Deathwatch by Jean Genet

First published:Haute Surveillance, 1949 (English translation, 1954)

First produced: 1949, at Théâtre des Mathurins, Paris

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: A prison

Principal Characters:

• Green Eyes, a twenty-two-year-old prisoner
• Maurice, a seventeen-year-old prisoner
• Lefranc, a twenty-three-year-old prisoner
• The Guard

The Play

Deathwatch opens in a prison cell, where Green Eyes has just separated Maurice and Lefranc, who have been fighting for his attention. They both idolize Green Eyes, the supreme criminal hero, who has been convicted of murdering a prostitute and is awaiting his execution. The enormity of his crime and his coolness of temper create a mystique they crave for themselves. Maurice treats Green Eyes almost as a figure of religious awe and is deeply angered by Lefranc’s suggestion that Snowball, a black criminal, is actually superior. In fact, the play turns on how these two young men perceive Green Eyes: Is he their champion, a pure example of the criminal mind, or no more than a petty convict like themselves?

Lefranc has identified a vulnerability in Green Eyes: He is illiterate and cannot express himself in writing. Lefranc has been writing letters to Green Eyes’ girl for Green Eyes, but he has evidently used words and phrases that declare his own feelings. Green Eyes, however, is hardly damaged by his inability to control what Lefranc says, because he has decided to break off with his girl—indeed, to give her to one of the boys or to the Guard who comes to announce her arrival. His utter aloofness from what would be normal jealousy or suspicion restores some of his godlike stature, especially when he proposes that one of his acolytes murder her. Which of them will do his bidding and prove his faithfulness?

However, Green Eyes himself seems to acknowledge Snowball’s dominance in the prison and that he is a better man than Green Eyes. He accepts a gift of cigarettes from Snowball (brought to him by the Guard), and he makes clear to Maurice and Lefranc that his murder of the prostitute was not a calculated act but a reckless deed done in a moment of passion. In other words, Green Eyes is no more in control of his emotions than is any other man. This point neither Maurice nor Lefranc seems able to grasp: Green Eyes believes that he has been chosen by destiny to murder, to be placed in a special category of men that transcends the ordinariness of most crime.

Maurice’s reason for living is to adore power. When Green Eyes suggests that he is something less than omnipotent, and when he does not favor Maurice over Lefranc, Maurice goads his rival until Lefranc, who envies Green Eyes’ revered status as murderer, deliberately and coldly strangles Maurice. Lefranc calls himself “the Avenger”—a name used by other famous criminals in French prisons—in the belief that he has just demonstrated his authentic criminality.

Green Eyes is not impressed. The quintessential criminal is not one who wills himself into being, he suggests to Lefranc. On the contrary, Green Eyes reiterates his feeling that it has been his fate to be a criminal, and he has struggled against it to no avail. Lefranc, in Green Eyes’ view, has simply murdered for the pleasure of it, hoping to be elevated for his wretched feat. Instead of respecting Lefranc, Green Eyes is disgusted, and Lefranc now realizes how arbitrary he has been, trying to imitate the life of another rather than living for himself.

Dramatic Devices

At least as effective as the language of the play is the setting. In a succinct description, Jean Genet indicates that the prison cell should be part of a complex structure, at the rear of which is a “barred transom” with spikes that turn inward. The scene is like the minds that inhabit it, sharply pointed, self-torturing, and barred from contact with any world outside it.

Unless it is kept in mind that the “entire play unfolds as in a dream,” the dialogue will seem somewhat disjointed and unrealistic as it seesaws between favorable and unfavorable views of Green Eyes. More than one critic has suggested that Genet hit upon the dramatic device of employing three characters to reveal the interior of a divided mind. The cool, commanding Green Eyes, the adoring Maurice, and the rebellious Lefranc can be read as the conflicting tendencies of a single personality. What all three characters have in common is the search for some authority, or some interpretation of existence, by which they can lead their lives.

The playwright dresses his characters in “violent colors . . . whites and hard blacks,” and suggests that their movements can be “either heavy or else extreme and incomprehensibly rapid, like flashes of lightning.” This last stage direction implies that the actors bear responsibility for creating alternating extremes of action that are like the alternating extremes of existence itself: acceptance and rejection, illogical polar opposites that are mysteriously linked in dreams if not in everyday waking reality. A prison, after all, is its own special world, Genet implies, and it can be peculiarly effective in demonstrating the obsessive behavior of human beings.

Critical Context

Deathwatch was written in the mid-1940’s, probably during one of Jean Genet’s own stays in prison. Convicted repeatedly for thievery, he was pardoned in 1947 from a life sentence only after appeals flooded in from the greatest literary figures and intellectuals of the period. He had intimate knowledge of the petty lives of criminals in a criminal universe with a separate ethical system. In this criminal world, members were judged according to the consistency and genuineness of their behavior. At the same time, plays such as Deathwatch suggest the illusory nature of reality. These criminals may have created a different standard of measurement for themselves, but they have not succeeded in finding freedom, and they suffer from intense longing for an authentic inner self.

Genet is remarkable for his ability to revive and to advance the cliche of honor among thieves. For Genet, among criminals there is a code every bit as demanding and genuine as that espoused by the law-abiding. A great artist, he does not sentimentalize his subjects or suggest that criminals reveal a deeper truth about society. On the contrary, his criminals seem motivated by universal impulses: the desire to find a savior, to adhere to a principle of sacrifice, and to believe in a concept of individuality even while succumbing to the most degrading, conformist behavior.

There is also the quest to believe that the hero’s own actions speak for larger principles. Green Eyes, for example, regards his cell as a microcosm of a greater order:

Here in the cell I’m the one who bears the whole brunt. The brunt of what—I don’t know. I’m illiterate. But I know I need a strong back. The way Snowball bears the same weight. But for the whole prison. Maybe there’s someone else, a Number One Big Shot, who bears it for the whole world!

It is no wonder that Jean-Paul Sartre titled his biography Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1963), for no modern writer has had a stronger sense of man’s desire to feel that he is not alone, that in his actions are the stuff of a great belief, an allegiance to transcendent values whose powers can be felt even in a prison cell.

Deathwatch bears a striking resemblance to Genet’s early work, particularly toNotre-Dame des fleurs (1944; Our Lady of the Flowers, 1949). This novel is set in a prison in which Genet is a prisoner. He decorates the walls with pictures of notorious criminals and meditates on the meaning of imprisonment and freedom. In Miracle de la rose (1946; Miracle of the Rose, 1966), Genet creates a character, Harcamone, who resembles Green Eyes. Harcamone’s special status as a murderer elevates him above Genet’s own petty criminality. While much of Genet’s work appears to be autobiographical, the precise relationship between his work and his life has never been established.

Sources for Further Study

Brooks, Peter, and Joseph Halpern, eds. Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

Cetta, Lewis T. Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet: A Study of His Drama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974.

Coe, Richard N. The Vision of Jean Genet. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Driver, Tom F. Jean Genet. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.

Knapp, Bettina L. Jean Genet. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

McMahon, Joseph H. The Imagination of Jean Genet. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.

Plunka, Gene A. The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Heinemann, 1988.

Thody, Philip. Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays. New York: Stein and Day, 1968.

White, Edmund. Genet: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1994.