Our Lady of the Flowers (7 page)

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.

¹
In 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.

¹
The fact is that the content suggests an incipient outburst, for the image is meant to signify the joyous blossoming of the murderer. But this burst is immediately checked and organized, just as the stiff, black surging is checked and fixed forever by its contours.

²
Nietzsche used to call himself an explosion, an infernal machine.

¹
This perhaps parallels a distinction between the “feminine” imagination (which reinforces in the woman–when she is her master's accomplice–the illusion of being at the center of a beautiful order) and the “manly,” explosive imagination (which contains and transcends anguish by means of the images it forms).

²
In Mallarmé, the act is not the unification of the diverse by a progressive operation, but a
form in action
which, if it exists, appears all at once and which is dispersed by the diversity of the real: “the place a lapping below, sufficient for dispersing the empty act.” It goes without saying that between Mallarme and Rimbaud, the two pure and opposite types of imagination, there exists a series of mixed, transitional types.

¹
Gilson,
La Philosophie au Moyen Age.

²
“Creatura mundi est quasi quidam liber in quo legitur Trinitas fabricatix.”

¹
This passage was dropped from the revised edition. (Translator's note.)

²
Cf.
Elucidarium:
"The flesh of man is the earth, his breath is the air, his blood the water, the fire is his vital heat, his eyes are the sun and the moon, his bosom receives the humours of the body as the sea the waves,” etc.

OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS

W
eidmann appeared before you in a five o'clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers. His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon Paris and all of France, to the depths of the most out-of-the-way villages, in castles and cabins, revealing to the mirthless bourgeois that their daily lives are grazed by enchanting murderers, cunningly elevated to their sleep, which they will cross by some back stairway that has abetted them by not creaking. Beneath his picture burst the dawn of his crimes: murder one, murder two, murder three, up to six, bespeaking his secret glory and preparing his future glory.

A little earlier, the Negro Angel Sun had killed his mistress.

A little later, the soldier Maurice Pilorge killed his lover, Escudero, to rob him of something under a thousand francs, then, for his twentieth birthday, they cut off his head while, you will recall, he thumbed his nose at the enraged executioner.

Finally, a young ensign, still a child, committed treason for treason's sake: he was shot. And it is in honor of their crimes that I am writing my book.

I learned only in bits and pieces of that wonderful blossoming of dark and lovely flowers: one was revealed to me by a scrap of newspaper; another was casually alluded to by my lawyer; another was mentioned, almost sung, by the prisoners–their song became fantastic and funereal (a
De Profundis
),
as much so as the plaints which they sing in the evening, as the voice which crosses the cells and reaches me blurred, hopeless, inflected. At the end of the phrases it breaks, and that break makes it so sweet that it seems borne by the music of angels, which horrifies me, for angels fill me with horror, being, I imagine, neither mind nor matter, white, filmy, and frightening, like the transluscent bodies of ghosts.

These murderers, now dead, have nevertheless reached me, and whenever one of these luminaries of affliction falls into my cell, my heart beats fast, my heart beats a loud tattoo, if the tattoo is the drum-call announcing the capitulation of a city. And there follows a fervor comparable to that which wrung me and left me for some minutes grotesquely contorted, when I heard the German plane passing over the prison and the burst of the bomb which it dropped nearby. In the twinkling of an eye, I saw a lone child, borne by his iron bird, laughingly strewing death. For him alone were unleashed the sirens, the bells, the hundred-and-one cannon shots reserved for the Dauphin, the cries of hatred and fear. All the cells were atremble, shivering, mad with terror; the prisoners pounded the doors, rolled on the floor, shrieked, screamed blasphemies, and prayed to God. I saw, as I say, or thought I saw, an eighteen-year-old child in the plane, and from the depths of my 426 I smiled at him lovingly.

I do not know whether it is their faces, the real ones, which spatter the wall of my cell with a sparkling mud, but it cannot be by chance that I cut those handsome, vacant-eyed heads out of the magazines. I say vacant, for all the eyes are clear and must be sky-blue,
like the razor's edge to which clings a star of transparent light, blue and vacant like the windows of buildings under construction, through which you can see the sky from the windows of the opposite wall. Like those barracks which in the morning are open to all the winds, which you think are empty and pure when they are swarming with dangerous males, sprawled promiscuously on their beds. I say empty, but if they close their eyes, they become more disturbing to me than are huge prisons to the nubile maiden who passes by the high barred windows, prisons behind which sleeps, dreams, swears, and spits a race of murderers, which makes of each cell the hissing nest of a tangle of snakes, but also a kind of confessional with a curtain of dusty serge. These eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities–Lyons, Zurich–and they hypnotize me as much as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite. Men with such faces terrify me, whenever I have to cross their paths warily, but what a dazzling surprise when, in their landscape, at the turning of a deserted lane, I approach, my heart racing wildly, and discover nothing, nothing but looming emptiness, sensitive and proud like a tall foxglove!

I do not know, as I have said, whether the heads there are really those of my guillotined friends, but I have recognized by certain signs that they–those on the wall–are thoroughly supple, like the lashes of whips, and rigid as glass knives, precocious as child pundits and fresh as forget-me-nots, bodies chosen because they are possessed by terrible souls.

The newspapers are tattered by the time they reach my cell, and the finest pages have been looted of their finest flowers, those pimps, like gardens in May. The big, inflexible, strict pimps, their members in full bloom–I no longer know whether they are lilies or whether lilies and
members are not totally they, so much so that in the evening, on my knees, in thought, I encircle their legs with my arms–all that rigidity floors me and makes me confuse them, and the memory which I gladly give as food for my nights is of yours, which, as I caressed it, remained inert, stretched out; only your rod, unsheathed and brandished, went through my mouth with the suddenly cruel sharpness of a steeple puncturing a cloud of ink, a hatpin a breast. You did not move, you were not asleep, you were not dreaming, you were in flight, motionless and pale, frozen, straight, stretched out stiff on the flat bed, like a coffin on the sea, and I know that we were chaste, while I, all attention, felt you flow into me, warm and white, in continuous little jerks. Perhaps you were playing at coming. At the climax, you were lit up with a quiet ecstasy, which enveloped your blessed body in a supernatural nimbus, like a cloak that you pierced with your head and feet.

Still, I managed to get about twenty photographs, and with bits of chewed bread I pasted them on the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall. Some are pinned up with bits of brass wire which the foreman brings me and on which I have to string colored glass beads.

Using the same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral wreaths, I have made star-shaped frames for the most purely criminal. In the evening, as you open your window to the street, I turn the back of the regulations sheet toward me. Smiles and sneers, alike inexorable, enter me by all the holes I offer, their vigor penetrates me and erects me. I live among these pits. They watch over my little routines, which, along with them, are all the family I have and my only friends.

Perhaps some lad who did nothing to deserve prison–a champion, an athlete–slipped in among the twenty by
mistake. But if I have nailed him to my wall, it was because, as I see it, he had the sacred sign of the monster at the corner of his mouth or the angle of the eyelids. The flaw on the face or in the set gesture indicates to me that they may very possibly love me, for they love me only if they are monsters–and it may therefore be said that it is this stray himself who has chosen to be here. To provide them with a court and retinue, I have culled here and there, from the illustrated covers of a few adventure novels, a young Mexican half-breed, a gaucho, a Caucasian horseman, and, from the pages of these novels that are passed from hand to hand when we take our walk, clumsy drawings: profiles of pimps and apaches with a smoking butt, or the outline of a tough with a hard-on.