Absolute Evil implies the existence of Absolute Good at the opposite extreme; but there is no sign of that in his writing. Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarassing, humanistic dues to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commital to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has lang been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of ‘
logique’. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America, and simply has associations of the grotesque in Germany. Although ‘bourgeois’ has a definite place in Marxist hagiography, it is hard to appoint a certain place for it in our empiricism. Some believe that its emotional force in France comes from the violent overthrow of the Commune in 1871. Possibly the self-love, the trim, pedantic obduracy of the French middle class, owes a great deal to its roots in the satisfactions of a successful peasantry. (They got what they wanted after the Revolution and, frugally, what they have they hold.)
Again, there seems to be a Manichaean overtone in discussion about the class: the conflict is between the children of light and the children of darkness. In Genet’s novels, his criminals, traitors, male prostitutes, pimps, collaborators and Nazis are known by adjectives that convey light and brightness. Those of us who close his works in anger and disgust at his sacrilege live in the outer darkness of right thinking. Hell is not an extreme; it is in the middle.
Genet, a modern nihilist [fragment]
uit:
The myth makers : essays on European, Russian and South American novelists - V.S. Pritchett
