Chapter 1 Jean Genet’s transgressive scenography

I. Introduction Whether or not, accepting Edmund White’s sober readjustments, one views with corrective scepticism Genet’s self-mythologisation, consecrated by Sartre in his Saint Genet: comédien et martyr,1 the compelling evidence from the exhaustive research behind Genet: A Biography2 is that Genet knows early on what it is like, not simply to be an outsider as an illegitimate child from Paris, a cul de Paris in foster care in Alligny-en-Morvan. Serially recidivist petty thief and vagabond, he is incarcerated as an adolescent and learns what it is to be cast onto the social scrapheap. From this accursed share he seeks to reclaim a degree of sovereignty within abasement and abjection. Defecation before all in the exercise yard at the Children’s Colony at Mettray,3 for example, on a “throne” marking the yard’s centre, under the gazes of all young inmates tramping through their circuit, raises the stakes of the young boy’s Baudelairean4 challenge, to make “gold” of this “mud” or, in this case, shit. Derrida’s brilliant and baroque analysis in Glas5 shows “what shitting from a great height”6 with such




























































1 Jean-Paul Sartre. 1966. ‘Saint-Genet, comédien et martyre’, Préface à Jean Genet, Œuvres complètes I. Paris: NRF Gallimard. 2 Edmund White. 1993. Genet: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 3 Mettray was a penal colony in the Massif Central run by catholic nuns and priests on a strict, virtually medieval model for juvenile delinquents, and was geared to form recruits for the military, and in the 19th century, for the navy in particular. It supplies the context and the intensifying constraints of Le miracle de la rose (1946), which work romanticises the institution’s cruelly feudal hierarchical regime to the degree that it hosts the dawning of homoerotic desire for the young Genet. 4 “Tu m’as donnée de la boue et j’en ai fait de l’or.” [You gave me mud and I turned it to gold]. (Charles Baudelaire. 1975. ‘Projets d’un épilogue pour l’édition de 1861’ in Œuvres complètes, texte établi par Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléïade, 192.) 5 See Jacques Derrida. 1981. Glas. Paris: Denoël-Gonthier. For a fascinating, psychoanalytic reading of Sartre’s Saint-Genet and Derrida’s Glas as desiring (in the perspective of a fascination with androgynous ‘con-verge-ence’) responses to Genet’s work, see Robert Harvey. 1997. ‘Genet’s Open Enemies: Sartre and Derrida’, in Yale 32 Poetic revolutionaries: intertextuality and subversion an alchemical imagination can become. The great drop down the lavatory well induces a golden geyser of accumulated urine that splashes the buttocks of the exposed boy; it takes some fiercely imaginative work to make this seem like a prize. The panopticon, as Genet’s earliest works demonstrate, well ahead of Foucault’s analysis7 and no doubt enriching it, is not just a scopic regime of control; it proliferates sites of resistance and desire where every glance, every lingering gaze, every furtive gesture is freighted, just as it is counterfeited, for the intimate projection of the fragile communicant. It is tempting to hypothesise that it is the prison experience at Mettray Penal Colony, and later at prisons like Fresnes, La Santé, and many other lockups throughout Europe, that at least in part prepared Genet’s development as one of the most radical and imaginative dramatic poets of the spatial8 in twentieth century theatre. Beyond primary school Genet was an autodidact,9 feeding at first on a diet of

French Studies, Genet: In the Language of the Enemy 91: 103-116. 6 See Brian Castro, 2003, Shanghai Dancing, which I discuss in Chapter 7 of this study, for a reworking of this theme. 7 Michel Foucault. 1977 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (tr. Alan Sheridan). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 8 Laura Oswald’s brilliant analysis identifies the “staging of the subject as a question” as the most important aspect of Genet’s radical practice. In both her analysis of Genet’s narrative texts and the theatre proper, she looks at the “pull of indexation” or play of indices and deictics as they deconstruct stability, continuity and presence of the subject for its other(s). What is rehearsed in the interaction of diegesis and mimesis in the novels, through which representation is shown to depend on verbal masks or dissimulation, clearly takes on a vertiginous spatiality in the theatre through the mutual imbrication of insides and outsides, of the subject and his/her other – i.e., of doubles. See Laura Oswald. 1989. Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 37. 9 Genet’s mother, who registered her occupation as “governess” but was more probably a maid, gave him over to state care when he was seven months old. He was allocated to the care of a rural artisan family in the Morvan district, headed by Eugénie and Charles Régnier. Genet’s formal schooling finished at thirteen, when he earned the highest grade, bien [distinction] on his School Certificate, in which examination he ranked first in the whole Commune. From here he was sent to the École d’Alembert, where the more gifted children in state care were trained in typography, printing and joinery. He ran away after three months, later to be assigned to the blind popular songwriter, René de Buxeuil, as an assistant. See Richard C. Webb. 1992. File on Genet. London: Methuen Drama, 7. Edmund White offers an engrossing and demythologising account of these early years in his Genet: A Biography, Chapters I-III.