Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
In sharp contrast to the Americans' involvement in Vietnam, which has been endlessly dramatized in different forms, the realities of the Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 until 1962 and cost 100,000 dead or wounded, have been dealt with by very few French playwrights or film-makers. In fact Genet is the only one to have written a substantial work based on this subject matter while the war was taking place. The one other dramatist with whom he can be compared in this respect is the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, whose trilogy Le Cercle des représailles offers some intriguing similarities with Genet's three great plays written during the course of the war: Le Balcon, Les Nègres and Les Paravents.
1. Both reprinted in Théâtre complet, vol. 1 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1986).
2. See Stora, Benjamin, La Gangrène et l'oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1991)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3 and chapter 17.
3. ‘In Cahors they'll give my name to a cul-de-sac where my uncle manufactures mattresses.’ Genet, Jean, Œuvres complètes, V (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 344Google Scholar; see also p. 374.
4. In the 1970s, Daniel Besnehard wrote plays set in Nazi-occupied Normandy, Michel Deutsch and Bernard Chartreux wrote two linked plays about collaboration and betrayal under the title Violences à Vichy, Jean-Claude Grumberg wrote L'Atelier, about a group of women living through the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Paris, and a number of plays dealt with the rise of Nazism leading up to the war, of which the most notable was Ariane Mnouchkine's Mephisto. This was also the decade in which Marcel Ophüls's great documentary film of life under the occupation, Le Chagrin et la pitié, was shocking audiences all over France with its revelations of the extent to which ordinary French men and women had accepted collaboration as a way of life.
5. Four particularly successful examples are: Koltès, Bernard-Marie, Le Retour au désert (Paris: Minuit, 1988)Google Scholar; Lemahieu, Daniel, Djebels (Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1988)Google Scholar; Durif, Eugène, B. M. C. (Paris: Comp'Act, 1991)Google Scholar; Bourgeat, François, Djurdjura (Paris: Théâtrales, 1991).Google Scholar
6. Blin, Roger, Souvenirs et propos, ed. Lynda, Bellity Peskine (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 174–230.Google Scholar
7. ‘One thing should be noted: this is not a plea on behalf of housemaids. No doubt there is a trade union for domestic servants – that is not our concern.’ Genet, Jean, Œuvres complètes, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 269.Google Scholar
8. ‘No problem set out in the theatre should be resolved on the imaginary plane, especially where the dramatic resolution urges us towards a perfected social order. On the contrary, let evil explode on stage, let is show us naked, leave us hagard if it can, and with no other recourse than to ourselves. The function of the artist, or poet, is not to find practical solutions to the problems of evil. Let them accept damnation.’ Œuvres complètes, IV, p. 35.
9. ‘Never have I copied life.’ Œuvres complètes, IV, p. 259.
10. Ibid., p. 233. Both Les Nègres and Les Paravents were directed by Blin, Roger and designed by Acquart, André, the first in 1959Google Scholar (Théâtre Lutèce) and the second in 1966 (Odéon-Théâtre de France).
11. ‘Genet ou le combat avec le théâtre, in Théâtres (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 122–39.Google Scholar
12. ‘Les pièces, habituellement dit-on, auraient un sens: pas celle-ci. C'est une fête dont les élément sont disparates, elle n'est la célébration de rien.’ Œuvres complètes, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 223.Google Scholar
13. See for example Fleury, Georges, La Guerre en Algérie (Paris: Plon, 1993).Google Scholar
14. ‘Genet would say: ‘that's fine, go ahead and construct your ideal republic but above all make sure that you keep a corner with a little pile of filth’. That was Saïd. (Saïd is the central character of Les Paravents) What Genet denounces is the inescapable return to order, the revolution triumphant. There is no solution, no political moral to be drawn from his plays. This is something that Sartre blamed Genet for, as did Adamov as well.’ Blin, Roger, Souvenirs et propos, ed. Lynda, Bellity Peskine (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 201.Google Scholar
15. The Manifeste des cent-vingt-et-un was a petition circulated and signed by 121 well-known people demanding the withdrawal of the French army and self-determination for the people of Algeria. Those who signed were debarred from work on the state radio or television for several years.
16. Paris: Editeurs Français Réunis.
17. White, Edmund, Genet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 511.Google Scholar
18. White, Genet, p. 489.
19. ‘I am not concerned about whether my plays serve the cause of Blacks. Besides, I doubt it. I believe that action, direct struggle against colonialism can do more for Blacks than a play in the theatre.’ Genet, Jean, L'Ennemi déclaré (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 23.Google Scholar
20. ‘It is better to carry out real acts, whose scale may appear small, than theatrical shows that are vain.’ L'Ennemi déclaré, p. 50.
