Word: genetic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Abysses is drawn from a celebrated French murder case of 1933, which also inspired Jean Genet's drama The Maids. Selected by Andre Malraux as France's entry in the 1963 Cannes film festival, it arrives in the U.S. trailing breathless encomiums from Jean-Paul Sartre ("Cinema has given us its foremost tragedy"), and Simone de Beauvoir ("One of the greatest films I have ever seen"). Since such illustrious, finely honed sensibilities are not easily ignored, the ordinary moviegoer probably ought to read what has been written about the movie instead of actually sitting through it. Only cultists...
...THIEF'S JOURNAL by Jean Genet. 268 pages. Grove...
...Jean-Paul Sartre who canonized Jean Genet. But it was Genet himself-sodomist, petty criminal, playwright (The Blacks)-who thought up the notion that purified evil could be a kind of sainthood. His self-nomination is announced and ritually celebrated in The Thief's Journal, written in the '40s, which is just now translated and published in the U.S. By his own lights, Genet is indeed a saint. But he is a watch-charm saint, a petty demon whose villainy is on so small a scale that its very earnestness is laughable. The crimes that this Narcissus drops...
...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...