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

neglected the particulars. We shall never know what Divine and Gabriel said to each other, which of the two took the initiative in approaching the other, etc. Nevertheless, Genet, like all great writers, is a storyteller, and we shall find in Our Lady several accounts of specific and dated events, for examplethe murder of old Ragon or the trial of Our Lady of the Flowers. But even then the fictional or pseudo-fictional episodes offer a surprising mixture of the temporal and the eternal. Genet, who is both a realist and an idealist, shows himself in his accounts to be both an empiricist and a Platonist. These accounts offer at first the resistance and irrational opacity of the event only to be metamorphosed all at once into classifications and descriptions of essence. In Plato, the hierarchy of ideas represents the immutable truth; the myth introduces time, space, and movement into this calm sphere. In Genet, the relations are reversed, but in any case it is art and art alone which, in both writers, links truth to the myth. Art alone enables Our Lady of the Flowers to be both the “golden legend” and the botany of the “underworld.” It is art that gives this tear-soaked manuscript the air of being a “Mirror of the World.” G. K. Chesterton said that the modern world is full of Christian ideas run wild. Our Lady of the Flowers would surely have confirmed him in his view. It is an “Itinerary of the Soul toward God,” the author of which, run wild, takes himself for the Creator of the universe. Every object in it speaks to us of Genet as every being in the cosmos of Saint Bonaventura speaks to us of God. Sabunde, following Lully, declares that the Creation “is a book,” that God “has given us two books,” that of Holy Scriptures and that of Nature. Genet reverses the terms. For him, the Book is the Creation of the World; Nature and the Holy Scriptures are one and the same. This is not surprising since, in his view, words contain within themselves the substantial reality of things. The being of the thief is contained in the name “thief.” Hence, the being of trees and flowers, of animals and men, is contained in the words that designate them. For the medieval philosophers, “life is only a pilgrimage to God: the physical world is the road that leads us to Him. Thebeings along the way are signs, signs that may at first seem puzzling to us, but if we examine them carefully, faith, with the aid of reason, will decipher, under characters that are always different, a single word, a call that is always the same: God.” 1 Replace God by Genet and you have the universe of Our Lady of the Flowers, whose only reason for being is to express Genet–who has written only in order to be read by Genet–and to recall him constantly to love of Genet. 2
    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