Our Lady of the Flowers Read Online Free PDF

master. The master requires of his fictions that they show him things as they are–that is his realism–but with the slight displacement that will enable him to see them as he would like them to be. Behind each image is, to use the words of Kant, a pattern “in unison with the principle and the phenomenon, which makes possible the application of the former to the latter.” In the case of Genet the poet, the principles are his basic desires, the rules of his sensibility, which govern a very particular approach to the world. The patterns come afterward. They organize the imagesin such a way that the latter reflect back to him, through the real, his own plan of being. Their structure and “style,” their very matter, express Genet and Genet only. The stones, plants, and men of which he speaks are his masks. His imagination has a certain homosexual and criminal twist. 1
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    There are two types of unification in modern poetry, one expansive, the other retractile. The aim of both is to enable us to perceive an esthetic order behind the freaks of chance. But the first tendency–which is that of Rimbaud–forcibly compels natural diversity to symbolize an explosive unity. We are gradually made to see in a miscellaneous collection the breaking up of a prior totality whose elements, set in motion by centrifugal force, break away from each other and fly off into space, colonizing it and there reconstituting a new unity. To see the dawn as a “people of doves” is to blow up the morning as if it were a powder keg. Far from denying plurality, one discovers it everywhere, one exaggerates it, but only to present it as a moment in a progression; it is the abstract instant that congeals it into an exploding but static beauty. Impenetrability, which is an inert resistance of space, the sagging of a dead weight, is transformed into a conquering force, and infinite divisibility into a glorious burst of continuity; persons are refulgent sprays whose dynamic unity is combustion. If this violence congeals, the flare falls in a rain of ashes. We shall then have discontinuity and number, those two names of death. But as long as the explosion lasts, juxtapositionsignifies progress. Beside means beyond. For each object, scattered everywhere, in all directions, launched with all the others upon an infinite course, to be is to participate in the raging tide whereby the universe at every moment wins new areas of being from nothingness. This Dionysian imagery gladdens our hearts, fills us with a sense of power. It derives its force from an imperial pride, from a generosity that gushes forth and spends itself utterly. Its aim is to force the externality of Nature to reflect to man his own transcendence. For those who want “to change life,” “to reinvent love,” God is nothing but a hindrance. If the unity is not dynamic, if it manifests itself in the form of restrictive contours, it reflects the image of their chains. Revolutionaries break the shells of being; the yolk flows everywhere.
    Compared to them, how miserly Genet seems (as does Mallarmé). His patient will-to-unify is constricting, confining; it is always marking out limits and grouping things together. His aim is not to present externality as an expansive power, but to make of it a nothingness, a shadow, the pure, perceptible appearance of secret unities. 1 In order to do so, he reverses the natural movement of things; he transforms centrifugal into centripetal forces. “A cherry branch, supported by the full flight of the pink flowers, surges stiff and black from a vase.” As we read this sentence from Our Lady, we actually feel a transformation taking place in our very vision. The image does, to be sure, begin with a movement; in Genet's pan-sexualism, the erection of the penis plays a very special role. But the erectile movement–stiffening, hardening,swelling–is not at all explosive. It accords very well with the poet's essentialism. The penis proceeds from potentiality