Genet, Jean (Vol. 5) - Genet, Jean 1910–
Genet, Jean 1910–
Genet is a French playwright, novelist, and poet; but, Sartre has written, his eternal essence consists in his being a thief. After the early prison poems, Genet wrote the autobiographical novels, deliberately antisocial accounts of homosexual love and criminal violence which led some to call him a "black magician," before turning to drama, for him the perfect literary form for the incantatory expression of dream and ritual. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-16, rev. ed.)
The concept of sovereignty has always obsessed the imagination of Genet. Sartre believes that Genet chose evil because that was precisely the realm in which he could hope to reach a status of sovereignty. In Miracle de la Rose, in those passages where the character Harcamone is meditating in his cell, the ideal of sovereignty is ascribed to the assassin who is about to be executed. The state of evil is the reverse of the state of holiness....
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