The Maids and Deathwatch by Jean Genet Jean-Paul Sartre

Author:Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

But even in the imaginary it is faked in advance. The maids know that they will not have time enough to get to the crime.

“S OLANGE: The same thing happens every time. And it's all your fault, you're never ready. I can't finish you off.

C LAIRE: We waste too much time with the preliminaries.”

Thus, the playing of the sacrilege conceals a failure in behavior. It is imaginary to the second degree: Claire and Solange do not even play the fictitious murder; they pretend to play it. They are thereby merely imitating their creator. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Genet prefers imaginary murder to real murder because in the former the will to evil, though remaining entire, pushes the love of nothingness to a point where it reduces itself to impotence. In the last analysis, Solange and Claire are fully satisfied with this appearance of crime; what they like about it more than anything else is the taste of nothingness with which it leaves them. But they both pretend, by means of a further lie, that they are disappointed at not having gone through with the thing to the very end. And besides, what would there have been “at the very end"? The true murder of the fake Madame? The fake murder of Claire? Perhaps they don't even know themselves.

The fact remains that in this phantom play-acting, which, even as play acting, never concludes, 1 the great role this evening is reserved for Claire: it is for her to personify Madame and so to exasperate Solange that she commits a crime. But Solange personifies Claire. Whence, a new disintegration: the relationships of the fake Madame with the fake Claire have a triple, a quadruple basis. In the first place, Claire makes herself be Madame because she loves her; for Genet, to love means to want to be. As Madame, she blossoms out; she escapes from herself. But in addition, she makes herself be Madame because she hates her: resentment de-realizes; Madame is merely a passive phantom who is slapped on Claire's cheeks. Besides, the interpretation of Claire is forced; she is not aiming at showing Madame as she is, but at making her hateful. Madame, the sweet and kind Madame, insults her maids, humiliates them, exasperates them. And we do not know whether this distorted caricature tends to reveal the mistress in her true light, to expose the truth of that indifferent good-nature which may be concealing a pitiless cruelty, or whether it already wreaks an imaginary vengeance by metamorphosizing Madame, by the incantation of the gesture, into a harpy. As psychoanalysis has revealed to us, one of the motives of acts of self-punishment is to force the judge to punish unjustly and thereby to burden him with a guilt which discredits him and makes him unworthy of judging. By means of her interpretation of Madame's role, Claire transforms her into an unjust judge and rids herself of her. But at the same time, in the guise of Madame, she insults and humiliates Solange, whom she hates, Solange, her bad smell: “Avoid pawing me.

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