User:Trashpuppy/Jean Genet - The Thief's Journal

SYNOPSIS

THE THIEF'S JOURNAL is Genet's most autobiographical work, recounting as well as fictionalising bits of his life during the 1930s (Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Nazi Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Morocco). During this time he lived as a vagabond, travelling on foot and living off crime, begging and prostitution.

Genet uses noble as well as religious language to describe his lovers and practices, in doing so proposing an alternative Sainthood with its own holy trinity of homosexuality, theft and betrayal.

"I want to rehabilitate this period by writing of it with the names of things most noble. My victory is verbal and I owe it to the richness of the terms, but may the poverty that counsels such choices be blessed" (p. 59)

It is a subversion of a world which he through his life and birth is expelled from. What is humiliated and wrapped in shame becomes noble and virtuous. This re-appropriation is an ANARCHICAL SELF-CREATION.

CONNECTIONS

In this way the book has quite some parallels to Lipstick traces and the therein described negation. Genet's negation contains within itself a similar contradiction and denial. But not a denial of all possibility of truth. He contradicts more than denies it. In this way Genet's subversion implodes or expands the "original" structure of Christian religion similarly to heretic practices. This negation contains within itself a similar fear as Greil Marcus discusses, if nothing is true, all is possible. This circular economy of ideology Genet proposes and maintains a moral solitude

QUOTES

•"As the origin of moral order is in Christian precepts, I wished to familiarize myself with the idea of God: in a state of mortal sin, I would take communion at morning mass" (p. 172)

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