Our Lady of the Flowers (3 page)

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.