Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  In short, one might contrast the humanistic universe of Rimbaud or Nietzsche,2 in which the powers of the negative shatter the limits of things, with the stable and theological universe of Baudelaire or Mallarmé, in which a divine crosier shepherds things together in a flock, imposing unity upon discontinuity itself. That Genet chose the latter is only to be expected. In order to do evil, this outcast needs to affirm the pre-existence of good, that is, of order. At the very source of his images is a will to compel reality to manifest the great social hierarchy from which he is excluded. There is a manly generosity in the explosive images of Rimbaud. They are ejaculations; they manifest the unity of the undertaking. An entire man plunges forward. It is his freedom in action which will unite the diverse elements. He maps out the lines, and they exist through the movement that maps them out. The quiet feminine passivity of Genet thrusts him into a ready-made world in which the lines and curves struggle against the dispersion and splintering ad infinitum by means of an objective power of cohesion intermediary between activity and passivity.1 When the prisoner wants to please himself, he does not imagine that he is acting, that he himself is imposing unity upon diversity, but he pleases himself in being, as creator, at the source of the magical cohesion that produces the objective unity of the things. In short, incapable of carving out a place in the universe for himself, he imagines in order to convince himself that he has created the world which excludes him.2

  When he was free, he roamed over Europe, convinced that the events of his life had been planned by Providence, of which he was the sole concern. Rejecting even the idea of chance, his mind acted upon his perception so that it could discern everywhere the signs of an external and providential order. When he thought he had discovered beneath the disordered multiplicity of human beings an esthetic form that insured their cohesion, he allowed his intense satisfaction to substitute for actual fact. “. . . populous streets on whose throng my gaze happens to fall: a sweetness, a tenderness, situates them outside the moment; I am charmed and–I can't tell why–that mob of people is balm to my eyes. I turn away; then I look again, but I no longer find either sweetness or tenderness. The street becomes dismal, like a morning of insomnia.” The reason is that he had succeeded in discovering an order in this concourse of chance elements. And if he found it there, he did so because he had put it there. His questing eyes roamed over nature as if it were a picture puzzle in which he had to discover the hunter's rifle between the branches or in the grass. Later, during his period of imprisonment, he again made use of these patterns, but instead of using them to decipher, he transformed them into rules for building. In reconstructing the universe in his book, he satisfies his desire since he makes himself both the Providence that governs things and the man who discovers the designs of Providence. As we have already seen, in most of his descriptions a circular movement is organized and the objects, which are drawn into this round, turn their faces to the motionless center. In general, this motionless mover is Genet himself or one of his substitutes. But even when the center is merely a figurehead, this planetary attraction which makes things gravitate about a central mass is to him a symbol of Providence. He reconstructs the real on every page of his book in such a way as to produce for himself proof of the existence of God, that is, of his own existence.

  This hierarchical conception of a world in which forms dovetail has a name: essentialism. Genet's imagination is essentialist, as is his homosexuality. In real life, he seeks the Seaman in every sailor, the Eternal in every pimp. In his reverie he bends his mind to justifying his quest. He generates each of his characters out of a higher Essence; he reduces the episode to being merely the manifest illustration of an eternal truth.

