Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr Author(s): Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard Frechtman Source: The Tulane Drama

Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1963), pp. 18-36 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125081 Accessed: 06/07/2010 23:40
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Saint
Actor

Genet:

and

Martyr

By

JEAN-PAUL

SARTRE

Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of passeistes.1 An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant; he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this "break" is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual that the memory condenses into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual re-beginnings of an individual history. What matters is that Genet lives and continues to re-live this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant. To say "instant" is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life. One feels oneself to be one's own self and another; the eternal is present in an atom of duration. In the midst of the fullest life, one has a foreboding that one will merely survive; one is afraid of the future. It is the time of anguish and of heroism, of pleasure and destruction. An instant is sufficient to destroy, to enjoy, to kill, to be killed, to make one's fortune at the turn of a card. Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant which
lPassdiste: one who is not adapted to the present age, who is not a man of his time, who "livesin the past."-Translator's note. 19

Portrait of Jean Genet by Alberto Giacometti

18

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has lost none of its virulence, an infinitesimal and sacred void which concludes a death and begins a horrible metamorphosis. The argument of this liturgical drama is as follows: a child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child. One would have to speak of resurrection, to evoke the old initiatic rites of shamanism and secret societies were it not that Genet refuses categorically to be a man who has been resuscitated(.2 There was death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man. If he appears to be still alive, it is with the larval existence which certain peoples ascribe to their deceased in the grave. All his heroes have died at least once in their life. "After his first murder, Querelle experienced the feeling of being dead... His human form-what is called the envelope of flesh-continued nevertheless to move about on the surface of the earth." His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern his future death, his being-to-die, but rather his being-dead, his (leath as past event. This original crisis also appears to him as a metamorphosis. The well-behaved child is suddenly transformed into a hoodlum, as Gregor Samsa was changed into a bug. Genet's attitude toward this metamorphosis is ambivalent: he both loathes it and yearns for it. He lives in terror lest the original crisis recur; he fears it as one fears an attack of epilepsy.
Querelle could not get used to the idea, an idea never formulated, of being a monster. He would consider, would regard his past with a smile that was ironic, frightened and tender at the same time, insofar as this past merged with himself. A young boy who has been metamorphosed into an alligator and whose soul appears in his eyes might in like manner-if he is not quite conscious of his maw, of his enormous jaw-consider his scaly body, his solemn tail that slaps the water or the beach or grazes other monsters... ' The candidate for shamaic functions is killed by the spirits. His body is cut to pieces. Then he comes to life again. Only then is he a shaman. Almost all "rites of passage" center about death and rebirth. The theme

of death and resurrection similarlygovernsall initiations.

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SARTRE

21

He knew the horror of being alone, stricken by an immortal enchantment in the midst of the living world. The initial event determined Genet's inner climate, which will be horror. "Few are the moments when I escape from horror, few the moments when I do not have a vision, or some horrifying perception of human beings and events." This horror is both fear of past metamorphoses and terrified expectation of their repetition: A young Italian...was laughing and relating some trivial experiences ... I took him for an animal that had been metamorphosed into a man. I felt-that, in the presence of this privilege which I thought he possessed, he could, at any given moment, turn me, by his simple wish, even unexpressed, into a jackal, a fox, a guinea-fowl. At every instant Genet fears "the miracle, that catastrophe of horror, horrifying as an angel... though radiant as the solution of a problem in mathematics, frighteningly exact." But the aim of these passages is to give poetic expression to his fear; it is not literally true that Genet is afraid of being changed into a jackal. In the following passage, however, he expresses himself almost without transposition. Genet, who is in the presence of a handsome young man, is afraid of dying: Which is to say that either I would become aware of being suddenly naked in a crowd which sees my nakedness; or that my hands would become overgrown with leaves and I would have to live with them, tie my shoelaces with them, hold my cigarette, scratch myself, open the door with them; or that he himself would know spontaneously what I am at bottom and would laugh at seeing me thus... or that I would see and feel my penis being eternally devoured by fish; or that a sudden friendship would permit me to caress toads and corpses to the point of orgasm, for when I evoke these-and other-torments, my death is in danger of being the knowledge of my shame which has appeared in the play of the manifestations most feared in the presence of the beloved being. Note the connection between death and metamorphosis: "My death is in (danger of being the knowledge of my shame." "The child who is transformed into an alligator fears lest some gleam

