[In the following essay, Hanrahan argues that Genet's sexual symbolism serves to subvert the traditional phallic cult of desire.]

Genet's second novel, Miracle de la Rose, constitutes a paean of praise to male beauty. The text recounts the narrator's relationship with a series of men whose charm on a preliminary reading seems in direct proportion to their masculinity; the more virile and phallic their appearance, the greater their fascination for Genet. But I would like to argue that, far from shoring up the cult of the phallus, Genet is profoundly subversive of the orthodoxy, most clearly articulated by Lacan, which privileges the phallus as (part-)object of desire. His writing is exceptional not only in the way it insidiously devirilises the images whose maleness it eulogises, but in the high symbolic and erotic value it attaches to the femininity it thus reveals in the most phallic of men. One of the most remarkable aspects of Genet's fantasmatic structure, in terms of sexual politics, is that the ‘loss’ of phallic status he enjoys imagining for character after character is represented not as a loss, a castration, but as a sexual enrichment. The work of this renowned homosexual (literally, same-sex lover) breaks new symbolic ground by presenting an erotics of diversity.

The narrator himself draws attention to the unexpected erotic charm he finds in the loss of the attributes which first aroused his desire:

I mean that whenever I discovered a ridiculous side to a boy, a blemish, a stain on his beauty, it did not prevent me from being in love with him. I even went so far as to be in love because of it. Too weary of loving, I have followed, spied on kids quivering with grace, until the charm was broken. I would wait for the moment, the glance which would enable me to discover the speck of ugliness, the angle that would be enough to indicate the ugliness, the line or volume destroying the beauty, so that I would be rid of the burden of love, but it often happened, on the contrary, that when I had seen the boy from all sides [faces], he would sparkle with a thousand other lights and catch me in the confusion of charms entangled in his multiplied facets [facettes multipliées]. And the discovered blemish would no longer be enough to free me. On the contrary. In seeking it, I would discover each time a new point of view of the masterpiece.¹

The ‘stain’ on the boy's beauty serves to increase both his beauty and the narrator's bewitchment. The ugliness which shows a new angle of the ‘masterpiece’ adds to its charm, becomes another, equally precious aspect of its beauty, with the result that it is impossible to determine where beauty ends and ugliness begins.

The narrator describes himself observing the boy as a jeweller inspects a jewel for imperfections. The reason the boy sparkles ‘with a thousand other lights’ is that the ‘blemish’ discovered is part of the jewel: seeing the boy ‘from all sides [faces]’ enables the narrator to discover the ‘charms’ of his ‘multiplied facets’. It is significant that Bijou (Jewel) is the nickname of Bulkaen, one of the men the narrator loves. The nickname is particularly rich in ambiguity in French: the plural expression ‘family jewels’ (les bijoux de famille) is slang for the testicles, whereas the singular ‘jewel’, as in English, symbolises the female genitals.² These connotations lend a sexual dimension to the ‘confusion of charms’ entangled in the boy's ‘multiplied facets’. It seems that, far from being repugnant to the narrator, the diversity of a boy's ‘jewels’ enhances his attraction.

DIVERS

It is especially in relation to that other character with a ‘singular’ name, Divers, that Genet explores the value of diversity:

The fact that he was called Divers gave him an earthly, nocturnal dream quality which was enough to enchant me [m'enchanter]. For one is not called Georges Divers, or Jules, or Joseph Divers, and this nominal singleness placed him on a throne as if, from the time he was in the children's prison, glory had recognised him. This name was almost a nickname, royal, brief, haughty, a convention.³

Divers' name is both single and diverse: the narrator is ‘enchanted’, as by Bulkaen's nickname, by its numerical undecidability. Note the importance of subjecting Genet's writing to the same close scrutiny he gives the objects of his desire: like them, it always contains a twist which casts its overt meaning in a new light. Thus Divers' ‘nominal singleness’ distinguishes him from other men—but not from other Divers.⁴ And the name the reader has by this stage long since automatically classed as a nickname is declared to be ‘almost’ a nickname: it is therefore Divers' ‘real’ name.

Quite early in the novel, we learn that Divers' integrity, in the sense of wholeness, is not intact:

In Divers, finally, there was that crack [fêlure], which was intended by the architect, as was intended [fut voulue] the pathetic breach in the Colosseum which causes eternal lightning to flash [fulgure] over its mass. I later discovered the meaning of that crack, a second sign of mourning, and of the even more theatrical one which furrows Bulkaen, which furrows all the hards, from Botchako to Charlot.⁵

Remarkably, Genet asserts Divers' ‘crack’ (which also furrows the writing: fêlure, fut voulue, fulgure, and whose ‘architect’ of course is no other than Genet) to be ‘intended’, voluntary, chosen. The comparison of the crack with the breach in the Colosseum in itself holds little that is remarkable; the audacity lies in the calm reinterpretation of one of the most ‘monumental’ of all monuments. The notion that the breach is an integral part of the building rather than an accident destroying its original integrity shows a ‘colossal’ freedom of imagination. Genet has recourse to universally recognisable figures to illustrate his thinking, but the ‘intended’ effect is to render these figures unrecognisable.