  The chief characters in Our Lady, those whose function is to embody Genet's destiny, can be viewed as examples of Platonic idealism: “to Divine, Darling is only . . . the physical expression, in short, the symbol of a being (perhaps God), of an idea that remains in heaven.” Most of the time, however, his essentialism takes on the features of Aristotelian alchemy, because he forces his fictions to furnish him with proof of the powers of language. He wants to convince himself by means of his own tale that naming changes being. When he was named a thief he was transformed; since then, as we have seen, the verb to be has been enchanted. “His head is a singing copse. He himself is a beribboned wedding feast skipping . . . down a sunken April road.” “The policemen held me up. . . . They were the Holy Women wiping my face.” The verb in these sentences expresses an inert and instantaneous metamorphosis intermediary between the state and the flux, as the cohesion of forms, which we mentioned above, is intermediary between activity and passivity. Genet says “Gabriel is a soldier.” This sentence does not have the same taste in his mouth as in ours. He immediately adds: “The army is the red blood that flows from the artilleryman's ears; it is the little lightfoot soldier of the snows crucified on skis, a spahi on his horse of cloud that has pulled up at the edge of Eternity; it is masked princes and brotherly murderers in the Foreign Legion” etc. To us, “to be a soldier” means to exercise a function for a limited time, to become a subject who has been given abstract rights and duties. To Genet it means to share suddenly and magically in the virtues, mysteries, and legendary history of a huge, multicolored beast; to be a soldier is to be the entire army, just as the latest bearer of a noble name is both his entire family and his entire House. This is so because Genet, an exile from our bourgeois, industrial democracy, was cast into an artificial medieval world. He was thrust into a grim feudal system; he belongs to the military society of “strong” and “weak.” For him, to be is to be identified with a group that confers the honors of the name. The progression from one caste to another is a new birth which occurs by formal naming, and the new member of the caste possesses, within himself, the entire caste: a sailor is the entire fleet, a murderer is all of crime. Names are titles, and “titles are sacred.” In the twelfth century this conception of society was justified by an essentialism that extended to all of nature. In order for a knight to be defined by his membership in the order of knighthood, God had to have created the world in such a way that the rose was defined by its belonging to the order of florality. The social hierarchy is legitimate if God willed it, and the manifest proof of this will is to be found in the hierarchy of things. Inversely, the thinking of an agricultural community is naturally essentialist; wheat, cattle, all the goods of this world, reproduce by birth, and these births, which are sacred, symbolically manifest initiation, just as initiation symbolizes birth.

  This philosophy of concept was destroyed by science and industrial practice which substituted for it a philosophy of judgment. Inactive, parasite of an industrious society, convinced of his predestination, Genet must liken his thinking to the idle and parasitic thinking of the medieval clerk. The logical framework of the social world which he invents for his ethical needs is the military hierarchy of concepts. Does he believe in it? Of course not. He is far too intelligent. He cannot entirely overlook the discoveries of science nor the working world that terrifies and disgusts but also fascinates him. But precisely because he does not believe in it, he must convince himself. One of the major demands he imposes upon his imagination is that it present to him the everyday world–our world–in such a light as to verify his conceptualism. From the universe that he recreates with the purpose of offering it to himself as an object of imaginary experience one could derive the principles of a scholastic philosophy: the concept is the form that is imposed upon all matter (in other words, it is initiation or birth that creates the person); in changing form, the same matter changes being (in other words, one moves from one caste to another as a result of naming); any reality that, in any aspect of its nature, pertains to a concept immediately becomes the singular expression of the entire concept-thus, every object can simultaneously or successively express immutable and conflicting Ideas, and these Ideas are concrete totalities, actual principles of individuation (in other words, since the group is eminently present in
each of its members and confers upon each his sacred reality, an individual who belongs to several groups at the same time is simultaneously and entirely each of these groups). Is this a kind of Aristotelianism? One would think so at times, for it seems–this is the theory of gesture which we set forth above–that men and things are visited by essences that settle upon them for a moment and disappear: if they make a movement or strike another attitude or if there is simply a change in the surrounding environment, they immediately receive a new name, a new being. Policemen have only to be attentive to Divine and they immediately become Holy Women. And in order for Divine to be an infanta all that is needed is a four-wheeled carriage and an iron gate. The animating force of all these metamorphoses is, as for the medieval clerk, analogy; every apparent analogy is a sign of deep identity. Resting against the cushions of a carriage, Divine is in a position analogous to that of an infanta; therefore she is an infanta. The weight of the word “infanta” crushes the details of the image that might check the metamorphosis and does away with Divine's masculinity and poverty. In the realm of the imaginary, the operation succeeds every time: “the royal idea is of this world.” Take the word royal as in the old expression “royal art”: this is conceptualism. The aim of this masturbator is very like that of the alchemists. He wants to give lead the form of gold. For Genet this means to place, in imagination, a piece of lead in a system of relations that ordinarily refer to gold, and then imperceptibly to speak of lead as if it were gold.

