Identify Books Concering Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
| Original Title: | Saint Genet, comédien et martyr |
| ISBN: | 0394715837 (ISBN13: 9780394715834) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Description In Favor Of Books Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
a selection from the beginning of the first section in Book I:?
THE MELODIOUS CHILD DEAD IN ME LONG BEFORE THE AX CHOPS OFF MY HEAD
Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of pass?istes. 1 An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant: he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this "break" is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual rebeginnings of an individual history. What matters is that Genet lives and continues to relive this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant.
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1
Pass?iste: one who is not adapted to the present age, who is not a man of his time, who "lives in the past."--Translator's note.
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To say "instant" is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life. One feels oneself to be one's own self and another; the eternal is present in an atom of duration. In the midst of the fullest life, one has a foreboding that one will merely survive, one is afraid of the future. It is the time of anguish and of heroism, of pleasure and of destruction. An instant is sufficient to destroy, to enjoy, to kill, to be killed, to make one's fortune at the turn of a card. Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant which has lost none of its virulence, an infinitesimal and sacred void which concludes a death and begins a horrible metamorphosis. The argument of this liturgical drama is as follows: a child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child. One would have to speak of resurrection, to evoke the old initiatory rites of shamanism and secret societies, were it not that Genet refuses categorically to be a man who has been resuscitated. 2 There was a death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man. If he appears to be still alive, it is with the larval existence which certain peoples ascribe to their defunct in the grave. All his heroes have died at least once in their life.
"After his first murder, Querelle experienced the feeling of being dead. . . . His human form--what is called the envelope of flesh-continued nevertheless to move about on the surface of the earth."
His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern his future death, his being-to-die, but rather his being-dead, his death as past event.
This original crisis also appears to him as a metamorphosis. The well-behaved child is suddenly transformed into a hoodlum, as Gregor Samsa was changed into a bug. Genet's attitude toward this metamorphosis is ambivalent: he both loathes it and yearns for it.
List Appertaining To Books Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
| Title | : | Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr |
| Author | : | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 625 pages |
| Published | : | September 12th 1983 by Pantheon (first published 1952) |
| Categories | : | Biography. Philosophy. Nonfiction. Cultural. France |
Rating Appertaining To Books Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
Ratings: 4.02 From 341 Users | 15 ReviewsColumn Appertaining To Books Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
Fantastic - I learned a lot about myself reading this book - he starts with the hypothesis that the artist (in this case, Genet) is someone that may have had their concept of the world shattered in childhood, and spends the rest of their life trying to reassemble those shattered pieces through the journey of creative acts. A great study of one of my favorite writers, and perhaps one of the clearest prose works Sartre ever wrote.Reading Saint Homicide put me in mind of this "biography" of Jean Genet by Sartre, which I had read in college and was surprised to find I still had on one of my bookshelves. Despite finding the book heavily marked up with underlined passages and notes and symbols in the margins, I find it almost completely unreadable now. Reading Sartre, like reading Heideggar, requires learning the foreign language of their terminology, otherwise it is gobbledygook. And even then, who knows? Although, the
Quite a long read - perhaps a bit long-winded - on Sartre's relationship with Genet. Mainly concerned with Sartre's concerns for the underdog. Very good on how Genet forged himself a sense of self in a world that had rejected him.
A wonderful book about queerness and crime and (marginally) writing as an entry into or escape from the world.Sartres prose is intensely circular but hey thats dialectics.
within the first 70 pages, this book helped me to decipher my complete modus operendi in terms of socialization. But, more importantly, it's a biographical dissection of a critical and controversial 20th century figure whom Sartre regards as the existential man-- within him, we can find elements of the existensial crisis in us all. Brilliantly written but incredibly dense, its something I keep returning to but cannot read continually without drying out or, conversely, exploding, my brain.
within the first 70 pages, this book helped me to decipher my complete modus operendi in terms of socialization. But, more importantly, it's a biographical dissection of a critical and controversial 20th century figure whom Sartre regards as the existential man-- within him, we can find elements of the existensial crisis in us all. Brilliantly written but incredibly dense, its something I keep returning to but cannot read continually without drying out or, conversely, exploding, my brain.
I heard this described once as a biography of Genet. It isn't really that at all. It's a chance for Sartre to philosophize about the idea of Genet. VERY dense book. It's about 10% biography, 20% literary criticism and 110% philosophy. How did I come up with 140%. This is Sartre. Dude's brain was cranked to 11.
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