Fragments of the Artwork

by Jean Genet, Charlotte Mandell

Fragments of the Artwork brings together Jean Genet's critical writings and open letters on art and aesthetic issues. This collection testifies to Genet's enormous influence on the modern theater, on the development of the novel, and on the representation of crime, sex, gender, and race. In lyrical essays and one candid interview, these works present an untutored, original, defiant Genet, displaying his provocative insights and acuities on a range of topics.

Genet wrestles with the athletic genius of Rembrandt, adores the intricate criminal resurrections of Dostoevsky, challenges our easy readings of Brecht, and, in what is one of the most exalting art historical essays ever written, provides us with his detailed personal account of the work and presence of Alberto Giacometti. Altogether these essays comprise a series of engrossing meditations on the central motives of theatricality and art.

Genres: Art

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2003

About the author

Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His work, much of it considered scandalous when it first appeared, is now placed among the classics of modern literature and has been translated and performed throughout the world.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a tough but necessary read.

Necessary if you are seeking more insights into the sensibilities behind Genet's works.

Necessary, if only, to witness the arabesque observations of a idiosyncratic, marginalized autodidact on topics that far exceed art and spill into truths both poignant and unsettling about being alive and your relationship to the Other.

I started this after reading Genet's Querelle of Brest. But it was Ian Penman's Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors that started me down the long path towards this book. While ToM made me think it would be prudent to read Querelle before watching Fassbinder's adaptation, it was Penman's haunted lingering on a few passages in Fragments of the Artwork that entranced me with Genet entirely.

This is one such excerpt from Genet's essay "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" that had such an effect on me: About four years ago, I was on the train. Opposite me in the compartment, an appalling old man was sitting. Dirty, and obviously, mean, as some of his remarks proved to me. Refusing to pursue an unfruitful conversation with him, I wanted to read, but despite myself, I looked at the little old man: he was very ugly. His gaze crossed, as they say, mine, and although I no longer know if it was short or drawn-out, I suddenly knew the painful-yes, painful feeling that any man was exactly-"worth" any other man. "Anyone at all," I told myself, can be loved beyond his ugliness, his stupidity, his meanness."[...] And what causes a man to be loved beyond his ugliness and meanness allows one to love precisely those things, his ugliness and meanness. Do not misunderstand: it was not a question of goodness coming from me, but of a recognition.

The dread that permeated this sentiment seized me. And after finishing Querelle (having admired its ferocity and temerity), I decided that I needed to follow through and read Fragments. The above quotation represents the outset of one of the central themes of the essay collection: we are all experiencing a solitude in our experience of life that it defines the total contours of our existence. The second contention that poses later is that all of us are of the same singular essence, as if bottled off from one original vat of prime mover liquid, but we are unable to spill our essences into others to rejoin the singularity due to this totalizing solitude.

It's certainly a potentially laughable sentiment if not only because it sounds like it could come out of a sophomore on DMT or your local wack-job practicing nun-chucks on Venice Beach. However, if you read it, you will get the sense that he almost doesn't want to be telling you because he, himself, doesn't want it to be true, like this knowledge was heaved upon him and it flattened all of the experiential topographies of his life. This is further underscored in another section where he says this realization crushed all pleasurable aspects of the erotic for him. While this is not my experience and I want to disagree with him, it certainly put a crack in my proverbial looking glass for one reason or another. P.S. he formulates this massive existential crisis for the purposes of getting the reader to understand that Giacometti's sculptures capture the very nature of this perpetual solitude.

This book becomes intensely sui generis when the above theme and other movements of his various essays are incorporated into the ninth essay What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Littles Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet where various extracts and extrapolations from those essays (which were written years apart from each other) are formatted in two columns running side by side but independent of each other's meanings. All the things you were able to grasp across the book between moments of wily stylized-French-syntax-translated-to-English appear miraculously in this strange amalgam of essays therefore concreting your grasp of what is truly essential... it made the whole battle of reading this work truly rewarding.

There are many other ingratiating moments of this book as well though Genet is endlessly impish and ironic, sometimes beyond my comprehension. The essays: Letter to Leonor Fini (super impish), The Tightrope Walker, Letter to Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Rembrandt's Secret and Chartres Cathedral feature stunning bouts of style and criticism.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Showcasing the brilliance and dynamicism of Genet's abilities when he is not self-constrained by the writing of Violence. Not that his novels are not any good -- contrarily, they very much are so. However, in flourishing his pen towards the topic of art, Genet touches upon subtleties and anomalies which are present in the everyday. His keen observances are particularly magnificent in essays on Giacometti and "What Remains of a Rembrandt..." The interview is disastrously strident: Genet erects massive barriers to accessing his fluid emotive philosophies, comes across badly in doing so, perpetually criticizes the interview as evoking performance whereas solitary writing produces truths. This is the only scruple I take in my recommending this book to others. Disregard the interview. It is Genet's art which ought to speak alone.

[Tosh]

A book I must read!