198
PARTISAN REVIEW
" I would bet you imagined you were working wonders," he wrote
to her in ano ther letter, " in reducing me to an atrocious abstinence
from the sin s of the fl esh. Well , you were quite mistaken . You were
heating up my brain. You made me create phantoms whi ch I must
bring to life." Genet's dependence on masturbation fantasies is re–
marka bl y similar: " I exi st onl y through those who do not exist except
for the being they receive from me."
His novels are not genericall y different from his
Dialogue.
The
ratio of action to argument may be higher, but argument bulks large in
all his fi ction , and it is obvious that the excitement of writing it was
no t merely intellectual. Just as a sense of wrongdoing had been integral
to his sexual pleasure-he preferred the an al position for moral as
much as sensual reasons-the pleasure he took in immoralism was
almos t physica l. The
Dialogue
contains the seeds of all his subsequent
fiction . The crucial experi ence, I suspect, was the discovery of how
much pleasure was to be had from writing out his fantasy about an
orgy involving a pries t, a dying man and six beautiful women . Erotic
daydream draws freely, if tenuously, on memories of phys ical contact;
the act o f wri ting, the appearance of words on paper, not onl y stabilizes
the imagina ry action but helps to elaborate it. In becoming less
cerebral, the experience becomes more orderl y. Even if the words will
never be read , they are hos tages to space outside the mind. They have a
tangibl e, if two-dimensional, existence, and they systematize the ac–
tion, discipline it, commit it tidil y to a sequence or a scheme. A
description o f a woman 's body, for instance, may be based on a
merging of memory with desire, anthologizing any number of appetiz–
ing features, but it must be self- consistent. In fantasy she can be a
redhead one minute and blonde the next; in eighteenth- century prose
she canno t:
The elegance of her fi gure did no t detract from her freshness.
It
did
not stop her from being plump and rounded. The most delicious
curves, offering themselves under a skin whiter than lilies, gave the
impression tha t love itself had carefull y formed her. Her face was
slightl y lo ng, the features extraordinaril y noble, with more majesty
than prettiness, more grandeur than delicacy. Her eyes were big,
black and full of fire; her mouth extremely small and decorated with
the most beautiful teeth that could be imagined. Her tongue was thin
and narrow, o f a beautiful rosy pinkness and her breath was even
sweeter than the smell of a rose. Her throat was full , very round, as
white and firm as alabaster. The most extraordinary curves led down
deliciously from the small of her back to the most precisely and
artisticall y sculpted bottom that nature had produced for a very long
time. Its roundness was exact. It was not very bi g but firm, white,
