THEATER CHRONICLE
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possible only in fiction: in reality the confrontation, the judgment
and the revolt never come to an end. The Coryphee's final
observation is:
«Nous sommes ce qu'on veut que nom sayons, et
nous Ie serons jusqu'au bout, absurdement."
Of course,
Les N egres
is not a play against colonialism or
racism. The crucial speech in this
clownerie
is:
«Si sa souffrance
est trop torte, qu'il se repose sur la parole."
This is what Genet
has let his Negroes do: entrust themselves to the word in order
to confess by making fun of their own natures and, through the
confession, judging and exposing themselves to judgment.
Be–
neath the mirror-play and the buffoonery there
is
a genuine
moral dialectic: the tormenting dialetic of judgment to which
existence amidst the others,
if
suffered from within,
is
reduced.
What counts is the fantasy which, thanks to this mirror-game,
is
released and takes shape, or, in other words, the acute aware–
ness of existential loneliness and, at the same time, of the look of
the others out of which is born, in Jean Genet, the act of
"playacting."
With this play,
Les N egres,
in a manner theatrically even
more persuasive than in
Le Balcon,
Genet gives us today a unique
example of what it means to throw oneself into a scenic situation
so as to draw out of it all that it can possibly give, unconcerned
about anything but the poetry of that situation and its theatrical
shape. What strikes one is the great freedom and lightness of the
invention, when compared to the obsessive heaviness, frightfully
shut up in itself, of Genet the novelist. The theater,
so
it seems,
is
the means through which the damned Genet achieves redemp–
tion. Redemption from what? From the mire of the real, from
the obsession of real experience, from the obstinacy of the outcast
immured in his own biography, determined to nourish himself on
the condemnation by the others, without being able to respond
to this condemnation save by again and again proclaiming him–
self criminal and perverted, segregated in Evil, and thus beyond
the reach of the condemnation of the others. Yet by the simple
act of stepping on the stage and entering the theatrical game,
there appears the possibility of a judgment without condemna–
tion-objective, since purely thought through-and, with this,
