Welcome back to the deep dive. I'm your host.
And today we are tackling a figure who is I mean,
he's basically a walking, talking paradox. That's
putting it lightly. We're looking at a man whose
life really reads like a collision between a
police blotter and a Ph .D. thesis. I mean, we're
talking about a vagabond, a petty thief, a repeat
offender facing a life sentence who just becomes
this celebrated literary icon of the 20th century.
Without even really changing. Exactly. That's
the thing. There's no redemption arc, is there?
No, not in the traditional sense. Usually you
get the story of the criminal who sees the light,
you know, and becomes a saint. Yeah. But our
subject today, Jean Genet. He didn't do that.
Not at all. He became a saint by doubling down
on being a sinner. Yes. He's the man who wrote
about the dazzling beauty of betrayal, yet he
ends his life as this fiercely loyal political
ally to marginalized groups. The Black Panthers,
the Palestinians. It's a messy, complicated,
and frankly, it's an explosive stack of sources
we have today. It really is. We're pulling from
several biographies, his own novels, which are
incredibly dense, and then historical accounts
of his activism. from the 40s all the way through
the 80s, plus the literary criticism. Can't forget
the heavy hitters. Oh yeah, John Paul Sartre
especially. So our mission today is really to
unpack this specific question. How did a self
-proclaimed criminal child manage to dismantle
societal values just by writing about them? And
why does his work still feel so relevant? Why
is he still the touchstone for understanding
power? masks, the concept of the outsider. To
get there, I think we have to look at the masks
he wore. Absolutely. The thief, the writer, the
activist. It's all performance in a way. Okay,
so here's our roadmap for the steep dive. We're
going to break his life into four distinct phases.
Phase one, the biography of an outcast. You know
how a foster kid becomes a career criminal. And
why that was maybe a choice. Right. Then phase
two. the literary explosion him writing these
absolute masterpieces from a prison cell which
is just an incredible story in itself then phase
three the theater of illusion he moves to the
stage and that's where he really starts to deconstruct
power rituals and masks and finally phase four
the radical activist his uh really surprising
turn as a revolutionary figure in the U .S. and
Middle East. It's a wild trajectory. He goes
from solitary confinement to, I mean, the absolute
center of global politics. It's an unbelievable
life. So let's start at the very beginning. Paris,
1910. Because the circumstances of his birth,
really, they set the stage for everything that
followed. They really do. December 19th, 1910,
Jean Genet is born. And that theme of rejection
is stamped on him. I mean... His mother was a
prostitute. She keeps him for seven months and
then she gives him up for adoption. He becomes
a ward of the state. And usually when we hear
abandoned child of a prostitute in early 1900s
France, you know, we immediately picture this
Dickensian nightmare. Oh, absolutely. Gruel,
beatings, sleeping in a coal shed, that whole
thing. Right. The tragic childhood trope. We
want to believe that society failed him. So he
failed society. It's a neat, clean story. But
the sources, they paint a very different and
I think a much more interesting picture. Genet
was sent to a provincial town, a place called
Elenion Morven. Okay. And his foster family,
headed by a carpenter, was, well, they were fine.
They were better than fine, weren't they? The
sources say they were quite good to him. They
were, by all accounts. And his main biographer,
Edmund White, confirms this. They were loving
and attentive. This wasn't a house of horrors.
And not only that, Genet was a star pupil. He
got excellent grades. Excellent grades. He was
the altar boy. He was smart. He was supported.
He was, you know, religious. The opposite of
the cliche. This is the part I find so fascinating.
If you have a loving home and you're getting
straight A's, where does the thief come from?
Why turn to crime? That is the million -dollar
psychological question, isn't it? Because despite
all that support, he started running away. He
started stealing. Small things at first. Yeah,
petty theft. Money from the house, items from
local shops. And there's a strong argument to
be made here that this was an existential choice.
An existential choice. What do you mean by that?
He decided to be bad. In a way, yeah. I mean,
think about it. He knows he's a foundling. He
knows his brave mother abandoned him. He feels
that at his core, by birth, he is already outside
the social order. OK, so he's already marked.
