Our Lady of the Flowers (6 page)

Each creature is the word incarnate. As in Bonaventura, none of them is in itself the sufficient reason for its existence; each of them opens out in order to reveal, in its depths, its creator. In each of them, multiple forms are graded hierarchically so as to constitute a unit. Each is a microcosm that symbolizes the whole universe and, through it, God the creator of the universe. Note how the following few lines recall medieval poetry, the attraction of like by like, the participations, the magical action of analogy: “Children ran about in the glades and pressed their naked bellies, though sheltered from the moon, against the trunks of beeches and oaks that were as sturdy as adult mountaineers whose short thighs bulged beneath their buckskin breeches, at a spot stripped of its bark, in such a way as to receive on the tender skin of their little white bellies the discharge of sap in the spring.” Whiteness of the little bellies, whiteness of the moon. At the contact of the children's flesh, the trees became flesh and their sap sperm. The tree symbolizes the man. In the following passage, the man symbolizes an entire forest: “Under his rough blue bark he wore a white silk shirt, which blends with the blue linen of the pajamas, and their slowly wafted entanglement is the oriflamme of Joan of Arc which floats very
blandly at the end of a banner, sole pillar of a basilica.”
¹
And finally he symbolizes everything, he is a little world that concentrates the great world within itself: “What is a malefactor? A tie dancing in the moonlight, an epileptic rug, a stairway going up flat on its belly, a dagger on the march since the beginning of the world, a panicky phial of poison, gloved hands in the darkness, a sailor's blue collar, an open succession, a series of benign and simple gestures, a silent hasp.” And: “Swallows nest under his arms. They have masoned a nest there of dry earth. Snuff-colored velvet caterpillars mingle with the curls of his hair. Beneath his feet, a hive of bees, and broods of asps behind his eyes.”
²
Genet's reveries about words ("the poetry . . . contained in the word
esclave
(slave), in which are found . . . the world
clé
(key), and the word
genou
(knee)” recall those of Vincent de Beauvais and Honorius of Autun (mulier-mollis aer; cadaver-caro data vermibus); his bestiary evokes that of Alexander Neckham. When he writes, for example: “Certain animals, by their gaze, make us possess at one swoop their absolute being: snakes, dogs,” he brings to mind the definitions in
The Book of the Treasure:
"The cock is a domestic bird that dwells among men and by its voice tells the hours of the day and night and the changes of the weather . . . when the crocodile conquers men, it weeps as it eats them.” Our industrial twentieth century has witnessed the birth of three medieval edifices, of unequal value: the work of Giraudoux,
Ulysses,
and
Our Lady of the Flowers.

Thus, Genet is God. When he was free, he wished
to be only the
object
of providential solicitude, and if he identified himself with Providence, he did so chiefly to be sure of being well treated. In short, he was still
of the world.
In prison, he lets go, he drifts out of the universe. In the isolation of the cell, the captive's imagination takes a cosmic turn. He gives his characters the All for setting. “Darling is a giant whose curved feet cover half the globe as he stands with his legs apart in baggy, sky-blue silk underpants.” “Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin about!” And again: “Snow was falling. About the courtroom, all was silence. The Criminal Court was abandoned in infinite space, all alone. It had already ceased to obey the laws of the earth. Swiftly it flew across stars and planets.” In a later work too, Genet will revert to this strange longing of a soul that wants to be all because it is nothing: “A blazing or casual meditation on the planetary systems, the suns, the nebulae, the galaxies, will never console me for not containing the world. When confronted with the Universe, I feel lost.” In fact, even when the universe is not mentioned, it is present; it slips into Divine's garret, into the dormitories of the reform school. The silence of the young inmates is “the silence of the jungle, full of its pestilence, of its stone monsters . . .” “the hand of the man condemned to death . . . which I see when he puts it through the grating of his cell . . . is the Space-Time amalgam of the anteroom of death.” Time and again Genet says of his heroes that they are “alone in the world.” And when he refuses Divine the happiness of loving and being loved so as to doom her more surely to the heaven of his black mystique, he apologizes for not saving her by “a great
earthly
love.” The adjective stresses Divine's relationship with the entire globe. In short, his characters are not first defined by the relations they maintain with their fellows but by the place they occupy in Creation. Before being
human and social, the persons and events have a religious dimension: they have dealings with the All. If Divine and Darling suddenly become conscious of themselves and their solitude, they could say, with the mystics, “God, the world, and I.” And God, of course, is the great barbaric goddess, Genet, the Mother, Genemesis, who probes them with her finger tip. And as if that were still not enough, this savage demiurge takes pleasure in the universalizations, the morbid generalizations that are found particularly in schizophrenics. Every event refers to the entire world because it makes the individual think of all the events of the same type that are taking place on earth at the same moment: “The corpse of the old man, of
one of those thousands of old men whose lot is to die that way,
is lying on the blue rug.” In the outhouse, the child Genet finds “a reassuring and soothing peace . . . [feels] mysteriously moved, because it was there that
the most secret part of human beings
came to reveal itself.” At other times, he starts from the universal, then, on a sudden impulse, stops short at a particular exemplar, just as Napoleon would suddenly swoop down on one of the soldiers of his Old Guard and pinch his ear: “Recently [the guards] have been wearing a dark blue uniform . . . . They are aviators fallen from the sky. . . . They are guardians of tombs.” And so on for two pages. Then, suddenly, laterally, at the turn of a sentence, Genet introduces
a
guard, who seems the embodiment of all jailers. “Not a flower bespatters their uniform, not a crease of dubious elegance, and if I could say of one of them that he walked on velvet feet, it was because a few days later he was to betray, to go over to the opposite camp, which is the thieving camp. . . . I had noticed him at mass, in the chapel. At the moment of communion, the chaplain left the altar. . . .” It is as if a movie camera, as in King Vidor's
The Street
, were first fixed on the city, ranged slowly over the panorama,
stopped at
a
house, approached
a
window, slid along ideal rails, entered
a
room and there, from among a thousand characters, all of them more or less alike, suddenly focused upon
an
individual who thereupon woke up and started living. This is the sport of a god.

