Jean Genet: une écriture des perversions (review)

Geir Uvsløkk's Jean Genet: une écriture des perversions is a comprehensive study of perversion in Genet's triptych of semi-autobiographical novels, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Journal d'un voleur. The study is divided into three chapters, 'Perversions morales', 'Perversions sexuelles', and 'Perversions textuelles'. This is, above all, a thoroughly researched and solid work of literary criticism. Throughout, Uvsløkk demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of Genet criticism, both francophone and anglophone, giving particular attention to major French critics such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, and Éric Marty. He fills out our understanding of each of the three domains of perversions with an impressively broad range of intellectual references, from Michel Foucault to Émile Durkheim to Pierre Bourdieu, while turning to the mainstays of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot for literary theory. Uvsløkk's use of archival research and his meticulous comparisons between the original editions of Genet's novels and the most commonly referenced Gallimard French editions, which cut many erotic passages to avoid censorship, are particularly welcome. Uvsløkk uses 'perversion', in each of his chapters, as a deconstructive tool, demonstrating how Genet initially espouses the dominant notion of perversion as the opposite of normalcy only to transcend subversively the binary between perversion and normalcy. This thesis encompasses much of Genet's writing, and Uvsløkk gives us a broad and thorough view of its operation in Genet's three novels. However, the demonstration of the argument again and again across each domain of perversion can become repetitive and predictable. The repetitive effect is partly due to Uvsløkk's interpretative technique, which is primarily one of synopsis and accumulation. He quickly summarizes passages from Genet's novels as well as complex arguments by major theorists, driving his point home by accumulating more summaries of similar passages and theoretical arguments, but seldom taking the time to do a nuanced close reading in order to tease out some of the significant slight differences between patterns that, on the surface, appear the same. Given how well established the field of post-structuralist Genet criticism is and how many brilliant and sophisticated deconstructive readings of Genet already exist, Uvsløkk's study itself, although it has great interpretative reach and leads to many fine individual readings, does not feel particularly fresh or new. At times, one feels that Uvsløkk is approaching a major breakthrough, a bold new interpretation of what precisely Genet's subversion of a given norm does. Unfortunately, the reading usually stops short at this point. Part of the problem here is the structure of the book, which creates an analytical divide between different modes of perversity, whereas what makes Genet's novels so transgressive is precisely his interrogation of the connections between the domains of morality, sexuality, writing, and politics. It is perhaps symptomatic that the major piece of Genet criticism conspicuously absent from Uvsløkk's book is Leo Bersani's 'The Gay Outlaw' (in Homos (1995)), which creates explosive effects through close readings that bring queer literary, political, and sexual perversion into volatile contact with one another.