The Vision of Jean Genet 0720600804

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The Vision of Jean Genet by Richard N Coe A Study of His Poems,Plays and Novels

The Vision of Jean Genet Richard N. Coe ~

Reader in French, University of Warwick

Peter Owen . London

The Vision of Jean Genet

SBN 7206 0080 4

FOT Joan and Vivian

PETER OWEN LIMITED 12 Kendrick Mews Kendrick Place London SW7

© Richard N. Coe, 1968 Printed in Great Britain by Clarke Doble & Brendon Ltd Cattedown, Plymouth

CONTENTS Author's Note

vii

Introduction

1 All Done with Mirrors

3 The Novels

2 Head down, Feet up (Our Lady of the Flowers) 3 Traps and Allegories (Miracle of the Rose)

66

4- The Golden Legend of a Professional Burglar (The Thiefs Journal)

99

31

5 Love Thine Enemy (Pompes Funebres)

135

6 Murder and Metaphysics (Querelle of Brest)

170

The Plays

7 The Small Boy Who Was Night 8 Anarchy in the Brothel (The Balcony)

213 251

9 Politics without Platitudes (The Blacks and The Screens)

282:

(Deathwatch and The Maids)

321 337

Bibliography Thematic Index

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to thank the following for their kind pennission to quote from the works of Jean Genet: Editions Gallimard for their overall pennission to quote from the French text of Genet; Messrs. Faber & Faber Ltd. and Grove Press, Inc. for the plays: The Maids, The Screens, The Blacks, Deathwatch and The Balcony, all translated by Bernard Frechtman; Messrs. Anthony Blond Ltd. and Grove Press, Inc. for the novels: OUT Lady of the FloweTs, MiTacle of the Rose, The Thiel's Journal, all translated by Bernard Frechtman, and Querelle of BTest, translated by Roger Senhouse; Grove Press, Inc. for The Funambulists translated by Bernard Frechtman, and published in EveTgTeen Review, No. 32; Editions Jean-Jacques Pauvert for 'Lettre a Pauvert sur Les Bonnes'. For other works the following must be thanked: Editions Gallimard for J.-P. Sartre's Saint-Genet Comedien et MaTtYT and Messrs. W. H. Allen & Co. and George Braziller Inc. for their English edition, Saint Genet; Messrs. Calder & Boyars Ltd. and Grove Press Inc, for The Unnamable, the third part of Samuel Beckett's trilogy; Editions Gallimard for J.-P. Sartre's Les Mouches, and Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. and Alfred Knopf Inc. for their English edition, The Flies, translated by Stuart Gilbert; The Clarendon Press, Oxford, for Helvetius: A Study in Persecution by D. W. Smith; Editions Gallimard for Ionesco's Victimes du DevoiT, and Messrs. Calder & Boyars and Grove Press, Inc. for their translation, Victims of Duty, translated by Donald Watson; Miss Sonia Bronwell, Messrs. Seeker & Warburg Ltd. and Harcourt Brace & World Inc. for George Orwell's Keep the AspidistTa Flying. R.N.C.

vi

AUTHOR'S NOTE This book is not a biography of Jean Genet; it is a study of his ideas, his art, his imagery and his dreams-in short, his vision of the world-as he has chosen to giV'e them to us in his poems, plays and novels. To attempt a serious biography of a living writer without his co-operation would be worse than a risk; it would be an unpardonable impertinence. On the other hand, Genet has chosen to present at least two of his novels, together with the Thiel's Journal, in the first person singular! and it is well-nigh impossible to refer to the omnipresent 'I' who fonns the subject of these books other than as 'Jean Genet'. It is essential, however, to remember that this Jean Genet-the Jean Genet of Our Lady of the Flowers and of Miracle of the Rose, not to mention the Thief's Journal-while he may have roots in the real Jean Genet's emotions and experience, is essentially imaginary. Like the 'Marcel' of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the being who says 'I' in Jean Genet's novels, poems, plays and essays is as much a fictional character as Harcamone or Mimosa half-IV, as Stilitano or Clement Village. Nothing that Jean-Genet-the-Writer says about this character is necessarily false; but neither is it necessarily true. Jean Cocteau, who was one of Genet's earliest champions, once uttered a famous paradox: II taut mentir pour etre vrai. This phrase should stand in letters of gold at the head of every chapter in this study.

