Our Lady of the Flowers (2024)

Prison isn’t a resort. Prison isn’t a paradise. So Jean Genet resides in the world of his obscene and sinful fantasies…

What is involved for me who is making up this story? In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky. Slowly displacing volumes of fetid air, cutting threads from which hang bouquets of feelings, seeing the gypsy for whom I am looking emerge perhaps from some starry river, wet, with mossy hair, playing the fiddle, diabolically whisked away by the scarlet velvet portiere of a cabaret.

Without bringing her back to reality, for she never left reality, the arrangement of the setting obliged her to shake off the dream. She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hand, weighty as a phallus in action, she realized she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse.

“The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.”

I think everybody who tries to write a review about Our Lady of the Flowers starts out confounded, befuddled, muddled as to where to start because for one thing Genet's writing style has jumbled up the coherent, organized part of your brain.

I was fortunate that the edition I chose to read included the Jean-Paul Sartre introduction. I'm sometimes on the fence about introductions, especially long introductions, Sartre's intro is 49 pages, because I think sometimes they suck the life out of the novel before you even have a chance to read the first page. Many introductions also assume that the reader has read the book previously. I took a chance mainly because I like Sartre and he did a wonderful job of preparing me for what I was about to experience.

This book is an ode to onanistic activities or in other words masturbation. To be more specific this is a collection of fantasies that Genet wrote while in prison to help him achieve a chain of org*sms. Yes there are explicitly written parts, but do not categorize this book as p*rnography or a book of cheap thrills. Genet writes such lush, evocative scenes that the sex that may or may not occur is immaterial. Really this is about passion. This is about Genet making love to himself. The characters that flow through this novel from Divine, to Darling, to Our Lady of the Flowers, to Mimosa are all just derivatives of himself. He uses shells of ultra masculine males, gypsies, thieves, and beautiful young boys, that he has cut out of magazines, to fulfill his sexual fantasies, but underneath in the hollow parts of their bodies they are Jean Genet.

"When she talks to herself about Darling, Divine says, clasping her hands in thought: I worship him. When I see him lying naked, I feel like saying mass on his chest." We all hope that we can experience a moment where someone feels this way about us. For Jean Genet these characters sprang from his imagination fully formed as the perfect, flawed lovers that his mind could move about like furniture building up fantasies that ultimately leads to his satisfaction.

Our Lady of the Flowers by Miriam Laufer

"Darling's life is an underground heaven thronged with barmen, pimps, queers, ladies of the night, and Queens of Spades, but his life is a heaven. He is voluptuary. He knows all the cafes in Paris where the toilets have seats. To do a good job, he says, I've got to be sitting down. He walks for miles, preciously carrying in his bowels the desire to sh*t, which he will gravely deposit in the mauve tiled toilets of the Cafe Terminus at the Saint-Lazare station."

I thought this was a good example of Genet talking about something most of us never want or need to talk about and yet when I read this I had to stop and read it again and again because it is a beautiful statement about one of the most base things that we all are required by our design to perform. Yet he jolts us by uses the coarse word sh*t which is quickly softened with the word mauve. He has made taking a crap a pilgrimage, an event, that the character Darling will cherish, and look forward to consummating.

And consuming.

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.”

I've never read anything like this. There are flashes of Genet in the stream of consciousness of the Beat writers, certainly Thomas Pynchon had read Genet before writing Gravity's Rainbow. The surprising part of the book is how accessible it is. This book was compelling to read and even though some of the twists and turns left me dazed and confused I just let it wash over me and continued on.

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Nothing if not hypnotic. Genet's prose is entirely unpredictable and he does something here I wouldn't have thought possible or feasible or even desirable. He takes all these Parisian hom*osexuals (his word), some of them evildoers -- murderers, thieves, prostitutes, assorted toughs -- though not necessarily evil people, it's just that like all of us they are capable of evil and from time to time actually commit it -- and he raises them to near saintly levels. That's how big his empathy is. It's extraordinary. Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction calls it a "masturbatory" novel undertaken simply to excite Genet during a long, boring incarceration at Fresnes Prison in 1942. This is no doubt true of the earlier drafts, which had long passages of graphic hom*osex. I don't think it's as true of the final text, which is no more p*rnographic than, say, Lady Chatterley's Lover or Ulysses. On the most immediate level one might declare that Genet's characters are never denied their fundamental humanity, or something equally grandiose. But that's hedging of course. Actually, I'm not sure how he does it. I may have to chalk it up to genius, but that will require at least one more reading. He subverts religion, in this case Catholicism, and uses it to build his own special transposed morality, in which murderers are saints and prostitutes angels. Crimes are committed for bizarre existential reasons. As when Divine let's a little neighborhood girl fall to her death from her ninth floor balcony so she can no longer be "good." Genet plays with reader expectations as all great writers do. There's an ecstatic discursiveness to the writing, like a prose boomerang which arcs through seemingly unrelated material before returning to its point of origin in wholly unanticipated ways. I know of no one like him. The Beats are said to have greatly esteemed Genet, and one can see why. He's their urtext.

Μια δοξολογία έκπτωτων αγγέλων στο μεγαλείο της ανδρικής φύσης.
Ωδή στη φύση-παραφύση και ποίηση γραμμένη απο ανδρικά χέρια με γυναικείες σκέψεις,ηδονές και οδύνες.

Αυτό το βιβλίο κατατάσσεται αμέσως στο θεατρικό πλάνο του παραλόγου με ρεαλισμό,ωμότητα,φρίκη,αηδία,θαυμασμό,ξεπεσμό και πλήθος εγκληματικών πράξεων κάθε μορφής,κάθε σχέσης,κάθε τυπικής οικογενειακής και κοινωνικής ευθύνης.

Όλη η ιστορία καταγράφεται μέσα απο τη φυλακή. Ο Ζαν ένας ονειροπόλος ομοφυλόφιλος,τρυφερός και σιχαμερά γλαφυρός περιγράφει την ιστορία της ζωής του ανακατεύοντας γεγονότα,φαντασία,καταστάσεις,νοσταλγίες,όνειρα,
πουλημένες συνειδήσεις,αγορασμένο έρωτα και παρακαταθήκες βρομερών πραξεων εγέγγυων πίστης και λατρείας σε νταβατζήδες ανυπόστατης ανδρείας αλλά πιστοποιημένης ανοχής και εκστατικής ηδονής.

Θυσίες στο βωμό του φαλλού..και ιερές τελετές ανήθικων πλασμάτων που εκκλησιάζονται στο ναό του περιθωρίου σε έναν μιαρό Θεό.

Δημιουργός μιας δικής του κατηγορίας θεϊκών πλασμάτων που λατρεύονται και λοιδορούνται τόσο όσο διαρκεί μια ερωτική κορύφωση.

Πλάσματα στολισμένα με ψεύτικα λουλούδια που μαραίνονται και πανάκριβα αρώματα που βρομάνε.

Πλάσματα ντυμένα με γυναικεία ρούχα και ψεύτικα κοσμήματα που γυαλίζουν σαν σπασμένα γυαλιά ποτηριών μέσα σε υπόγεια μπαρ απο φθηνά ποτά και σωματικά υγρά.

