Word: genetic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shocking artists from Swift to Joyce were so vehemently condemned at first. It hardly follows that any writer who manages to shock is therefore automatically entitled to respect as a worthy rebel. Yet this is how their followers regard the heroes of today's avantgarde, notably Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch). "The new immoralists" is what they are labeled by Partisan Review Editor William Phillips, who is anything but a literary reactionary. He adds: "To embrace what is assumed to be beyond the pale is taken as a sign of true sophistication...
Like Jean Genet, Jones, who is rnarried to a white woman, has the gift for projecting his fantasy life directly onto a stage. His chief fantasy is retaliation. In these plays, the Negro has the gun. He gives the orders, he slugs, he kills, he wins. Dramatically, the virtue of this is that action follows idea like a dagger thrust without the shadow of explanations, descriptions and rationalizations that fall on drama like a blight...
...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...
...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...