Apart from the very particular case of philosophical intuition, one is rarely able to perceive creatures against the background of the universe, for the reason that they are all involved in the world and are equally part of it. If a given clerk, a given magistrate, wanted to view the earth in perspective, he would have to cut himself off from his function, his family, would have to break the bonds of his social relationships and, from his self-enclosed solitude, consider men as if they were painted objects. The novelist himself often has difficulty in establishing this distance between himself and his creation. No sooner are his characters conceived than they enter into various relationships with other characters, and the latter with others, and so on. The author exhausts himself in the effort to follow these relations in detail; he sees things and people through the eyes of his heroes, who are threatened by specific dangers and thrust into particular situations; he never has the leisure to raise his head and take a commanding view of the whole. In fact, if he has any fellow feeling for the human beings about whom he is writing, he will plant his feet on the ground with them. Only a god can take a lofty view of his work and of the living creatures that people it, and he can do so because he has never been in the world and has no relation with it other than that of having created it. A god, or a pariah whom the world has rejected. Society excluded Genet and locked him out; it drove him from nature. He was forced from the very beginning into the solitude that the mystic and the metaphysician have such difficulty in attaining: “The whole world that mounts guard around the Santé Prison
knows nothing, wishes to know nothing of the distress of a little cell, lost amidst others.” For this captive, the universe is everything that is denied him, everything from which the walls of his prison separate him. He, in turn, rejects what is denied him; his resentment finishes the job: “The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in [a] somber . . . sky.” When he creates an imaginary universe on paper, he produces it at a respectful distance. It is the same universe from which he was excluded, as far away and inaccessible as the other, and it discloses totality because of its remoteness. This absence of connection with external reality is transfigured and becomes the sign of the demiurge's independence of his creation. He works at arm's length, he stands clear of the object he is sculpting. In the realm of the imaginary, absolute impotence changes sign and becomes omnipotence. Genet plays at inventing the world in order to stand before it in a state of supreme indifference. The “golden point in a somber sky” ends by becoming the sole object of the creator's efforts, just as it is the object of all the captive's thoughts. He molds his characters–even those who have no function other than that of exciting him–out of common clay, at a distance, and they appear to him at once in their relation to the All. Divine and Darling are inhabitants of Montmartre and Montmartre is a province of the Universe. They met on the street to which Genet will perhaps never go back; they frequent bars to which he cannot return. They are
beings of the outside,
and their
involvement in all Being
is not meant to manifest to Genet
his
own presence but to let him see his absence from All in the most favorable light, to convince him that this absence is deliberate. If he is not in the midst of men, it is because he has drawn them from the clay and fashioned
them in his own way, it is because he governs their destinies. Since the pariah and God are alike external to nature, it will suffice for the pariah, in his cell, to dare invent being: he will be God. Genet creates in order to enjoy his infinite power. However, his too human finiteness makes it impossible for him to conjure up the celestial sphere and the globe in the detailed distinctness of their parts; he sees the world as a big, dark mass, as a dim jumble of stars, in short,
as a background
. Genet fakes; unable to follow the royal progression of Creation, he creates his heroes
first
so as to introduce
afterward
into each of them a primordial and constituent relation to the universe. No matter–it suffices to look at Divine or Darling in order for this unseen, unnamed universe which they imply to spread its dark velvet about them.

To us, this overweening pride and reckless unhappiness often seem exquisitely naïve. The just man, immersed in his community, determines each individual's importance, including his own, by means of an infinite system of references in which each man serves as a measure for all and each. Whatever the object he considers, he knows that its dimensions vary with the perspective, distance, or unit of comparison; that what appears to him to be a mountain will be a molehill to someone else and that the other's point of view is neither more nor less true than his. But Genet, who is shut in, has no point of comparison. If he serves a two-year sentence, he is equidistant from Brazil and the Place Pigalle, that is, two years away. He does not touch the earth; he soars above it. Since he is equally absent from everything, his imagination is omnipresent; he is not in space. Every object therefore takes on for him the dimensions his fancy confers upon it, and these dimensions are
absolute,
that is, they are not given as a relationship of the object with other objects but as the immediate relationship
of the thing to its creator. They can increase or diminish without those of the other varying, and since Genet wishes to ignore the severe and disagreeable laws of perspective–which are all right for the free citizens of French society–a hoodlum in Montmartre and a star in the sky seem to him equally close. Often he amuses himself by enlarging or shrinking a victim (all things remaining equal, moreover), in order to punish or test or glorify him. This ghastly book has at times the naïve poetry of the early astrolabes and maps of the world. Against a background of oceans, mountains or fields of stars appear animals and persons–the Scorpion, the Ram, Gemini–all of the same size, all equally alone. But this strange freshness is only an appearance. We sense behind it the maniacal will–which has become exacerbated in prison–to regard the Nay as the symbol of the Yea and the Nought as the symbol of the All. Precisely because he feels lost “when confronted with the universe,” he wants to delude himself into thinking that he is creating the universe. If his characters are cosmic, it is because he is confined in “the obscene (which is the off-scene, not of this world).” The God of the Middle Ages wrote “the book of creatures” to reveal his existence to man, his only reader. Similarly with Genet: his “book of creatures” is
Our Lady of the Flowers,
and he intends it for only one reader, only one man, himself. By their suffering and purity, Our Lady and Darling, saints and martyrs, bear witness before this wonderstruck man to his Divine existence.