Jean Genet

Dubbed "the Black Prince of letters," by his discoverer, Jean Cocteau, the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet (1910-1986) was obsessed with the illusory, perverse, and grotesque elements of human experience. His works present the world of the isolated and despairing outcast.

According to his own version of events, Jean Genet was born on Dec. 19, 1910, to a Parisian prostitute, who soon abandoned him. Placed in a foster home, Jean was raised in the Morvau region by a farming family. At the age of 10 he began pilfering articles from his benefactors and their neighbors, perhaps to arouse the parental concern he knew to be absent in his life. His ploy failed and, according to Jean Paul Sartre, his resolution to remain a thief constituted a significant existential act: "Thus I decisively repudiated a world that had repudiated me."

At the age of 16 Genet was sent to the Mettray Reformatory, where the impressionable boy cultivated an admiration for evil and a taste for homosexuality. Escaping from his confinement after five years, Genet contracted for an extended enlistment in the Foreign Legion, collected his bonus and a few days later deserted. During the next decade Genet wandered across Europe, immersing himself in the underworld and surviving as a beggar, thief, narcotics smuggler, forger, and male prostitute. Arrested several times, Genet spent most of World War II in prison, where he began to write.

Genet, however, often lied about his past, and Edmund White took about the task of dispelling many of the clouds surrounding Genet and propagated by Sartre. As even Sartre himself acknowledged, Genet practiced certain economies when it came to self-revelatory truth so White relentlessly seeks out corroboration. Many of the documents, it turns out, refuse to corroborate. White first shows how thoroughly Genet's own version of his childhood—drawn in sharp lines of poverty and abuse—was a myth, an affectation given credibility by Sartre. Born in Paris in 1910, Genet had been abandoned by his unwed mother and made a ward of the state. But the carpenter's family that was entrusted with his care gave Genet ample attention and affection. Raised in a farming village, he was not made to work, prospered in school, had plenty of books, and scored high on examinations. Contrary to his later claim, he did not have to steal to survive. ("You couldn't call them thefts," recalls one classmate. "He took some pennies from his mother to buy sweets, all kids do that.")

The effect of White's first chapters is to suggest Genet largely fabricated a grim childhood to fit his chosen persona as a renegade. Precocious and rebellious, the dandified Genet refused, as he put it, "to become an accountant or a petty official." And so he escaped from every apprenticeship, opting to become a petty thief. This eventually landed him in the notorious reform penitentiary at Mettray, a society of male outcasts governed by a counter-code of homosexuality, theft, and betrayal which Genet would later celebrate.

Concentrating on the ambiguity of morality in a society characterized by repression and hypocrisy, his novels and plays portray the individual trapped in a state of enforced dissolution. Our Lady of the Flowers, composed under almost impossible conditions in Fresnes prison, was published in Lyons in 1943. The novel, peopled by pimps and prostitutes, depicts the author's erotic world of homosexuality, masturbation, bizarre fantasies, and violent murder. Marked by nonconformity and exoticism, the work uses a lyrical delicacy of language to describe an incredibly sordid milieu.

The Miracle of the Rose (1943), written in Santé prison, is an autobiographical narrative in which Genet proclaims a cult of the criminal, praising both crime itself and the perpetrators of it. The religious imagery of the earlier work is intensified, and the ceremony of prison life is closely identified with the satisfactions derived from religious rites. Funeral Rites (1945) and Quarrel of Brest (1946) continue these themes.

Genet's works composed in prison, to which he had been sentenced for life, attracted critical acclaim; such literary notables as Sartre and Jean Cocteau successfully petitioned for his pardon, and he was released in 1948. TheThief's Journal (1949), recounting Genet's adventures in the European underworld of the 1930s, was proclaimed by Sartre to be the author's finest work in both form and substance.

In his drama The Maids (1948) Genet explores the sequence of masks, roles, and conditions assumed by two maids to maintain their constantly shifting identities. Moral values are reversed throughout, with evil achieving a reverence traditionally assigned to goodness. Death-watch (1949) describes the sadomasochistic relationship of three prisoners, ending in nightmarish death. Genet's ritualistic theater continued to explore the deceptive relationship between illusion and reality in The Balcony (1957), The Blacks (1959), and The Screens (1961).

His heart leaned from his "'religious nature" as he confessed in his autobiographical Thief's Journal (1949, English 1965). "I am alone in the world, and I am not sure but that I may not be the king …"

On September 19, 1982, Genet visited the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila near Beirut. Two nights earlier, Israel had permitted its Lebanese allies to enter the surrounded camp, and they had massacred its Palestinian inhabitants. A walk through Shatila, wrote Genet, "resembled a game of hopscotch …. A photograph doesn't show how you must jump over the bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next.