Πλάσματα δίχως φύλο και ταυτότητα.Με μπερδεμένα γενετήσια ένστικτα και χαμένες ψυχές.
Καταδικασμένα αρχικά απο την οικογένεια και τελικά απο όλη την κοινωνία σε έναν θάνατο ζωντανό και μνησίκακο.
Σε μια ανάταση παράλογα πνευματική και σε μια κατάντια τόσο θλιβερή που γίνεται σπουδαία και ιερή.

Ο Ζαν μας περιγράφει με ανατριχιαστικές λεπτομέρειες και βιωματικές θύμησες ιστορίες που δεν έχουν αρχή έχουν μόνο τέλος. Ιστορίες που αρχικά ξεκινούν όμορφα και το τέλος δεν έρχεται ποτέ επειδή χάνει το δρόμο του μέσα σε λαβύρινθους επακόλουθων ιστοριών,παραληρηματικών συνειρμών και αδιάφορων ποιητικών απαγγελιών σε μια ελεγεία φιλοσοφίας,αγάπης και λύπης.

Τραγουδάει ενα θρησκευτικό άσμα με πρωταγωνιστές τη Θεά(τραβεστί)
τον Μινιόν μικρά ποδαράκια(μοιραίο άνδρα και νταβατζή κάθε είδους και έννοιας)
την Παναγία των λουλουδιών(νεαρό,τρυφερό,ανισόρροπο εγκληματία)
τον Γκαμπριέλ την ερωμένη,
τις Μιμόζες,
τους Πρίγκιπες του πρωκτού,
κάποιον νέγρο εραστή με έντονη κακοσμία,
κάποιον Κορσικανό λοποδύτη
και πολλούς άλλους που εμπλέκονται σε αυτό το υπερθέαμα στοχασμών,παραλληλισμών και πολλαπλών αξιόλογων και ολοζώντανων περιγραφών της ανδρικής φύσης... σε σημείο εγκωμιαστικού κορεσμού.

Πρώτη μου (παραφύση) επαφή με τον συγγραφέα και θα τολμήσω να πω πως χάθηκα στον ουρανό του, αναγούλιασα με τη «γλύκα» του,μπούχτισα με το ντελίριο του,εντάχθηκα σε γνωστικές λειτουργίες και αντιλήψεις,συνυπήρχα σε ψευδαισθήσεις,παραισθήσεις,ερωτικές εκρήξεις,συναισθηματικές αστάθειες,βίαιες συμπεριφορές και ενδοκρινικές διαταραχές.

Παρόλα ��αύτα 4/5* τα αξίζει. Κατά την ταπεινή μου άποψη.

Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς!

Surreal and erotic, Genet’s semi-autobiographical debut novel unfolds in a series of loosely linked vignettes, sketching the lurid exploits of a small group of queer sex workers, pimps, and murderers, who alternately feud and fall in love with each other. In hallucinatory prose the incarcerated author-narrator fends off boredom and seeks pleasure by imagining ever-more baroque misadventures for his cast of characters. The work’s upturning of bourgeois morality isn’t much shocking anymore, but the writing’s hypnotic.

They should give Jean Genet a kids show. You know, like Sesame Street and Barney and whatever they have now -- Dora the Explorer? Jean could teach the kids outdated pimp argot instead of Spanish! But the language thing would be extra; the reason Genet gets a kids show is that the message of this book is the same as those shows': this message being the glorious imperative to use your imagination.

"Use your imagination!" When you think about it, it's a bit strange that there's such an emphasis on this in media for children, since they already are using their imaginations (or would be, anyway, if they weren't sitting in front of the TV). Since kids imagine things spontaneously without being told, this hysterical, unnecessary urging by the adults putting out TV probably has less to do with the children's edification than with something the adults are missing themselves. Maybe what Ernie and Barney are really saying is, "Use your imagination NOW, kid, because one day real soon, it is going to shrivel up into a flaccid and desiccated and useless old husk, and you will be serving a life sentence in a filthy French prison called Adulthood, surrounded by bedbugs, sociopaths, and the rank stench of sh*t. And you'll have no recourse then, and no hope for escape."

This, then, in the kids' show I'm developing, provides a nice segue into the basics of how capitalism should work. See, adult, you have no imagination; you are incarcerated (so to speak) in the cramped stinking cell that is reality, from which you cannot escape because you no longer possess that once-prized power to use your imagination. Fortunately, you can benefit from the fruits of our neighbor M. Genet's vigorous labor, since he does still have an imagination, and for a nominal fee he will let you use it (and for a couple francs more, you can use something else of his, too).

And this is why we read: to get out of our lives. To get out of our cells. Okay, so that's a bit overwrought, but I mean it. We need other people's books because our brains are not enough, and our own imaginations are too feeble to invent worlds that will make ourselves free. See, I bet that would've sounded less cheesy if I'd written it in French! Those bastards really do get away with a lot.

Awhile ago I reviewed Jim Thompson on here, and someone on the thread wondered if he'd ever read Proust. The thought of that made my stomach lurch -- of course he didn't! gross! -- but I'm willing to bet Genet read both guys (maybe at the same time), and swallowed them in the same mouthful with no sense of dissonance.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to everyone. It's almost assaultively poetic and gorgeous while incredibly raunchy and scatological, like an overpowering bouquet of gardenias and lilacs with erect penises popping out between the petals, in a cracked crystal vase set on the back of an overflowing toilet. If you think you might be fascinated by a swooningly imaginative, lovely fever dream of a pre-pre-Stonewall, pre-pre-pre-AIDS degenerate hom*osexual underworld and aesthetic, then this could potentially be a book you'd enjoy. Think pimps, wigs and teacups, thieves, murderers and pearls, boxers and graveyards, news clippings of killers, and a drag ball of queens in stained nineteenth-century gowns.... Think co*ck after co*ck after huge erect co*ck, with paeans to farting and a few trips to Mass. There's a trial. There's a funeral. There's a lot of jacking off! Instead of furry blue monster Grover's "cooperation," M. Genet's neighborhood would emphasize the importance of "la masturbation," an almost diametrically opposite concept but one also essential for the development of young people.

If I were a more artistic soul myself, I might try and put together a Geneted-out Sesame Street version, since the pimps and queens would make beautiful muppets, and the animated sequences could really be something. Our Lady of the Flowers doesn't need that, though. It doesn't need me or anyone else; we need it! Truthfully, I think I really did need Our Lady. This is the first book I've read in awhile that actually changed the way that I think; I feel like it gave me a bit of a trepanning, sort of relieved some pressure on the skull and gave my uninteresting organ some more room to breathe. I was really living in the world a bit too much, and now I'm not here if I don't need to be. Genet did remind me that I don't have to stay here, and that if things become too oppressive I can just run off to become a male prostitute and live in a Parisian garret above a cemetery with my Negro and my adolescent psychopath, and a whole lot of drugs and makeup and fake jewels. It's too bad the fascistic policies of public television would likely not allow this glorious message of freedom to be shared with a nation of tots. For now, unfortunately, this book is limited to people who have learned how to read. The good news is, you can probably buy it used for a dollar! Though I might recommend a newer edition than the one I have, which identifies itself on the cover as "A SHATTERING NOVEL OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY," which will make people look at you like you're just reading a bunch of trash. Which you are not. You're just using your imagination!

It's been weeks now, and I've been trying to figure out something, anything to say about this novel. Oh, I liked it—very much so, as my rating surely indicates—but I keep circling around and around it, desperately searching for the detail upon which to structure and make sense of my reactions. I have to admit I still haven't found it, though there's plenty that could be rhapsodized over—the cruel beauty, the unexpected possibility of transcendence, the influential, still-avant garde style. But no, I just keep returning to a single thought:

This novel just doesn't give a damn about me.

