Our Lady of the Flowers

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.E53N613
1987
843’.912
87-414

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

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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

O
ur 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.