Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  Thus, Genet is God. When he was free, he wished to be only the object of providential solicitude, and if he identified himself with Providence, he did so chiefly to be sure of being well treated. In short, he was still of the world. In prison, he lets go, he drifts out of the universe. In the isolation of the cell, the captive's imagination takes a cosmic turn. He gives his characters the All for setting. “Darling is a giant whose curved feet cover half the globe as he stands with his legs apart in baggy, sky-blue silk underpants.” “Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin about!” And again: “Snow was falling. About the courtroom, all was silence. The Criminal Court was abandoned in infinite space, all alone. It had already ceased to obey the laws of the earth. Swiftly it flew across stars and planets.” In a later work too, Genet will revert to this strange longing of a soul that wants to be all because it is nothing: “A blazing or casual meditation on the planetary systems, the suns, the nebulae, the galaxies, will never console me for not containing the world. When confronted with the Universe, I feel lost.” In fact, even when the universe is not mentioned, it is present; it slips into Divine's garret, into the dormitories of the reform school. The silence of the young inmates is “the silence of the jungle, full of its pestilence, of its stone monsters . . .” “the hand of the man condemned to death . . . which I see when he puts it through the grating of his cell . . . is the Space-Time amalgam of the anteroom of death.” Time and again Genet says of his heroes that they are “alone in the world.” And when he refuses Divine the happiness of loving and being loved so as to doom her more surely to the heaven of his black mystique, he apologizes for not saving her by “a great earthly love.” The adjective stresses Divine's relationship with the entire globe. In short, his characters are not first defined by the relations they maintain with their fellows but by the place they occupy in Creation. Before being human and social, the persons and events have a religious dimension: they have dealings with the All. If Divine and Darling suddenly become conscious of themselves and their solitude, they could say, with the mystics, “God, the world, and I.” And God, of course, is the great barbaric goddess, Genet, the Mother, Genemesis, who probes them with her finger tip. And as if that were still not enough, this savage demiurge takes pleasure in the universalizations, the morbid generalizations that are found particularly in schizophrenics. Every event refers to the entire world because it makes the individual think of all the events of the same type that are taking place on earth at the same moment: “The corpse of the old man, of one of those thousands of old men whose lot is to die that way, is lying on the blue rug.” In the outhouse, the child Genet finds “a reassuring and soothing peace . . . [feels] mysteriously moved, because it was there that the most secret part of human beings came to reveal itself.” At other times, he starts from the universal, then, on a sudden impulse, stops short at a particular exemplar, just as Napoleon would suddenly swoop down on one of the soldiers of his Old Guard and pinch his ear: “Recently [the guards] have been wearing a dark blue uniform . . . . They are aviators fallen from the sky. . . . They are guardians of tombs.” And so on for two pages. Then, suddenly, laterally, at the turn of a sentence, Genet introduces a guard, who seems the embodiment of all jailers. “Not a flower bespatters their uniform, not a crease of dubious elegance, and if I could say of one of them that he walked on velvet feet, it was because a few days later he was to betray, to go over to the opposite camp, which is the thieving camp. . . . I had noticed him at mass, in the chapel. At the moment of communion, the chaplain left the altar. . . .” It is as if a movie camera, as in King Vidor's The Street, were first fixed on the city, ranged slowly over the panorama, stopped at a house, approached a window, slid along ideal rails, entered a room and there, from among a thousand characters, all of them more or less alike, suddenly focused upon an individual who thereupon woke up and started living. This is the sport of a god.

