SOURCE: Bokyo-Head, Christine. “Mirroring the Split Subject: Jean Genet's The Balcony.” Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts 3, no. 2 (August 2002).

In the following essay, Boyko-Head investigates how characters in The Balcony fail to reconcile the split between their perceived images and their true identities.

Una Chadhuri defines avant-garde theatre as “performance under-erasure … a radical, total disunity. In semiotic terms … it is a fall into the abyss between signifier and signified” (1990, 39). Jean Genet's literary work celebrates the abyss as a parallel universe for the decentralized, and the socially subverse. While writing about this parallel world may negate its radical potential, Genet points to a necessary ironic tension co-existing between legitimate and subversive realms. According to Mark Pizzato, Genet's subversive creations mark an autobiographical reconstruction where “the sole purpose of his writing would then have been to read it himself, to re-read himself and his imaginings, and to re-imagine himself through his...