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Jean Genet (1910-1986) |
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This French writer, a dramatist and
convicted felon, became one of the leading figures in the avant-garde
theater. Jean Genet depicted the world of male prostitutes,
convicts, pimps and social outcasts, the dark side of society which
knew by his own experience. For a long time he was so addicted to his criminal behavior
that he stole from those who tried to help him.
However, Genet's life changed radically when such prominent figures as
Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau clamored successfully for his parole.
He embarked on a new career
as a writer, who glorified homosexual love and lawbreaking. "Convict's garb is striped pink and white. Though it was at my heart's bidding that I chose the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding therein the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are the same nature as the brutal insensivity of the latter." (from The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet, foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, Grove Press, 1973, p. 9) Jean Genet was born in Paris, the illegitimate son of Camille
Gabrielle Genet, who abandoned him to the Assistance Publique, an
organization that supervises the care of unwanted children. François
Genet, his father, was a labourer. Camille Gabrielle worked as a
seamstress and maidservant; she died in 1919. Until the age of 21,
Genet was a ward of the state, raised in state institutions and by a
family in the village of Alligny-en-Morvan, where the
anti-Dreyfusards had a strong following. It has been argued that
Genet's negative view of the Jews was influenced by the conservative,
anti-Semitic church dogma. ('Jean Genet's
Anti-Semitism: Fact or Fiction' by Gene A. Plunka, in The French Review, Vol. 76.No. 3,
February 2003. p. 507) A
religious
and submissive child, Genet's foster mother hoped he would end up a
priest, but toilet was his refuge from his pressures: "Life, which I
saw far off and blurred through its darkness and smell—an odor that
filled me with compassion, in which the scent of the elders and the
loamy earth was dominant, for the outhouse was at the far end of the
garden, near the hedge—life, as it reached me, was singularly sweet,
caressing, light, or rather lightened, delivered from heaviness." (Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Flechtman, introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Bantam Books, 1964, p. 98) As a child, Genet spent hours
in the drowsy, shadowy outhouse, daydreaming and reading. At
the age of 10, he was accused of stealing; the thefts were small. "They
were just peccadilloes," recalled one of his classmates much later.
"You couldn't call them thefts. He took some pennies from his mother to
buy sweets". (Saint
Genet Decanonized: The Ludic Body in Querelle by Loren Ringer,
2001, p. 31) During
adolescence Genet
spent five years at the Mettray Reformatory. He escaped from there and
at age 19 joined the French Foreign Legion and deserted it soon. Then
began a period of wandering throughout Europe. He was charged with
vagrancy, homosexuality, theft, and smuggling. From 1930 onwards he
spent time in various European prisons. His psychiatrist Dr. Henri
Claude defined him "morally mad" but not insane. In 1939 Genet began to write. He produced between the years
1942 and
1948 several autobiographical novels. These works which celebrated thievery and homosexuality included Our
Lady of the Flowers, first published in a limited edition by
L'Arbalète of Lyons in 1943, and Querelle of Brest (1947).
The central character is the amoral sailor Querelle, whose strenght is
his extremely handsome appearance, and his will to add still further to
that beauty the crime of murder. As he kills his victim, he
destroys himself; killers are surrounded by immense respect in Genet's
hierarchy of
criminals. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film version of the book from
1982 followed its plot and characterizations but the German director
also weaved deeply personal themes into the story, such as search for
identity. Most of the action takes place in a bordello filled with
mirrors, curtains, and Art Nouveau glass panels. According th
Fassbinder, Querelle was a
"third-class story" but Genet's narrative method transformed it into an
"astonishing mythology". (Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
Film as Private and Public Art by Wallace Steadman Watson, 1996,
p. 257) In Miracle of the Rose (1946) the chains transform
to a garland of flowers. This work was based on the author's
experiences in the prisons of Mettray reformatory and Fontervault,
formerly a monastery. Genet makes no distinction between devotion to
God expressed in acts of worship and the prisoner's life: "The prison
lived like a cathedral at midnight on Christmas. We were carrying on the
traditions of the monks who went about their business at midnight, in
silence. We belonged to the Middle Ages." (Ibid., translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, Grove Weidenfeld, 1988, p. 11) The narrator meditates on the
meaning of imprisonment, and when a murderer named Harcamore is
executed, he
ascends to paradise at the moment of execution. The novel was written
in 1943 while Genet was imprisoned in La Santé penitentiary in Paris
for theft. In 1948 Genet was convicted of burglary for the 10th time and
condemned to automatic life imprisonment. However, by 1947, his works
had gained attention from such writers as Jean-Paul
Sartre,
André Gide and Jean Cocteau. After the sentence, they petitioned the
President of the Republic, Vincent Auriol, for his release.