He's already marked. So if society says be good
and you feel society has already rejected you,
compliance just feels fake, you know. But if
you choose evil, if you choose to be the thief,
you're taking control. You're not just a victim
of abandonment anymore. You're the active villain
in your own story. That is such a powerful reframe.
It's almost like he's saying, you didn't cast
me out. I walked out first. Precisely. He's taking
ownership of his narrative. And boy, did he commit
to it. By age 15, after repeated acts of vagrancy
and misdemeanors, the system had finally had
enough. And that's when he's sent to Metre. Metre
Penal Colony. The name even sounds heavy. This
wasn't just a juvenile hall, was it? No. Metre
was infamous. It was a legendarily harsh place.
He was there from 1926 to 1929, so for nearly
three years. What was it like? It was a brutal
military -style institution. Hard labor, really
strict discipline. But, and here is that paradox
again, for Genet, this wasn't just a prison.
It was a university. The university of crime.
The university of identity. This period is so
crucial. It forms the entire basis of his later
novel, Miracle of the Rose. He didn't look back
on Maitre with horror. He mythologized it. He
romanticized it. Completely. He saw the hierarchy
of the tough older inmates and the younger weaker
ones as a sort of royal court. He transformed
the squalor and the violence into a hierarchy
of saints and sinners. So he's, what, 15, 16
years old, locked up in this terrible place.
And instead of being broken by the experience,
he's actively world building. He's turning the
bullies into kings. It cemented his identity
as a prisoner. He realized that this dark underworld
had its own codes, its own beauty, its own aesthetic.
And he wanted to be a part of it. He wanted to
understand it. So he gets out at 18. He's young.
He has a record. What's the next move for someone
like that? Well, he tries to escape the penal
system by joining the ultimate institution for
lost souls. Let me guess. The Foreign Legion.
The French Foreign Legion. The classic runaway
and join the army move. How did that work out
for a guy who clearly hates authority? About
as well as you'd expect. He joined at 18, but
it didn't last long. He was eventually given
a dishonorable discharge. For what? The official
reason was indecency. He was caught engaged in
a homosexual act with another soldier. OK, so
let's just recap here. He's maybe 18 or 19 years
old. He has no family. He's a convicted juvenile
delinquent. And now he's been kicked out of the
army for being gay in the 1930s. He is like zero
for three on the social acceptance scoreboard.
And this is what kicks off what we can call the
vagabond era. The next several years, he just
wanders across Europe. Where to go? Spain, Italy,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, all over. He's living
the life of a drifter. He's a petty thief. He's
a prostitute. He's a beggar. He's using false
papers to cross borders. It sounds kind of adventurous
in a movie sort of way, but the reality must
have been incredibly grim. Just cold, hungry,
constantly looking over your shoulder. It was
absolutely grueling. But again, with Sinead,
he isn't just suffering through this. He's observing
it. He's taking notes. These experiences became
the raw material for the Thies journal, which
he published in 1949. And in that book, he recounts
this life of wandering, not with shame, but with
pride. With a kind of sacred pride. And that's
a key distinction I really want to drill into.
Most people, if they lived that life selling
their body for a sandwich, stealing from churches,
they would either hide it or they would write
a misery memoir. Look how terrible my life was.
Please pity me. Right. Genet does the absolute
opposite. He refuses your pity. He wants your
envy, or at least your awe. He actively mythologized
his own degradation. He took the mud of his life,
the theft, the prostitution, the lice -infested
cells, and he sculpted it into something he considered
beautiful. He calls it the splendor of the outcast.
Which brings us perfectly into phase two, the
literary explosion. He returns to Paris in 1937,
and he's stuck in this revolving door of prison.
Right. He's in and out constantly. Theft, false
papers, lewd acts. He's a known nuisance to the
Paris police at this point. But during one of
these stints in prison, I believe it was Fransny
Prison, something shifts. He doesn't just sit
there and do his time. He starts writing. The
creative spark ignites. It's an amazing moment.
