Saint Genet is Sartre's account of the roles enacted, the metamorphoses undergone, by Genet himself. It is easier to indicate Sartre's aims in this huge volume than to describe his procedure. What we have is not a process of analysis, nor even the retracing of such a process, but its results: an exposition of the totality of Genet, arranged partly chronologically and partly according to certain topics. As before with Baudelaire, Sartre commences with origins—Genet's parentage and childhood environment—looking for the decisive choices made in youth, and showing how these shaped the adult, how they formed Genet's conception first of himself, then of art and artistic activity, and so in time came to dictate the particulars of literary expression. Like the essay on Baudelaire, that on Genet ends with a prolonged inspection of the published works themselves, in which these are seen as a final splendid relic of the ontological disease, secreted by a creature in desperation. (p. 276)

In its general character Saint Genet falls somewhere between Sartre's philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, and his other essays, plays, and novels. It resembles Being and Nothingness in its daunting bulk and comprehensiveness; it actually adopts much of the apparatus constructed in the earlier book. Sometimes, indeed, it threatens to provoke a guffaw as it wheels up its massive ordinance of abstractions, and trains them on matters of the order of magnitude of the lice, crabs, spit, and excrement of a single human creature. But despite the panoply of exposition, the texture of the book is assertive and aphoristic rather than logical. There is little attempt to preserve the rigor of proof, to derive terms, argue closely, anticipate objections, or the like, and there is much use of anecdote, metaphor, and the enticements of fact. Sartre assumes a certain order, as he says, in the chaotically rich world of Genet's imagination, and proceeds to describe it in a freely discursive rumination on certain themes. (p. 278)

[The validity] of the argument as a whole depends on our response to the quality of Sartre's insight. If we are seeking "proof," if we stipulate rigor, judiciousness, intellectual hedge-hogging and flank-protecting, we had better apply elsewhere. Sartre, with a recklessness akin to Genet's, pushes his theses to their most flamboyant extremes. When they reach their limit and start doubling back on themselves, he coolly follows, beckoning us along the dizzying path. If we stop to ponder, we are likely to lose our footing. But Sartre has spent a lifetime listening to the inner rhythms of humanity. He has a "passion for understanding men." What he offers is a pattern of illumination. What verifies is the imaginative vigor of the construction, the degree to which it welds into an intelligible synthesis the bizarre career of its subject, and makes sense of his mystifying literary productions. Though Saint Genet is not a book for those unacquainted with Genet, the insight it provides extends well beyond Genet himself, into a dozen aspects of the relations between literature and the rest of existence. Sartre's ontological portrait is a vast complicated apparatus, ablink with multiple lights, which now dazzles us and now leaves us in darkness.

Certainly the machine creaks from time to time, and threatens to disintegrate in mid-air. Sartre can be absurdly literal, as when he tries to derive the quality of Genet's sexuality, and his whole life style, from the fact (if it was a fact) that he was caught stealing from behind. Even the strenuous reweavings of this thread into later contexts do not dispel the impression of wilfulness it makes. On the other hand, in his discussion of Our Lady of the Flowers as the "epic of masturbation" in which characters are invented and incidents prolonged solely for the autoerotic pleasure of the author, Sartre is not literal enough; he refuses to distinguish between the fantasies as experienced during masturbation, and as recollected later during writing. But Genet surely cannot write while masturbating. And if he writes later, the character of the fantasy necessarily changes: its power to sustain erection and provoke orgasm can hardly have the same importance. Lapses of memory must occur, requiring fresh details to be invented; new considerations must enter in to dictate the choice of the new details. And this is the kind of difference one would think crucial to understanding the genesis of a book so bizarrely engendered, assuming Sartre's account to be in its main outlines valid.