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from the interior of his body or from his own consciousness illuminate him, hook on to his scaly carapace the reflection of a form and make him visible to men." When unmasked, he changes into himself. The metamorphosis that threatens him unceasingly is the constituent revelation that occured one day through the mediation of others and that can recur any minute. And no doubt this myth is fed by ordinary and quite real worries. Having reached manhood, Genet, who considers himself a coward, is afraid of revealing his cowardice to his young lovers: "In the presence of the person I adore and in whose eyes I seemed an angel, here am I being knocked down, biting the dust, turning inside out like a glove and showing exactly the opposite of what I was." As a professional thief, he is quite simply afraid of being caught: A little old woman said to him quietly, "What have you stolen, young man?"... a new universe instantly presented itself to Darling: the universeof the irremediable.It is the same as the one we were in, with one peculiar difference;instead of acting and knowing we are acting, we know we are acted upon ... the order of this world-seen inside out-appears so perfect in its inevitability that this world has only to disappear. But the striking thing is that the erotic humiliations of a homosexual and the occupational risks of a thief are tinged with an aura of the sacred. Confronted with a trivial, everyday event, Genet is "turned inside out," "like a glove"; the whole world is involved, one touches the ineluctable. These erotic and occupational accidents have a meaning which transcends them, and, as has been said of love, "they are much more than what they are," because they manifest the "immortal enchantment" that begot a monster and killed a child. These metamorphoses fascinate him. He fears them and lives only for them. Apart from these brusque changes of Being, nothing in the world interests him. Having died in boyhood, Genet contains within him the dizziness of the irremediable, he wants to die again. He abandons himself to the instant, to the cathartic crises that reproduce the first enchantment and carry it to the sublime: crime, capital punishment, poetry, orgasm, homosex-

JEAN-PAUL

SARTRE

23

uality. In each case we shall find the paradox of the before and after, a rise and fall, a life staked on a single card, the play of the eternal and the fleeting. The very images and the words that designate them are of the same nature: from the bright scaffold spring roses, "lovely effect of death"; from the "ebony prick" spring white flowers, death and flowering of pleasure; a decapitated head falls from the guillotine, a black member shrivels and droops. If metamorphosis is a death, death and pleasure are metamorphoses. Thus, Genet lives outside history, in parentheses. He no more cares about his individual adventure-which he contemptuously calls the anecdote-than did an ancient Egyptian about his national history. He deigns to take notice of the circumstances of his life only insofar as they seem to repeat the original drama of the lost paradise. He is a man of repetition; the drab, slack time of his daily life-a profane life in which everything is permissible-is shot through with blazing hierophanies which restore to him his original passion, as Holy Week restores to us that of Christ. Just as Jesus does not cease to die, so Genet does not cease to be metamorphosed into a foul insect; the same archetypical event is reproduced in the same symbolic and ritual form through the same ceremonies of transfiguration. To Genet, as to the faithful of a religious community, sacred time is cyclical; it is the time of Eternal Recurrence. Genet has been, he has lived. As for the event that determined his fate, it has long since ceased to be a memory and has entered the category of myths, so that what has been written about the mentality of primitives might be applied to Genet word for word: "What we might call [his] 'history' is reduced exclusively to the mythical events which occurred in illo tempore and which have not ceased to repeat themselves from that time until ours."3 Genet has no profane history. He has only a sacred history, or, if one prefers, like so-called "archaic" societies he is continually transforming history into mythical categories. If we wish to understand this man, the only way to do so is to reconstruct carefully, through the mythical representations he has given us of his universe, the original event to which he constantly
' Cf. Mircea-Eliade, L'Eternel Retour.

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refers and which he reproduces in his secret ceremonies. By analysis of the myths we shall proceed to re-establish the facts in their true significance.

