Our Lady of the Flowers Read online

  OUR

  LADY

  OF THE

  FLOWERS

  * * *

  * * *

  OTHER WORKS BY JEAN GENET

  Published by Grove Press

  The Balcony

  The Blacks

  Funeral Rites

  The Maids and Deathwatch

  Miracle of the Rose

  Querelle

  The Screens

  The Thief's Journal

  OUR

  LADY

  OF THE

  FLOWERS

  * * *

  * * *

  Jean Genet

  * * *

  Translated by

  BERNARD FRECHTMAN

  Introduction by

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  * * *

  GROVE PRESS

  New York

  Copyright © 1963 by Grove Press, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 1991 by Grove Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in a limited edition by L'Arbalète of Lyons, France, in 1943 under the title Notre-Dame des Fleurs. Revised version published under the same title by Librairie Gallimard.

  The Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre is from the author's Saint-Genet, comedien et martyr, copyright © 1952 by Librairie Gallimard, and is published by permission of Librairie Gallimard. The American edition of Saint Genet is published by George Braziller, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Genet, Jean, 1910–

  Our Lady of the Flowers.

  Translation of: Notre-Dame des Fleurs.

  I. Title

  PQ2613.E53N6131987843’.91287-414

  ISBN-13: 9780802194244

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  06070809102019181716151413121110

  Were it not for Maurice

  Pilorge, whose death keeps

  plaguing my life, I would

  never have written this

  book. I dedicate it to his

  memory.

  J. G.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame des Fleurs)was published in a limited edition by L'Arbalète of Lyons in 1943. A trade edition, revised by the author, was issued by the Librairie Gallimard in 1951.

  An English translation based on the Arbalète edition was published by the Editions Morihien of Paris in 1949. The present text, which follows the now standard Gallimard edition, has been revised and corrected for English and American publication. Like the former, it is unabridged and unexpurgated.

  The translator is indebted to Richard Seaver for the exceptional care with which he read the translation, and takes this occasion to express gratitude for the number and diversity of his suggestions.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Jean-Paul Sartre

  Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity. It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign–indeed divine–freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

  French prison authorities, convinced that “work is freedom,” give the inmates paper from which they are required to make bags. It was on this brown paper that Genet wrote, in pencil, Our Lady of the Flowers. One day, while the prisoners were marching in the yard, a turnkey entered the cell, noticed the manuscript, took it away, and burned it. Genet began again. Why? For whom? There was small chance of his keeping the work until his release, and even less of getting it printed. If, against all likelihood, he succeeded, the book was bound to be banned; it would be confiscated and scrapped. Yet he wrote on, he persisted in writing. Nothing in the world mattered to him except those sheets of brown paper which a match could reduce to ashes.

  In a sense, Our Lady is the height of aloofness. We do not even find in it–or at least not at first–the attempt at communication (a hesitant and contradictory attempt, to be sure) that resulted in his first poem, “The Condemned Man.” A convict lets himself sink like a rock to the depths of reverie. If the world of human beings, in its terrible absence, is still in some way present, it is solely because this solitude is a defiance of that world: “The whole world is dying of panicky fright. Five million young men of all tongues will die by the cannon that erects and discharges. . . . But where I am I can muse in comfort on the lovely dead of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

  The world has isolated him as if he were pestiferous, it has cooped him in. Very well, he will intensify the quarantine. He will sink to depths where no one will be able to reach him or understand him; amidst the turmoil of Europe, he will enjoy a ghastly tranquillity. He rejects reality and, in order to be even more certain that he will not be recaptured, logic itself. He is going to find his way back to the great laws of the participationist and autistic thinking of children and schizophrenics. In short, we are confronted with a regression toward infantilism, toward the childish narcissism of the onanist.

