Genet's Visions

Social Expatriate's Writings Reviewed

By Ruth Fischer

"The world made me into a whore; now I make the world into a brothel," the lethal heroine declares in Friedrich Duerrenmatt's "The Visit." Her bitter manifesto almost paraphrases Jean Genet, the French jailbird and homosexual prostitute turned novelist and playwright. In "The Thief's Journal" he wrote: "I repudiated a world that repudiated me."

But Genet, unlike Duerrenmatt's hapless lady, was not interested in a self-indulgent vendetta against a hypocritical society. Instead he took the brothels of his wretched past, turned them into metaphors, embellished them with bizarre reflections, and created an arresting literature of the social expatriate. And he did it all well, almost all with mirrors.

The Vision of Jean Genet by Richard N. Coe (Grove Press; $7.50), is the best analysis to date of Genet's work. Coe is a British professor whose earlier books are about Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, so he is no stranger to contemporary French writing.

HIS NEW study focuses on Genet's roots in the Paris underworld and on the crooked mirrors and convoluted images that have become his literary trademark. It picks up where Martin Esslin's articulate but brief critical essays left off, and it avoids the extravagant adulation of JeanPaul Sartre's "Saint Genet.'

Coe subtitled his work "A Study of His Poems, Plays and Novels." However. he devotes relatively little space to the poems, dismissing them as conventional and monotonous. (Even Sartre found them "flat and uninteresting.")

Genet's plays and novels aren't easy reading (we tend to regard his plays as reading because they are so rarely performed in this country). It would be reckless to claim that Coe's illuminations always make things come up crystal clear. Indeed, if The Vision of Jean Genet has a shortcoming, it is the author's occasional lapse into a

complexity

that rivals Genet at his murkiest. One metaphysical concept, it seems, begets another

FOR THE most part, Coe's discussion is lucid and fascinating. He says, for example, of Genet's mirroropposite concept of good and evil; "Judas is the mirror image of Christ; it was necessary that Judas should betray in order that Christ should be glorified. Their functions are inseparable." Coe believes, incidentally, that Genet is not an anti-religionist, that his target is institutionalized religon.

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The Vision of Jean Genet embodies two visions (not mirror images, this time.) One is Genet's iconoclastic vision of the universe; the other is Coe's perceptive vision of his challenging subject. For the casual reader. the book will provide insights into an art dredged up from the lower depths. For the serious Genet scholar, it will be an invaluable reference work.