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ABEL
than the very revolutionary who had wanted to keep the revolution
real) pretending to be the Chief of Police, castrates himself. The
episode is brutal, vulgar and utterly undramatic. Should illusion
also have sacrifices, martyrs? I explain the weak thinking here
as not peculiar to Genet but present in modem intellectuals. They
are afraid of the implications of their own ideas, which have
rendered the world less real than they would like it to be. They
do not want to think of life as a dream, but as serious, valid,
overwhelming maybe. They would like nothing better than to
come upon some implacable value they could regard as true. So
the one real fault in Genet's play is not just his. We all have
some share in it. Yet, in the main, the point of view of Genet is
that the destruction of illusion, as represented by
The Balcony,
would be the destruction of life as such. Is this thought shock–
ing? Some of the reviewers evidently thought so. But
is
the French
dramatist's view really so different from that expressed by
Prospero at the conclusion of
The Tempest?
If
anything, I should
say that Genet's play ends less cynically than Shakespeare's. For
Genet the revels have not ended. The action will continue. The
more or less humble characters will again mount on stilts and
costume themselves to be again extravagant in sex. Illusion and
reality cannot be segregated; they will continually change places,
and be the Same to the Other, the Other to the Same.
My contention is that the dramatic philosophy of
The
Balcony,
as of Genet's
The Maids,
and of his new play,
The
Blacks,
while certainly his own, is yet, when we think of it
formally, the same dramatic philosophy present in
Twelfth Night,
Measure for Measure, Hamlet, The T empest, Life
is
a Dream.
Let none then reproach Jean Genet for his ideas. His thought
proceeds on a level where one can only think what has to be
thought. Without tragedy, of which we may be incapable, there
is
no philosophic alternative to the two concepts by which I have
defined the metaplay: the world is a stage, life is a dream.
