Word: genetic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...other playwright can quite match Genet at holding the audience at bay, taut between open distaste and hypnotic fascination. Even so, Genet as artist is still much smaller in scale than Genet as existentialist hero. Much of his autobiographical writing is so sleazily scabrous that it loses even shock value. On the stage, his imagination sometimes runs to episodes so melodramatically contrived that they miss theatrical effectiveness, as when the revolutionary leader in The Balcony emasculates himself onstage...
...good or ill, Genet has been converted by Sartre into a walking allegory. If he was not born to it, or has yet fully to achieve it, he has had significance thrust upon...