Genet by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76449-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

GENET’S fiction invites a backward glance. It was his greatest achievement and remains his strongest claim to immortality. Like many other crucial works of poetry and prose, his novels are formally overdetermined and semantically underdetermined. In each there is a clear form, usually based on three interwoven plots, cinematically intercut. He has a way of emphasizing his formal control over the material and placing himself in the foreground that points up his ambiguous relationship to his material, as both an apologist for his characters and a sadist who likes to show his control over them and his occasional scorn for them. Similarly, he alternately flatters and assaults his readers. This constant switching of sympathies toward his characters and passive-aggressive teasing of his readers sets up a rippling or even corrugated surface, not just of the prose but also in the reader’s expectations. The net effect is to highlight Genet’s power as a creator of his fictional universe. He is the ringmaster, the man at centre stage; he has made and can destroy his characters and even the level of reality (is this autobiography or fiction, chronicle or erotic fantasy, sociology or invention?). Everything shifts queasily according to Genet’s caprices.

Genet’s novels—which wield such disparate traditional fictional structures as suspense, mystery, foreshadowing, character development, progression d’effet and yearning for closure—also promise ethnological information, spiritual transfiguration and even a thoroughgoing Nietz-schean transvaluation of all values. These are all dynamic tensions calling for resolution. One could argue that they pose psychological and moral questions primarily to serve formalist ends—namely to lend momentum to an essentially static view of the world.

Genet is semantically underdetermined. We do not know what his novels or plays exactly mean—we are never sure of their ‘message’, which is all the more surprising in that he deals with very ‘hot’ materials: law and order, loyalty and betrayal, the competing claims of ugly virtue and beautiful vice, homosexuality, crime, the manipulation of public opinion through propaganda and the related question of public image-mongering versus private authenticity. Curiously, Genet was close to Sartre just when he was calling for a politically committed literature and an end to art for art’s sake. Genet’s greatest originality (that is, his greatest perversity) is that he deals with the biggest questions of the day more as a dandy than as a moralist. The significance of his work is highly charged but not easily paraphrased. This elusiveness became even more problematic in his last three plays.

The usual form/content dichotomy for analyzing fiction is not very useful then, since the formal excitement is induced precisely by our shifting sympathies for Genet as narrator and for Genet’s ideas and characters. But the distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’ might serve us better. The ‘story’ is the simplest, most straightforward reconstitution of the unadorned events, told chronologically; the story as you might recount it to a friend after you read the book. The ‘plot’, on the other hand, is the author’s often indirect and non-sequential method of presenting the narrative, his way

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