Genet is seven years old. The National Foundling Society has placed him in the care of Morvan peasants. Adrift in nature, he lives "in sweet confusion with the world." He fondles himself in the grass, in the water; he plays; the whole countryside passes through his vacant transparency. In short, he is innocent. This innocence comes to him from others--everything comes to us from others, even innocence. Grown-ups never weary of taking stock of their belongings; this is called regarding. The child is in the assortment, between two stools or under the table. He comes to know himself through their regard, and his happiness lies in being part of the stock. To Be is to belong to someone. If property defines Being, the quiet, sober steadiness of earthly possessions defines the Good. Good as good soil, faithful as a spade, as a rake, pure as milk, Genet grows up piously. He is a good little boy, a respectful and gentle child, weaker and smaller than his playmates, but more intelligent. He is always at the head of his class. In addition, he is serious, thoughtful, not talkative, in short, as good as gold. This Good is simple; one has parents whom one worships, one does one's homework in their presence, and before going to bed one says one's prayers. Later, one likewise becomes an owner of things and one works hard and saves. Work, family, country, honesty, property: such is his conception of the Good. It is graven forever upon his heart. Later on, despite the fact that he steals, begs, lies, prostitutes himself, it will not change. The local priest says that his is a religious nature. This child is the victim of a cruel hoax. If you say to adults that they are innocent, they get annoyed, but they like to have been innocent. It is an alibi, an occasion for sentiment, a pathway to resentment and all forms of "passdiste" thinking, a ready-made refuge for times of misfortune, a way of asserting or implying that one was better than one's life. The myth of childhood innocence is a bastardized, positive, and convenient form of the myth of

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

25

Paradise Lost. As saints, intercessors, and vestals of this pocket religion, it is the function of children, from the age of one to ten, to represent for grown-ups the original state of grace. Many of them find it to their advantage to become these sacred vessels, in particular those who are very secure, for example, the eldest of large families. But there are some whose actual situation contradicts the mythical virtues with which they have been adorned. Genet is one of these. He was given to believe, as were all the other village youngsters, that his soul was white; he therefore sees himself as white. Or rather, he sees nothing at all, but takes the grown-ups' word for it; they are able to discern his secret snows. This modest pride is going to determine his destiny; it consecrates, without his suspecting it, the priority of the object over the subject, of what one is to others over what one is to oneself. Nevertheless, the fact is that he lives his innocence, that he enjoys it, that it makes him happy. It would be wrong to paint Genet's childhood in too-dark colors since he has been careful to inform us himself that it was the most beautiful period of his life. And yet, from this moment on he lives in a state of uneasiness. The pious and lawful vocables which he has been made to learn are not very applicable to what he is and what he feels. But as he possesses no others, he can neither describe nor define his malaise. Unnamed, unnamable, marginal, unexpressed, this anxiety, which is faceless and without consistency, seems to him a negligible mood. Genet does not perceive it. Yet it expresses his deepest reality, which is contradictory, for his self-certainty contradicts the truth that he is for others. Innocent in general, he senses that he is suspect in particular. He is obliged, by error, to use a language which is not his own, which belongs only to legitimate children. Genet has neither mother nor heritage-how could he be innocent? By virtue of his mere existence he disturbs the natural order and the social order. A human institution with its birth-register and its bureaucracy has come between the species and himself. He is a fake child. No doubt he was born of a woman, but this origin has not been noted by the social memory. As far as everyone and, consequently, he himself are concerned, he appeared one fine day without having been carried in any

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known womb; he is a synthetic product. He is obscurely aware that he belongs legally to administrative bodies and laboratories, and so there is nothing surprising in the fact that he later feels elective affinities with reformatories and prisons. Being a fabricated creature, he will find his truth in sophism; being a child of miracle, he will be mineral or spirit; but he does not belong to the intermediate kingdom-to life. He will never care for sports or physical pleasures; he will never be gluttonous or sensual; he will never have confidence in his body. For want of having known the primordial relationship with naked flesh, with the swooning fertility of a woman, he will never have that tender familiarity with his own flesh, that abandon which makes it possible for others to reproduce within themselves and by themselves the indissoluble intimacy of mother and nursling. He is said to be "contrary to nature." But the reason is that, as far back as he can remember, nature has been against him. We others who issue from the species have a mandate to continue the species. Genet, who was born without parents, is preparing to die without descendants. His sexuality will be sterility and abstract tension. How does the little boy forsee his destiny? I cannot say, but there is no doubt that he already lives it in advance. Since his earliest childhood, the unknown mother has been one of the chief figures of his mythology. He both worships and hates her, smothers her with kisses and seeks to debase her. He is still fairly young when he addresses the Mettray Reformatory as if it were his own mother; he imagines that it appears to him "with all that is peculiar to women": tenderness, slightly nauseating stale smell emanating from the open mouth, deep heaving bosom, in short everything that makes the mother a mother. In short, the MotherGoddess, fertile and bountiful; better still, nature personified. Later, in his books, woman will appear only as mother. Genet disregards girls, except to turn them over to his handsome murderers who casually slaughter them. In fact, he peoples his works with guilty women whose children are dead and who mourn triumphantly, and if at times we do encounter amorous females in their forties, they too are mothers, incestuous and sacrilegious mothers, for they are laid by young lovers who could be their sons. But the theme of the "guilty mother" seems to be of recent

