The Satanic Tradition

...Camus and Malraux While English and German romanticism foundered in Gothic nightmares and amorous idylls, French romanticism made the criminal its hero, and linked the artist with the outlaw in an alliance that, in the cases of Verlaine and Genet, has amounted to identification This explains French romanticism's extraordinary vitality, for no conflict is more enduring than the one between the individual and society, and no situation in life or fiction represents that conflict more intensely than the relationship between the criminal and the policeman, the convict and the jailer, the condemned and the executioner A murderer provides the title for Genet's most recently translated book Querelle is a sailor in the French navy and an opium smuggler To get his drugs ashore he finds an accomplice in his crew, but once the operation is completed, he coolly and expertly does away with the fellow Later, Querelle submits to and enjoys a sodomist assault Like so many ot Genet's characters, Querelle is a being of total amoral-ity, as polymorphously perverse as a Freudian infant, and entirely devoid ot any spark of decency as ordinarily understood Thus, he deliberately contrives the arrest of another man, toward whom he feels a profound emotional attachment, and who will go to the guillotine for Querelle's crime As the novel proceeds, we learn that Querelle has committed a whole series ot passionless and calculated murders Still, in his relations with other men (he is uninterested in women) he is liable to attacks of an ambiguous sentimentality, the homosexual equivalent of the mawk-lshness that at times overcomes Balzac's most ruthless characters I mention Balzac deliberately, for no one can read Genet without being reminded of Vautnn, the Satanic malefactor of Pere Gouot or, for that matter of Stendhal's Julian Sorel But ot course there are differences The crimes of Vautnn and Sorel are seen by their perpetrators as direct challenges to the corruption and tyranny by which society sustains itself Rebellion is explicit, whereas in Genet it is only implied In this way, his people are really closer to later, more nihilistic figures of French literature, Gide's Lafcadio and Camus' Meursault, antiheroes who commit crimes gratuits, motiveless acts of emotionless violence Criminality for Genet is autonomous, and is described with a curious artifice that lifts it completely out of a naturalistic realm This sense of crime as artifice?and the novel as well—is enhanced in Queielle by Genet's stylized description ot Brest and its togs (giving the book a tone of haunting remoteness reminiscent of Marcel Carne's film Quai des Bitimes) and by the remarkably elaborate passages ot psychological analysis These take on the nature ot an arabesque decoration unrelated in any immediate way to the characters or their actions The verbal surface ot the novel is extraordinarily well-worked in the original Much that we take at first for profundity is m fact a skillful arrangemerit ot ideas and images into evocative but ambiguous fictional patterns Unfortunately, this aspect ot Genet's writing is largely lost in the present translation, for Anselm Hollo tries to render colloquial French ot the '50s into colloquial American of the '70s Genet is not the deep or subtle thinker some critics have taken him tor Although he, like Sartre and Camus, deals with extreme situations, he does so in terms of evading them rather than facing them, in the final analysis he is nearer to grand symbolists like Proust than to the novelist-philosophers His criminals are significant not for what they tell us about the relationship between society and its enemies, but for what they suggest to every man about himself and about those pure impulses—diabolical yet innocent because they are beyond good and evil—that demand liberation from within each of us...

...The Satanic Tradition Querelle BY Jean Genet Translated by Anselm Hollo Grove 276 pp $7 95 Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literattue", author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour The more I read Genet, the more I feel that his is a case where the biography of the writer is fallacious (in the sense the New Critics once argued all literary biography to be), that his life has no bearing on his work We are told on Querelle's dust cover—as we have been told on other Genet dust covers—ot the author's criminal record, of his "numerous prison sentences for stealing, begging and smuggling", of the fact that his first book was written while he was serving one of those sentences, of the time he was condemned to life imprisonment and a President ot the Republic bowed to a petition from France's most eminent writers (somewhat more rapidly than a previous President had bowed to a similar petition presented on behalf of Kropotkm) and pardoned him Well and good Doubtless Genet's experience as a prisoner, and between imprisonments as a petty criminal, has provided him with a wealth of material, a plethora of the factual detail documentary novelists love Yet Genet is not a documentary novelist You can probably learn more about the actual life ot French criminals from the memoirs of surviving Devil's Island convicts or from perusing Simenon with care than you can from reading Our Lady of the Flowers or The Miracle of the Rose This does not mean, however, that Genet is an inferior author On the contrary, he is better than most novelists writing in France today What I am suggesting is that, far from becoming a writer because he was a criminal whose life provided him with something to say, Genet is a natural artist who happened to become a criminal, and whose experiences in that role have merely assisted him in presenting his romantically metaphysical visions Indeed, the source of Genet's visions is to be found not in the underworld he has inhabited and described, but in the long vistas of French literature Genet is hardly a literary freak He stands firmly and centrally in the French "anti-tradition," the line of great amoral moralists beginning with Sade and Laclos and continuing through Balzac and Stendhal, Baudelaire and Verlaine, to Gide and Celine...