Honestly, I can't think of another text that is so completely disregards the reader—Genet makes no concessions, doesn't even pretend to create some kind of connection between character and reader; everything is on Genet's terms, and the reader can accept that or simply f*ck off. Oh, I can certainly pretend that being gay offers me some kind of "in," but that just as quickly unmasks me for what I am, a bourgeois queer as far removed from Genet's world as anything else. I can observe, I can try to keep up; I certainly can't relate.

And that's kind of the wonder and power of it: six decades on, and Genet still resists assimilation into contemporary gay culture—he'd undoubtedly mock post-Stonewall living as scathingly as he does polite French society in the first half of the 20th century. He still remains the perpetual brooding outsider. And frankly, I don't think he'd have it any other way.

"I was his at once, as if (who said that?) he had discharged through my mouth straight into my heart."

My gay uncle just died. I never got to know him really. As a kid, he’d been my mystery uncle. I knew he existed but never saw him and, having a secret of my own, knew not to ask. That’s not to say I knew he was gay, only that I knew the subject was forbidden - never outwardly but in the way families communicate through the absence of words.

One day on the lead-up to Christmas, my parents called me and my siblings into the living room - a forbidden place in itself - to announce that we’d be dropping by my uncle’s place for a holiday visit. This was unprecedented. Then they dropped the bomb. “Your uncle,” my father said, “Is a hom*osexual.” Even today I’m not sure why they did that. Perhaps they thought it was the Christian thing to do or perhaps to put us on our guard in case he made advances. Clearly, they had no idea who they were talking to.

A couple of weeks later, in making our Christmas day rounds, we dropped by my uncle’s. He was affable and welcoming, but I held back and soon found myself alone in his living room. I’d always read. Reading was my buoy in life. So I scanned his book collection, mostly paperbacks, old and well-used. And there it was. I’d never heard of Jean Genet, but the blurb caught my eye: “A shattering novel of human depravity.” I knew I had to have it and I knew I’d never have the chance again. So I stole it.

I must have read it three times in a row, not so much for the ‘depravity’, but because I didn’t understand much. I was maybe fourteen, had had no sexual adventures beyond my own hand, and had no idea what words like ‘cornholing’ meant. But I swooned under the weight of the words. I knew they were hom*oerotic and that was enough. It was not a one-handed event. It was more of an out-of-body experience. And it changed me. Outside of funerals, I never saw my uncle again, but he'd opened a door that no one could close again.

This is an odd book review, I know. But some books are greater than the sum of their parts. Some books are like flame throwers. They mark you for life.

My introduction to masturbation occurred when I was around nine years old. A senior boy shared the secret. At home that afternoon, for the first time I rubbed my little prick and…nothing. All I created was friction, sweat and boredom. It was as though my penis wasn’t ready for what was being asked of it. A few hours later, however, I tried again, and on this occasion something did happen. The tinder started to smoulder; and then it caught fire. A small flame. I blew on it gently, scared in case it went out. The smoke intensified, rising swiftly. It entered my lungs and my breathing became laboured. Meanwhile, the fire grew bigger, warmer. I stoked it aggressively, and the warmth spread throughout my body. Then, just as quickly as it had ignited, the fire died, and I was left in pain.

The following day, everything had changed. I saw the world differently. It had became fractured, yet fuller. Suddenly there were women. I felt as though I had given birth to them, had created them myself, in my bedroom, under the covers. I had created them, then cast them far and wide; and now I sought to gather them up, to reclaim them so as to use them in private. How many women have I jerked off to in the intervening years? Thousands? Someone I see on a train, in a shop, on the street. Celebrities, nobodies. I gather these women up, and store them away, for later, when they are always obliging, and always so expert at getting me off. Nobody can do me the way that they can do me, when I act as their intermediary.

What is perhaps most attractive about masturbation is that it is an escape into another world, an imaginary, and better, world, over which you have control. The women I fondle and f*ck, who gratefully grip and suck, are a conjurer’s trick; they are in fact amalgamations, they are monstrously sown together from the body parts of various women. I am their father, and, in this way, they are one of the purest expressions of my self, as well as a means of avoiding myself and my circ*mstances. Wanking is, therefore, an indulgent and imaginative endeavour with a factual foundation, like writing, only more satisfying, of course, and less likely to be thrust upon an unsuspecting, and largely disinterested, public.

Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers was, it is said, written in prison on the brown paper that was issued to inmates in order to make bags. It is often described as [hom*o]erotica, but it differs from other books of that sort in that it was most likely not composed in order to make its readers hot, although it could function in this way, but rather as an aid to getting Genet off while he languished in his cell. Indeed, the narrator/author states that he has ‘raised egoistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult’ and lauds the ‘pleasure of the solitary, gesture of solitude that makes you sufficient unto yourself, possessing intimately others who serve your pleasure without their suspecting it.’ These ‘others’ are, in the main, pictures of hoodlums and murderers that he has taken from newspapers and pinned to the walls of his cell.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a champion of the work, called it ‘the epic of masturbation.’ Yet this gives the impression that Our Lady of the Flowers is simply a record of Genet’s adventures in pleasuring himself, that it is a kind of wanking diary, but the reality is something more complex and wonderful. The moments when the author is present in the text, with co*ck in hand, are infrequent; in fact, sex itself, explicitly explored, makes up only a small proportion of the book. Masturbation may have been the motivating factor, and much of the content may have served this purpose for the incarcerated Frenchman, but the most fascinating, beautiful, thing about Our Lady of the Flowers is how in fantasising about the criminals on his wall, in loving them, Genet’s love ‘endows them with life.’

Throughout Our Lady of the Flowers the pictures, and his own experiences and memories, even aspects of himself, are transposed into his characters and situations. He says of the transvestite Divine that ‘it will take an entire book before I will draw from her petrifaction and little by little impart to her my suffering.’ The real Divine he met, he writes, in Fresnes prison. She spoke to him of Darling Daintyfoot, another important character in the novel, but Genet ‘never quite knew his face.’ The author sees this as a ‘tempting opportunity to make him merge in my mind with the face and build of Roger,’ only very little of this man remains in his memory. Therefore, the Darling that ‘exists’ within the pages of Our Lady of the Flowers is a composite of many men, including ‘the face of another youngster’ he saw emerging from a brothel.

So, for me, the book is more about the creative writing process than it is blowing your load, or is at least about the relationship between these two things. If you have ever attempted to create a character you will know that they are, in exactly the way that Genet describes, partly born from your rib, but also from a variety of other people you may have known or observed [and, as noted in my introduction, this is how masturbatory fantasies work too]. Moreover, as you breathe life into them, as you populate, you – as the creator – begin to understand your power, but simultaneously, ultimately, your powerlessness, over them. For example, as the author you can decide to give ‘a breathing-spell, even a bit of happiness’ to your creations, as Genet is tempted to do vis-a-vis Divine and Darling. Yet he also acknowledges that once brought to life these people in a sense exist independently [“if it were up to me only, I would make of her the kind of fatal hero I like”], that, once you have given them qualities, they must act in accordance with these qualities.