He writes his first poem, Le Condamné Amour,
The Man Sentenced to Death. Yeah. And get this
detail. He believed in it so much that he had
it printed at his own cost. While in prison.
While he was a penniless thief. He somehow finds
the money to print his own poetry. That is some
serious dedication. He's betting on himself.
And then comes the big one. The novel. Our Lady
of the Flowers, written in prison in 1944. I've
read excerpts of this. Intense is not the word.
It's not a standard linear story at all. It feels
more like a fever dream. That's a great way to
put it. It's a journey through the prison underworld,
but it's filtered through this incredibly poetic,
almost hallucinatory lens. And it has this fictional
alter ego, right? Divine. Yes, divine. And divine
is surrounded by these characters, other prisoners,
drag queens, pimps. With names that are just
fantastic. Give you some examples. Mimosa I,
Mimosa II, First Communion, and my favorite,
the Queen of Romania. The Queen of Romania. You
have to love the campiness of it. It is camp,
but it's gritty camp. It explores the specificity
of homosexual gestures, the secret coding of
that subculture, and the brutal hierarchy of
the prison. He's describing a world that 99 %
of the reading public knew nothing about. And
he's describing it with the language of a cathedral.
Precisely. The language of sainthood and martyrdom.
So he's writing these masterpieces on, what,
brown paper bags or whatever scraps he can find
in jail. How does it get out? How does the sophisticated
Parisian literary world find out about this,
for lack of a better term, dirtbag genius? He
sought out Jean Cocteau. The Jean Cocteau. The
famous filmmaker, poet, the darling of the avant
-garde. Very same. Genet somehow managed to get
his work to Cocteau. And Cocteau was just...
Blown away. He saw it right away. Immediately.
He recognized that this wasn't just prison scribbles.
This was high art. This was something new. So
Cocteau used his massive network of contacts
to get the novel published. So he has a champion.
A very powerful champion. But there is a ticking
clock here, right? Genet is still committing
crimes he hasn't stopped. Exactly. The writing
doesn't stop the thieving. By 1949, Genet had
accumulated 10 convictions. And under an old
French law at the time, once you hit that 10th
conviction, you were automatically facing a life
sentence of preventive detention. A life sentence.
It's basically three strikes and you're out.
But for France. Right. So the literary career
he just started was about to be conducted entirely
from a cell forever. But then this rescue mission
happened. And this is honestly one of the most
remarkable moments in all of literary history.
A group of prominent figures got together. A
supergroup. Jean Cocteau, Jean -Paul Sartre,
and Pablo Picasso. Just pause on those names.
Sartre, Cocteau, Picasso. That is the Mount Rushmore
of European culture at the time. You couldn't
assemble a more powerful cultural team. And they
petitioned the president of the republic to set
aside the sentence. And what was their argument?
They argued that Genet's talent was so significant,
so important to French culture, that he should
be pardoned. that his art transcended his crimes.
Imagine that happening today. Yes, Mr. President,
this man is a habitual thief, but have you read
his prose? It's magnificent. It really speaks
to the immense power of the intellectual class
in France at that time. And it worked. It worked.
The president granted the pardon. Jean Genet
never returned to prison after that moment. He's
free. The thief is now a celebrated author. So
let's talk about the content of these books that
saved his life. We mentioned Our Lady of the
Flowers, but there's also Funeral Rites and Corelle
of Brest. Funeral Rites seems particularly shocking,
even for him. Funeral Rites is a tough read for
many people. It was written for his lover, Jean
de Carnon, who was a resistance fighter killed
by the Germans in World War II. So on the surface,
it's a tragic love story, a tribute. Well, it's
Genet, so it's never that simple. He grieves
for his lover, yes. But the book explores love
and betrayal across political divides in a way
that is just jarring. He writes about the enemy
with a strange kind of erotic charge. He does.
And we have to address the elephant in the room
here. Sinead's relationship with France and with
the Nazis. Right. I saw in the notes that later
in life he admitted to something pretty damning.