  Time–opaque, irrational, nullifying time, the time of chance and of ignorance, the time through which we grope our way–disappears in this perspective. An event is nothing other than a transubstantiation, in short a naming. A being receives a new essence and a new name. When Genet describes a scene minutely, he does so because it excites him. Moreover, these favored–and, in general, erotic–scenes are frequentative. That is, he gathers together in a single narration a hundred events that recurred in the course of time in an identical way. And, in that case, the tale is not, as one might think, a later “digest” of a hundred experiences whose fundamental identity is gradually isolated. On the contrary, the identity is posited at the very beginning; it is the concept that is temporalized, the sacred essence that is projected into and developed in duration. Thereupon, the event becomes a ceremony, and the tale changes into a ritual. At times the characters exchange words, but these words reach us in the flow of the sacred discourse that announces the rites. Most often the words are the rites themselves: “She meets him in the evening on the promenade of the boulevard, where he tells her very sweetly the story of his life, for he knows nothing else. And Divine says: ‘It's not your life story you're telling me, Archangel, but an underground passage of my own, which I was unaware of.’ Divine also says: ‘I love you as if you were in my belly,’ and also: ‘You're not my sweetheart, you're myself. My heart or my sex. A branch of me.’ And Gabriel, thrilled, though smiling with pride, replies: ‘Oh, you little hussy!’ His smile whipped up at the corner of his mouth a few delicate balls of white foam.” Note the sudden change to the past tense; the words are in the present because they are carmina sacra.

  As for the events which he reports, they are of only secondary interest to him. We know that he loathes history and historicity. In the case of a unique and dated fact that cannot be passed over in silence, Genet limits himself to a summary account of the experience. He describes a petty agitation which has no interest other than that of preparing for the formal appearance of the essence. For example, Divine meets Gabriel. The onanist hesitates for a long time: in what form will this event give him the most pleasure? Will Gabriel appear in a bar, “presented” by the revolving door? Will he be walking down a steep street? Or will he emerge from a grocery shop? Genet finally does not choose. The circumstances matter little to him, provided they comply with requirements whose origin is his own choice of himself. All that is necessary is that they magnify the meeting without failing to satisfy Genet's deep resentment against all handsome men. In short, it is a matter of inventing the overwhelming advent of an archangel with the soul of a doll. The revolving door will present the handsome soldier in the magnificence of a crystal setting. Immediately Genet compares its incessant rotation to the “mechanism of a Venetian belfry,” the effect of which is to transform all who enter, and Gabriel himself, into painted wooden figures. If the soldier goes down “an almost vertical street,” he is changed by his movement into an angel who swoops down upon Divine from the sky. Genet immediately re-establishes equilibrium by comparing him, in parentheses, to a bewitched dog. The ringing of the grocery bell preludes the meeting majestically, like a theater orchestra announcing the coming of the emperor. But the soldier who comes out of the shop is holding in his hand a very childish object: a surprise package. Wooden beauty, dog-archangel, emperor with the soul of a doll. Slyly and discreetly the tale is composed in such a way as to suggest in the order of the succession the major qualities that constitute the essence of the “boy-queens”: a staggering beauty, a soul that is a “looming emptiness, sensitive and proud.” The story is a projection of the concept into the temporal flow. But time itself is suddenly effaced. All these details have been given only to prepare for the meeting. Now, the meeting is intemporal: “I should have liked to talk to you about encounters. I have a notion that the moment that provoked–or provokes–them is located outside time, that the shock spatters the surrounding time and space.” This is so because the meeting is not to be confused with the clash of two atoms that happen to be projected against each other and that cling to each other. It is the appearance of a celestial form which “of two makes but one,” a conceptual and intemporal unit that is imposed upon the soldier and the old queen. From that moment on, the characters themselves are transformed. Gabriel becomes the soldier; Divine is no longer Divine, the vicious “camp” who will kill a child and destroy Our Lady: “Aging Divine sweats with anxiety. She is a poor woman who wonders, ‘Will he love me?’ “ And the transition from duration to timelessness is marked by the substitution of the present for the past tense. “The revolving door presented . . . Gabriel appeared . . . he had just bought a surprise package . . . he was a soldier.” And then suddenly: “Divine, of course, calls him Archangel. . . . He lets himself be worshiped without batting an eyelash. He doesn't mind. . . .” etc. We are on the inner side of the meeting, in the eternal present of love.

