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Our Lady of the Flowers ReviewJean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then - present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control.
The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn. Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self - sustaining "Jean" describes his Tiamat.... Legs thrown over shoulders, "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self - imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."
Though the narrative is not the primary focus of this or any of Genet's novels, most responsible critics have failed to remark on the fact that the narrative of Our Lady Of The Flowers is the least compelling of any found in his five major novels. Our Lady Of The Flowers, does, however, lay the basic groundwork for the novels to come: The Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, and The Thief's Journal (all written between 1944 and 1948).
While Our Lady Of The Flowers is Genet's only novel to feature a predominantly effeminate homosexual man (Divine, who is at least partially a transvestite) as its protagonist ("Our Lady Of The Flowers," a virile young thug, is a secondary character), most of the other elements of the book will be very familiar to those who have read the balance of his fiction. Transvestites and transvestite figures abound, as do handsome, amoral, and homosexual or bisexual "toughs," jokes and extended vignettes concerned with lice, flatulence, constipation, and feces, mordant examinations of manhood and the criminal's code of honor, obsession with personal power through emotional betrayal, the long vagabond road to "sainthood," theft, masochistic love, prostitution, and vivid examples of the way in which physical desire and sexuality secretly and subtly fuel, in Genet's view, almost every aspect of life. As in portions of his other novels, the characters here, even the swaggering, virile young men, are known among their friends by fey pet names like "Darling Daintyfoot," "Mimosa," and "Our Lady of the Flowers," which are intended to be simultaneously affectionate and mocking. To further confuse, Divine is referred to as a "he" and referred to his surname during his youth and as a "she" and "Divine" in maturity. As in the Miracle of the Rose and Funeral Rites, characters mesh into one another, exchange identities, and move backward and forward through time at the narrator's whim. Both "Jean" and the individual characters fuse their own and each other's personalities together as needed, and all occasionally lose control of this process: but Jean Genet, master puppeteer, never does.
Genet's readers are probably aware of the existence of haughty establishment critics who pretentiously embrace Genet's work but nonetheless treat it like something best held at the end of a very long stick. "Evil" is the word most commonly used to describe Genet's fiction by stuffy, anxious middlebrow critics who, while distressingly stimulated by his work, feel duty - bound to officially decry its potential for pernicious influence. Many artists are said to create a "moral universe" within the body of their work; Genet is one of the few that actually does, though his is a mirror universe where amorality reigns. Genet's world is so exclusively concerned with flea - ridden prostitutes, child murderers who don't wipe themselves, handsome pimps who eat what they scratch out of their noses, [prostitutes] with rotting teeth, strutting, uneducated alpha male hustlers, and masochistic sodomites -- bourgeois emblems of horror all -- that the question of "evil" as such in Genet's work becomes obsolete.
While Genet loves and personally glorifies his memories, fictional recreations and their outcast lifestyles, he never objectively condones their actions to his audience. In all of his novels, Genet finds beauty, suffering, and vulnerability - humanity - in everyone, thus setting a far better example than his hypocritical reviewers. There is as much "evil" in Genet's books as there is represented by any typical novel's reality principle (for example, all of Genet's characters reveal more humanity and innate dignity than the crass, vacuous crowd Nick Carraway falls in with in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) or, for that matter, as there is in the lives of those unstable, morally - confused critics who are simply too cowardly to recognize the world as the diverse, dangerous, devouring, and unstable place that it is. If Our Lady Of The Flowers proves anything, it's that fifty years after its initial publication, the book is still effectively upsetting the wormy apple carts Genet intended it to.
From the standpoint of Jung's psychological types, Genet's feeling and sensation functions probably predominated in both his life and his writing. However, his thinking and intuition functions were clearly constellated as well, giving Our Lady Of The Flowers and the masterpieces that followed it unmatched macrocosmic perceptiveness, poetic resonance, and gripping, all - inclusive dramatic power. Like alchemical "totality" the hermaphrodite, a shaman, or a legitimate Christian saint, mystic Genet seems to have written from a state of undifferentiated consciousness and enjoyed a state of perpetual participation mystique with life.
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