Genet, Mailer, & the New Paternalism (1961)

“It is easily imagined of Jean Genet that he is one those artists who so adore reality that they are obsessed with the ever-present possibility that it too will betray them. Sitting through the too long evening of ‘The Blacks’ or wending a careful and respect­ful way through the printed texts of ‘Deathwatch’ or ‘The Maids,’ we are overwhelmed by our sense of his distrust of us; his refusal to honor our longings for communion. Presently we understand that he does not seem to believe that is what we do long for and so, now and again, he drops even the remnants of his regard, and flails at us. He encloses the reckless and undefined dozen or so jokes; dismisses what he may consider to be the boundaries of even his own mind. He becomes the threatening soldier who may or may not put bullets in the gun, such being the depth of his contempt for the enemy. Of course, when whimsy does allow him to load and fire, we are shattered. Norman Mailer’s discussion of ‘The Blacks’ (Voice, May 11, May 18) was, therefore, in proper meter. Between the play and Mai­ler’s discernible reaction to it, a duet was indeed sung. The rise and fall of his coherence and incoherence alike strikes a stunning and, I think, significant kinship with the French writer. This is especially so in his lusty acceptance of the romantic racism which need­ed evocation to allow for the conceptualization of ‘The Blacks’ in the first place. For, at this moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, certain of the best of men have sent up a lament which is much concerned with the disorders of a civilization which they do not really believe in their hearts are to be set aright by in­vocation of either fresh ‘frontiers’ or antique ‘grandeur.’ Sensing the source of the disorders to be deeper than any of that, they have will­fully turned to the traditional route of history’s more serious nay-sayers. They have elected the spirit and fraternity of what the balance of society is always pleased to hope are ‘the damned’: pros­titutes, pimps, thieves, and general down-and-outers of whatever persuasion. They are certain, as their antecedents in all ages have been, that if the self-appointed ‘top’ of society is as utterly rotten as it is, then the better side of madness must be the company and deistic celebration of ‘the bottom.’ As far as they are concerned, history has merely inadvertently provided them with a massive set of fra­ternals in ‘the Blacks.’ Among the Negro artists and in­tellectuals whom I know it is a melancholy point of reference. …”
Voice
Voice: Norman Mailer on Iran Genet’s “The Blacks”
W – The Blacks (play)
The Blacks by Jean Genet (Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Grove Press, 1960)
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