Unexpectedly, Genet was pardoned in advance in August 1949. His
gratitude Genet expressed in a poem extolling the values of
criminals, in which a prison cell can turn into a place of monastic
meditations or scene of sexual fantasies. The presidential pardon was
taken as official acknowledgement of Genet's literary importance. "The
whole basis of his fellow feeling for Sartre was this idea of liberty
they shared, which nothing could suppress,"said Simone de
Beauvoir. (Jean-Paul
Sartre: The Philosopher as a Literary Critic by Benjamin Suhl,
1999, p. 150) "THE BISHOP (after making a visible effort to calm himself, in front of the mirror and holding his surplice): Now answer, mirror, answer me. Do I come here to discover evil and innocence? And in your gilt-edged glass, what was I? Never—I affirm it before God Who sees me—I never desired the episcopal throne. To become bishop, to work my way up—by means of virtues or vices—would have been to turn away from the ultimate dignity of bishop." (from The Balcony, translated by Bernard Frechtman, revised edition, Grove Press, 1966, p. 11) In the late 1940s Genet began to write for the theatre, but
several
of his plays were too controversial to be performed in France. His
central theme was the struggle between the authorities and those who
are under their control. The Maids, his first play, made a
significant contribution to the theatre of the absurd. It was based on
a true story of two maids, sisters, who killed their mistress. Deathwatch
(1947) used the prison setting of his earlier works, but later dramas
explore the symbolic landscapes of loneliness and despair. Genet also
abandoned traditional concepts of character, plot and motivation. Genet's autobiography, The Thief's Journal (1949),
depicted
his youth and the "forbidden universe" of opium-rackets, prostitution,
begging, stealing. Due to the controversial nature of the book,
Gallimard published it without the publisher's name. Sartre's long
philosophical preface to Gallimard's Oeuvres
complètes of Genet, Saint
Genet, comédie et martyr
(1952), became a separate work. Already in 1947, when Sartre lectured
at Yale, he expressed his high opinion of the importance of Genet.
Curiously, Sartre came to examine Genet's vocation in much greater
detail than his own, without much experience of thievery and
homosexuality. "In writing out, for his pleasure, the incommunicable dreams of his particularity, Genet has transformed them into exigencies of communication. There was no invocation, no call. Nor was there that aching need for self-expression that writers have invented for the needs of personal publicity. . . . Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by its problems, gradually led him to seek readers." (Saint Genet: Actor and Masrtyr by Jean-Paul Sartre, New American Library , 1971, pp. 481-482) Genet regards thefts as a holy vocation, which he practices with a religious devotion. Situations repeat themselves in his life. The narator in The Thief's Journal is aware that it is because of the choices he makes about how to react, behave, and believe. Representatives of the law and of the criminal world are homosexual icons: "If I wanted my policemen and hoodlums to be handsome, it was in order that their dazzling bodies might avenge the contempt in which you hold them. Hard muscles and harmonious faces were meant to sing and glorify the odious functions of my friends and impose them upon you. Whenever I met a good-looking kid, I would tremble at the thought that he might be high-minded, though I tolerated the idea that a petty, despicable mind might inhabit a puny body." (Ibid., p. 194) The publication of the journal marked the end of Genet's first prolific creative period. "Criminals and the police are the most virile emanation of this world." (The Thief's Journal, p. 194) The Balcony (1957) was set in a brothel. Madame Irma, proprietress of a brothel known as the Grand Balcony, provides the setting and all that is necessary for the acting out of her client's scenarios of wish-fulfillments. The clients play such roles as Bishop, General and Judge. A revolution is going on outside the brothel. The rebels overthrow the figureheads of the old regime. One of Irma's girls, Chantal, becomes a heroine-martyr. Clients who have played Bishop, General and Judge take the place of the former officials. Roger, a defeated revolutionary leader, arrives to enact a scenario in which he is the Chief of Police. False figures remain in office, but another round of revolution starts. The Blacks (1959) was about the world of colonialism, within the framework of a play-within- a-play. The Screens (1961) took place in the midst of the French-Algerian War. After
1966 Genet largely gave up writing and spent his time
lecturing and supporting radical causes. However, although he was a
supporter of the PLO, Genet expressed his dispproval of the "sharks
among the leaders who instead of hijacking aircraft hijacked the
Resistance's funds." (Yasir
Arafat: A Political Biography by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp
Rubin, 2003, p. 233) During the last period of his life, Jean Genet suffered from throat cancer. He was found death on April 15, 1986, at Jack's Hotel, 13th arrondissement of Paris, where he worked on Un captif amoureux (1986, Prisoner of Love). A collection of letters, Lettres au Petit Franz, sent to François Sentein in 1943-45, came out in 2000. They contain glimpses of Parisian life, a depiction of Genet's arrest when he was accused of stealing a rare edition of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes, and thoughts about Jean Decarnin, whom he loved. In his study Saint-Genet: Actor and Martyr (translated by Bernard Frechtman, 1963) Sartre proclaimed Genet to be the prototype of the existentialist man, whose distinction between good and evil is the result of personal choices and decisions. Other writers, like François Mauriac, criticized Genet for being a prisoner of his own world of crime. For further reading: Saint Genet, comédien et martyr by Jean-Paul Sartre (1952); The Imagination of Jean Genet by Joseph H. McMahon (1963); Jean Genet by Tom F. Driver (1966); The Vision of Genet by Richard N. Coe (1968); Jean Genet by Bettina L. Knapp (1968); Jean Genet by Philip Thody (1970); Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet by Lewis T. Cetta (1974); Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. by Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern (1979); Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance by Laura Oswald (1989); Genet: A Biography by Edmund White (1993); Jean Genet by Stephen Barber and Edmund White (2005); Jean Genet: Born To Lose: An Illustrated Critical History by Jeremy Reed (2005); Jean Genet by David Bradby and Clare Finburgh (2011); The Politics of Jean Genet's Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution by Carl Lavery (2013); Dictionnaire Jean Genet, edited by Marie-Claude Hubert (2014); The Crime of Jean Genet by Dominique Eddé (2016); Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History by Kadji Amin (2017); Collectivity in Struggle: Godard, Genet, and the Palestinian Revolt of the 1970s by Shaul Setter (2021); L'obscur objet d'un film: Jean Genet et les images de cinéma by Alexis Lussier (2022); Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject by Joanne Brueton (2022); Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion by James Penney (2023) Selected works:
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