  Apart from the very particular case of philosophical intuition, one is rarely able to perceive creatures against the background of the universe, for the reason that they are all involved in the world and are equally part of it. If a given clerk, a given magistrate, wanted to view the earth in perspective, he would have to cut himself off from his function, his family, would have to break the bonds of his social relationships and, from his self-enclosed solitude, consider men as if they were painted objects. The novelist himself often has difficulty in establishing this distance between himself and his creation. No sooner are his characters conceived than they enter into various relationships with other characters, and the latter with others, and so on. The author exhausts himself in the effort to follow these relations in detail; he sees things and people through the eyes of his heroes, who are threatened by specific dangers and thrust into particular situations; he never has the leisure to raise his head and take a commanding view of the whole. In fact, if he has any fellow feeling for the human beings about whom he is writing, he will plant his feet on the ground with them. Only a god can take a lofty view of his work and of the living creatures that people it, and he can do so because he has never been in the world and has no relation with it other than that of having created it. A god, or a pariah whom the world has rejected. Society excluded Genet and locked him out; it drove him from nature. He was forced from the very beginning into the solitude that the mystic and the metaphysician have such difficulty in attaining: “The whole world that mounts guard around the Santé Prison knows nothing, wishes to know nothing of the distress of a little cell, lost amidst others.” For this captive, the universe is everything that is denied him, everything from which the walls of his prison separate him. He, in turn, rejects what is denied him; his resentment finishes the job: “The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in [a] somber . . . sky.” When he creates an imaginary universe on paper, he produces it at a respectful distance. It is the same universe from which he was excluded, as far away and inaccessible as the other, and it discloses totality because of its remoteness. This absence of connection with external reality is transfigured and becomes the sign of the demiurge's independence of his creation. He works at arm's length, he stands clear of the object he is sculpting. In the realm of the imaginary, absolute impotence changes sign and becomes omnipotence. Genet plays at inventing the world in order to stand before it in a state of supreme indifference. The “golden point in a somber sky” ends by becoming the sole object of the creator's efforts, just as it is the object of all the captive's thoughts. He molds his characters–even those who have no function other than that of exciting him–out of common clay, at a distance, and they appear to him at once in their relation to the All. Divine and Darling are inhabitants of Montmartre and Montmartre is a province of the Universe. They met on the street to which Genet will perhaps never go back; they frequent bars to which he cannot return. They are beings of the outside, and their involvement in all Being is not meant to manifest to Genet his own presence but to let him see his absence from All in the most favorable light, to convince him that this absence is deliberate. If he is not in the midst of men, it is because he has drawn them from the clay and fashioned them in his own way, it is because he governs their destinies. Since the pariah and God are alike external to nature, it will suffice for the pariah, in his cell, to dare invent being: he will be God. Genet creates in order to enjoy his infinite power. However, his too human finiteness makes it impossible for him to conjure up the celestial sphere and the globe in the detailed distinctness of their parts; he sees the world as a big, dark mass, as a dim jumble of stars, in short, as a background. Genet fakes; unable to follow the royal progression of Creation, he creates his heroes first so as to introduce afterward into each of them a primordial and constituent relation to the universe. No matter–it suffices to look at Divine or Darling in order for this unseen, unnamed universe which they imply to spread its dark velvet about them.

 
To us, this overweening pride and reckless unhappiness often seem exquisitely naïve. The just man, immersed in his community, determines each individual's importance, including his own, by means of an infinite system of references in which each man serves as a measure for all and each. Whatever the object he considers, he knows that its dimensions vary with the perspective, distance, or unit of comparison; that what appears to him to be a mountain will be a molehill to someone else and that the other's point of view is neither more nor less true than his. But Genet, who is shut in, has no point of comparison. If he serves a two-year sentence, he is equidistant from Brazil and the Place Pigalle, that is, two years away. He does not touch the earth; he soars above it. Since he is equally absent from everything, his imagination is omnipresent; he is not in space. Every object therefore takes on for him the dimensions his fancy confers upon it, and these dimensions are absolute, that is, they are not given as a relationship of the object with other objects but as the immediate relationship of the thing to its creator. They can increase or diminish without those of the other varying, and since Genet wishes to ignore the severe and disagreeable laws of perspective–which are all right for the free citizens of French society–a hoodlum in Montmartre and a star in the sky seem to him equally close. Often he amuses himself by enlarging or shrinking a victim (all things remaining equal, moreover), in order to punish or test or glorify him. This ghastly book has at times the naïve poetry of the early astrolabes and maps of the world. Against a background of oceans, mountains or fields of stars appear animals and persons–the Scorpion, the Ram, Gemini–all of the same size, all equally alone. But this strange freshness is only an appearance. We sense behind it the maniacal will–which has become exacerbated in prison–to regard the Nay as the symbol of the Yea and the Nought as the symbol of the All. Precisely because he feels lost “when confronted with the universe,” he wants to delude himself into thinking that he is creating the universe. If his characters are cosmic, it is because he is confined in “the obscene (which is the off-scene, not of this world).” The God of the Middle Ages wrote “the book of creatures” to reveal his existence to man, his only reader. Similarly with Genet: his “book of creatures” is Our Lady of the Flowers, and he intends it for only one reader, only one man, himself. By their suffering and purity, Our Lady and Darling, saints and martyrs, bear witness before this wonderstruck man to his Divine existence.

