Jean Genet

Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986), was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Maids.

Life

Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family, who, according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away, and incidents of petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal, impoverished childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image).

In any event, he was eventually detained at the youth prison of Mettray. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives a fictionalised account of this period of detention which ended when, at 18, he joined the army. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act), and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe, a time he later gave fictionalized treatment in The Thief's Journal (1949). After returning to Paris in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts, and other offenses. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort," which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). In Paris Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published and when, in 1949, after ten convictions, Genet was threatened with a life sentence, Cocteau, joined by other key figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never again return to prison.

By 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s, his work was banned in the United States.Edward de Grazia, An Interview with Jean Genet. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 307-324. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952) which, somewhat anomalously, was published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the following five years. Between 1955 and 1961, however, Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet", on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work "Glas". During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression and even attempted suicide.

From the late 1960s, and starting with a homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became more politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA where he stayed for three months, giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy novel about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, which would be published after his death. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persistent since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. In September 1982 Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" (Four Hours in Chatila), an eye-witness account of his visit to Shatila after the massacres.

Genet developed throat cancer and died on April 15, 1986 alone in a hotel room in Paris. He was buried in the Spanish Cemetery near Larache, Morocco.

Genet's works

Novels

Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his assumed readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizing his own singularity as he raises violent criminals to icons, enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding, and depicts scenes of betrayal.

The first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), is a journey through the prison underworld, featuring a fictionalized alter-ego by the name of Divine, usually referred to in the feminine, at the center of a circle of tantes ("aunties" or "queens") with colorful sobriquets such as Our Lady of the Flowers, Mimosa I, Mimosa II, and First Communion. The two auto-fictional novels, The Miracle of the Rose (1946) and A Thief's Journal (1949), describe Genet's time at Mettray Reformatory, and his experiences as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe. Querelle de Brest (1947) is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder; and Funeral Rites (1949) is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, written this time for the narrator's lover, Jean Decarnin, killed by the Germans in WWII.

A Prisoner of Love published in (1986), after Genet's death, is written in an entirely different tone than that of his earlier, more provocative fiction.

Plays

Associated with the Theatre of Cruelty, Genet's plays present highly stylised depictions of ritual struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors. Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering, as maids play each other or their mistress in The Maids (1949), or leading figures in society play out the role of victims in a brothel, surrounded by mirrors which both reflect and conceal in The Balcony (1956). Most strikingly, Genet takes further what Aimée Césaire called negritude, in The Blacks (1958), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence. His most ambitious play is The Screens (1963), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

Film

Genet directed Un Chant d'Amour in 1950, a 26-minute black-and-white film depicting the fantasies of a gay male prisoner and his prison warden.

Genet's work has also been adapted for film and produced by other filmmakers. Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Querelle, a 1982 film based on Querelle de Brest. (Genet himself never saw this film because he would not have been allowed to smoke in a movie theatre.) Todd Haynes' 1991 movie Poison was also based on the writings of Genet.

Bibliography

Novels and Autobiography

Theatre

Haute surveillance (1947) - not published until 1949
Les Bonnes (1947)
Le Balcon (1956)
Les Nègres (1959)
Les Paravents (1961)
Le Bagne (1994), édition posthume

Poetry

Le Condamné à mort (1942)

Complete works

Jean Genet, Œuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952-)

Volume 1: Saint Genêt: comédien et martyr (by J.-P. Sartre)
Volume 2: Notre-Dame des fleurs - Le condamné à mort - Miracle de la rose - Un chant d’amour
Volume 3: Pompes funèbres - Le pêcheur du Suquet - Querelle de Brest
Volume 4: L’étrange mot d’ ... - Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés - Le balcon - Les bonnes - Haute surveillance -Lettres à Roger Blin - Comment jouer ’Les bonnes’ - Comment jouer ’Le balcon’
Volume 5: Le funambule - Le secret de Rembrandt - L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti - Les nègres - Les paravents - L’enfant criminel
Volume 6: L’ennemi déclaré: textes et entretiens

Inspired works

The album Elegy by composer John Zorn is a musical tribute to Genet, released by Tzadik Records in 1991.
The song "The Actor's Opprobrium" by the indie rock band Of Montreal references Genet.
The title of the song "Jean Genie" from the album Aladdin Sane by David Bowie is a pun on Genet's name.
Genet provided the inspiration for the song "Beautiful Boyz" by the band CocoRosie; BBC Interview and song performance (requires RealVideo).
Hell's Ditch by The Pogues contains references to Genet and Our Lady of the Flowers.
The French cabaret singer Serge Gainsbourg wrote a number of songs in the late '60s adopting Genet's persona, celebrating the (very French) romance with the lives of doomed desperadoes; some of these have been reissued on the CD Comic Strip.
The song 'Les Boys' by Dire Straits references Genet
The eponymously titled queer disco band Jean Genet from Leeds, UK.

References

External links

Genet, Jean (1910–1986) From glbtq: Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture
Prisoner of Hate: Jean Genet and Palestine A review of Edmund White's biography of Genet by Martin Kramer
The Ontological Priority of Violence: On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet's Work By William Haver

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