Funeral Rites

by Jean Genet

Book Overview

Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War II unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802130879
• ISBN13: 9780802130877
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Genet defies any categorical boxes you could think up

Funeral rites is jean genet's farewell to one of the great loves of his life.. such a great love, in fact, that the only way to come to terms with this death is to delve into fantasy.. so it comes about that he creates this character in his mind in a very ambiguous style.. the only thing he can rely on is to cherish the opposite of his lover.. to embrace the unthinkable.. the very man who put him to death.. Riton is the symbollic opposite of jean - he is the phallus to jean's anal qualities... and in a sea of beautiful dreamlike prose we find at the end that genet is not trying to appeal to us so much as nurse his own demons.. This is one of Genet's strangest works of fiction.. but simply a deight to read.. It would be interesting to hear a psychologists reactions to these probing meditations on death..

A Phallic Universe of Satyrs and Martyrs

Despite its title, Jean Genet's Funeral Rites is considerably less desperate and less grim a novel than his others; here, Genet's stand-in narrator (Jean) sounds more boastful and vainglorious than threatening or threatened. Taking place in Paris during the Nazi occupation and just after, this is Genet's most psychologically incestuous book, one in which almost every character is linked to the others by undiscussed or only infrequently acknowledged sexual affairs. Despite the violent emotions the characters feel for one another, when they actually speak, their words are banal, monosyllabic, and thus lacking in complex information; the only extensive dialogues are internal. Genet's philosophy is clearly stated: "Speech kills, poisons, mutilates, distorts, dirties."As the book opens, Genet's love-object--a young resistance fighter also named Jean--has just been killed and buried. There are extended early passages about the dejection Genet feels; he states that "the book is completely devoted to the cult of a dead person with whom I am living on intimate terms." However, Genet questions whether the 'Jean' to whom the book is dedicated is the dead man or himself, and soon refers to him as "my poor Jean-in-the-box" and thinks of him as "changing into fertilizer." Eventually Jean becomes something of an afterthought, as Genet turns away from the dead towards his lust for the living. The conversational, episodic plot concerns Genet's interactions with the remaining members of Jean's family, as well as with German Erik, former Hitler Youth member and current tank-driver for Hitler, and youthful French traitor Riton, a collaborator with the Reich. Genet presents an awesomely entwined branch of relationships: Genet and the dead Jean; Genet's casual friendship with Jean's brother Paulo, who is both Hitler's and Genet's lover in Genet's fantasies; Giselle, Jean's steadfastly bourgeois mother, is Erik's mistress and keeper regardless of his Nazism; Erik and Riton are physical and emotional lovers; Erik, who clearly gets around, is also the submissive lover of Hitler's massive, unnamed, ax-wielding executioner; unattractive Juliette, Giselle's despised housemaid, is Jean's former fiancé; and Genet and Erik also become sexual partners in time, and right under Giselle's roof. Genet adds another layer of complexity by having character 'Genet' transform mid-scene into the characters he is describing. Genet briefly becomes Joan of Arc just before she is burned alive, and replaces Erik as the killer when Erik decides to murder an innocent country boy to establish his manhood. Genet also steps into other shoes during the erotic passages, metamorphosing into Hitler (who sends "his finest-looking men to death" because he can't bugger them all, Genet says) when the Fuhrer orders Paulo aside and rapes him, an act Paulo accepts flatteringly and actively responds to. The narrative also moves frequently backward and forward in time, and at least one murdered characte

Eloquent and Disturbing

Though not for the faint of heart (it's by far his most graphic and violent novel), this book has some of Genet's most poetic moments. Serving as both a bittersweet eulogy to Genet's dead lover and as an exploration of his own feelings regarding WWII France, the book's subject matter is explosive, keeping emotions at a fever pitch throughout the whole of the novel. While it lacks the range and coherancy of "The Thief's Journal" (his later novel) and is probably not the best choice if you've never read Genet before (try "Our Lady of the Flowers" or "The Thief's Journal" first), it is nonetheless well worth the read.

AN iconoclastic, existential view of wwII in france

Jean Genet--orphan, thief, homosexual prostitute, renders his impressions of the occupation and liberation of Paris. His metaphors lead to the comparison of the city to a child who is submissive to rape by the Germans, and afraid of offending them as they perpetrate the act. The narraor's lover is killed at the barricades during the liberation of the city, implying parrallels between the decay of old philosophy and the rise of new (existential) philosophy during that apocalyptic period in the history of the world.