Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr

"It is a reference to the third-century martyr Saint Genestus, the patron saint of actors, who is known in French as Genêt. He was supposedly an actor who converted to Christianity on stage during a play that mocked Christian rituals. Sartre is drawing parallels between the life of Genet and the mythology surrounding this saint. He’s not necessarily holding Genet up as a hero. I have to admit this is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It’s a biography, as you say, of Genet, who was quite famous at the time as a novelist, a playwright, and a poet. But he wasn’t hugely famous. Sartre had been asked to write a preface to a collected works of Genet, and what he ended up writing was a 700-page psychoanalytic tome. He didn’t believe in the particular Freudian structure of the mind, but he did think that a lot of what Freud described about patterns of behaviour was correct. He just thought Freud had developed the wrong theory of the mind to account for it. In fact, he thought Freud’s theory of mind failed to explain it. That’s right. He was trying to present an analysis of Genet’s life and all the details of it as if in the first person. But on the other hand, he does sometimes describe the book as a true novel. There are various places in it where he describes some event, and you’re reading it thinking, ‘how could you possibly know this event took place like this when Genet was ten years old?’ And then Sartre quite disarmingly writes ‘oh, well maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that, but something like this happened.’ He did talk to Genet and studied his writings, which were strongly autobiographical. But to some extent what he was doing with Saint Genet was not just presenting a biography of a particular person, but rather showing how a whole person, with all of their tastes and mannerisms and works, can actually be a manifestation of a single underlying project. In a way, it’s a description of a possible person, a description of how the theory can be coherent and give a story about a person. In that way it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true about Genet; that’s what I think he means when he deflects with those disarming comments. That’s certainly right. It’s a much more lucid piece of writing. Some passages in Being and Nothingness are great, but some of them are absolutely tortuous. In many respects, what he’s doing in Saint Genet is rethinking the existentialism of Being and Nothingness because he has abandoned the idea of radical freedom because he’s been persuaded finally that Beauvoir is right about sedimentation. That’s why he cites The Second Sex a few times in Saint Genet . It’s also the first time really that he’s paid much attention to childhood: there is a lot about Genet’s formation throughout his childhood; whereas in Being and Nothingness it’s as though we simply appear out of nowhere as fully formed adults. Obviously later he wrote The Words which is a short autobiography. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for that, but went on to reject the prize. So, he did later devote time to thinking about childhood and in particular his own childhood… It’s probably the definitive statement of Sartre’s existentialism. His existentialism developed until this point, because of the tensions between radical freedom and sedimentation that we’ve discussed. Once he had finally accepted the theory of sedimentation, he didn’t want to throw out his existing existentialism, but could see that this alteration in the metaphysical theory had far-reaching ramifications. So, this is all thoroughly rethought throughout Saint Genet . The book also weaves together various threads he’d been working on in the previous decade. The work on imagination in particular, and the way it developed in Genet’s own aesthetic sensibilities, the way it came out in his poetry and prose – these were all things Sartre had talked about in different ways, but he had never tried to coalesce them all into a single picture before. That may well be true, although to be honest there might be other reasons why it wasn’t mainstream. It is just such an odd book. You wouldn’t necessarily intuitively think that some great philosopher’s definitive work might be found in the biography of a playwright and poet. Admittedly Being and Nothingness is a strange book too, although that’s strange in a way that’s fairly familiar from the history of philosophy."