{"id":93674,"date":"2016-01-21T12:04:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T17:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93674"},"modified":"2016-01-21T12:40:12","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T17:40:12","slug":"kicked-towards-saintliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/21\/kicked-towards-saintliness\/","title":{"rendered":"Kicked Toward Saintliness"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the dark erotics of Jean Genet\u2019s <\/em>Our Lady of the Flowers.<\/p>\n

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From a German edition of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 11, 1895, the deputy chaplain of Wandsworth prison wrote a worried report about one of his new charges, Oscar Wilde, who had been transferred from Pentonville two months before. \u201cHe is now quite crushed and broken<\/a>,\u201d the chaplain recorded:<\/p>\n

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This is unfortunate, as a prisoner who breaks down in one direction generally breaks down in several, and I fear from what I hear and see that perverse sexual practices are again getting the better of him. This is a common occurrence among prisoners of his class and is of course favoured by constant cellular isolation. The odour of his cell is now so bad that the officer in charge of him has to use carbolic acid in it every day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The possibility that a famous author had been driven to masturbating during his internment in Wandsworth would not have reflected well on the prison\u2019s authorities, who immediately denied the charge and changed the indiscreet chaplain\u2019s assignment. One wonders how they would have reacted to Jean Genet\u2019s short film Un chant d\u2019amour<\/a> <\/em>(1950), which the French author, playwright, and criminal directed in collaboration with Jean Cocteau soon after writing the last of the five novels that earned him international fame. Midway through the film, a poker-faced prison guard peers one at a time into a row of cells, each of which turns out to contain an autoerotic peepshow more wild, graphic, and uninhibited than the one before. A convict rubs his exposed member against the wall of his cell; a smiling bather lathers himself lasciviously in soap; a young black man, one of the many dark-skinned figures in Genet who appear to their white observers as sexual threats, dances with a tight grip on his open-flied crotch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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From Un chant d\u2019amour<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The movie\u2019s drama came from the romantic connection between two male prisoners locked in adjacent cells: one cool, spritely, and self-possessed, the other visibly burning with lust. The latter generates the extended sexual fantasy that becomes the film\u2019s climactic scene, and in his frustration there\u2019s also something of the property that the first-person narrator of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Notre dame des fleurs<\/em>),\u00a0Genet\u2019s formidable 1943 debut novel, attributes to imprisonment: a \u201cpleasure of the solitary \u2026 that makes you sufficient unto yourself, possessing intimately others who serve your pleasure without their suspecting it, a pleasure that gives to your most casual gestures, even when you are up and about, that air of supreme indifference toward everyone.\u201d For Wilde\u2019s chaplain, masturbation was a shameful last resort for the imprisoned and alone. For Genet, it was a potent metaphor for the lonely kinds of imaginative projections novelists make. In the same passage of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>, that thought led Genet\u2019s narrator into strange rhapsodies about imprisonment itself: \u201cI\u2019ve got lots of work for making my fingers fly! Ten years to go! My good, my gentle friend! My cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genet wrote those words from Paris\u2019s Prison de la Sant\u00e9, where he was doing time for a long string of petty thefts. Ironically named, it was a jail severe enough to forbid its inmates writing paper. On returning from a court hearing one day in 1941, when he was thirty years old, Genet was sentenced to three days in solitary confinement for writing on the paper his guards had given him to make into bags\u2014material that \u201cwasn\u2019t intended,\u201d as Genet would later claim the prison officials told him, \u201cfor literary masterpieces.\u201d Like many of Madame Roland\u2019s prison memoirs, that early manuscript of Our Lady of the Flowers <\/em>was destroyed. Genet \u201cordered some notebooks at the canteen,\u201d as he\u2019d tell Playboy <\/em>in 1964, \u201cgot into bed, pulled the covers over my head and tried to remember, word for word, the fifty pages I had written. I think I succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the midsixties, Genet may have been partially conflating the main dramatic action of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em> with the story of the book\u2019s production. The novel\u2019s narrator, a prison inmate named Jean, begins his long, unbroken address to the reader by relating that he scours daily newspapers\u2014\u201ctattered by the time they reach my cell\u201d\u2014for stories about executed murderers. He cuts out \u201ctheir handsome, vacant-eyed heads,\u201d glues their images \u201con the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall,\u201d and honors \u201cthe most purely criminal\u201d among them with frames constructed with \u201cthe same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral wreaths.\u201d<\/p>\n

