The Truth of Paradox
WELLWARTH, GEORGE E.
The Truth of Paradox THE VISION OF JEAN GENET By Richard N. Coe Grove Press. 343 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by GEORGE E. WELLWARTH Associate Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University;...
...These are merely carpings with Coe's method...
...What one sees, not what one is, is the important thing...
...Coe tells us: "That there is a mysterious and irremediable pattern of predestination in the universe is something that Genet has never doubted...
...the convict, like the wartime traitors who saw Hitler as nearer to God than the Christian saints, is active and petulant in his resistance...
...It becomes necessary to point out that Genet is a thinker whose means fascinate though his ends are wrong...
...Like the judge in The Balcony whose existence depends on the existence of crime, or the bishop in the same play whose existence depends on the sins that it is his function to absolve, Genet needs society—the comfortable, compact, self-satisfied majority—to press against...
...The core of Genet's thought lies in his belief that there can be no reality within society, that anyone who acts within the structure of society (and here is the paradox) is literally unreal...
...While he sometimes makes use of absurdist means, his purpose is quite different —i.e., he has a purpose: "For Ionesco, Aristotelian non-sequiturs become 'pataphysical' syllogisms...
...Among the more interesting contributions Coe makes to the understanding of Genet is his insistence that the playwright does not belong to what Martin Esslin has rather facilely called the "absurdist" school of drama...
...co-editor, "Modern French Theater' and "Postwar German Theater" Richard N. Coe's The Vision of Jean Genet is the most elaborate and successful exegesis of the complexities of Genet's thought that has yet appeared...
...But Coe recognizes that they only become virtues "once you look at them in the mirror...
...He has become a member of another organization and is clearly no more free than the man in society...
...Judas Iscariot is, of course, the supreme example of the Genet hero...
...The anchorite is the true antithesis of the social being, though his resistance is only passive and exemplary...
...Although Coe occasionally falls into the Sartrian trap of making his explanations of Genet more inscrutable than the original, by and large his book is extremely lucid and readable...
...A writer as skilled as Genet is not blatantly obvious and knows how to disguise the repellence of his ideas in the seductive garb of an ingenious logical system...
...Here, it seems to me, Coe goes astray...
...I do not happen to believe that it is right for a scholar to set out to do only what Coe has done—a scholar must be a critic, too...
...Coe asserts that the intensity of this feeling led Genet to deify sadistic traitors, such as the "brutal and unlovely teen-age thugs who worked for the Gestapo in France during the War," and to admire Hitler as the epitome of the antisocial creature...
...It is perfectly true that Genet believes this, yet one might expect some sign from Coe that he is aware of the intellectual flimsiness of such clap-trap...
...I do not agree...
...Unfortunately, it leads Genet—who is a playwright of protest as well as of paradox?to an ethic of antisocial behavior...
...For Genet, "appearance is more than reality...
...The revolver, the phial of poison, comes forward to meet the hand that will use it as ineluctably as the hand is advanced to grasp its opportunity...
...Another peculiarity of Genet's thought that should not have been presented in a solemnly straightforward manner is his belief in criminal predestination—a convenient sophistry that avoids the necessity for moral responsibility...
...His real hero is the man who stands alone in his treachery, which must be purely gratuitous, like Said in The Screens...
...for Genet moral vices become metaphysical virtues...
...As Coe correctly points out, Genet does not deny the significance of human experience, but "is constantly concerned to discover new dimensions of meaning...
...Genet was well aware of this and showed it happening to the rebels in The Balcony...
...His scholarship is exemplary, his exegesis is outstanding—but he refuses to criticize...
...And it is clear from this that the basic point of resemblance between Genet and those who are strictly dramatists of the absurd is that they arrive at what they consider to be the truth through paradox...
...The Vision of Jean Genet is an excellent analysis of the writer's work...
...What he did set out to do, however, Coe has done superlatively well...
...Indeed, too much drama has been lumped under this catchall rubric as a result of Esslin's un-scholarly and superficial work...
...He does not exist...
...and that, when closely looked at, his logical system sometimes breaks down because it is inevitably subservient to his psychological needs...
...Perhaps Coe considers the flaws in Genet's thinking too obvious to be commented upon...
...It is not, for example, correct to say, as Coe does, that "convicts and anchorites are following parallel paths toward an identical goal...
...This should lead to an ethic of asocial behavior...
...Since appearance is more than reality, and since there is no reality in society for Genet, the mirror must reflect a distorted defiance...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
