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Culture, history,
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JEAN GENET - French Dramatist
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The French writer
Jean Genet {zhuh-nay'}, b. Dec. 19, 1910, d. Apr. 15, 1986, was a
novelist and exponent of the theater of the absurd. Discovered and
championed by the existentialist
Jean Paul
Sartre, Genet was an orphan, thief, and homosexual who had
spent most of his youth in prison. There he developed his personal
credo: to harden himself against pain. Reversing the Christian
mystic's ascent toward a state of holiness, 
Genet in the 1930s embarked on a
satanic pilgrimage with the goal of reaching the lowest possible
state of evil. The Thief's Journal (1949; Eng. trans., 1964)
is his record of this journey, in which no aspect of suffering,
sordidness, and degradation was spared him. While still in prison,
Genet wrote his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1943 and
1951; Eng. trans., 1963), a transposition and sublimation of the
elements of his life. Likewise, in Miracle of the Rose (1943
and 1951; Eng. trans., 1966), his heroes--monsters and
saints--represent aspects of the men he knew in prison, as well as
extensions of himself--rootless, troubled personalities in revolt.
Genet's plays are
the finest products of his art, mature reappraisals of the themes
treated in his novels. In The Maids (1947; Eng. trans., 1954),
Deathwatch (1949; Eng. trans., 1954), The Balcony
(1956; Eng. trans., 1957), The Blacks (1958; Eng. trans.,
1960), and The Screens (1961; Eng. trans., 1962) are seen
conflicts between illusion and reality, life and death, good and
evil, the strong and the weak, the old and the young, the conscious
and the unconscious. Although hedonistic and ostensibly amoral, these
plays nevertheless approach religious ritual and can best be
understood as sacred drama, through which the audience's deepest
feelings are aroused by sharing in the theatrical ceremony. As with
ancient Greek theater or the Mass, the audience is offered the
possibility of transformation as a result of participation. Genet is
the inventor of a highly personal metaphoric imagery with a unique
structure of mysterious relationships and analogies and an
extraordinary violence and cruelty that produce energetically
rhythmic dramatic sequences. His plays, always shocking but never
vulgar, have been a powerful force in the renewal of modern drama.
Bettina Knapp, Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literatures,
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City.
Source: 1997 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia v.9.0.1
Bibliography: Una Chaudhuri, No Man's Stage:
A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Major Plays (1986);
S.D. Henning, Genet's Ritual Play (1981);
Bettina Knapp, Jean Genet, rev. ed. (1989);
Laura Oswald, Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance (1989);
Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (1963);
Philip Thody, Jean Genet (1970);
Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (1993; repr. 1994).
Image Source: portrait of Jean Genet -
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères and
Association Française d'Action Artistique.
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Playwright Biographies:
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