using paper “... that wasn’t intended for literary masterpieces” (Knapp, 1968:23).
Genet rewrote these fragments of his inner life, word for word, fifty pages:
... sincerely, with fire and rage ... My solitude in prison was total.
Now that I speak of it, it is less so. Then I was alone. At night I
would let myself be borne along by a current of abandon. The
world was a torrent, a rapid of forces come together to carry me
to the sea, to death. I had the bitter joy of knowing I was alone. I
am nostalgic for the following sound: as I lie dreaming in my cell,
my mind idly drifting, suddenly the convict in the cell above me
gets up and starts walking up and down, with an even pace. My
reverie is also adrift, but this sound (in the foreground, as it were,
because of its precision) reminds me that the body which is
daydreaming, the one from which the reverie has escaped, is in
prison, prisoner of a clear, sudden, regular pacing ... (Genet,
1949:91).
Yet Genet was not alone for his cell was populated by imaginary figures,
they lived with him and were often composites of actual people but they took on an
often extended imaginal existence of their own, indeed an autonomous existence
very much like the character encountered by John Fowles which precipitated the
writing of The French Lieutenants Woman.
Sartre, wrote in his introduction to Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, that the
words which compose it, “... are those that a prisoner said to himself while panting
with excitement, those with which he loaded himself, as with stones, in order to
sink to the bottom of his reveries ... dreams of words” (in Genet, 1973:10). Genet’s
works have been criticised because of their overt homosexuality, their pornographic
content, yet I believe that this is the very quality that marks them as shamanic, for
one need only consult Jung, Eliade and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to
understand how closely the sexual act, whether symbolic or actual, is part and
parcel of religion. I ndeed, the Genet corpus is not so much pornographic as it is
instinctual, for example, in Funeral Rites, he writes:
I n the state of ecstasy there is also an element of fear with
respect to the divinity or his angels. The prick I was touching with
my finger was not only my lover’s but also that of a warrior, of the
most brutal, most formidable of warriors, of the lord of war, of the
demon, of the exterminating angel. I was committing a sacrilege
and was conscious of it. I t was his secret weapon, the V-1 on
which the Fuhrer relies. I t was the ultimate and major treasure of
the Germans (Genet, 1973:143).
And in The Thief’s Journal, (Penguin, 1975 edition) Genet writes:
Thus, we sometimes stole, and each burglary allowed us to
breathe for a moment at the surface. A vigil of arms precedes