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origin in Genet's work. When he referred to the Reformatory in the past, that big woman was simply severe. At the beginning, he was the guilty one. Whenever the child tries to reach beyond the bureaucracy of which he seems an emanation to his true origins, he finds that his birth coincides with a gesture of rejection. He was driven out the very moment he was brought into the world. Later, it is all of society that will cast him out, but this social rejection is latent in the maternal rejection. The child senses that a woman tore him from herself, alive, covered with blood, and sent him rolling outside the world, and he feels himself an outcast. Ever since his birth he has been the unloved one, the inopportune, the superfluous. Undesirable to his very being, he is not that woman's son but her excrement. And we shall see how insistently, with what masochistic pleasure Genet will later compare himself to filth, to a waste pioduct. Psychoanalysts have observed that children often feel a parent's death to be a condemnation; the mother goes away so as no longer to see her unnatural son. The abandoning of a child signifies an even more radical condemnation. Is it a mysterious sentence that is punishing him for having committed the crime of being born? Is it a prophetic verdict that is making him pay in advance for future crimes? In any case, the judge is unknown, the child is ignorant of the charges and of the law, but the condemnation attacks his existence itself and eats away at it. Beneath the supposed innocence that adults have conferred upon him is hidden a sense of elusive guilt. Being nobody's son, he is nothing. As a result of his fault, disorder has wormed its way into the beautiful order of the world, a crack has appeared in the fullness of being. Being nothing, he possesses nothing. Whether judged from the viewpoint of Having or that of Being, he is equally at fault. He knows that he does not quite belong to his foster-parents, that the public authorities have loaned him to them and can take him back, and that consequently nothing his parents own belongs to him. For others, things are warm, alive, elastic, but if he takes them in his hands, they die. He can name them, count them, even try to use them, but their dense opacity becomes an absence; it is to the others that they address their homey smile. If, later on, in the presence of the handsome young men who fascinate him, he

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re-experiences that strange impression of being kept at a distance, it is because it has never left him: "Whenever I was close to an object he had touched, my hand would stop three inches from it, with the result that things, outlined by my gestures, seemed extraordinarily inflated, bristling with invisible rays or augmented by their metaphysical double, to my now sensitized fingers." It is the material possession of things that is forbidden him, and his life will be a long effort to dematerialize them, to construct with air their metaphysical double, which is all he can possess. Of course, he is neither cold nor hungry. He is given board and lodging. But there's the rub-he is given them. This child has had more than enough of gifts. Everything is a gift, including the air he breathes. He has to say "thank you" for everything. Every minute a gift is put into his hands at the whim of a generosity that leaves its mark on him forever. Every minute Genet moves a little further away from his foster-parents. All this bounty obliges him to recognize that they were not obliged to adopt him, to feed him, to take care of him, that they "owed him nothing," that he is obliged to them, that they were quite free not to give him what he was not free not to accept, in short, that he is not their son. A true son does not have to display his gratitude. He draws from the family purse, and it is his father's duty to bring him up. Deprived of everything through the kindness of others, Genet will later express his hatred of all generosity towards inferiors: Madame is kindl Madame adores us. She loves us the way she loves her armchair... like her bidet, rather. Like her pink enamel toilet-seat.And we, we can't love each other... Filth doesn't love filth. It's easy to be kind, and smiling, and sweet ... when you're beautiful and rich... But what if you'reonly a maid? A lady once said to him, "My maid must be pleased. I give her my dresses." "That's nice," he replied, "does she give you hers?" Cast-off of a society that defines being by having, the child Genet wants to have in order to be. However, the normal modes of appropriation are denied him. He will obtain nothing by purchase, nothing by heritage. The gift accords him a relative and provisional being but enslaves him forever to his benefactors.

