SOURCE: Katz, Leslie. “Jean Genet: ‘Une Solitude Mortelle’.” Raritan 16, no. 2 (fall 1996): 65-85.

In the following essay, Katz examines Genet's techniques to convey meaning in his writing.

In the art of the tightrope walker, Jean Genet discovered a metaphor for a particular kind of theatricality: at once grand and furtive, flamboyant and private. In his essay, “Le Funambule,” he writes, “It was not a whore we went to see at the circus, but a solitary lover in pursuit of his own image. … It was Narcissus who danced.” Through the reference to Narcissus, Genet may wish to capture the performer's radical and necessary absorption in his art, the placement of the foot and, by extension, the weight of the entire body on the wire; a level of concentration that, second by second, averts the possibility of the performer falling to his death. But it is not only the tightrope walker...