Objects of abjection: the animation of difference in Jean Genet's novels - French author

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by John Plotz

Bliss and terror are twinned aspects of an object's departure from its ordinary place. The estranged pleasure an audience gets from watching Chaplin dodge animate rifles, or Buster Keaton run downhill pursued by boulders, counterbalances the horror that Capek's schlemiel feels opening a drawer of bloodthirsty kitchen knives. The pleasure a doll calls out in Rilke, or a toy train in Adorno, counterbalances the horror that shifting walls deal out when Marcel wakes disoriented in the middle of the night. And the horror that domestic objects (doors, hands, telephones) call forth in Scarry's account of torture is counterbalanced by the pleasure inherent in the sudden bursts of animation of the penis, rose, or tube of Vaseline in Genet's novels. Genet's critics have documented well the sexual dimension of these appealing objects (Bersani, White). But little has been said of the similarity between the pleasure that these excessively active items produce (the "quivering" and "oscillation" that the sexual mode induces in Genet's narrators) and the sort of horror that occurs when an object is invested with a power that one's own power as meaning-maker can no longer counter. When objects get the upper hand, that is, either bliss or abjection (or both) will replace the ordinary range of emotions that Genet associates with banal norreality. To say this thrill is only sexual is to neglect the dread inherent in the frisson.

The pleasure that Genet gets from these objects is at every level dual - to begin with, what is at once the simplest and the most highly charged moment in all Genet's writing: a tube of Vaseline that sits, circumspect and reduced, along with the arrested narrator in a police station in Spain. One pleasure the tube of Vaseline provides is that its durability resists the gaze of even the most hardened policeman: Its autonomy, despite its fragility (because of its fragility), is irreproachable. To that extent, the tube's fetishistic power still functions like Proust's madeleine, or like Adorno's trains. It is set in utter alterity to the homogeneous system from which it escapes. But Genet also brings out the Vaseline's liquidity, its ductility, its propensity to slide back into the world it stubbornly resists.

I knew that all night long my tube of vaseline would be exposed to the scorn - the contrary of a Perpetual Adoration - of a group of strong, handsome, husky policemen. So strong that if the weakest of them barely squeezed his fingers together, there would shoot forth, first with a slight fart, brief and dirty, a ribbon of gum which would continue to emerge in a ridiculous silence. Nevertheless, I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw down upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages. (TJ20)

Here are Genet's central themes in a nutshell: the putatively strong policemen against an apparently debased object; the (homo)sexual moment in the form of an invasive proclamation of strength by a straight, handsome male; the (mock) discharge at the moment of humiliation.(9) Most striking of all is the tube of Vaseline's duality: hard and resistant to the gaze, yet designed to emit an effluvial haze. The tube is a solid erection until used,(10) but the Vaseline that comes forth is both gas (like the fart or the rose's aroma) and thick white liquid (like sperm from a penis). It is the exemplary "ineffable" haze that springs into being around the most animate and the most debased objects in Genet's universe.