Tempus fugit. A
fortiori. Time flies. With stronger reasons. On 19th December 1910,
a supercilious penman named Jean Genet was born in Paris , and with his heretical pen, stultified
all the vulpine and lupine hegemony of the jackanapes of his contemporary
literary world. A thousand thousand gun salutes to this plenary Quixotic for
the veracious proclivity of his adroit pen, on behalf of us, on his birth
centenary.
An illegitimate child abandoned by
his mother, Genet began to write while imprisoned for burglary. Apart from his
first novel ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ (1944) portraying an underworld of thugs,
pimps and hustlers; and the ‘Miracle of the Rose’ (1945-46) telling of his
adolescence at a notorious reform school; perhaps his most demented polemic is
‘The Thief’s Journal’ (1949) recounting his life as a tramp, pickpocket and
prostitute. Genet does not write about homosexuality. He writes as a homosexual
--- sans defense, sans justification, sans repentance or a plea for social
understanding. His taste and activity as a thief were related to his
homosexuality that had set him apart in solitude in his society. To him the
prison embodied freedom --- freedom from heterosexual taboos, freedom from
bourgeois preoccupations of glory and wealth, and it united him in abjection
with the humiliated and the deprived sections of humanity. He became a leading
figure in avant-garde theatre with just five plays --- ‘Deathwatch’, ‘The
Maids’, ‘The Balcony’, ‘The Blacks’, and ‘The Screens’ --- stylized
Expressionist dramas designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing
its hypocrisy and complicity in an exploitative social order. Admired by the
Existentialists, he was the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre’s historic and
adulatory biography ‘Saint Genet’ (1952).
Today,
as we should doff our hats verily in honour to this genius; we also must vow to
proscribe every single puerile and jejune pen-shit of each such asinine writer,
who itself is an astringent bane, a stigma, an onus --- in the literary
territory. Thereby, in culmination, heralding an adage for the non-cerebral
mediocre readers before choosing books to buy : “Caveat emptor.” Let the buyer
beware!
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