I have thus far only mentioned in passing the author’s preoccupation with murderers. For Genet, these people are ‘enchanting’, they are ‘a wonderful blossoming of dark and lovely flowers.’ Indeed, it is, he states, ‘in honour of their crimes’ that he is writing his book. One could understand this fascination in relation to sex, of course. In my review of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden I explored the connection between sex and violence, so I do not want to repeat myself here; but, on a more basic level, we are all aware of the allure, the sexual potency, of the hard man, the dangerous man, the bit of rough, even if we do not subscribe to it ourselves. However, I believe that there is a deeper significance to Genet’s interest, which is that violent criminals exist on the fringes of society, they have, intentionally, placed themselves outside of bourgeois or conventional society. Murderers are people of ‘wild imagination’, who have ‘the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.’ In this way, they are similar to his transvestites and hom*osexuals, and to himself.

This attitude, this interest in and admiration for the unconventional, perhaps also explains why Christianity is such a consistent presence in the text. Indeed, on the first page Genet writes about his dislike of angels, which, he says, fill him with horror. Most frequently, the author uses Christian language or imagery to describe something that would be considered irreligious. For example, when Divine makes hard the co*cks of two policemen, they are said to knock against the doors of their trousers, urging them to open ‘like the clergy at the closed church door on Palm Sunday.’ There is also, of course, the double meaning of the name Divine [who, moreover, dies at the beginning of the book and is then, in a sense, resurrected], and another transvestite prostitute is called First Communion. By repeatedly merging the divine and the debauched, Genet is deliberately dirtying Christianity – which preaches conventionality – by association.

While all of what I have written about previously is of interest, and goes a long way to making Our Lady of the Flowers the masterpiece that it is, the biggest selling point, the most extravagantly plumed feather in the book’s cap, is the quality of the prose. I ought to say that it is beautiful, amongst the most beautiful I have ever encountered, and leave it at that; but I will attempt some kind of discussion, anyway. Genet wrote in a kind of freestyle, or at least that it how it appears in translation, in an elegantly inelegant fashion. His sentences meander across the page, like a handsome, yet drunk, young couple. His imagery is at times ludicrous or fantastical – ‘a pulled tooth, lying in a glass of champagne in the middle of a Greek landscape’ – and at others precise or impressively restrained – ‘the revolver/disappeared beneath the bed like an axe at the bottom of a pond.’ In all instances, at all times, however, it satisfied me, it got me hard.

Jean Genet, the author, is serving time in 1940s Paris, and whilst awaiting sentencing begins to write, all sorts, on the back of brown paper bags: and voila: Our Lady of the Flowers is born. He would have used hundreds of these brown bags though: how did he ever get them.

Genet writes to assist his masturbation (niiice), and cobbles together a patchwork quilt of personal reminiscences, fantasy, autobiographical sense data, general musings and various story threads of unascertainable veracity.

The skeleton of Our Lady is framed by the multiple narrative of ostensibly one character, Jean Genet, who morphs continuously into a drag queen Divine, and Darling, his pimp. The narrative modes vacillate between ‘She’, ‘I’, and ‘He’ and it can’t be ascertained if any of the different manifestations of the same character are real or a figment of his imagination. This heightened existentialist outlay then provides the perfect vehicle for showcasing the collapse of external reality, the denouncement of a fractured society, the purported destruction of consciousness, and the multiple perspectives of that same reality.

The reality being that of a coterie of hom*osexuals, drag queens, petty thieves, murderers, male prostitutes and pimps: probably a pretty radical read for 1940s Paris. But what really makes this lasting fiction is not so much the forays of a criminal underclass (although that DOES have a voyeuristic appeal), but rather Genet’s incredibly lyrical and imaginative word-smithing.
Genet need only look at a peisage, and the quotidian becomes transformed under his linguistic auspices into strange and wonderful images. One of his victims becomes’ a corpse, lying in a glass of champagne in the middle of a Greek landscape with truncated ringed columns around which long white tapeworms were twisting and streaming like coils’.

Divine loses Darling to a woman (well, only so he can be a kept man). This is how it happens: ‘When he walked by, Darling was smoking, and a slit of abandon in the woman’s hardness of soul chanced just then to be open, a slit that catches the hook cast by innocent looking objects. If one of your openings happens to be loosely fastened or a flap of your softness to be floating, you’re done for’.
That has just got to be one of the most poetically rendered snapshots, ever, of love at first sight.

Genet is nothing if not obligingly transgressive. We’ve all heard of the good old prose poem, and Genet indulges duly in a nonpareil one page dream sequence. It is only at the end that the realisation dawns: this whole book is one giant, eloquent, prose poem.

So, is there a catch? Well, yes, for me. In as much as the whole novel is a string of loosely connected but plausibly standalone etudes, I did reach a saturation point. Unfortunately before the end. Although I did finish it, and don’t regret that I did. But, that old adage: how long is a piece of string? applies. In all the randomness of the build up, I don’t know, I guess I reached masturbatory satisfaction before Genet did.

.

What would you do if you found yourself in a prison cell serving a long sentence and facing the horrors of isolation, alienation, physical and psychological deprivation?

You could:
1) commit suicide;
2) go nuts;
3) go nuts and commit suicide;
4) rape your cellmate;
5) rape your cellmate and kill him because the voice of God is calling from the toilet bowl, asking for blood;
6) miscellaneous.

As for me, I know all too well what I would do: I'd spend my time thinking of all the lovers I've had since my teens. All of them. Males, females, single, married, straight, queer, respectable, embarrassing. From the most insignificant random f*ck to the one and only love of my life, I would think of them so intensely and desperately they would come back again and gather for me. I would smell their skin, stroke their hair, hear their voices and feel their bodies onto mine as if we had never parted.
Like a necromancer, my soul would bring back all its ghosts and my desire would give them a new shape, utterly beyond my own understanding and will. And then I would make them meet, mate, merge, kill each other - presiding over their very existence, which would now be nothing but a mere extension of my mind.

That's exactly what Genet's narrator/alter ego does in the most poetic and hallucinated work of Existentialist literature to date.
What starts as a hom*osexual prisoner's masturbatory stream-of-consciousness monologue turns out to be an atlas of the soul, an astronomy of lust and memory. A journey through his own fading self by means of all the bodies and identities he loved and desired, puppets moving on a stage only he can see. A psychodrama played by ghosts.
Divine, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Mignon, Mimosa, Première Communion; those are the kings and queens of the French underworld of the Forties. Whether we look at them as outcasts or romantic heroes, their heartrending grandeur permeates the narrator's dreams and nightmares. Kids, men, transvestites, pimps, hustlers, petty thieves, murderers - repulsive and gorgeous, vain and vile, innocent and corrupt: these are the fallen angels and saintly demons inhabiting the recesses of Genet's mind as well as the seedy streets of Paris, carrying around the burden of their desperate beauty through the decay they thrive in ("The kids were indeed waiting to commit some real crime as a pretext to go to hell"), a light shining through the mist of time and the veil of guilt, loss and regret.

The thing is, our ineffable narrator is locked up in a prison cell. The outside world has long ceased to exist for him; all these people, feelings and memories belong to another universe, a plane of reality he is now totally deprived of. Withdrawal - psychological implosion - is the narrator's only means to reach out and keep in touch with reality. As a matter of fact, the only way out is a way in, until the border between the outer world and the narrator's innermost perception gets so blurred he himself starts morphing into a character in his narration.
It's almost impossible to discern between erotic fantasy and reliable (auto)biographic contents here. Impossible and pointless: 'abstract memoir' is the only fitting definition- a dimension in which the texture of time, space and self-consciousness are tore apart by razor-sharp blade of the written word.
In his own words,

"This book is but a mere particle of my inner life."

