history and theatre

an equation for black people on stage
Structurally I really liked and hated how the critical texts precede the play in the reading packet we are reading.
The structure inevitably positions the text in the same way as the way blackness and whiteness is portrayed that Susan Lori Park supposedly dislikes; susan writes how blackness, its superfluous fluidity is always positioned in relative position to the white presence, which is a solid grounded position, in theatre that has both white and black. likewise, the critical text with its solidity/certainty inevitably positions the creative text in fluid relative/reactive position, which is also vulnerable to the scrutiny of academicians-- the super pc, the believer of literal oppresser and oppressed binary--gaze.
This shows the operatie system of theatre of academic publishing and a marginalized writers: the overflowing meaning the nonstandard body is put under the easily comprehendable solid theory and names.
But at the same time, susan revels in this theatre: that's why the black character's name that susan lori parks is giving are attached to stereotypical food(black man w watermelon; black woman with fried drumstick). she plays with mask that obviously cannot contain the superfluous body. it is just like when tracie morris screams and sings the textbooklike text that describes slaery; the music is manifestation of superfluidity, the textbook-y language are the names, mask.

Of Mimicry and Man
When I say mask that cannot contain the superfluidity, it is the opposite of the mimicry/camouflage in homi bhabha's text in terms of its original purpose. The maks Susan plays with is purposfully limited to flaunt superfluidity behind it; camouflage is intended to hide the superfluidity to fit into standardized world. yet ironically they function similarly.  they both reveals constructed, thus, not-absolute nature of the mainstream/stanadard/whiteness through their own-- exaggeratedly limiting/too defined mask&trying to blend in but unsuccessful mimicry-- constructedness/performativeness

posession
in this zero-sum(in terms of interiority and authenticity) equation "the definition of posession cancels itself out. the relationship between possessor and possessed" is even further eradicated, the economic implication in the word possess. Black and white relations are always in midst of economic transaction; slavery, welfare queen, a boy with a ratty hoodie is suspicious because of this implication, and economy is inevitably in the center of theatre of history.



element of style
This title reminds me of the grammar book written by dr. white.
This section of the Susan's writing does mimick the absolute tones of instruction yet the excess, the black speech tone seeps into the instructions of how elements should be arranged to re-member the scattered, de-constructed, no longer absolutely-binary elements and masks into a new constellation, a new universe, another Ameria


America Play
That is why this is America Play, not American Play. It is creating another America, another history. There are doubling of everything, making everything into the construction and super-fluid darkmatter, the hole. The hole of History. The hole=theatre. There is no solidity. There never was. There is no ground. There is no America with capital A.

 (I will add more about the play itself later; but feel free to fill it in? :) )

Obscenity, Duality, and Style

Caveat: If the second half of this post seems a little incoherent, it's because I wrote it in unbridled anger. I had a nice, finished entry and as soon as I hit "Publish Post," Blogger immediately ate more than half of what I'd written. So I took a half hour to stomp around the house and throw things before coming back to finish it. So the tone may shift wildly. I apologize in advance.

Let me start by admitting that I didn't find Ronaldo Wilson's Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man to be that obscene. It's possible that I'm desensitized to talk of sex and blow jobs and dicks because of my romance reading habits or because of all the young male authors I read back in high school; I'm guessing a lot of you have had the same experience. I don't think it's the obscenity that is "shocking" in this book, just as I don't think it's the book's driving force, either. I think it's the super-simple style of the Narrative that leads people into feeling as if they just read something profoundly dirty or grotesque (also, I think it's a matter of race being brought into the mix of the sex and shit that gets to readers). We've read a lot of work with some kind of "artifice" lately - the quotations of Notley, the idea of roles in The Maids, etc. So the thing that interested me about Wilson's book was its lack of artifice, the way it simply lives in basics.

When I talk about "basics," I mean a handful of things. There's the actual writing style, which is incredibly simple. You don't have to run to the dictionary reading this book. The simplicity is what gives it such a poetic feel, particularly in its most beautiful passages - such as that last paragraph on page 25. There's power in the elemental aspects of good writing, particularly in the power of the plain nouns. If you look at Wilson's writing, you'll find it contains very few adjectives. And often the adjectives are nouns, too ("sand clouds," for example).

