It is unlikely that, during his prolific career as a criminal, Jean Genet had the opportunity to read Joseph Roth’s beautiful parable, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which was published after his ill-fated 1939 death. Since the terms “myth” and “sacredness” were of particular importance at the heart of Genet’s literary project, he would have felt that the forlorn Austrian master’s work was challenged with unusual force had he been able to encounter it. Seventy-five years after its publication, let us give a voice to the author himself in this Thief’s Diary, which brings us together today: “Sacredness lies in making pain useful. Forcing the devil to become God. It is the recognition of evil. I’ve been writing a book for five years: I can say I did it with pleasure, but I finished it. Thanks to writing, I got what I was looking for. What will guide me as a teaching is not my experiences, but the style in which I tell it. Artwork, not anecdotes. It’s not my life, it’s his interpretation. This is what language offers me to evoke it, to talk about it, to translate it. Manage to make my legend ».
Genet is transparent and explanatory, almost pedagogical in these lines. On the one hand, it saves critics from any interpretive play, pages of painful exegesis, any scattering of ad hominems; on the other hand, it proudly presupposes the inevitable contradictions and definitive paradoxes that fuel any story with an autobiographical basis. For it is true that in the books events are not recounted as they really are, but it is also true that the author of Santa MarÃa de las Flores openly states that he resolved this conflict between reality and its representation in a bloodless event. since the beginning of his career as a writer. The important thing is the solution framework. The author has the power to distort the past and give the reader his own climate. In this way, Genet not only satisfies a certain maxim of Buffon (“Style is man”), but also conquers for his text the autonomy inherent in every work of art, the unique and dominant atmosphere that is not interchangeable. that a Human creation has attained the singularity of being unlike anything else and not responding to any criteria that did not stem from its own indisputable consistency.
The Thief’s Diary expresses this singularity and presupposes this consistency to its limits. It’s a raw, violent, violent book, and also an astonishing mastery. Full of lice and fags, but also full of tenderness and lyrical exuberance. In the same paragraph, Genet is a sodomite and avid poet, a thief and a generous heart, a fan of murder and the resurrected Jesus. Her life from the ruins culminates in a starry firmament where, in multi-carat French, beauty has rendered hieroglyphs of blood, shit, and sperm. Genet weaves a sacred cloth using the coarsest materials, reinforcing hundreds of wonders. He carries water from a poisoned well and fulfills the mystery of quenching the thirst. This dialectic between garbage and alchemy is above all the adventures of a book that includes a journey in the company of a hallucinated peasantry around a landscape poised for destruction in Europe from the 1930s to the 1940s: pimps and transvestites, swindlers and murderers, traitors and drugs. addicts, criminals and corrupt cops, men as beautiful as savages whose common destiny is death. (It should be noted that Genet dedicated his moving Le condamné à mort to Maurice Pilorge, one of the last to be guillotined in France).
In a text constructed more like a palimpsest than an ossified structure and with a largely fragmentary and capricious use of time, Genet’s voyage to Spain deserves special credit. Indeed, Diario del ladrón, in its first part, draws almost exclusively from the hero’s Spanish adventures with Barcelona and Andalusia as epicenters, and presents a sometimes Goyavarian fascinating portrait of our country at the turn of the 19th century. The 1980s, the 30s of the last century, when the writer was a very young beggar, when he began to build legendary perspectives of the future. The relevance of this portrait of Spain actually goes far beyond the time map it presents, for Genet manages to metabolize the country, turning it into a kind of personal organ; closes: “that region I call Spain”
In the case of the one-armed Stilitano, which encodes memorable moments such as the murder committed by Gypsy Pepe and serves to display them in a large and colorful way, it is a region populated by the criminal writer with unforgettable heroes. theater of the absurd, the miserable and at the same time heroic effort of his peers to achieve the dignity of the helpless. It is not in vain that the core value of Genet’s literature has almost always given a voice to the underprivileged, the catalog of moral monsters that make us believe ourselves better than we really are. Therefore, when blessed with fame and recognition and acclaimed by the society he hated so much in his early books, Genet puts his voice in the defense of blacks in the United States or Palestinians in the Middle East. doing nothing but putting on new clothes, the purpose that enlivens his writings from the very beginning: to give presence to those who have barely survived their death, to remind them that they are alive, and at the same time immerse them in it. this framework of anarchy and uncertainty, the definitive and valuable development of the legend itself.
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.