A particle indeed, one single atom of a man's most elusive matter.
Today we're painfully aware of the terrifying power of the infinitely small; we're well acquainted with the omnipotence of the atom. Genet's writing is the splitting of that inmer atom and the devastating blast that follows.
Have a look at the excerpts I picked for my updates and you'll realise how beautiful his prose is, how poetic, how graphic; what a musical quality his voice has throughout the book. Lighter than the petals of a wild flower carried away by a summer storm.

From the very first page the reader must give up on any attempt to trace the convoluted contours of this arabesque. Somewhere between the Divine Comedy and the Comédie Humaine, this is Genet's contribution to the most impure Holy Scriptures ever written.

” Nessuno può dire se uscirò di qui,
né quando, se mai ne uscirò.
Con l’aiuto dei miei amanti sconosciuti, dunque, scriverò una storia.
I miei eroi sono loro, incollati al muro, loro e io che me ne sto qui, rinchiuso.
Man mano che leggerete, i personaggi, anche Divine, e Culafroy, cadranno dal muro sulle pagine come foglie secche, per concimare il mio racconto.”

Pubblicato nel 1942 in forma anonima e clandestina, ”Notre-Dame des.- Fleurs” è’ la celebrazione di un’epica omosessuale nella Parigi della fine degli anni ’30.

Romanzo impudico e lirico la cui voce narrante è quella di un carcerato che trova sollievo nell’immaginazione.
La fantasia però è mescolata al ricordo e così si confondono i contorni di ciò che è accaduto realmente e ciò che è finzione.

“Impetuoso” è l’aggettivo che mi martella nella mente leggendo questa storia.
Impetuoso per la passione carnale che l’autore lascia a briglia sciolta come qualcosa che non si può e non si vuole più trattenere.
Una forza travolgente che sfugge dalle mani tanto che si confondono non solo i piani temporali ma lo stesso racconto si fonde con i ricordi di chi parla oppure con i sogni fatti sotto una rozza coperta del carcere.
Questo mi ha creato grande difficoltà nel leggere un libro che altrimenti mi avrebbe fatto soffermare sì per le sottolineature di passaggi veramente ricchi di umanità e splendidi dal punto di vista letterario.
Mi sono trovata, invece, spesso a brancolare tra le righe, in cerca di un appiglio che mi guidasse.

(Planches de Chantal Montellier pour Divine (d’après Notre-Dame des Fleurs de Jean Genet) publiées dans la revue Ah ! Nana. hom*osexualité. Changez de sexe ! Transsexualité. n°8, juin 1978.)

Siamo tra prostitute, assassini, magnaccia, ladri, carcerati: i bassifondi.
Si comincia con il funerale di Divine la puttana che in un’altra vita si chiamava Paul Garcia:
due persone nello stesso corpo; entrambe costrette a rovistare nell’immondizia per sopravvivere.
Divine, però, incontrerà il magnaccia Mignon che saprà amarla e guidarla tra i marciapiedi di Parigi.

C’è poi il sedicenne Notre- Dame- Des Fleurs (” Dati segnaletici di Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs: statura m 1,71, peso kg 71, volto ovale, capelli biondi, occhi azzurri, colorito chiaro, denti perfetti, naso diritto, membro in erezione: lunghezza m 0,24, circonferenza m 0,10.” ) assassino che celebra il matrimonio tra il sacro a cui il suo nomignolo richiama e l’estremo profano che si compie con l’atto dell’uccidere.

Questa di Genet è sicuramente un’opera importante nella misura in cui manifesta la rivolta contro ogni ipocrisia sociale che, nonostante imprigioni i corpi entro limiti che vogliono soffocarne la natura, trova spazi per liberarsi.
E’ un mondo diverso da qualsiasi celebrazione letteraria sia stata mai fatta.
Il linguaggio stesso testimonia la differenziazione all’interno degli stessi bassifondi: gli uomini parlano l’argot ma le checche rielaborano e creano nuovi codici semantici che danno il segnale di appartenenza e fortificano i propri confini.

Questo è uno dei libri che celebra la marginalità e parla chiaramente di cosa succede veramente dietre le quinte:
senza limiti e senza scrupoli.

” La sua vita è un cielo sotterraneo popolato di baristi, di magnaccia, di zie, di belle di notte, di dame di picche, ma la sua vita è un Cielo. È un voluttuoso. Conosce tutti i caffè di Parigi con w.c. muniti di tazza (…)”

” L’atmosfera della notte, l’odore che sale dalla latrina intasata, traboccante di merda e di acqua gialla, sollevano i ricordi d’infanzia, come una terra nera scavata dalle talpe. L’uno suscita l’altro e lo costringe a uscire. Tutta una vita che credevo sotterranea e per sempre sepolta torna alla superficie, all’aperto, al sole triste, che le danno un sentore di marcio in cui mi cullo.”

Paris, France during the 40's. Louis Culafroy, a gay boy has come out and named himself Divine. This is his story: his life as a son, male prostitute, thief, swindler, blackmailer and lover. His one true love is a pimp and a beautiful virile man called Darling Daintyfoot. Description of Darling: height, 5 ft. 9 in., weight 165 lbs., oval face, blond hair, blue-green eyes, mat complexion, perfect teeth, straight nose. Divine loves him so much that she worships Darling's co*ck that she has made a plaster cast of it. Description of the co*ck: gigantic when erect. The most impressive thing about it is the vigor, hence the beauty, of that part which goes from the anus to the tip of the penis. To Divine, Darling is everything. She takes care of his penis. Darling's penis is in itself all of Darling: the object of her pure luxury. If Divine is willing to see in her man anything other than a hot, purplish member, it is because she can follow its stiffness, which extends to the anus, and can sense that it goes farther into his body, that it is this very body of Darling erect and terminating in the pale, tired face, a face of eyes, nose, mouth, flat cheeks, curly hair, beads of sweat.. Darling loves Divine too. Darling gets a hard on even when Divine just looks at his crotch. Divine has had previous lovers like the young boy, Alberto and the black man, Gabriel but she feels that Darling is the best. However, one day when Darling is about to turn 30, Darling goes home with another of his lover, Our Lady of the Flowers. Description of Our Lady of the Flowers: height, 5 ft. 7 in., weight, 156 lbs., oval face, blond hair, blue eyes, mat complexion, perfect teeth, straight nose. It is obvious that Darling and Our Lady of the Flowers have similar features. Hence, Our Lady's edge over Divine.

French writer and an openly gay man, Jean Genet (1910-1986) wrote Our Lady of the Flowers(Notre Dame des Fleurs) while he was incarcerated in Paris prison for burglary. Genet was abandoned by his parents as a boy so he grew up with people not related to him and became a young thief. When WWII broke out, the young man Genet served as an army man alongside Hitler's German forces. The war disillusioned him further and compounded his angst. During his 10th incarceration,he wrote the manuscript of his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers on paper bags provided to inmates. The manuscript was confiscated and burned several times but he persisted. When it came to the hands of Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980), he marveled at Genet's talent so he and his friends, Andre Gide (1869-1951) and Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) petitioned for Genet's release. The French government granted it.