One of the other things I refer to when I say "basics" is the use of color in this book. You've got two colors right in the title. I was absolutely bowled over by the sheer colorfulness of this book, especially when considering that it's largely the same colors coming up again and again (white, brown, black, grey, green). I'm still trying to figure out the exact significance of the colors besides the fact that they build the world in really cool ways. It's largely a factor of what is meant by using color words. To call the man "white," to call the boy "brown" - these are systems of labeling, and Wilson takes that labeling and begins to apply it to all sorts of things in the world of this book. In some ways, it takes away the power of labeling colors, but it also highlights the fact that we and the characters live in a world defined by color. Color is everywhere and nowhere at the same time in this book, much like race somehow manages to feel both integral and secondary to this narrative.

Finally, one of the things that really strikes me about the deceptively simple style of this book lies in the duality Wilson establishes throughout. Everything has a kind of back and forth to it. Dichotomies here become incredibly important. Old and young. Black and white. The city of the boy's present and the open field of his past. The land and the water. It's fascinating how these dichotomies are established in ways that aren't necessarily attached to value systems. There's not really good and bad in this book. Instead, it's the fact that the narrative is capable of polarizations in a single plane of existence. Wilson establishes a kind of shuttered world within the narrative, to the point where you feel trapped in with the readers, and yet this shuttered world is full of opposites everywhere. Much like the colors, these dualities become easily forgettable while also sticking out like a sore thumb.

This is where Bataille comes in, I think. I'll admit to struggling with the Bataille a bit (it's nice out and a couple of ducks got into a fight in front of me while I was reading it!), but it seems largely concerned with the falseness of utility, and how our obsession with utility is problematic. It just made me think about the one type of dualism I barely noticed in Wilson's work: that of class. Wilson establishes a world of dichotomies and yet there's not a great sense of socioeconomic class. There is an early section in which the brown boy mentions how hard his mother had to work and how relieved he was to realize he wouldn't have to do the same. And obviously there's mention of some wealth in the petsitting section. But mostly this book lives in what Bataille seems to find particularly reprehensible: the world of the bourgeoisie. Isn't the white man's world basically a model of everything bourgeois? It's such a world of middleness, of accumulation without real meaning. Think about how plain this world is. The book seems more alive when the white man's not around, I think. The bourgeois has this kind of pulverizing thing going on where it obliterates utility because of it's own obsession with utility. Is the white man's world one in which middleness reigns? How does this differ from the boy's past? I hope someone can help me understand the ways the Bataille article connects to Wilson's book (outside all the talk of excrement, at least), as I had a bit of trouble with it.

Finally, we absoutely cannot talk about the Narrative without talking about the body. This is a book where the body suffocates everything. It's a book largely dealing in bodily fluids: the sex and shit of the brown boy's world. What's interesting here is how bodily functions differ in this narrative when considered in the context of time. This seems related to how bodies are controlled throughout the book. The boy's past is marked by the body's loss of control. The father losing control of his bowels, the way the baby keeps throwing up all over itself - these things hold a kind of horror for the boy. And then there's the material weight of the mother's dead body. The body as its presented in the past is all about the way it cannot be controlled. Then, in the present (or future, we might call it), the body is marked by sex. It exchanges one bodily fluid for another, but this one seems almost easier to control. The sexual body is all over this book in the context of the boy's current existence. Penisis and blow jobs and the way the brown boy notices other men's bodies all the time. And yet it all seems much more controlled than the loss of bodily function presented in the dreams/memories of the past. Isn't it a mark of adulthood that we can (technically, or at least so we think) control who we fuck?

I'm interested in what you guys all have to say. How do you see the body in this book? What about the dualities or use of color? And what do you make of the ending, which is so beautifully written and yet which felt like a bit of a cop-out to me in the way everything becomes literally clear at the end. It made the issues of race in the Narrative seem a little too well-dealt with by the end in the way color becomes obliterated inside that glass. What did you guys think?

Note: I hope I wasn't the only one to get the Sleepers reference in that section with Kevin Bacon and Brad Pitt (who were both in the film, which was made in 1996). Wilson's bringing up of that movie is really interesting to me because of the way the film deals so harshly with not just sex and death but with the horrifying divide between being a boy and being a man. It's a really problematic movie, from what I remember. Wilson's use of it brought back my own memories of having watched the movie on cable when I was in middle school one afternoon when my parents weren't around. At an age where I could barely comprehend my own body, I was being confronted with what happens to other people's bodies (rape, murder, etc). I still remember Kevin Bacon's leering face when I think of that movie. I haven't watched it since, and it's probably more innocuous than I remember. But I don't plan to ever see it again. Anyone else in this boat? Or am I a special, pop-culture-warped snowflake?

