On Late Style by Said Edward W

Author:Said, Edward W. [SAID, EDWARD W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48903-6
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2006-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

In their movement of regenerative rebellion, the Palestinians, like the Algerians and Black Panthers before them, show Genet a new language, not of orderly communication, but of astonishing lyricism, of a prelogical and yet highly wrought intensity that delivers "moments of wonder and … flashes of comprehension." Many of the most memorable fragments in the mysteriously digressive structure of Le captif amoureux meditate on language, which Genet always wants to transform from a force for identity and statement into a transgressive, disruptive, and perhaps even consciously evil mode of betrayal. "Once we see in the need to ‘translate’ the obvious need to ‘betray,’ we shall see the temptation to betray as something desirable, comparable perhaps to erotic exaltation. Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all" (LCA 85/59). There is in this admission the very same dark force of the Mother, Khadija, Leila, and Said in Les paravents, partisans of Algerian liberation who nevertheless exultantly betray their comrades.

The challenge of Genet’s writing therefore is its fierce anti-nomianism. Here is a man in love with "the other," an outcast and stranger himself, feeling the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian revolution as the "metaphysical" uprising of outcasts and strangers—"my heart was in it, my body was in it; my spirit was in it"—yet neither his "total belief," nor "the whole of myself" could be in it (LCA 125/90). The consciousness of being a sham, an unstable personality perpetually at the border ("where human personality expresses itself most fully, whether in harmony or in contradiction with itself" [LCA 203/147]) is the central experience of the book. "My whole life was made up of unimportant trifles cleverly blown up into acts of daring" (LCA 205/148). One is immediately reminded here of T E. Lawrence, an imperial agent among the Arabs (though pretending to be otherwise) half a century earlier, but Lawrence’s assertiveness and instinct for detached domination are superseded in Genet (who was no agent) by eroticism and an authentic submission to the political sweep of a passionate commitment.

Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, political, and even spiritual beings. The logic of culture and of families doubles the strength of identity, which to someone like Genet who was a victim of the identity forced on him by his delinquency, his isolation, and his trans-gressive talents and delights—is something to be resolutely opposed. Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity.

Genet therefore is the traveler across identities, the tourist whose purpose is marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in constant agitation. Despite their prohibitions, he says in Le captif, frontiers are fascinating because a Jacobin who crosses frontiers must change into a Machiavellian.

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