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The World is a Stage: Sartre versus Genet JERRY L. CURTIS • . . . All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. As Yau Like It, Act II, Scene 7 IT IS NO SECRET THAT JEAN GENET is the self-proclaimed Bastard of Society. This infant without mother, this "effect without a cause," as Sartre has named him,l has stated that he likes being an outcast, although "the act of revealing myself to be a homosexual, thief, traitor and coward," he admits, "put me in a situation that wasn't exactly safe, a situation that made it impossible for me to write works that society could easily digest.,,2 Most contemporary French writers, when faced with a society devastated by world wars and the ever-fearful possibility of even more calamitous entanglements, have attempted, according to Martin Esslin, to come to terms with the world.3 Genet's originality stems from the fact that he has cogently chosen to refuse society's values and has set about to reverse, if only for himself, the moral code of our time. His "lansenism of Evil," as Sartre calls it,4 is, in reality, a search for identity in an atmosphere of uncertainty. For Genet, as for Shakespeare, the world is a stage, and you and I, the players. In his massive biography of Genet, lean-Paul Sartre states that the key to understanding this admired criminal's self-imposed bastardy can be found in an incident taken from his adolescence: discovered with his hand in a purse, the youthful Genet was marked for life by the accusation: "You are a thief." At least he became convinced, according to Sartre, that he should become 33 34 JERRY 1. CURTIS "Another than Sel[."s Since this child of ten did not view himself as an absolute criminal yet was extremely intimidated by the unflinching judgment of others, he chose for himself a mode of being which posits its justification in the look of others. "In his very depths, Genet is first an object - and an object to others."6 Even Genet's homosexuality is traced to the desire to be an object for others. For since the principal characteristic of feminine sexuality is that the woman is seen as a sex-object, Genet, in compliance with his initial choice, willingly makes himself into an object in his sexual relations. It is, moreover, this same primary choice to be an object which induces Genet to write. He seems to view literature as a fabric of lies which veil the truth. By means of the mystification called: literature, he is able to swindle and rob the public. Genet abandons himself to literature because the fictional world he creates becomes the evasive object of an often credulous body of admirers. He thereby confirms, both to himself and to us, that the world is a stage. The most salient confirmation of his views on the subject, as one might expect, is to be found in his theatre. For his plays, as Leonard Pronko has rightly observed, are rituals where "Genet's characters perform their sacraments.,,7 The images we find there are indeed alarming; for they are meant to unmask the duplicitous nature of man's behavior, to reflect our grimaces and masks back to us. Genet indicates in one of the prefaces to The Maids (subtitled, by the way: How To Play Maids) that the heroines of the play "are monsters, like each one of us when we dream of this or that."s Genet's Irma (The Balcony), after having redistributed certain roles to the characters of the play, turns to the audience and says: "Prepare your roles ... judges, generals, bishops, chamberlains, rebels who let revolts die, I am going to prepare my costumes and my drawing rooms for tomorrow ... We must go home now, where, you can be sure, everything is even more false than here.,,9 The Blacks begins with Archibald's stage directions to both the on-stage Court and to the pUblic: "You are White. And spectators. Tonight we will play for...

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