Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  We can be sure that our “dreamer” never leaves reality; he arranges it. That is why this introvert, who is incapable of true relations with others, can create such vivid figures as Darling, Divine, and Mimosa. He weaves a dream around his experiences, and that means, most of the time, that he simply changes their sign. Out of his hatred for women, his resentment against his guilty mother, his desire for femininity, his realism, his taste for ceremonies, he will create Ernestine. She will try to murder her son because Genet's mother abandoned him and because the author dreams of killing a young man. She will shoot wide of the mark because Genet knows that he is not of the “elect,” that he will never be a murderer. She will march in Divine's funeral procession as the servant girl will march in that of her child1 because Genet, when he was a child, followed (or dreamed of following) that of a little girl with whom he was in love. All these traits will finally compose a fleeting and inimitable figure that will have the contingency and truth of life and that will be the obverse of the fake coin of which Genet himself is the reverse. He plays, he alters a situation, a character, sure of never making an error since he is obeying his desires, since he checks on his invention by his state of excitement. At times he stops and consults himself; he hesitates playfully: “So Divine is alone in the world. Whom shall I give her for a lover? The gypsy I am seeking? . . . He accompanies her for a while in the passing crowd . . . lifts her from the ground, carries her in front of him without touching her with his hands, then, upon reaching a big melodious house, he puts her down . . . picks up from the mud of the gutter a violin . . . [and] disappears.” The scenery is put up as he goes along, as in dreams: Genet brings out the props when they are needed, for example, the gypsy, a leitmotif of his solitary pleasures. We are told he plays the guitar The reason is that Genet was once in love with a guitarist. Besides, for this fetishist the guitar is an erotic object because it has a round, low-slung rump. We read in his poem “The Galley:” “Their guitar-like rumps burst into melody” the low-pitched sounds of the plucked strings are the farts that “stream from downy behinds.” Later, in Funeral Rites, Jean Decarnin will be metamorphosed into a guitar. In this autistic thinking, the guitarist is his own guitar. When Genet brings Divine and the gypsy together, immediately “he lifts her from the ground without touching her with his hands.” On his penis, of course. Our lonely prisoner dreams of straddling a huge, powerful member that rises slowly and lifts him from the ground. Later, it will be the mast that Genet climbs in Miracle of the Rose and the cannon in Funeral Rites. But this pattern is linked more particularly–I do not know why–with his desire for gypsies. In The Thief's Journal, he will spring into the air on a gypsy's prick. The scene is merely outlined in Our Lady,1 for the reason that other forces and desires prevented it from being filled in. This triumphal cavalcade was not meant for poor Divine. It does not succeed in exciting Genet; he immediately loses interest in it. From the gypsy is born a melody, which floats for a moment, then suddenly condenses and becomes a “melodious house,” just a bare detail, the minimum requited for the gypsy to be able to push open a door and disappear, dissolved in his own music.

  Genet shows everything. Since his only aim is to please himself, he sets down everything. He informs us of his erections that come to nothing just as he does of those that come off successfully. Thus, his characters have, like real men, a life in action, a life involving a range of possibilities. Life in action may be defined as the succession of images that have led Genet to orgasm. He will be able to repeat the “effective” scenes indefinitely, at will, without modifying them, or to vary them around a few fixed elements. (Here too a selection takes place. There are some whose erotic power is quickly exhausted: the “dreams are usually sated after four or five hours.” Others, which have deeper roots, remain at times in a state of virulence, at times inert and floating, awaiting a new embodiment.) The possibilities, on the other hand, are all the images that he has caressed without attaining orgasm. Thus, unlike our possibilities, which are the acts that we can and, quite often, do perform, these fictional possibilities represent simply the missed opportunities, the permission that Genet pitilessly refuses his creatures. He once said to me: “My books are not novels because none of my characters make decisions on their own.” This is particularly true of Our Lady and accounts for the book's desolate, desert-like aspect. Hope can cling only to free and active characters. Genet, however, is concerned only with satisfying his cruelty. All his characters are inert, are knocked about by fate. The author is a barbaric god who revels in human sacrifice. This is what Genet himself calls the “Cruelty of the Creator.” He kicks Divine toward saintliness. The unhappy girl-queen undergoes her ascesis in an agony. Genet diverts himself by imposing upon her the progressive austerity he wishes to achieve freely himself. It is the breath of Genet that blights the soft flesh of Divine; it is the hand of Genet that pulls out her teeth; it is the will of Genet that makes her hair fall out; it is the whim of Genet that takes her lovers from her. And it is Genet who amuses himself by driving Our Lady to crime and then drawing from him the confession that condemns him to death. But cannot the same be said of every novelist? Who, if not Stendhal, caused Julien Sorel to die on the scaffold? The difference is that the novelist kills his hero or reduces him to despair in the name of truth, or experience, so that the book may be more beautiful or because he cannot work out his story otherwise. If Julien Sorel is executed, it is because the young tutor on whom he was modeled lost his head. The psychoanalyst has, of course, the right to seek a deeper, a criminal intention behind the author's conscious motives, but, except for the Marquis de Sade and two or three others, very few novelists take out their passions on their characters out of sheer cussedness. But listen to Genet: “Marchetti will remain between four white walls to the end of ends. . . . It will be the death of Hope. . . . I am very glad of it. Let this arrogant and handsome pimp in turn know the torments reserved for the weakly.” Moreover, the author himself, that owl who says “I” in the heart of his darkness, hardly comes off any better. Later, he will reserve certain active roles for himself. We shall see him strike and dominate Bulkaen, or slowly get over the death of Jean Decarnin. Later, Jean Genet will become “the wiliest hoodlum,” Ulysses. For the time being, he is lying on his back, paralyzed. He is passively waiting for a judge to decide his fate. He too is in danger of being sent to a penal colony for life. Yes, Our Lady of the Flowers is a dream. Only in dreams do we find this dreadful passivity. In dreams the characters wait for their night to end. In dreams, stranglers pass through walls, the fugitive has leaden soles, and his revolver is loaded with blanks.

  II – THE WORDS

  Yet, by the same movement that chains him in his work to these drifting, rudderless creatures, he frees himself, shakes off his reverie and transforms himself into a creator. Our Lady is a dream that contains its own awakening.

  The reason is that the imagination depends on words. Words complete our fantasies, fill in their gaps, support their inconsistency, prolong them, enrich them with what cannot be seen or touched. It was long ago pointed out that no image can render so simple a sentence as “I'm going to the country tomorrow.” This is perhaps not entirely so, but it is true that abstract connections are expressed more frequently by our inner monologues than by the play of our imagination. “Marchetti will remain between four white walls to the end of ends.” We can be fairly sure that this sentence occurred to Genet spontaneously and that it replaced images which were too vague or schematic. The reason is that there are abstract relationships which can be erotic. The idea that Marchetti will remain a prisoner forever is certainly even more exciting to this resentful sadist than the image of his being humiliated by the guards. There is something final and inexorable about it that only words can render. Images are fleeting, blurred, individual; they reflect our particularity. But words are social, they universalize. No doubt Genet's language suffers from deep lesions; it is stolen, faked, poeticized. No matter: with words, the Other reappears.


  We observed earlier that Genet's two contradictory components (quietism-passivity-masochism; activism-ferocity-existence) united for a moment in masturbation only to disunite after pleasure. Genet the onanist attempted to make himself an object for a subject which, disguised as Darling or Gorgui, was no other than himself, or, as subject, he hounded Divine, an imaginary object and also himself. But the Word expresses the relationship of Narcissus to himself; he is with the subject and with the object. It is no accident that the Word frequently accompanies the act of masturbation, that Gide shows Boris uttering his incantatory formula as an “open sesame.” The onanist wants to take hold of the word as an object. When it is repeated aloud or in a whisper, it immediately acquires an objectivity and presence that are lacking in the object. The image remains something absent; I do not really see it, nor do I hear it. It is I who exhaust myself trying to hold it up. But if I utter the word, I can hear it. And if I succeed in taking my mind off myself when the word comes out of my mouth, if I succeed in forgetting that it is I who say it, I can listen to it as if it emanated from someone else, and indeed even as if it were sounding all by itself. Here is a phrase that still vibrates in Genet's ears. What does he say? “To the end of ends.” To the end of ends Marchetti will remain in jail. It seems that an absolute sentence has been delivered in the cell and that the images have taken on flesh. To the end of ends: is it therefore true? But this object which has surged up in the real world has a shape, a face. Genet can pluck from its visual physiognomy or sound structure the erotic object which he lacks. When he speaks of Darling's “downy behind” we can be sure that he does not couple these words for the truth or beauty of the assemblage, but for its power of suggestion. He is enchanted with the feminine ending of the masculine noun derrière (behind). Fake femininity? Fake masculinity? The rump is the secret femininity of males, their passivity. And what about douillet (downy)? Where does its meaning begin? Where does its significance end? The fleshy blossoming of the diphthong suggests a kind of big, heavy, wet, silky flower; the trim, dainty flectional ending evokes the coy grace of a fop. Darling drapes himself in his behind as in a quilted wrap (douillette). The word conveys the thing; it is the thing itself. Are we so far from poetry? Can it be that poetry is only the reverse side of masturbation?

