Imperial graffiti

Jean Genet (1910–86) knew the story of his life would shape the way he was read. Orphaned and raised on public welfare, Genet made his literary debut as a convict. Between 1938 and 1942 he had been imprisoned eleven times for offences including delinquency, stealing volumes of Proust, pilfering bottles of liquor and deserting from the French Colonial Infantry in Morocco. On May 29, 1943 he was caught pocketing a copy of Paul Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes (1869) from the Librairie de la Chaussée-d’Antin, and risked life imprisonment and deportation to the French penal colonies – but by that point Jean Cocteau was championing the dissident writer throughout artistic Paris, so he received only three months.

For Cocteau, Genet was a poète maudit, a Rimbaud reborn whose first lyric poem, Le Condamné à mort (1942; The Man Sentenced to Death, 1965) – which, in formal alexandrines, celebrated the criminal underworld – marked the “only great event of the period”. When Cocteau read the manuscript of Genet’s masterpiece, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943; Our Lady of the Flowers, 1964), a homoerotic fantasy of drag queens and jailbirds told in the conservative frame of the literary novel, he thought that literature had changed for ever. The “Genet bomb” had arrived on “its light feet of scandal, on its velvety feet” to tell France that its value systems, norms and moral codes – not the pimps and prostitutes – were the real criminals. For Cocteau: “He’s right and the rest of the world is wrong”. Genet’s confrontational style appealed to the surrealist poets Paul Éluard and Robert Desnos, the novelist Colette and the critic Jean Paulhan, who also pored over the manuscript. As Genet’s fame spread from his prison cell, Cocteau was determined to get his illicit prose in print, and by 1949 Genet had published five novels, drafted seven plays, and compiled a collection of poems, Chants secrets (1945).

Genet’s legend is perhaps crowned by a letter that Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre – soon to write his monumental study Saint Genet (1952) – addressed to the French president, Vincent Auriol, in July 1948. An unserved part of Genet’s sentence from 1940 haunted him and he again risked life imprisonment. Coupled with a manifesto signed by twentieth- century giants including Pablo Picasso, Paul Claudel and the theatre director Louis Jouvet, all clamouring for Genet’s exoneration, Cocteau and Sartre cemented his name in a tradition of canonical outlaws that stretched from the medieval poet-thief François Villon to Verlaine. He was eventually pardoned in August 1949, and his fate was ultimately to be canonized by the literary establishment he sought to antagonize.

Genet was famously wary of being mythologized (see his BBC interview from 1985 for the prickly evidence), but he was nevertheless alive to the ways in which his notoriety could be transformative. In Journal du voleur (1949; The Thief’s Journal, 1964), he wrote: “my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext”. For Genet life and literature were wedded together. As a vagabond, thief, queer icon and – later – ally to revolutionaries around the world, Genet believed in the poetic potential of his outsider status to disrupt linguistic structures of power and domination. In his political activism he aligned with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1969, the Black Panthers in 1970 and the Comité Djellali, which fought against anti-Arab racism, in 1971, while supporting the Viet Cong, the Guarani Indians, the Red Army Faction and Michel Foucault’s Groupe d’information sur les prisons throughout the 1970s. In the play Les Nègres (1958; The Blacks, 1960), Genet brought the ideas of anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon to his incendiary stage. Black actors, masked as white members of the European court, exposed the hypocrisy of white liberal artists attempting to speak for the colonized subject. In Le Balcon (1956; The Balcony, 1966), a play set in a brothel where the clients are the leaders of the nation, he eviscerates symbols of power as pure playhouse illusion.

For the biographer Edmund White, Genet used “poetry as a critical act of negativity”: a rejection of the “Good”, and of the moral and aesthetic codes that turn values into absolutes. This is a political position derived from language and literature, not a literary stance with secondary political significance. As much as Genet’s poems, novels and plays make visible the world of pimps and prisons, or voice the struggles of Palestine, their revolutionary charge comes from the way they use language, radically transforming classical French from a language of mastery, authority or cultural imperialism into a poetics for the excluded. “À vos roueries, j’opposerai toujours ma ruse” (“As you are cunning, I will always oppose you with my craftiness”), he tells us in L’Enfant criminel (1949; The Criminal Child, 2020). By refracting “roueries” with “ruse”, Genet highlights the trickery and deceit of dominant culture, just as he strives to betray its codes and world-views. As the colonizers Monsieur Blankensee and Sir Harold put it in Les Paravents (1961; The Screens, 1962), “nous sommes les maîtres du langage […] Et toucher à la langue est sacrilège” (“we’re the lords of language […] to tamper with language is sacrilegious”). Genet, the iconic pariah, not only tampered with French, but also exploded the language of oppression from the inside.

This bringing together of Genet’s personal myth, his critique of absolutes and his use of poetry to evacuate power, is central to the cut-throat drama of his recently discovered playHéliogabale (2024). Drafted in June 1942 as part of a dramatic cycle including Haute Surveillance (1947; Deathwatch, 1961), Persée, La Journée castillane and Les Guerriers nus, this forty-page manuscript was acquired by the Houghton Library at Harvard in 1983 and chanced upon by François Rouget, a scholar working in the Ronsard archives. This poetic circularity would undoubtedly have pleased Genet, who credits the Renaissance “prince of poets” for his idiosyncratic style: “Il fallait être entendu de Ronsard, Ronsard n’aurait pas supporté l’argot” (“I had to make myself heard by Ronsard. Ronsard would never have tolerated slang”). Genet couldn’t be overly familiar with French; if it was the language of the enemy, it needed to be mastered.

