Profile of Jean Genet on Famous Like Me

Jean Genet (1910-1986) 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

Abandoned at birth, Genet was raised 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 was a series of attempts at running away and 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 Mettray. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives fictionalised account of this period of detention which ended when, at 18, he joined the army in order to get away from Mettray. Genet deserted in 1936 and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe, which he later recounted 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 and army desertion. 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). Jean Cocteau met Genet and was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published and when, in 1949, Genet was threatened with a life sentence, Cocteau, joined by such other key figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, got him acquitted. Genet never went back to prison.

Having written prolifically in prison, by 1949 Genet completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems. Genet's explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality was such that by 1951 his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952), which, somewhat paradoxically, 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 essays on Rembrandt. 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 himself.

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 pervasive 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 Beyrouth 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 in Paris. He was buried in the Spanish Cemetery of Tangier, Morocco.

Genet's works

Novels

Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his implied 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, written in honour of famous assassins who had recently been killed. The two auto-fictional novels, The Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief's Journal (1949), describe Genet's time at Mettray youth prison and as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe. Querelle de Brest (1947) is set in the mist of the port-town 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 to his early, provocative writing.

Plays

Associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, 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 men play maids playing 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.

Further Reading

Edmund White, Jean Genet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) - a biography of Genet.

Prisoner of Hate: Jean Genet and Palestine, a review of Edmund White's biography of Genet by Martin Kramer.

Inspired Works

The song The Jean Genie from the album Aladdin Sane by David Bowie is about Genet.

Provided the inspiration for the song "Beautiful Boyz" by the band CocoRosie.

BBC Interview and song performance (requires RealVideo)

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