Secular Prayers: Genet’s Criminal Child

Abstract

What are the aftereffects of a catastrophic event that does not intrude from the outside—as a natural disaster or terrorist attack—but is integral to a system broken from its foundation? In 1948, French Radio invited Jean Genet on the air to comment on the government’s new efforts to rehabilitate children in juvenile prisons. The radio quickly censured Genet, as it did Artaud a year prior. In the censured piece, “The Criminal Child,” Genet speaks as a survivor of Mettray, the notorious French penal colony. In no allegorical terms, Mettray was a place where many children went to die, at times in gruesome conditions. Genet contends that in the eye of the incarcerated child, youth prisons must not be reformed for rehabilitation, but instead inflict more cruelty. Defiance and transgression, Genet contends, are the criminal child’s most creative force, and complacency takes that away. The prison slang—the language of resistance—bears a certain oracular force, similar to Rimbaud’s poetry or Genet’s own prison writing. These singular writings, I argue, bring to light an originary bind between art and life, beyond any disciplinary or aesthetic categorization, revealing the structure of a secular prayer.

Keywords:

• Genet
• prison
• children
• criminal
• slang
• prayer

Notes

1 “If a boy was caught masturbating he was condemned to eight days in the disciplinary quarter, during which time he walked 20 kilometers a day in a circle […]. [One boy] was so rebellious that of his two and a half years at Mettray, he spent one year walking in a circle. The supervisor of punishments, Bienveau, would shout out, ‘I’m going to break you!’” (White 79).

2 See Stéphanie Boulard’s thoughtful analysis of the guillotine’s sanctifying impact in Genet: “le divin s’atteint par le châtiment suprême par excellence: la décapitation par la guillotine” (Boulard 299).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amin Erfani

Amin Erfani is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, working on avant-garde theater, poetry, new media, critical and psychoanalytic theory. His publications include translations of French playwrights including Bernard-Marie Koltès and Valère Novarina, articles on prose and poetry, also on dramatic, critical, and psychoanalytic theory. He teaches at Lehman College, CUNY.