SOURCE: Flieger, Jerry Aline. “Dream, Humor and Power in Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.” French Forum 9, no. 1 (January 1984): 69-83.

[In the following essay, Flieger examines the sense of “criminal gaiety” in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.]

I

En un clin d'œil je vis un enfant isolé, porté par son oiseau de fer, semant la mort en riant.

—Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs¹

In Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, Sartre reads Genet's first novel [Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs] as a dream that contains its own awakening.² For Sartre, this waking dream begins as an infantile act of defiance directed against a world which has rebuffed the writer-criminal, a regression to the childish narcissism of the onanist. Indeed, Sartre suggests that it is only because the dreamer's self-induced reveries of pleasure remain incomplete that he must finally turn to the social act of writing to finish the job: by seeking to prolong and heighten his masturbatory pleasure, the dreamer is drawn into the social trap of writing. Sartre sees this literary trap—the need to address the erotic fantasy to a public—as a salutary one for the criminal dreamer, inducing a passage from a kind of madness to sanity. Wrested from the isolation of infantile onanism by the exigencies of communication imposed upon him by the act of writing, the dreamer awakens to a social role as artist, depicting the downfall of human creatures as an inverted triumph of sorts. Thus, Sartre suggests, the criminal turned artist is able to redeem himself and others through an act of creative volition. In Sartre's view, “Saint Genet” wields a considerable power, not only in the fictional world of his creation, but in the world outside his text as well.

While I think that Sartre is right to read Genet's novel as an exercise in the acquisition and enjoyment of power—and while such an exercise does indeed imply the triumph of a certain kind of will—I think that it is nonetheless essential to consider the triumph of the criminal artist as no less a trap than his original narcissism. The act of writing not only undermines the dreamer's original goal of inducing and prolonging private pleasure, as Sartre points out, but it also necessarily undercuts the possibility of any public salvation, the martyrdom and subsequent canonization which Sartre proposes for his saintly writer. Sartre, of course, sees and discusses the paradox of power in Genet's sado-masochistic revery, suggesting that the dreamer's need to communicate his triumphant dream to an audience—to assert, in words, his own access to power—comes complete with a built-in mechanism for the limitation of that power. But in the sort of reading which Sartre proposes, the emphasis remains on the recuperative aspect of the criminal's literary act (characterized by Sartre as an act of the rashest optimism), his maturation as an artist, his awakening from delirium to sobriety, his triumphant emergence as an adult social being.

It is possible to shift this emphasis somewhat by focusing on Genet as comedian rather than as saintly and powerful martyr, and by reading his artistic trajectory not as a maturation or rehabilitation managing to reintegrate the criminal into society, but rather as a power play which permits the anti-social artist to criminalize the proper society which reads him. This criminalization remains an act of will: Genet's dreamer explicitly and repeatedly voices his choice to reject the temptation of the tragic redeemer role, both for himself and for his “Divine” protagonist. Moreover, the joking tone which permeates Genet's work, the unsilenceable ricanement of his comic voice, works to undercut the complacency of any such saintly pose. In other words, if the criminal writer fails to triumph, he fails both willfully and cheerfully. Rejecting rehabilitation, he opts for the maintenance of a certain desperately gay criminality. Like Notre-Dame himself, Genet's criminal persona plays out his tragic tale comically and with measure (“on dirait qu'il chante un poème de mort sur un air de minuet,” Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, p. 111). Indeed, Genet's novel could be said to differ from similarly therapeutic acts of confessional writing—such as the works of Rousseau or Proust—in precisely this regard: in its maintained criminality, which explicitly rejects the equation of writing with epiphany or cure.

The key to this maintained criminal gaiety may be found in the act of writing itself, which is not only a supplement to erotic pleasure, as Sartre points out, but is, for Genet at least, the occasion for this pleasure. Writing does not merely prolong or enhance Genet's masturbatory activity; it is that activity, a means of both stimulation and appeasement. In Genet's text, the mere act of pronouncing a poetically suggestive word suffices to provoke an ejaculation of meaning:

Le mot “mégot” et la saveur du tabac sucé firent l'échine de l'abbé se raidir, se tirer en arrière de trois petits coups secs, qui se répercutèrent en vibrations à travers tous ses muscles et jusqu'à l'infini, qui en frémit et éjacula une semence de constellations.

(p. 23)

For Genet, the literary text is never simply the representation of an erotic dream played out during a nocturnal existence of repose, but it is itself a nocturnal emission of sorts.