He did. In a BBC interview in 1985, just a year
before he died, he admitted that during the occupation
of Paris, he was happy to see the French army
defeated. He said he supported the Nazis when
they invaded. Whoa. Okay. We need to parse this
very carefully. Was he a fascist? Did he believe
in the master race ideology? Most scholars and
the evidence in his work would say no, not ideologically.
It wasn't about anti -Semitism or Aryan supremacy
for him. What was it about? It was about his
hatred of the French state. Remember, the French
state was the entity that took him from his mother,
put him in Maitre, and threw him in prison repeatedly.
So for him, he operated on the principle that
the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if that
enemy was the Third Reich? Even then. It's an
extreme, almost pathological contrarianism. And
that's the tension in funeral rites. Exactly.
He elevates violent criminals, even Nazi collaborators,
to the status of icons, of saints. He celebrates
beauty and evil. He forces you, the reader, to
confront your own morality. He's asking, if I
can write a sentence so beautiful that it makes
you admire a monster even for a second, what
does that say about you? What does that say about
art? It's a trap. He's trapping the reader in
their own aesthetic appreciation. He's showing
you that your sense of beauty can be weaponized
against your sense of morality. Precisely. He's
showing that beauty and morality are not synonyms.
They are often at war with each other. So he
becomes the bad boy of French literature. He's
famous. He's free. And then something incredibly
ironic happens. He gets Sartred. Ah, yes. The
Sartre effect. In 1952, Jean -Paul Sartre, who
was then the high priest of existentialism, wrote
a massive analysis of Genet. It was called Saint
-Genet. Saint -Genet. It sounds like a canonization,
and in a way it was. How long was this book?
It was a 600 -page philosophical tome. I mean,
huge. Sartre analyzes Genet's every move, every
word. He explains Genet's existential development
from vagrant to writer. He basically takes Genet
apart like a clock to show the world how he works.
And how did Genet take that? I can't imagine
having a genius explain you to yourself is a
comfortable experience. He hated it. Or maybe
it's more accurate to say it paralyzed him. He
was so deeply affected by being explained. by
being turned into a philosophical object, a case
study, that he got severe writer's block. He
stopped writing. He didn't write fiction for
the next five years. That is the ultimate irony,
isn't it? Sartre helps save him from a literal
prison, but then imprisons him in a book. Genet
himself said he felt stripped naked. He felt
like he had been buried by Sartre. Once the mystery
of the artist is dissected and explained, can
you still create the illusion? He didn't think
so for a while. So he goes quiet, but he doesn't
stay quiet forever. When he comes back, he shifts
gears entirely. He moves from novels to the stage.
This brings us to phase three, the theater of
illusion. Right. And if the novels were about
excavating his own past, the plays were about
the structures of power itself. He became obsessed
with ritual, with mirrors, with masks. Let's
talk about The Maids. This is one of his most
famous plays, and he actually wrote it earlier
in 1947, but it really gained traction later.
The maids is a perfect example of this. It's
an intense study in role play and identity. You
have two maids, Solange and Claire. And when
their mistress is away, they perform this elaborate
ritual. What do they do? They take turns playing
the mistress and the maid. They wear her clothes.
They imitate her voice. They abuse each other
in character. They fantasize about killing the
real mistress. So it's like Downton Abbey on
a heavy dose of acid. That's one way to put it.
It's all about social identity. Who are you when
you're wearing the uniform versus when you take
it off? Is the mistress only powerful because
the maids agree to play the role of the oppressed?
It's about the performance of class. And then
he follows that up with the balcony in 1957.
This one sounds even more trippy. The balcony
is a masterpiece of the absurd. And it's so politically
sharp. It's set in a brothel. There's not a normal
brothel. How so? It's a house of illusions. Clients
don't come there for sex in the usual way. They
come there. to simulate roles of power. So you
go there to pretend to be important. Exactly.
A gas man comes to pretend he's a bishop. He
wears the robes. He hears confessions. He forgives
sins. Another man comes to be a judge, a general.
They're surrounded by mirrors, and they essentially
rent authority by the hour. That feels incredibly
relevant to the social media age, doesn't it?
