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Saint Genet:
Actor and Martyr
By JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
18
20 Tulane Drama Review
Querelle could not get used to the idea, an idea never formulated,
of being a monster. He would consider, would regard his past with
a smile that was ironic, frightened and tender at the same time,
insofar as this past merged with himself. A young boy who has
been metamorphosed into an alligator and whose soul appears
in his eyes might in like manner-if he is not quite conscious of
his maw, of his enormous jaw-consider his scaly body, his solemn
tail that slaps the water or the beach or grazes other monsters...
' The candidate for shamaic functions is killed
by the spirits. His body
is cut to pieces. Then he comes to life again. Only then is he a shaman.
Almost all "rites of passage" center about death and rebirth. The theme
of death and resurrectionsimilarlygovernsall initiations.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 21
uality. In each case we shall find the paradox of the before and
after, a rise and fall, a life staked on a single card, the play of
the eternal and the fleeting. The very images and the words that
designate them are of the same nature: from the bright scaffold
spring roses, "lovely effect of death"; from the "ebony prick"
spring white flowers, death and flowering of pleasure; a decap-
itated head falls from the guillotine, a black member shrivels and
droops. If metamorphosis is a death, death and pleasure are
metamorphoses.
Thus, Genet lives outside history, in parentheses. He no more
cares about his individual adventure-which he contemptuously
calls the anecdote-than did an ancient Egyptian about his na-
tional history. He deigns to take notice of the circumstances of
his life only insofar as they seem to repeat the original drama of
the lost paradise. He is a man of repetition; the drab, slack time
of his daily life-a profane life in which everything is permis-
sible-is shot through with blazing hierophanies which restore
to him his original passion, as Holy Week restores to us that of
Christ. Just as Jesus does not cease to die, so Genet does not cease
to be metamorphosed into a foul insect; the same archetypical
event is reproduced in the same symbolic and ritual form through
the same ceremonies of transfiguration. To Genet, as to the faith-
ful of a religious community, sacred time is cyclical; it is the time
of Eternal Recurrence. Genet has been, he has lived. As for the
event that determined his fate, it has long since ceased to be a
memory and has entered the category of myths, so that what has
been written about the mentality of primitives might be applied
to Genet word for word: "What we might call [his] 'history' is
reduced exclusively to the mythical events which occurred in illo
tempore and which have not ceased to repeat themselves from
that time until ours."3 Genet has no profane history. He has only
a sacred history, or, if one prefers, like so-called "archaic" soci-
eties he is continually transforming history into mythical cate-
gories.
If we wish to understand this man, the only way to do so is to
reconstruct carefully, through the mythical representations he has
given us of his universe, the original event to which he constantly
' Cf. Mircea-Eliade, L'Eternel Retour.
24 Tulane Drama Review