The Sharp Side

I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood or that they fall in love at first sight, or that Darling, by indisputable signs invisible to the vulgar eye, betrays the fact that he is a thief . . . Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their being are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.

The text of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers [Notre-Dame des Fleurs, 1943; revised 1951; trans. Bernard Frechtman] seems at odds with the definitions which are conventionally imposed upon it. For example:

The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.

The narrative is generated by ‘Jean Genet’, a man alone in a prison cell. At the beginning, he states that he is writing a book and that it is written in honour of the crimes committed by some notorious murderers. He mixes his image of these murderers with others drawn from the illustrations and content of some unidentified adventure novels. At night he reconfigures them into handsome men and masturbates while dreaming of a sexual encounter. “So, with the help of my unknown lovers, I am going to write a story.”

What follows is a narrative which is ceaselessly aware of its own provisional, made-up quality. It focuses on four individuals: a gay transvestite prostitute named Divine, ‘her’ male lover Darling, a young murderer known as Our Lady of the Flowers and the narrator himself. Jean makes it clear that these three characters are creatures of his imagination. Joyously he creates them from numerous sources – newspaper reports, trashy novels, personal experience. But none of those is enough: Jean is always explaining to the reader that his knowledge is sketchy and his stories are inventions. “Don’t complain about probability,” he says to the reader at one point: “Truth is not my strong point”.

What animates the novel is the telling: the conscious pleasure of creation. In her twenties, we are told, Divine cruised the Mediterranean (in both senses):

the yacht touched at Venice, where a film director took a fancy to her. They lived for few months through the huge rooms, fit for giant guards and horsemen astride their mounts, of a dilapidated palace.

After a number of further romantic involvements Divine returns to ‘her’ origins in Jean’s prison cell. Those romantic interludes never existed. They were written “to console” the solitary narrator in his squalid prison cell: “I invent for Divine the cosiest apartments where I myself wallow.” The floral imagery which runs through the book seems expressive of this urge to make a lonely existence in a prison cell blossom with colourful possibility.

Jean maintains an exuberant dialogue with the reader as he writes his story. And it’s a collage narrative, with an equivocal attitude to fiction. It mocks the formulas and language of genre fiction but is also uses them. Darling, for example, is unaware that he is Our Lady of the Flower’s father. But the revelation is casually incorporated, as if Jean had just thought of it, rather than being worked towards.

Through much of its history the novel has been a bourgeois art form which speaks to a leisured class about their lives. Our Lady of the Flowers reclaims it for those at the margins of society. It exuberantly celebrates a lumpenproletarian gay sensibility, not simply in its accounts of sexual activity but also in the way it imagines its fictional world. When Our Lady, on trial for his life, uses the word ‘erection’ the jury is embarrassed. Genet mocks them in cartoon-like imagery:

the twelve old men, all together, very quickly put their hands over their ears to prevent the entry of the word that was big as an organ, which, finding no other orifice, entered all stiff and hot into their gaping mouths.

The novel is also infused with a Catholic sensibility. But it’s one which absorbs the lush, sensuous rites and iconography of the Church, strips them of religion, and reapplies them to the secular world of the gay demimonde. Genet insists on the divinity and holiness of his characters; no coincidence that the central character is named Divine. And why, it might be asked, is the novel entitled Our Lady of the Flowers, when this character is not the central one. Could it be that Notre-Dame des Fleurs is in part a shrine and a structure set up in opposition to that other Notre-Dame? Genet’s narrative seems determined both to transgress and to thumb its nose at those who might be outraged by its transgressions. It joyously investigates areas of narrative possibility normally excluded from the novel – wanking, farting and shitting, to name but three. Another prominent seam of imagery emphasizes that the book’s low-life characters are regal, aristocratic and full of grace and style. And the disjunction between conventional narrative and Genet’s is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the way in which Divine, a man, is throughout referred to as ‘she’. But ultimately Genet’s most profound engagement with the form of the novel lies in the way he fractures his narrative, scrambles chronology and buoyantly and jauntily insists on his story’s fictionality. The voice of ‘Jean’ energizes his endeavours.

The book itself runs backwards. It starts with Divine’s death and then retraces the course of ‘her’ life. Genet has no interest in creating suspense: we no sooner meet Our Lady than we are told he will be executed for the murder he commits. The novel moves towards a conclusion: a hearing at which Jean might be set free. But he also considers the possibility that he will remain a prisoner, in which case he plans to “refashion lovely new lives” for his characters. We never learn what happens. And the novel ends not with a climax but with frustrated desire. It closes with the image of the outline of an erect penis – a dotted line which is a representation of virility, of Divine's lover and of the contours of an absence.

The dotted line that Darling refers to is the outline of his prick. I once saw a pimp who had a hard-on while writing to his girl place his heavy cock on the paper and trace its contours. I would like that line to portray Darling.