Our Lady of the Flowers (2 page)

Here is Divine. Divine is Genet himself, is “a thousand shapes, charming in their grace, [that] emerge from my eyes, mouth, elbows, knees, from all parts of me. They say to me, ‘Jean, how glad I am to be living as Divine and to be living with Darling.’ “ Genet objectifies himself, as we all do in our dreams. As a sovereign creator, he cannot
believe
in the real existence of Darling; he believes in him through Divine. As Divine, he projects all his masochism, his vainglorious desire for martyrdom. As Divine, he has the disturbing and voluptuous experience of
aging; he “realizes” his dreadful fear of growing old. She is the only one of his creatures whom he does not desire; he makes her be desired by the others. She excites him through Darling or Gorgui. Divine is an ambiguous character who serves both to bring his entire life into focus in the lucidity of his gaze and to let him plunge more deeply into sleep, to sink to the depths of a cosy horror, to drown in his opera.

The others–all the others, except the girl-queens–are the creatures and objects of his feminine desires. The whole graceful procession of Pimps, those lovely vacant-eyed does, are the means he chooses for being petted, pawed, tumbled, and entered.

Here is how Darling was born: “Very little of this Corsican remains in my memory: a hand with too massive a thumb . . . and the faint image of a blond boy. . . . The memory of his memory made way for other men. For the past two days, in my daydreams, I have again been mingling his (made-up) life with mine. . . . For two successive days I have fed with his image a dream which is usually sated after four or five hours. . . . I am worn out with the invented trips, thefts, rapes, burglaries . . . in which we were involved. . . . I am exhausted; I have a cramp in my wrist. The pleasure of the last drops is dry. . . . I have given up the daydream. . . . I have quit, the way a contestant in a six-day bicycle race quits; yet the memory of [him] refuses to disappear as the memory of my dream-friends usually does. It floats about. It is less sharp than when the adventures were taking place, but it lives in me nevertheless. Certain details persist more obstinately in remaining. . . . If I continue, he will rise up, become erect. . . . I can't bear it any longer. I am turning him into a character whom I shall be able to torment in my own way, namely, Darling Daintyfoot.”

Our Lady “was born of my love for Pilorge.”

Here is Gorgui: “Clément Village filled the cell with
an odor stronger than death. . . . I have tried to recapture in the cell where I am now writing the odor of carrion spread by the proud-scented Negro, and thanks to him I am better able to give life to Seck Gorgui. . . . You know from
Paris-Soir
that he was killed during the jailbreak at Cayenne. But he was handsome. He was perhaps the handsomest Negro I have ever seen. How lovingly I shall caress, with the memory of him, the image I shall compose, thanks to it, of Seck Gorgui. I want him too to be handsome, nervous, and vulgar.”

Sometimes a gesture alone remains, or an odor, or a simple relic whose erotic potency, which has been experienced again and again, is inexhaustible. A few schematic features can be sufficient: what remains of Roger the Corsican? A nebulous, “faint image of a blond boy,” and a few solid elements: a hand, a gait, a chain, a key. Around these sacred remains Genet drapes another flesh. He “fits” them with other memories richer and less sacred: the color of a skin or a look which excited him elsewhere, on another occasion. Darling's eyes will be weary after love-making; Genet will “cull” this fatigue and the circles under the eyes from the face of another youngster whom he saw leaving a brothel. This mask of flesh is becoming to the archaic skeleton. Whereupon Genet gets an erection. This erection is not merely the index of his achievement, but its goal–as if Flaubert had described the poisoning of Emma Bovary only to fill his own mouth with ink. The character has no need to be judged according to other criteria. There is no concern with his mental or even physical verisimilitude: Darling remains the same age all his life. To us who are not sexually excited, these creatures should be insipid. And yet they are not. Genet's desire gives them heat and light. If they were conceived in accordance with verisimilitude, they would perhaps have a more general truth, but they would lose that absurd and singular “presence” that comes from their being
born of a desire. Precisely because
we
do not desire them, because they do not cease, in our eyes, to belong to another person's dream, they take on a strange and fleeting charm, like homely girls who we know are passionately loved and whom we look at hesitantly, vaguely tempted, while wondering: “But what does he see in her?” Darling and Divine will always baffle the “normal” reader, and the more they elude him, the more true we think them. In short, we are fascinated by someone else's loves.

As soon as the character is modeled, baked, and trimmed, Genet launches him in situations which he evaluates according to the same rules. He is telling
himself
stories in order to please
himself.
Do the situation and the character harmonize? Yes and no. The author is the only one to decide. Or rather, it is not he who decides, but the capricious and blasé little fellow he carries between his thighs. Depending on Genet's mood of the moment, Darling will be victim or tyrant. The same male who cleaves the queens like a knife will stand naked and dirty before the guards who manhandle him. Does he lack coherence? Not at all. Amidst his metamorphoses he retains, without effort, a vital, ingrained identity that is more convincing than the studied unity of many fictional characters because it simply reflects the permanence of the desire it arouses. At times Genet submits to the Pimps, at times he betrays them in secret, dreaming that they are being whipped. But in order for his pleasure to have style and taste, those whom he adores and those who are whipped must be the
same.
The truth about Darling is that he is both the glamorous pimp and the humiliated little faggot. That is his coherence. Although his other features are only dream images, they have, nevertheless, the gratuitousness, mystery, and stubbornness of life. Each time Darling is arrested, he is proud of dazzling the jailbirds by the elegance of his attire. The prospect delights
him in advance. This is the “kind of detail one doesn't invent.” And indeed, Genet did not invent it. But he did not observe it either. He simply has his hero experience in glory what he himself experienced in shame. Humiliated at having to appear for questioning in a prisoner's outfit, he takes his revenge in fantasy, in the guise of Darling.

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 child
¹
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.