Review: Jean Genet in the Looking Glass

Reviewed Work(s): The Vision of Jean Genet by Richard N. Coe; Jean Genet by Bettina L.
Knapp; Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays by Philip Thody
Review by: John Killinger
Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1970), pp. 141-145
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3830978
Accessed: 10-07-2023 06:08 +00:00

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ESSAY-REVIEWS 141

JOHN KILLINGER
VANDERBILT DIVINITY SCHOOL, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

JEAN GENET IN THE LOOKING GLASS

-Richard N. Coe. The Vision of Jean Genet. Grove Press, 1968. 344
pp. $7.50.
-Bettina L. Knapp. Jean Genet. Twayne's World Author Series, No. 44.
New York, 1968. $4.95.
-Philip Thody. Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays. Stein and
Day, 1969. 262 pp. $6.95.

There is a mesmerism in depths, and this minor profusion of full-length studies of a

living author suggests to the merely casual reader of Jean Genet that there are indeed
depths and then depths in that illusory poet and worshiper of evil.
Normally a man is not feted thus until after he is dead-or has ceased to add anything
significant to the corpus of his writings. In this case, it may be for the latter reason. As
Philip Thody notes in his book, something happened to Genet's power of poiesis after
the appearance of Sartre's amazing Saint-Genet Comedien et Martyr: its psychoanalysis
of the foundling-turned-thief-and-rebel-against-society was so accurate and devastating
that it almost totally disarmed the mechanism of rebellion which had enabled the
criminogenic author to write. Genet himself commented in a Playboy interview that
Sartre had succeeded in stripping him naked. It is true of course that three fascinating
plays, Le Balcon (The Balcony), Les Negres (The Blacks), and Les Paravents (The
Screens), appeared after Saint-Genet. But it is also true (the observation is Coe's) that
Le Balcon marked Genet's turning from the theatrical model of Sartre's No Exit, with its
adherence to classical rules, to that of Brecht, with its episodic character and use of
Verfremdungseffekte. And it has been nearly a decade since Les Paravents opened in the
Schlosspark Theatre in Berlin. Since then there have been only occasional notes, letters,
and articles, such as the famous Esquire piece about Chicago in which the famous
homosexual expressed frank admiration for the taut thighs of one of Mayor Daley's
policemen.
Who then was the Genet Sartre captured so difinitively in his massive treatise? What
were the facets of his genius that have attracted the various examinations of these recent
critics? He was indeed a self-confessed thief, sodomist, pederast, glorifier of evil and
degradation-a poete maudit with a vengeance! His writings were self-admittedly
pornographic. What was there about him and his vision that commanded the interest of
Satre and Beauvoir and Cocteau, and now elicits a spate of commentaries on his work?
In a stunningly brilliant introduction, Richard Coe suggests that it is the mirror which
is the symbol of Genet's entire world-"a world in which there is no certain or tangible
reality, but only appearances and voids." The suggestion is not itself an original one;
Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, had cited from The Thief's Journal the
passage about Genet's friend Stilitano who had once been trapped in the Hall of Mirrors
at a fun-fair in Antwerp, and used it to polarize the welter of images and ideas in Genet's
theater. But Coe probes the psycho-philosophical meaning of the symbol and puts to-