Curating an avatar of who you want to be. It's
extremely prescient. But here's the brilliant
twist in the play. Outside the brothel. A real
revolution is happening. The regime falls. The
real bishop, the real judge, and the real general
are all killed or have fled. So there's a power
vacuum. Total power vacuum. So the chief of police
comes to the brothel and begs the clients, the
fake bishop, the fake judge, to go out onto the
balcony and face the crowd. They have to become
the figures they were only pretending to be in
order to save the system. That is brilliant.
It completely blurs the line between fantasy
and political reality. It suggests that power
is just a costume that anyone can wear. Jeanette
is saying that all authority is a performance.
If you wear the robe and speak the lines convincingly
enough, the crowd will bow. And then we get to
the blacks in 1958. Now, this sounds like his
most direct and maybe most controversial work
regarding race. It is. It's a critical dramatization
of negritude, which was the black identity movement.
The play presents a group of black actors who
are performing a ritualistic murder of a white
woman. And they're doing this before a court
of white authority figures. OK. But. And here's
the classic Jeanette twist. The white court is
played by black actors wearing white masks. So
there are no white actors on stage? None. It's
layers upon layers of performance. Yeah. He's
exploring the mask that black people were forced
to wear in a white -dominated society, but he's
also deconstructing it from the inside. He wasn't
trying to speak for black people so much as he
was exposing the complete absurdity of the racial
hierarchy itself. And I read that the production
history of this was huge in New York. This wasn't
some obscure arthouse play. It was massive. The
1961 New York production ran for 1 ,408 performances.
It was the longest -running off -Broadway non
-musical of the entire decade. And the cast.
My God, the cast. It was in it. James Earl Jones,
Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou.
Charles Gordon. That is a Hall of Fame lineup.
That's unbelievable. It was a powerhouse production.
And it shows that Genet's work, despite being
very French and very avant -garde, resonated
so deeply with the American civil rights struggle.
Yeah. They saw their own fight reflected in his
Hall of Mirrors. Which leads us perfectly into
phase four. Because Genet didn't just write about
these struggles from a cafe in Paris. He actually
went to the front lines. This is the part of
the story that always surprises people. The radical
activists. The shift really happens after May
1968. You know, the student uprisings in Paris.
Genet, who had been relatively quiet for a while,
suddenly woke up politically. He felt the energy
of the moment. He did. He started with an homage
to Daniel Cohn -Bendit, the student leader. He
started looking at the terrible living conditions
of immigrants in France. And then in 1970, he
gets this really unexpected invitation. From
the Black Panthers. From the Black Panthers,
yes. The Revolutionary Black Power Organization
in the U .S. invited this elderly white French
gay writer to come and visit them. And he went.
He didn't just go for a photo op. He stayed for
three months. He toured the United States. He
gave lectures at universities to raise money
for their legal defense funds. He attended the
trial of Huey Newton. He wrote articles for their
journals like Here and Now for Bobby Seale. He
was all in. I have to ask about the logistics
here. He's a convicted criminal in France. The
U .S. in 1970 wasn't exactly handing out visas
to radical ex -cons who wanted to hang out with
the Black Panthers. Oh, he was absolutely refused
a visa. He had been expelled or refused entry
back in 1968. So in 1970, he just ignored it.
What do you mean he ignored it? He flew to Canada
and crossed the border illegally. That is so
perfectly Genet. The law says, no, I'll just
find a backdoor. It's the thief's mentality applied
to international travel. It's exactly that. And
he felt this incredibly deep solidarity with
the Panthers. He saw the police brutality against
black Americans and recognized the exact same
machinery of oppression that he had faced as
a poor youth in France. He wrote very bluntly
about it. He said the Americans kill off blacks.
He saw it as a systemic extermination. And his
activism didn't stop in the U .S. After this,
he went to the Middle East. Later in that same
year, 1970, he went to Jordan and he spent six
months living in Palestinian refugee camps. Six
months, not just a visit. He was living there,
sleeping in tents. Living with the fedayeen,
the fighters, learning their struggle from the
inside. He even secretly met Yasser Arafat near
Amman. He was totally immersed in that world.
What was he looking for there? Was this just
some kind of radical tourism? I don't think so.
I really think he was looking for a new kind
of outcast community. In the refugee camps, he
found a people who were displaced, who were rejected
by the world, living on the margins, just like
the prisoners he used to live with. But with
a key difference. A key difference. Unlike the
prisoners, these people had a collective political
purpose. They weren't just individuals surviving.
They were a nation fighting for a homeland. And
this commitment, it lasted until the end of his
life, right? He was in Beirut in 1982 during
a truly horrific event. September 1982. The Sabra
and Shatila massacre. The Falangist militia,
while the area was under Israeli control, massacred
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinian Lebanese
Shiite civilians in the refugee camps. And Jene
was in Beirut when this happened. He was in the
city. And he was one of the very first Westerners
to enter the camp after the killing stopped.
My God, that must have been a vision of hell.
He described it that way. Walking through streets
piled with bodies. Swollen corpses, flies everywhere.
The smell. And he did what he does best. He bore
witness. He wrote an essay called Four Hours
in Chatila. And it's not journalism. It's not
standard journalism at all. It's a poetic witnessing
of horror. He describes the strange, almost theatrical
positioning of the bodies, the smells, the textures
of death. He forces you to look at the decay,
at the abject. It's almost like his entire life,
his entire artistic project prepared him for
that moment. He had spent decades finding the
humanity or the beauty in the abject, in the
dark corners of life. And now he was applying
that same unflinching gaze to a war crime. I
think that's exactly right. He later read this
text at a public event. in Vienna in 1983. It
was one of his last major public appearances.
And all of this culminated in his final book,
right? Prisoner of Love. Published posthumously
in 1986. Prisoner of Love is a memoir, but it
has this very different documentary tone. It
chronicles his time with both the Panthers and
the Palestinians. He wasn't inventing Divine
or the Queen of Romania anymore. He was documenting
the real life saints of the revolution as he
saw them. We should also mention he kept up the
fight in Europe, too. He supported Angela Davis,
wrote the intro to George Jackson's prison letters,
Soledad Brother. And back in France, he worked
with Michel Foucault and Sartre to protest police
brutality against Algerians. This was deeply
personal for him. He remembered the 1961 Paris
Massacre, where Algerian protesters were beaten
by police and their bodies thrown into the Seine
River. Chenet never forgot that kind of state
violence. He even expressed solidarity with the
Boeder -Meinhof group, the Red Army faction in
Germany, in 1977. Which again shows his consistency,
as unsettling as it can be. If the state called
them terrorists, Jeunet was immediately interested.
He wrote an article called Violence and Brutality,
arguing that the violence of the revolutionary
is always a response to the pre -existing brutality
of the state. OK, let's move into our final section,
what we can call controversy, cinema and pop
culture, because Jeunet didn't just exist in
highbrow literature and radical politics. He
bled into the, you know, the cool factor of pop
culture. Absolutely. And we have to start with
his own film, Ashonda Moore, A Song of Love,
which he directed in 1950. I've heard of this.
It was banned for decades, wasn't it? For a very
long time. It's a 26 minute black and white silent
film. It depicts two male prisoners in adjacent
cells. They can't see each other, but they find
ways to communicate. They share cigarette smoke
through a straw pushed through a hole in the
wall. They swing a garland of flowers on a string
between their barred windows. It's incredibly
erotic, very explicit for its time, and stylistically
just gorgeous. It sounds like a music video before
music videos even existed. It totally does. And
it influenced a huge amount of queer cinema.
Later, you have great directors adapting his
work. Rainer Werner Fathbender's final film was
Querelle, based on Genet's book Querelle of Breast.
