Jean Genet

Stefano Boselli

2024, The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature, edited by Michael Bennett. New York: Routledge

Transforming his early life experiences as a drifter, thief, prostitute, and inmate with the power of imagination and undeniable literary skills, Jean Genet (1910–1986) developed a unique artistic trajectory and found recognition by shocking conventional French society. His often-bewildering stories of criminals, convicts, and queer characters explore the power of deception, betrayal, abjection, and intense homosexual desire through non-linear plots, sudden shifts of point of view, and complex metatheatrical structures. As a precursor of an absurdist sensibility, Genet unsettles the reader and spectator by plunging them in the midst of “strange” and “unique” worlds, only imperfectly illuminated and yet potently alluring. The chapter analyzes the arc of Genet’s oeuvre, focusing on his novels Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, The Thief’s Journal, and Funeral Rites, and his plays Deathwatch, The Maids, Splendid’s, The Pope, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. Moving from deeply personal matters to more grandiose architectures, Genet’s work displays a gusto for defying expectations, an eagerness to contradict the assumptions of bourgeois morality, and a constant reminder of the power and fragility of simulacra in the private and political arena. Despite the disappearance of many of Genet’s world coordinates, his creations still offer exciting and unique dilemmas that his readers and spectators are compelled to unravel.