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142 JOHN KILLINGER

gether, beyond the shimmering surfaces of Genet's appearance, a lucid and convincing
interpretation of his manner of thinking, connecting it at the same time with Sartre's
understanding of the basic structure of human consciousness as "un reflet-refletant."
His conclusion, argued with precision and subtleties like reverberations in a crystal
goblet: "Genet not merely illustrates the Sartreian thesis in a series of brilliant images,
but in fact takes the argument into regions where Satre, too precisely trained in the
rigorous exactitudes of philosophic dialectic, dare not venture." Everything, for Genet,
has its reverse side, and nothing is anything without the other side. Anything taken in
itself is false. Therefor only falsehoods can supply the truth. "Pour etre vrai," as
Cocteau said, "il faut mentir." Genet is not Genet without the void that threatens him-
therefore he humiliates himself. The world is not the world without its alter-ego through
the looking-glass. God is not even God without all that is not-God-and can therefore be
celebrated in the names of the criminals and perverts of Our Lady of the Flowers (Di-
vine, First Communion, Gabriel, Notre-Dame, etc.) or the Black Mass of Les Bonnes
(The Maids). And because le neant, or nothingness, is as important as I'etre, or being,
acting is as vital to human existence as its counterpart sincerity. This was where Genet
went beyond Sartre, and it explains the ritualistic quality about all of his writings, even
the nontheatrical works-man is what he acts as much as he is what he really is. "You
must now go home," says Mme. Irma to the audience at the end of Le Balcon, "where
everything-you can be quite sure-will be even falser than here." Genet, then, as the
very paradigm of existentialist schizophrenia, embodied not only the mystic heart of
Sartreian philosophy but the entire preoccupation with the dialectics of negation and
illusion from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Pirandello and Camus and the absurdists.
Coe, who earlier provided us with extremely helpful studies of Beckett and lonesco
(his analysis of Beckett's plays in the light of Zeno's Analogy of the Millet-Heap is for me
the single most illuminating perspective in all the criticism of Beckett), and who is
therefore obviously well acquainted with the Theatre of the Absurd, points to Genet's
use of ritual, his veritable obsession with ritual, as one thing essentially distinguishing
him from the absurdist phenomenon, where Esslin had placed him. The vision of life as
ritualistic tragedy redeems existence from absurdity. In an arena where life is half-
acting and acting is half-life, the rite or the act imparts location and specificity in the
midst of illusion and mystery.
Bettina Knapp's volume, which is briefer and less weighted with Sartreian metaphysics
than Coe's, adds another and important dimension to the discussion by pursuing the
mythical and tribal backgrounds of rite and symbol in Genet's works. Her aptness for
metaphor and lilting phraseology, coupled with her female instinct for detail, has led
her to many valuable associations with classical legend and symbolism, particularly
with regard to flowers, children, and tragic love affairs. She is especially struck by the
fact that many European prisons, including Fontevrault, where Genet was incarcerated
and had the experience he later chronicled in The Miracle of the Rose, were actually
medieval abbeys converted to darker uses, and she moves feelingly through the cen-
turies with Genet, as in a dream, co-equating the rituals of monks and prisoners, abbots
and inmates. Basically, however, her book is intended as an introduction to Genet, and
does not accumulate gravity in the manner of Coe's, or even Thody's. Many of her in-
sights are not amplified as fully as they might be. There are moments when she reasons
closely, observes minutely, flashes the brilliance of her facile mind, and gives promise
of vast richness; but then she generally aborts and pulls back, as if suddenly reminded

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ON JEAN GENET 143

that the book is to be a mere introduction, not a full poem, not an orchestral masterpiece
like Sartre's Saint-Genet. The book will be useful for students. It would be interesting to
see it expanded and developed, with all the stops pulled out. But the musical image re-
minds me of Aaron Copland's observation in Music and Imagination that there have
been no great woman composers because women seem not to be capable of sustaining
their inventions beyond the stage of the three-minute composition. Perhaps the female
competes in color and movement and detail, and not in terms of overall force and mag-
nitude. These virtues are certainly there in Mrs. Knapp's study at any rate, and add a
vital dimension to our appreciation for Genet-the-child-of-the-ages.
Of the three volumes presently being considered, Mr. Thody's is the most sober and
the least adventurous. It is a carefully argued, closely developed textual study, and
marks, in my mind, a real advance in scholarship and critical maturity over the author's
earlier book on Camus. Thody works with the patience and methodical persistence of a
puzzle-solver, juxtaposing texts, examining them from various perspectives, and ad-
vancing only cautiously over the solid foundations he himself has laid. If his results are
less flamboyant than those of either Mr. Coe or Mrs. Knapp, they are perhaps surer and
more consistently dependable, as they involve less speculation and funambulism.
Characteristic of the kind of insights which he brings to our growing critical knowledge
of Genet is his reminder of the importance of reading Genet in French in order to retain
the real subtleties of his thought; for one thing, many of the vulgarities in his characters'
speech are rather common among the more-or-less uninhibited French, and do not
come across in the original with the same force of shock and crudeness they carry in
translation. I recall having heard a friend who worked in the American Embassy in Paris
say that Bernard Frechtman, who did most of the Genet translations, would rather fre-
quently approach Americans who had just transferred in from stateside to inquire what
the current slang was for this or that French expression in a novel or play. Mr. Thody
makes the effect of this process very clear: Genet is actually coarsened by translation,
and what appears merely vile to the Anglo-American reader may in the French have
been beautifully vile.
Mr. thody also dwells at some length on the political nature of Genet's plays, espe-
cially The Maids, which is less obviously socio-political than The Balcony, The Blacks,
and The Screens. He notes that most productions of the plays have concentrated on the
audacity of individual aberrations, which are more easily conveyed in drama, and have
generally ignored or underplayed the socio-political audacities. Mr. Coe does observe
the very astute political theory which is foundational to most of Genet's plays, especially
in their Brechtian theatre-engage aspect, but tends to dismiss it more readily than Thody
as merely another structure of the evil man lives with in the world, or as a means of
Genet's going beyond Artaud's notion of a Theatre of Cruelty and actualizing on the
stage his own version of a Theatre of Hatred.
All three critics acknowledge the continuity between Artaud's conception of the the-
atre as a whirlwind of higher forces, calculated to invade the audience and rape its
sensibilities, and the achievement of Genet, which fulfills and even exceeds the earlier
Frenchman's dream. Mrs. Knapp sees Artaudian principles at work as early as the novel
Pompes funebres (Funeral Rites), whose clashing myths and histories shatter the reader
en passant and result, finally, in the broadening or depolarizing of his previous points of
view. More might be made of this relationship, I think, as there was a true kinship of
understanding and method between the two writers, and the psychology of Artaud offers

