Vol. 31 No. 3 1964 - page 445

BOOKS
445
strongly physical. (Similarly, in the poem "Le Condamne
a
mort," Genet
manages
argotique
and obscene language within the formal structure
of the
alexandrin.)
Obviously such a style presents infinite difficulties
for the translator, especially since the
argot
of a given French milieu is
apt to be more of a constituted language than any English equivalent.
Bernard Frechtman has met the difficulties with a fine attention to
meaning and tone. One will always have cavils-but how
do
you translate
"Tu es mon Affolante," anyway?
Where, ultimately, is the reader's locus of interest in the elaborate
puppetry of
Our Lady
'Of
the Flowers?
Sartre has a simplistic answer:
"We are fascinated by someone else's loves." When they are as flam–
boyant and urgent as Genet's, this may well be so. But such an interest
remains exotic, like that the French once took in
Ie roman americain,
which was supposed to be all about primitivism, lynchings, and incest,
and Genet's book is more than another of those novels which exist
solely to exploit a milieu unknown to the reader. What most actively
engages us is the relation between Genet and the characters who excite
him, the play between a creating mind and the possibilities it sees in
the world it has made. Through the loves of Darling and Divine, we
are returned to the cell and to the enforced solipsism that made the
novel necessary. The fiction, Genet insinuates, cannot be so limited
as he intended:
This story may not always seem artificial, and in spite of
me you may recognize in it the call of the blood: the reason
is that within my night I shall have happened to strike my
forehead at some door, freeing an anguished memory that had
been haunting me since the world began. Forgive me for it. This
book aims to be only a small fragment of my inner life.
The freeing of memory, the enlargement of the inner life, make
us finally aware that we have
to
a degree been experiencing the itinerary
of a soul: "The longest detours lead back to my prison, to my cell.
Now, almost without trimmings, without transposition, without any
intermediary, I could tell of my life here. My present life." But Genet
does not continue to describe life in Fresnes; rather, we are told how
Darling the pimp, himself in prison, learned of the arrest of Our Lady.
What follows is the best section of the novel, the interrogation and trial
of Our Lady. The best, because Genet's inner pilgrimage has somehow
released a new, fuller, broader love for Our Lady: an "intermediary"
has come to life. The trial scene itself is a masterpiece of absurdity–
like the trial in Camus'
The Stranger,
but more remarkable since Genet's
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