  One is bored in a cell; boredom makes for amorousness. Genet masturbates: this is an act of defiance, a willful perversion of the sexual act; it is also, quite simply, an idiosyncrasy. The operation condenses the drifting reveries, which now congeal and disintegrate in the release of pleasure. No wonder Our Lady horrifies people: it is the epic of masturbation. The words which compose this book are those that a prisoner said to himself while panting with excitement, those with which he loaded himself, as with stones, in order to sink to the bottom of his reveries, those which were born of the dream itself and which are dream-words, dreams of words. The reader will open Our Lady of the Flowers, as one might open the cabinet of a fetishist, and find there, laid out on the shelves, like shoes that have been sniffed at and kissed and bitten hundreds of times, the damp and evil words that gleam with the excitement which they arouse in another person and which we cannot feel. In The Counterfeiters, little Boris inscribes on a piece of parchment the words: “Gas, Telephone. One hundred thousand rubles.” “These six words were the open sesame of the shameful Paradise into which sensual pleasure plunged him. Boris called this parchment his talisman.” In a certain sense, Our Lady is Genet's collection of erotic talismans, the thesaurus of all the “Gas, Telephone. One hundred thousand rubles” that have the power to excite him. There is only one subject: the pollutions of a prisoner in the darkness of his cell; only one hero: the masturbator; only one place: his “evil-smelling hole, beneath the coarse wool of the covers.” From beginning to end we remain with him who
buries himself under the covers and gathers in “my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose.” No events other than his vile metamorphoses. At times, a secret gangrene detaches his head from his body: ‘'With my head still under the covers, my fingers digging into my eyes and my mind off somewhere, there remains only the lower part of my body, detached, by my digging fingers, from my rotting head.” At others, an abyss opens at the bottom of the hole and Genet falls into the fathomless pit. But we always come back in the end to the gesture of solitude, to the flying fingers: “a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshiper.”

  This work of the mind is an organic product. It smells of bowels and sperm and milk. If it emits at times an odor of violets, it does so in the manner of decaying meat that turns into a preserve; when we poke it, the blood runs and we find ourselves in a belly, amidst gas bubbles and lumps of entrails. No other book, not even Ulysses, brings us into such close physical contact with an author. Through the prisoner's nostrils we inhale his own odor. The “double sensation” of flesh touching itself, of two fingers of the same hand pressing against each other, gives us a phantom otherness-in-unity. This self-intimacy is traversed by an ideal separating surface, the page on which Genet writes Our Lady of the Flowers.

  But, at the same time, this work is, without the author's suspecting it, the journal of a detoxication, of a conversion. In it Genet detoxicates himself of himself and turns to the outside world. In fact, this book is the detoxication itself. It is not content with bearing witness to the cure, but concretizes it. Born of a nightmare, it effects–line by line, page by page, from death to life, from the state of dream to that of waking, from madness to sanity–a passageway that is marked with relapses. Before Our Lady, Genet was an esthete; after it, an artist. But at no moment was a decision made to achieve this conversion. The decision is Our Lady. Throughout Our Lady it both makes and rejects itself, observes and knows itself, is unaware of itself, plays tricks on itself and encumbers itself everywhere, even in the relapses. On every page it is born of its opposite, and at the very moment it leads Genet to the borderline of awakening, it leaves on the paper the sticky traces of the most monstrous dream. At times the art of the tale aims only at bringing the narrator's excitement to its climax, and at times the artist makes the excitement he feels the pretext of his art. In any case, it is the artist who will win. Seeking excitement and pleasure, Genet starts by enveloping himself in his images, as the polecat envelops itself in its odor. These images call forth by themselves words that reinforce them; often they even remain incomplete; words are needed to finish the job; these words require that they be uttered and, finally, written down; writing calls forth and creates its audience; the onanistic narcissism ends by being staunched in words. Genet writes in a state of dream and, in order to consolidate his dreams, dreams that he writes, then writes that he dreams, and the act of writing awakens him. The consciousness of the word is a local awakening within the fantasy; he awakes without ceasing to dream. Let us follow him in these various phases of his metamorphosis.

  I – THE CREATURES

  Under his lice-ridden coverings, this recumbent figure ejects, like a starfish, a visceral and glandular world, then draws it back and dissolves it within itself. In this world, creatures wriggle about for a moment, are resorbed, reappear, and disappear again: Darling, Our Lady, Gorgui, Gabriel, Divine. Genet relates their story, describes their features, shows their gestures. He is guided by only one factor, his state of excitement. These figures of fantasy must provoke erection and orgasm; if they do not, he rejects them. Their truth, their density, are measured solely by the effect they produce upon him.

  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.