The narrator never clarifies the ‘meaning’ he announces here of the crack which furrows not only Divers, but all the ‘hards’. However, this meaning can be gleaned from an extraordinary passage that elaborates on Divers' attraction for the narrator, and that on the surface belies the existence of any ‘crack’. Following the narrator's example in our first quotation, the writing surreptitiously shows Divers from ‘a new point of view’ which, contrary to appearances, has the effect of heightening his seductive power:

He appeared more and more fabulous to me. Everything about him still surprises and enchants me [m'enchante]. Even the word ‘diversity’ seems to me to be born [né] of him, as achillea, or the Achilles plant, is born [née] of the warrior who treated his heel with it. Divers often said ‘Balls’ [Mes couilles], simply. He said it instead of ‘What a fuckup’ [Quelle connerie]. His face was hard [dur]. When I kissed him for the first time, on our wedding night, […] along with the intoxication of intimacy, with such a beautiful face continued by such a beautiful body, of so rigid a male, I knew the impossibility of communion. That head was hard [dure] like a head of marble. It numbed your wrists. And cold. He didn't throb. No flaw, no crack [Aucune faille, fente], let out an idea, an emotion [une idée, un émoi]. He was not porous. Some men are porous. A vapour emanates from them and penetrates you. Divers' face was less mean [méchant] than strange [étrange]. It is only by kissing him that I recognise him a little, that he seemed to me to show himself [il me semblait le voir se présenter] in a new and troubling light, opening up unknown perspectives.⁶

Divers' ‘fabulous’ appearance gives him a marvellous, legendary status, immediately reinforced by the comparison with Achilles. According to Genet, his proper name, like that of the warrior, has created a common noun; his name turns out, in effect, to be the very opposite of a nickname, typically suggested by a characteristic feature of the person. Again, Genet's delight in turning received assumptions on their heads is evident in the way he exploits his onomastic resource, deeming Divers to have given his name to diversity, rather than the reverse.

But the comparison between Divers and Achilles extends still further. Like the warrior whose heel was the only vulnerable point of his body, Divers too manifests a vulnerable, feminine side (remember that Achilles spent a number of years disguised as a woman) which is at odds with his very hard appearance. From the beginning of the passage, a sexual ‘diversity’ is adumbrated in the shift in gender from the word ‘born’ (né) of him (moreover, the fact that something is ‘born’ of Divers automatically places him in a maternal position) to the plant ‘born’ (née) of Achilles. Graphically, the masculine pronoun il, so conspicuous at the opening of the paragraph (it begins two of the first three sentences), acquires a feminine resonance from the play of the signifier: ‘Achille’, ‘couilles’, and even ‘Il le disait’. The visual similarity between the heroic proper name ‘Achille’ and the obscenity which follows it closely, that most ‘common’ of nouns ‘couilles’ (balls), creates a link between two opposing registers; the suggestion of sexual uncertainty is reflected in the overlapping of the sublime and the vulgar. A typically Genetian paradox: the greater the vulgarity, the greater the refinement. ‘Divers disait souvent: “Mes couilles” simplement’: the sentence inscribing the obscenity is a perfect alexandrine, with interior rhyme (souvent, simplement) at the caesura. Genet adopts a Racinian style, but does so to sing of vulgarity.⁷ Furthermore, the first two sentences, with twelve and eleven syllables respectively, approximate the rhythm of verse. If we added to ‘Divers’ the x which transformed Bulkaen into an undecidable Bijou(x), the text could create a fable of ten lines—dix vers!

At first glance, the beginning of the text sketches the portrait of a patently phallic man. Divers' face is hard, his body beautiful and rigid, his head hard and cold; his very name disseminates the sounds of hardness—dur, raide, froide, etc. He rejects the slightest trace of femininity, even in his exclamations; he uses the expression ‘balls’⁸ instead of an expression which in French inscribes the feminine sex, ‘Quelle connerie’.⁹ It would appear that Divers represents a ‘perfectly’ masculine man, one with ‘no flaw, no crack’: Genet's idol is a man who seems to have achieved the impossible, warded off all trace of castration. However, the narrator ridicules his hero as much as he rapturises over him, exactly as he claimed to do in his love affairs. With no crack from which ‘an idea, an emotion’ might emerge, Divers' impassivity renders him both stupid and unfeeling. His cold head is numbing:¹⁰ the ‘hard’ is frigid. His insensitivity is reflected phonically in the proliferation of plosive consonants in the original (for example: ‘Cette tête était dure comme une tête de marbre’) and in the jerkiness of the rhythm, unpleasant on the ear (‘And cold. He didn't throb. No flaw, no crack let out an idea, an emotion’). The irony of the description is compounded by the fact that Divers does not emit a ‘vapour’—he does not breathe. Kissing a ‘hard’, Genet suggests, is like kissing a corpse.

