Lably
Skip to content

Jean Genet

French novelist, playwright, and poet (1910–1986)

  • 8 min read
  • 2 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Activism, Adoption and Existentialism

Lab · Class 6–12The Constitution of IndiaLab · Class 11How Courts Work

Biography

Early life

Genet's mother was a prostitute who raised him for the first seven months of his life before placing him for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France. His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund White's biography, was loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft.

Detention and military service

For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, he was sent at the age of 15 to Mettray Penal Colony, where he was detained between 2 September 1926 and 1 March 1929. In Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency, having been caught engaged in a homosexual act, and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe—experiences he recounts in The Thief's Journal (1949).

Criminal career, prison, and prison writings

After returning to Paris in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison after arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts, and other offences. In prison Genet wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort", which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944).

In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published. In 1949, when Genet was threatened with a life sentence after ten convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet never returned to prison.

Writing and activism

By 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. In 1952, Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer), entitled Saint Genet, which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis, and did not write for the next five years.

Between 1955 and 1961, Genet wrote three more plays and an essay called "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet", on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work Glas. During this time, Genet became emotionally attached to Abdallah Bentaga, a tightrope walker. Following a number of accidents and Bentaga's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, and attempted suicide.

From the late 1960s, starting with an homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations, drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. Genet was censored in the United States in 1968 and later expelled when he was refused a visa. In an interview with Edward de Grazia, professor of law and First Amendment lawyer, Genet discusses the time he went through Canada for the Chicago congress. He entered without a visa and left with no issues.

In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the United States, where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attended the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and published articles in their journals, such as "Here and Now for Bobby Seale," published in Ramparts. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in the United States and Jordan, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, Prisoner of Love, which was published posthumously.

Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were found floating in the Seine after the 1961 Paris Massacre. In 1977, Genet expressed his solidarity with the Red Army Faction (RAF) of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in the article "Violence et brutalité", published in Le Monde.

In September 1982, Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" ("Four Hours in Shatila"), an account of his visit to Shatila after the event. On 19 December 1983, in one of his rare public appearances during the later period of his life, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler, he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna, Austria.

Death

Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead at Jack's Hotel in Paris on 15 April 1986, where his photograph and books remain. Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head. He is buried in the Larache Christian Cemetery in Larache, Morocco.

Sign in to keep reading

One more chapter is free with a Lably account.

More in Writers and journalists

Aldous HuxleyEnglish writer and philosopher (1894–1963)Pliny the YoungerRoman lawyer, author and magistrate (61 – c. 113)J. K. RowlingBritish author (born 1965)Nathaniel HawthorneAmerican author (1804–1864)Robert GravesEnglish poet, novelist and critic (1895–1985)Waka (poetry)Waka (和歌, "Japanese poem") is a type of poetry in classical Japanese literature. Although