Yet it is significant that Genet's erotic fantasy is verbal: unlike a private masturbatory episode, his emission is evoked by words and is couched in words. From its inception, then, Genet's literary onanism is a social phenomenon, rather than an act of isolation. In other words, the dreamer-writer is less an onanist than an exhibitionist: the poetry of the erotic crimes which he recounts is a poetry destined to be shared. Indeed, the opening passage of the novel suggests that Notre-Dame's crime must be published in order for it to achieve its full poetic flowering:

Son beau visage multiplié par les machines, s'abbatit sur Paris et sur la France … révélant aux bourgeois attristés que leur vie quotidienne est frôlée d'assassins enchanteurs, élevés sournoisement jusqu'à leur sommeil qu'ils vont traverser, par quelque escalier d'office qui, complice pour eux, n'a pas grincé.

(p. 9)

Genet's writing aims to exhibit and to multiply Notre-Dame's crime, showering an enchanted captive audience with the multiplied visages of a perverse hero. And this literary exhibitionism is neither therapeutic nor co-optable: Genet's writing does not socialize the criminal author as much as it implicates the society which reads him in the textual crime. For the lackluster dreams of the mirthless bourgeois are invaded by the criminal's forbidden and infectious fantasies, which creep like a burglar into the readers' consciousness. Indeed, a contagious criminality—a sort of social disease—is the generative core of Genet's transcribed revery (“C'est en honneur de leurs crimes que j'écris mon livre,” p. 9). Thus, for Genet, the social act of communication is fundamentally and paradoxically anti-social: the reader is infected by the text, conned into guilt by association, subjected to criminal pleasures which countermand the limits posed by social propriety. Reading, like writing itself, becomes a dangerous and potentially inculpating transaction between consenting adults.

Now Genet's exhibitionism, which aims at the fascination and contamination of straight and mirthless readers, functions as a sort of wish fulfillment, promising vicarious gratification to writer and reader alike. The novel's opening passage, quoted above, hints at the pressure of collective unconscious impulses, murderous and comic, which the work seeks to liberate from the joyless censorship of its proper public. It is the seductive fantasy of murder which motivates the social intercourse between obscene author and right-thinking reader. Indeed, the criminal author seems to advertise Notre-Dame's deed out of a sort of perverse altruism, in order, as he says, to reveal enchantment to the mirthless bourgeois. Genet sacrifices his criminal hero—who is condemned outright in the opening lines of the novel—in order to fuel the fantasy of his reader. Notre-Dame is the object of a pornographic and comic spectacle, the butt of an off-color literary joke, served up to a dried-out public, in order to infuse their lives with mirth and scandal (“c'est bien pour [eux], pour enchanter [leur] crépuscule, que Notre-Dame avait tué un vieillard,” p. 175). Thus, Genet's social act, the act of writing, manages paradoxically to be sadistic and altruistic at once: the dreamer-author contaminates his reader by inflicting that dangerous pleasure which will simultaneously enchant, entertain and ensnare.

If it is correct, then, to talk about the act of writing as a social trap for the infantile onanist, we must nonetheless insist that this trap is a chosen one, a transaction which implicates not only the imprisoned artist, but the public and the (beloved) fictional characters as well. Paradoxically, it is the social nature of this literary circuit which safeguards the text's anti-social virulence, its criminality. It will be interesting to look at just how it is that this infectious criminality is related to the play with power in Genet; and especially to the two exercises of power—dreaming and joking—evoked in the opening passage of the work (in which the author proposes to cheer up his readers by “enchanting” their twilight reveries). By reading the text first as a sort of dream, and second, as a kind of extended joke, I want to suggest how these two curiously ambiguous power plays (dreaming and joking) allow Genet to remain criminal, a wanted man who eludes the deadening rehabilitation of a writing cure, opting instead to spread the word to the not-so-innocent bystander, his reader.

II

Vous parlez d'enfantillages. Ce sont des enfantillages. Tous les détenus sont des enfants et les enfants seuls sont tortueux, repliés, clairs, et confus.

(p. 19)

Genet's novel is dreamlike both in its aim of wish fulfillment (the fantasy originates in the dreamer-author's desire to possess his characters) and in the techniques of which the dreamer avails himself to assuage his desire.³ Perhaps the most readily apparent of these dream techniques in the text is regression: the use of infantile source material and technique.⁴ Not only does Genet boast of his own childishness, and of the childish nature of his art, but he alots a substantial portion of the narrative to his protagonist Divine's infantile experience (as Lou, male child). In a sense, all of Divine's adult experience seems to hearken back to the humiliation and ritual violation suffered during the “jeux inconnus” of her childhood, the erotic play in which “she” participated with the older village boys.