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144 JOHN KILLINGER

one fruitful approach to the interpretation not only of Genet's dramatic method but of
his theory of opposites and illusion as well. There is in both men a sensitivity to the
mystery around us, to "the powers of the air," to that numen or sacral power which in-
vests our drabbest rituals with meaning sufficient to scare the living daylights out of us,
were we but aware of it-a sensitivity keen enough to rebuild the contemporary theatre
on, if not all the contemporary arts, which may indeed be what is happening in ourtime.
Mr. Coe also temptingly refers to Genet's indebtedness to Dostoevsky, particularly to
the Dostoevsky of Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. This again I
suspect of being an avenue to the meaning of Genet capable of considerably more ex-
ploitation than it receives, for if Genet found in Dostoevsky a preoccupation with the
pathology of crime, he also found there one of the keenest modern sensitivities, along
with his own, to the double nature of both sainthood and the demonic. If Dostoevsky
was planning, as some critics have opined, to make the saintly Alyosha of The Brothers
Karamazov into "the great sinner" of a projected novel, then there was a precedent,
albeit an obverse one, for Genet's own attempt to achieve sainthood through evil and
degradation.
Whether Genet is a saint or not, even ironically, it is impossible to discuss him apart
from ritual and religion. His thought is so integrally related to the Christian faith, either
as analogue or as opposition, as to derive its main strength there, and to threaten, if con-
fronted with uprooting, the demolition of that faith itself. None of the authors of these
critical volumes hesitates to recognize the basically theological nature of the Genetian
novel or play, and to discuss it straightforwardly in fideistic terms. That is to be hailed as
an accomplishment in the art of criticism, I judge, for, strangely enough, the effect of
Western Christianity upon the artistic consciousness has been one of the last great areas
to be annexed to the new criticism. Genet may have played a not inconsiderable part in
the freeing of theology for its significant participation in the critical dialogue so im-
mediately before us.
In one sense or another, every man wants to be saved. With some the desire becomes
superficial. They manage to abstract the idea into religious terms, to "deal" in salvation,
and thus to avert the real problem deep within them. Others, unable to avert the issue,
are condemned to face it all their lives. The artist belongs to the latter group. Always try-
ing to discover himself through his work (for that is his real quest), he is basically the
man obsessed with salvation; much more so, actually, than the man who can conceptu-
alize salvation in purely religious terms.
Genet represents a peculiar combination of the religious and nonreligious in the quest
for redemption: religious in the sense that he employs symbols and rituals from tradi-
tional faith as vehicles of act and communication; nonreligious in that he does not
accept those symbols and rites in the traditional way, but inverts and transmutes them
into artistic materials which are in turn used in poetic and highly original ways. Philo-
sophically, at least, he is an artist in the very highest sense, for he risks everything on the
world he creates, or on his own particular vision of the world we all inhabit. For an age
that has lost its taste for the stale and bloodless theologies of the more recent past, he
will doubtless serve as one of the more important models for the reconstitution of a
belief that matters and matters entirely.
The contributions of Professors Coe, Knapp, and Thody are notable, especially the
first two, for their lack of reluctance to deal with Genet's writings on a metaphysical
level, where the act of composition is redemption-in-process and what is required in a

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ON JEAN GENET 145

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