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Genet had no such metaphysical escape hatch. At the moment when he was denied by his foster parents, he was utterly without resources or the ability to judge himself. His fate was fixed. If parents and society cast him out, he must be guilty. His subsequent pursuit of depravity was ignited by a strange motive. By doing evil, he would discover the evil that he had been told possessed him.
This willed decision to play the role that life had already forced him into makes him, for Sartre, the perfect existential hero. Indeed, to Sartre, Genet is modern man. Born into a meaningless and hostile world, guilty, fearful, evil and vacillating, man can be free only by willing the existence he has been given and acting energetically on his decision—just as a man carried along by an inexorable current can create the illusion of freedom by swimming with the current but faster than it carries him.
He in She's Clothing. A reader is free (and likely) to differ with Sartre's view of man's condition, as well as with his estimate of Genet's genius. But it is difficult not to be intrigued by what is certainly one of the longest, most difficult and most astonishing critical studies ever written about one writer by another. Whole pages of Saint Genet could have been cut. Line after line is unintelligible to anyone but a skilled metaphysician. What remains is an appalling guidebook to a nether world.
Without benefit of Sartre, for instance, what is to be made of Our Lady of the Flowers? The book is infested with shadowy characters—like the handsome pimp known as "Darling Daintyfoot"—who come to gruesome ends after enjoying a succession of couplings and even triplings. The heroine at first seems to be a dead prostitute called "Divine." But Divine is also referred to as "Lou" and "Culafroy," and it is eventually apparent that she is Jean Genet. It is also clear that she is not really a she but a he in she's clothing.
Sartre plunges earthily to the center of all this confusion. "Seeking excitement and pleasure," he explains, "Genet starts enveloping himself in his images as a polecat envelops itself in its odor." Darling Daintyfoot and Divine are projections of Genet's imagination, conjured up to excite himself as he lay in his prison cell in 1942. Genet began to record these autoerotic visions on the paper that the prison provided its inmates to manufacture paper bags. A guard burned the writing. Genet began again. The final result was Our Lady of the Flowers.
By writing down the dreams, says Sartre, Genet became aware of another reality—the reality of words, which he could master. Till that moment lost in a nightmarish effort to justify the world's conception of himself as a thief, he suddenly wakened to his own notion that he could be a writer. He might also be a thief, but he could be his own hero—and fob himself off on the public.