A STUDY IN CONTRADICTIONS
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean
Genet The Criminal Child: Selected Essays (Charlotte Mandell and Jeffrey
Zuckerman, translators) (New York, New York Review of Books, 2020).
Jean
Genet’s The Criminal Child, selected essays recently published in a
wonderful translation of Charlotte Mandell and Jeffrey Zuckerman by the New
York Review of Books, is a study in contradictions, however beautifully
expressed.
Although readily admitting to his criminal
childhood acts—which consisted mostly of stealing books and sexual acts as a
child prostitute—Genet, naming many another such beings (Saint-Maurice,
Saint-Hilaire, Bell-Isle, Eysse, Aniane, Montresson, MettrayĆ©)—admittedly
meaningless to the rest of us, that these children, sentenced often for a
prison period of 21 years (the French system was not a palliative one), writes:
These children are committing an
(intentional) error, the tribunal
having passed a judgment such.
Acquitted for having acted
without full awareness, and entrusted to the
reformatory until
the age of majority….” But the young
criminal immediately
rejects the indulgence and concern
of a society that he has, in
committing his first offence,
revolted against. At fifteen or
sixteen or earlier yet, he has
attained a maturity that other may
not even reach even at sixty, and he
scorns their munificence.
He insists that his punishment be unsparing.
I am certainly unsure that all teenage
offenders quite felt the way Genet portrays them, but then Genet, despite his
moral indulgences was also a highly moral being determined to react to the
school-boy discipline that “strike a gentle soul as severe and pitiless,” while
yet to remaining true to French church teachings that would be infused in his
radical theatrical and fictional works to the end of his life.*
It is clear, even in these early essays,
that Genet was always torn between societal values and his own radical reaction
against them.
His ballet, “’Adame Miroir,” for example
is a performance about mirrors, which reveal the class differences between a
handsome sailor, who “has no past,” and whose life “beings with the
choreography, which utterly contains it. He is young and handsome. He has curly
hair. His muscles are hard and supple: in short, he is our of the ideal lover,”
and The Domino, who represents death, a coupling performed in the interior of
an extremely sumptuous palace, “the hallways covered with beveled mirrors.” In short,
it is a slightly later version of Querelle of Brest.
Although it is quite clear that he loves
the work of fellow French director Jean Cocteau, he also describes the famed
author-director as writing a work that is a “curious fragment, brief hard
blazing, comically incomplete.”
That is how Jean Cocteau’s work seems
to us, like a light, aerial
stormy civilization hanging from the
heavy heart of our own. The
very person of the poet adds to it,
thin, knotted, silvery as olive
trees.
Genet’s wonderful essay on the artist
Alberto Giacometti is just as fraught with contradictions.
On
one hand, he recognizes Giacometti’s work as representing a kind of nostalgia:
It is Giacometti’s body of work that
make our universe so un-
bearable to me, so much does it seem
that this artist knew how
to remove whatever impeded his gaze
so could discover what
remains of man when the pretense is
removed.
Yet, clearly, he is entranced by the
sculptures, for him an truly sensuous experience.
I cannot prevent myself from the
touch the statues: I turn away
my eyes, and my hand continues to
discoveries alone, the neck,
the head, the nape of the neck, the
shoulders…Sensations
flow to my fingertips. Not one that
isn’t different, so that my
hand travels through an extremely
varied and lively landscape.
But it is the last essay of this book, “The
Tightrope Walker,” that most intrigues me as a kind of metaphoric statement of
Genet’s own writing and sensibility. For him, the dance, the acrobatic on the
wire is everything—in short it is the performance of the art that is even more
important than the writer/performer.
Give your metal wire the most
beautiful expression, not of
you, but of it. Your leaps, your
somersaults, your dances—
in acrobat slang, your
pitter-patter, bows, midair somersaults,
cartwheels, etc.—you will execute
them successfully, not
for you to shine, but so that a
steel wire that was dead and
voiceless which finally sings.
This short volume of essays by Genet
reveals volumes about his art, as contradictory as it may be—but then that was
what Genet himself was!
After finishing them over a few days of quarantine,
I wished I might read them all over again.
Los
Angeles, May 5, 2020
Reprinted
from Green Integer Review (May 2020).
*I
need to again mention that at about the age of 15, visiting a University of
Iowa bookstore, I stole the only book that I ever have or will: which just
happened to be Jean Genet’s The Blacks. I knew absolutely noting about
Genet, and had never read his work, and certainly did not at all know that he
had been arrested for doing the same thing; but the book just called out to me
and I had to have it, despite the fact that I had little money, and was allowed
to visit the stores for a short while before my other family members would be
delighted to take in the Hawkeyes’ football game.
Strangely I never felt guilty about this
one-time act, but when I relayed it, after I myself had become a major
publisher, to the bookseller from that same bookstore, he seemed shocked,
startled by my revelation, and surely ready to have me arrested for my
childhood crime.
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