Our Lady of the Flowers Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the act, regains its favored form, that is, its natural limits, from which it will depart only to collapse. the cherry branch is thus a penis. But in the very same sentence its expansive force disappears. It surged stiff and black from a vase; it is now borne up by flowers. It is passive, indolently supported by angels. A flowering branch normally suggests the image of a blossoming, of an expansion, in short, of a centrifugal explosion. The poetic movement parallels the natural movement and goes from the tree to the bud, from the bud to the flower. But Genet's image, instead of bringing the flowers out of the branch, brings them back to it, glues them to the wood. The movement of the image is from without inward. from the wings to the axis. 1 In general, his poetic patterns present closed and stable units. When Divine enters Graff's Café at about two A.M., “the customers were a muddy, still shapeless clay.” The creator's power agglutinates the customers, presses the discrete particles against each other and gives them the unity of a paste. The. next moment, “as the wind turns leaves, so she turned heads, heads which all at once became light.” The allusion to the wind creates circularity. The whirl of faces that are turned inward reflects Divine, at the center. The movement closes in on itself; a form has just been born, a form which has the calm cohesion of geometric figures. In the same way, a few astringent words are enough to transform the courtroom audience into a single being: “The courtroom crowd . . . is sparkling with a thousand poetic gestures. It is as shuddering as taffeta. . . . The crowd is not gay; its soul is sad unto death. It huddled together on the benches, drew itsknees and buttocks together, wiped its collective nose, and attended to the hundred needs of a courtroom crowd.” And further on: “The judge was twisting his beautiful hands. The crowd was twisting its faces.” The moments of a succession are united by a dynamic form: “A clerk called the witnesses. They were waiting in a little side room. . . . The door opened, each time, just enough to let them edge through sideways, and one by one, drop by drop, they were infused into the trial.” The words “drop by drop,” though stressing the fact that each witness is a singular object, refer to a unity without parts, to the undifferentiated continuity of a liquid mass filling the “little side room” and pressing against the door as against the inner surface of a vase. Divine is sitting in a bar. Customers enter, men who have perhaps never seen each other. They come from diverse places and have diverse destinies. In order to unify them, Genet makes use of the revolving door: “When the revolving door turned, at each turn, like the mechanism of a Venetian belfry, it presented a sturdy archer, a supple page, an exemplar of High Faggotry.” The word “presented” agglutinates these individuals, changes them, by analogy, into fashion models presenting gowns, subjects their comings and goings to a providential design, makes of each angle of the revolving door a niche, a little cell, a loggia. This time the privileged witness–Divine, Genet's substitute–is external to the system, and the painted wooden figures turn their faces outward. But the word “mechanism” recaptures them, assembles them about their axis of rotation, and sets the merry-go-round in motion, thus re-establishing the reign of circularity.
    This passage and others in the same vein warrant our comparing this kind of arch fancy to the humor of Proust. Proust, too, has a tendency to tighten the bonds of the real world, which are always a little loose, to give an additional turn of the screw, to assume that there isan order among objects that actually have none. The author of Cities of the Plains, also a homosexual and a recluse, likewise practiced “a selection among things which rids [him] of their usual appearance and enables [him] to perceive analogies.” One