In one early work,
L'Enfant criminel (The Child Criminal, published with
'Adame Miroir, 1949), he wrote brazenly: "Si mon chant était beau, ... oserez-vous dire que celui qui l'inspira était vil" (If my song was beautiful, ... who will dare to say that its inspiration was vile"). That question is a particularly rich one in the context of his works: it suggests that they were meant to be provocative; it indicates that Genet's writing was directed toward a public which was not going to understand him easily; and it conveys his conviction that careful aesthetic rendering, what he called his "lyrisme" (lyricism), can make any kind of material transcendent.
Though efforts have been made to associate Genet with other French writers--François Villon and Paul Verlaine, the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont--his work resists such attributions. He never retreated into the religious solace the first two found, and his intentions were quite different from those of the latter two. He is perhaps more readily comparable to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the citizen of Geneva, who was to the eighteenth century what Genet became to the twentieth: a voice, articulate and powerful, insisting on making the literate public aware of levels of experience it had not previously considered worthy of its attention.
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