REQUIRING THE MARGINS

In his 1971 essay on Aziyadé, Barthes wonders what the modern-day equivalent of Loti's defection from the West might be. The lieutenant's counterpart a hundred years on, he speculates, could be some young Arabophile teacher, identifying perhaps in Egypt or Morocco a phantasmatic Orient. And just as Loti defended a declining Ottoman culture against imperialist Russia, so Barthes's putative dissident of the 1970s might campaign against Israeli expansion. In reality, the role came to be played by an established writer, who was indeed older than Barthes. For around the time of the appearance of Barthes's Nouveaux Essais critiques, Genet was meeting secretly with Yasser Arafat in a camp near Amman and promising to write in support of the Palestinians. His testimony, Un captif amoureux [Prisoner of Love], finally appeared in May 1986, in the month after his death and twenty-five years after the appearance of his penultimate literary work, Les Paravents [The Screens].

While Genet exploits caricatural self-images in his earlier works – one thinks immediately of his imprisonment, his aggressively asserted homosexuality, and his social marginality, all of which fuelled the Genet myth that Sartre made such play of – he refuses to see social opprobrium as a necessary condition or guarantee of artistic success.