The Radical Idealism of The Screens

The Radical Idealism of The Screens MARGARET SCARBOROUGH • RICHARD COE, COMMENTING ON THE IDEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF JEAN GENET, remarked that he seems to have become "engage malgre lui."l However The Screens is viewed, one cannot deny that Genet's hero, SaiU, is acting from some idealistic commitment and that the value of this commitment precludes all other value. With all the frantic urgency of a child, Genet strips action and characters of conventional assumptions to leave us, in the end, with a character who is little more than a song. But Jacques Guicharnaud, whose sense of moral outrage often inclines him to a myopic view of Genet, is too reductive when he tells us that "the whole play" may be reduced to a "decoration" and a "song.,,2 Genet's concern, like that of many of his predecessors, particularly the "poetes maudits," is immediate intense and active. It is with the dynamics of being and nothingness as they impinge upon value, aesthetics and human identity. Idealistic and singular of purpose, Genet leads Leila and SaiU relentlessly through every sort of dejection into freedom and song, into authenticity and the world of art. I At first glance, The Screens may appear somewhat confusing because Genet's artistry is not that of the traditional theatre. In fact, he has constructed here a universe whose laws are in absolute opposition, not only to those of the conventional theatre, but to those of our modern perception of reality.3 It is an inverted universe where characters move most when they move not at all, where one is expected to communicate irrespective of time or place, where the truth of a matter is in the imitation or reflection of what it would be in the normally ordered world. This violation of the logic of time, space and action is the architecture of a radically creative universe. Instead of taking the 355 356 MARGARET SCARBOROUGH materials of life and its dimensions as a frame upon which to hang the action of the play, Genet designs a world to miscarry our conventional expectations. His purpose here is threefold: to place the action in eternity, to force us to reconsider our tacit assumptions about life and value, and to stress what Genet feels is the most important feature of man - his impulse to fiction. The first indication that we are not in the normal order of time and space comes in Scene One. Said enters, faces the wing from which he entered, and speaks loudly to someone. Moments later, the Mother, his traveling companion, enters from the other side. In Scene Nine, when the Gendarme enters on the left side of the stage, Leila bows toward the right, introducing herself. The dead lower their heads to observe the Mother drag Pierre on the level above. Time presents Genet with a somewhat more complex problem since his play moves through a systematic progression of changes in character and action. But he makes his point\hrough dialogue. When Leila tells Said how he could have avoided entrapment (Scene Eleven), Said responds calmly, logically, "If you're right, you idiot, it's even worse, since you're showing me how to escape now that it's too late. You should have told me before...." Leila was in jail before. It is clear that the action takes place in eternity, not historical time, when the dead change levels (Scene Seventeen) and begin talking openly with the living. One of Genet's most characteristic and developed devices is the transformation of character to symbol. In order to activate the imagination of his audience and allow the perception of moral and factual affinities between actions and character, Genet discards psychology in favor of metaphor and symbol: I hope thereby to do away with characters - which stand up, usually only by virtue of psychological convention - to the advantage of signs as remote as possible from what they are meant first to signify, though nevertheless attached to them in order, by this sole link, to unite the author with the spectator, in short, so to contrive that the characters on the stage would be only metaphors of what they are supposed to represent.4 and...