Saint Genet is Sartre's account of the roles enacted, the metamorphoses undergone, by Genet himself. It is easier to indicate Sartre's aims in this huge volume than to describe his procedure. What we have is not a process of analysis, nor even the retracing of such a process, but its results: an exposition of the totality of Genet, arranged partly chronologically and partly according to certain topics. As before with Baudelaire, Sartre commences with origins—Genet's parentage and childhood environment—looking for the decisive choices made in youth, and showing how these shaped the adult, how they formed Genet's conception first of himself, then of art and artistic activity, and so in time came to dictate the particulars of literary expression. Like the essay on Baudelaire, that on Genet ends with a prolonged inspection of the published works themselves, in which these are seen as a final splendid relic of the ontological disease, secreted by a creature in desperation. (p. 276)
In its general character Saint Genet falls somewhere between Sartre's philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, and his other essays, plays, and novels. It resembles Being and Nothingness in its daunting bulk and comprehensiveness; it actually adopts much of the apparatus constructed in the earlier book. Sometimes, indeed, it threatens to provoke a guffaw as it wheels up its massive ordinance of abstractions, and trains them on matters of the order of magnitude of the lice, crabs, spit, and excrement of a single human creature. But despite the panoply of exposition, the texture of the book is assertive and aphoristic rather than logical. There is little attempt to preserve the rigor of proof, to derive terms, argue closely, anticipate objections, or the like, and there is much use of anecdote, metaphor, and the enticements of fact. Sartre assumes a certain order, as he says, in the chaotically rich world of Genet's imagination, and proceeds to describe it in a freely discursive rumination on certain themes. (p. 278)
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