Jean Genet

From MarxWiki

“For Genet, theatrical procedure is demoniacal. Appearance, which is constantly on the point of passing itself off as reality, must constantly reveal its profound unreality. Everything must be so false that it sets our teeth on edge. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre. In these patient fakings, appearance is revealed at the same time as pure nothingness and as cause of itself ... Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of the Good. Thus, Genet's Beauty will be glaringly false: it is a fictive creation and a false destruction.” – Jean Paul Sartre on Jean Genet (online available: http://www.3to6.com/final_theatre/legend-genet.htm)

The life and work of French novelist, playwright, and poet Jean Genet is called upon by Dick Hebdige in his book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, as a “metaphor and model” for the use of style in subculture to refute the dominant ideology. Writing the signs in a way that inscribed his Otherness, his Exile by the state, “he more than most has explored in both his life and his art the subversive implications of art…Genet is a subculture unto himself” (137).

Born in Paris on December 10, 1910 to a Parisian prostitute, Genet was abandoned by both of his parents and spent his childhood as a burden of the state in homes for juvenile delinquents. When he was only ten, he was accused of stealing – although the charges were false he decided to assume the role into which society had hailed him and become a thief. He writes, “I decisively repudiated a world that had repudiated me.”

At age 23, a lice-ridden Genet was begging a living in Spain, sleeping with a one-armed pimp. This experience became the inspiration for “The Thief’s Journal,” the work that Hebdige references in the beginning of his own book. Genet spent the 1930’s traveling first with the French Legion in Syria and then through Europe. Arriving in Nazi Germany he was dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities to break the moral code: “I had a feeling of being in a camp of organized bandits. This is a nation of thieves, I felt. If I steal here, I accomplish no special act that could help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of things. I do not destroy it.” His words are especially revealing in understanding the motivation behind Genet’s lifestyle; he appears to define through “criminal” acts in the popular eye, through publicly defying the regulated legal and moral system. According to Hebdige, Genet was also a homosexual; making a spectacle of his sexuality was certainly a flagrant attack on the status quo.

Imprisoned for theft, Genet wrote his first manuscript at the age of 32 in a prison cell. Although the document was discovered by the prison guards and destroyed, Genet rewrote it from memory and managed to get it smuggled out of his cell. It found its way to Jean Paul Sartre and Cocteau who garnered the support of other French intellectuals to lobby the government in Genet’s behalf.

After writing five novels largely informed by his prison experiences before retreating for a time into silence, Genet became a playwright in the late 1940’s. Not surprisingly, he abandons traditional plot lines and story formats for heavily psychological, ritual stories of transformation, illusion, and interchangeable identities. His plays are filled with prostitutes, homosexuals, thiefs, and outcasts who, haunted by their own distorted reflections at every turn, “are trapped in self-destructive circles.” Deathwatch is the story of three inmates who compete for power in the cell while a fourth watches from the side. In The Maids, Genet depicts two female maids in a role play, taking turns being the “Madame” and the maid. In examining the power structure at play, he illustrates the contempt the maids hold for the authority that oppresses them as well as their own complicity in the system. Set in a luxurious brothel, The Balcony juxtaposes the illicit fantasies of men and a revolution rocking the country outside of the brothel walls. In The Blacks, a group of colored actors perform a re-enactment of the murder of a white of which they have been accused in front of a jury of black men with white masks. The Screens, the last of Genet’s plays to be produced while he was still living, is his statement on the Algerian Revolution. “These plays are grotesque…they exude a strange ritualistic, incantatory quality that successfully transforms life into a series of ceremonies and rituals that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable existence.”

Genet was also sympathetic with other marginalized groups around the world. He supported the Black Panthers in the USA and the Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon, even publishing his final book about the time spent with these two group. Now buried in Morocco, he died on April 15, 1986 in a hotel room in the same area where he had been first abandoned by his parents as an infant. Genet also wrote film scripts and produced a silent film.

Hebdige ultimately embraces Genet as the author closest to his own object of study: subculture. He draws out three major themes in Genet’s work that compliment his work: “the status and meaning of revolt,” “the idea of style as a form of Refusal,” and “the elevation of crime into art.” Given the ways that Genet appropriates and transforms the most mundane objects, disrupting and questioning the process of meaning making, using them as “a form of stigmata…tokens of a self-imposed exile,” the emphasis is placed on the parallel focus between the deformity, transformation, and Refusal in Genet’s life and work and Hebdige’s study of subcultural style.

WORKS CITED: Manisha Vardhan. `Jean Genet: The Sham is the Thing.` [1]