A Note on Authorship

Genet’s work offers valuable testimony to the ways in which literary texts are betrayed as they pass through the hands of editors, translators, and censors. There are at least two versions of Genet’s novels, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Pompes funèbres: cut and uncut. The Marc Barbézat, l’Arbalète editions of Notre-Dame-des-fleurs (1948) and Miracle de la rose (1946), and an anonymously published, special edition of Pompes funèbres (1948),¹ contain passages which have been censored from the later, Gallimard editions published in the 1950s. Ironically, the incomplete, censored versions form part of the Oeuvres complètes of Jean Genet, the most widely known collection of his works, which includes Sartre’s monumental “introduction,” Saint Genêt.

While all of the censored passages contain profane language or depict illicit sex acts, it is not always clear why some were cut and others uncut from the Gallimard edition. Political motives could explain why a sex scene involving two German soldiers during the occupation of France is included in Pompes funèbres, while a similar scene between two French men is censored; or why profane words are included when they describe other criminals in Miracle de la rose, but excluded when they refer to guards. The danger lies in the fact that the censor’s hand barely leaves a trace in the Gallimard edition. At times, where entire pages have been cut, there remains an unmarked passage from one sentence to the next or one paragraph to the next. Any gaps in the text blend imperceptibly into Genet’s fragmented, non-linear style of narration.

I am grateful to the Grove Press for permitting me to reproduce passages from Bernard Frechtman’s English translation of Genet’s work. However, since this translation was based on the Gallimard edition, it passes on to Anglophone readers the same, censored version of Genet’s novels. When necessary, I translated the original texts directly from French. By including uncensored material in my own analysis of Genet’s language, I do not intend to shock or tease the reader, but to restore to the texts their original, raw poetry.

Frechtman’s is by and large an adequate translation, but it leans toward clarifying the meaning of words at the expense of the work of the signifier, including the effects of rime and alliteration. Consequently, Frechtman often misses the erotic dimension of word-play in Genet’s style, obscuring the point that Genet practices perversion first and foremost with reference to languages of authority, notably standard French. In other instances, the violence done to syntax and meaning by criminal argot simply escapes translation and has no counterpart in the American slang used in the English version.

Finally, Genet’s last work, Un Captif amoureux, published shortly after his death, poses extremely interesting problems of authorship. Having worked long and closely with Genet’s literary language, I have the impression that Un Captif amoureux was authored by two different writers. While one recognizes Genet in lyrical passages which seize the cruel beauty of human existence in paradoxical figures, one cannot identify the voice speaking in the more didactic passages, which give almost journalistic accounts of Middle East politics and the history of the Palestinian Liberation Movement. It is not unlikely that Genet’s last work, which has provoked a great deal of gossip in the press but not much critical reading, was written co-operatively, though the nature of such collaboration and Genet’s part in it will never be known. Genet mentions in Un Captif amoureux that he dismissed a suggestion of Arafat’s to write a book about the movement. The question remains whether Genet was indeed co-opted by one Palestinian group or another to author a book which would draw attention to their cause, or whether Genet deliberately surrendered his authority over the narration in keeping with his systematic challenge to systems of authority.

Now that Gallimard is planning to reedit Un Captif amoureux (along what lines?), perhaps the traces of another voice, another author, will be erased for all time, leaving us with the appearance of a false unity, a shallow beauty.

NOTE:

1. According to Jean-Bernard Moraly, this edition was published anonymously by Paul Morhien and financed by Jean Cocteau. “Les Cinq vies de Jean Genet,” in Les Nègres au port de la lune. ed. C.D.N. Bordeaux. (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1988), p. 25.