Word: genet
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Sartre plunges earthily to the center of all this confusion. "Seeking excitement and pleasure," he explains, "Genet starts enveloping himself in his images as a polecat envelops itself in its odor." Darling Daintyfoot and Divine are projections of Genet's imagination, conjured up to excite himself as he lay in his prison cell in 1942. Genet began to record these autoerotic visions on the paper that the prison provided its inmates to manufacture paper bags. A guard burned the writing. Genet began again. The final result was Our Lady of the Flowers...
...writing down the dreams, says Sartre, Genet became aware of another reality-the reality of words, which he could master. Till that moment lost in a nightmarish effort to justify the world's conception of himself as a thief, he suddenly wakened to his own notion that he could be a writer. He might also be a thief, but he could be his own hero-and fob himself off on the public...
...Vicious. "By infecting us with his evil," Sartre concludes complacently, "Genet delivers himself from it." This switch on Freudian analysis involves more than just turning his readers into a collective listening analyst. For Genet it means tarring them with the same brush as himself. His writings abound in emotional traps that lure a reader along the path of natural human feeling only to jar him with some small monstrosity at the end. In Our Lady of the Flowers, for example, Divine's despair is so eloquently described that the reader is moved to the kind of sympathy one feels...
...Genet is now reasonably well off and respected in France. He has even been able to acquire a house near Nice, which he generously gave to a former lover (male), the lover's young wife (female) and her children by an earlier marriage. In the past decade, he has switched from prose to playwriting, and he has stopped displaying, so directly at least, his own private life. "I wanted," he explains, "to write something that would be more than merely subjectively scandalous. It would be objectively horrifying...
...World Is a Brothel. The two best-known examples of this later Genet are The Balcony, a play that suggests that the world is a brothel patronized by fetishists with illusions of grandeur, and The Blacks, in which the Negro cast dons strange white masks to act out the ritual rape and murder of a white woman-only to turn to the whites in the audience and taunt them with the explanation that they are only behaving as whites expect them to behave. Last week The Blacks passed the 1,000th-performance mark off-Broadway in New York...