Abstract
At least two commentators have claimed that Antonin Artaud was an important influence on Jean Genet. Ronald Harwood says this influence was ‘enormous’1 while John Russell Taylor classifies Genet as a ‘follower’2 of Artaud. Such views represent the received wisdom and, like all received wisdom, it needs to be questioned. The purpose of this essay is to examine the influence of Artaud on Genet with reference to The Maids,3 and then to consider examples of other approaches to the play before finally problematising the whole question of ‘influence’ as a way of making sense of a text, especially when that text is a play.
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Notes
R. Harwood, All the World’s a Stage (London: Methuen, 1984) p. 287.
J. Russell Taylor, Dictionary of the Theatre (London and New York: Penguin, 1984) p. 113.
J. Genet, The Maids and Deathwatch, trans. B. Frechtman (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989).
A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. V. Corti (London: John Calder, 1985).
S. Sontag ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in A Susan Sontag Reader (London and New York: Penguin, 1987) pp. 305–25 and p. 316.
See B. Benvenuto and R. Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London: Free Association Books, 1986) p. 33.
For a useful introduction to Hegel’s theories, see R. Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 1976).
For a more detailed view of these ideas, together with Hegel’s ‘influence’ on Lacan, see W. Ver Eecke, ‘Hegel as Lacan’s Source for Necessity in Psychoanalytic Theory’, in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds), Interpreting Lacan (New York: Vail Ballou Press, 1983) pp. 113–39.
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© 1994 The Editorial Board, Lumière Cooperative Press Ltd
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Day, G. (1994). Artaud and Genet’s The Maids. In: Docherty, B. (eds) Twentieth-Century European Drama. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23073-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23073-0_10
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