PETER BROOKS
by now well known: Genet, in his cell at Fresnes, is masturbating.
He is inventing a story based on all the queens, pimps, and male whores
he has known, from whom he is now separated. The purpose of this
act of literary creation is auto-erotic, and he is interested in his characters
only so long as they maintain his sexual excitement. Such a genesis may
not be without precedent-one recalls Rousseau's description of the
state in which he wrote
La Nouvelle Heloise,
and many characters in
fiction probably originated in their creator's more or less erotic feelings
for them. Yet it is difficult to think of another author whose love of
his creation is so pragmatic, so exclusive and infantile. Creative love–
inclusive, mature--has often been a means by which the novelist
could know and free the potentialities of his characters, but Genet's
narcissist's world, deprived of liberty, is closed and self-reflexive.
Genet is aware of this: "My books are not novels," Sartre quotes
him as saying, "because none of my characters makes a decision on his
own." The story of Divine, from boyhood to death in a pool of vomited
blood in a garret, is a series of carefully contrived encounters that
permit Genet passively to experience seduction, exclusion, jealousy, be–
trayal, aging, heroism, death. A night world of Pigalle, inhabited by
Darling, Our Lady, Mimosa, Seck Gorgui, Gabriel, is called forth and
informed with life as erotic necessity dictates. The narrative hesitates,
reaches out uncertainly for its objects, improvises- and then the proper
situation is found, a meeting completed, and the narrator can come
to climax. The passages of subsequent repose often have a barren,
deserted quality-a world returned to a time previous to life. Narrative
past tense frequently gives way to a present that brings the author's
creations face to face with him, seeming to abolish (but thereby also
emphasizing) the cell walls: "Darling and Divine. To my mind, they
are the ideal pair of lovers. From my evil-smelling hole, beneath the
coarse wool of the covers, with my nose in the sweat and my eyes wide
open, alone with them, I see them." Genet, protagonist, author of and
within the book, writes day by day, not
to
record what happens, not
to rearrange reality, but to substitute for life, to forge Divine's existence
as a negation of his own deprivations.
Imitation, celebration, rejection are all active in Genet's style. His
language is highly imaged, often fancy and queenish, onanistically self–
indulgent. Some of it seems borrowed- from a French tradition of literary
religiosity and satanism- and at times, as Sartre remarks, it possesses
the talismanic quality of medieval literature. It can be elaborately boring,
but it can also achieve an extraordinary union of elegance with violence
and
argot
in
a style entirely appropriate to a world both artificial and
