Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)
I didn't get on very well with The Thief's Journal but somehow picked up the idea that this was the one I should have read; so now I've read it.

Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in prison with a broken pencil and sheets of brown paper squirrelled away from whatever forced labour the authorities had deemed might keep him out of trouble. The manuscript - because I suppose that's what it was - was found and destroyed at some point or other, probably by another jailbird - and so Genet started again; although I suspect it was probably more the case that he simply carried on given that the novel comprises philosophical musings entangled around a vivid fantasy existence, so the narrative structure seems pretty much analogous to what happens when you twist a spigot. I doubt the destruction of the earlier draft has deprived us of any particular episode or insight which hasn't been regurgitated here.

Genet was a petty thief, amongst other things - barely even a decent criminal - someone so profoundly unlikely to ever fit in that he's barely even a snug fit within his own mildly transgressive mythology, but his writing was powerful, vividly poetic and arguably unique, even if a little goes a long way. Our Lady of the Flowers is horribly self-indulgent to a point bordering on masturbation, rendering it somewhat impenetrable to the casual reader, which seems to have been Genet's intention - specifically art without compromise and which is absolutely true to itself.

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 so somber a sky that the abyss between our world and the other is such that the only real thing that remains is the grave. So I am beginning here a really dead man's existence. More and more I prune that existence, I trim it of all facts, especially the more pretty ones, those which might readily remind me that the real world is spread out twenty yards away, right at the foot of the walls.

The subject is Genet himself as reflected in his brutally, cramped microcosm merged with that of his own imagination, and with very little dividing the layers. So we don't hear a great deal about other inmates or humorous misunderstandings in the mess hall, and it will probably be some time before we see this adapted for telly with Ross Kemp donning the stripey pyjamas, but we spend a lot of time inside Genet's head, populated mostly by homosexuals, drag queens, pimps, addicts, and other refugees from some Lou Reed album. I suspect my description may here strike a potentially contentious note, although I feel that to adopt drearily empowering contemporary terms would be doing both Genet and the reader's intelligence a disservice.

Society generally took a dim view of homosexuality in Genet's day, and Genet conflates his own sexuality with its unfortunate associations, the bestial and perverse, the dirty and the irredeemable to an almost fetishist degree of association where even acts of betrayal and dishonesty seem to take on a near divine quality in which, as with certain Shamanic systems, sin approaches the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the ordinary and socially acceptable. Anyone requiring parables of honour amongst thieves or the dignity of the outcast is unlikely to find anything here.

I might, just as she admitted to me, confide that if I take contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous, not to be reviled, by anything or anyone, that I have placed myself lower than dirt. I could not do otherwise. If I declare that I am an old whore, no one can better that, I discourage insult. People can't even spit in my face any more.

Of course, it's a defence mechanism to some extent, but any self-flagellation involved should be taken as essentially celebratory, a relishing of sin without attempts to turn it into anything more conventionally noble.

I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption.

Our Lady of the Flowers is therefore, from one angle, Genet maintaining his sanity by modelling his world in something approximating his own image, and the act of writing it down may be what made it real, or at least real enough for his purposes.

But I know that the poor Demiurge is forced to make his creature in his own image and that he did not invent Lucifer. In my cell, little by little, I shall have to give my thrills to the granite. I shall be alone with it for a long long time, and I shall make it live with my breath and the smell of my farts, both the solemn and the mild ones. It will take me an entire book before I draw her from her petrifaction and little by little impart to her my suffering, little by little deliver her from evil, and, holding her by the hand, lead her to saintliness.

Despite an erotic undertone, I'm not convinced that it's really about sex, gender identity or anything involving orifices, and sexually ambiguous males such as Darling, Our Lady and the rest drift in and out of the visionary narrative perpetrating small acts of betrayal upon one another apparently for the sake of mapping the territory. Indeed, to colonise Our Lady of the Flowers in service of gender theory - as I see has already been done in a few bits of internet - seems reductionist and divisive when all the information one might require is already to be found explicitly stated in the text.

Which is all very nice, but actually reading the thing night after night is exhausting because Genet writes entirely for himself, leaving the rest of us to make the best of it. When he says something interesting, it's wonderful, like crisp sunlight breaking through grey cloud in the wake of a storm, but such instances are few and far between, presumably unless one treats the whole as poetry, taking it slowly, one paragraph at a time. Without it representing any sort of failure on Genet's part, given what he was doing with this novel, Sartre's fifty-page introduction is a lot more engaging and a lot more enlightening. None of which is to say that Genet wasn't a great writer, or that he lacked philosophical depth, or even that this work shouldn't be considered a masterpiece - because it probably is by some definition - but I nevertheless found it a chore and I guess Genet just isn't for me. I tried, and I'm glad I tried, but there it is.