BOOKS
well Sartre's enterprise serves Genet. This is because Genet himself, in
his writings, is notably and explicitly involved in the enterprise of self–
transfiguration. Crime, sexual and social degradation, above all murder,
are understood by Genet as occasions for glory. It did not take much
ingenuity on Sartre's part to propose that Genet's writings are an
extended treatise on abjection-conceived as a spiritual method. The
"sanctity" of Genet, created by an onanistic meditation upon his own
degradation and the imaginative annihilation of the world, is the explicit
subject of his prose works. Wha t remained for Sartre was to draw out
the implica tions of what is explicit in Genet. Genet has probably never
read Descartes, Hegel, or Husserl. But Sartre is right, entirely right, in
finding a relation in Genet to the ideas of Descartes, Hegel, and
Husserl. As Sartre brilliantly observes: "Abjection is a methodical
conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian
e'poche:
it establishes
the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without,
in the manner of the divine understanding. The superiority of this
method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain and pride.
It
therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal consciousness
of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the sub–
stantial
cogito
of Descartes, but to an individual existence at its highest
degree of tension and lucidity."
As I have said, the only work of Sartre's comparable to
Saint Genet
is the dazzling essay on Baudelaire. Baudelaire is analyzed as a man in
revolt whose life is continally lived in bad faith. His freedom is not
creative, rebellious though it may have been, because it never finds
its own set of values. Throughout his life, the profligate Baudelaire
needed bourgeois morality to condemn him. Genet is the true revolu–
tionist. In Genet, freedom is won for freedom's sake. Genet's triumph,
his "sanctity," is that he breaks through the social framework against
unbelievable odds to found his own morality. Sartre shows us Genet
making a lucid, coherent system out of
le mal.
Unlike Baudelaire, Genet
is free of self-deception. Genet lives evil for evil's sake.
Saint Genet
is a book about the dialectic of freedom, and is, formally
at least, set in the Hegelian mold. What Sartre wants to show is how
Genet, by means of action and reflection, has spent his whole life
attaining the lucid free act. Cast from his birth in the role of the
Other, the outcast, Genet chose himself. This original choice is as–
serted through three different metamorphoses-the criminal, the aes–
thete, the writer. Each one is necessary to fulfill freedom's demand
for a push beyond the self. Each new level of freedom carries with it a
new knowledge of the self. Thus the whole discussion of Genet may be
