The Blacks
Mailer's two-part Village Voice review of Jean Genet's play The Blacks, 11 May and 18 May 1961. The review's framing of the play's racial politics drew an attack from Lorraine Hansberry in the Voice of 1 June, which Mailer answered on 8 June (61.7). Partially reprinted in The Presidential Papers (63.37).
“The Blacks.” Parts 1 and 2. Village Voice, 11 May 1961, 11, 14; 18 May 1961, 11, 14–15. Criticism (theater review).
A two-part Voice review of Genet‘s play The Blacks. The framing of the play’s racial politics drew an attack from Lorraine Hansberry in the Voice of 1 June 1961, which Mailer answered the following week in “Mailer to Hansberry” (61.7). Rpt: 63.37 (The Presidential Papers), partial.
The review’s argument, in brief
Part 1 takes Mailer’s argument out from a sketched account of “cancer gulch” — his name for American theater — to a fuller indictment of “Liberal Totalitarianism”: the levelling of the country’s two greatest minority peoples, the Jews and the Negroes, by their absorption into the bland-suburban center. Genet’s play, Mailer argues, is “the truest and most explosive play anyone has yet written at all about the turn in the tide” — its actors burdened with delivering “Mother F. Kerr” lines to a white audience that wants chiefly to feel itself absolved. Mailer’s praise for the cast as entertainers (“the greatest entertainers in America have been Negro”) and his strictures on them as actors (“they lack relaxation … they tend not to be good”) prefigure the cluster of Mailer-on-race arguments that Hansberry’s 1 June reply will single out.
Part 2 reasons through the play’s structure — Genet’s “dance of three, a play of shimmers” with Black actors in White masks playing White judges, never with literal Black confronting literal White — and against it: “Certain themes, simple on their face, complex in their depths, insist on returning to the surface and remaining simple. The murder of Lumumba is thus simple. It is simple and it is overbearing. It is inescapable.” Mailer finds Genet a “brave and great writer” hobbled by Surrealist mannerism and homosexual chi-chi (a homophobic register pervasive in this period of his prose); the essay’s coda — “How well Genet personifies the dilemma” — defines Mailer’s idea of the artist of late civilization, “stilled, all but paralyzed between the tension to create and that urge which is its opposite.”
Full text
The full two-part text was reprinted on villagevoice.com in June 2020 and is held in our working archive at Texts → The Blacks (61.6) with rights: REQUEST-NEEDED — not cleared for public display in this edition. The Voice reprint embeds the five scanned issue-pages (11 and 14 of 11 May; 11, 14, and 15 of 18 May).
Related pages
- 1961 | The Village Voice | Jean Genet | Lorraine Hansberry
- Mailer to [Lorraine] Hansberry | The Presidential Papers
- Mailer to [Lorraine] Hansberry (61.7)