Genet's Black Mass

GENET'S BLACK MASS THE TERM "theater of the absurd," because it has been misused as a blanket definition of anything new or bizarre in the theater, and because the philosophical conception "the absurd" is itself difficult , has created as many obstacles to the understanding of contemporary drama as it has overcome. Most unfortunate is the impression the term creates of homogeneity of outlook and intention among contemporary playwrights. We are led by it to yoke together writers of such markedly different sensibility as Beckett and Genet, for example. Some modern drama is indeed illuminated when we consider it in the light of existentialism's "absurd," but it comprises plays which (in the Aristotlean sense) are "imitations" of the "absurd" condition, i.e. the state of being simultaneously imprisoned in the confines of self and displaced in the universal order. Genet's drama is not part of this variety of modern drama. Genet jumps off at the point where the existential vision completes itself; moreover, his work moves in a direction which existentialism completely rejects. We might indeed say that in form, in theme, in inspiration , the drama of Genet in antithetical to a drama of the "absurd." Although Genet's plays begin in the prison of self, their design moves in a direction exactly opposite that of "absurd" drama, for they are ritual approaches to the liberation from the self. In his introduction to The Maids~ Sartre, whose perceptions of Genet, like Genet's own perceptions of himself, are always framed in religious terms, first used the expression "black mass." He did not pursue his insight further than its expression. When we do pursue it, we find that it leads to the very center of Genet's art (not to mention his life, which itself is a consciously wrought work of art); and we find more particularly that it is the aesthetic, moral principle upon which his dramaturgy rests. "On a stage almost like ours, on a platform," Genet writes, "it was a matter of reconstructing the end of a meal. From that starting point that one can hardly discover in it any more, the height of modern drama has found expression through two thousand years and every day in the sacrifice of the Mass. The starting point disappears under the profusion of ornaments and symbols.... No doubt it is one of the functions of art to replace religious faith by the effective ingredient of beauty. At least this beauty must have the power of a poem, that is to say of a crime."i 1 Quoted by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), p. 149· 247 248 MODERN DRAMA December Genet's plays are ritual celebrations of the black mass. Each is a vision of the ceremonial steps toward the demonic absolute, toward consummation and, in it, liberation. In his best play, The Blacks, the ritual ends in its beginning and the celebration is perpetual. The function of the white Mass is to provide the way to spiritual apotheosis; it celebrates man's participation in godhead through the sacrifice of Christ. Moreover, the repeated participation of the celebrant in the ritual is his way toward immortality. At death he is joined to the deity; his soul becomes the bride of Christ; he is washed in the blood of the Lamb. The black mass is the exact perversion of the white. Its deity is the Adversary (Genet says, in A Thief's Journal that the perfect work of art makes the devil God);2 its ritual is the point by point reversal it imitates; the ultimate power to which it leads the celebrant is demonic. The essential structure of the white Mass consists in: (I) the elevation of the deity, (2) the consecration which, by turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, evokes the actual presence of the deity, and (3) the communion, the actual participation of the celebrant in the being of the deity. In the black mass the elevation consists in the distancing of the deity; the god is made present to be murdered and the ultimate moment of truth is not communion but dissolution (or as Genet...