The Imagination of Jean Genet by Joseph H. McMahon (review)

1966 BOOK REVIEWS 44S THE IMAGINATION OF JEAN GENET, by Joseph H. McMahon, Yale University Press and Presses Universitaires de France, New Haven, London and Paris, 191)3, 273 pp. Price $6.50. (Yale Romanic Studies, Second Series, 10). This is the first full-length critical study of the writer whom Professor McMahon ingeniously views as having passed from enfant terrible to enfant gdt4. The Imagination of Jean Genet was published at a significant moment in the ascendancy of Genet's reputation in America; its appearance was conveniently accompanied by the Grove Press translation of Genet's first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, and the Braziller translation of Sartre's celebrated study, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. It has, fortunately, done more than just assure Genet's popular inIage as the criminal·turned-writer and the author of several avant-garde plays performed, usually Off·Broadway, which prompted such startled reviewers' descriptions as, "elaborate as a religious ceremony and as broad as an Italian opera." The Genet who emerges from McMahon's study has been separated from the legend which has accompanied his reputation and become the enviable possessor of a rare poetic vision and of an "imagination that is most crucially significant because it is the constant and unendingly refurbished generator of his works." (p. 7) Professor McMahon's books is very optimistic. He studies Genet as a continually improving writer who sheds his early lyricism in favor of an increasingly objective view expressed through ritual and ceremony; literature, with the mature Genet, established analogies with and comes to approxinIate the sister arts of music and, especially, dance. (We can see in this something of joyce's prescription , expressed in Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man, for the artist passing from the lyrical to the dramatic.) The plays move towards a dramatic midpoint between playwright and audience in a manner quite remote from Genet's earlier "autobiographical soundings." When Alex Szogyi reviewed Our Lady of the Flowers and Saint Genet for The New York Times Book Review (September 1190 1963), he recognized Genet's "spiritual ancestors" in Villon, Baudelaire, the MarqUis de Sade, Proust, Villiers de rIsle-Adam, Rimbaud, and Gide. (I should be tempted to add Pirandello and celine.) McMahon seems intent on safeguarding Genet's independence from influence. Some of his most incisive critical judgments spring from this tendency almost to remove Genet from literary history: "If they have done nothing else, the preceding chapters have shown how difficult it is to label Jean Genet or to find a place for him in any known literary constellation." (p. 1141) Thus, McMahon distinguishes Genet's kind of metaphor from Rimbaud's (p. 104), his use of memory from Proust's (p. 34), his application of art to reality from Pirandello's. (p. 133). However hard McMahon tries to establish Genet's uniqueness, he somehow must fall !back on certain established literary formulas. Although he scarcely mentions the "play within the play" device-which proliferates in western drama from Shakespeare through Pirandel1o-it is crucially present in most of Genet's dranlatic work. Although he insists on Genet's originality as an experimenter in prose fiction, there are certainly anticipations of many of his techniques in the prose poetry of the Symbolists and in what Ralph Freedman has recently labeled "the lyrical novel" (which goes back to Navalis and the German Romantics). The claims that Professor McMahon jealously makes for Genet occasionally exceed the bounds of literary decorum. So anxious is he to establish Genet's position as an unexcelled master of prose fiction from Notre·Dame·des·Fleurs 446 MODERN DRAMA February through Querelle de Brest that he roundly dismisses the nouveau roman in the harshest terms: "The anti-novelists, with the possible exception of Mme. Sarraute, so weigh us down with trivia as to drug us into believing that nothing important ever happens, no violent catastrophes of accident or emotion ever come to upset the dull range of quotidian existence; everything is muted and snipped into insignificant particles_" (p. 240) He takes another somewhat unfair thrust at the same group in an urgent attempt to qualify the position of one of Genet's novels...