Notley's The Descent of Alette

Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette

*Because the poem is so long, I’ve summarized and highlighted passages I think are important—there’s so very much going on in this book that I’ll trust all of you to do more close reading and interpretation than I do here. Hopefully my post will at least start everybody off. I'm so sorry for the length of this!

Book I

Notley’s epic poem—compared on the back cover to Dante’s Inferno, although it is essentially a subversion of so many aspects of the traditional epic—begins on the subway, on which a “world of souls” rides endlessly below ground, never surfacing, forced beneath the earth by a Tyrant who will let you off only if you sell your soul to him. In this nightmare world, Alette encounters wounded and tortured souls, all in some way enslaved by the Tyrant and his mind: shattered, drug-addled soldiers who killed for him, women and children on fire (clear references to the Vietnam War), strippers (suggestive of male ownership of women’s bodies), lunatics, businessmen and women, etc. There are cars of garbage and of blood, of disembodied voices crying for help, of ghostly office-workers. Not too far into the poem, it becomes clear that the Tyrant is a kind of metaphysical being, embodied in various avatars throughout history but never completely reducible to them: he is capitalist, Pope, Caesar, bureaucrat (6), even (at times) revolutionaries with guns who want to change things (implying the exchange of one form of the Tyrant for another) (39); he owns form (25), (spiritual) enlightenment, and light itself (37). He is Reason as well, wresting order out of chaos (20). He’s also a mild-mannered, appealing guy. His maleness could be read either as essentialist or as conditional, I think. The feminine principal of the poem is chthonic, creative, timeless, and the “ground of being” so to speak, and the Tyrant’s maleness is order-driven, authoritarian, hierarchical, rational, power-obsessed, and removed from the creative life-force of the earth itself. These qualities could be said to inhere in every person regardless of sex, and later on in the poem, Alette discovers that everyone has a piece of the Tyrant inside (81). More on this later. Nevertheless, beneath the Tyrant’s rule, true life itself is forced underground and the psyche is stunted, allowed not to unfurl of its own accord but borne against its will, mechanistically, back and forth along a pre-established pattern, without meaning, in the darkness of oppression / repression.

And yet there seems to be hope, if only a tentative kind at first. A woman in one car recalls a dream in which she becomes a snake and strikes at the Tyrant, albeit unsuccessfully. (The snake will return again and again throughout the poem as a symbol of chthonic, feminine / creative resistance to the Tyrant’s rule—a kind of earth mother.) Another woman—a painter—is trying to invent a form that the Tyrant doesn’t own. There is even a car made of living flesh in which Alette has an intimation that there is “someone else” in all of us who escapes the Tyrant’s rule. Alette encounters an owl—symbol of dark wisdom—in one car, who tells her that her duty is to kill the Tyrant, and when she does, she must remember that she is an animal and do it cleanly. (The animal ‘way’ of killing is significant to me: animals kill not out of malice but out of necessity, in harmony with natural impulses.) Interestingly, Alette feels the owl to be the spirit of her dead father, adding an element of male resistance to the Tyrant in an otherwise female-dominated paradigm. Alette later witnesses a death, and a counsel of spirit-beings that urge the dead man’s spirit not to rise but to descend, because to rise would be to enter the Tyrant’s world: “We can only go” “down” “farther down—“ / “Down” “is now the only way” “to rise” (26). Descendence rather than ascendence / transcendence, darkness rather than light, the depths of the earth and of the psyche rather than the heights of heaven / reason, is what Notely’s epic ultimately privileges as a path towards reclaiming all that has been lost to the Tyrant. In this spirit, Alette boards a black train at the end of Part I, headed downwards towards “true night”, “endless darkness”, and the “unknown.”