In addition to the infantile nature of Genet's thematic material, his method of composition bears the imprint of the regressive or infantile dream process.⁵ Like a dream, which, as Freud tells us, is composed of the daily residue of waking experience, Genet's oneiric tale is composed of psychic leftovers, recognizable fragments of his own lived experience. Like his fictional character Mignon—who hoards the stolen loot from his “expéditions diurnes,” returning from his shoplifting sprees at day's end to the garret which he shares with Divine—Genet as dreamer-writer accumulates scraps of daily life in his psychic attic, using his text as a scrapbook of erotic memorabilia. His writings are strewn with snippets of biographical material, at times indistinguishable from fantasy, rearranged according to the dictates of erotic caprice.

This process of piecemeal recomposition of character, decor, and situation from fragments of real life, a sort of collage which is the prevailing stylistic technique in the work, is clearly analogous to the dreamwork technique of displacement, in which dream elements are moved around and rearranged in order to elude censorship.⁶ Like the displacement of material in a dream, Genet's method of disjunctive composition serves a function of censorship, which, as he himself admits, keeps the dreamer-author from talking about himself too directly (p. 169).⁷

Moreover, Genet's hodgepodge of sources leads to an interplay of proliferated images, in which every dream experience is fair game to be used in engendering another, and in which time and space may be telescoped at will. This imagistic proliferation results in the consistently overdetermined character of Genet's text, contributing to the overall oneiric cast of the work.⁸ Because of what Genet calls “la duplicité du sexe des tantes” (p. 57), all of his characters lead dual existences, each possessing at least two names and two faces (Lou/Divine, Notre-Dame/René, Antoine/Première-Communion, etc.). Even the choice of the feminine pronoun to refer to Divine functions as a double entendre of sorts, always evoking, by omission, the unmentioned sex. Furthermore, the overdetermination of character stemming from the condensation of two sexual identities in one body not only results in a doubling of character, but actually effects a proliferation of cross-reflected personalities, unstable and multi-faceted. (As lover to both the masculine Seck and the feminine Notre-Dame, Divine acquires “la richesse d'une multiple personnalité,” p. 136.) Thus, Genet's literary exercise of dream technique results in a proliferation of ways to take and to be taken, an expansion of normal powers to gratify desire.

It is perhaps for this reason that Genet turns to the extra-ordinary workings of dream to fashion his novel: by dreaming his text, the author may violate diurnal constraints at his whim, creating a game where he alone determines the rules. Genet's dreamer repeatedly boasts of this unlimited creative potency (“il me faudra établir, régler toute une astronomie interne,” p. 114), setting himself up as a deity who secretes his creatures from every pore (p. 51), and then receives their prayers of gratitude. Often, this internal exercise of potency takes a sadistic turn: Genet confesses that he delights in shattering, decomposing, and reassembling his characters, affixing their images on the prison wall, celebrating and re-celebrating his control over these beloved figments of his imagination. Genet's use of dream technique, then, seems ultimately to coincide with a maniacal manifestation of erotic will.

And yet, like child's play, Genet's exercise of will seems to lack real clout, since it is, after all, carried out in fantasy and directed against imaginary victims. Moreover, Genet's boast of supreme power seems incommensurate with the oneiric quality of the work, since dreamers are passive beings who are often tormented by their own dreams. What, then, is the nature of the dreamer-author's absolute power? A close examination of the subtext of this dreamer's claim must reveal the profoundly paradoxical nature of his “authority”: this revery is actually a two-sided power play, which, even while it grants extraordinary powers to the dreamer, nevertheless continues to depend to some degree on the passivity/vulnerability of the supine author.

Throughout the novel, Genet's own ambivalence towards the exercise of power and control is thematically associated with the act of masturbation, that act which is itself a paradox of sorts: an active fulfillment of physical desire which nonetheless retains a markedly passive character. The onanistic act, in which Genet plays the dual role of subject-instigator and of object-victim, marks the point of convergence of two seemingly contradictory urges: an egotistical and even sadistic impulse of mastery promoting a glorification of the willful self who controls the fantasy; and a masochistic impulse towards an obliteration of self, a finishing off in a discharge of energy in the experience of orgasm (la petite mort). In fact, Genet's erotic fantasy is often explicitly associated with a death-wish, a longing for the final discharge which will provide the ultimate quiescence of desire (“c'est la seule réalité qui nous comble,” p. 204). The expressed desire for death, a refrain in the text, is often couched in images of masturbation, with sado-masochistic resonances of both murder and suicide. Genet reflects, for example, on the voyeuristic delight of finishing off a lover with the same name as he: “mais tuer, te tuer, Jean. Ne s'agirait-il pas de savoir comment je me comporterai, te regardant mourir par moi?” (p. 62). To confer the finishing touch of death is to become the author of the ultimate fait accompli, an irremediable accomplissement which brings an end to one's own internal cosmology. In Genet's inverted power play, the ultimate masochistic passivity—the relinquishing of self in death—coincides with the ultimate sadistic exercise of power in murder/suicide, the power to end it all in an act so madly irremediable that it brings in its wake “la fin du monde” (p. 42).