Reading Our Lady of the Flowers made me remember Marquis de Sade's (1740-1814) 120 Days of Sodom minus the rampant rapes and senseless killings. The edition of my book has Satre calling the book as epic of masturbation. I do read erotic novels, some of them with gay men as characters, but this is my first time to read a classic book which describes the hom*osexual acts in details. It is not as distasteful as De Sade's because Genet made his men (gay and non-gays) seemed to be in-love during those sexual acts and one of them don't get killed by the other after they climaxed so I would not say that those scenes are grossly as distasteful. Again my mantra: it is their body, it is their life, it is what they want, so be it. Regardless of whether the reader is a straight man or gay, I think what should be appreciated in this book are two: (1) the beautiful playful prose which is almost like a long lyrical poem is definitely a joy to read and (2) that Genet wrote this inside the prison cell trying to express his protest against WWII and the French society in general.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN!!! PARIS REELS!!!

“There are only two real writers among the living Frenchmen: Genet and I.”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (noted Célinean)

“Genet is God.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, noted Sartrean)

****************************************

What to make of this novel? What can I possibly add to something both as simple as a “children’s tale” yet so slathered in an alchemical mixture of the sacred and profane that their differentiation becomes a thankless, no, useless task? There are some books that you just have to get out of the way of, to let their beauty remain uninterrupted by your critical inanities. I’ll accomplish nothing by pointing out that people that have this filed under ‘erotica’ are clearly f*cking insane; that if all you get out of Our Lady of the Flowers is Hot Gay Action (HGA), then you are clearly distracted by the word “co*ck" out of all proportion; that Genet’s prose is so nimble that it threatens to fly off the page at points; etc. (See what I did there?)

Read this single sentence and be Genet’s judge, jury, and executioner. I don’t think he’d have had it any other way. Hey, it was good enough for Our Lady:

”The village, which they recreated for their own use, and where, as we have said, the children were sovereign, was entangled in practices that were without strangeness to those who lived in a village of strange nights, where stillborn children were buried toward evening, carried to the cemetery by their sisters in pine boxes as narrow and varnished as violin cases; where other 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; where the Italian woman walked by, spying on the old, sick, and paralytic, whose souls she culled from their eyes, listening to them die (the old die the way children are born), having them at her mercy, and her mercy was not her grace; a village whose days were no less strange than its nights, where, on Corpus Christi or Rogation Day, corteges went through the blazing noonday countryside in processions composed of little girls with porcelain heads wearing white dresses and crowned with cloth flowers, of choir boys swinging in the wind censers covered with verdigris, of women stiff in their green orblack moiré, of men gloved in black, holding up a canopy of oriental cast that was plumed with ostrich feathers, under which walked the priest carrying a monstrance.”

Love,

Darling Daintyfoot

This was hard, but there is an unmistakable art in Genet's writing--a sensuality as it should be: consumed with textures and scents. I got lost and am certain I did not always understand but the book left me impressed with Genet's eye for details, humor, and poetry. Like poetry, it should be read more than once; it's blunted characters and blurred identities fall like sunlight or shadows on whatever you as a reader bring. This is not a celebration of gay or criminal lives, but a perspective that like any other includes joy and hardships, and is different enough to mistake for seduction when it is merely true to itself while asking for the same in return.

Towards the end a single terrible act anchors the book in tragedy. It was here, I had the hardest time and lost a lot of sympathy for Divine. However, along with other sad moments, Genet offers us this uneasy bed to lie in--the kind of trap we all learn to sleep with.

I remember a febrile, malt liquor-fueled convo in college about the "abject," which I was listening to more than participating in, and a handful of people more sophisticated than myself, most of whom would go on to being professional New Yorkers, talking about how great art occurs when something simultaneously repels and allures (per Kristeva).

This is Genet's metier, and it's probably stronger in Our Lady of the Flowers than anywhere else. This is the sensation of staring at the pair of stained panties in the hamper longer than one ought to, rendered in novel form. Prisoners, streetwalkers, crossdressers, runaway teens, pimps, queers, people who encompass more than one of these categories (and perhaps all of them) all are beautiful and transcendent in Genet's world, and somehow you come to love them. I mean, really, really love them, hold their stories close to your heart.

Sartre characterizes this text in the introduction as “an epic of masturbation” (2), “only one subject: the pollutions of a prisoner in the darkness of his cell” (3), which presents the primary structural difficulty in interpretation here—the modulation between the moments of the fictive Real metanarrative and the purported Imaginary sub-narratives therein. Sartre also thinks that the text has a “desolate, desert-like aspect” wherein one character, say, “undergoes ascesis in an agony” (11)—overall, a “ghastly book” (47). He wonders if “poetry is only the reverse side of masturbation” (15). That stuff may be philistine (and Sartre’s handling of the admittedly complicated gender politics is likewise woefully inadequate), but he does situate the general politics well:

one might contrast the humanistic universe of Rimbaud and Nietzsche, in which the powers of the negative shatter the limits of things, with the stable and theological universe of Baudelaire or Mallarme, in which a divine crosier shepherds things together in a flock, imposing unity on discontinuity itself. That Genet chose the latter is only to be expected. In order to do evil, this outcast needs to affirm the pre-existence of good, that is, of order. At the very source of his images is a will to compel reality to manifest the great social hierarchy from which he is excluded. (30)

So much for Sartre. Text proper is labor intensive. Its statement of purpose is ostensibly “in honor of their crimes” (51), regarding specific seemingly historical executed persons. (Honoring the crimes however strikes me like a signature moment of lumpenized antisocial nihilism.) Text lays out a phantasmagoric narrative/metanarrative. Productive perhaps to examine on the basis of conceptual axis.

Corpus/animus—

In reflecting on the persons honored for their crimes, supra, narrator suggests that they are “bodies chosen because they are possessed by terrible souls” (53), which is a concern that we might see show up in Agamben’s most recent, The Use of Bodies, incidentally. We see a “blessed body in a supernatural nimbus” (54), the consecrated corpus, subject to agambenian devotio, quite plausibly in this narrative. One character’s death is likened to “Jesus the gilded chancre where gleams His flaming Sacred Heart. So much for the divine aspect of her death. The other aspect, ours, because of those streams of blood that had been shed” (57) (cf. Marlowe’s “Christ’s blood streams in the firmament”). “When I see him lying naked, I feel like saying mass on his chest” (84). The consecration runs to the point of radical corporeal disaggregation: she “lived only on tea and grief. She ate her grief and drank it; this sour food had dried her body and corroded her mind” (155).

Gender ISA—

Althusser’s ideological state apparatus (perhaps as described in our review of Butler’s Gender Trouble) is thoroughly frustrated in this text. I hope that this is not the reason that I identify the presentation as lumpenized antisocial nihilist. Specifically, characters are not stable with regard to pronoun usage: “Divine died yesterday in a pool of her own vomited blood” (57). But: “the duplicity of the sex of fa*gs” (114). The alleged 'duplicity' is borne out regarding the same character, who is always subject to indetermination on this point:

She tried for male gestures, which are rarely the gestures of males […] she was supposed to show she was virile so as to capture the murderer, she would end up burlesquing them, and this double formula enveloped her in strangeness [xenos], made her a timid clown in plain dress […] to crown her metamorphosis from female into tough male, she imagined a man-to-man friendship which would link her with one of those faultless pimps whose gestures could not be regarded as ambiguous. (133-34)

Warning—

Narrator notes “the foul monstrousness of my arrest” (103). But he also recalls that

he had the sacred sign [sic] of the monster the corner of his mouth […] The flaw on the face [sic] or in the set gesture indicates to me that they may very possibly love me, for they love me only if they are monsters. (55)

early 14c., "malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect," from Old French monstre, mostre "monster, monstrosity" (12c.), and directly from Latin monstrum "divine omen, portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination," from root of monere "warn" (see monitor (n.)). Abnormal or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impending evil. Extended by late 14c. to imaginary animals composed of parts of creatures (centaur, griffin, etc.). Meaning "animal of vast size" is from 1520s; sense of "person of inhuman cruelty or wickedness" is from 1550s. As an adjective, "of extraordinary size," from 1837. In Old English, the monster Grendel was an aglæca, a word related to aglæc "calamity, terror, distress, oppression.

