ROB APPLEFORD
Jouée en 1993 et publiée en 2003, l’adaptation du dramaturge cri Floyd Favel Starr des Négres de Genet, intitulée Lady of Silences, est dotée d’une généalogie curieuse, vexée sur le plan idéologique, tant dans son évolution (de l’adaptation à l’état publié, en passant par le texte manuscrit de la représentation) que dans sa représentation du stéréotype autochtone. En effet, le texte publié par Favel Starr revoit de façon importante la pièce de Genet ainsi que sa première adaptation, créant une parodie inquiétante de la performativité autochtone. Appleford fait valoir que la version manuscrite et la version publiée Du Lady of Silences sont toutes deux des per-versions, le préfixe «per» signifiant, en anglais, «tout à fait, entièrement» et «au loin tout à fait, jusqu’à la déstruction» (OED). Il montre comment les deux «versions» de la pièce de Genet produites par Favel Starr exposent l’échaffaudage idéologique de l’oeuvre de Genet et poussent plus loin la «version» du désir du voyeur produite par Genet pour atteindre des extrêmes troublants.
This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. […] But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used.
[Jean Genet, The Blacks (1959)]
To be against (opposed to) is also to be against (close up, in proximity to) or, in other words, up against.
[Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (1991)]
In an anecdote related by Anishnaabe (Ojibway) scholar Dennis McPherson memorializing his grandmother, two anxieties collide: “I still remember the words of my grandmother when she would say ‘Don’t act like an Indian!’[…] she understood the implications of the Indian Act. For her, it meant for the people to act, and in some respects, they have been acting ever since. They have been acting Indian!” (23) This first admonition – “Don’t act like an Indian” – suggests a reluctance to “act out” the political implications of the Indian Act of 1876. This reluctance is in itself part of a historical strategy of resistance, a refusal to perform images which represent Aboriginal experience, and thereby a refusal to permit the manipulation of this experience in an externalized economy of exchange.Yet, there is also in this admonition a tacit recognition of the essential performativity of Aboriginal identity. By implication here, to refuse to “act Indian” is at once to accept that “Indian” is one role among many with a distinctive genealogy and a recognizable emploi, and to entertain the possibility that one could somehow perform an “Indian act” which catalogues a more responsive and responsible repertoire of images. Thus, the notion that Aboriginal identity can be reconstituted through performance presupposes a recognition that one must act this identity rather than simply rediscover and re-present it. And if this notion is pursued, what becomes inevitable is the tension between the refusal to “act Indian,” a disavowal, and the performative act that seeks to reconstitute Aboriginal identity without seeming to “act Indian” in the process. To “act Indian” in this sense is to act the double-bind.
It is the interstitial space between the “act” and the “Indian,” the double-bind, that I wish to consider in relation to the play Lady of Silences by Plains Cree playwright Floyd Favel Starr. Lady of Silences, an adaptation of Genet’s The Blacks, displays its own curious and, I will argue, ideologically vexed genealogy, both in terms of its evolution from adaptation to original performance script to published text, and its depiction of stereotypical Indian images. The published text revises in significant ways both Genet’s play and Favel Starr’s earlier adaptation of the play1, creating a problematic spectacle of Indian performativity which refuses to act an other kind of Indian. I will argue that both the early version and the published version of Lady of Silences are per-versions, the prefix “per” denoting “thoroughly, completely,” “away entirely, to destruction,” and “extremely, very” (OED). I will discuss the divergent ways in which Favel Starr’s two “versions” of Genet’s play expose the ideological scaffolding of Genet’s work, dismantle this scaffolding which obscures Genet’s voyeuristic desire, and, by doing so, pursue the generic and ideological implications of Genet’s “version” of voyeuristic desire. In my examination, I will draw upon the definitions of perversity as reclaimed by Ric Knowles and Jonathan Dollimore, which foreground the term’s utility as a marker of ideological resistance. My discussion will highlight how Favel Starr’s two adaptations of Genet’s 1959 play both stage the inherent frission between the “act”and the “Indian”in different and disturbing ways, and how, in both adaptations, the performative act of Aboriginality is shown to be a thorough, destructive, and extreme “per-version”of the politics of desire.
