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METATHEATER
329
made that the revolutionaries must make a determined effort to
do without illusion. Perhaps they can. "Have they jumped into
reality?' asks the Police Chief from his headquarters in Madame
Irma's brothel. Evidently the real adversary of the revolution
is
none other than Madame Irma. Moreover, she has already con–
quered. The revolutionaries will not
be
able to remain real; what
is more, they do not want to. They may conquer the palace, the
legislature, the army, the courts; they will not
be
able to control
the old whorehouses.
It is the revolutionaries in Genet's play who represent implac–
able values, Actually, in the modern world, only revolutionaries
have been able to represent such values. Hence, the prestige of
revolutionaries. But Genet has taken their measure too and finally
renders them ridiculous. We have the impression that they will
all come finally to Madame Irma's Balcony. They are would-be
tragedians in the world of metatheater.
Yet in a way Genet shares the weakness of his revolutionaries
in
The Balcony;
he too would like to create something other than
the kind of play he can make so magnificently; this master of the
metaplay would like to create tragedy. And the sentimental
inclination toward something impossible for him is responsible,
I believe, for the one bad scene in
The
Balcony,
a scene almost
fatal to the second half of the play, lasting for almost an hour
and
boring from beginning to end. Having absorbed the revolution
with its insistence on reality into the illusionist world of The Great
Balcony, Genet suddenly reverses himself and tries to see illusion
itself
as
inexorable. But this is an impossible idea, contrary to all
dramatic judgment or good sense: it may be our fate to have
illusions; this does not mean that illusion can have the same force
as
fate, Or to put the matter better, fate might free us from
illusions, but is probably itself illusory. This is more or less what
Genet has said throughout his play, but at the very end he seems
to want to say the contrary. I noted this weakness in another play
of his,
The Maids.
It was not necessary for one of the two girls
actually to take poison in that work, since when she did I felt that
she was acting. There is something similar in
The
Balcony
at the
very
close. The Chief of Police wants to be apotheosized and as
a
phallus. He achieves this gandiose
aim
when a client, (none other