1540s, "senior pupil at a school charged with keeping order, etc.," from Latin monitor "one who reminds, admonishes, or checks," also "an overseer, instructor, guide, teacher," agent noun from monere "to admonish, warn, advise," which is related to memini "I remember, I am mindful of," and to mens "mind," from PIE root *men- "to think" (see mind (n.)).

What monsters continue their lives in my depths? Perhaps their exhalations or their excrements or their decomposition hatch at my surface some horror or beauty that I feel is elicited by them. I recognize their influence, the charm of their melodrama. My mind continues to produce lovely chimeras. (122)

he had steeped himself in all the monstrosities of which she was composed. He had passed them in review: her very white dry skin, her thinness, the hollows of her eyes, her powdered wrinkles, her slicked down hair, her gold teeth. He noted every detail. (155)

Narrator through “monstrous horror” is “exiled to the confines of the obscene (which is the off-scene of the world),” which is reasoned to be the “origin of the world and at the origin of the world” (301)—the condition of possibility of the arche is the monstrous, the warning.

Hard f*cking—

The main appeal of course is prurient, mixed in with unforeseeable abstractions. Who after all shall object to “I was his at once, as if […] he had discharged through my mouth straight to my heart” (60)? Or to how something “made the abbe’s spine stiffen and draw back with three short jerks, the vibrations of which reverberated through all his muscles and on to infinity, which shuddered and ejacul*ted a seed of constellations” (69)? Or to when “he will rise up, become erect, and penetrate me so deeply that I shall be marked with stigmata” (77)? There’s some indication that these are presented as mere phantasm, insofar as the narrative is interpolated with comments such as “now I am exhausted with inventing circ*mstances” and “I have a cramp in my wrist” (id.).

Otherwise, much of interest. We see the coincidence of both epainos and logos with eros, such that the third is the condition of possibility for the others: “if I think about him, I can’t stop praising him until my hand is smeared with my liberated pleasure” (61). Manual praise, the epainos liberated, is kinda kickass. Let it be a warning to ye. Or, rather, let a bakhtinian grotesque realism be a warning:

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world. (75)

The phallos otherwise as not so much the transcendental signified of phallogocentrism, but rather “an object of pure luxury” (106), as the necessary economic good is reflected in “I lived in the midst of an infinity of holes in the form of men” (174).

Recommended for those who serve a text they know nothing about, readers whose love is akin to despair, and persons forced to love what they loathe.

Utterly against my expectations, I ended up deeply moved by this work. When I first started reading it, one of my initial reactions was irritation at the apparent gay self-hate manifested in the work through statements like:

…because for the occasion I make myself a male who knows that he really isn’t one.

Our domestic life and the law of our Homes do not resemble your Homes. We love each other without love.

My other reaction was frankly tedium at a work whose value lay apparently in its shock value at its time by its frank depiction of gay sex and sanctification of gay prostitutes and murderers. While a straight Catholic in the 1940s might find much to be shocked by in this work, there could be no horripilating frisson for me, a gay atheist in 2019. I thought, well, it’s just of a piece with Serrano’s Piss Christ isn’t it, *yawn*.

As it turned out, I was more right on that than I knew. For Serrano, a religious man, said this about his work:

The thing about the crucifix itself is that we treat it almost like a fashion accessory. When you see it, you’re not horrified by it at all, but what it represents is the crucifixion of a man. And for Christ to have been crucified and laid on the cross for three days where he not only bled to death, he shat himself and he peed himself to death. So if ‘Piss Christ’ upsets you, maybe it’s a good thing to think about what happened on the cross.

The beauty of his images (I won’t say his language since I read this in translation, having given up with struggling with 1940s gay and criminal argot French) swept over me and won me over by the last 10% of the novel. Its striking, I found myself thinking, how people forget that Jesus was condemned as criminal, no more worthy in the eyes of his contemporaries than Our Lady of the Flowers was to his. And for Genet to find his peace, his life raft in this act of creation, that just blew me away. I’m very glad I didn’t give up on the work.

Hold on, this sh*t is kinda gay.

*
I was 17 when I first read Our Lady, and I would never be the same again.

My mind & teenage limbic system simply did not know how to process passages like the following. I thought I literally might explode.

'I know very well that if I were sick, and were cured by a miracle, I would not survive it.'

'July Fourteenth: red, white, and blue everywhere. Divine dresses up in all the other colors, out of consideration for them, because they are disdained.'

'When Mimosa left the garret, Darling tried to pick a quarrel with Divine so he could leave her. He found nothing to quarrel about. That made him furious with her. He called her a bitch and left.'

'I shall surround myself only with roughnecks of undistinguished personality, with none of the nobility that comes from heroism. My loved ones will be those whom you would call "hoodlums of the worst sort."'

'I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my sh*t, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts which I carry to my nose.'

'Our Lady never thought of anything, and that was what gave him the air of knowing everything straight away, as by a kind of grace.'

'At the reformatory, an inspector (he was twenty-five years old and wore fawn-colored leather boots up to his thighs which were no doubt hairy) had noticed the youngsters' shirttails were stained with sh*t. Every Sunday morning, when we changed linen, he therefore made us hold out our dirty shirts by the outspread sleeves. With the thin end of his whip he would lash the face, already tortured by humiliation, of the boy whose shirttail was doubtful. We no longer dared to go to the toilet, but, when we were driven to it by a case of the gripes, after wiping our fingers on the white-washed walls (there was no paper) which was already yellow with piss, we took good care to lift up our shirttails (I now say "we," but at the time each kid thought he was the only one who did it), and it was the seat of the white pants that was soiled. On Sunday mornings we felt the hypocritical purity of virgins.'

*
Jean Genet was once mentioned in a Dire Straits song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neBIz...

Powerful work with sensual descriptions of even ordinary events. Considering his lack of education (left school at about 12 or so) it's a work of genius, and he is not fettered by conventional uses of narrative.

Bernard Frechtman translation

Feb 2015.
It would be more rewarding to re-read bits of A rebours and The Naked Civil Servant, I thought at first. (Genet's descriptions are never so lush as Huysmans', and his gay demi-monde - or full-on underworld - is contemporaneous with Crisp's but, for all the use of Wildean reversal / transvaluation of values, the wit here is rarely as funny.) This might have been another instance of reading a classic too late, when I'd already read so much inspired by it that the original wasn't terribly interesting on its own merits.

