PARTISAN REVIEW
207
In
The Thiel's Journal,
Genet lived as a satellite to Stilitano, a
dim
but virile one-armed bandit whose life's ambition is to be "the
conquering hero of the comic books." Serving the master by assum–
ing the burden of dangerous trips across national borders with packets
of opium, Genet reports that he acted "out of obedience, out of sub–
mission to a sovereign Power." "It's perfectly natural," I said to my–
self. "He's a prick and I'm a cunt." An operating pimp, Stilitano
also runs a woman, the prostitute Sylvia, and so has two "cunts" in
his service, Genet being the second. When a biological male is de–
scribed as a "cunt," one gets a better notion of the meaning of the
word. By revealing its primarily status and power definition, Genet
has demonstrated the utterly arbitrary and invidious nature of sex role.
Divorced from their usual justification in an assumed biological con–
gruity (where alignment is semantic) masculine and feminine stand
out as terms of praise and blame, authority and servitude, high and
low, master and slave.
II
And of course there is something infinitely ironic in Genet's use
of the terms, masculine and feminine, for as both his groups are male,
role appears more than simply arbitrary; it is the function of an
oppressive social system. Particulars of status are observed with such
excess of zeal, such tribal rigidity, that the final impression is hu–
morous. Genet's own attitude fluctuates between obsequious accep–
tance and tongue-in-cheek mockery so that the total effect
is
satiric,
and increasingly so as the oblique parody one finds in his prose fiction
develops into direct statement in the plays, where feminine or op–
pressed mentality is extended to the other political contexts of race,
class and colony.
In the novels, Genet is forever arranging things so that his own
feminine last shall
be
first, shall triumph somehow, even
if
it be the
victory of despair and martyrdom. His queens embrace their lowliness
with such fervor they convert it to grandeur, like those "Daughters
of Shame," the Carolinas, a transvestite horde who march abroad in
the streets of Barcelona, their "extravagant gestures" but a method
to "pierce the shell of the world's contempt." Through the miracle
of Genet's prose ("my victory is verbal") the masochism consistent