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There remains work. But his work at school is also a gift; he receives general education just as later he will receive technical education; they want "to make a man of him." He helps in the fields, he helps at home. But this unproductive help confers no rights upon him. It will never pay for the care he is given; it is merely the expression of his gratitude. A vicious circle. One might say about the little Genet what Rougemont has said about Don Juan: that he is not enough in order to have-and also the opposite: that he has not enough in order to be. Different circumstances might have broken the circle, might have dissociated beirig from having; had he been placed in a working-class home, had he lived in an industrial suburb of a big city, had he been accustomed, at an early age, to hearing the very right of ownership challenged, or had his foster-father worked in a nationalized branch of industry, he might perhaps have learned that one is also what one does. But-height of misfortune-he had to be sent into the fields. Those who provided him with the first image of man were landowners. To that stern, that mineral race, the farmer and his land form an indissoluble couple; one has the property because one is the legitimate heir, and, vice-versa, one is shaped by what one has. The peasant acquires the silent immobility of his field. Our future burglar starts by learning absolute respect for property.

How will this abstract child react to his double exile? By a miming of being and having, in short, by playing games, like all children. He will have two favorite ones: saintliness and pilfering. Insufficiency of being prompts him to play the former, and lack of having, the latter. Saintliness first. He is already fascinated by this word, which he will later call the most beautiful in the French language. Though lie does not yet dream clearly of becoming a saint, he feels that a man is not worth much if he does not live on grasshoppers, if he does not die at the stake with a smile on his lips. This exaltation betrays his secret disorder. It is not unusual for young boys to have extreme tastes, for them to want to be perfect,

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to be everything, to be first in everything, but if they want to become great captains or great doctors, it is in order to be great among men and of a greatness recognized by men. In Genet's mysticism, however, we discern a rejection of the human order. An abandoned child, he takes revenge by admiring the children who abandon father and mother to follow Christ. It pleases him that the saints are answerable only to God, that they long to wrest themselves from the species and that they go counter to their most legitimate desires in order to achieve within themselves an anti-nature. His contempt for his body makes ascetism easy for him. For the same reasons we shall later see him make of love a form of torture. But, above all, he asks God to give him the rightful existence that men deny him. He derives at least one advantage from his orphan's solitude: his inner life is not socialized. No gaze disturbs his original privacy. A mother claims to know everything, she makes her child feel that she can read his mind, he thinks he is never alone. One evening, at dinner, it suddenly occurred to a little girl that her mother was silly. The child blushed to her ears and left the table, convinced that her parents had heard her inner voice. For a long time, our wicked thoughts will seem to us to be public knowledge; for a long time, we shall lie to others to the very depths of our being. But no family ceremony has consecrated Genet's union with his social image. Alone, without words, without a secret witness, he lives with himself in a state of concubinage. This solitude will later be mated; he will talk to himself, will worship himself, reinventing for his own use the archaic myths of the double and of the twins. For the time being, he takes it into his head to elect God witness to his secret life. God compensates for the absent mother, for indifferent society. In becoming an object of concern to an infinite being, Genet will acquire the being which he lacks. He will be a saint, since he is not a son. Another and even more amusing game: from time to time God turns his head away; whereupon soft, silent, unperceived acts flow from the child. Thefts. The budding saint robs his fosterparents and sometimes their neighbors. He robs them in all innocence, without remorse and without shame, and without ceasing to want to be a saint. In his eyes this petty pilfering does

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not count. He is hardly aware of what he is doing; his hands simply wander. Moreover, his foster-mother wasn't shy about filching. She was an "honest woman," of course, and remained honest while stealing. Honesty is an eternal essence which is not dimmed by accidental lapses. Besides, it is unimportant who suggested to him his first 'thefts; it is unimportant whether he first stole alone or with playmates. The essential point is that he thinks less of stealing than of engaging in imaginary experiments in appropriation. He experiments, as scientists say, "just to see." He is feeling his way with the aim of establishing forthwith a possessive relationship with things. Since an owner is a man who can use a thing without having to say "thank you," Genet will lay hands, in secret, on personal effects, tools, trinkets-in secret, so as not to have to thank anyone. He will use them in solitude. But using is, in this situation, only a means of possessing. The aim is not merely to take the object but also to assume the familiar, expert, offhand attitude which will indicate, to invisible witnesses, that he is its real owner. The servant girls Solange and Claire4 do not rob Madame. They put on her dresses when she is out, they adjust them, drape them, they primp and preen; they admire themselves in the mirror, they receive the real caresses of the silk and satin as an investiture. Their sensations and gestures designate them, in their own sight, as Madame. It is Madame's reflection that they see in the mirror, and each in turn becomes more servant-like so that the other may feel more mistress-like. It is only a game. But should the dress be spotted, should it be burned by an ash, the imaginary using of it will end in real consumption; they will roll it up, carry it away and destroy it-and thus becomes thieves. Genet moves from game to theft with the same fatality. It is highly significant that his first acts of larceny did not spring from hunger and covetousness. These are needs that care not a rap about mine and thine, that demand simply to be satisfied. Under their pressure the hungry man challenges, provisionally or definitively, the right of others to possess. In the case of Genet, however, his thefts, far from challenging property, affirm it. This child who has enough to eat but whom society
4In Genet's play The Maids.

