SOURCE: Pizzato, Mark. “Genet's Violent, Subjective Split into the Theatre of Lacan's Three Orders.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5, no. 1 (fall 1990): 115-30.

In the following essay, Pizzato provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of Genet's works, focusing on Genet's creation of a self in both his life and works.

In his brief book on Proust, Samuel Beckett states:

The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

(7-8)

But in Proustian fictional memory, according to Beckett, there are breaks in the rule of Habit, “when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being” (8). And in...