Sartre rarely tries to rescue his own formulations when they start falling, as they sometimes do, into something approximating gobbledygook: "By Evil one therefore means both the Being of Nonbeing and the Nonbeing of Being."… Such statements recall some of the more term-top-heavy utterances in Being and Nothingness itself, at which even sympathetic readers could not always refrain from hilarity. Certainly the humorlessness of Saint Genet is staggering, and matches the humorlessness of its subject. On occasion Sartre simply irritates. The repeated use of American Negroes as parallels to Genet cheapens the discussion; it beclouds the plight of the Negroes instead of clarifying it. Seizing on a few schematic likenesses to illustrate a general law, it ignores the differences that confer vitality; by substituting the abstract for the concrete, Sartre violates the reality of the Negroes' suffering.

On this topic we hear the cold-war Sartre speaking, the doctrinaire, communisant Sartre whose Marxism is capable of leading him into coarse judgments on current issues. On the other hand, far oftener in the book the Marxist Sartre speaks with magnificent authority and discernment. Sartre, generally, is brilliant when he expatiates on the human tendency to convert every aspect of existence into an expression of class. Among the most successful passages in Saint Genet are various quasi-Marxist digressions: on tools and utensils as extensions of human will; on theft as a "sacred destruction" and an impoverishment of the human world; on nature as a "social myth"; on argot as a poetic speech devised by outcasts who would perpetrate a rape on ordinary language; on aestheticism as a social revenge, whereby undesirables translate themselves to a realm of values that transcends society's own, and so escape its judgments. Some of these themes had been announced earlier in Being and Nothingness; Sartre now plays lordly and dazzling variations on them.

One especially rewarding notion is Sartre's view of Genet as not merely a totality, but a self-constituted totality—a being who sees himself as fixed, complete, and hence incapable of growth or change…. The characters in Genet's fiction, like those in his life, reduce themselves to types—the criminal, the sailor—differentiated from each other only by trivial gestures, never by substantial acts. Genet, indeed, is not concerned with acts, whereby men evolve into futurity, but with gestures, whereby they proclaim themselves what they already are (or wish to be), and so retreat into the past. For his characters Genet devises situations that will show them off in their roles. The essential nature of a gesture, according to Sartre, is that "it has already been made. It is not an operation that we invent as we go along: it is a unit that is already constituted, a totality that governs its parts, something like a dance step."… Hence the forbidding lack of spontaneity in Genet's life and works. Since the transfixing moment, nothing in it has been freely or newly experienced; all is re-enactment; all is studied, posed, and rehearsed; all accident has been instantly absorbed into the pattern of completed rite. (pp. 279-81)

[For Sartre, the] necessity of role playing is a tragic limitation, a testimony to the agonizing contradictions inherent in our nature, and a dismaying invitation to bad faith. Even when, as with Genet, the role constitutes a heroic response to an intolerable situation, it stems from profound inner derangement. Much of the force of Sartre's writing lies in its implicit effort to persuade men to give up their illusions, to face the roles they have assumed, so as to free themselves from falsehood and bring themselves into closer accord with the situations in which they find themselves. The age-old counsel of the impassioned moralist, Nosce teipsum, is as much the burden of Sartre's texts as it was of Socrates' talks.

Saint Genet, happily, has a happy ending. Through ten years of writing, Genet frees himself from his nightmares. He transfers them onto paper, and the paper drinks them dry. It turns them into objects, whereupon they hurl themselves back into the troubled minds of pious citizens, who, as they read, are forced to accept in themselves what they most viscerally loathe and fear. In the process Genet liquidates his own obsessions. Criminality and sainthood lose their feverish glamor for him; his theatricality subsides; his behavior contains fewer gestures, more acts. In a word, he authenticates himself. Sartre's finale urges us to read Genet for purposes of self-recognition. To use Genet properly is to utilize his books as therapeutic devices, as mirrors wherein we see a more virulent case of our own malaise. Genet having had the courage to live the ontological dilemma to its limits, in both its incompatible dimensions, we can, if we open ourselves to the ogres that haunted him, liberate ourselves from them as well. (p. 282)