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keeps at a distance wants, by means of a solitary act, to integrate himself into the community. He is aiming at the impossible. His austere and feverish quest for Being involves an imaginary satisfaction only. Thus is born that most peculiar nature which carries out a real operation whose aim and meaning lie in unreality. The act is performed in two stages. The first does not count for anyone, not even for the one who commits it. The mind clouds over, everyone dies then and there, even the little thief. "The culprit is your hand."5 In the absence of human creatures, a hand moves in the desert. When the people come to life again, nothing has changed, except that there is a hundred francs less in a purse and a hundred francs more in a pocket. The second moment, on the other hand, requires the most intense consciousness; Genet begins his spiritual exercises. Outcast of a consuming society, the rites which he celebrates in secret reproduce the cardinal act of the society which excludes him; he sacrifices, he consumes, that is, he destroys. An object goes up in smoke, a piece of fruit melts to water in his mouth, his pleasure blossoms and fades, it is going to die. It is this process of dissolution that constitutes the entire ceremony. By a fictive communion he touches, on this stolen food, on this evanescent and stealthy pleasure, his imaginary being as fair-haired-boy-rightfully-possessing-the-fruits-of-his-earth; he eats it. Like "the youngster too vacillating to be included in the breed ... who turned in on himself in the form of a slice of bread smeared with soft cheese, already the snow of peaks, the lily or other whiteness constitutive of inner wings,"6 he turns in on himself, he regards himself. The pleasure is real. Real, too, the chewing and swallowing. But their reality is of no interest in itself; it is there only to lend a body to the desperate efforts of appropriation. The important thing is to use these real facts as symbols. The legitimate owner puts out his hand, picks a piece of fruit, and eats it peacefully. Genet transfers to hlimself the owner's gestures and sensations so as to identify himself with the latter by an effort of mind. He takes in order to convince himself that he had the right to take; he eats as an actor eats on the stage; he is playing at possession; he em6 Cocteau,Anna la Bonne.

6 Mallarm6,Oeuvres

completes,p. 278.

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bodies the owner as Barrault embodies Hamlet. However, he makes, at the same time, a considerable effort to be his own audience so as to catch himself in the act of possessing. Need I say that he is always about to succeed but never does? It doesn't matter. He already finds within himself what the Marquis de Sade calls the "principle of delicacy," which makes him prefer nothingness to being, imagination to reality, tension to enjoyment. In short, his operation clearly falls into the category of poetic acts: it is the systematic pursuit of the impossible. No wonder that he wrote later that "the land of the Chimeras is the only one worth inhabiting" and that he quoted the following line from Pope: "Nothing is beautiful, save that which is not."7 But what appears with the first thefts is not only that straining of the soul toward something beyond the true which will henceforth characterize Genet's inner tempo, but also the particular nature of his poetic procedure. He never dreams. He does not turn away from the world in order to invent better worlds, he does not abandon himself to images, to musings. His imagination is a corrosive operation that is practiced on the real, an operation aimed not at evading but at transcending reality, and, as we have seen, at de-materializing it. Other children would have played at ownership with imaginary belongings. A pebble would have been a goldpiece. They would have made believe they were buying or eating. But our little thief wants to eat "for real," wants to have real pleasure in his mouth. Only, this real pleasure is neither wanted nor felt for its own sake; it is in the service of an impossible attempt to coincide, in the realm of the imaginary, with the essence of an owner of things. As a result, the whole system is de-realized, the very enjoyment becomes imaginary. The true pleasure of a thief becomes a fictive pleasure of a fake owner. Reality is worn so thin that one can see the light through it. To imagine is to give the imaginary a bit of the real to chew at. For thllisreason, Genet will be able to say of the chimerical Ernestine: "She never left reality." No imaginary without reality. It is in the real's movement to annihilate itself that the pale shadows of the imagination are embodied. And thereby, despite all the dif7This is not Pope's line but a translation of Genet's misquotation, frommemory,of a Frenchrendering.-Translator's note.

