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Jean Genet-Introduction

Jean Genet was a French novelist and playwright who began writing in prison in the 1940s. Some of his major works include the novels The Miracle of the Rose, Querelle of Brest, and Our Lady of the Flowers. As a playwright, his notable plays include The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks. Genet explored themes of fantasy, illusion, imagination, and the subversion of power through characters who were often socially marginalized and trapped in restrictive environments. His works used innovative dramatic techniques to blur reality and illusion.

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257 views

Jean Genet-Introduction

Jean Genet was a French novelist and playwright who began writing in prison in the 1940s. Some of his major works include the novels The Miracle of the Rose, Querelle of Brest, and Our Lady of the Flowers. As a playwright, his notable plays include The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks. Genet explored themes of fantasy, illusion, imagination, and the subversion of power through characters who were often socially marginalized and trapped in restrictive environments. His works used innovative dramatic techniques to blur reality and illusion.

Uploaded by

Maryum Tariq
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Introduction

• Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910 and his path of becoming a
playwright began during a prison sentence in the 1940s. Orphaned
and sent into state care prior to his first birthday, Jean Genet grew
up in the care of a family of artisans in rural France.
• His pattern of petty thievery ensured he spent several years in the
notorious Mettray Penal Colony before joining the French Foreign
Legion at the beginning of World War II. Upon returning to Paris and
continuing his life of petty crime, Genet was imprisoned again,
where he began writing the first of five successful novels. On the
cusp of Genet’s receiving a life sentence, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul
Sartre took it upon themselves to lobby for his successful release,
which led to a long career of writing.
His Works

• In 1946 his first novel, The Miracle of The Rose, was published, quickly
followed by Querelle of Brest in 1947, Our Lady of the Flowers in 1948,
the critically acclaimed The Thief’s Journal, and Funeral Rites, both in
1949. During that year he also produced a silent picture, A Song of Love
(“Un chant d’amour”).
• Genet’s first play, Deathwatch, experimented with the idea of murderer
as hero. His second dramatic work, and also his first critical success as a
playwright, was The Maids, written in 1947 when he was not yet 40.
• The next decade of his career was dedicated to the theater, producing
The Balcony in 1957, The Blacks in 1959, and The Screens in 1964. He
wrote two pieces, Splendid’s and Her (“Elle”), during this period, which
were not produced in his lifetime.
Works

• In 1952 Genet became the subject of Jean Paul Sartre’s lengthy and
adoring essay Saint Genet and his place in the forefront of French
literature was solidified. Genet’s last novel, Prisoner of Love, is a
memoir of his encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black
Panthers, and was not published until after the author’s death. By
the late 1960s Genet was convinced he had “nothing else to say” in
novels, plays, or film.
• Yet, he supported the Paris student uprising in 1968, and in 1970,
became a spokesperson for the Black Panthers. Later, he took up the
cause of the Palestinians and visited Beirut in 1982. Jean Genet died
in Paris in 1986.
Themes

• Fantasy and Illusion (Imitation of Madame) His theatrical works are often “plays within
plays,” where the audience is asked to consider who is really telling the story, whether central
characters are imagining their lives or living them, and always questioning who, if anyone, is
telling the truth.

• The play is amazing because it proposes the invention of theater by people who don’t own
theater—the mistress owns the theater and she owns culture. The maids live entirely outside
of that; they live in a lit-tle attic and everything they know has been taught to them by other
people. They only exist in order to be slaves and they are completely dispossessed—they
have to invent and make up a new reality in order to get some sense of self.

• Fantasy becomes reality and that is the condition of these two women, they are trafficking in
fantasy. They invent these fantasies to free themselves and feel alive. They accuse each other,
“I invented this story and you used it all up on yourself, you got off on it—that story was so
impor-tant to you, you were prepared to betray me on it.” That is one of the absurd and
insane things about the play, these women are arguing over things that are so concrete to
them yet they don’t exist. They’ll die over them, but they don’t exist!
• Imagination/ Acting - (Perform roles beyond reach) There is a line Solange has,
“My jet of spit is my spray of diamonds.” All of Genet is in this line: the lowest of
the low, the poorest, have nothing but their spit and nothing but their hate. They
don’t have the diamonds of the wealthy like their mistress—spit is transformed
into diamonds—that is an act of theater-making.

• Notions of destabilization and disruption. As the idea of play, Maids, was actually
taken from a real-life murder of a mistress and her daughter by two female
servants.

• The subversion of power—of servant killing employer—is a theme that seemed to


resonate with Genet and would be explored again and again in his future works
too.
Themes and Setting

Genet’s other early works, Deathwatch and The Balcony, also explore
themes of:
• Freedom
• Powerlessness
• Rejection
• Dense emotional expression
• often with conflicted, sexually subversive characters trapped in worlds
that do not accept them.
• If we look at the settings, Genet used prisons, brothels, and bedrooms in
each of these plays to explore his characters’ complex relationship with
power, sex, and identity. Each of these settings, well understood by
Genet from personal experience, often blurred the lines between
illusion and reality, individual and society, truth and narrative.
Dramatic Theory and Techniques

• Theatre of Perverse (language in his plays, deviant, illusion-stage


poetry)
• Theatre of Absurd
• Socio-Politically charged plays (like in the play the maids the rise of
the lower class and the treatment of the servants at the hands of
upper class)
• Meta theater (performance of Claire and Solange)
• Metaphoric Imagery (the adaptation of different roles is used as
images and symbols of their wants and needs)
• Rhythmic Dramatic Sequence (the shift between several roles is
done swiftly) which also points to the unreliability of the narrator.
Final Comments

• Genet considered art and artistic creation to be deeply


personal poetic experience based on emotional and aesthetic
commitment and alien to any form of didacticism. he had
strong reservation about Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’
• Shows shifts in the Paradigm of Culture- He in the plays points
out what the culture constitutes and what it eliminates so his
plays question the dominant cultural positions and through
his dramaturgy focuses on those areas which have been
subsumed within the established. ” A conception of culture
that would lead the audience to radical social change”

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