Genet, Jean

born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France

died April 15, 1986, Paris

French novelist and dramatist.

An illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Genet began to write while imprisoned for burglary. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), portrays an underworld of thugs, pimps, and hustlers. Miracle of the Rose (1945–46) is based on his adolescence at a notorious reform school, and The Thief's Journal (1949) recounts his life as a tramp, pickpocket, and prostitute. He became a leading figure in avant-garde theatre with such plays as The Maids (1947), The Balcony (1956), and The Blacks (1958), stylized Expressionist dramas designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing its hypocrisy and complicity in an exploitative social order. Admired by the existentialists, he was the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre's huge and adulatory biography Saint Genet (1952).

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▪ French writer

born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France

died April 15, 1986, Paris

 French criminal and social outcast turned writer who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and often obscene subject matter into a poetic vision of the universe and, as a dramatist, became a leading figure in the avant-garde theatre, especially the Theatre of the Absurd (Absurd, Theatre of the).

      Genet, an illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Gabrielle Genet, was raised by a family of peasants. Caught stealing at the age of 10, he spent part of his adolescence at a notorious reform school, Mettray, where he experienced much that was later described in the novel Miracle de la rose (1945–46; Miracle of the Rose). His autobiographical Journal du voleur (1949; The Thief's Journal) gives a complete and uninhibited account of his life as a tramp, pickpocket, and male prostitute in Barcelona, Antwerp, and various other cities (c. 1930–39). It also reveals him as an aesthete, an existentialist, and a pioneer of the Absurd.

      He began to write in 1942 while imprisoned for theft at Fresnes and produced an outstanding novel, Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1943; Our Lady of the Flowers), vividly portraying the prewar Montmartre underworld of thugs, pimps, and perverts. His talent was brought to the attention of Jean Cocteau and later Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Because Genet in 1948 was convicted of theft for the 10th time and would have faced automatic life imprisonment if convicted again, a delegation of well-known writers appealed on his behalf to the president of the French republic, and he was “pardoned in advance.”

      After writing two other novels, Pompes funèbres (1947; Funeral Rites) and Querelle de Brest (1947; Querelle of Brest, filmed 1982), Genet began to experiment with drama. His early attempts, by their compact, neoclassical, one-act structure, reveal the strong influence of Sartre. Haute Surveillance (1949; Deathwatch) continues his prison-world themes. Les Bonnes (1947; The Maids), however, begins to explore the complex problems of identity that were soon to preoccupy other avant-garde dramatists such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. With this play Genet was established as an outstanding figure in the Theatre of the Absurd.

      His subsequent plays, Le Balcon (1956; The Balcony), Les Nègres (1958; The Blacks), and Les Paravents (1961; The Screens), are large-scale, stylized dramas in the Expressionist manner, designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing its hypocrisy and complicity. This “Theatre of Hatred” attempts to wrest the maximum dramatic power from a social or political situation without necessarily endorsing the political platitudes of either the right or the left.

      Genet, a rebel and an anarchist of the most extreme sort, rejected almost all forms of social discipline or political commitment. The violent and often degraded eroticism of his experience led him to a concept of mystic humiliation.

Additional Reading

Biographies in English include Harry E. Stewart and Rob Roy McGregor, Jean Genet (1989); and Edmund White, Genet (1993). Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1963, reissued 1988; originally published in French, 1952), compares Genet's evident pursuit of mortification and self-abasement to that of a saint. Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern (eds.), Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (1979), examines his novels and plays.

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