Volume 9, Number 3 · August 24, 1967
Black Chivalry
By John Weightman
Miracle of the Rose
by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman
Grove, 344 pp., $7.50
The French have a reputation for carrying intellectual attitudes to extremes and especially for being doggedly persistent in negativity. They are not motivated in this by any misty kind of Schadenfreude, but rather by intellectual glee at forcing their own logicality on that Janus-faced nonentity known as God or the Devil. 'If this is Your creation,' one can hear the French genius saying, 'we are damned well going to define it as we see it.' This is the common Frenchness linking the most dissimilar individuals—Jean-Paul Sartre, General de Gaulle, Paul Valéry, François Mauriac, the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, etc. As for Jean Genet, although he is a real person, he is such a perfect example of thoroughgoing negativity that he might almost have been invented as a synthetic demonstration of this tendency of the French mind. His system of values is as symmetrical as a French formal garden, and his sense of hierarchy and ceremonial detail is almost as acute as if he had been brought up under the ancien régime at Versailles. But what he presents us with is an inverted mirror-image of the 'average' world; his is literally an underworld or counter-world, a realm of night or hell which stands in black opposition to the moderately tragic operations of daylight existence.
Review, 2097 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |