Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  A rapid study of the “free play” of his imagination will enable us to understand this better. We are going to see Genet inflate his dream to the breaking point, to the point of his becoming God, and then, when the bubble bursts, to discover he is an author.

  III – THE IMAGES

  He amuses himself. His comparisons and metaphors seem to obey only his fancy. The sole rule of this sinister playfulness is that he be pleased. But this is the sternest of rules. Nothing is so constraining as to have to flatter the quirks and fancies of a single master. The master requires of his fictions that they show him things as they are–that is his realism–but with the slight displacement that will enable him to see them as he would like them to be. Behind each image is, to use the words of Kant, a pattern “in unison with the principle and the phenomenon, which makes possible the application of the former to the latter.” In the case of Genet the poet, the principles are his basic desires, the rules of his sensibility, which govern a very particular approach to the world. The patterns come afterward. They organize the images in such a way that the latter reflect back to him, through the real, his own plan of being. Their structure and “style,” their very matter, express Genet and Genet only. The stones, plants, and men of which he speaks are his masks. His imagination has a certain homosexual and criminal twist.1

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  There are two types of unification in modern poetry, one expansive, the other retractile. The aim of both is to enable us to perceive an esthetic order behind the freaks of chance. But the first tendency–which is that of Rimbaud–forcibly compels natural diversity to symbolize an explosive unity. We are gradually made to see in a miscellaneous collection the breaking up of a prior totality whose elements, set in motion by centrifugal force, break away from each other and fly off into space, colonizing it and there reconstituting a new unity. To see the dawn as a “people of doves” is to blow up the morning as if it were a powder keg. Far from denying plurality, one discovers it everywhere, one exaggerates it, but only to present it as a moment in a progression; it is the abstract instant that congeals it into an exploding but static beauty. Impenetrability, which is an inert resistance of space, the sagging of a dead weight, is transformed into a conquering force, and infinite divisibility into a glorious burst of continuity; persons are refulgent sprays whose dynamic unity is combustion. If this violence congeals, the flare falls in a rain of ashes. We shall then have discontinuity and number, those two names of death. But as long as the explosion lasts, juxtaposition signifies progress. Beside means beyond. For each object, scattered everywhere, in all directions, launched with all the others upon an infinite course, to be is to participate in the raging tide whereby the universe at every moment wins new areas of being from nothingness. This Dionysian imagery gladdens our hearts, fills us with a sense of power. It derives its force from an imperial pride, from a generosity that gushes forth and spends itself utterly. Its aim is to force the externality of Nature to reflect to man his own transcendence. For those who want “to change life,” “to reinvent love,” God is nothing but a hindrance. If the unity is not dynamic, if it manifests itself in the form of restrictive contours, it reflects the image of their chains. Revolutionaries break the shells of being; the yolk flows everywhere.

  Compared to them, how miserly Genet seems (as does Mallarmé). His patient will-to-unify is constricting, confining; it is always marking out limits and grouping things together. His aim is not to present externality as an expansive power, but to make of it a nothingness, a shadow, the pure, perceptible appearance of secret unities.1 In order to do so, he reverses the natural movement of things; he transforms centrifugal into centripetal forces. “A cherry branch, supported by the full flight of the pink flowers, surges stiff and black from a vase.” As we read this sentence from Our Lady, we actually feel a transformation taking place in our very vision. The image does, to be sure, begin with a movement; in Genet's pan-sexualism, the erection of the penis plays a very special role. But the erectile movement–stiffening, hardening, swelling–is not at all explosive. It accords very well with the poet's essentialism. The penis proceeds from potentiality to the act, regains its favored form, that is, its natural limits, from which it will depart only to collapse. the cherry branch is thus a penis. But in the very same sentence its expansive force disappears. It surged stiff and black from a vase; it is now borne up by flowers. It is passive, indolently supported by angels. A flowering branch normally suggests the image of a blossoming, of an expansion, in short, of a centrifugal explosion. The poetic movement parallels the natural movement and goes from the tree to the bud, from the bud to the flower. But Genet's image, instead of bringing the flowers out of the branch, brings them back to it, glues them to the wood. The movement of the image is from without inward. from the wings to the axis.1 In general, his poetic patterns present closed and stable units. When Divine enters Graff's Café at about two A.M., “the customers were a muddy, still shapeless clay.” The creator's power agglutinates the customers, presses the discrete particles against each other and gives them the unity of a paste. The. next moment, “as the wind turns leaves, so she turned heads, heads which all at once became light.” The allusion to the wind creates circularity. The whirl of faces that are turned inward reflects Divine, at the center. The movement closes in on itself; a form has just been born, a form which has the calm cohesion of geometric figures. In the same way, a few astringent words are enough to transform the courtroom audience into a single being: “The courtroom crowd . . . is sparkling with a thousand poetic gestures. It is as shuddering as taffeta. . . . The crowd is not gay; its soul is sad unto death. It huddled together on the benches, drew its knees and buttocks together, wiped its collective nose, and attended to the hundred needs of a courtroom crowd.” And further on: “The judge was twisting his beautiful hands. The crowd was twisting its faces.” The moments of a succession are united by a dynamic form: “A clerk called the witnesses. They were waiting in a little side room. . . . The door opened, each time, just enough to let them edge through sideways, and one by one, drop by drop, they were infused into the trial.” The words “drop by drop,” though stressing the fact that each witness is a singular object, refer to a unity without parts, to the undifferentiated continuity of a liquid mass filling the “little side room” and pressing against the door as against the inner surface of a vase. Divine is sitting in a bar. Customers enter, men who have perhaps never seen each other. They come from diverse places and have diverse destinies. In order to unify them, Genet makes use of the revolving door: “When the revolving door turned, at each turn, like the mechanism of a Venetian belfry, it presented a sturdy archer, a supple page, an exemplar of High Faggotry.” The word “presented” agglutinates these individuals, changes them, by analogy, into fashion models presenting gowns, subjects their comings and goings to a providential design, makes of each angle of the revolving door a niche, a little cell, a loggia. This time the privileged witness–Divine, Genet's substitute–is external to the system, and the painted wooden figures turn their faces outward. But the word “mechanism” recaptures them, assembles them about their axis of rotation, and sets the merry-go-round in motion, thus re-establishing the reign of circularity.

  This passage and others in the same vein warrant our comparing this kind of arch fancy to the humor of Proust. Proust, too, has a tendency to tighten the bonds of the real world, which are always a little loose, to give an additional turn of the screw, to assume that there is an order among objects that actually have none. The author of Cities of the Plains, also a homosexual and a recluse, likewise practiced “a selection among things which rids [him] of their usual appearance and enables [him] to perceive analogies.” One need only recall the description of the restaurant at Rivebelle: “I looked at the round tables whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets as planets are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistibly attractive force at work among thes
e divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting. . . . The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless servants who, because, instead of being seated like the diners, they were on their feet, performed their evolutions in a more exalted sphere. No doubt they were running, one to fetch the hors d'oeuvres, another to change the wine or with clean glasses. But despite these special reasons, their perpetual course among the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its dizzy but ordered circulation. . . . People began to rise from table; and if each party while their dinner lasted . . . had been held in perfect cohesion about their own, the attractive force that had kept them gravitating round their host of the evening lost its power at the moment when, for coffee, they repaired to the same corridor that had been used for the tea parties; it often happened that in its passage from place to place some party on the march dropped one or more of its human corpuscles who, having come under the irresistible attraction of the rival party, detached themselves for a moment from their own.”1 The same circular, planetary units; the same homosexual archness, which, in the case of one, metamorphoses men into wooden effigies and, in that of the other, into stellar masses; the same fundamental resentment; the same contemplative quietism; the same Platonism. But in the case of Proust, who is more positive, the whimsical humor is counteracted by the will to give his comparisons a scientific basis. Genet, who rejects modern culture, bases his on magic, on craftsmanship. He pushes the “organization” of his universe to the point of identifying persons with their symbolic properties. and attributes.1 Here is Divine's fan: “. . . she would pull the fan from her sleeve . . ., unfurl it, and suddenly one would see the fluttering wing in which the lower part of her face was hidden. Divine's fan will beat lightly about her face all her life.” At times, an entire human body, an entire person, extends through others and serves as their link, their entelechy, their unity. “He was waiting for Alberto, who did not come. Yet all the peasant boys and girls who came in had something of the snake fisher about them. They were like his harbingers, his ambassadors, his precursors, bearing some of his gifts before him, preparing his coming by smoothing the way for him. . . . One had his walk, another his gestures, or the color of his trousers, or his corduroy, or Alberto's voice; and Culafroy, like someone waiting, never doubted that all these scattered elements would eventually fuse and enable a reconstructed Alberto to make [a] solemn, appointed, and surprising entrance.” Of course, this is merely a way of saying that, while waiting for Alberto, Culafroy thinks he recognizes him in every passerby. But Genet takes this pretext for kneading the matter of the world and pursuing his act of unification. Here, too, the movement is retractile. It is not a matter of Alberto's exploding in all directions and spattering on all the figures, but rather of a condensation of scattered elements which suddenly spring together to effect the synthetic reconstitution of the snake charmer. Even when Genet says of Our Lady that he is a wedding feast, his aim is not to disseminate Our Lady over all the wedding guests, but to bring them all together in Our Lady,1 just as he brought all the country people together in Alberto. He effects a recomposition.