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Between negativity and resistance: Jean Genet and committed theatre

Conventional wisdom has it that Jean Genet’s political engagement started during les événements of May 1968, when he wrote an article for the popular magazine Nouvel Observateur defending Daniel CohnBendit, the porte-parole of the Parisian students, from anti-Semitic slurs made in the French Communist Party’s (PCF) newspaper, L’Humanité. Genet’s decision to abandon creative literature in the late 1960s and to put his pen at the service of numerous political groups and causes including immigrant workers, the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) would appear to vindicate the correctness of that judgement. So to claim, as I intend to do, that Genet’s late theatre, written between 1955 and 1961, is a sophisticated example of théâtre engagé is, perhaps, surprising. For some familiar with Genet’s work, it might even appear foolhardy. Did not Genet repeat, again and again, that political art was pointless and that only concrete action would do? However, as is often the case with a writer as deliberately perverse as Genet, comments like these cannot be taken at face value. And indeed while Genet certainly did dismiss engagement at times, there are other occasions when he articulated a more positive attitude toward committed art, claiming, for instance, in a late interview in 1982 with Rüdiger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid Barrada, that his plays are political, albeit in an ‘oblique way’. Taking this obliqueness as a point of departure, I intend to go against the critical grain in this essay by claiming Genet as one of the most politically astute playwrights of his generation. The argument develops in 1. See the article ‘Lenin’s Mistresses’ reproduced in Albert Dichy (ed.), Jean Genet: L’Ennemi déclaré, Œuvres complètes, vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). All translations (including those of titles) are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have left the ‘Avertissement au Balcon’ in French as we do not have an equivalent word for un avertissement in English.