A short life of the author
Jean Genet (19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, and political activist whose life and work constitute one of the most extraordinary and disturbing phenomena in twentieth-century literature. Born illegitimate, abandoned by his mother, raised in reformatories and prisons, Genet transformed his experience of crime, homosexuality, prostitution, and betrayal into a body of literature — lyrical, blasphemous, and ecstatic — that inverts every moral category of bourgeois civilisation. Jean-Paul Sartre devoted an 800-page philosophical biography to him (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1952), calling him “the most important writer of our time.”
Life
Genet was born in Paris. His mother, Camille Gabrielle Genet, gave him up to the state at seven months. He was placed with a foster family in the Morvan region and was, by his own account, caught stealing as a child and declared a thief — an act of social naming that he claimed determined his destiny. (Sartre made this “original crisis” the foundation of his existentialist analysis: Genet chose to become what society had called him.)
He spent his adolescence in the Mettray Penal Colony — a brutal juvenile reformatory whose rituals of domination and submission would pervade his fiction — and his young manhood wandering through Europe as a petty criminal, beggar, and male prostitute. He served multiple prison sentences. He began writing in prison, and it was in prison that he produced the manuscripts that would make him famous.
The Novels
Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943) — written in prison on brown paper bags — is Genet’s first and most radical novel. It narrates the life and death of Divine, a male homosexual prostitute in Montmartre, through a prose of hallucinatory lyricism and sacramental imagery. Criminals become saints, murderers become madonnas, and the lowest degradations of street life are described with the ecstatic intensity of devotional literature. The novel was published clandestinely and made Genet famous among the Parisian literary avant-garde.
Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose, 1946) draws on Genet’s experience at Mettray and in Fontevrault prison. Funeral Rites (Pompes funèbres, 1947) is a scandalous meditation on death, sexuality, and collaboration during the German occupation of Paris. Querelle of Brest (Querelle de Brest, 1947) is a novel about murder and homosexual desire among sailors, later filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982).
The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur, 1949) — Genet’s last prose work — is an autobiography of his years of vagrancy, crime, and prostitution across Europe, written as a deliberate inversion of the confessional autobiography: where Augustine confesses sin in order to celebrate redemption, Genet celebrates transgression as its own form of grace.
The Plays
Genet’s plays are as radical as his fiction but more formally disciplined. The Maids (Les Bonnes, 1947) — two maids who role-play as their mistress, enacting fantasies of domination and murder — is his most frequently performed play. The Balcony (Le Balcon, 1957) is set in a brothel where clients enact fantasies of power (bishop, judge, general) while a revolution rages outside — a play about the relationship between power and spectacle. The Blacks (Les Nègres, 1959) is a theatrical ritual in which Black actors perform a parodic murder of white identity before a white audience (or Black actors in whiteface). The Screens (Les Paravents, 1961) — set during the Algerian War — provoked riots at its Paris premiere.
Later Life
After The Thief’s Journal, Genet stopped writing prose fiction. He became involved in political activism, supporting the Black Panthers in America and the Palestinian cause. His last major work, Prisoner of Love (Un captif amoureux, 1986, published posthumously), is a memoir of his time with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers.
Critical Standing
Genet is one of the essential writers of the twentieth century. His work has been central to queer theory, to the Theatre of the Absurd, and to postcolonial thought. His prose is difficult, disturbing, and intoxicating — it demands that the reader abandon conventional moral categories and enter a world where beauty and degradation are inseparable.
The Sartre connection is central to Genet’s critical reception. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952) — Sartre’s 800-page existentialist analysis — both consecrated Genet’s reputation and, paradoxically, nearly silenced him. Genet later said that Sartre’s book had stripped him naked, that being understood so completely by another consciousness was a kind of psychic violence. He stopped writing prose fiction after its publication and did not return to major literary production for nearly a decade. The episode is a parable of the relationship between criticism and creation: the philosopher’s totalising interpretation threatened to replace the writer’s work with the philosopher’s explanation of it.
Genet’s influence extends far beyond literature: his plays shaped the work of Peter Brook, Roger Blin, and the Living Theatre; his politics influenced Huey Newton and the Palestinian literary movement; his aesthetics of transgression anticipate Foucault, Bataille, and the entire French intellectual project of understanding power through its margins. He is the extreme case of the writer as outcast — a man who made his exclusion from respectable society the foundation of an art that respectable society could neither ignore nor comfortably assimilate.
Collecting Genet
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1944, L’Arbalète, Lyon, limited to 350 copies) in first edition brings €2,000–€10,000. Journal du voleur (1949, Gallimard) brings €100–€500. English translations (Grove Press) bring $30–$100. Genet’s limited editions, often illustrated, are avidly collected.