Genet's dream of omnipotence, then, is actually symptomatic of a profound ambivalence towards the acquisition and enjoyment of power. Indeed, because of the importance of selection and control in Genet's fantasy life, it would perhaps be more accurate to compare his textual revery to a daydream than to a nocturnal dream. A hybrid activity somewhere between the activity of wakefulness and the passivity of sleep, Genet's fantasy celebrates the pleasures of telling stories to oneself. And paradoxically, it is this all-important distinction between Genet's somnolent revery and a dream actually experienced in sleep—that is, the control exercised over a waking dream—which ultimately accounts for the lack of complete control over the textual fantasy, the disenfranchisement implicit in even the boldest of his power maneuvers. Even though Genet's dreaming author initiates and controls his textual onanism, the textual ejaculation finally seems to exceed his control.

Like all daydreamers, Genet's criminal author of course knows that he is merely fantasizing, even at moments of erotic transport.⁹ This inescapable knowledge seems to be the source of the social trap which the onanist encounters: this exhibitionist needs to go public, to enlist a reader whom he may both shock and enchant with his display of erotic play. Reflected in his reader's rapt attention, the criminal author may exult in his power over his fictive lovers, as well as over the enchanted reader. But, of course, the power which the exhibitionist wields is curiously limited, undermined by the need for a consenting adult to witness his exhibition.

Nor is this need for the intercession of the Other the sole limit on Genet's dream of power. Even though the author lays claim to limitless powers in the dream-text, disregarding the restraints of narrative logic or literary convention, these expanded possibilities themselves tend to pose a threat to the author's powerful identity, corroding the godlike image which he attempts to project. Like his multiple characters—who enjoy the actor's privilege of multiple identity—the author himself insists on exercising an actor's license, proliferating and adorning his own persona in layers of disguise. Thanks to his rejection of the requirements of realistic representation, Genet is free to confuse himself with his characters, playing in his own novel, shifting from the first to the third person without transition, and superimposing scenes from his own childhood upon Lou's childhood memories. Indeed, Genet often goes so far as to grant this same dream license to the reader, whom he encourages to fantasize freely (“Faites ce qui vous plaira,” p. 65).

Now this confusion and hesitation among possibilities is one indication of the paradox inherent in dream power, at least at the level of the text: even while Genet's imagination does grant him an expansion of personal power, as author of a textual universe, it nonetheless always also implies a limitation of that power, since it threatens to induce a fragmentation or confusion of personality in a sort of literary schizophrenia. And significantly, the potential for assuming multiple roles and identities, accompanied by a threat to the primary identity, is always linked to the dreamer's encounter with the Other, the very audience whom he seeks to entertain. Consider, for example, the following passage in which a child—with whom Genet identifies as alter-ego—bursts into laughter, causing Genet's persona to dissolve into a shower of false roles:

Pour ainsi dire, au rire de l'enfant, je tombai en miettes sous mes yeux … si l'enfant dans lequel je crois me revoir rit il rompt le drame qui s'était élaboré en moi et qui est ma vie passée quand j'y songe: il le détruit, le fausse, tout au moins parce qu'il apporte une attitude que le personnage ne pouvait avoir … [il] m'oblige à me voir devenir un autre, et sur le premier drame, en greffe un second.

(p. 195)

This passage illustrates the crystallization of the conflict between power and passivity in Genet's imagination: the protean power to adopt a variety of roles, wreaking a spellbinding effect on his audience, is also a sign of the fragility of Genet's primary identity. In this passage, moreover, the play of power and passivity is once again couched in masturbatory imagery: Genet characterizes himself as both victim and executioner, sadist and masochist, the Other to himself, who sees himself fall to pieces in a seminal shower. In exposing his own falsity to the alter-ego/voyeur (who also seems to be the reader) Genet inseminates his own vision, grafting new dramas on the original one. Shattered by a laughing alter-ego, Genet casts himself in the role of the critical Other, the mocking audience. Isolated onanism is thus a fundamental impossibility for this writer, who experiences even his own role playing as an alienated expression emanating from another self.

Nor is it insignificant that it is laughter which sows the seed of the fecund fragmentation, challenging the identity of the narrating persona, forcing him to expose himself as impostor. The image of the laughing Other—emblematic of Genet's recourse to the comic mode in the novel—suggests the crucial way in which his dream-text differs from the solitary pleasures of dream: in its humor, which requires an audience. Through the comic transaction, the everpresent onlooker (the audience, which is not a party to a nocturnal dream) serves as both innocent victim and accomplice of Genet's creative crimes.

