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Saint Genet

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In this 625-page masterpiece of psychoanalysis of one of our most complex men, the renown Existentialist Philosopher, Play write and French man of letters, Jean Paul Sartre, has turned his erstwhile compatriot, Jean Genet into his own private existential living hero -- built-up from whole cloth through literal allegory.

Jean Genet's biography is as well known, as it is scandalous. To wit: from the age of 10 Genet, a bastard "ward of the French State," became a willing societal tool and incorrigible. He was, at various times in his life: a beggar, thief, homosexual, prostitute, deserter, escapee from both reform schools and prisons, and was eventually declared by the French government as a "habitual criminal." When it was discovered that he was not just a writer, but an extraordinarily good one, Sartre and other members of the French Literati, requested and got him pardoned from an automatically earned life sentence.

Genet, then of course proceeded to continue to live out the life of what he had accepted as his defined role in society, as a vagabond, deadbeat, homosexual and criminal. Even later in life, after he had become both a famous and a wealthy writer, he traveled, continued thieving, defended revolutionary causes and never quite stopped giving "the middle finger" to the society that had previously rejected him. But to this list he could now also added the persona of writer.

As the New York Times reviewer put it so elegantly at the time of the book's release: "of all the forbidden literary fruits, Jean Genet was always the darkest and most dangerous." In this book Sartre echoes that sentiment by describing Genet's books as "an epic of masturbation ... a matchless, unholy trinity of scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil."

Yet, it is precisely in his unwillingness to live out the hand dealt to him by French society, that Genet emerges in Sartre's eyes as the ultimate existential hero. Sartre maintains that, only "by [actually] doing evil, could [Genet] discover the evil that [French society] had told him, he possessed. In Sartre's eyes, Genet, born into a meaningless and hostile world, filled with guilt, fear, evil, and vacillation could only be free by eventually learning how to rebel against the society that had so carefully categorized him and then so profoundly rejected him.

Much of Genet's materials were excavations from his prison dreams. In these, the whole world is but one big brothel. Genet's autoerotic visions were always populated with characters right out of central casting from the deepest, darkest and most evil of pornographic movies. Yet it was from the depths of this moral black hole, it was through these characters and dreams, that Genet awoke to an entirely different and new reality: One in which he was no longer just a hapless prop for French society, but one that he could master as a free and independent human being.

He had discovered the reality of words. Genet no longer needed to justify his existence by "treading water" through an assigned persona in a world thrust upon him by French society, he could become a hero in his own reality. And so he did. All of his writings and plays became famous. Genet became a rich man, but he remained, until his death of cancer in 1983, a man of simple counter-cultural taste. Until the bitter end, he mocked the society that had rejected.

Of Sartre, Genet himself said in his 1964 Playboy interview, that "in a world where everyone is trying to be a respectful prostitute, its nice to meet someone who knows he's a bit whorish but doesn't want to be respectable." About this biography, in that same interview, he said that "It filled me with a kind of disgust, because I saw myself stripped naked--by someone other than myself. When I strip myself I manage not to get too damaged as I disguise myself with words, with attitudes, with certain choices, by means of certain magic. My first impulse was to burn the book. I was almost unable to continue writing. Sartre's book created a kind of void which made for [me] a kind of psychological deterioration.

Fifty stars

'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, and never vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach. There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component. It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man. The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade. Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapter is 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness.