Appendix II:

The author and web publisher, Bruce Duvall, would like to thank Jean-Paul Sartre for his tour de force, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, a book which analyzed the writing, character and world of the French poet, playwright and novelist Jean Genet, including psychological and religious factors.

Sartre’s book title in English does not convey accurately the original meaning of the French title, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952 – translated into English 1963). With his use in his title of the word comédien (which was translated into English as ‘actor’), Sartre meant – not just ‘actor’, or ‘comic actor’, or ‘sham’, but – that Genet in his writing and life refrained from wandering into psychological realms of ‘tragedy’, but remained in psychological worlds that, while maybe sad or pathetic at times, or super-dramatic, never were so awful as to qualify as ‘tragic’. And ‘martyr’ meant that, even though Genet was a thief and vagabond, a Parisian off-color street rowdy who spent much of his life in jail cells, his life had a certain self-sacrificing and religious dimension. He was not a one-dimensional thief, or actor, or playwright, but a person of multiple and complex qualities.

Duvall, who usually prefers to stay in the background, has finally come out of writer’s seclusion enough to compose the following comments regarding the book, Saint Genet, and its relevance to the present work, ‘a look at mj lorenzo’s Tales of Waring’, and to all of his writing in general:

Recently it occurred to me that in my own mind I have failed unconscionably to give Sartre due credit for the impact on my life of his great book, Saint Genet. While I was putting the present work of fiction together ('a look at mj lorenzo's second book, Tales of Waring'), it struck me one day that many of the tricks I have been using in the fictional oeuvre, ‘a look at the life and creative artifacts of mj lorenzo’, including the present work of fiction, may owe their origin partly to that brainy barnstormer – or – I think maybe I meant – brawny brainstormer – of Jean-Paul Sartre’s. Years ago I stopped thinking consciously about Sartre and Genet, and this may explain my failure until now to recognize their constant contribution and presence in my writing work, even up to today, May 30, 2019. The conscious impact on me of these two French authors occurred mostly during the nineteen sixties, when I was in my twenties and reading everything they wrote I could lay my hands on, even if I had to struggle with French. Any effect on me thereafter has remained un-conscious until only this past year, during the summer of 2018, when suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the following things:

Most writers over the centuries have picked just one tried and true traditional format for looking at another writer (or artist of any kind)) in a formal written work. They may critique a given work, or group of works, calling their own work ‘literary or artistic criticism’, using that genre in more or less traditional ways; or they may outline the writer’s life in a kind of biography, and mention a few ways that their life affected their writing or art, or their writing, their life. These are maybe the commonest ways, but since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a third approach, too, the psychoanalytic.

For example, Carl Gustav Jung, M.D., the revered Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and sage, wrote many short pieces reflecting on a number of written works he considered importantly helpful to his own lifelong career studying scientifically the structure of the universal Homo sapiens psyche. These works included a foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s English translation of the ancient Chinese text, The I Ching; an epilogue to Roland Cahen’s Man in Search of his Soul; a reflection on James Joyce’s modern novel Finnegan’s Wake; a commentary on the ancient Chinese work, The Secret of the Golden Flower; psychological commentaries on “The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,” and “The Tibetan Book of the Dead;” and many, many more. But Jung’s approach was neither literary criticism in the usual sense, nor biography in any typical literary sense. It was psychoanalytic, i.e., mind-analyzing, plumbing the depths of the human psyche, and not just one author’s, but everybody’s. He looked at their works from a unique perspective, applying to each work individually certain principles which he had outlined in his own writing while creating the field of scientific psychological knowledge he called Analytical Psychology. The I Ching he analyzed mostly in terms of a phenomenon of the human psyche he named ‘synchronicity’, but also in terms of another phenomenon of the human psyche, the interplay of two universal forces he called ‘spirit and matter’. Man in Search of His Soul he analyzed mostly from the viewpoint of the specific ‘archetype of the collective unconscious’ which he labeled ‘the Self’. And so on. These were certainly not the only books Jung studied in order to psychoanalyze their authors and, at the same time, analyze the deepest unconscious psychodynamics of the human race as a whole. He delved into many ancient texts of alchemy, for example, and analyzed the psyches of all of the authors, collectively, then wrote major works on the universal human psychological patterns he had discovered in their alchemical works. And he astutely analyzed psychologically dozens of other written works, and their authors, over his lifetime. In his early blockbuster Psychological Types, just to name one of his major published treatises, for example, he painted psychological pictures of dozens of creative thinkers over the past two thousand years, from Origen and Tertullian through Goethe and Schiller to William James and Freud, based on their writings. Many more individual psychoanalyses can be found in his 19 or more volumes of Collected Works, each analysis based on a given writer’s written output.

Erik Erikson did something similar in his analytic biographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Ghandi.

Jean-Paul Sartre, for his part, went even beyond these approaches and used all three approaches at once and more when he studied Genet: literary criticism, biography, psychoanalysis, and more. Taking certain character-forming events from Genet’s childhood and youth which he considered important and therefore recounted in lurid detail, and also looking at specific written artistic works of Genet’s, he CHARACTER-ANALYZED Genet from the Existentialist (not Freudian; and not Jungian) point of view. ‘Character-analyzed’, however, may not be the perfect term. He analyzed Genet’s character and talent and psychology in a huge opus while Genet was yet alive and maybe even – probably – in jail for the twenty-ninth time (because Genet routinely broke the law in a number of flagrant ways by stealing and carrying on in the streets of Paris with a band of rowdies that included transvestites etc.); and thereby Sartre built a construct, a complex paradigm for understanding the man which also included political; religious (French Roman Catholic); sociological; cultural; subcultural; and even street-buddy factors: all from the standpoint of the general European thought stream’s movements of ‘existential philosophy’ and ‘existential psychology’, both of which in Sartre’s case were colored at this point in his life (1952) by ‘dialectical materialism’ in the form of Stalinist Communism. (Later Sartre would repudiate Stalinist Communism and embrace instead what came to be called 'Sartrian Socialism'.)

Perhaps then the reader will see some similarities between Sartre’s method of ‘looking at’ Genet, and my own as described on the home page of   bruceduvall.com   and also on the title page of each separate mj lorenzo work at that website (which is the present website), where I have described my own method of study, or ‘looking at’ a creative writer/artist, in this way:

this multi-volume  ‘look’  at mj lorenzo    makes use of      an unusual literary genre      which

patch-quilts                  novelistic plot suspense and action      with      among other things

imaginative biography      and      interpretive criticism      (literary & artistic & general)

while pretending as well                  to a comprehension of a fundamental and right

analysis of earth’s human culture       and       philosophy of earth’s human spirit

. 

As one will hopefully see, Sartre could have written something similar to this as a description of his approach to conceiving and writing his great book, Saint Genet. If we replace the words “this multi-volume ‘look’ at mj lorenzo” with the words “this immense one-volume ‘look’ at Jean Genet,” it might well work as a description of Sartre’s method of study in his book, Saint Genet.

I hope this thank you will assuage some guilt for hitherto failing to recognize Sartre as a significant source of style, structure, and overall conception, in my approach to writing about mj lorenzo.

And, for having finally shown some due respect and appreciation to a forgotten writer forebear, may it buy me a nicer niche in Writers’ Heaven.

Thank you for considering these thoughts.

Sincerely,

Bruce C. Duvall

P.S. I would like to mention, just in case M. Sartre is reading over my shoulder, that just exactly like him, my mother’s mother’s mother’s father, John A. Kirchner (who lived most of his adult life and died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – during the middle-to-late 1800s), was born and raised an Alsatian and was from the highly educated class of Alsace. (John A. was ‘fluent in seven languages’, as my mother’s mother attested.) And that suggests Monsieur Sartre and I might be related in another way too, i.e., genetically. Alsace is not that big a place.

BCD

Additional note to readers,

as of May 30, 2019 – It has come to my regretful attention that m/Monsieurs mj lorenzo and Sammy Martinez have been growing ever more inordinately independent and high and mighty, and have recently even gone so far as to align, and claim that I am ‘merely’ the webmaster of the present website. Please ignore all such frivolities, wherever and whenever they pop up while you read, and be assured that I am the fully fledged and only authorized author of everything or anything happening at this website of address   bruceduvall.com   including Monsieurs lorenzo and Martinez themselves, who are ‘merely’ figments of MY imagination. Hopefully this loud public repudiation of any and all such claims belittling my contribution will quell any further acts of sedition. Please accept my apologies if this (hopefully temporary) psychic disturbance and loss of total conscious control over my website content has caused reader confusion. Surely, if a U.S. president can be made a stool pigeon by the Russians and get to enjoy seeing it happily overlooked by so many decent and discerning people, then an American fiction writer should be even more glad-handedly forgiven if he is duped by his own characters, which are, after all, not real and dangerously ill-purposed like the Russians, but just a writer's private fictional – and therefore innocent – creations.

And furthermore, while I'm setting the record straight, please disregard all claims by any fictional characters of mine, such as lorenzo or Martinez, that they are 'real' writers, editors, contributors, board presidents with veto power, or possess similar titles or prerogatives, and are writing nonfictiion about themselves in the real world. They and all of the little or big things they say or do are merely part of the fictional world I have been creating for the past five decades, since June of 1970, to be precise.

I guess it's just that, sometimes they seem so real, they start bossing me around.  

As for lorenzo and Martinez claiming (just above, within the caption under Sartre's Genet bookcover) that they are 'real' because of a certain picture of Lorenzo presented within the present work (title page for Part III), where his ringed fingers match those of Duvall's at the top of the present page: a careful and clear explanation of where we find photos to represent our fictional characters, including Dr. Lorenzo, may be found at the present website, within our look at Hooked on Cocaland:  www.bruceduvall.com/HOChtmls/hoc107-bcdnote.html . In other words, and to belabor the tiresomely silly point not a mad second further, the hand with rings at the top of the present page is Bruce Duvall's, as is the hand on the Part III title page which those boys (I almost said bozos) are claiming is Dr. Lorenzo's.

They may 'write' and 'create' and 'edit' all they please, but there are decided advantages in being your own typesetter and publisher. You get the final word.

BCD