To pervert is to resist in ways unforeseen. What is demanded when charting the perverse genealogy of Favel Starr’s play is a methodological approach that can fruitfully engage with the artistic employment of the perverse as a tactic of resistance. Before tackling the evolution of Lady of Silences, from its source in Genet to its 1993 performance script and through to its revised publication in 2003, I must first outline what I mean by perversity as a political mode of resistance. In his discussion of “Canadian postmodern” dramaturgy, Ric Knowles introduces the concept of “the dramaturgy of the perverse,” which disrupts “the romantic and post-romantic conceptions of a unified subject and of unified character and action” (Theatre of Form 45). This concept, according to Knowles, is more destabilizing than subversion, which is “arranged in an oppositional (and therefore affirming) relationship to the dominant” (44): “The revisioning of those structures [of traditional Aristotelian or modernist plays] fractures traditional concepts of focus, unity, and action, and perversely twists them out of shape in order to divide and multiply the prisms through which we see, and to extend the subject positions available to Canadian theatre audiences” (“Dramaturgy” 234). While this concept is useful when attempting to understand how contemporary theatre can turn the traditional Western principles of play structure against themselves, it also raises two key problems that Knowles does not address.
The first problem relates to the elision, in Knowles’ coinage of perversity, of the psychoanalytic definitions of the term, and its pedigree of pathology that restricts its meaning to manifestations of deviance in the individual psyche. Knowles’ “dramaturgy of the perverse” is clearly a perversity of theatrical form, not of the self, yet the term “perverse,” when applied to the self in the (post-) Freudian tradition, foregrounds issues of normativity, fetishization, foreclosure, and desire which both trouble and augment Knowles’ application of the term to instances of dramaturgical innovation. The second problem is equally vexed, yet holds equal promise for development of the idea of perversity as a thoroughgoing tactic of resistance. Given Knowles’ definition of “dramaturgy of the perverse” as profoundly disruptive of unified notions of subjectivity and ontology, can playwrights from a “marginal” position afford to pervert that which they (and their compatriots) have fought so long to achieve and protect? In other words, what exactly is at stake politically in Knowles’ perverse dramaturgy?2 The use of perversity as a tactic of resistance raises the necessary problem of limits, since the perverse presupposes the disposition “to go counter to what is reasonable or required” (OED) in terms of the expectations of both normative discourses and of the resistant discourses which seek to challenge the former’s hegemony.
Like Knowles, Jonathan Dollimore seeks to renovate perversity as a political mode of resistance, but he approaches the task through a close reading of historical (especially early modern) uses of the term. In his examination of pre-sexological and pre-Freudian understandings of perversity, Dollimore argues that “the concept of perversion can be reconstructed as one of struggle and conflict between domination and insubordination, between desire and law, and between transgression and conformity” (“Cultural Politics” 9). For Dollimore, perversity is a displacement of normative cultural anxiety, an anxiety born of the recognition that the threat of the deviant lies not in its discrete otherness, but in its immanent flowering within the selfsame:
[T]he most extreme threat to the true form of something comes not so much from its absolute opposite or its direct negation, but in the form of its perversion; somehow the perverse threat is inextricably rooted in the true and the authentic, while being, in spite of (or rather because of) that connection, also the utter contradiction of the true and authentic. (Sexual Dissidence 121)
Dollimore argues that this paradox of perversity – “that perversion has its origins in, or exists in an intimate relation with, that which it subverts” (120) – makes possible both the political uses of the term and its role in Freudian theorizing of the “normal,” since in both contexts it is the necessary proximity of the deviant to the norm which helps define the norm and lend it its apparent cohesion.3 What these understandings of the perverse – as unstable refraction of the norm, as proximate inhabitation of the norm – permit in the analysis of a play like Lady of Silences is the consideration of its relation to both its inspiration (Genet’s The Blacks) and larger questions of Aboriginal adaptation and subjectivity. One must ask whether Favel Starr’s adaptations (the 1993 and 2003 versions) pervert Genet’s text, and if they do, whether these adaptations reaffirm or dismantle Genet’s implied model of normativity/resistance in similar ways, either through a proliferation and excess of subject positions (Knowles) or a paradoxical revelation of the perverse proximate within Genet’s model (Dollimore). Put simply: are the two adaptations of Lady of Silences (1993, 2003) “versions” of The Blacks or “per-versions”? But first, we must consider which “version” of normativity/resistance in Genet’s 1959 play receives perverse treatment.
