or cannot break out of the "hall" is irrelevant. Whether he tries or does not try to break out is central. His success is not moot, and neither is the pinnacle he does or does not reach for. Genet's play opens on a bishop, reciting a theology which appears to border on the Black Mass. We soon learn that the bishop is not a bishop at all, but rather a gasman in one room of a large brothel, the Balcony, playing out his erotic illusions of churchly power. Scenes two, three, and four reveal other characters, a "judge," a "general," and a "tramp," occupied in similar ways in other of the brothel's many rooms. It is important to note that all the characters are grotesques, horribly made up, mounted on cothurni to give themselves a !physical height and power which is contradicted in each by a whining desire to be reassured of their strength. In scene five, during a conversation between the bawd, Irma, and one of her whores, Carmen , the machinations and elaborate preparations of each of the "ceremonies" is discussed. We further learn what has only been intimated in the previous acts by machine-gun fire and the "bishop's" rantings-there is a revolution in progress outside the Balcony. In scene seven, when the court envoy is introduced, it becomes obvious that his reality and the reality he represents, the extra-brothel world of government and aristocracy, is jaded and corrupt. Each of the levels of reality we meet in the Balcony, like the dead bodies of the Queen and Madame Irma's pimp, is "moving rapidly toward immobility."! Like Stilitano, they are sapped of all vitality, since life for them has become a maze of mirrors, reflections of reflections of a true reality outside their brothel world. In the world of the play, then, there are four distinct levels of reality: the reality of the bishop, judge, general, and tramp; the reality of Irma and Carmen, which overlaps and includes each of the smaller realities of their clients; the reality of the 1 Jean Genet, The Balcony (New York, 1958), p. 70. 151 152 MODERN DRAMA September Envoy's world outside the Balcony; and the reality of another world outside, of the revolution. The mouthpiece of true revolution is Roger, and if there is a hero in the play, it is he. He speaks for a dispassionate but brutal rebellion from the abstraction and illusion symbolized by Madame Irma's brothel; he wants to "eliminate distance" (p. 59), in combat, in the revolution, and in the personal relationships between human beings. Thus, he objects when the central committee of the revolution uses an ex-whore, Chantal, to "embody the revolution" (p. 63), because he realizes that such an embodiment will make her "an emblem forever escaping from her womanliness" (p. 65), make her, in short, a symbol. Chantal is first of all a woman for Roger, who is in love with her. When the committee turns Chantal into a symbol, it is defeated in principle, for, as Roger says earlier, "If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy." (p. 56) When Chantal becomes a symbol, the revolution becomes merely one of Madame Irma's rooms enlarged, and each of the revolutionaries becomes her client. The revolution is defeated in fact when its symbol, Chantal, confronts four stronger symbols-Irma, dressed as the Queen, and her clients, the bishop, the judge, and the general. Chantal is shot down, perhaps by a stray bullet, perhaps by the revolutionaries, who now wish...