III

Genet's use of comic material, like his use of dream material and technique, attests to two seemingly contradictory tendencies vis-a-vis the assertion of power. At first reading, Genet's text seems to speak in two distinct comic voices: one masterful, in control to the point of being sadistic; the other vulnerable, self-deprecating, with overtones of masochism. In the first vein, Genet's ruthlessly mordant humor often reduces his “tantes” to little more than animated puppets (“Leurs paupières ne battaient pas, ne froissaient pas leurs tempes; simplement le globe des yeux se coulait de droite à gauche, de gauche à droite, roulait sur lui-même, et leurs regards étaient mus par un système de roulement à billes,” p. 54). Genet clearly takes great delight in dehumanizing his characters, playing a sort of ringmaster who exhibits the antics and posturings of a freakish cast of clowns for the entertainment of the reader who looks on.

Of all the players in Genet's freak show, it is Divine who is most often cast in the role of slapstick victim: she is hauled off in a paddy wagon; taunted by normal boys; battered by Mignon; bullied and mocked to a chorus of laughter. Oddly enough, it is Genet's persistently sadistic portrayal of Divine which also evokes his second masochistic comic vein. Insofar as Genet identifies himself with the butt of his joke—writing that he is to some extent himself Divine, lover of Mignon—his bullying of this alter-ego constitutes self-abuse. Moreover, Genet's masochistic comic voice, like his masturbatory dreams of suicide, seems to be motivated by a perverse death wish, an urge to die laughing, exploded by hysterical mirth. The text is stigmatized throughout by this dark strident laughter, closely allied with pain (“un rire n'éclate ici que d'un drame. Il est un cri de douleur,” p. 181).

The excesses of this comic folly, moreover, are associated with inverted religious imagery. In Genet's perverse cosmology, the sacred is identified with the violation of normal boundaries of propriety and convention, coinciding with the outrageously poetic excesses of criminal fantasy. It is quite appropriate, then, that the principal source of masochistic humor in Genet's novel should be the outrageous “Toute-Folle” herself, Divine, whose very name suggests both mockery and sanctity. This divine protagonist is a whore, who (by her own admission) is lower than dirt. Her sacred person is excessive, flighty and flamboyant, inebriated by her own wild gestures and the desperate gaiety of her milieu. Often bordering on hysteria, Divine is an easy mark, who not only offers herself up to the ridicule of others, but often chimes into the chorus of derision (“Ah! que je suis donc la Folle Fille!” p. 87).

But the good-natured self-sacrifice of Genet's lightheaded heroine is never simply masochistic: by debasing herself, the “Toute-Persécutée” manages to have the last laugh. When, for instance, Divine loses her rhinestone tiara, she re-crowns herself with her false teeth, jolting her laughing audience by confronting them with the image of Death itself. This macabre act of self-deprecation strikes the winning blow in the power match between Divine and her public (“elle s'écrie d'une voix changée et les lèvres rentrées dans la bouche:—Eh bien merde, mesdames, je serai reine quand même,” p. 119).

Similarly, when Genet turns derisive laughter against himself, in a confessional sort of humor, he seems to do so in the hope that he will be able to surmount the deadly scorn of others, by anticipating it: “je pourrais confier que ce mépris que je supporte en riant aux éclats … c'est pour n'être pas avili par rien ni personne que je me suis mis plus bas que terre” (p. 59). Thus, the self-mortification in Genet's novel serves an end of self-aggrandizement: by flaunting his criminality and confessing his vulnerability the criminal author seeks to ward off the derision of the Other whom he entertains with his antics. By availing himself of what he calls “the firm footing of joking” (“je repris pied sur ce fond solide qui est la drôlerie,” p. 157), the writer-dreamer plays tricks with humility, turning it to the service of egotism.

But the solid footing of joking turns out to be quicksand. For Genet, even the boldest power play or the most daring joke is always defensive in character (“je ne pouvais faire autrement,” p. 59). Genet's joking is thus part of a curious pleasure formula in which assertion of power and admission of the limits of power are equal ingredients. And the catalyst in this formula is the Other, the laughing alter-ego upon whom the dreamer calls to witness his exhibition. In other words, Genet's choice of the less-than-solid footing of joking entails a social exchange which is in itself symptomatic of the limits on the “unlimited” powers of the writer-dreamer. Seeking to infect his public with mirth, the writer contracts an incurable social disease—his need for an audience for his comic routine.

Genet's jokes, then, are always to some extent told at the teller's expense, especially since these off-color jests are motivated by desire of the very victims over whom the writer wishes to demonstrate control through ridicule (Divine, Mignon, and the rest of the cast). So even though joking, like day-dreaming, does provide a gratification of sorts for Genet's author-persona, by effecting a kind of domination of the beloved characters through ridicule, this gratification nonetheless remains incomplete, circuitous and substitutive: the writer is, after all, imprisoned when writing his story, barred from real contact with the real objects of his desire.¹⁰ Symptomatic of impotence or incapacitation—the inability to take direct action to assuage desire—Genet's joking tone constitutes an admission that in “reality” this desire is out of control. Genet's compulsive joking is fueled both by an inextinguishable longing for his fictional victims and his inescapable need for a public.