Héliogabale recounts the downfall of the eccentric teenage tyrant Elagabalus, emperor of Rome from 218 to 222 CE. Writers and artists such as Edgar Allen Poe, Antonin Artaud and Anselm Kiefer have also taken inspiration from tales of Elagabalus’s deviance: he was notoriously a transgender pioneer, a sadistic dinner-party host and a monster who staged child sacrifices. Genet’s vision of the emperor plays with the artifice behind all these roles; the playwright makes his protagonist un dieu de théâtre (“a god of theatre”). The dramatic smoke and mirrors that inevitably distort historical fact are themselves set in a mise en abyme of legend-making – centuries of rumour and gossip – and loaded with an anti-imperial charge that anticipates his later politics. Héliogabale doesn’t just present the Roman Empire as entropic; rather, Genet’s protagonist inhabits its moral decay as the route to freedom: “nous serons plus forts que le monde puisque nous habiterons l’immonde” (“we’ll be stronger than the world because we’ll live in the underworld”). In this way Genet aligns himself with a generation of young French playwrights, including Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh and Albert Camus, who reworked classical tragedy to unmask the illusions of grandeur, glory and heritage that inspired European imperial conquest.

Writing from Fresnes prison in 1942–44, against a national backdrop of Nazi occupation, Genet was personally consumed by the existential revolt of Elagabalus the libertine. François Sentein and Marc Barbezat, the editors of his early manuscripts, recall Genet’s obsession with the dynastic machinations that accompanied Elagabalus’s ascent to power, and we know the young playwright had been reading the nineteenth-century classical historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. Barbezat is unsure if, by this point, Genet had also read Artaud’s biography Héliogabale ou L’anarchiste couronné (1934; Heliogabalus or, the Crowned Anarchist, 2006), but both Genet and Artaud hailed the radical humanity of Elagabalus the man, rather than the historical tyrant. For Artaud the emperor was an anarchist, “a rebel, a crazed individualist”; for Genet he was a queer martyr, “Saint Héliogabale […] tu n’es plus qu’une couronne d’épines” (“Saint Héliogabale, you are nothing more than a crown of thorns”). Genet’s shift in emphasis becomes a philosophical as well as a political act: his Héliogabale presents himself as a “professeur de désordre” (“master of disorder”); articulates syllogisms that suggest the overthrow of the Roman Empire would dismantle similar power structures worldwide; and understands himself to be a sort of synecdoche, one part of the empire that evokes the whole. At the same time Genet depicts Héliogabale as no more than a name – just a spectre, an image, a morbid scent, the shadow of the Sun God he is supposed to serve – so that, under his supposed command, the Empire is unveiled as pure absence: “truqué comme le théâtre” (“rigged like a theatre”).

Elagabalus was murdered in the latrines of the Praetorian Guard, but Genet’s version of events takes a more metaphysical approach. It asks how poetry can transcend hierarchies of power to envisage new forms of relation: poetics become the subject of the play. In the fourth act Genet presents Héliogabale holed up in his servants’ toilets, awaiting his execution. The emperor makes out traces of graffiti on the walls, distorted scrawl that reads “Pour Varius Héligilb…”. He marvels at how his name has been half effaced, then embellished by lewd sketches, poems, lyrics and the handprints of slaves. Genet imagines Héliogabale’s apotheosis via the deformation of his proper name and its divine inheritance: “mon nom et mes titres, les uns et les autres déformés, transformés, grimaçants ou souriants, au choix, parmi, et les soutenant – des poèmes et des dessins obscènes, que tout le monde dirait ignobles” (“both my name and my titles are deformed, transformed, grinning or smiling, adorned with obscene poems and drawings that would be deemed vile”). Slaves have taken over the signs of power. Their reinscriptions and distortions reveal power to be nothing more than a play of language. Genet further eroticizes these scratchings as part of a phallic ritual that worships neither Helios the Sun God nor the imperial high priest Héliogabale. The slaves become love poets by night, carving messages of devotion with their nails into the walls that will bear witness to Héliogabale’s execution.

The play closes with Héliogabale’s body dragged across the stage, flanked by all the weaponry of a political coup. But the coup itself is a secondary consideration. The latrines have become a place where power collapses and, in its wake, we encounter the man behind the myth, the slave behind the master. The obscene graffiti undermines normal power relations and we are left with traces of the complex, erotic egalitarianism that drives the whole of Genet’s literary project.

There is a foreshadowing of this in the second act, when Héliogabale asks Aeginus, his lover and eventual assassin, to imagine “l’amitié dans l’abjection” (friendship in abjection). It is only when we are jettisoned from the “monde des hommes”, with its regard for privilege and virtue, says Jean Genet, that we are free to relate to the other.

Joanne Brueton is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris and the author of Geometry in Jean Genet: Shaping the subject, 2022

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