And Todd Haynes' first feature, Poison, from
1991, is deeply based on Genet's writings. And
speaking of music... We have to talk about David
Bowie. It's a Jean Genie. I honestly never made
the connection until I read these notes. Jean
Genie? Jean Genet? It's so obvious now that you
see it. Bowie confirmed it himself in his book
Moonish Daydream. He called it a clumsy pun on
Jean Genie. He was absolutely channeling that
same androgynous pretty boy criminal energy.
And it didn't stop there. The Libertines, Pete
Doherty, that whole mid -2000s indie sleaze aesthetic.
Oh, totally. Pete already cites Jene as a main
influence. He references Miracle of the Rose
directly in his lyrics. The cover of his collected
journals is even inspired by the first edition
of Our Lady of the Flowers. That whole romanticized,
poetic, junkie -slash -criminal aesthetic is
pure Jene. Even Dire Straits referenced him in
their song Less Boys. He really became a symbol,
a kind of shorthand for gritty, intellectual
rebellion. He was the patron saint of the bad
boy artist, the ultimate outlaw. Before we wrap
up with his death and legacy, we have to touch
on that BBC interview one last time, the one
from 1985 with Nigel Williams. It's a fascinating
watch. It was just a year before his death, and
he's so combative. He completely refuses to play
the role of the nice old writer looking back
on his life. He compared the interview itself
to a police interrogation. He did. He was provocative,
difficult, and brilliant to the very end. So
how does the story end for him? Well, Jeanne
developed throat cancer. He was quite ill. And
he was found dead on April 15, 1986. Where? In
a hospital. A nice chateau in the countryside.
No. At Jack's Hotel in Paris. A modest, simple,
one -star hotel near the Gare de Lyon. There
is something so poetic and fitting about that.
He started his adult life as a vagabond, and
he died in a transient hotel room. It seems he
fell during the night and hit his head, which
was likely the fatal injury. And the hotel, to
this day, still keeps his photograph and books
there. As a small shrine. And his burial. Did
France finally claim him for the Pantheon alongside
their other literary giants? Not a chance. This
is his final act of rejection. He is buried in
the La Roche Christian Cemetery in Morocco. Facing
the sea. In a land that was once a French colony,
surrounded by the marginalized people he spent
his later years supporting. It was the only fitting
resting place for a man who never felt at home
in France. So let's try to land the plane here.
We've covered the crimes, the books, the plays,
the Panthers, the camps. What does it all mean?
Why does Jean Genet still matter today? I think
Genet matters because he forces us to confront
the other. Not just the concept of it, but the
reality of it. He doesn't just ask us to tolerate
the outcast. He asks us to admire them, to find
the sacred in them. He completely challenges
the foundation of our moral compass. Completely.
He suggests that in betrayal... In crime, in
the absolute refusal to conform, there is a kind
of holiness. Now, you don't have to agree with
him. In fact, his statements about the Nazis
make it very hard to agree with him wholesale.
But you cannot ignore the mirror he holds up
to society. He shows us that the people we lock
away have voices. And that sometimes those voices
are more eloquent, more profound, and more beautiful
than our own. That's a powerful takeaway. He
finds the saint in the sinner. And just as importantly,
the sinner in the saint. I want to leave our
listeners with one final provocative thought
to chew on. You mentioned his essay on the sculptor
Alberto Gicometti. And there's this incredible
quote from Jeannette about Gicometti's thin spectral
statues. He said they should be offered to the
dead and that they should be buried. It's such
a haunting idea. Art that isn't for the living,
but for the dead. Kind of funerary offering.
It makes me wonder about Jeannette's own work.
Was he really writing for us, the living audience
in the bookshops and theaters, or was he creating
these monuments, these novels, these plays, to
be buried alongside his own dead? Was funeral
rites really for us, or was it a grave good for
his lover, Jean de Carnon? Were all his books
just monuments to the ghosts of Maitre? That
is a beautiful and provocative thought. Perhaps
we are just grave robbers reading texts that
were meant for the ghosts. Something to mull
over. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive
into the complex, contradictory, and brilliant
life of Jean Genet. My pleasure. It was a fascinating
journey. And to our listeners, keep reading,
keep questioning, and we'll see you on the next
deep dive.