Indeed, the entire text may be read as a joke of sorts, and one that Genet finally tells on himself, offering himself as comic butt. The tripolar textual intercourse—enacted between writer, characters and public—is actually analogous to the joking process, not only in its genesis in the author-joker's unquenchable desire, but also in its structure and its technique. Like the joker, Genet exposes the butt of his joke—his unfortunate characters, with whom he himself identifies as fall guys—to an audience, the laughing reader. Genet's joking causes him, as the criminal author, to be caught in a three-sided social snare, a triangle emblematic of the shackles imposed by the act of writing itself (“à présent, l'image de la fatalité, c'est pour moi le triangle que forment trois hommes d'allure trop banale pour n'être pas dangereuse … le triangle où je vais m'enfermer,” p. 171).

Like this deceptively ordinary configuration which snares the criminal in the police net, the seemingly simple act of writing functions as a trap which entangles the writer in an involvement with his public and his characters, a farcical circuit in which he cannot win for losing. The criminal author is born as a writer, but he does not emerge into the light of day. Rather, like an actor, and a joker, he lives only by reflected light, caught in a labyrinth of prismatic pages. His existence is a text woven from mirrors and his text, conversely, is a fragmented reflection of his lived experience. The nature of Genet's literary perversity ensures that any attempt to extricate himself from his fictional fun house can only cause him to penetrate more deeply into a maze of reflected passages where fantasy is indistinguishable from reality. Genet himself seems aware of this paradox: he chooses to write not to get out of prison or to assume real power, but to imprison himself more inextricably in fantasy, and, in the process, to ensnare the reader as well.

Thus, throughout the novel, Genet reflects upon a series of what he admits are ridiculously literary gestures (p. 136), such as Ernestine's abortive attempt to murder her son Lou, a gesture performed in full regalia before her mirror. The novel amounts to a collection of such less-than-final acts, which, like Ernestine's bullet, are aimed to miss their mark. All of the work's seemingly final gestures are endlessly rehearsed (“elle a passé sa vie à se précipiter d'un rocher,” p. 198); all fatal doses are administered with antidote (“à chacune de ses remarques elle ajoutait un cordial adoucissant,” p. 153). To the final satisfaction of death, the dreaming writer prefers “la joie qui précède les suicides” (p. 72). Reluctant to act as a killjoy, the writer seeks to “retarder le choc final” (p. 70), putting off an ending of the novel which would constitute a sort of death, a silencing of the textual reflections. In other words, Genet's work represents a tenuous compromise between a death-urge, aiming at a total emptying of vital energy, and a persistent life-instinct, seeking to maintain the quotient of energy necessary to reactivate the pleasure game.

Artifice, dissimulation and disguise work to effect this volatile compromise between life and death impulses: Death, Genet writes, is always present in the novel, disguised as one of the players (“son visage est symboliquement caché par une espèce de moustaches qui en arrangerait au goût du jour l'épouvantable réalité,” p. 202). This image of Death as costumed guest in the text, moreover, suggests the multivalence of disguise in Genet's writing. For disguise not only serves as a major motif of the text—Genet likens the novel to a masquerade ball where the doubly-named characters come dressed as themselves—but it also functions as a mode of the fiction, serving the doubly criminal purpose of cloaking a frightening reality (the presence of Death in the seemingly innocent person of Notre-Dame the murderer) and engendering a fundamentally perverse pleasure. To the drag queens, feminine disguise is necessary in order to lend a certain titillation to the bare truth.

Indeed, throughout the novel, the bare truth is always literally a mere pretext, a skeleton for an embellished version: “Encore que je m'efforce à un style écharné, montrant l'os, je voudrais vous adresser du fond de ma prison, un livre chargé de fleurs, de jupons neigeux, de rubans bleus” (p. 114). This image of bare bones background, loaded with layer upon layer of fanciful costume, suggests yet another striking analogy between Genet's writing and the joking process. Just as a joke manages to say something forbidden by disguising its point, sneaking it past the hearer's censorship by cloaking it in a playful form (“don't take offense, it's only a joke”), Genet's playful writing disguises the death wish in the text, always artfully avoiding the finality of the fait accompli. In order to keep the game going, the writer repeatedly resorts to the old trick of partial confessions, reserving or dissimulating some part of the story for a future telling.¹² Like an illusionist, Genet has recourse to flagrant trickery, reserving the right not only to hide the bare truth, but also the option to be deliberately, if playfully, false. Let it be understood from the outset, he warns us, that this is not for real, that the artist-counterfeiter-showman entertains by dissimulation and half-truth: “Ne criez pas l'invraisemblance. Ce qui va suivre est faux et personne n'est tenu de l'accepter pour argent comptant” (p. 135).

