A Note On Genet.

"The memory with the quickest sting is of the toilet outside the house with the slate roof. It was my refuge. Life, which I perceived as distant and blurred through its shadow and smell [..] Life reached me as singularly sweet, tender, light,or rather lightened, stripped of its heaviness [..] Life seemed to float a bit a like a painted dream while I, in my own hole like a larva, took up a peaceful nocturnal existence, and sometimes had teh feeling that I was slowly sinking deeper, as in a sleep or a lake or a maternal bosom toward the spiritual centre of the world."

Genet





An emblematic passage; for could one not describe Genet's world as a world of light and unreality glimpsed furtively, perhaps greedily from behind a latrine wall: the combination of glimmering surfaces, glittering films and skeins, and the dark and humid interiority of the toilet. The latrine is also here the body, or a prosthetic extension thereof, the body as an engine of life and putrefaction at once, a clammy hut where the heart jet and the knocking of Death are indissociable, where customary oppositions between life and death glide into the one another. Genet inhales his own smells with the delicacy of the wine-taster, delights in the dark interior as well as the smooth exterior of the body. Flatulence and grace, balletic harmony and formless shit are not longer arranged on a ladder of aesthetic distinction.

The obscene is folded inside out and made beautiful. Beauty? It seeps out of a tube of vaseline, or flashes from a policeman's truncheon, as if promiscously indifferent to its object.

Genet compares the latrine to a confessional. There is something of the same 'economy' of release: All that is festering inside is allowed egress and recognition. The good Freudian child offers his shit as a gift, and so does the sinner offer his moral corruption to the priest. The anal child, or Genet, relishes his shit, a strange repulsive miracle, a slimy larval soul.

For Genet, the body, eroticised by the restless 'I' inside it, becomes a kind of soft prism through which the external world is perceived and received. Genet's true home is his body, his nomad's shell. The latrine, in turn, is the body's carapace. Everythign outside this febrile territory is foreign, remote, an object of curiousity or violent desire (the violence is needed to break through the screen separating him from the world of light and Others). Yet if he is detached from the world, its alien shapes and pungent colours, the inexplicable exchanges of its citizens, crouched on the beached margins, something seemingly contrary is also true; for often Genet seems the very addresee of the world - the details of the world mutely implore him to give them a voice, translate them into what will then become his style. Style gives a local habitation to the nude Things which, out there in the foreign world, transfix the vagabond poet. Genet is a magician who makes the world speak. So it can seem, at least. It is never entirely clear whether he is teasing out from the world its hitherto trapped language, or whether he is simply putting words into its mouth, as one puts flowers in a jar. He scarcely knows himself.