When evening falls, he crawls under his covers, just as Genet did, and uses his improvised gallery of criminals to bring himself to orgasm. (\u201cAt night I love them, and my love endows them with life.\u201d) It\u2019s the stories he generates during this nightly ritual, he announces, that will make up the book he is currently speaking into being: \u201cAs you read on, the characters, and Divine too, and Culafroy, will fall from the wall onto my pages like dead leaves, to fertilize my tale.\u201d Only later does it emerge that \u201cDivine\u201d and \u201cCulafroy\u201d both refer to the same character\u2014the first name to her mature incarnation as a Parisian drag queen handling a trio of haunted and fickle lovers; the second to her boyhood self, whose provincial childhood strongly resembles Genet\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s prologue is the closest it ever comes to clear exposition, and without it\u00a0Our Lady of the Flowers <\/em>would make much less sense. The shape of the novel\u2019s convoluted, embellished sentences seems wedded precisely to the purpose they might serve in the imaginative construction of a prisoner pleasuring himself under the cover of darkness. They stall extravagantly, delaying climax, as in an early account of the way Paris\u2019s drag queens would gather under Divine\u2019s garret window:<\/p>\n

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In the street, between the blank haloes of the tiny flat umbrellas which they are holding in one hand like bouquets, Mimosa I, Mimosa II, Mimosa the half-IV, First Communion, Angela, Milord, Castagnette, R\u00e9gine\u2014in short, a host, a still long litany of creatures who are glittering names\u2014are waiting, and in the other hand are carrying, like umbrellas, little bouquets of violets which make one of them lose herself, for example, in a reverie from which she will emerge bewildered and quite dumbfounded with nobility, for she (let us say First Communion) remembers the article, thrilling as a song from the other world, from our world too, in which an evening paper, thereby embalmed, stated: \u2018The black velvet rug of the Hotel Crillon, where lay the silver and ebony coffin containing the embalmed body of the Princess of Monaco, was strewn with Parma violets.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Genet was virtuosic at reproducing the hesitations, elaborations, imprecisions, and jump cuts in which a storyteller can indulge when he\u2019s his only audience. Jean-Paul Sartre, whose generous praise largely made Genet\u2019s career, seized on that fact to make an argument that still clings to Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>. \u201cHis characters,\u201d Sartre wrote in his lengthy introduction to the novel, \u201chave, like real <\/em>men, a life in action<\/em>, a life involving a range of possibilities.\u201d And yet, since the characters\u2019 actions are nothing but \u201cthe succession of images that have led Genet to orgasm,\u201d the possibilities available to them \u201crepresent simply the missed opportunities, the permission that Genet piteously refuses his characters.\u201d He quotes Genet to the effect that \u201cmy books are not novels because none of my characters make decisions on their own.\u201d The working-out of this thought in Our Lady<\/em>, for Sartre,<\/p>\n

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accounts for the book\u2019s desolate, desert-like aspect. Hope can only cling to free and active characters. Genet, however, is concerned only with satisfying his cruelty. All his characters are inert, are knocked about by fate \u2026 This is what Genet calls the \u2018Cruelty of the Creator.\u2019 He kicks Divine towards saintliness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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From a French edition of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s a seductively ironic notion that the freedom Genet gave his narrator consisted precisely in letting him abuse and enslave the rest of the book\u2019s characters. But rarely do the figures who move through Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>\u2014Divine\/Culafroy, but also Darling, her primary male love interest; Our Lady, the young murderer for whose charms Divine falls; and Gorgui, \u201cthe big sunny Negro\u201d she treats with a mixture of tenderness and exotic fascination\u2014seem shackled to their fates to the extent Sartre suggests. What gives the book much of its depth is the intensity with which its narrator identifies with these men. \u201cTheir density\u201d as characters, in Sartre\u2019s words, might be \u201cmeasured by the effect they produce in him\u201d (i.e., their ability to arouse him), but they arouse him precisely by giving him bodies to occupy, spaces to inhabit, memories to relive, and frissons to experience outside his prison\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n

