Drama:
Les Bonnes, pr. 1947, revised pr., pb. 1954 (The Maids, 1954)
Splendid’s, wr. 1948, pb. 1993 (English translation, 1995)
Haute Surveillance, pr., pb. 1949 (definitive edition pb. 1963; Deathwatch, 1954)
Le Balcon, pb. 1956, revised pb. 1962 (The Balcony, 1957)
Les Nègres: Clownerie, pb. 1958 (The Blacks: A Clown Show, 1960)
Les Paravents, pr., pb. 1961 (The Screens, 1962)
Long Fiction:
Notre-Dame des Fleurs, 1944, 1951 (Our Lady of the Flowers, 1949)
Miracle de la rose, 1946, 1951 (Miracle of the Rose, 1966)
Pompes funèbres, 1947, 1953 (Funeral Rites, 1968)
Querelle de Brest, 1947, 1953 (Querelle of Brest, 1966)
Poetry:
Poèmes, 1948
Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet, 1980
Nonfiction:
Journal du voleur, 1948, 1949 (The Thief’s Journal, 1954)
Lettres à Roger Blin, 1966 (Letters to Roger Blin, 1969)
Lettres au petit Franz: 1943-1944, 2000
Miscellaneous:
Œuvres complètes, 1952 (4 volumes)
Jean Genet (zhuh-neh), celebrated by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as a model of existentialist commitment, produced in his novels and plays an ethical stance of adhering to and flaunting the immorality of which French society and law found him guilty. For him, criminality was not a pursuit of gain or power but a matter of choice, a way of life. He imbued this way of life with his own aesthetic and religious principles. His years in the reformatory and his ten prison sentences attest a life lived largely in illegitimacy. As he lived, so had he been born–illegitimately in a maternity hospital, where his mother, a Parisian prostitute named Gabrielle Genet, abandoned him. He was reared as a public charge by country people; accused by them of being a thief when he was ten years old, he accepted his identity as a thief and fashioned his life in keeping with that identity. Adding homosexuality and betrayal to thievery, he ensconced himself in what for him became the dark beauty of that trinity.
Jean Genet in 1963.
According to most sources, Genet spent the years 1926 through 1929 in a reformatory in Mettray, during which time he ran away once but was returned. He spent most of the next fifteen years in prisons for various crimes. In 1948, about to receive a life sentence for a crime to which he pleaded guilty but had not in fact committed, Genet was pardoned by President Vincent Auriol in response to the public request made by Jean-Paul Sartre and writer Jean Cocteau.
Genet began his literary career in prison. At Fresnes prison he wrote a long poem, “The Man Condemned to Death,” which was published in 1942. It was dedicated to the memory of “Maurice Pilorge,” a twenty-year-old convicted murderer whose real name was Adrien Baillon and who had been executed; Maurice Pilorge is also the titular character of Our Lady of the Flowers, the first and, according to most critics, the best of Genet’s novels. That work was also written in Fresnes prison and featured some of its inmates, including Genet, as the characters; most of them are identified by feminine names in a homosexual context.
Miracle of the Rose, written in La Sante and Tourelles prisons, is set in Fontevrault prison and the Mettray reformatory; the narrative alternates between the two settings. The central presence of the novel is Harcamone, an inmate who as a youth killed a girl and is now condemned to death for murdering a prison guard. Genet envisions the prelude to Harcamone’s execution as the entrance of four men–judge, lawyer, chaplain, and executioner–into the prisoner’s body through his ears and mouth; they traverse its corridors until they come together at the heart and are overwhelmed by the splendor of the Mystic Rose.
Funeral Rites and Querelle of Brest were written outside prison and have clearer story lines but less imaginatively lyrical intensity than Genet’s first two novels. It is in The Thief’s Journal that Genet declares his theology of betrayal, thievery, and homosexuality. The appurtenances of this assertedly religious commitment are the pursuits of evil, beauty, and sainthood: Betrayal proves the reality of love by its infraction of love; thievery is intrinsically elegant; and homosexuality is the holy confluence of love and death. In this same context, sanctity is the complete subscription to evil by which an individual fully experiences all sins and, by making them his own, takes upon himself the sins of the world.
From prose narrative as his major vehicle of expression Genet turned in mid-career to drama. His five plays concentrate on inversion. In Deathwatch, “inverted sanctity” holds evil to be goodness and holds murder, the worst of evils, to ensure the greatest glory. In The Maids, a woman pretends to be her sister, who in turn pretends to be their employer, whom both later plot to poison; when the plot fails, the sister playing Madame-the-employer deliberately contrives to be poisoned in accordance with the original plot: The inversion of maid and mistress becomes a reality that is fatal to the employee. The social commentary implicit in The Maids is magnified in The Balcony, in which the imaginations of the characters confute the reality of society with a self-destructive reality of illusion.
Genet’s dramatic works project the inherent injustice of social discrimination and the deliberate evil that is both prerequisite to correcting the injustice and generative of more profound injustice. During the decade before his death from throat cancer in 1986, Genet wrote in support of the Black Panthers’ causes in the United States.
Critical reception of Genet’s work includes rejection on the grounds of its immorality, praise qualified by disapproval of its immorality, rejection on the grounds of its artistic failure, and acceptance as true art. For Sartre, who extolled Genet’s work as true art, Genet’s expressions of the contraventional morality to which he committed himself, along with that morality itself, constitute an artistic integer. Critics in the habit of separating artists’ morality from their work cannot easily make the same separation in the case of Genet, if, as Sartre insists, his moral life and his life’s work are consanguineous and inextricable.