21. ‘When we see Blacks, do we see anything other than the precise and sombre phantoms of our own desire? But what do these phantoms think of us? What is their game?’ Genet, Jean, Les Nègres au port de la lune (C.D.N. Bordeaux, Editions de la Différence, 1988), p. 101.Google Scholar In White, Genet, p. 494.
22. Œuvres complètes, V, p. 233.
23. ‘We brought you civilization and you continue to live like vagabonds. Not even beneath the bridges! at the foot of the ruins. Everything. We give you everything: schools, hospitals, the gendarmerie and for you it all adds up to nothing. Wind. Sand.’ Œuvres complètes, V, p. 235.
24. Œuvres complètes, V, pp. 292–3 and pp. 330–1 respectively.
25. Œuvres complètes, V, p. 291.
26. ‘GENERAL.… Be careful, lieutenant, of their growing beauty. (Lyrical.) Beauty, beauty, that cements armies together, as you say, cement for us but for them as well. (Pause.) I wonder, after twenty-eight years in the service, if I hadn't admired my bearing in the mirror, would I have had the courage to defend it?… If that lot, facing us, ever get a mirror between their paws. LIEUTENANT. I have given orders for the men to fire instantly at any mirror.’ Œuvres complètes, V, p. 304.
27. ‘Ah! Ah!… That was predictable! So you lot have already reached the stage of uniform, discipline, pretty march-pasts in shirt-sleeves, parades and heroic deaths as you sing Madelon and the Marseillaise all that warlike beauty… Soldier. There are other things than shit and filth… OMMOU.… is copied from them, to be their reflection is to turn into them: forehead to forehead, nose to nose, chin-chin, belly-belly, and why not, good God, why not make love to them, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, tongue to tongue, cry to cry, gasp to gasp…’ Œuvres, V, p. 315.
28. Œuvres, V, p. 264.
29. Œuvres, V, p. 354.
30. White, Genet, pp. 558–9. Warda's line appears on p. 319 of Œuvres, V.5
31. Koltès, Bernard-Marie and Regnault, François, La Famille des orties: esquisses et croquis autour des Paravents de Jean Genet (Paris: Editions Nanterre/Amandiers, 1983), p. 23.Google Scholar
32. ‘Neither for or against: on. As one talks of an engraving on wood (woodcut). A play that France had to endure, as Athens had to endure the plays of Aristophanes.’ Ibid.
33. ‘my last play, Les Paravents, was nothing more or less than a long meditation on the Algerian war.’ Cit. Linda Bellity Peskine et Dichy, Albert, La Bataille des Paravents (Paris: IMEC, 1991), p. 59.Google Scholar This book provides an invaluable history of the conflicts to which Blin's production gave rise, and reprints all the reviews that appeared at the time; Jean-Jacques Gautier's review for Le Figaro is on p. 65–6.
34. ‘everything must contribute to breaking through what separates us from the dead.’ Œuvres, IV, p. 221.
35. Savona, Jeannette L., Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36. ‘not so much a dramatic poem as a dramatic song in which arias and recitatives intermingle.’ Lemahieu, Djebels, p. 6 (see n. 5 above).
37. ‘How did you get in? I dropped in from the sky, of course… I floated down like a little snowflake in summer time, so that you could sleep safe and sound.’ Koltès, Le Retour au désert, p. 55.
38. ‘I love this land, bourgeois, but I don't love the people in it. Who is the enemy? Are you friend or foe? Who should I defend? Who should I attack? Since I don't know who is the enemy, I shoot everything that moves. I love this land, sure, but I long for the good old days. I'm nostalgic for the soft light of oil lamps, for the glory of a navy under sail. I look back to the colonial era with its cool verandas and its croak of bull-frogs, when evenings were long and when everyone in the country knew his place, stretched out in a hammock, swinging on the rocking-chair or crouching beneath the mangrove, each in his own place, calm and settled, and that place was his. I'm nostalgic for the little nigger boys running about behind their cows, that you could send flying like mosquitoes. Yes, I love this land, let noone doubt it, I love my France all the way from Dunkirk to Brazzaville because I have mounted guard on its borders, I have marched for night after night, gun in hand, ears cocked and eyes towards the foe. And now I'm told I must forget nostalgia, that the times have changed.… My only function is to fight, and my only rest will be in death.’ Koltès, Le Retour au désert, p. 56–7.
39. See n. 21 above. For further discussion of the playwrights mentioned in the last part of this article, see my ‘Images of the Algerian war on the French stage 1988–92’, French Cultural Studies, June 1994, also appearing in Theater Journal, Autumn, 1994. The author would like to record his gratitude to the British Academy for financial assistance with the costs of travel to the World Congress of the IFTR in 1994, where some of the ideas expressed in this paper were discussed.