While the premiere performance of Genet’s The Blacks in 1959 provoked a vociferous outrage – Gabriel Marcel called it “the rejection, the spitting forth, the vomiting of everything that has constituted the honor and dignity of the Christian West” (qtd. in Coe 120) – from our later perspective, the play is less iconoclastic than exemplary of the goals and strategies of the Theatre of the Absurd, and of Genet’s theatrical obsessions in particular. The play itself is structured as a meta-theatrical experience, where the murder of a white woman named Jane is ritualized for both an on-stage “audience,” black actors wearing white masks, and an off-stage audience of white spectators. Genet’s staging forces the white spectators to witness the black “audience” on stage watching them watch the ritualized enactment of the murder, and thus, as Derek Connon suggests, “the act of provocation formed by the murder attacks the spectators in one way whilst the mockery provided by the parody of their own kind offends in another, and the implied threat is intensified when the stage ‘audience’ of whites enter into the ritual itself, only to be symbolically murdered in their turn” (426). If this dis(as)sembling confrontation between parody and its target were the only tactic Genet employed to discomfort his audience, one could fairly describe it, as Connon does, as not a play written for blacks, but as “a play written against whites” (425) and see its representation of blacks as entirely and self-consciously surfaced: funhouse mirrors for dominant “white” prejudice and ethnic terror. If seen in this light, the play could easily (but of course, not unproblematically) be interpreted as a particularly Fanonian “script,” where signifiers of race have no reference to an objective signified existence. As Fanon points out: “[T]he Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (Black Skin 231). Yet, the play also problematizes this deconstructive reading by including another layer of dissimulation, where the entire ritual performance on stage is meant to distract the spectators from the “real” agonism: the off-stage trial and execution of a black defendant by a revolutionary black organization. Thus, The Blacks becomes “a subterfuge within a ritual within a performance within a play” (Chaudhuri 366).
However, the play’s relationship to political action, and Genet’s own erotic conflation of artistic and political resistance, renders The Blacks a deeply conflicted document of colonial desire. Since the play’s focus seems to be on the bankruptcy of white colonial empathy with the oppressed, the “Greek scene” of black revolutionary action referenced but never enacted on stage serves to problematize the relationship between white fantasy and black reality. The issue remains whether the off-stage revolution is in fact as unreal as the ritual performed for the white spectators. Genet’s own disavowal of the play’s political effect underwrites his refusal to commit art in the service of political action:“I write plays in order to crystallize a theatrical, a dramatic emotion. I’m not concerned about whether, for example, The Blacks serves the Negroes. Besides, I don’t think it does” (“Interview” 52). On one hand, Genet’s own personal commitment to political action, evidenced by his participation in the Black Panther and the Palestinian Liberation movements, suggests that his apparent lack of concern for his plays’ political utility is a result of his personal engagement with realpolitik. On the other, when his comments regarding the “erotic charge” of these movements are taken into account, we can begin to understand the conflicted depiction of black revolution in The Blacks:
[…] I find the Panthers’ movement and the Palestinians’ movement to be very just – but this belonging, this sympathizing with them, is at the same time dictated by the erotic charge which the Arab world in its totality or the black American world represents to me, to my sexuality. (qtd in Dollimore, Dissidence 351)
Thus, we can begin to see the ways in which Genet’s play is perverse in both Knowles’ sense and in Dollimore’s sense. The former is evinced by the play’s proliferation of identities and formal denaturing, or as Una Chaudhuri argues, the “process in which a series of apparently stable realities are progressively destabilized and denied; a process during which every assumption about theatrical communication is exposed and undermined” (364-5).Yet, also, the play can be seen to embody what Dollimore terms the “perverse dynamic,” which “discloses not an underlying unity in the name of which social division can be transcended, but a radical interconnectedness which has been and remains the unstable ground of both repression and liberation”(229). Considering Genet’s conflation of erotic charge and political commitment, the relationship between the off-stage black revolutionary action and the on-stage ritualized enactment of a white woman’s murder by a black man (the character of Village) is less simply oppositional than dangerously cathected. By presenting a white audience with intimations of