  Genet would not be true to himself if he were not fascinated by the sacrilege to be committed. We saw a while ago that he listened to words. He is now going to direct his attention to the verbal act, to perceive himself in the process of talking. The naming of forbidden pleasures is blasphemous. The man who masturbates humbly, without saying a word or being too preoccupied with what his hand is doing, is half forgiven; his gesture fades out in the darkness. If it is named, it becomes the Gesture of the masturbator, a threat to everyone's memory. In order to increase his pleasure, Genet names it. To whom? To nobody and to God. For him, as for primitives, the Word has metaphysical virtues. It is evil, it is delightful that an obscene word resound in the semi-darkness of his cell, that it emerge from the dark hole of his covers. The order of the universe is thereby upset. A word uttered is word as subject; heard, it is object. If you read Our Lady of the Flowers, you will see the sentence manifest one or the other of these verbal functions, depending on the poet's mood. Read the description of the love-making of Darling and Divine, or of the first night that Divine spent with Gabriel, or of Gorgui's sexual play with Divine and Our Lady. Read them, for I dare not transcribe them or comment upon them too closely. You will be struck, in most cases, by the incantatory use of the present tense, which is intended to draw the scene into the cell, on to Genet's body, to make it contemporary with the caresses he lavishes on himself. It is also a finical, slightly breathless precision, expressing an eagerness to .find the detail that excites. Here the word is a quasi-object. But this hoarse, hasty, scrupulously careful voice that is panting with incipient pleasure, suddenly breaks. Genet's hand puts down the pen; one of the scenes is hastily finished off: “and so on” another ends with a series of dots. The next moment, Genet, still in a swoon, moans with gratitude: “Oh, I so love to talk about them! . . . The whole world is dying of panicky fright. Five million young men . . . will die. . . . But where I am I can muse in comfort on the lovely dead of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I dream of the lovers’ garret.” This time the word is subject; Genet wants to be heard, to create a scandal. This abandoned “where I am I can muse in comfort” is the giggle of a woman who is being tickled. It is a challenge.

  At the beginning, Genet utters the words or dreams them; he does not write them down. But before long these murmurs cease to satisfy him. When he listens to himself, he cannot ignore the fact that it is he who is speaking. It is in the eagerness for pleasure that he speaks, and he does so in order to excite himself further. And as soon as he surprises himself in the act of speaking, his sacrilegious joy vanishes. He is aware that he alone hears himself and that a moan of pleasure will not keep the earth from turning. Therein lies the trap: he will write. Scripta manent: tomorrow, in three days, when he finds the inert little sketch that confronts him with all its inertia, he will regard the phrase as an erotic and scandalous object. A drifting, authorless sentence will float toward him. He will read it for the first time. A sentence? Why not a whole story? Why not perpetuate the memory of his latest pleasures? Tomorrow a dead voice will relate them to him. He writes obscene and passionate words as he wrote his poems, in order to reread himself.

  This is only an expedient. Even when he reads the sentence, Genet still knows who set it down. He is therefore going to turn, once again, to the Other, for it is the Other who confers upon the word a veritable objectivity–by listening to it. Thus do toilet-poets engrave their dreams upon walls; others will read them, for example that gentleman with a mustache who is hurrying to the street urinal. Whereupon the words become huge, they scream out, swollen with the other's indignation. Unable to read what he writes, Genet empowers the Others to carry on for him. How could it be otherwise? They were already present in the heart of the word, hearers and speakers, awaiting their turn. It was Another who spoke those words which were uttered in the absolute; it was to Others that Genet dedicated these blasphemies which were addressed to the absolute. What Others? Certainly not the prisoners in the neighboring cells who are singing and dreaming and fondling themselves in their melancholy solitude? How could he hope for a moment to scandalize these brothers-in-misery? But, long before, he had been taken by surprise and singled out by men. Later, when he became a thief, he danced before invisible eyes in empty apartments. Is it not to this same omnipresent and fictive public that he is going to dedicate his solitary pleasures? The Just–they are his public. It is they whom he is taunting and by whom he wants to be condemned. He provokes outraged voyeurs in order to take his pleasure in a state of shame and defiance.

  Thus far, there is no art. Writing is an erotic device. The imaginary gaze of the gentle reader has no function other than to give the word a new and strange consistency. The reader is not an end; he is a means, an instrument that doubles the pleasure, in short a voyeur despite himself. Genet is not yet speaking to us; he is talking to himself though wanting to be heard. Intent on his pleasure, he does not so much as glance at us, and though his monologue is secretly meant for us, it is for us as witnesses, not as participants. We shall have the strange feeling that we are intruders and that nevertheless our expected gaze will, in running over the words on the page, be caressing Genet physically. He has just discovered his public, and we shall see that he will be faithful to it. A real public? An imaginary public? Does Genet write without expecting to be read? Is he already thinking of publishing? I imagine that he himself does not know. As a thief, he streamed with light, wanted to be caught, to end in a blaze of glory, and at the same time, frightened to death, did all he could to elude the cops. It is in the same state of mind that he starts to write.

  A dream public, dream orgies, dream speeches. But when the dream word is written down, it becomes a true word. Divine, writes Genet
, “sat down . . . and asked for tea.” This is all that is needed to generate an event in the world. And this event is not the materialization of Divine, who remains where she is, in Genet's head or around his body, but quite simply the appearance of letters on paper, a general and objective result of an activity. Genet wanted to give his dream characters a kind of presence. He failed, but the dream itself, as signification, is present on the sheet “in person” the sentence is impregnated with an event of the mind and reflects it. Whereupon Genet ceases to feel; he knows that he did feel. Let us recall little Culafroy's reverie that was condensed into the single word “suns,’” which he uttered in the presence of a real listener. Genet immediately observes: “It was the word-poem that fell from the vision and began to petrify it.” He has also said of Divine that “it was necessary that [she] never formulate her thoughts aloud, for herself. Doubtless there had been times, when she had said to herself aloud ‘I'm just a foolish girl,’ but having felt this, she felt it no longer, and, in saying it, she no longer thought it.” When confronted with the words that were uttered, she thinks that she thought it. She reflects upon herself, and she who reflects is no longer she who experienced: a pure Divine gazes at herself in the mirror of language. Similarly with Genet: while writing, he has eyes only for Divine, but as soon as the ink is dry he ceases to see her, he sees his own thought. He wanted to see Divine sitting down and asking for tea. A metamorphosis takes place beneath his pen and he sees himself thinking that Divine is sitting down. This mystifying transformation is the exact counterpart of that which led him to his semi-madness. Formerly, he wanted to act, and all his acts changed into gestures. Now, he wants to make a gesture, to brave an imaginary public, and an act is reflected in the signs he has traced: “I wrote that.” Has he thus awakened at last? In one sense, he has, but in another, he is still dreaming, steeped in his excitement, tangled up in his images. A curious kind of thinking indeed, a thinking that becomes hallucinated, reflects upon its hallucinations, recognizes them as such and frees itself from them only to fall again into the trap of a delirium that extends to its reflection. It envelops its madness in a lucid gaze that disarms it, and its lucidity is in turn enveloped and disarmed by madness. The dream is at the core of the awakening, and the awakening is snugly embedded in the dream. Let us read a passage taken at random from Our Lady: “Darling loves Divine more and more deeply, that is, more and more without realizing it. Word by word, he grows attached. But more and more neglects her. She stays in the garret alone. . . . Divine is consumed with fire. I might, just as she admitted to me, confide that if I take contempt with a smile or a burst of laughter, it is not yet–and will it some day be?–out of contempt for contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous, not to be reviled, by anything or anyone, that I have placed myself lower than dirt. I could not do otherwise. If I declare that I am an old whore, no one can better that, I discourage insult. People can't even spit in my face any more. And Darling Daintyfoot is like the rest of you; all he can do is despise me. . . . To be sure, a great earthly love would destroy this wretchedness, but Darling is not yet the Chosen One. Later on, there will come a soldier, so that Divine may have some respite in the course of that calamity which is her life. Darling is merely a fraud ('an adorable fraud,’ Divine calls him), and he must remain one in order to preserve that appearance of a rock walking blindly through my tale (I left out the d in blindly, I wrote ‘blinly‘).1 It is only on this condition that I can like him. I say of him, as of all my lovers, against whom I butt and crumble: ‘Let him be steeped in indifference, let him be petrified with blind indifference.’ Divine will take up this phrase and apply it to Our Lady of the Flowers.” A story at first, up to “Divine is consumed with fire.” Genet lets himself be taken in by it, grows excited; this is the dream. Suddenly, the awakening: jealous of the emotion that Divine's misfortunes have aroused in him and that they may arouse in an imaginary reader, he cries out in annoyance: “I too could make myself interesting if I wanted to.” Implying: “But I have too much pride.” This time, he speaks about himself, not about an invented hero. Is this a true awakening? No, since he continues to affirm the real existence of Divine: “I might, just as she admitted to me . . .” But the very next moment Divine is himself: “All [Darling] can do is despise me.” An awakening this time? Yes and no. Genet has resorbed Divine into himself, but Darling continues to live his independent life. Here and there we come upon sentences which seem to have been written without a pause and which give the impression that Genet, completely taken up with lulling his dream, has not reread what he has set down. Certain sentences limp because they have not been looked after; they are children that have been made to walk too soon: “I might, just as she admitted to me, confide that if I take contempt with a smile or a burst of laughter, it is not yet–and will it some day be?–out of contempt for contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous, not to be reviled, by anything or anyone, that I have placed myself lower than dirt.” Two propositions have collided: this contempt that I take “with a smile or a burst of laughter is not out of contempt for contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous [infer: that I like it]” and “it is not out of contempt for contempt but rather in order not to be ridiculous that I have placed myself lower than dirt.” In short, at this level the words are inductors with relation to each other; they attract and engender one another, in accordance with grammatical habits, within an unheeding consciousness that wants only to weep tears over itself. The sentence takes shape all by itself; it is the dream. But immediately afterward, Genet writes, parenthetically: “I left out the d in blindly, I wrote ‘blinly.’ ‘’ This time he reflects on the sentence, hence on his activity as a writer. It is no longer the love of Divine and Darling that is the object of his reflection, but the slip of his sentence and of his hand. This error in spelling draws his attention to the meaning of the sentence. He contemplates it, discovers it, and decides: “Divine will take up this phrase and apply it to Our Lady of the Flowers.” This time we feel we are reading a passage from The Journal of Crime and Punishment or The Journal of The Counterfeiters. A perfectly lucid writer is informing us of his projects, goes into detail about his creative activities. Genet awakens; Darling in turn becomes a pure and imaginary object. Will Darling be the Chosen One? No, “Darling is merely a fraud . . . and he must remain one, etc.” But who is it who has just awakened? The writer or the onanist? Both. For we are given two reasons explaining why Darling must not change: “in order to preserve my tale,” and “it is only on this condition that I can like him.” Now, the former is that of the creator who wants his work to keep its severity of line, but the latter is that of the masturbator who wants to prolong his excitement. In the end he seems to merge with himself as the pure will that keeps the fantasies well in hand, for he writes, with sudden tranquillity: “It is Darling whom I cherish most, for you realize that, in the final analysis, it is my own destiny, be it true or false, that I am draping (at times a rag, at times a court robe) on Divine's shoulders. Slowly but surely I want to strip her of every vestige of happiness so as to make a saint of her. . . . A morality is being born, which is certainly not the usual morality. . . . And I, more gentle than a wicked angel, lead her by the hand.” But this very detachment seems suspect. Why plume oneself on it, why bring it to our attention? Is it that he wants to shock us? Where does the truth lie? Nowhere. This lucid dreamer, this “evil angel,” retains within himself, in a kind of undifferentiated state, the masturbator, the creator, the masochist who tortures himself by proxy, the serene and pitiless god who plots the fate of his creatures and the sadist who has turned writer in order to be able to torture them more and whose detachment is merely a sham. Our Lady is what certain psychiatrists call a “controlled waking dream,” one which is in constant danger of breaking up or diverging under the pressure of emotional needs and which an artist's reflective intelligence constantly pulls back into line, governing and directing it in accordance with principles of logic and standards of beauty.
By itself, the story becomes plodding, tends toward stereo-types, breaks up as soon as it ceases to excite its author, contradicts itself time and again, is enriched with odd details, meanders off, drifts, bogs down, suddenly reappears, lingers over trivial scenes, skips essential ones, drops back to the past, rushes years ahead, spreads an hour over a hundred pages, condenses a month into ten lines, and then suddenly there is a burst of activity that pulls things together, brings them into line and explains the symbols. Just when we think we are under the covers, pressed against the warm body of the masturbator, we find ourselves outside again, participating in the stony power of the demiurge. This development of onanistic themes gradually becomes an introspective exploration. The emotional pattern begets the image, and in the image Genet, like an analyst, discovers the emotional pattern. His thought crystallizes before his eyes; he reads it, then completes and clarifies it. Whereupon reflection is achieved, in its translucent purity, as knowledge and as activity.