*

*

*

Notes on the text are to be found at the end of each chapter. These include the English source of reference, followed by the original French text, followed by the French source of reference. Except where otherwise stated, French quotations from the noV'els have been taken from the definitive text as printed in the Oeuvres Completes de Jean Genet, Paris (Gallimard), vol. ii (1951) and vol. iii (1953). Quotations from J.-P. Sartre, Saint-Genet Comedien et Martyr are also taken from this edition, vol. i (1952). For details of the sources of other quotations taken from Genet, reference should be made to the Bibliography, where the text used is indicated by an asterisk in each case. The Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti is published in an unpaginated edition. For convenience of reference, I have introduced a provisional pagination (pp. 1-88), beginning at the title-page and including the illustrations. VIl

AUTHOR'S NOTE

All major quotations have been translated in the text, except for those taken from Pompes Funebres; owing to copyright difficulties no translation of this has been pennitted, and the original French appears in the text. I have used wherever possible the published translations by Bernard Frechtman, and in the case of Querelle 0/ Brest, that by Roger Senhouse. Certain difficulties arise when providing translations for quotations taken from Genet's dramas, since, frequently, the published French and English texts do not correspond. This is not only because Mr Frechtman has, quite rightly, aimed to produce good acting dialogue in English, rather than a word-far-word literal rendering; but also because the translations were often made from versions other than those which have since become definitive in French. Wherever possible, I have used the published English texts, even when the correspondence is not exact; and I have only substituted my own literal version, either when the precise point that I wished to make was obscured, or else, more frequently, when the passage quoted was missing altogether from the English edition. The following abbreviated titles should. be noted: Balcon-C. J. L. Bal. Article: 'Comment jouer Le Balcon', which precedes the text of the play. Bonnes-C.J L.B. Article; 'Comment jouer Les Bonnes', which precedes the text of the play. E.R. The Funambulists in Euergreen Reuiew, No. 32, April-May 1964 Giacometti. L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti Journal. Journal du Voleur Miracle. Miracle de la Rose Notre-Dame. Notre-Dame des Fleurs Our Lady. Our Lady 0/ the Flowers Parauents-Q1. Article: 'Quelques Indications', which precedes the text of the play. Pauuert. 'Lettre a Pauvert sur Les Bonnes' Q. 0/ B. Querelle 0/ Brest Queuelle. Queuelle de Brest Rose. Miracle 0/ the Rose S. Genet. Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr Saint-G. Sartre, Saint-Genet Comedien et Martyr Thief. The Thiefs Journal

viii

Introduction

I ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS The thief is a solitary creature. He knows little of nonnal human relationships. At liberty, his aim is to lose himself in the crowd, to pass unnoticed, unobserved by policemen and store-detectives, to cultivate anonymity almost to the point of non-existence. Caught and convicted, he is once again absorbed into a herd of dehumanized beings, all dressed alike, all moving in mechanical obedience to orders, all reduced to numbers and statistics in a card-index. He is alone, a nameless particle is a sea of namelessness; or else he is alone-literally-in his cell. And Jean Genet,l who has been both a thief and a convict, is obsessed with solitude. Such intimate realities as family, or friendship, or the comradeship of labour are abstractions to him; they appear as mere 'functions' of a complex social pattern, pleasanter perhaps, but ultimately no different in kind from the necessary functional interdependence of criminal and victim, or of prisoner-at-the-bar and magistrate-on-the-bench.2 For Genet the only truly significant relationship is that of a man with himself. Solitude, then, with its complexities, its rewards and its terrors, is Genet's main theme; it dominates the novels, it infonns the early plays, it is constantly felt even behind the crowded tapestry of moving figures that constitutes The Screens. Genet is the poet of solitude. From the first, however, the poet, with his emotional responses of anguish, despair and visionary mysticism, has been accompanied by the philosopher, determined to discover a more or less rational 3