both black political revolution and interracial sexual violence, with both scenarios ending in sacrificial death of a victim (one black, one white; one male, one female), Genet is implicating the audience in a double-moment of political/erotic voyeurism. Since both events are ultimately withheld from view, Genet effectively frustrates the audience’s desire to voyeuristically participate in the struggle of the Other to either realize or expiate itself as a speaking subject. And Genet himself clearly understands himself as a voyeur par excellence, one whose awareness of his own spectatorial desire does nothing to limit his enjoyment of his position of entrenched power as a white observer: “I am steeped in an idea of property while I loot property. I recreate the absent proprietor” (Thief ’s Journal 129). Given all this, my question is embarrassingly simple: what possible use could this play be to an Aboriginal playwright? The Blacks, while ideologically fraught, is in the final analysis a disturbing play about white colonial voyeurism. The first version of Lady of Silences (1993) appears to reinvest the voyeurism of Genet’s play using the anti-detective genre as a formal distancing trope, while the published version (2003) seems to confront the voyeurism head-on, and in so doing produces a spectacle of abasement designed to provide the voyeurism with an entirely perverse object for its pleasure.
In Lady of Silences (1993, henceforth referred to as Lady 1993), Favel Starr refigures the meta-theatrical dramaturgy of Genet’s play. Gone are the white masks, the black “audience” on stage, and the revolutionary insurrection off-stage. Unlike Genet’s play, where black faces wear white masks without privileging either the mask or the face beneath in terms of identity politics, Favel Starr constructs an anti-detective story that explores internalized Aboriginal self-loathing. However, Lady 1993 also attempts to foreground the desires often sublimated by the detective form, and in this way Genet’s original intention to confront the white audience with its own desires is upheld. In Lady 1993, a white woman, Jane, is found beaten and stabbed to death outside a seedy “Indian” bar. The four suspects – Village, Sheila, Ruth, and Lisa – each possess ample motive for the crime. Village is the jilted male Aboriginal lover of Jane, while the three Aboriginal women each have been used and betrayed by Village in his pursuit of her. Clues, such as a charm bracelet with the engraved name “Nestor” left at the scene of the crime and traces of blood on Village, suggest that a speedy solution to the puzzle is possible through the piecing-together of material and circumstantial evidence. However, we are quickly made aware that this case is far from open-and-shut. Two of the characters (Lisa and Sheila) confess to the murder with mutually exclusive retellings of the event (40-3), and the charm bracelet bears the name of an imaginary lover of Sheila. From its opening scene, the play flouts logical causality and pursues a different goal from the one typical of the detective genre.
Favel Starr’s 1993 play has been called, quite aptly, a “Native noir” (Winsor 32).His use of the name Belmondo for his detective (a nod to the iconic French actor Jean-Pierre Belmondo) incorporates the register of French New Wave série noire into the play, an appropriate intertext given the play’s perverse dramaturgy. Both the story of the crime and of the investigation are filled with ambiguity and paradox, and, thus, the play appears to operate as an anti-detective story. As such, the play denatures generic structure and expectation in order to challenge the master narrative of totality and rationality it is perceived to articulate. Like Dollimore’s “perverse dynamic,” the anti-detective story is a perverse proximate, existing in counterdistinction to the detective genre while at the same time reflecting the deferred cultural anxiety the detective genre must disallow to function. In anti-detective per-versions (Ionesco’s Victims of Duty is a theatrical example of this type), the relations between crime and solution, wrongdoing and culpability, are intentionally obscured and rendered absurd, and, as a result, the desire for justice and the closure it promises are foregrounded and thwarted.
Like in other anti-detective stories, there is an explicit awareness of the human need to witness the process through which order emerges out of chaos. Impatient with the slowness of his investigation, Belmondo reminds his suspects that “the clock is ticking, and our audience waits. It’s a confession they want, it’s a confession we must find” (36). While the play resembles antidetective plays like Victims of Duty in its self-reflexive perversion of formal convention, it does not manipulate these conventions to suggest a vaguely nihilistic or existential position often espoused in postmodern parody. While the play parodies the standard signs of detective narrative, there are both real crimes and equally real culprits, not in bourgeois drawing rooms or seedy flophouses, but in the realm of identity politics.
