Jean Genet Enters the Pléiade: A Scandalous Canonization

Jean Genet, the French writer and playwright once condemned as a homosexual pornographer and former death row inmate, has received the most unexpected consecration: inclusion in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The complete theatrical works, including unpublished plays, critical texts, a chronology, and selected correspondence, have been published under the direction of Albert Dichy, with an introduction by Michel Corvin. Genet's arrival on the French theater scene in the 1950s, with productions like 'Les Nègres' (directed by Roger Blin at the Théâtre de Lutèce in 1959) and 'Les Paravents' (at the Odéon-Théâtre), caused a mental shock more violent than that of Brecht. Unlike Brecht's familiar Marxist ideology, Genet's work offered no footholds, with its omnipresent sexual themes, obscene and poetic language, and rejection of conventional politics. He sought to 'inhumanize' himself, aiming for a 'fête' and 'féerie' that would 'signify nothing' rather than nihilism. His theater, he wrote, is 'a place near death, where all freedoms are permitted.' The publication by Gallimard in the Pléiade series marks a historic shift in the reception of an author once reviled as a thief, pornographer, and homosexual.