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SUSAN SONTAG
Sartre was much more concerned with specifically psychological issues:
Baudelaire's relation to his mother, his mistresses, etc. The present study
of Genet is more philosophical because, to put it bluntly, Sartre admires
Genet in a way that he does not admire Baudelaire.
It
would seem
that, according to Sartre, Genet deserves something more than per–
ceptive psychologizing. He merits philosophical diagnosis.
Please note Sartre's dilemma, because it accounts for the length–
and the breathlessness-of the book. All thought, as Sartre knows,
universalizes. Sartre wants to be concrete. He wants to catch Genet,
not simply to exercise his own tireless intellectual facility. But he cannot.
His enterprise is fundamentally impossible. He cannot catch the real
Genet; he is always slipping back into categories of Thief, Homosexual,
Free Lucid Individual. Somewhere Sartre knows this, and it torments
him. The length, and the inexorable tone, of
Saint Genet
are really the
product of intellectual agony.
The agony comes from the philosopher's commitment to impose
meaning upon action. The key notion of existentialism-liberty-reveals
itself in
Saint Genet,
even more clearly than
in
Being and Nothingness,
as a compulsion to assign meaning, a refusal to let the world alone.
According to Sartre's phenomenology of action, to act is to change the
world. Man, haunted by the world, acts. H.e acts in order to modify
the world in view of an end, an ideal. An act is therefore intentional,
not accidental. An accident is not to be counted as an act.
~either
the
gestures of personality nor the works of the artist are simply to
be
experienced. They must be understood, they must
be
interpreted as
modifications of the world. Thus, throughout
Saint Genet,
Sartre
continually moralizes. He moralizes upon the acts of Genet. And since
Sartre's book was written at a time when Genet was chiefly a writer of
prose narratives (among the plays, only the first two,
The Maids
and
Deathwatch,
had been written), and since these narratives are all
autobiographical and written in the first person, Sartre need not
separate the personal from the literary act. Although Sartre occasionally
uses some item which comes from his own friendship with Genet, it is
almost entirely the man revealed by his books of which Sartre speaks.
It is a monstrous figure, real and surreal at the same time, all of
whose acts are seen by Sartre as meaningful, intentional. This is what
gives
Saint Genet
a quality that is clotted and ghostly. The name
"Genet" repeated thousands of times throughout the book never seems to
be
the name of a real person.
It
is the name given to an infinitely
complex process of philosophical transfiguration.
Given all these ulterior intellectual motives, it is surprising how