INTR( IDUCTION

solution to the mystery of human loneliness. For the poet, 'Solitude is sweet. It is bitter. One might think that the head should be emptied there of all past entries (precursory practice of purification) ...'3; but for the philosopher, the anguish of solitude lies rather in the fact that the being who is totally isolated-allowing this to be conceivable-has no way of knowing himself, of conceiving his own identity, and therefore no way of being himself in the plenitude of his own awareness. Like Pascal, Genet is haunted by a sense of his own impe:fection-not by his social or moral shortcomings which, after all, offended only society, and society showed him fairly promptly that it was well able to look after itself in this respectbut by his incompleteness, his failure to realise himself (in the Sartrian sense) as a being, since the being can only lay claim to a real identity in so far as it is completely and immediately conscious of itself existing. Genet, the 'brillant de belle taille' that jewellers call 'solitaire? never came to know himself in the normal, fairly haphazard manner of the average, integrated being growing up in a society of which he feels himself a part: first accepting from his friends and parents certain simplified, ready-made notions about himself, then gradually comparing these notions with what he feels to be the inner reality, his truth, modifying and discarding as the years go by, until a working picture is formed of an apparently real and stable personality-an identity that I know as myself. This, as Jean-Paul Sartre has so brilliantly demonstrated,5 was not Genet's way. . For Genet was an illegitimate child, born of an unknown father, and of a mother who was a prostitute and who abandoned him to be brought up by the public authorities. As a child, he lived with foster-parents in the country. Not his country, for in Paris he was born, and to Paris he has always belonged; nor his parents. From his very first moment of consciousness, everything was alien: between himself and others, there was a gap, an impassable abyss. And when these Others found words to describe him as he seemed to them, Genet possessed no well-adjusted subconscious mechanism to redress the balance. Between the conflicting internal and external awareness of that being known for reference as 'Jean Genet', tllere was no point of contact. Either the boy had to reject everything that he learned about himself from others (and how should a child do that ?), or else he had to accept it all, and learn to see and feel himself-in short, to be himself--entirely as others said he was. And soon, the Others began to say he was a thief. So Genet was a thief. He lived thief, and acted thief, and felt thief. Jean Genet had no awareness of Jean Genet in terms of anything other than thief, which was what his foster-parents and his neighbours called him.

ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS

5

Yet there remained an awareness, precisely, of the fact that there was no other awareness: a sense of something missing, a consciousness of a Nothingness that had usurped the place of what Jean Genet ought to have known himself to be, but could not. At the centre of his being there was a Void-a Neant. He, as himself, could know nothing about himself because he, in himself and for himself, was nothing. Hence the haunting sense of imperfection and incompleteness which pervades every line that Genet has written. Other, more fortunate people, can be-what-they-are; Genet can only be what the Others made him-and in a desperate attempt to achieve some sort of balance within himself, he one day took the momentous decision which, in Our Lady of the Flowers, he attributes to the child Culafroy, and which, in Sartre's view, marks the beginning of his authentic existence in this world: He did not want to disappoint. He joined in the rough stuff. With a few others of a small band that was as tightly knit as a gang, he helped commit a petty theft inside the home. The Mother Superior [..••J asked Lou why he had stolen. All he could answer was: 'Because the others thought I was a thief.II

