Volume 39, Number 19 · November 19, 1992
Genet's Last Stand
By Clifford Geertz
Prisoner of Love
by Jean Genet, translated by Barbara Bray, Introduction by Edmund White
Wesleyan University Press, 375 pp., $24.95
Max Weber once said of a minor German poet, irregular, drifting, and a friend of his, who had gotten himself involved in some of the scruffier aspects of popular revolt, that God had led him into politics in a fit of malice. Literary figures, especially romantical ones, who involve themselves directly in the dirty-hands world of collective violence (as opposed to the much larger number who harangue meetings, disgorge newspaper articles, get up petitions, or display themselves in demonstrations) do not as a rule come off very well. The sort of person given to staging extravagant parabolical dramas or writing out involute private imaginings is usually at a bit of a loss among artisans of more practical fantasies; or, often enough, their victim. The danger of taking oneself too seriously or one's comrades in arms not seriously enough, confusing words with bullets or aestheticizing blood, is all too real.
Review, 3341 words
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