Lady 1993 is primarily about the self-hatred experienced by Aboriginal peoples living in an environment where the ideals of beauty and worth are determined by non-Aboriginal dominant culture. Village, the jilted lover, is masterful in his manipulation of dominant tropes of Aboriginality, in turn strutting the stage mouthing the animalistic similes of Aboriginal male potency and begging victim status due to his genetic inferiority (7-8). He is the image of Other-directed Aboriginal identity, constantly pursuing the non-Aboriginal perfection that the murdered Jane comes to represent. For the three Aboriginal women, as well, Jane is a symbol of the promised land, but one which serves to remind them of their perpetual banishment:
SHEILA. She was born among the marble ruins of a dead civilization, chalk white and slender as a yew tree. Her blue eyes sparkled mediterranean blue, azure. Lips blew kisses soft as pussy willows. Against her whiteness our hate pounded its teeth and nails, until there was only blood and shreds of skin. (16A)
Just as the detective narrative profluently reveals the hidden relationship between cause and effect in a positivist sense, Belmondo’s investigation in the play mirrors a racial/cultural search for cause and effect in the sphere of identity. In hard-boiled fiction, readers are attracted by the quasi-sociological nature of the investigation of marginal characters and their environments, a guided tour that also serves to stimulate a voyeuristic appetite for the criminal Other. In this case, the crime under investigation, the murder of Jane, is of secondary interest to the audience, which needs to “know” the causes of Aboriginal violence and self-abuse which have resulted in the effect of murder. Because the crime was interracial, a white woman murdered by Aboriginals, the discovery of guilt and motive is, from a non-Aboriginal perspective, vital to either the reestablishment of good intercultural relations or the reintrenchment of cultural hegemony.
As in other “ethnic” or “marginal” detective stories, such as Rick Shiome’s play Yellow Fever, the detective’s investigation of both guilt and motive is necessarily an investigation of group cohesion and cultural identification as markers of centre/periphery status. In Shiome’s play, for example, the hard-boiled form is mimicked without obvious perversion, with the second-generation Japanese-Canadian gumshoe Sam Shikaze investigating the mysterious disappearance of the Cherry Blossom Queen from a Vancouver neighbourhood. It is in the elucidation of motive that the play reveals its cultural critique, which is framed in cultural/political, rather than psychoanalytical or individual, terms. Each suspect’s motive, whether to commit the crime or hinder its resolution, is shown to reflect the individual’s role in the reaffirmation of dominant (non-Japanese) hegemony, and the implicit crime in Yellow Fever is collusion with those who seek to break down Japanese-Canadian solidarity.
In similar fashion, Lady 1993 also interrogates the ways in which Aboriginal identity is threatened by colonizing forces, but, unlike Shiome, Favel Starr perverts the detective formula in explicit ways. In addition to the narrative’s self-consciousness, the play is framed as a particular performance of a ceremony that all the characters are doomed to repeat nightly, as Belmondo warns Village: “[…] until this cancerous crime is burned from the cells of your body you will remain here under the harsh light where no secret stays hidden for long, the curtain will not drop” (7). This ceremonial frame is reinforced by the play’s staging, where Belmondo, as detective/priest, officiates over the proceedings from a raised altar on which are placed ritual objects such as roses, a silver chalice, and a silver bell. By presenting the investigation story in the heightened style of ritualized action and speech (typically, notes Todorov, the story of the investigation in standard narratives attempts to render itself transparent in order to act as mediator between the reader and the story of the crime [46]), Favel Starr accomplishes two very important things. First, he reveals the submerged identity of the standard detective form as ceremony, in that in the detective story group solidarity and communal health are restored by the expiation of both the sacrificial victim and the scapegoat murderer. But, perhaps in a more important sense, the representation of the investigation in ritual terms illuminates the goal of the performance: namely, a reorientation of how identity is constructed. Ritual, in its basic sense, involves not the narration of fact but rather the narration of recombination, where the reordering of cultural elements effects a change in the subject’s consciousness, thereby restoring harmony on both an individual and communal level. Despite the confessions of both Sheila and Lisa to the murder of Jane, it is Village, as the principal actor in this ceremony, who must “confess his crime” of racial self-hatred using the death of Jane as a catalyst (Belmondo admonishes him that he will be incapable of love until he does [7]).
It could be argued that Lady 1993 is a fairly straightforward adaptation of The Blacks, in that it substitutes the play-within-aplay structure and self-conscious role-playing in the latter with similar distancing dramaturgical devices, namely the anti-detective narrative and the explicitly ritualized action (introduced but not capitalized upon by Genet). Like The Blacks, Favel Starr’s play makes the audience aware it is watching a play, and that its voyeurism has been recognized and reflected back upon itself in the frustration of raciocinative closure.
Yet, unlike Genet’s text, Favel Starr’s play investigates the cost of voyeurism on the subjects who are forced to perform for its enjoyment. When Village stands over the battered body of his former lover (signified by a white dress in Lady 1993), he expresses the shame at the root of his desire:
I looked into the pools of her blood. I saw my reflection and I thought that, surely, I was made in the image of God hisself. I looked back into the bloody mirror to slick back my hair, and I saw ... my heavy Indian features ... Lice check! Indians on one side! We are standing in a line at the front of the class. Mrs. Phillips searches our heads for lice. Pink rosy cheeked children witness our lousiness. I see an open schoolbook in front of the little girl in the front row. I disappear into the pages and I am Dick and she is Jane. My dirty pudgy hand creeps her rosy thigh to the edge of her yellow skirt. All the time I am wishing, please don’t let me have lice, please don’t let me have lice. And I want to disappear under her skirt to a secret garden where only her and I will roam like first man and first woman. See Jane run. Run Jane run. Run, run, run! Little Village has lice!! (41-42)
Village, an expert performer of Aboriginal stereotypes, is presented with his own image in the reflective blood of his victim, and his response to this image is as conflicted as the stereotypes he performs. He sees “hisself,” a Rousseauist archetype of noble savagery, the “first man” burdened with “heavy Indian features,” and his erotic desire to “contaminate” the white girl in his class is predicated upon his own fear of contamination. This is neither a confession nor a denial of guilt (in keeping with the anti-detective narrative), but instead an admission of how desire and identity of the Other are coextensive. Its effect would be similar to one of Genet’s black performers removing his or her mask and forcing the white audience to witness the horror of subjective dissolution. Just as the hard-boiled detective is unavoidably tainted by the company he is forced to keep, Belmondo too is implicated in the crime of self-hatred. Under harsh questioning,Village accuses him of hypocrisy, claiming that given the same circumstances, Belmondo would have behaved as Village had (12). The shaken detective, no longer the imperious orchestrator of the ceremony, closes the play with a confession of his own culpability:
DETECTIVE. To look deep into the well is to see your own dark eyes […] to have self-knowledge or eternal hate. I remember I took the fork and began to gouge out my eyes to feed the crows. I hate you! I hate you! Let the crows take my eyes! Come crows! I can’t bear the burden of this tainted sight. (45)
It is Favel Starr’s refusal to present a “true crime” easily solvable by deductive means which forces the audience to examine its own desire for certain knowledge of Aboriginal identity, its “fallen nature.” Between the standard trope of detective fiction and its perversion, absolute order versus absolute disorder, Favel Starr constructs a morality tale about Aboriginal self-image that partakes of both but legitimates neither.
As an adaptation of Genet’s The Blacks, Lady 1993 can be seen to both extend Genet’s intentions and subject them to scrutiny. Like Genet, Favel Starr foregrounds the voyeurism that permits the audience to vicariously enjoy its specular desire and seek fulfilment of this desire through performative closure. But as indicated, Genet’s meta-theatrical practice has at its root a desire for proximate connection, where black bodies are self-consciously coded and unavailable but also vicariously enjoyed as bodies which could be something else. Genet appears to want it both ways, in that the performance refuses a coherent, cohesive black subjectivity, and is meant to reflect the white audience back upon itself, yet the play is ostensibly written to be performed by black actors. Hence Genet’s obsessively specific stage direction that “if the blacks [in the audience] refuse the [white] masks, then let a dummy be used” to signify the white spectator (i). It is ambiguous whether Genet’s allowance of a dummy as racial stand-in is his minimal requirement for the performance or in reality his ideal; is the play’s white audience necessarily a fetish object rather than a constituency capable of change?
