Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr by Jean-Paul Sartre (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS SAINT GENET: ACTOR AND MARTYR, by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, Braziller, 625 pp. Price $8.50. The performance of The Balcony and The Blacks in off-Broadway theaters, the publication by the Grove Press of Genet's five plays from The Maids (1947) to The Screens (1961) have made of Jean Genet one of the most discussed of today's playwrights. He has occupied an increasingly important place in each of the halfdozen books concerning the French stage that have appeared since 1960 (Guicharnaud , Esslin, Pronko, Grossvogel ...); a bibliography of Genet articles today would be impressively long. The quasi-simultaneous translation of Our Lady Of the Flowers-an account of the strange metamorphoses and sea-changes Genet's memories underwent in the erotic dream world into which his onanistic practices projected him while he was in prison-and of Saint Genet, Sartre's essay, takes us back several years to a period when he had not as yet received recognition. Sartre's essay was published in 1952, and does not, of necessity, deal with Genet as dramatist-only The Maids and Deathwatch had been written at that time. The essay is a biography of Jean Genet, emphasizing facts that are by now common knowledge-the foundling, the foster home, the thefts, the homosexuality, the monotonous career in the underworld of crime, reformatory and penitentiary. But it is more than that. It is an interpretation, an existential psychoanalysis of Genet as Sartre understands the man from his own point of view in 1952. "I have tried to do the following": says Sartre at the .beginning of his last chapter , "to indicate the limit of psychoanalytic interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; ... to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperation . . . ." (p. 584) Facts and an interpretation that must illustrate and prove the efficacies of a whole systematic ideology-metaphysical, psychological , social, political-are interlocked. One is grateful to Bernard Frechtman for a translation that, without betraying Sartre, makes him more readable, more clearcut than in the original. The "to and fro" movement of the dialectic method of development dear to Sartre, the "exhaustiveness" he aims at, give the book the cumbersome dynamism peculiar to all Sartre's writing and, with it too, the arbitrary verbal build-up in which rhetoric takes the place of fact and proof. Sartre begins by an overly insistent, a strangely sentimental description of the "situation" of Genet the child, the gentle orphan and respectful outcast. In order to "belong" in a society where to possess is to be "right," the child innocently "appropriates" objects, the ownership of which magically makes of him one of the social group. His "project," as Sartre sees it, is essentially one of submission to the values of those "others"-his foster parents, the society to which, as foundling , he does not belong. But the "others" see him in the act of appropriation and brand him as "thief." The child appropriates the judgment of the "righteous ," sees himself as "other," as Evil. From this initial subversion, operated, Sartre claims, by a righteous society on an innocent child, Sartre will reconstruct Genet's entire career. One wonders at the violence and urgency of Sartre's defense, when compared 101 102 MODERN DRAMA May with his attack on Baudelaire, at the extraordinary need Sartre feels to transform Jean Genet into a High Priest of Evil, a kind of cross between Goetz in the first act of his Devil and the Good Lord (1951) and the "damned priest" Heinrich. Baudelaire's Litanies of Satan are pretty close at hand and a whole romantic fascination with damnation. If, as Sartre states, "every man is all man," why then does Jean-Paul Sartre, speaking of Jean Genet need, with such haste, such an enormous battery of words, such a wealth of reference ranging from Plato to Mallarme, to beat down some colossal opponent who never shows up? Surely the violence of the rather childish attacks on Fran~ois Mauriac or Andre Rousseaux or "the High-minded"-an abstract strawman...