Book II

Beneath the subway’s subconscious world lies a universe of the unconscious, the “middle psyche” as the poem refers to it (47)—caverns within caverns, dreams within dreams. Before beginning her journey through the caves, Alette hears an old man’s voice singing of the snake / earth mother that once carried people through their lives before the Tyrant’s train took its place. She has numerous mystical experiences in the caves (some of which I find very difficult to interpret), and seems to draw closer and closer to the evasive earth mother / primal life-force. Of all the experiences, one of the most striking is the one in which Alette meets a mermaid with a hairy chest (suggestive of a primordial, hermaphroditic union of male and female) who tells her that she is a “forgotten possibility” and that Alette’s people “have / divided” “themselves in two:” “have made” “domination” “[their] principal”. She tells Alette, “You must begin again,” “create again” / “each moment” (64). For me, the mermaid signifies the primordial, creative union of the sexes in harmony, and the possibility of *creating* a path and a life beyond the Tyrant’s life-defeating dominion that exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in each person. The hermaphrodite motif shows up again and again through Part II (in the god/woman whose genitals are “blank” and who shapes “a hairless,” “sexless figure” out of clay [66], in the “divine neuter” mask [75], etc.) Although other parts of Part II might be read as essentializing masculinity and femininity, the hermaphrodite motif, for me, implies a basic union of masculine and feminine energies in each person that has been forgotten under the Tyrant’s rule, thus saving the poem from a simplistic kind of essentialism. The ending sections of Part II are significant dramatic movements: Alette puts on a cellophane half-mask and declares to a group of men and women that the old structures must be torn down and beds built for all the living. The group draws cards to decide who will kill the Tyrant, and Alette draws the Ace of Roses/Panthers (again, this pairing of symbols could be read as a union of feminine/masculine energies) and tells the group she will do it. She finds and steals a piece of the Tyrant’s heart in one of the last caves, and says: “its presence here” “meant, I knew” “that / something of him may be” “indigenous” “to any one of us” (81). (I will refrain from dwelling on the fact that I think it’s pretty impossible not to think of Blake’s Urizen, Ginsberg’s Moloch, as well as Voldemort’s Horcruxes here…) The primordial creative force inheres in every psyche, but so does the Tyrant’s death-drive. At last, Alette enters a cave and descends a stairwell that emerges—surprisingly—onto the earth again, and wades into a night river.

Book III

Alette swims across the river and enters a forest, eventually meeting with a headless woman—the true first woman / mother. Her headlessness perhaps represents the division of the body and mind that is perpetrated by the Tyrant’s energies: the first woman speaks of the ignorance of the holy men, the wise men, the poets, etc. as having caused her to suffer (90). She speaks of the beginning of the world, of how male and female were once one, but the male somehow lost the primal connection to the world of creation and became a thinker, a war-maker, a ruler, etc. (91). She can only “see” with her voice—a voice that emanates from deep within her being—but Alette helps her to reattach her head so that her voice can actually create reality once again (99). Alette and the first woman bid goodbye to each other and the owl reappears, and so begins Alette’s necessary self-transformation that will allow her to kill the Tyrant. Alette is first made to eat a mouse the owl has killed, and so realizes the unity of all creation, of death and life (104). She is then led to the black lake of death, beyond which is the “great darkness”—the dream-world before creation. Thrown into the lake by the owl, Alette is dismembered of her being so that she can be transformed into becoming, and in the great darkness she meets a light that isn’t a light, but her very self. This might be putting too much of my own spin on things, but I feel that this “true” self is not a fixed entity but the *process* of being—the endlessly self-creative self (to put it that way). A voice reminds her: “’It’s what you’ve / always” “suspected” “It’s nothing but” “what you’ve always known,” / “always been” “For you’ve always” “been being” (111). Alette reenters her body, delighting in her senses, and finds herself in the forest again, where the owl bequeaths a talon to her so that she can kill the Tyrant as an animal (once again, the dichotomy between natural killing and rationalized violence is highlighted). Alette must now find her way upwards to the Tyrant’s house.