This warning is, of course, appropriate to the theatrical nature of the work. According to Genet's conception of theater (discussed in the preface to Les Bonnes), the audience must be reminded of the play nature of the action, preferably by means of a placard placed at the side of the stage. The same lucidity is enforced in Genet's fiction, where the reader is often warned of the novel's spurious nature and of the author's dissimulation and taste for sham. But, typically, even the seeming candor of Genet's narrating persona works as a ploy, a trap designed to lure the reader into criminal complicity. Just as a joke's hearer is bribed into listening to something titillating or forbidden, lulled by the assurance that “this is only a joke,” the reader of Genet's dirty story is encouraged to remain indulgent, reassured by the repeated assertion that this is only a story, a literary distraction where even the most heinous of crimes is imaginary. The seriousness of even the most irremediable gesture is undermined by the placard at the side of the “stage,” Genet's joking commentary on the tragic events of the novel. This tone ensures that Genet's victims may be resurrected for a curtain call, and that the whole process may be replayed at the next performance of masturbatory fantasy. Genet's proclivity for comic material and technique is, then, more than a mere esthetic inclination; joking is crucial to the novel's precarious power play, since it functions as a gesture of limitation, a marginal commentary which, like the requisite placard at the side of Genet's stage, imposes borders on the narrative's tragic impact. Indeed, it is this comic play with limits—their constant transgression and subsequent reinstatement throughout the text—which works to promulgate the criminality of Genet's fictive process.

IV

Significantly, it is possible to draw an analogy between the types of limitation at work in the joking process itself, as described by Freud, and the play of limits in Genet's dreamed fiction. Freud has demonstrated (in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) that a joke is limited in three major ways, all of which find equivalents in Genet's writing. First, a joke is limited in its capacity to assuage the desire which motivates it. It is always merely a substitute gratification of the unacceptable impulses of sexuality and aggression which it only partially placates. Second, a joke's subversive capacity is limited by the requirements of its technique: even though a joke always says something forbidden, it is nonetheless required to say it in a permissible and fundamentally inoffensive way. This mitigation of its subversive content amounts to a concession to the prohibition surrounding the subject. Third, any single instance of joke-telling is limited circumstantially because it always constitutes only one link in a chain, a mere step in an inexorably repeated process. The compulsion to repeat the joke is irresistible, as Freud reminds us, because the person who has been taken in by the joke at the first telling has a compelling urge to get the last laugh by pulling the same joke on another listener. Joking, then, is a peculiarly ambivalent power play in which each participant, instigator and victim alike, both wins and loses (by being taken in, and yet enjoying himself in the process).

As we have seen, limitation works in analogous ways in Genet's text. Genet's tale is, for author and reader alike, a vicarious (and hence substitute) gratification of forbidden erotic and aggressive urges. This vicarious peepshow, moreover, is artful pornography, which violates propriety in an esthetic (hence acceptable) manner. It thus both acknowledges and reinstates the boundaries of taste and convention, the very boundaries which it purports to subvert. Finally, Genet's material, like a vast joke, is part of an ongoing circuit of information, reflected in a hall of mirrors where no image is demonstrably true or final. Genet reflects upon and repeats bits of gossip, overheard anecdotes, even making use of graffiti left behind by other prisoners as part of the material of his novel. Like an endless series of reflections in cross-reflecting mirrors, Genet's textual voice creates a series of echoes, in which the narrating / is only one point in a circuit of rumor and repeated information, continued limitlessly within (and thanks to) the limits which contain and perpetuate the information. Like the rules of the game which stipulate the constraints on playful activity—ensuring that the game will not get out of hand, and that it may be replayed—the limits on Genet's creative fantasy serve to perpetuate the dream.

In this fantasy mise-en-abîme, every instance of excess or transgression is followed by a renvoi to a prophylactic limit. The queens attend the masked ball “disguised” (opening to unlimited possibility) as “themselves” (renvoi or qualification). Divine's saintly death, which threatens to put an end to the action by conferring a sacred other-worldly status on the heroine (allowing her to exceed the pages of the novel and her own mortality), is acted out in the confines of a garret and is undercut by Divine's own ridiculously literary comic commentary on the event: “je ne suis pas encore morte, j'ai entendu les anges péter au plafond” (p. 203). Even the angels, although they are infinite beings (who nonetheless seem to be stuck on the ceiling of Divine's garret), are characterized as a limitation, as “gestes” from which Divine is excluded (p. 203) in an infinitely prolonged dying. At the end of the death scene itself, Genet undercuts the solemnity of the drama by pronouncing his heroine the “Quite-Dead” (“Toute-Morte”) in a final punch line which is itself a renvoi to the earlier comic “Toute-Toute” litanies. Divine's comic death—which is a mere prelude to her resurrection in the text—catches her in the act of being herself, excessive and flighty, outrageous as ever.