What Favel Starr’s adaptation tests is the potential for nonwhite bodies to enact dominant stereotypes in order to understand their penetrative agency. While the off-stage revolution colours the parodic depiction of black resistance in Genet, perhaps it is the implied subjectivity outside or against (proximate to) the stereotypes in Lady 1993 which might permit an audience to embrace Favel Starr’s play as ultimately redemptive.While the first version of Lady of Silences might be renovated in this manner, the published version (henceforth referred to as Lady 2003) resists such a renovation in significant ways.
I say this not because the published text is a radical departure from its earlier incarnation, but because it selectively removes elements from the 1993 version which permit it to be understood as a distanced meta-theatrical critique of audience voyeurism, and, thus, its import is more radical in its perversity. Gone are the anti-detective touches which foreground and refuse the audience’s desire for positivist certainty. What is added is also subtle, but equally disturbing. Instead of the ceremonial signifiers which disarticulate the white woman Jane’s body, her verism, Lady 2003 returns to Genet’s earlier dramaturgical tactic of having the characters on stage impersonating Jane (now named Linda) through parodic drag. Instead of the deferral of guilt through the proliferation of motive and evidence, there is the complete certainty of culpability in the White Woman’s death, since we see less a ritualized fragmentation of her death than a brutal enactment of her murder at the hands of Lisa, Ruth, and Sheila. The description of the event is larded with racial stereotype in an orgiastic celebration of violence:
SHEILA and RUTH as warrior horsewomen, begin to gallop and circle LISA as the White Woman.
SHEILA & RUTH. The thunder of the horses’ hooves shakes the earth, and the dust and action is as thick as the battle of the Little Big Horn. A massacre is in the air – our nostrils dilate with the smell of blood, our eyes roll white with anticipation! We attack with prayers and hate in our savage red hearts.
RUTH jumps off her horse and catches the knife SHEILA tosses her. The White Woman [LISA] is terrified. Then RUTH, knife clenched in her teeth, attacks the White Woman. Throwing the White Woman to the ground, RUTH stabs her repeatedly and scalps her.
RUTH.[…] I like White Women. Their thin fragile veins, delicate like spider webs, arouse me. Their blue eyes tempt me – to kill, kill, kill! (290-291)
I can think of two ways of reading this text: as non-exclusive hate literature or as a calling of Genet’s bluff. I use the term nonexclusive here because the play promotes the dehumanization of the White Woman (as type, not individual), yet also dehumanizes the Native characters, all of whom fervently desire and/or do nothing to prevent her destruction. Thus, the result is very much unlike that of typical hate literature, where one group is dehumanized to serve another group’s discursive needs. The later version of the play calls Genet’s bluff in that the deferred subjectivity of the Other, which is gestured towards but tantalizingly refused in The Blacks (thereby allowing it to blossom in the minds of the white spectators, unchecked by the constraints of cultural or political difference) is brought front-and-centre, on stage, undeferred, and it is shown to be thoroughly poisoned by the audience’s voyeurism. Like pornography, where paid bodies enact voyeuristic desires, Lady 2003 enacts racial stereotypes without signalling their intrinsic fraudulence. Even our “soiled knight,” the detective Belmondo, no longer displays a schismatic awareness of the effects of living and struggling against racial discrimination and self-loathing. He has become “[…] a star. A star falling, falling from the Grace of Heaven where I once was an angel, a light. The light pierces me like nails and I am not sure of who I am, and that knowledge sends a shudder through my body … and the joy is excruciating” (289).
Belmondo has embraced numinous anonymity, and the joy of finally being Satan, Christ, and most importantly, no one at all, is “excruciating.” Here, in the interstitial space between the “act” and the “Indian,” the voyeurism is complete and ultimately mortifying. The later version of the play appears to argue not for critical distance, nor deferred hope, nor revolution, but rather for the sublime acceptance of voyeuristic desire which has constructed all, and therefore can never be refracted back upon itself. As Žižek suggests, “the fundamental level of ideology […] is not of an illusion masking the real state of things, but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring social reality itself” (33). The fantasy here, unlike Genet’s erotic charge, is made manifest, and the audience is left with the impression that Favel Starr’s per-version of The Blacks has left no room for a version ofAboriginal identity unalloyed with this fantasy. His version of deferred and refractory identity politics is at once thorough, complete (to destruction), and extreme.