  Genet has systematically neglected the particulars. We shall never know what Divine and Gabriel said to each other, which of the two took the initiative in approaching the other, etc. Nevertheless, Genet, like all great writers, is a storyteller, and we shall find in Our Lady several accounts of specific and dated events, for example the murder of old Ragon or the trial of Our Lady of the Flowers. But even then the fictional or pseudo-fictional episodes offer a surprising mixture of the temporal and the eternal. Genet, who is both a realist and an idealist, shows himself in his accounts to be both an empiricist and a Platonist. These accounts offer at first the resistance and irrational opacity of the event only to be metamorphosed all at once into classifications and descriptions of essence. In Plato, the hierarchy of ideas represents the immutable truth; the myth introduces time, space, and movement into this calm sphere. In Genet, the relations are reversed, but in any case it is art and art alone which, in both writers, links truth to the myth. Art alone enables Our Lady of the Flowers to be both the “golden legend” and the botany of the “underworld.” It is art that gives this tear-soaked manuscript the air of being a “Mirror of the World.” G. K. Chesterton said that the modern world is full of Christian ideas run wild. Our Lady of the Flowers would surely have confirmed him in his view. It is an “Itinerary of the Soul toward God,” the author of which, run wild, takes himself for the Creator of the universe. Every object in it speaks to us of Genet as every being in the cosmos of Saint Bonaventura speaks to us of God. Sabunde, following Lully, declares that the Creation “is a book,” that God “has given us two books,” that of Holy Scriptures
and that of Nature. Genet reverses the terms. For him, the Book is the Creation of the World; Nature and the Holy Scriptures are one and the same. This is not surprising since, in his view, words contain within themselves the substantial reality of things. The being of the thief is contained in the name “thief.” Hence, the being of trees and flowers, of animals and men, is contained in the words that designate them. For the medieval philosophers, “life is only a pilgrimage to God: the physical world is the road that leads us to Him. The beings along the way are signs, signs that may at first seem puzzling to us, but if we examine them carefully, faith, with the aid of reason, will decipher, under characters that are always different, a single word, a call that is always the same: God.”1 Replace God by Genet and you have the universe of Our Lady of the Flowers, whose only reason for being is to express Genet–who has written only in order to be read by Genet–and to recall him constantly to love of Genet.2

  Each creature is the word incarnate. As in Bonaventura, none of them is in itself the sufficient reason for its existence; each of them opens out in order to reveal, in its depths, its creator. In each of them, multiple forms are graded hierarchically so as to constitute a unit. Each is a microcosm that symbolizes the whole universe and, through it, God the creator of the universe. Note how the following few lines recall medieval poetry, the attraction of like by like, the participations, the magical action of analogy: “Children ran about in the glades and pressed their naked bellies, though sheltered from the moon, against the trunks of beeches and oaks that were as sturdy as adult mountaineers whose short thighs bulged beneath their buckskin breeches, at a spot stripped of its bark, in such a way as to receive on the tender skin of their little white bellies the discharge of sap in the spring.” Whiteness of the little bellies, whiteness of the moon. At the contact of the children's flesh, the trees became flesh and their sap sperm. The tree symbolizes the man. In the following passage, the man symbolizes an entire forest: “Under his rough blue bark he wore a white silk shirt, which blends with the blue linen of the pajamas, and their slowly wafted entanglement is the oriflamme of Joan of Arc which floats very blandly at the end of a banner, sole pillar of a basilica.”1 And finally he symbolizes everything, he is a little world that concentrates the great world within itself: “What is a malefactor? A tie dancing in the moonlight, an epileptic rug, a stairway going up flat on its belly, a dagger on the march since the beginning of the world, a panicky phial of poison, gloved hands in the darkness, a sailor's blue collar, an open succession, a series of benign and simple gestures, a silent hasp.” And: “Swallows nest under his arms. They have masoned a nest there of dry earth. Snuff-colored velvet caterpillars mingle with the curls of his hair. Beneath his feet, a hive of bees, and broods of asps behind his eyes.”2 Genet's reveries about words ("the poetry . . . contained in the word esclave (slave), in which are found . . . the world clé (key), and the word genou (knee)” recall those of Vincent de Beauvais and Honorius of Autun (mulier-mollis aer; cadaver-caro data vermibus); his bestiary evokes that of Alexander Neckham. When he writes, for example: “Certain animals, by their gaze, make us possess at one swoop their absolute being: snakes, dogs,” he brings to mind the definitions in The Book of the Treasure: "The cock is a domestic bird that dwells among men and by its voice tells the hours of the day and night and the changes of the weather . . . when the crocodile conquers men, it weeps as it eats them.” Our industrial twentieth century has witnessed the birth of three medieval edifices, of unequal value: the work of Giraudoux, Ulysses, and Our Lady of the Flowers.