The Consumption of Empty Signs: Jean Genet's The Balcony

The Consumption of Empty Signs: Jean Genet's The Balcony MARIA SHEVTSOV A Not since Pirandello has a playwright so skillfully exploited the principle of the theater within the theater as Genet. The Balcony is probably the most intricate example of Genet's five plays of this process of mise-en-abyme.' Its singularity, also in the Genetian canon, lies in the fact that it is always about the theater, even when it least appears to be. This thematic and structural characteristic certainly has not escaped Genet criticism. Bernard Dort, one of the playwright's earliest commentators, specifies tbat not only The Balcony in particular, but all of Genet's dramatic output is quintessentially a theater of representation, by which he means that theater is both subject matter ofGenet's theater and the mirror-image through which this very subject is repeated. In other words, Dort distinguishes between "theater in the theater" and "theater about the theater" in order to give a twofold thrust to his notion of "representation", while sustaining his argument that a double theatricality of this kind necessarily leads Genet to celebrating theater all the better to destroy it2 Dort does not dwell on the combative, destructive impulse he imputes to Genet vis-a-vis the theater. Yet it can be deduced from his argument that the Geoetian process of mise-en-abyme - a term, incidentally, that Dort does not . use - is a mechanism for self-destruction, the negative side, we could say, of self-representation and, we might add, perhaps the only outcome possible for texts whose exclusive focus of attention are themselves. Dort's emphasis on "representation" has inspired further analysis along the lines just given, namely, that the theater and only the theater is the substance of Genet's plays. Michele Piemme illustrates this position well when she denies emphatically the relevance of politics to Genet's texts and maintains that what she calls the "dialectic of appearance and reality" concerns Genet's commitment to the factitiousness of the theater, rather than any thoughts he may have had about society.3 According to these parameters, reality is merely a mask for the sole "reality" composed ofthe appearances created by the theater in and for MARIA SHEVTSOVA the theater. Piemme's argument does not depart significantly from Dort's proposition that anything concerning society in Genet is subsumed under his overriding preoccupation with the theater, a preoccupation showing, Dort believes, Genet's conviction that the stage is unable to speak about the social world' 'However, the most radical expression of the view that Genet's self-reflexive theater is also self-centered can be found in Robert Abirached's brief, but acute, description of mise-en-abyme in Genet.' From Abirached's account emerges the idea that mise-en-abyme is the force through which Genet asserts the theater's autarchy, its absolute dependence upon itself for its meaning and its absolute autonomy with respect to society. Abirached's framework offers a very precise definition of mise-en-abyme as the procedure which closes Genet's theater in on its own reflection and which, by sheer force of such closure, proves that Genet's theater takes nothing from society and, therefore, owes nothing to it. As such, mise-en-abyme automatically excludes "society" as a point of reference. Abirached's radicalisation of the concept of representation through the concept of mise-en-abyme assumes that theater and society are, and can only be, mutually exclusive. A similar opposition between the two entities underpins the work ofcritics who stress the tension, the play ofopposites or the play of otherness between illusion and reality, fantasy, myth, dream and reality, desire and fact, and appearing and being.6 The difference, though, between the dualism on which these critics rely and the dualism established by the theses on theatricality discussed above lies in the fact that the'second, say, conciliatory, type of dualism engages its opposites in a working, ongoing dialogue. The result of this particular variety of binary opposition, where both elements are simultaneously operative, is that the tenn "theater" marks the hiatus between it and the tenn "society", but does not eliminate the latter. "Society" in the...