As Dollimore suggests, what emerges as a necessary corollary of the acceptance of perversity as a proximate of normalcy is that identity must never be understood as seeking parity with other identities in the hopes of finding sameness: “So we are not all the same. We are differences that radically proximate” (Dissidence 229). Favel Starr, in both the first and second versions of his play Lady of Silences, refuses to present a model ofAboriginal subjectivity which is untainted by negative images of Aboriginality. Instead, he tackles the difficult task of re-presenting radical proximates of Aboriginal identity, those proximates which do not mitigate the social process of voyeurism, but which instead “crystallize a theatrical, a dramatic emotion” (Genet) that is deeply destructive and yet part of the perverse dynamic of cultural representation.
NOTES
1. My discussion in this paper of Favel Starr’s first version of Lady of
Silences borrows from my earlier consideration of the playwright’s
work in the essay “Making Relations Visible in Native Canadian
Performance,” in Siting the Other: Re-visions of Marginality in
Australian and English-Canadian Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort and
Franca Bellarsi.Brussells: P.I.E.-Peter Lang. 2001, 233-246.
Return to article
2. In his examination of perverse dramaturgy, Knowles examines
Canadian playwrights who are well-known (George F.Walker, Judith
Thompson,Margaret Hollingsworth, and Beverley Simons), but who
are not self-identified as belonging to so-called “marginal” groups.
Return to article
3. Dollimore discusses the arguments of Freud and Foucault, who
represent conflicting views of how perversity serves to buttress or
challenge social formations (Dissidence, 105-6).
Return to article
WORKS CITED
Appleford, Rob. “Making Relations Visible in Native Canadian Performance,” in Siting the Other: Re-visions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi.Brussells: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2001. 233-246.
Chaudhuri, Una. “The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit, and Threat in Genet’s The Blacks.” Modern Drama 28.3 (Sept. 1985): 362-76.
Coe, Richard. ed. The Theater of Jean Genet: A Casebook. New York: Grove P, 1970.
Connon, Derek.“Confused? You Will Be: Genet’s Les Negres and the Art of Upsetting the Audience.” French Studies 50.4 (Oct. 1996): 425-38.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.
---. “The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault.” Genders 8 (Summer 1990): 1-16.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto P, 1986.
Favel Starr, Floyd. Lady of Silences [Lady 2003]. Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English. Ed.Monique Mojica and Ric Knowles. Toronto: Playwrights Canada P, 2003.
---.“Native Performance Culture Research 1991-1996.”Canadian Theatre Review 90 (Spring 1997): 83.
---. Lady of Silences [Lady 1993]. (unpublished playscript). U of Guelph: Native Earth Performing Arts Archives, 1993. XZ1 MS A875021.
Genet, Jean. The Thief ’s Journal. 1949. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
---. “Interview.” Playboy 9 (April 1964): 45-54.
---. The Blacks. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove P, 1960.
Knowles, Ric. The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies. Toronto: ECW P, 1999.
---.“The Dramaturgy of the Perverse.”Theatre Research International 17.3 (1992): 226-35.
MacPherson, Dennis and J.Douglas Rabb. Indian From the Inside:A Study in Ethno-Metaphysics. Thunder Bay: Lakehead U. Centre for Northern Studies Occasional Paper #14.
“Perversion.” The OED Online. 2nd ed. 1989. 18 August 2003.
Shiome, Rick. Yellow Fever. Toronto: Playwrights Union Canada P, 1983.
Tani, Stephano. The Doomed Detective: The Contributions of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois P, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” Trans. R. Howard. The Poetics of Prose. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 42-52.
Winsor, Christopher. “Confrontation with shame: Floyd Favel guides Native Earth Performing Arts out of the shadows.” Eye Magazine 1 April 1993: 32.
Žižek , Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.