The Mirror of Jean Genet

Yes, it’s true: Jean Genet (1910-1986) shared a birthday with Edith Piaf and Barbette! Now, that’s a three-way I’d watch through any peephole!

Genet was a 20th century literary giant, so, naturally most Americans have never heard of him. Along with figures like Beckett and Ionesco, he was considered one of the principal Absurdist playwrights, as well as an exemplar of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Naturally, that’s the head of this Hydra I’ve always been most concerned with, though Genet also made an enormous impact on the literary world as a novelist, poet, memoirist, aesthetic theorist, and political activist, among other things. Cocteau, Sartre, Derrida, and Lacan were among his champions. In the States he influenced the Off-Off-Broadway theatre, the Theatre of the Ridiculous especially, anything to do with drag performances, as well as underground film. He was a major influence on John Waters, who named Divine after a character in Genet’s 1943 Our Lady of the Flowers. The title of Ron Rice’sThe Flower Thief, starring Taylor Mead, sounds like a mash-up of that work and Genet’s The Thief’s Journal (1949). My friends of Thieves Theatre named their company after the same work.

All this business about thieves is because Genet was one. Not in the timid literary way many writers are. He did not steal words and ideas. He STOLE. THINGS. He was a criminal. The son of a Paris prostitute, he was sent to live with a foster family at a young age, but proved incorrigible, running away from home frequently and getting in trouble for petty theft and shoplifting. He was sent to a reformatory for boys and then drafted into the French Foreign Legion, from which he was ejected after being caught committing homosexual acts. In young adulthood he alternated between homelessness and incarceration, mostly being jailed for acts of theft or public lewdness.

Vagabondage and jail leave plenty of time for reading, contemplation, and writing. Genet plumbed the depths of his own nature. The things that obsessed him are the same things that obsessed Shakespeare: identity, role play, existence, the nature of theatre itself, and the artificial constructs that govern, confine and define the way we live our lives. Sartre titled his 1952 book Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr not because Genet was a saint (he was the farthest thing from it) but with reference to St. Genesius (known in France as Genest or Genêt), a third century Roman martyr who is the patron saint of actors and clowns. The French word comédien means something closer to “actor” but can also refer to someone who is putting up a front, playing a “role” in real life, thus referring also to the existential and theatrical elements in Genet’s writing.

Criminality and queerness are foursquare at the center of Genet’s writing. Later he became an activist of the Far Left. These factors seem to have combined to keep him at the fringes of American culture. His work has certainly been adapted and performed here, but his influence has been indirect. The commercial film industry is terrified of the kinds of themes his work brings up. Outside of the example of John Waters, the one film/book/musical I can think of that reflects the likely influence of Genet is Kiss of the Spider Woman, maybe? The public remains both homophobic and morally hypocritical. Genet makes you re-examine what it means to be a human being, and that’s frightening to people.

Principal stage/screen works:

Deathwatch (Haute surveillance). Originally written in 1947, it concerns a love triangle among three jailbirds in a prison cell. Astoundingly, it was made into a film in 1965 by Vic Morrow (co-adapted by wife Barbara Turner) and starred the jaw-dropping cast of Leonard Nimoy (who co-produced it), Michael Forest (the guy who played Apollo in that Star Trek episode), and Paul Mazursky.

The Maids (Les Bonnes). Also from 1947, this oft-produced play was inspired by real-life murderers Christine and Léa Papin, sisters who worked in the same household as domestics and who brutally murdered their mistresses, a mother and daughter. In the play, the girls Solange and Clair take turns playing the cruel woman of the house and engage in all kinds of sadomasochist head games. Some have felt that it is the next natural step beyond Deathwatch, and its ultimate realization would be to have biological men in the roles. (These days, the way we talk about gender has changed so radically, that concept may actually be antiquated. Not for me to say). At any rate it is tailor made for the theatrical experience, a live event. There is a 1974 film version starring Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, based on their stage performances of the previous year, which somehow manages to be deadly dull in spite of the play’s racy subject matter.

Querelle of Brest (Querelle de Brest). Genet’s 1947 novel is about a serial-killing hustler in a seaside town full of sailors. Fassbinder turned it into a stylized film in 1982 starring Brad Davis of Midnight Express and Chariots of Fire.

Un chant d’amour. Genet directed this 1950 short film himself, possibly with the involvement of Cocteau. Its explicit gay content depicting sex between prisoners got it widely banned. In the mid ’60s Jonas Mekas publicly screened this movie on a double bill with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and got arrested for it. Genet intended to follow up this film with another called Le Bagne (The penal colony), but it never came to fruition, though the screenplay has been published.

Les Rêves interdits, ou L’autre versant du rêve (Forbidden Dreams or The Other Side of Dreams) (1952). This story or treatment became the basis for the script for Tony Richardson’s film Mademoiselle (1966) which starred Jeanne Moreau as an admired local schoolteacher who is actually an arsonist, poisoner, and all around murderess, and who frames a local lothario for her crimes. They have kinky sex in the woods, the villagers lynch him, and then for the coup de grace, she opens the floodgates to a local dam, drowning the entire town. Because sometimes love is like that.

The Balcony (Le Balcon). originally written in 1956, this is one of Genet’s best known and most off-produced plays. It is set in a special whorehouse, where the patrons all get to pose as important community leaders (a Bishop, a Judge, a Chief of Police) while a revolution rages outside. In the end, the real-life leaders are all killed, and the johns assume their roles in society. It shows the influence of Neitzche, Brecht, Artaud, and The Bacchae, and presages Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. Erwin Piscator and Peter Brook directed important productions. Jose Quintero directed the 1960 Off Broadway production with Nancy Marchand (later replaced by Grayson Hall), Sylvia Miles, and others. Joseph Strick, who later directed Ulysses (1967) and Tropic of Cancer (1970) directed an interesting screen version in 1963 with Shelley Winters, Peter Falk,Lee Grant, and — once again — Leonard Nimoy! It is much better than the movie of The Maids.

The Blacks: A Clown Show (Les Nègres). This work was the longest running Off-Broadway play of the 1960s, opening in 1961 and running 1,408 performances. Produced by Andre Gregory and directed by Gene Frankel, the history making cast included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson,Godfrey Cambridge,Helen Martin, Maya Angelou, and others. In this work, the author plays with racial identity as he had earlier played with gender. It depicts a trial, with several of the all-black cast performing in whiteface, a kind of reverse minstrel show (I find it hard to imagine the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s minstrel show would have existed without it)

The Screens (Les Paravents). The title of this 1958 work refers to TV screens, movable stage flats, and metaphorical walls. It represents a kind of pivot in Genet’s career as it is about the Algerian War for Independence that was then raging, though both the colonial power and the North African nation are unspecified. It has no plot per se, but contains 17 thematically related scenes. Perhaps because it concerns the politics of a specific moment and not a universal metaphysical struggle this one has been revived and produced less often than many of Genet’s earlier ones.

Genet’s lover for many years was a Moroccan tightrope walker named Abdallah Bentaga, who died by suicide in 1964. This event, combined with the Paris Riots of May 1968, seems to have changed the course of Genet’s focus from one that was primarily literary to one that was purely political. He was too fond of terrorist groups for my liking but only dolts and simpletons believe you have to approve of artists — or anyone — whole cloth. Unless that cloth be the Shroud of Turin. Genet was a sinner, not a saint. To deny his relevance to you is to proclaim your manifest fitness to be portrayed in one of his plays.