  So Genet has become God in reverie. He creates the world and man in his image; he manipulates the elements, space, light-years; he has gone quite mad. But the awakening is contained in the dream, for in the depths of his delirium this imaginary creator of Reality connects with himself as a real Creator of an imaginary world. His feeling of omnipotence leaves him with a taste of bitterness and ashes. His characters are too docile; the objects he describes are both blinding and too pallid. Everything collapses, everything ends; only the words remain. To be frightened, at the height of one's power, by silence and the void, to elect to be God, to produce beings by decree and to find oneself a man and a captive, to feel a sudden need of others in the lofty pride of solitude, to count on others to confer upon one's creatures the flesh, density, and rebelliousness that one is incapable of giving them–such is the lot of the creator of images. The artist is a God who has need of human beings. It is not through their self sufficiency that the creatures escape their creator, but through their nullity. Genet and Jouhandeau, ambushed in Nothingness, hoped to avoid the gaze of God, who sees only Being. Their fictions play the same trick on them. Owing to the modicum of reality that Genet communicates to her, Divine is Genet. She merges with him; she dissolves into a kind of turbidity, into moistness and swoons. She can be Divine only insofar as she is not Genet, that is, in so far as she is absolutely nothing.

  Thus, the characters in Our Lady of the Flowers, born, for the most part, of Genet's fancy, change into quiet exigencies; they will live only if he believes in them. Genet the Creator therefore calls Genet the reader to the rescue, wants him to read and be taken in by the phantasmagoria. But Genet cannot read his work; he is too aware that he has put into it what he wanted to find in it, and he can find nothing in it precisely because he cannot forget what he has put into it. So long as he fondled them in reverie, the figures seemed domesticated and familiar; when they are set down on paper, they are reproaches, shadows that can either take on flesh and blood nor vanish, and that beg to be: "Forget what you know, forget yourself, prefer us, imagine that you're meeting us, believe in us.” And since Genet is powerless to animate them, to confer objectivity upon them, they beg to exist for all, that is, through all. If the “book of creatures” was composed in order to tell men about God, there had to be a God to write it and men to read it, and Genet cannot be God and man at the same time. Now that his dreams are written down, he is no longer either God or man, and he has no other way of regaining his lost divinity than to manifest himself to men. These fictions will assume a new objectivity for him if he obliges others to believe in them. And at the core of all his characters is the same categorical imperative: “Since you don't have faith enough to believe in us, you must at least make others adopt us and must convince them that we exist.” In writing out, for his own pleasure, the incommunicable dreams of his particularity, Genet has transformed them into exigencies of communication. There was no invocation, no call. Nor was there that aching need for self-expression that writers have invented for the needs of personal publicity. You will not find in Genet the “fateful gift” and “imperiousness of talent” about which the high-minded are in the habit of sounding off. To cultivated young men who go in for literature, the craft of writing appears first as a means of communication. But Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by its problems, gradually led him to seek readers. As a result of the virtues–and inadequacies–of words, this onanist transformed himself into a writer. But his art will always smack of its origins, and the “communication” at which he aims will be of a very singular kind.

  1 In Funeral Rites.

  1In fact, Genet dropped the entire passage from the revised edition. (Translator's note.)

  1 The words in italics do not appear in the revised edition. (Translator's note.)

  1 It must be understood that to prove is also a function of the imagination. The imagination represents objects to us in such a way as to incline our judgment in the direction we wish. The drawings of a madman do not simply express his terrors; they aim at maintaining them and confining him within them.

  1 If I were not afraid of opening the way to excessive simplification and of being misunderstood, I would say that there is a “leftist” turn of imagination and a “rightist” one. The former aims at representing the unity that human labor forcibly imposes upon the disparate; the latter, at depicting the entire world in accordance with the type of hierarchical society.

  1 See also, at the end of the book: “The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers, cannot go to the bottom of the water,” etc.

  1 Within a Budding Grove, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

  1 For Mallarmé, the element of chance and the externality of the Real arc expressed by the word “outspread” (éployé): “all the futile abyss outspread.” And the unifying act of the poet is expressed by its opposite:·"to fold” (reployer): “to fold its division.” It is thus a matter of compressing multiplicity until the elements interpenetrate and form an indivisible totality.