PETER BROOKS
scene is recorded, not from the point of view of an alienated narrator,
but from a detached, olympian vantage. The psychiatrist's jargon, the
jurors' hypocrisy, the lawyers' futility, and Our Lady's outrageous final
reply force us to an unexpected recognition of our feelings for this
character, whose destiny now seems exemplary.
I t is here that one might see the justification of Sartre's claims
for the value of Genet as criminal literature. Sartre argues that since
we, at present enclosed in our subjectivity, will by history be judged
as object and found guilty, it is vital that we understand the response
which Genet, already convicted, represents: "our solitude pushed to the
point of Passion." Such a claim seems to me more legitimately put
forth for Genet's plays-perhaps because the notion is in itself theatrical:
one thinks at once of something like
The Blacks- and
could apply to
Our Lady
only if the novel implicated us in its rejections. It doesn't,
because its rejections are made its private pleasures; Genet builds his
world to caress it, not to catch the bourgeois reader in a horror of
connivance. The Passion of Our Lady is violent and beautiful, but the
martyrdom of Divine-Genet is too passive and self-indulgent for the
novel as a whole to count as much as Sartre thinks it does.
Peter Brooks
LESSONS IN DEMOCRACY
THE FIRST NEW NATION: THE UNITED STATES IN HISTORICAL AND
COM PARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. By Seymour MMtin Lipset. Bosic Books.
$5.95.
Mr. Lipset's recent book,
The First New Nation,
is a work its
author obviously didn't expect anybody to read attentively. He can
scarcely have read it himself, though there is ample evidence that he
wrote it. The cumulative effect is to make one despair of one's own
logical and intellectual faculties.
The author states that "in addition to explaining 'what makes
America tick,' this book is designed to suggest how the sociologist's
analysis of value systems can contribute to the systematic study of the
development of a nation's institutions." He deals with "the historical
sources and the specific nature of the American social system," (Parts
