Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet Read Free Book Online Page A

you're myself. My heart or my sex. A branch of me.’ And Gabriel, thrilled, though smiling with pride, replies: ‘Oh, you little hussy!’ His smile whipped up at the corner of his mouth a few delicate balls of white foam.” Note the sudden change to the past tense; the words are in the present because they are carmina sacra.

    As for the events which he reports, they are of only secondary interest to him. We know that he loathes history and historicity. In the case of a unique and dated fact that cannot be passed over in silence, Genet limits himself to a summary account of the experience. He describes a petty agitation which has no interest other than that of preparing for the formal appearance of the essence. For example, Divine meets Gabriel. The onanist hesitates for a long time: in what form will this event give him the most pleasure? Will Gabriel appear in a bar, “presented” by the revolving door? Will he be walking down a steep street? Or will he emerge from a grocery shop? Genet finally does not choose. The circumstances matter little to him, provided they comply with requirements whose origin is his own choice of himself. All that is necessary is that they magnify the meeting without failing to satisfy Genet's deep resentment against all handsome men. In short, it is a matter of inventing the overwhelming advent of an archangel with the soul of a doll. The revolving door will present the handsome soldier in the magnificence of a crystal setting. Immediately Genet compares its incessant rotation to the “mechanism of a Venetian belfry,” the effect of which is to transform all who enter, and Gabriel himself, into painted wooden figures. If the soldier goes down “an almost vertical street,” he is changed by his movement into an angel who swoops down upon Divine from the sky. Genet immediately re-establishes equilibrium by comparing him, in parentheses, to a bewitched dog. The ringing of the grocery bell preludes the meeting majestically, like a theater orchestra announcing the coming of the emperor. But the soldier who comes out of the shop is holding in his hand a very childish object: a surprise package. Wooden beauty, dog-archangel, emperor with the soul of a doll. Slyly and discreetly the tale is composed in such a way as to suggest in the orderof the succession the major qualities that constitute the essence of the “boy-queens”: a staggering beauty, a soul that is a “looming emptiness, sensitive and proud.” The story is a projection of the concept into the temporal flow. But time itself is suddenly effaced. All these details have been given only to prepare for the meeting. Now, the meeting is intemporal: “I should have liked to talk to you about encounters. I have a notion that the moment that provoked–or provokes–them is located outside time, that the shock spatters the surrounding time and space.” This is so because the meeting is not to be confused with the clash of two atoms that happen to be projected against each other and that cling to each other. It is the appearance of a celestial form which “of two makes but one,” a conceptual and intemporal unit that is imposed upon the soldier and the old queen. From that moment on, the characters themselves are transformed. Gabriel becomes the soldier; Divine is no longer Divine, the vicious “camp” who will kill a child and destroy Our Lady: “Aging Divine sweats with anxiety. She is a poor woman who wonders, ‘Will he love me?’ “ And the transition from duration to timelessness is marked by the substitution of the present for the past tense. “The revolving door present ed . . . Gabriel appear ed . . . he had just bought a surprise package . . . he was a soldier.” And then suddenly: “Divine, of course, calls him Archangel. . . . He lets himself be worshiped without batting an eyelash. He doesn't mind. . . .” etc. We are on the inner side of the meeting, in the eternal present of love.
    Genet has systematically