Book IV

Alette and the Tyrant finally meet, and the Tyrant finally reveals that he is reality itself (though Alette doubts this), and has no need for the heart she has brought with her. He leads her through his house, past displays of various kinds showing various human societies, the subway, and his “government.” He also shows her masks of “principals,” “essences”—including vegetation, sexuality, religious leaders, and the first woman herself. It becomes clear the Tyrant is abstraction itself—he lays claim to and attempts to possess realities but cannot fully own them, although he thinks he does, in the same way that he owns museums, art galleries, and greenhouses. He thinks he owns Nature as well, but only as a scientist can, “From the outside” (128). Alette and the Tyrant travel to the subway, where the Tyrant reveals that the subway is actually his heart, and that its darkness scares him, but also empowers him (132). This is poignant to me: the Tyrant’s power comes from the very act of repression-- his darkness is transmuted to violence, to mental agility, etc. Later on, the Tyrant reveals that it is from this darkness that all inspiration, poetry, etc. comes from as well. (Do we buy this?) At last the pair emerges at a stop called “River Street”, which is a river of blood that flows off into separate rivulets throughout the subway. Alette reclaims a lost memory in this river—the memory of her brother who died in battle. This is also the only moment in the poem when we hear Alette speak her own name, and thus voice her feminine, individual identity against the Tyrant. Alette becomes an owl and flies over the river of blood, looking for a place where the Tyrant is vulnerable. She comes to a flesh grotto, where a strange bush grows: its three arms are vegetable, animal, and human, and in the human hand is a dead black rose (symbolizing, perhaps, male ownership of the female principal of life). Alette invokes the owl-spirit and pulls the bush out at the roots, and the Tyrant’s is mortally wounded. He pleads with her, says that she is killing herself, her own culture, her own soul. But all of these, Alette knows, are simply unreal constructions, dreams. “’Starting” / “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change” “In / dreams,” “in dreams, now,” “you will die” (144). The Tyrant is ultimately a dream solidified into reality, and with the Tyrant’s death Alette returns the world to the primordial openness of existence: “What we can have now,”…”is infinity” “in our lives”. (147). The Tyrant’s repressive “reality” is revealed as only a constructed reality, reified by the millions of souls unable to dream or create anything else. The sky is clear again, the light is new, and the people emerge from the subway determined to remake the world. All the lost and forgotten beings from the depths of being emerge from the depths of the earth, and with this the poem closes. Notely’s epic has come full-circle: to revitalize existence, Alette does not travel upwards to heaven, but downwards through the darkness of being to reclaim the lost power of creation that can re-imagine and re-create the world.

Some questions to consider (if you want to, of course):

What are we to make of the fact that Alette must use the power of the owl—who was formerly a man—in order to kill the Tyrant? Can this be read as a channeling of male violence against itself, or as reclaiming a sort of power that was / is always inherent in the female psyche?

Going off that, what do you all think of the essentialist aspects of this poem? As I’ve said, I definitely think there are moments of true essentialism, but also many moments that seem to undermine the male/female dichotomy. Which wins out for you, in the end?

Finally, the question of voice. Notely’s uses quotations to make sure that her text is experienced as a spoken voice, not simply a text, and the figure of the voice shows up over and over throughout the poem. Is voice synonymous with creation itself, a bringing into being of something that never was before? What other valences could there be to this?

Finally, the last question: the poem privileges descent into the depths of being over transcendence. Is the inherent, messy chaos of being the solution to tyrannical order imposed by the mind? What are the political implications of this? The psychic implications? The implications for sexual politics?

The Maids: Artifice, Performativity, and Society

“Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.”—William Blake

**

Jean Genet is the quintessential Outsider. Born to a prostitute and raised in foster care and the Mettray Penal Colony (a kind of ‘reform school’ for boys), Genet traveled around Europe as a young man, engaging in petty theft, smuggling, and homosexual prostitution, and serving time in prisons here and there as a result. He was eventually condemned to a life sentence in France, but Jean Cocteau and a group of artists and writers intervened after reading the novel Genet had completed in prison (Our Lady of the Flowers, which is totally brilliant in case you’re interested). In court, Cocteau compared Genet to Rimbaud and proclaimed Genet one of France’s greatest writers. Genet was pardoned and never returned to prison. Thereafter, it was through art and political activism that Genet lived out his role of Outsider—analyzing and critiquing bourgeois society and its mores, and championing the rights of the oppressed (Palestinians, African-Americans, immigrants, prisoners, etc.). His work is incendiary, subversive, and revolutionary--a critique of normative society and the inherently oppressive structures it engenders.

Genet’s work exposes bourgeois society as structure and Artifice—a play of forms. Even Good and Evil are construed artificially by its workings, and depend upon the degree to which an individual does or does not conform to its oppressive standards. If conformism to society’s Artifice is Goodness, then Goodness will always breed its opposite in those it oppresses and relegates to the status of Other, of Outsider. It is at the level of Artifice that Genet works, then, in order to expose society’s Artifice for what it is. Like Picasso, his art is a lie which tells the truth.

