Reading Order
Journal du voleur Reading Order
Journal du voleur (The Thief's Journal, 1949) by Jean Genet is the autobiographical account of his years as a thief, beggar, and prostitute in Spain, Belgium, and Germany in the late 1930s — the explicit key to the fantasy worlds of the novels, giving the real experiences that Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Querelle de Brest transform into lyrical fiction. The Journal is Genet's most directly personal work, but it is not a simple autobiography — it is as self-consciously literary as the novels, aware at every moment that the 'I' constructing the autobiography is a literary creation as much as a real person. The Journal gives the first explicit account of Genet's program: the transformation of shame and criminality into beauty, the choice to be what society has condemned, the aesthetics of the forbidden. It was published by Gallimard with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who had campaigned successfully for Genet's release from a life sentence in 1948.
Where to start
Read the four novels (Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, Pompes funèbres, Querelle de Brest) before Journal du voleur — the Journal is the autobiographical key that gives the real basis for the fantasy worlds of the novels, and reading it first reduces the effect of the novels' lyricism. Read it last, as the explicit account of what the novels' fantasies are based on.
Complete Journal du voleur Book List
- 1Buy
Journal du voleur
Jean Genet·1949·Start here (if read before the novels) or read last — the autobiographical account; the key to the novels' fantasy worlds - 2Buy
Notre-Dame des Fleurs
Jean Genet·1943·The first and most radical novel — if not already read, read before the Journal for the full effect - 3Buy
Miracle de la rose
Jean Genet·1946·Miracle of the Rose — Mettray and Fontevrault; the prison world of the Journal transformed into lyrical fiction - 4Buy
Querelle de Brest
Jean Genet·1947·The most formally controlled of the novels — the sailor-murderer and masculine beauty; the complement to Journal - 5Buy
Saint Genet, comédien et martyr
Jean-Paul Sartre·1952·Sartre's 600-page existentialist account — the most important critical reading of Genet; read after the major works
Journal du voleur — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the program that Journal du voleur describes?
Genet describes his program explicitly: the transformation of shame into beauty, the aestheticization of what society condemns. As a child designated 'thief,' abandoned, imprisoned, he chose to take this condemnation and make it into a positive identity — to be the thief, the faggot, the criminal, not as something forced on him but as something chosen absolutely. The aesthetic program of the novels is the creative realization of this: the deliberate creation of beauty from the material of transgression and criminality. Journal du voleur gives this program in its explicit autobiographical form, making the novels legible as creative transformations of actual experience.
What is Genet's attitude toward his criminal past in the Journal?
Genet does not regret or explain his criminal past — he celebrates it, but in a way that is literary rather than simply defiant. He presents theft, prostitution, and begging as occasions for beauty and self-knowledge, not as victimhood or rebellion. The Journal's most striking quality is its aesthetic serenity: Genet describes sleeping in doorways, being expelled from Spain, servicing strangers in German railroad stations, with the same lyrical attention he gives to the beauty of young criminals and the moral weight of transgression. The attitude is the opposite of self-pity or moral protest; it is closer to acceptance combined with aestheticization.
How did Genet avoid a life sentence?
Genet was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948 after his tenth conviction for theft — French law at the time imposed mandatory life sentences on recidivists. Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre led a public campaign on his behalf, writing letters to the courts and the press; eventually the French government pardoned him. The campaign succeeded partly because of Genet's literary reputation — Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and the plays had already been published and had established him as a major French writer. The pardon was granted by the French President, and Genet was released in 1948, the year before Journal du voleur was published.
What are Genet's plays and how do they relate to the novels?
Genet's plays — Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1947), Haute Surveillance (Deathwatch, 1949), Le Balcon (The Balcony, 1957), Les Nègres (The Blacks, 1959), Les Paravents (The Screens, 1961) — are in many ways more widely known than the novels, especially in the English-speaking world after Peter Brook's productions in the 1960s. The plays develop the theatrical dimension of the novels' central interest: the self as performance, the impossibility of authentic identity, the theater within theater. Les Bonnes is the most accessible introduction; The Balcony and The Blacks are the most politically ambitious. All the plays should be read after the novels to see the transformation of the lyrical mode into the theatrical.
What is the Bernard Frechtman translation like?
Bernard Frechtman's translations (Grove Press, 1954–1964) — of Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, Querelle de Brest, Pompes funèbres, and Journal du voleur — are the standard English versions and were done in close collaboration with Genet himself. They are remarkably faithful to Genet's extraordinary prose — the run-on sentences, the lyrical flights, the sudden collapses into slang — and are among the finest translations of any twentieth-century French writer. Grove Press kept all five books in print for decades, and the Frechtman translations are still the standard versions.
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