In other words, Genet is a classic case of existentialist schizophrenia. He possesses two distinct personalities, or rather, two distinct identities: the first, that which he presents to Others, the second, that which he really is within himself. Normally, we assume that the personality which I know and think of as myself is the ultimate reality, whereas that which Others see and upon which they pass their damning and categorical judgements in something superficial: it is not really me, but me-as-I-appear. Genet's schizophrenia, however, consists in this, that he invariably looks at himself with the eyes of others: he sees and judges himself as others see and judge him-and yet, at the same time, he is dissatisfied. He is obscurely aware that this Self, observed in such a manner from an alien point of view, is not himself. It is an appearance, an illusion, a reflection, nothing more or less, of something else, something that is himself, yet which, precisely because it is the perceiver, cannot be perceived. In Sartrian terms, the source of perception (le poursoi) can never perceive itself; for, as soon as it has knowledge of something, that something, by definition, becomes not perceiver, but the object of perception (l'en-soi). In short, Genet, by his own confession, is the ideal illustration of all those ontological conundrums that Sartre explores with off-beat, Germanic perserverence in the dense, interminable paragraphs of Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, dispassionate observer and philosopher, the fact that

6

INTRODUCTION

perception and perceived can never coincide-that I can never know myself, save in terms of that which I am not-is a proposition to be recorded, elaborated, and (with due academic moderation) considered as a source of nausea or anguish. For Genet, unprepared by Husserl, unfortified by Heidegger, unschooled by the rigorous discipline of the rue d'Ulm, the same experience has to be lived through as a blind temptation to madness, a chaos of despair a~d degradation, an urge towards the brink of suicide. For Genet's tragedy is that he is a lucid schizophrenic-a schizophrenic who is incessantly aware of the nature of his own disease, and who knows that it is incurable. In Sartre's analysis, perceiver and perceived can only realise themselves as a single unity in God; for Genet however, this unity must be realised, somehow, here and now, in himself. He is faced with an insoluble problem, yet cannot accept the fact that is it insoluble. He-like every other being in this existentialist universe-is an irreconcilable duality; yet only unity is tolerable, and, as a mystic, nothing can satisfy him for an instant, except the Absolute. All Genet's novels are concerned with a search for the Absolutewhether for an Absolute Good or an Absolute Evil is, in the long run, essentiaJly indifferent, and indeed, in those ultimate domains of thought, beyond time and space, to which he eventually leads us, the one becomes indistinguishable from the other. The only way, however, in which the being who is-what-Others-make-him can, in any Absolute sense, be himself, is to abstract himself from the importunate gaze and knowledge· of Others, and to confine himself for ever in solitude-in 'singularity'. Yet even this is not salvation. For if, in the completeness of his solitude, he were to achieve his ideal, his Absolute, of being-what-he-is, then he would become like the bed in his cell, or like the wall of the prison itself, an insensitive, unknowing, unperceiving object, which likewise is-what-it-is, without a chink in the armour of its absoluteness. He can only know himself for what he is by taking up a position outside himself, and, in a figurative sense, by looking at himself . . . but as soon as one part of him takes a stand apart, and becomes aware of the other part of him-that is, as soon as knowing emerges as something separate from being-then he is no longer exclusively and absolutely what he is. He is what he is but he is also himself aware of what he isnot one person, but two, no longer Jean Genet in total and metaphysical solitude, but Jean Genet in the company of another: himself, his own double. Outside the Self, of course, there are other phenomena which, to a greater or lesser degree, affect its destiny and modify its selfawareness. There is the world of inanimate objects which should,

ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS

7

ideally, just be what they are, yet which, more often than not, seem to possess some sort of awareness-a hostile awareness, in conflict with Genet's own. There is God, who may, or may not exist, but who, even if He is only a magnified projection of the Self--or rather, especially if He is a projection of the Self-provides an extra dimension with which the Self must reckon; for God has certainly created Hell, even if Heaven is rather more problematical. There are the Others, whose awareness and whose judgement of the Self constitute the perpetual danger, and at the same time the perpetual temptation. And finally, there is the Void. For Genet, the Void may simply be death; or (rather worse) a continued existence from which life, in the full sense, has alr~ady withdrawn; or perhaps again merely the equivalent in the outside world of that Nothingness which is Genet's own self-awareness that has abdicated in favour of the Others' awareness of his own identity. Whatever its ultimate reality, the Void is constantly present in Genet's novels, and makes itself felt through countless symbols: the blank eyes of statues, or the transparency of glass, or the eyes of murderers, ' ... blue and vacant like the windows of buildings under construction, through which you can see the sky from the windows of the opposite wall'T-and which, adds Genet, ' .... hypnotize me as much as do empty theatres, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts .. .'8--or, more significantly still, the Void is like two mirrors placed one in front of the other, each reflecting an eternal emptiness in infinite repetitions of Nothing. For the mirror is the most obsessive symbol in Genet's thought. God is a mirror that magnifies: the Other, a mirror that distorts; Good is the mirror-opposite of Evil, and darkness the mirror of light; while if the Self that is awareness wishes to observe the Self that is-what-it-is (and at the same time to observe itself observing), it has but to look in the mirror. For if, in the world of three-dimensional reality, the Self is complex and elusive, in the mirror it literally is-what-it-is and nothing more; it is pure appearance and, as Sartre argues with dogmatic optimism, while Genet, looking on in despair and anguish, agrees, 'what is reality, if not that which is apparent ?,g But the mirror is not merely the somewhat disquieting illustration of a problem in existentialist metaphysics; it is the symbol of the whole of Genet's world-a world in which there is no certain or tangible reality, but only appearances and voids: reflections alternating with panels of plain glass, both equally bafHing and impenetrable. In The Thief's Journal, Genet describes how, at the Fun-Fair in Antwerp, he once watched Stilitano-the Serbian pimp and petty gangster who was his lover, slave-driver and tyrant before World War II-struggling quite literally to escape from one such labyrinth

8

INTRODUCTION

of insubstantialities, a Hall of Mirrors; and this simple fair-ground attraction emerges as a grotesque distortion of Plato's vision of man forever tantalized by the dancing shadows on the rear wall of his cavern : Stilitano, and he alone, was trapped, visibly at a loSll, in the glaSll corridors. No-one could hear him, but by his gestures and his mouth one could tell he was screaming with anger [....J Stilitano was alone. Everyone had found the way out, except him. The universe became strangely overcast. The shadow which suddenly covered things and people was the shadow of my solitude in the face of this despair.•..10

In this remarkable passage, the emphasis is on the frustration of the human situation: Stilitano is cut off from all contact and' communication by invisible walls of glass, and his only direct experience of reality lies in bumping up against his own reflection. Yet this is only one aspect-and the most rational and encouraging aspect at that-of man's eternal conflict with the shadows of his own identity. From earliest times, in folk-lore and fairy-tale and occult literature, the mirror has been credited with mystic or magic properties-sometimes purely symbolic: the 'Mirror of Perfection', or of Truth, the Mirror that is Wisdom, the reflection of the power of God, 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form' --sometimes involved in the deployment of more sinister forces: the broken mirror that brings bad luck, the speaking mirror that answers the Queen's questions, the mirror that steals away the reflection that is confided to it, for the powers of evil can rob a man of his reflection as easily as they can rob him of his shadow, and with similar consequences.l l No less complex and sinister is the use that Genet makes of this same symbol: the mirror betrays, robs, multiplies, distorts or lies; it comes to life with a power of malice all its own, and yet cdntrives to remain a prosaic and impervious piece of furniture. In the mirror, Genet the metaphysician merges with Genet the poet, and the poetry is never far removed from the realms of magic and the. occult. In every sense, the balance between reality and reflection is J a delicate one: for if the basis of reality is appearance, then the pure appearance of the object in the mirror is in the end more real than the object which causes it.!And being more real, it attracts to itself all those attributes of exiStence which normally we attribute to three-dimensional beings: life, independent actions, past and future, identity. Darling (Mignon), for instance, in Our Lady of the Flowers, has no future, save what the mirror knows better than he·: • . . he continues by fits and starts the gestures of the drama which he is unaware he is acting out [....J Finally he gets up and, in front of the little twopenny mirror nailed to the wall, he pushes aside his blond hair and, without realising what he is doing, looks for a bullet-wound at his temple. u

ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS

9

-whereas the Sailor of 'Adame Miroir 'has no past' until the ballet starts, and for Genet 'his life begins' with the beginning of his first dance-that is, with the llmltiplication of his appearance in the wall of mirrors that forms the limit of his universe and the ·arena of the stage.18 Genet's solitary ballet, 'Adame Miroir (1947) is one the most ex plicit pieces of symbolism that he has produced, and there is no more immediate or illuminating introduction to his strange, poetic universe of shimmering evanescences than this little scenario, with its sharp outlines, its stylisation and its insubstantial puzzles of identity. The very title, 'Adame Miroir, with its shifting patterns of symbolic suggestion, is characteristic of Genet's preoccupations; for, around the central image of the mirror, 'Madame'-the female element in a sophisticated society-merges imperceptibly into 'Adam'-the male principle, the primitive, the first Original-while at the same time the clear classical French of Genet's prose ('madame') is reflected as in a glass darkly, and becomes the vague-outlined argot of Belle ville with its elided em' (' 'adame')-an argot which is half the mystery of Genet's poetry. In the mirror, the image has no life: it is therefore Death-yet it is not, for it is alive with the life of the Dancer, and with its own life too, since it dances even when he is still. 'It is not Death,' comments Genet himself, 'But who? The author cannot tell.'u If Genet could have given a neat, clear answer, he would probably never have needed to write the balletnor, for that matter, any of his plays or novels. For none of them finds the real solution. They merely continue to ask the question. 'Adame Miroir, then, is a symbolic excursion into the inconceivable realms of ultimate identity. At first curtain-rise, the Sailor, imprisoned like Stilitano in his Hall of Mirrors, simply fails to find his reflection altogether. The mirrors show nothing but their own eternal emptiness. At first he is puzzled; but soon he comes to accept the miracle, not as something frightening, but as a freedom, an overwhelming liberation, a unlooked-for surge of joy. He taunts the mirrors, treating them, says Genet, 'with great familiarity'-for. what are they now but Voids, whereas his reality, compared with that of the Nothing, liberated by the Nothing, is assured. He is himself . . . until suddenly, in one delirious turn, he bumps into a mirror, swings round-and sees himself. Immediately, the whole world changes focus. Wildly he rushes from mirror to mirror round the stage, but always the Image is there before him, granite-like, imperturbable, stronger than he. 'Maddened" ... exhausted ... he falls to the ground'15-in front of the great central mirror that dominates the stage. While he is still on the ground, however, his Image begins slowly to rise of its own volition. Hypnotized, the M

