Irma the Deuce: Genet's The Balcony and Some Problems of Bisexuality

I have no illusions. I'm his man and he relies on me, but I need that rugged shop-window dummy hanging on to my skirts. He's my body, as it were, but set beside me.

—Irma, speaking of her lover, Arthur, in The Balcony, 5.53

Rereading Jean Genet's The Balcony in preparation for writing this paper, I was reminded of an experience I had in Istanbul, Turkey, where I lived in 1989. While there, I worked for an English-language newspaper, and one of my assignments was to write a feature story about the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. I interviewed the patriarch (Demetrios I, who died in 1991) in his audience chamber, a large and shabby room in the patriarchal compound, in a seedy neighbourhood on the southern bank of the Golden Horn, which then smelled, on most days, of untreated sewage. The patriarchate is one of the last remnants of Greek culture in Turkey: the patriarchate's ability to remain in Istanbul is underwritten by international convention, but its presence in Turkey, since the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s and the eradication of Greek culture (and Greeks!) in Anatolia, has barely been tolerated by successive Turkish governments.

The man who was responsible, of course, for ridding Turkey of Greek culture, and most of its Greeks, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was Atatürk — Mustafa Kemal, the "Father of the Turks," the creator of the modern Turkish state, whose cult of personality is an important piece of the program of secularization he promulgated in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s. The holy image — the Greek word ikon is perfectly applicable here — is, of course, an important device in "secular" cults of personality, and the Atatürk cult was, from the beginning, shored up by the distribution of countless images of Atatürk — sculptures and paintings, but mostly photographs — throughout Turkey, and they are still ubiquitous in that country.

The patriarch's audience chamber had two images on its walls: a diminutive and humble crucifix and a much larger photographic portrait of Atatürk. Given the paucity of other decoration, it's fair to say that the Atatürk portrait dominated the room. This struck me as rather funny, and, when I wrote the feature, I mentioned the oddness of it: that in this inner sanctum of Greek Christianity, poor little Jesus should be so overwhelmed by a picture of the man who would, if he could, have thrown all the Greek Christians out of the country. For some (probably) deadline-related reason, the story wasn't vetted by the newspaper's management before going to press, and when it appeared as the lead story on the paper's back page, quite a hubbub ensued. Freedom of the press had only been reinstituted in Turkey a year before and was by no means solidly established, and our paper's managers were briefly, horrifyingly, convinced that because we had allowed what could be construed as a derogatory remark about Atatürk (i.e., about his image) to be printed, we would shortly be raided by government thugs, who would smash our computers and haul the paper's Turkish employees off to jail. (There was a bit of grandiosity embedded in this worry: the managers hadn't figured into their panic the fact that our paper had no readership, and so our blasphemous — toward Atatürk, that is — story went unnoticed.)

A few parallels between the world I describe and the world invented by Jean Genet in The Balcony may be obvious: The fretting, for example, of my paper's managers — the way in which they were envisioning their enterprise's destruction at the hands of thugs — resembles, in its way, all the worrying that goes on in Genet's brothel that that enterprise is on the brink of destruction. Then, there's the matter of photography as iconography, the posing and distribution of images, the role of the media in shoring up any modern regime — themes that Genet thoroughly and comically exploits in The Balcony...