• Born: Dec 19, 1910
• Died: Apr 14, 1986
• Occupation: Writer, Director
• Active: '60s, '80s
• Major Genres: Drama, Crime
• Career Highlights: Deathwatch, Poison, The Balcony
• First Major Screen Credit: Un Chant d'amour (1950)

Biography

Jean Genet was a controversial author who had many of his books banned for their eroticism and their frankness in dealing with the seamy side of life. Genet knew that world well. His mother abandoned him in infancy and he was raised by peasants. A hell-raiser as a youth, he spent four years in a reform school and after his release lived as a hobo during the '20s and '30s. Several of his books and plays were adapted into films including The Balcony, Mademoiselle, and Querelle. Genet penned and directed one short film Un Chant D'Amour. It too was banned. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Poison Buy this Movie	Querelle Buy this Movie	The Maids Buy this Movie	Mademoiselle Buy this Movie
The Balcony Buy this Movie

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.

For more information on Jean Genet, visit Britannica.com.

Genet, Jean (1910-86). French playwright and novelist. Courting scandal throughout his life, Genet first achieved notoriety as a criminal who, on paper stolen from the prison workshops, secretly wrote texts that combined aesthetic aspirations with largely pornographic content. Discovered by Cocteau, who on the strength of Genet's first poem proclaimed him a literary genius and secured a presidential pardon for him, his reputation was established by his first novels: Notre-Dame-des-fleurs (1944), a prison-cell fantasy woven around celebrated murderers and figures of Parisian low-life, and Miracle de la Rose (1946), evoking the mystical adoration directed by youthful delinquents in Mettray Reformatory towards the murderer awaiting execution in Fontevrault Prison. Another early admirer and friend was Sartre, who wrote the monumental Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1951) which established Genet as an Existentialist hero and helped enshrine the legend of the artist emerging spontaneously from the outcast. Although it is true that Genet was a foundling, never knew his mother nor the identity of his father, and spent his youth in state institutions or wandering Europe in more or less abject poverty, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that his literary bent pre-dated his prison career. That he provocatively cultivated his criminal image is evident in Journal du voleur (1948); in his other novels, Querelle de Brest and Pompes funèbres (1947), the narratorial voice delights in challenging the bemused reader to distinguish between reactions of scandal and complicity.

Being canonized and comprehensively explained by Sartre proved a deeply unsettling experience, and for a while Genet was haunted by the prospect of literary sterility. None the less, he re-emerged in the mid-1950s as a powerful and innovative dramatist. He has written Haute surveillance and Les Bonnes in the late 1940s, but the relatively conventional productions these had received tended to restrict their impact to that of their author's notoriety. Le Balcon (1956) depicts a brothel whose clients, accustomed to fantasizing in roles such as Judge, General, and Bishop, are called upon to stand in for these figures of authority when a revolution threatens to overturn the ruling regime outside. The script inevitably provoked new scandal, with the result that it was two years before a production in French could be mounted. The theatrical ambition was far-reaching, amounting to an assault on stage conventions of a kind envisaged by Artaud. Genet himself expressed outrage at the inadequacy of the first production, in English, which this play received.

Of the plays that followed, Les Nègres (1958) articulated the psychology of racial hatred in uncompromising terms. Roger Blin staged a French production in 1959 which won the author's whole-hearted approval, and The Blacks ran for three years in the United States in a 1961 production which coincided with and contributed significantly to the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Les Paravents (1961), set in Algeria and not staged in France until four years after the end of the Algerian War, succeeded even at this remove in causing outrage through its vigorous enactment of colonial conflict. While his depiction of power relations has a visceral, emotional impact, the dramatic method Genet explores involves a high degree of theatrical selfconsciousness, in which magnificent ritualized spectacle plays tantalizingly with the distinction between illusion and reality. These texts draw on the richest theatrical traditions to produce effects which are profoundly original and challenging.

Apart from essays on Rembrandt and Giacometti and other fragments, Genet virtually ceased literary publication after 1961, devoting himself instead to the support of political and social groups with which he could identify. It seems likely that he sought in this way to re-establish with society the relationship of hostility and exclusion to which he had become accustomed, and which he feared losing on becoming a successful artist. He witnessed the student uprising of May 1968 in Paris, and went on to seek more convincing militancy in the American Civil Rights movement and among the Black Panthers. Subsequently he wrote a preface to the prison letters of Black activist George Jackson, and created a furore in 1977 with an article supporting the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He also developed a long-standing allegiance to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, his relations with which figure prominently in Un captif amoureux (1986), a prose work he completed shortly before his death.

[David Walker]

Bibliography

• R. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (1968)
• J.-B. Moraly, Jean Genet, la vie écrite (1988)
• E. White, Genet (1993)

(zhäN zhənā') , 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).

Quotes:

"We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent -- or they themselves -- was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible."

"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile."

"Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity."

"The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them."

"Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

"Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun."

See more famous quotes by Jean Genet

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