Indeed, just as any joke must finally reveal its punch line, laying bare what it has artfully disguised up to that point, Genet's joke-text requires that all his players get caught in the act, in order to finish (however momentarily) the masturbatory pleasure. This required self-exposure is always double-edged, a strategy in a curious game of one-upmanship where no player is ever finally one up. For example, Mignon delights in stealing objects for which he has already paid, so that he may embarrass the detectives by producing the bill of sale when he is arrested. And like his hero's schemes, Genet's own determination to get caught in the act of counterfeiting his text is motivated by more than a puerile desire to shock the reader. Exposure is the sentence of the criminal author, willfully incurred; and it is a sentence which also exposes the complicity of the public, caught in the act of reading Genet's purple prose. In spite of the criminal author's feigned cries of protest, he remains a willing victim of the trap of writing, playing his con game knowing that he will be caught redhanded, and that he will escape to perpetrate his crimes again.

Thus, even if Genet's public daydream can be considered to be symptomatic of a social urge or lust for power, these symptoms cannot be read as reassuring signs of the rehabilitation of a criminal-turned-artist. If anything, Genet's dreamer is an artist turned criminal, pedaling hot goods to his reader. Genet himself councils that his power as a writer must be measured in terms of his failure to assuage desire, his ability to conserve some quotient of unfulfilled desire; for the importance of any event in our life, Genet asserts, lies in the resonance it sets up within us, and in the degree to which it makes us move towards asceticism (p. 146). Genet's is not a saintly asceticism, but an expedient one, which denies desire in order to play its game again.

The literary game as Genet plays it is funny—it has to be funny—for the first rule of his literary onanism is that its author must fail to “take himself” seriously. In the final passage of the novel, Genet decides to redo his story, resurrecting his actors in order to redecorate his cell: “je referai, pour l'enchantement de ma cellule, à Mignon, Divine, Notre-Dame et Gabriel, d'adorables vies nouvelles” (p. 206). Although he is momentarily tempted by the thought of a free life outside the prison walls (“je vivrai peut-être”), he finally seems loathe to give up his confinement, as he is afraid of the excess of freedom (to which he refers as that “luxe qui tue la rêverie”). To freedom, to respectability, he prefers his criminal place between the cell walls which continue to serve as backdrops for new versions of the novel, the pages upon which he will reinscribe his comic dreams at his pleasure.

Genet ends his novel with a comic act of literary masturbation, Mignon's tracing of the “silhouette de sa queue” to be sent off from prison to Divine, who is resurrected for the occasion. The work's signature, then, is an unsigned comic understatement, a mere trace (“je veux que ce trait serve à dessiner Mignon”). The erotic curve on the page, designating unfulfilled desire and signalling a renvoi to the novel's beginning, is Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs's only final, powerful statement.

Notes

1. Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), II, 10.

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).

3. The theoretical framework for my reading is Freud's various writings on both humor and dream, especially Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1960). For a concise summary of dream-work techniques, see ch. VI of that work.

4. For a discussion of the relation between regression and infantilism in dream, see Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), especially ch. V, “The Material and Sources of Dreams.”

5. For Freud's views on the regressive nature of dreaming, see The Interpretation of Dreams, chs. VI and VII.

6. For a discussion of displacement, see ch. VI of The Interpretation of Dreams, section B.

7. Cf. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 165: “The task of dream-formation is above all to overcome the inhibition from the censorship; and it is precisely this task which is solved by the displacements of psychical energy within the material of the dream-thoughts.”

8. For Freud, overdetermination is a characteristic common to joke and dream, stemming from the tendency towards “condensation” in primary process thinking. See p. 163 in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

9. Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ch. I (E): “Not until we wake up does the critical comment arise that we have not experienced anything but have merely been thinking in a peculiar way, or in other words dreaming. It is this characteristic that distinguishes true dreams from daydreaming, which is never confused with reality.”

10. For a discussion of the substitutive nature of joking pleasure, see Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ch. III, “The Purposes of Jokes,” and ch. V, “The Pleasure and Genesis of Jokes.”

11. On p. 108 of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud refers to jokes as a “disguised representation of the truth.”

12. Understatement is also a time-honored device of humor—saying less than one means or telling the hearer less than he or she expects to hear. Freud calls it allusion; Kant calls it the “sudden disappointment of an expectation.”