and were dominated by the most primitive parts of the brain. By making Sa' id a symbol of dis-alienation. Genet once again exaggerates a Western myth about a colonised peopk as he has done in The Blacks^ but with a difference. Through the ritualistic rape in the earlier play he had exaggerated, in order to mock at and demolish, the myth of the black man as the "black buck", sexually voracious and lusting after the white woman. This had served to underline the real tenderness and genuine humanism beneath the black militancy. In The Screens on the other hand Genet, exaggerating the myth of the Algerian criminality, seems also to glorify it Instead of rejecting it as contemporary intellectuals had indignantly done, he translates this criminality into a pervasive symbol of the anti-colonial, anti-West protest The path to true liberation in the play is shown to lie in the Algerians' discovery of an identity and sensibility that is even in its inversion moral rather than historical.
Obviously Genets sympathy for Sa'id springs partly from his self-identification with this outcast anti-hero. But Sa'id's mode of revolt is so individualistic and solitary that he cannot really be regarded as a rallying point of a nation's liberation movement Further it would be inaccurate to see him as a class-hero leading a peasant movement Despite the massive peasant participation in the war shown in the play, there is never any social, leave alone a class consciousness among the revolutionaries. As a source of inspiration for a new de-colonised society, then, Sa'id can only stand for anarchy. It could of course be argued that he is a symbolic figure and that his lawlessness should not be taken literally. But even a surrealist play once it touches upon a basically social and political issue like colonialism, has to work out its symbolism in such a way as to make a socially concrete statement
It is no surprise then that the nature of the uprising under Sard's inspiration in the play should become somewhat of a licence for anarchic lawlessness. I£ as iN this play, order, rationality, logic and discipline are condemned as decadent Cartesian remnants, then the opposite can only spell chaos. The explosion of evil on both sides at this second stage of the revolution, which is perhaps intended to shock us into new awareness of the colonial violence, appear? rather gratuitous. The dividing line between colon violence and Arab "disalienated violence" seems too blurred to argue a clear case for the Algerians.
In the third and final stage of the struggle in the play the war of images sees the French triumph in their cultural imperialism. For the majority of the Algerian soldiers—as distinct from a small rabble group which continues to be inspired by Sa'id—revert to French values of order, rationality, logic and discipline after they have won the war against the French. Politically the country becomes independent but on the psychological and the ethical plane it fails to liberate itself.
More than in The Blacks Genets vision in The Screens places him quite squarely among the avant-garde, the Absurdists: there is a big difference between the compassionate leader of The Blacks and Sa'id, the betrayer of his own people. Genets support of Sard's allegiance to himself indicates his own reversion to a stand that is essentially solitary and asocial As we have seen, at the
90 Number^