Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of passéistes. An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant; he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this “break” is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual that the memory condenses into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual re-beginnings of an individual history.

So you need a foreword. But what is there to say about a play from which I felt detached even before it was finished? To speak of its composition would be to evoke a world and climate without grandeur. But I would rather say a few words about the theatre in general. I dislike it. One will gather as much from reading this play .What I have been told about Japanese, Chinese, and Balinese revels and the perhaps magnified idea that persists in my brain make the formula of the Western theatre seem to me too coarse. One can only dream of an art that would be a profound web of active symbols capable of speaking to the audience a language in which nothing is said but everything portended.

But any poet who tried to realize this dream would see the haughty stupidity of actors and theatre people rise up in arms.

The Maids, produced for the first time in 1946 by Louis Jouvet at the Thèâtre de l'Athènèe, marks perhaps the beginning of “anti-theatre” in France. Certainly we are aware for the first time in The Maids of a strange new consciousness of theatre as in the same year Nathalie Sarraute in Portrait of a Man Unknown made us aware of a new concept of the novel. Sartre wrote of Nathalie Sarraute's “anti-novel”: “We live in an age of reflection and the novel is in process of reflecting on itself.” One might say with equal validity of Genet that his plays are theatre reflecting on the nature of theatre. It is this fact that makes his plays difficult to understand in any normal sense of the word. Nor are his plays “theatre within theatre” as Hamlet contains a play within a play.

The central theme of Jean Genet's extraordinary play, surely one of the major works of the twentieth century, is best expressed in two phrases about the nature of the cosmos we may take the liberty of adapting from two famous philosophers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (ca. 1400-1464): the identity of indiscernibles and the coincidence of opposites.

The ordinary man fancies that the solid realities of respectable society and the contrived illusions of the brothel are as far apart as are life and death. The play declares another message having only an incidental connection with the brothel setting: Reality and illusion are, strictly speaking, indistinguishable from one another, as indistinguishable as are dying and living.

In fact, Genet goes a giant step farther in his non-Euclidian geometry.

What makes The Blacks an entirely unique, entrancing, and disturbing theatrical venture is that the very ground of theatrical experience—the community of understanding and sympathy between the people in the audience and the humanity represented on the stage—seems to be pulled out from under our feet. Instead we become parts, both as objects and participants, of a “black” rite of murder and exorcism. The actors inform us at the opening of the play that there can be no relation between us and them other than hostility and contempt. They assure us, moreover, that they shall have the decency to make real communication between us and them impossible. The Negro (Diouf) who tries to adopt a conciliatory tone, who hopes to come to an understanding by engaging our sympathy, is promptly denounced by the group as a traitor; his place is in the ranks of the white spectators.

In Jean Genet's The Screens the revolt of the Algerian Arabs against their French colonizers is not characterized by the emancipation of human beings. Although the colonizers are described as oppressors inflated with their own power, the misery and the intolerable condition of the oppressed are not denounced in order to promote the liberation of the colonized people. On the contrary, these misfortunes are exalted so that the humiliated individual has the opportunity to make his misery the occasion for an inner experience based on the absolute contrast and conflict between his values and those of the Other—an unceasing contestation through which Saïd achieves a sovereignty which no action founded on the hope of a more just world could yield. For hope can take root only in this world, and the hope of claiming one's rights is lost in the desire to become the Other. The subjective, ascetic, and tragic experience of Saïd has indeed no political value.

It is as easy to dismiss (too much) with “parenthetical insults” as with intellectual assaults. Both tactics smack of arrogance. The end result, when the veil is rent, is usually rhetorical catastrophe. Nevertheless, can we afford not to dismiss Genet?

Whether rhetorical or not, all theatre is catastrophic (katastrophe, to overturn); bad theatre is rhetorically so to boot. This is certainly the case in the theatre of language and logic of which we have had too much and against which only the genius of the poet can prevail. However, should the theatre of linguistics continue to prevail, we will be forced to rewrite our poetics again, calling production and performance accidental to the essence of the play.

“Here I am, all present and complete in this instant of ever-lasting time … “ declares Gide in one of his few attempts at dramatic composition—intending, thereby, to assault the universe anew, firmly holding himself precludedly victorious.

I have never succeeded in becoming completely used to existence, neither to that of the world, nor to that of others, nor above all to my own. I sometimes feel that forms are suddenly emptied of their content, reality is unreal, words are only noises stripped of all meaning. These houses, the sky, are only facades of nothingness; people seem to move automatically, without any reason; everything seems to evaporate, everything is threatened—including myself—by an imminent, silent sinking into I know not what abyss, beyond day and night. By what sorcery can all this still exist? And what does all this mean, this appearance of movement, this appearance of light, these kinds of things, this kind of world? And yet, I am here, surrounded by the halo of creation, unable to grasp the smoke, understanding nothing, disoriented, torn away from I know not what which makes me feel that I have nothing.

One of the principal, and most persistent, sources of error that tends to bedevil a considerable proportion of contemporary literary analysis is the implicit assumption that the writer's creative process is a wholly conscious and purposive type of activity. Few critics stop to inquire into the psychological basis and the mechanism of the creative process itself; hence their tendency to approach a work of art in terms of the author's intentions. The excellence of a work can then be deduced from an examination of the intentions in the mind of the writer (whether they are relevant and important) and of the degree to which these intentions have been realized. And even if the complexity of the creative process is realized by a critic, once he has started to analyze, say, the imagery of a poem or play the effect on the reader will tend to be an impression that the given author deliberately chose the metaphors or images concerned rather than following a semiconscious urge to express his intuition in these, and no other, terms.

If we consider only the theatrical movement which felt Artaud's influence during the period between the wars, or the “poetic” theatre of the post-war period which is merely its continuation, the problem of the language of the avant-garde seems to have only a very limited interest. In the works which these movements have produced, the originality of the language is more spectacular than profound. Or more precisely, we might say that it lies more in its nature than in its function.

The traditional dramatist, whose only end was to interest the spectator by the analysis of passions and characters, used a language which was never disquieting or bewildering because it represented more or less—decorated only with certain literary attributes— the language of the public for whom it was written. In the avant-garde we have just spoken of, theatrical language changes to the same degree that the dramatist's attitude towards his audience changes.

Ionesco is the closest thing we have to an abstract expressionist in the theatre. His plays are plainly autobiographical and confessional. “I try to project on stage an inner drama (incomprehensible even to myself) telling myself, nevertheless, that since the microcosm is the image of the macrocosm, it may happen that this torn up, disarticulated inner world is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions.” He discovers the astonishing in the banal, the unreal in the real, the new in the old, the fresh in the stale, and the archetype in the stereotype. His work is romantic and subjective, mirroring his own anguish and inner struggles, translating them into symbols and patterns that have been empathetically embraced by audiences throughout the world. But this empathy should not confuse us.