M

10

INTRODUCTION

Sailor rises also; but when he begins to gesture in front of the Image, the Image becomes merely his image, and dutifully gestures back, identical with himself. Exasperated, the Sailor strikes the Image on the jaw-and half-knocks it out. As it recovers, the Image-which is still his image for all that-steps out of the Mirror to join its Master (or slave, or cause, or effect: the relationship constantly shifts and changes), and they dance. And the mirrors (logically, for once) cease to reflect. Between the Sailor and his Image, there now follows an erotic dance, leading towards the impossible union-the mystic union of lover with beloved, of two-in-one, of Saint with Deity, of Self with Knowledge-of-Self-when suddenly the dancers are interrupted. From a hidden mirror leaps the Domino, selects the Sailor and rejects the Image; stabs the Sailor (the Image now looking on with bored indifference) and Hamlet-like 'lugs the guts into the neighbour room'. Now the Image alone is alive-yet maddened with loneliness, for his life is a life-in-death, a reality which is at the same time an impossibility: which, after all, is what a mirror-image is. The Domino returns, and violently tries to drive the Image back into the mirror, where he belongs. But the Image can only reflect the Sailor, and now the Sailor is dead. The only figure left to reflect is that of the Domino ... the Domino, therefore, removes his sarilike costume and winds the Image in it. For a second they are confused, inextricable, half-Sailor-half-Domino; then they separate, and now the Image is the Image-of-the-Domino, but the Domino, stripped of his mask and robes, is now the Sailor. But appearance is reality. Now that the Image appears to be the Domino, the Image is the Domino; likewise the Domino is the Sailor. The Sailor (ex-Domino) tries to leap back into his mirror; but the mirrors are resistant glass, and will not even reflect: The Domino (ex-Image-of-the-Sailor) chases the Sailor: in panic, the Sailor knocks once more at the door of the mirror, and this time the mirror relents and admits him, but refuses the Domino who tries to follow. Now the Domino and the Sailor are on opposite sides, with all the world and death between them. They fight, and their gestures reflect each other exactly-for at bottom, they are each other's reflection, for all that one is violet-robed and masked, the other still the Sailor. The Domino backs away from the mirror: the Image (both his, yet at the same time not-his) backs away simultaneously-and disappears. The Domino charges like a: maddened bull against the mirror, but this time crashes up against his own reflection-his real own, in mask and violet robes. The Sailor has gone for good; now in every mirror there dances yet another Domino. They dance and dance until finally a mirror opens,

ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS

11

the Domino is admitted back into reality-and so the ballet ends. Although this scenario was written at the same time-or probably slightly before-the Stilitano episode in The Thief's Journal, its symbolism is vastly more complex. Almost all the major themes that dominate Genet's novels and plays are suggested in this sequence of dances, much as Samuel Beckett manages to condense all the essentials of his philosophy into the forty minutes of Krapp's Last Tape. There is the metamorphosis of identity, the interchange of appearance and reality, the longing to attain an ultimate mystic union with the Totality through erotic experience-which experience, however, being homosexual, is doomed to lead only to the embittered frustration of Querelle, in Querelle of Brest, when 'it seemed to him that he was pressing his face against a mirror that gave back his own image'ls-the themes of murder and indifference, the idea of the Mask, the figure of the Sailor . . . all these we shall meet again and again. Meanwhile, however, we must set aside the poet and return to the Existentialist philosopher, in order to follow further the implications of the symbol of the mirror. Critics have wondered at the strange phenomenon of Saint Genet: Actor and M artyr~ne of the longest books of criticism ever to be devoted by an eminent philosopher to a controversial and at the time almost unknown contemporary. Yet it is not hard to understand why Sartre should have produced a treatise almost as long and as dense as the famous Being and Nothingness in honour of our delinquent poet with his passion for mysteries and mirrors. Remembering that, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the basic structure of consciousness as 'un refiet-refletant',17 the link is already apparent. Genet not merely illustrates the Sartrian thesis in a series of brilliant images, but in fact takes the argument into regions where Sartre, too precisely trained in the rigorous exactitudes of philosophic dialectic, dare not venture. For Sartre, the universe consists of two distinct elements: that which exists, and that which perceives. Obviously these two elements are interdependent to a large extent, since that which exists can only be said to be what it is when it is perceived; whereas that which perceives depends upon that which exists in order to have an object of perception. In this fashion, each is the mirror-image of the other, and the process of consciousness is reflection-reflecting. For Sartre however, as for the Buddhist, that which exists, exists in an undifferentiated mass, as 'fullness', until it becomes the object of perception. Within the totality, there are no separate identities until the mirror is there to pick them out. Only a mind (the mirror of cOlls