each nocturanal [ sic] expedition. The nervousness provoked by
fear, and sometimes by anxiety, makes for a state akin to religious
moods. At such times I tend to see omens in the slightest
accidents. These things become signs of chance. I want to charm
the unknown powers upon which the success of the adventure
seems to me to depend. I try to charm them by moral acts,
chiefly by charity. I give more readily and more freely to beggars,
I give my seat to old people, I stand... (Genet, 1975:21).
Also,
As an operation of this kind cannot succeed by means of dialectics,
I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate
predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature (Genet, 1975:57-
58).
Genet is clearly identifying a state of consciousness that is akin to that of the
shaman where his inner thoughts and his actions are somehow connected with or
will influence the exterior world. He describes a type of participation mystique, a
primitive magical state. Of course, one needs to address the problem of translation
here but I suggest that the issue is not in the rewriting but rather in the way that
the text is understood, and herein lies one of the qualities of mythopoeic literature;
that neither the grammar and syntax nor implicature can, of itself, account for the
particular effect of mythopoeic literature even in translation. I n the context of my
thesis, the first requirement of the mythopoeic writer and reader is not explanation
but description, which brings with it the formidable challenge of describing the
places and experiences occupied and perceived by another person and then seeing
if those places and experiences have any more general meaning for humankind. In
other words, do they provide an inclusive overview of the experience of being
human and of the existential nature of place? One might well consider in his
introduction to Our Lady of the Flowers, Sartre’s comment on Genet’s essentialism
and apply it generally to the mythopoeic writer and reader:
Genet’s essentialism, a hierarchical conception of a world in which
forms dovetail. Genet's imagination is essentialist, as is his
homosexuality. I n real life, he seeks the Seaman in every sailor,
the Eternal in every pimp. I n his reverie he bends his mind to
justifying his quest. He generates each of his characters out of a
higher essence; he reduces the episode to being merely the
manifest illustration of an eternal truth (in Genet, 1975:46).