The Maids opens on a (deliberately confusing) scene which, on the level of appearance, involves a mistress and her maid engaged in a power-struggle as the maid helps the mistress dress for the evening. Both seem mutually dependent on one another, and waffle between expressions of feigned tenderness and violent hatred. At a point, the mistress and the maid’s hands touch and the mistress revolts; the maid exclaims, “Limits, boundaries, Madame. Frontiers are not conventions but laws. Here, my hands; there, your shore—“ (42). The irony is that exactly the opposite is true, of course: frontiers are conventions, not “laws.” It is convention, not “law” that makes the mistress recoil in disgust at touching her maid’s hands. It is Artifice and not Nature that breeds social inequality, oppression, and makes certain individuals objects of admiration while others become objects of disgust.

This point hits home when, after more struggle and insults, an alarm clock rings and we realize that everything just witnessed was pure Artifice, a play-within-a-play: the “mistress” and her “maid” are in fact both maids. They are sisters—Solange and Claire—and not only had they been playing mistress and maid, they had been playing one another as well. They return to their normal(ized) states, and in the course of the action we discover the sisters have framed their lover’s mistress and had him thrown in prison, and that they mean to kill their Madame as well.

But they can never kill their Madame, even while play-acting. Their vengeance is always frustrated, even in their imaginations, because they love their Madame (meaning, they want to become her inasmuch as she is superior to them) as much as they hate her (for being superior to them and making them subservient). When the actual Madame appears onstage, she seems kind, benevolent, and “Good”, and the sisters seem to be happy in her presence even while they attempt to make her drink tea that has been poisoned with phenobarbital. The Madame’s oppressive “Goodness” produces the sisters’ impotent “Evil”: they don’t succeed at killing her, of course, and in the end, after the Madame has gone to join her lover, the sisters’ play-acting resumes. It is Claire who eventually drinks the poisoned tea while pretending to be the mistress, while Solange, playing the part of the maid, delivers the final speech, ending on the ironic note, “We [maids] are beautiful, joyous, drunk, and free.”

But Claire is dead by her own hand and Solange will most likely be executed. The sisters’ internalized self-disgust expresses itself as a will to vengeance and Evil, and ultimately as self-destruction. Their Madame will continue to be “beautiful and rich,” to exploit the lives of other maids for her own comfort, to derive her superiority from the inferiority of others. Not one character in Genet’s play is existentially free; not one has an existence beyond the parts or roles each performs in the oppressive theater of bourgeois society. They are all are pure Artifice, derivable from the ultimate Artifice which is the oppressive social structure to which they belong.

There’s so much more to write about the existential themes of the play, but I’ll turn a moment to Genet’s subversive use of narrative itself, which also depends on Artifice. Conventional narrative is meant to suspend disbelief so that its audience can imaginatively enter into the “real” of its action. However, Genet’s narrative endlessly de-realizes itself and exposes itself as artificial: at no time during the play do we forget we’re watching a performance because *every* role is a performance, a play-within-a-play. (Genet’s stage notes even require all the women’s parts to be played by men, so that even femininity is revealed as performative, not intrinsic.) By calling attention to Artifice at all its levels, Genet’s play becomes, for me, a sort of ritual exorcism of social conditioning: anything and everything naturalized by social norms become de-naturalized, even narrative itself. By observing the Artifice of the play, and by means of it, the Artifice of society, the reader becomes an Outsider to both, and it is only then that s/he can gain perspective enough to be able to critique otherwise “naturalized” social evils.

Some questions:

What did you all make of the language of the play itself? Genet’s language in this play and elsewhere is pretty incomparably beautiful, but also chilling in the way it aestheticizes violence/horror/disgust/etc. What do you all make of this?

I didn’t touch on this point, but in Genet’s work a common motif is the equation of saint and criminal. At base, they seem to be one and the same. (Claire prays to God for help while trying to kill Madame, Solange mentions the “eternal couple” of saint and criminal. And of course I have to mention, Sartre would eventually write a monumental study of Genet himself, entitled Saint Genet.) What valences does this coupling/doubling have?

As always, feel free to bring up anything that you want, of course. There’s so much more to discuss and think about in this play that I didn’t even mention…