Word: genet
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Pieced together by Sartre, Genet's life at first appears to be just one more example of a child gone wrong. Abandoned by his mother and taken into public charge at birth in 1910, he innocently filched small articles in the home of his peasant foster parents, who kept him for the fee paid them by the state. When he was ten years old, they turned on him and publicly branded him a thief. From there on until 1948, he was in and out of prison. Wandering Europe, he became by turns a dope smuggler, a beggar, a Foreign...
...Genet had no such metaphysical escape hatch. At the moment when he was denied by his foster parents, he was utterly without resources or the ability to judge himself. His fate was fixed. If parents and society cast him out, he must be guilty. His subsequent pursuit of depravity was ignited by a strange motive. By doing evil, he would discover the evil that he had been told possessed...
This willed decision to play the role that life had already forced him into makes him, for Sartre, the perfect existential hero. Indeed, to Sartre, Genet is modern man. Born into a meaningless and hostile world, guilty, fearful, evil and vacillating, man can be free only by willing the existence he has been given and acting energetically on his decision-just as a man carried along by an inexorable current can create the illusion of freedom by swimming with the current but faster than it carries...
...Clothing. A reader is free (and likely) to differ with Sartre's view of man's condition, as well as with his estimate of Genet's genius. But it is difficult not to be intrigued by what is certainly one of the longest, most difficult and most astonishing critical studies ever written about one writer by another. Whole pages of Saint Genet could have been cut. Line after line is unintelligible to anyone but a skilled metaphysician. What remains is an appalling guidebook to a nether world...
...known as "Darling Daintyfoot"-who come to gruesome ends after enjoying a succession of couplings and even triplings. The heroine at first seems to be a dead prostitute called "Divine." But Divine is also referred to as "Lou" and "Culafroy," and it is eventually apparent that she is Jean Genet. It is also clear that she is not really a she but a he in she's clothing...