Jean Genet Biography and List of Works

French writer, former criminal, who as a dramatist became one of the leading figures in the avant-garde theatre. Genet has described in his works the underworld, male prostitutes, convicts, pimps and social outcasts.

"In writing out, for his pleasure the incommunicable dreams of his particularity, Genet has transformed them into exigencies of communication...
Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by its problems, gradually led him to seek readers."
(Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Genet, 1963)

Genet was born in Paris, the illigitimate son of a woman who abandoned him to the Assistance Publique, an organization that supervises the care of unwanted children. He was raised by state institutes and a family in the Morvan. At the age of 10 he was accused of stealing. During adolescence he spent five years in the Mettray Reformatory. He escaped from there and at age 19 joined the French Foreign Legion and deserted it soon. Then began a period of wandering throughout Europe. He was charged with vagrancy, homosexuality, theft, and smuggling. From 1930 he spent time in various European prisons.

In 1939 Genet started to write. He produced between the years 1942 and 1948 several autobiographical novels, where he depicted the rejection of the bourgeois society that had repudiated him. These works, which celebrated thievery and homosexuality, included Our Lady of the Flowers (1944) and Querelle of Brest (1947). In Miracle of the Rose (1946) the chains transform to a garland of flowers. Genet meditates the meaning of imprisonment, and when a murderer named Harcamore is executed, Genet ascends to paradise in the moment of execution.

In 1948 Genet was convicted of burglary for the 10th time and condemned to automatic life imprisonment. However, by 1947 his works had gained attention from such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. After the sentence, they petitioned the President of the Republic for his release. The request was granted.

"THE BISHOP (after making a visible effort to calm himself, in front of the mirror and holding his surplice): Now answer, mirror, answer me. Do I come here to discover evil and innocence? And in your gilt-edged glass, what was I?"
(from The Balcony)

In the late 1940s Genet started to write for the theatre. Several of Genet's plays were too controversial to be performed in France. His first play, The Maids, made a significant contribution to the theatre of the absurd. It was based on a true story of two maids, sisters, who killed their mistress. Deathwatch (1947) used the prison setting of his earlier works, but later dramas explore the symbolic landscapes of loneliness and despair. Genet also abandoned traditional concepts of character, plot and motivation. The Balcony (1957) was set in a brothel, The Blacks (1959) was an elaboration on the notion of a play within a play, and The Screens (1961) took place in the midst of the French-Algerian War.

Genet's autobiography, The Thief's Journal, appeared in 1949. After 1966 he largely gave up writing and spent his time lecturing and supporting radical causes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made in the early 1980s a film based on the author's novel Querelle of Brest. Genet died in Paris on April 15, 1986.

In his study Saint-Genet: Actor and Martyr (transl. 1963) Sartre proclaimed Genet to be the prototype of the existentialism man, whose distinction between good and evil is the result of personal choice and decision. Other writers, like François Mauriac, criticized Genet for being a prisoner of his own world of crime, where the author 'goes around and around like a squirrel in a cage, imprisoned in the dungeon of a vice from which he cannot escape'.

The Balcony (1956) - Madame Irma, the Madame of a brothel known as the Grand Balcony, provides settings and all necessary for the acting out of her client's scenarios of wish-fulfilments. The clients play such roles as Bishop, General and Judge. A revolution is going on outside the brothel. Irma's lover, the Chief of Police, is worried because someone in the brothel has made a scenario about him. The rebels overthrow the figureheads of the old regime. One of Irma's girls, Chantal, becomes a heroine-martyr. Clients who have played Bishop, General and Judge take place of the former officials. Roger, a defeated revolutionary leader, arrives to enact a scenario in which he is the Chief Police. False figures remain in office, but other round of revolution starts.

For further reading: Saint Genet, comédien et martyr by J.-P. Sartre (1952); The Imagination of Jean Genet by J.H. McMahon (1963); Jean Genet by T.F. Driver (1966); The Vision of Genet by R.N. Coe (1968); Jean Genet by B.L. Knapp (1968); Jean Genet by P. Thody (1970); Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet by L.T. Cetta (1974); Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. by P. Brooks and J. Halpern (1979); Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance by L. Oswald (1989); Genet: A Biography by E. White (1993)

NOTRE-DAME DES FLEURS, (1944)