Jean Genet

Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Maids.

Genet's works

Novels

Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his implied readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizing his own singularity as he raises violent criminals to icons, enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding, and depicts scenes of betrayal.

Related Topics:
Moral values - Evil - Icon

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The first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), is a journey through the prison underworld, written in honour of famous assassins who had recently been killed. The two auto-fictional novels, The Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief's Journal (1949), describe Genet's time at Mettray youth prison and as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe. Querelle de Brest (1947) is set in the mist of the port-town Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder; and Funeral Rites (1949), is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, written this time for the narrator's lover, Jean Decarnin, killed by the Germans in WWII.

Related Topics:
Our Lady of the Flowers - 1944 - Assassin - 1946 - 1949 - Querelle de Brest - 1947 - Murder - Funeral Rites - Germans - WWII

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A Prisoner of Love published in (1986), after Genet's death, is written in an entirely different tone to his early, provocative writing.

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Plays

Associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, Genet's plays present highly stylised depictions of ritual struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors. Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering as men play maids playing each other or their mistress in The Maids (1949), or leading figures in society play out the role of victims in a brothel, surrounded by mirrors which both reflect and conceal in The Balcony (1956). Most strikingly, Genet takes further what Aimée Césaire called negritude, in The Blacks (1958), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence. His most ambitious play is The Screens (1963), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

Related Topics:
Theatre of the Absurd - The Maids - 1949 - The Balcony - 1956 - Aimée Césaire - Negritude - 1958 - The Screens - 1963

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Film

Genet directed Un Chant d'Amour in 1950, a 26 minute black and white film depicting the fantasies of a gay male prisoner and his prison warden.

Related Topics:
1950 - Fantasies

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Genet's work has also been adapted for film and produced by other filmmakers. Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Querelle, a 1982 film based on Querelle de Brest. (Genet himself never saw this film because he would not have been allowed to smoke in a movie theatre.) Todd Haynes' 1991 movie Poison was also based on the writings of Genet.

Related Topics:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder - 1982 - Todd Haynes - 1991

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