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ferences which we shall point out later, Genet's thefts are not so far removed from the object-poems produced by surrealism, the inner contradiction of which represents the pure instant of the falling-away to nothingness, through which can be perceived the eternal absence of another world. The thefts spread and multiply. Genet now robs neighbors. There is no more effective defense against the temptation to have everything than to own something. If you have only a crumb that has fallen from the table, your life will be spent in defending that crumb, in convincing others and yourself that it is the best of crumbs and that, in the last analysis, it contains the universe. Genet has nothing, which amounts to saying that he has an eminent right over everything. At this point there begins the systematic turning of the positive into the negative and the negative into the positive which later, carried to an extreme, will lead Genet to "saintliness." In the "land of the Chimeras," a conversion of signs is sufficient to change penury into wealth. This pariah whom the world rejects is secretly pursuing the eminent possession of everything. We have all known the kind of bright, healthy child with "winning gaze" and "frank smile" whom everyone takes for a little angel. One day we realize that he steals things. At first we simply can't understand, he seemed so nicel And then we feel personally offended. He fooled us, he's a little hypocrite. We start regarding his virtues as crimes; he assumed the appearance of honesty the better to deceive us. We do not perceive the air-tight partition that separates his virtues from his pilfering. We do not see that he lives on two levels at the same time. Of course Genet condemns theftl But in the furtive acts he commits when he is all alone he does not recognize the offense which he condemns. He, steal? When wliat he is trying to do is to win, in the teeth of destiny, a regular status, parents, property, when he is attempting to (diminish his secret guilt and draw nearer to those whom he admires? What is he really seeking? To be like others, nothing more, and precisely because others are good and just, because they are right to be what they are. The truth is that he is impelled by anxiety. At times he feels obscurely within himself a kind of budding anguish, he feels

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that he is about to see clearly, that a veil is about to be torn and that he will know his destitution, his abandonment, his original offense. So he steals. He steals in order to ease the anguish that is coming on. When he has stolen the cakes and fruit, when he has eaten them in secret, his anxiety will disappear, he will once again find himself in the lawful and sun-lit world of honesty. His conduct is not to be regarded as sneaky. He is really and truly well-behaved and virtuous, and there is only one life that counts for him, the one he leads in the presence of adults. Outside that life there is only a bad dream, a kind of nameless nightmare in which he sometimes feels he is going to be unhappy and from which he awakes very quickly, an obscure menace against which he has invented two exorcisms, the game of saintliness and that of stealing. I would compare this childish magic, which operates at the frontiers of nothingness, of sleep, to the fantasies of onanism rather than to anything else. To the child who steals and the child who masturbates, to exist is to be seen by adults, and since these secret activities take place in solitude, they do not exist. The truth is that little Genet has been taught an ethic that condemns him. He believes in it with all his soul, but by the same token he destroys himself, for this ethic of ownership casts him doubly into nothingness, as ragamuffin and as bastard. This is the key to his conduct and state of disturbance. In broad daylight he is luminous, honest, happy, but the more he asserts his happiness in the light, the more he ruins and tortures himself in the darkness. He is going to reduce himself to despair. If he steals, if he dreams of saintliness, it is not in defiance of peasant ethics, but because of it. He has recourse to the double compensatory activity because he is unable to liquidate a system of values that denies him his place in the sun. Shall I say he is unhappy? Not yet. In fact, one should emphasize the optimism and will to happiness that characterize this child in the depths of his heart. Not for a moment has he wanted to believe that there was no way out of the situation. Not for a moment does he imagine that he is condemned to poverty and bastardy-it would not be just, it would not be right. God will substitute for the absent mother, theft will substitute for property. A petty theft here, a slight ecstasy there, these are enough to

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maintain his inner balance. Quickly he returns to sweet, natural confusion. But while he is stealing in innocence, while he modestly covets the martyr's palm, he is unaware that he is forging his destiny. Translated by BERNARD FRECHTMAN