Still, Our Lady has atmosphere & visuals, and regardless of remembering books that were more elegant sentence-on-sentence, I eventually got lost in it regardless. The truly sordid origins of bedsit glamour. A book I find easiest to sum up as an image: a paint-peeling room with a motheaten red-velvet throne and scuffed fake Louis Quinze furniture (long before the rough luxe trend, and with altogether too much damp to be salubrious) inhabited by a fabulous drag queen whose lovers are wiry, starveling scallies forever in and out of prison. And of course Genet in his cell imagining it all, and wanking off to pictures of men he's stuck to the wall. These characters are from fetishy fantasies and daydreams scribbled on secret bits of paper; they don't have conventionally rounded personalities; those who want healthily empathic description of everyone won't find it here. The urgency of getting off and of mental escape from confinement makes this an overwhelming visual and breathlessly fixated ...story... set of stories? There is the thread of a plot, but images and scenes wheel about, not entirely continuous.

I got round to this now because I wanted to read Patti Smith's Just Kids - in it she mentions Genet literally about 30 times. The rhythms of her run-on lyrics from Horses can be heard in some paragraphs; there are lines I knew from Bowie and possibly The Divine Comedy; imagery and favourite words I recognise from people I've met, who must have read this. So much here was familiar even whilst the specifics of the plot weren't.

Ages after I first read Martin Amis describing his characters on the loo, I'm not shocked by Genet's accounts of same, nosepicking etc as contemporaries were (though what with all the farting, I wondered if the Reeves & Mortimer farting characters [the Petermains?] were French because of this & Evgenie Sokolov). It's simply very embodied, in including both ecstatic and base bodily functions. (All belonging to people who are more or less beautiful.) I've never stopped being shocked though, that people were still judicially beheaded in Western Europe in the twentieth century.

To read Genet in a cheap edition with loads of typos, without ever having compared translations, seems true to the spirit of the thing, but this is also a book that's overdue for the full introduction and notes treatment.

The best prison novel ever! Well, actually it's a piece of erotica from a genius writer. Jean Genet is one of the greats, because he can express suffering, joyment, and a world that is extremely eroticize. To go into his world is like having a feverish dream and realizing that your world that you work in can not possibly exist. Genet's world is much more real, dirty and very very beautiful.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky. . .

Unbelievable that we are so lucky as to have this book real and readable in the world.

"Poetry is willful. It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, it was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow."

Jean Genet wrote Our Lady of Flowers whilst in prison. This is an author's personal masturbatory material — shockingly voyeuristic and kinky. A self-objectification for pleasure against a place of biting boredom and limited freedom. More than its acts of perversity and explicit eroticism — a hundred words in place of the word 'penis' and farts appearing oddly ("But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me.") —it tells a story amidst its disjointed stream of thoughts. Exclusively hom*osexual, this book refreshingly spurs the male gaze onto different variants of men. Genet's set of characters, fashioned from his abyssal imagination opposite the four walls of his cell where he makes them wear the clothes and personalities he wants, wanders in a world of pimps and criminals. They blend themselves then create a murky intersection of Genet and his characters; Genet is his characters; these characters are Genet: "[...] the story of Divine, whom I knew only slightly, the story of Our Lady of the Flowers, and, never fear, my own story."

His words harden, but in rare moments they unexpectedly soften. And when they do, Our Lady of the Flowers touches the underground tunnel of vulnerable existence ("She will go on living only to hasten toward Death." and "I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world."). It can be devastating and painful too. This is very different than most and I might as well say, perhaps, groundbreaking with its structure and content. But I don't think I would have appreciated it better if I did not read Sartre's brilliant introduction. His deep insight about the book's significance and the linear sentiments in its non-linearity makes it shine into another kind of light. But this is not something I would say I find totally stimulating and arousing nor can I say this has moved and seduced me.

Stumbling upon it in a list of books Susan Sontag recommended I can't help but wonder if I dealt with it as best as I could without the preconceived notions I shaped for myself after merely reading the synopsis. A more piercing question, did John Waters sculpt his own notorious Divine from Genet's?

"I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of dismal neighborhood of hard and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous."

Genet is a genious in his sensual descriptions of ruthless men. His attraction to crime and death equals his love for masculine beauty and sex. He wrote this book in jail, and in more than one way, this book released him.
The first time i read it I was about twenty and it actually shook my (literary) world. He was so different from anything I'd read before (and i'd real lots of books before) that I compulsively read and reread it.

Unique erotica, like no other book ever written. A convict in a French prison posts glamorous magazine pics of men on his cell wall and daydreams sex fantasies of them intermingled with fantasies of his fellow inmates.
This is no gay p*rn Walter Mitty, though; you find yourself inhabiting an alternate universe much like Kenneth Anger’s short films made during the same period (World War II Nineteen Forties). Read this and feel your head explode!

Where Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray or André Gide with The Immoralist stopped, having some pragmatic understanding of ‘proper’ social boundaries, Jean Genet merrily breezed by, all the way to the edges of our humanity, and for many, the most distasteful, repugnant of edges. This tale within a tale, swirling with explicit hom*oerotic, murderous and scatological themes, was constructed to satisfy the onanistic fantasies of our imprisoned main character, the author, and was written, and then rewritten, owing to the destruction of the first manuscript, during the German occupation.

I’m thinking I've found the greatest rewards in literature embedded in those works permitting free reflection of thought and removed from immediate commercial motivation. Others may have preceded M. Genet in their authenticity and courage, however, for me this feels groundbreaking. Then again, I wonder if a modern-day psychotherapist would think this 'just another day at the office?'

"Η Παναγία των λουλουδιών "

Ένα έργο με το οποίο διαφαίνεται η ψυχοσύνθεση του συγγραφέα!

Με ιδιαίτερο τρόπο ο Ζενέ προσεγγίζει τη ζωή του Ζαν, ενός ομοφυλόφιλου, που βρίσκεται στη φυλακή κ μας αφηγείται ανομολόγητα περιστατικά από τις ερωτικές του εμπειρίες. Οι εικόνες κατακλύζουν το μυαλό του, οι θύμησες ευαισθητοποιούν τη μνήμη του κ προσφέρουν στον αναγνώστη με κάθε γλαφυρή λεπτομέρεια ερωτικές συνευρέσεις γεμάτες σωματικά υγρά.

Τα πρόσωπα που συνθέτουν το ανάγνωσμα είναι πολλά. Η Θέα, μια τραβεστί, η Παναγία των λουλουδιών, ένας νεαρός που καταλήγει εγκληματίας, ένας νέγρος, άγριος εραστής, ένας νταβατζής, μια μάνα που ζούσε στο δικό της όνειρο. Έντονες σκηνές αγοραίου έρωτα, απολαύσεων, ηδονής. Τα άτομα αυτά εξυψώνονται στα μάτια των εραστών τους μόνο τη στιγμή της ερωτικής πράξης κ στη συνέχεια γρονθοκοπούνται, εξευτελίζονται, σέρνονται σε μπαρ κ σε κρεβάτια.

Μια ελεγεία για τους ομοφυλόφιλους άντρες, άντρες που ψάχνουν μια πραγματική αγκαλιά, αγάπη, αξιοπρέπεια κ κοινωνική αποδοχή.

I feel silly giving this stars ... it's less a work of art and more the darker parts of a man's living brain. As Sartre says in the intro: "This work of the mind is an organic product. It smells of bowels and sperm and milk."

I liked this description of the pimp: "all and always hot muscle and bush".

Strangely compelling. Perverse. Hallucinatory. Fascinating. Warning: Do Not Read!

A unique and disturbing book.

Every writer should have someone search their cell and destroy their work, forcing them to start over.