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

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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, creates moral solitude

The re-appropriation of a language and system you're expelled from, the conceptualisation of an own divinity, the anarchical self-creation; the belief system is not a received one that's gone unquestioned, it is built from the ground up. To believe in or experience a God and divine power at odds with the existing belief systems.

QUOTES

•"... but at night, by candlelight, I hunted for lice, our pets in the seams of his trousers. The lice inhabited us. They imparted to our clothes an animation, a presence, which, when they had gone, left our garments lifeless. We liked to know - and feel - that the translucent bugs were swarming; though not tamed, they were so much a part of us that a third person's louse disgusted us.The lice were the only sign of our prosperity, of the very underside of prosperity ..." (p. 26)

•"The nervousness provoked by fear, and sometimes anxiety, makes for a state akin to religious moods" (p. 29)

•"... the insidious confusion which would make me deny fundamental oppositions was already forming" (p. 32)

•"I then realized how hard it is to reach the light by puncturing the abscess of shame" (p. 67)

•"the greater my guilty in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom" (p. 84)

•"it was within me that I established this divinity - origin and disposition of myself. I swallowed it. I dedicated to it songs of my own invention" (p. 86)

•"Talent is courtesy to matter; it consists of giving song to that which is mute" (p. 110)

•"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)

•"My courage consisted of destroying all the usual reasons for living and discovering others" (p. 175)

•"As for him, he was unaware of the secret purpose I was making him serve and that he was what is called the homeland: the entity which fights in the soldier's place and sacrifices him." (p. 181)

•"Saintliness is individual. It's expression is original."

... However, it seems to me that its sole basis is renunciation. I therefore also associate it with freedom" (p. 209)

•"ceasing to be "I", ceasing to be "you", the subsisting smile is a uniform smile cast upon all things" (p. 215)