The "thick white smell of death" in Shatila inspired Genet to one self-invention. He would be reborn as a witness for the Palestinians. Prisoner of Love, his book-length memoir of the Palestinian fedayeen, appeared a month after his death in 1986. This was the first new writing Genet had produced in years, and it rekindled an interest in his life and work.

Genet's work, while involved with social issues, rejects any form of political commitment. His confrontation with the world has both deeply stirred and repulsed his readers and audiences. Composed outside literary tradition in terms of plot, characterization, and thematic implications, his personal projections possess a psychological truth fused with dramatic imagery.

According to White, Genet, rather than embodying some collective disorder of his time, acted largely upon his own disorder. But his death was as bland as his life was colorful. His obituary, after listing his many credits, simply states, "died in Paris".

Further Reading

Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet (1952; trans. 1963), is an exceptionally revealing analysis of the man and his art. Other full-length studies in English include Bettina Knapp, Jean Genet (1956); Tom F. Driver, Jean Genet (1966); Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (1968); and Philip Thody, Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays (1969). Focusing on the author's plays are critical sections in Wallace Fowlie, Dionysus in Paris (1960); Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961); David I. Grossvogel, Four Playwrights and a Postscript (1962); and Lionel Abel, Metatheater (1963). A good resource for his life's work can be found in: Genet: A Biography. Knopf, 728 pp., $35.00. Edmund White as cited by Marin Kramer. Many of his life's accomplishments can be found in Current Biography (1974). His obituary ran in the New York Times, April 16, 1986. □

Genet, Jean (1910–86), French dramatist and poet, whose view of theatre as an act of revolt against society was conditioned by an early life spent largely in correctional institutions and prisons. His plays are now generally recognized as important not only for their extreme beauty of language but also for their creation of a disciplined, realistic form akin to that of the Theatre of Cruelty advocated by Artaud. His first play Les Bonnes, directed by Jouvet in 1947, introduced his conception of a play as ceremony and masquerade. Under the mask the characters act out their dreams and secret desires, thus demonstrating the nullity of what is usually termed ‘reality’. The ceremony, or ritual, imposed on the masquerade is designed, on the analogy of the Catholic mass, to unite the spectators in a metaphysical experience beyond normal conceptions of good and evil. This conception was developed and strengthened in Haute surveillance (1949); Le Balcon (1956), a sexual-political ceremony in which a brothel becomes the focus for a revolution; and Les Nègres (1959; NY and London, as The Blacks, 1961). Les Paravents, first performed in Berlin in 1961, deals obliquely yet perceptively with the Algerian struggle for independence; it had a stormy reception at the Odéon in 1966. As The Screens it was given an abbreviated workshop production by Peter Brook in 1964. Les Bonnes, as The Maids, was seen in New York in 1955 and in London in 1956; Haute surveillance, as Deathwatch, appeared in New York in 1958 and in London in 1961; Le Balcon was produced as The Balcony in London in 1957, but not seen in France until 1960, when it was also seen in New York.

Jean Genet , 1910-86, French dramatist. Deserted by his parents as an infant, Genet spent much of his early life in reformatories and prisons. Between 1940 and 1948 he wrote several autobiographical prose narratives dealing with homosexuality and crime, including Our Lady of the Flowers (tr. 1949, repr. 1963) and The Thief's Journal (tr. 1964). In 1948 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for theft, but he was pardoned through the efforts of important French writers, including Gide, Sartre, and Cocteau. Genet's first two plays, Les Bonnes (1947; tr. The Maids, 1954) and Haute Surveillance (1949; tr. Deathwatch, 1954), established him as a dramatist concerned with theater as ritual and ceremony. Considered classic examples of the theater of the absurd, his dramas portray a world of outcasts in revolt against everything that renders humans helpless, subservient, and alone. His later plays include The Balcony (tr. 1958), in which the patrons of a brothel act out their fantasies as a revolution progresses in the streets, and The Blacks (tr. 1960), a "clown show" in which black actors play the roles of their white oppressors. Other works include the play The Screens (tr. 1962) and Querelle (tr. 1974).

Bibliography: See his Reflections on the Theatre (tr. 1972); J.-P. Sartre, Saint Genet (1952, tr. 1963); biography by E. White, Genet (1993); and studies by R. N. Coe (1970), B. Knapp (1968, rev. ed. 1989), and H. Stewart (1989).

Genet, Jean (1910–86) French dramatist and novelist. His experiences as a homosexual in reform schools, brothels and prisons are recounted in Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), Miracle of the Rose (1946), and The Robber's Journal (1949). A leading exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd, Genet used violent eroticism and bizarre illusion in plays such as The Maids (1947) and The Balcony (1957).