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JEAN GENET - French Dramatist

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, Jean GenetGenet 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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