BOOKS
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
SAINT GENET. By Jean-Paul Sortre. Translated by Bernard Frechtman.
George Braziller. $8 .50.
I t is hard to get over one's exasperation with Sartre for this
cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne
aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness. One
knows that the book began as an introductory essay to the collected
edition of Genet's works published by Gallimard-some fifty pages,
perhaps-and grew to its present length, whereupon it was issued in
1952 as a separate volume, the first, of the Collected Genet. Who has
read all of
Saint Genet
in French, who will read it through in English,
I don't know. Familiarity with Genet's writings in prose, most as yet
untranslated, is surely essential. Even more important, the reader must
come equipped with sympathy for Sartre's way of explicating a text,
without guidelines. Sartre breaks every rule of decorum established for
the critic; this is criticism by immersion. The book simply plunges into
Genet; there is little discernible organization to Sartre's argument;
nothing is made easy or clear. One should perhaps be grateful that
Sartre stops after six hundred and twenty-five pages. The indefatigable
act of literary and philosophical disembowelment which he practices on
Genet could just as well have gone on for a thousand pages. Yet,
Sartre's exasperating book is worth all one's effort of attention.
Saint
Genet
is not truly one of the great, mad books; it's too long and too
academic in vocabulary for that- But it is crammed with stunning and
profound ideas.
What made the book grow and grow is that Sartre, the philosopher,
could not help (however reverentially) upstaging Genet, the poet.
What began as an act of critical homage and recipe for the bourgeois
literary public's "good use of Genet" turned into something much
grander. Sartre's enterprise is really to exhibit his own philosophical
style--compounded of the phenomenological tradition from Descartes
through Husserl and Heidegger, plus a liberal admixture of Freud and
revisionist Marxism-while writing about a specific figure. Sartre gives
his enterprise the unfortunate name of "existential psychoanalysis,"
but never mind about that. In this instance, the individual whose acts
are made
to
yield the value of Sartre's philosophical vocabulary is the
foundling-homosexual-whore-writer-thief, Genet. In a previous effort at
"existential psychoanalysis," published in 1947 and kept to a more
digestible length, the individual was Baudelaire. In this earlier essay,