In some cases, they enjoy all the freedoms of movement he himself lacks. Late in the book, the narrator skims over a period during which Divine \u201cpursued the complicated, sinuous, looped existence of a kept woman.\u201d Each sentence carries her across another ocean, first to the Sundra Isles and Venice:<\/p>\n

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Then it was Vienna, in a gilded hotel, nestling between the wings of a black eagle. Sleeping in the arms of an English lord, deep in a canopied and curtained bed. Then there were rides in a heavy black limousine \u2026 She thought of her mother and of Darling. Darling received money orders from her, sometimes jewels, which he would wear for one evening and quickly resell so that he could treat his pals to dinner. Then back to Paris, and off again, and all in a warm, gilded luxury, all in such comfort that I need merely evoke it from time to time in its smug details for the vexations of my poor life as a prisoner to disappear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Divine\u2019s health and finances are no less fragile than her romantic connections, and there is indeed something cruelly inevitable about the way Genet announces her grisly death, as if in one of First Communion\u2019s evening papers, within the novel\u2019s first ten pages. But what fuels the book are the most contingent things about Divine, the departments in which she does<\/em> make decisions on her own\u2014the range of her desires and the clarity of her memories. When he locates her alone with Darling, Genet\u2019s language arrives at a pitch comic, warm, and unabashedly lustful enough to match her own mood: \u201cShe takes care of his penis. She caresses it with the most profuse tenderness and calls it by the kind of pet names used by ordinary folk when they feel horny \u2026 such expressions as Little Dicky, the Babe in the Cradle, Jesus in His Manger, the Hot Little Chap, your Baby Brother.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jean Genet.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Darling\u2019s thoughts drift back to her life as a young boy, Genet finds her a new, statelier tone. (\u201cBeneath the moon, Culafroy became this world of poisoners, pederasts, thieves, sorcerers, warriors, and courtesans, and the surrounding nature, the vegetable garden, remaining what they were, left him all alone, possessing and possessed by an epoch, in his barefoot walk, beneath the moon.\u201d) For Genet, fantasizing about Divine meant giving her a teeming, well-stocked inner life in which he could share. It entailed going so far as to almost become her, just like, in one of the book\u2019s late reversals, Darling\u2019s arrest leads him into a cell that overlaps perfectly with the narrator\u2019s own \u201con the fourth floor of the Fresnes prison,\u201d where Genet finished Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make this book out of the transposed, sublimated elements of my life as a convict,\u201d Genet\u2019s narrator insists two-thirds of the way through the novel. \u201cI am afraid that it says nothing about the things that haunt me.\u201d Similar moments of transparency flash up periodically in Our Lady<\/em>, but they cannot be sustained for long; the range of personas to take on is too inviting and wide. \u201cAfter all, is it necessary for me to talk about myself so directly?\u201d the narrator asks just as candidly seventy pages later. \u201cI much prefer to describe myself in the caresses I receive from my lovers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one consistent project across the book was perhaps not, as Sartre supposed, Genet\u2019s need to bring himself to climax, but his need to take on, voluptuously and vicariously, the lives of the people his narrator imagines. The book to which Genet aspired was, as the narrator of Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em> writes about poetry, \u201ca vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will\u201d\u2014the very opposite of \u201can abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses.\u201d It\u2019s unclear to what extent Genet\u2019s efforts on the page were in fact his way of playing God with his characters, alternately lavishing them with gifts and blighting them with poverty, loss, and disease. More certain\u2014and more consistent with Genet\u2019s own unromantic sense of what it meant to live in and out of prison\u2014is that they were exercises, self-assigned challenges, rigorous entertainments: ways of making do.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em><\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n