Word: genet
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...weekly New York National Enquirer. Turn-of-the-century postcards are Camp; so is enthusiasm for the ballet Swan Lake and the 1933 movie King Kong. Dirty movies are Camp -provided one gets no sexual kick out of them-and so are the ideas of the French playwright Jean Genet, an ex-thief and pederast who boasts about it. "Genet's statement that 'the only criterion of an act is its elegance' is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's 'In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style...
...remember, what being a child is like. The Words is not an account of an extraordinary childhood, but the extraordinary fantasy about childhood of a man who has created things with words all of his life. When it comes to recounting the events of his childhood Sartre (exactly like Genet's Lady of the Flowers when she is asked to describe the crime at her trial) sees no reason to stop describing life itself as the ultimate act of imagination...
...journal covers the years from 1932 to 1940 when Genet, a lazy young homosexual, ran with pimps, thieves and Foreign Legion deserters (Genet had been a legionnaire long enough to collect the enlistment money). It is a confession, but not the kind in which remorse is pretended. Genet's self-revelation is mischievous, unrepentant, and not to be trusted. Genet strokes his central paradox-that total degradation can produce spiritual exaltation-as if it were a pet cat. Speaking of his beggar's lice, he says: "Having become -as useful for the knowledge of our decline as jewels...
This mechanical trick of pretending that dirt is desirable and that revulsion is attraction is repeated until it is tiresome. Then Genet smiles like an urchin trying to charm a cop and admits that describing vileness "with words that usually designate what is noble was perhaps childish and somewhat facile." In such a way, being allowed to see that such honest admission of fraud is itself fraudulent, the reader is led through the shallows of Genet's soul. "I keep no place in my heart where the feeling of my innocence might take shelter," he writes at one point...
...reader who knows Genet as an author of power and glittering malice, as he appears provocatively in The Balcony and shatteringly in The Blacks, sees him here as a lesser and more engaging writer-a strangely amiable, seedy, not-to-be-trusted guide for a morning's excursion through the cooler outer regions of hell...