The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit, and Threat in Genet's The Blacks

The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit, and Threat in Genet's The Blacks UNA CHAUDHURI Every premiere production of a Genet play - indeed, every instance ofGenet's appearance on the literary or social scene - has been an occasion for heated controversy, scandal, even outrage. The fIrSt production of his fourth play, The Blacks, in 1959 was no exception. At once, the conservative critics were roused to express the kind ofhorror and rage that had seemed hysterical even in 1891, when its target was Ibsen's Ghosts. l The Blacks, wrote Gabriel Marcel, is "the rejection, the spitting forth, the vomiting of everything that has constituted the honor and dignity of the Christian West.,,2 Another critic compared watching the play to being "bashed on the head," adding, "Blasphemies faIl like huge turds on the altars of Faith and Fatherland.,,3 Many saw Genet as an irresponsible iconoclast, "smashing true and false gods indifferently.". To this moralistic attack, Genet's supporters reacted with a move that was to become, unfortunately, characteristic of much Genet criticism. It was what might be called the formalist or aestheticist move, the dangers of which Sartre had warned some time earlier: I know people who can read the coarsest passages without turning a hair! "Those two gentlemen sleep together? And then they eat their excrement?And after that, one goes off to denounce the other?As ifthat mattered! It's so well written." They stop at Genet's vocabulary so as Dot to enter his delirium; they admire the poem so as not to have to realize the content.S In this little parody, Sartre put his finger on a problem which is endemic not only in Genet's work but in all avant-garde theater: the problem of being co-opted, of having its disturbing, subversive content "neutralized" through critical admiration of its formal accomplishments. Roland Barthes felt this was inevitable: The Politics of Theater: Genet's The Blacks Today. Genet'5 work is undergoing the fate of all avant~garde theater. unfailingly wiped out/neutralized ["liquide"] from the day it is accepted by the audience with which it had claimed to break. It is not only in politics that acceptance is the bestmeans ofsmothering an annoying adversary.6 (my translation) The aesthetic power of Genet's language is often offered as a justification for tolerating his offensive subject matter. He is, writes one critic, our "Byron of the bawdy-house.,,7 The.critical tendency to focus exclusively on either the form or the content of Genet's work was also responsible for the second major controversy surrounding The Blacks: the political controversy. The play appeared to some as "a courageous ... denunciation of racism"s; to others as an insensitive, racist betrayal of the Black revolution and of socialism in general.9 Many accused Genet of carrying the revolutionary concept of Negritude to an absurd extreme; others - like Norman MailerlO - accused him of not being extreme enough, of turning the urgent reality of racism into a mere metaphor for a neo-Pirandellian analysis of abstract themes of role and identity. Finally, attempts have been made to resolve the political issue -like the moral issue - by reading the play's racial subject matter as a pretext, a convenient way to unleash the audience's most irrational urges, which then become the context for the "real" drama. "To produce a maximum of intensity," writes Richard Coe, " ... what Genet proposes is that the stage should present, ideally to a white audience of Episcopalian Goldwaterites from Arkansas, the spectacle of a Communist Negro raping the wife of the State Governor."" Unfortunately, Coe does not explain why, if this was his intention, Genet did not simply write a play in which a Communist Negro rapes the wife of the Governor of Arkansas. Genet himself has always denied having any didactic ambitions. As soon as his first play, The Maids, began to be described as an attack on the oppressive bourgeoisie, he insisted: "This has nothing to do with an argument on the lot of domestics. I suppose servants have their unions. ... That's no business of ours.,,·2 A similar disavowal of pOlitical motive accompanies The Blacks: Ifmy plays help...