Nevertheless, shifts in gender in these last sentences again serve to alert us to the undermining of this monolithic masculinity. The inscription at close intervals of the ‘hard’ (dur) face and the ‘hard’ (dure) head signals the beginning of an increasingly marked oscillation between masculine and feminine. ‘Elle engourdissait … Il ne palpitait … Aucune faille … une idée, un émoi …’ It seems that the more manly, i.e. the more inviolable, impregnable, impenetrable, one is, the less one penetrates; the vapour ‘which penetrates you’ emanates from men who are ‘porous’, permeable, penetrable. In the couple Genet-Divers, it is the narrator who symbolically penetrates the other man by kissing him, in so far as the latter's face is the one that alters,¹¹ ‘opening up unknown perspectives’. But if it is clear that this change occurs when the narrator kisses Divers, it is less clear who brings it about. ‘Il me semblait le voir se présenter …’: the untranslatable infinitive construction (literally, ‘it seemed to me to see him show himself’), with an impersonal subject, makes it impossible to determine whether Divers or Genet is the agent of the transformation. The ‘unknown perspectives’ are opened from an unknown perspective, in the movement from one subject to another. The way Divers is going to ‘show himself in a new and troubling light’ is in fact by disappearing from the rest of the passage, i.e. by allowing a different ‘fabulous’ face(t) to appear.

A NEW POINT OF VIEW

I experienced the same emotion when I cut out Pilorge's photograph from a detective magazine. My scissors [ciseaux] slowly followed the line of the face and this slowness forced me to notice details, the skin's texture, the shadow of the nose on the cheek. From a new point of view, I was seeing that beloved face. Then, needing to turn it upside down to facilitate the cutting, it suddenly composed for me a mountainous landscape, with a lunar relief, more deserted and desolate than a Tibetan landscape. I advanced along the line of the forehead [front], I turned a little and, suddenly, with the speed of a racing locomotive, shadowy perspectives and chasms of pain closed in [fonçaient] on me. I had to make several attempts to finish my work, so thick were the sighs [tant étaient épais] which, coming from far away, reached my throat [gorge] and blocked [boucher] it. The two blades of the scissors remained open, not daring to go further into the paper, so beautiful was the view I had of a certain eyelid. I did not want to finish too quickly. I was abandoned in a gorge [gorge] or on a peak [pic], struck by the discovery of an assassin's face.¹²

The text is, in every sense, in the process of changing subject—firstly, in that the appearance of Divers' ‘unknown perspectives’ leads directly into a comparison with the ‘shadowy perspectives’ revealed by Pilorge's face (the guillotined murderer to whom Genet dedicated Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs); secondly, in that the narrator is the grammatical subject in the majority of these sentences (as opposed to the first part of the paragraph which is nearly all in the third person). The text is indeed offering us ‘a new point of view’. It is important to stress that it is after the narrator tells us of his new perspective that he turns the photo and discovers the ‘shadowy perspectives’ hidden in Pilorge's face: the passage in fact describes a series of ‘points of view’. The disconcerting effect this shifting perspective has on the reader is exacerbated by the fact that nothing is ever what it seems initially. The narrator's ability to make out the ‘skin's texture’ (i.e. the pores? Is Pilorge one of the ‘porous men’?) suggests that the line he is following is the face's surface, not its outline. When he turns it upside-down, the face is suddenly in relief: Genet cuts out the photo with his scissors (ciseaux) as a sculptor releases a statue with a chisel (ciseau). Furthermore, the face becomes the subject: ‘it composed for me’. The photograph comes to life as it turns, like Galatea coming down from her pedestal.

If we follow the text closely, the important point is that Pilorge's body, as well as his face, seems to be turning. The mountainous landscape, with a ‘lunar relief more deserted and desolate than a Tibetan landscape’, evokes the behind both iconically and because in French the moon (la lune) is slang for the bottom.¹³ The narrator follows the line of the front, the forehead, which gives in reverse the line of the back(side), until he suddenly finds himself plunged in ‘shadowy perspectives’ and ‘chasms of pain’. There is yet another sudden change of subject: Genet doesn't plunge, the ‘perspectives’ close in (fonçaient) around him, with the speed of a ‘racing locomotive’. The scene clearly solicits reading as an anal penetration, where paradoxically the anus is the penetrating agent, in place of the subject it engulfs.¹⁴

The other side of Genet's idol's face can thus be read as the backside; by gradual displacement, the phallic head at the opening of the passage has turned into an anus. The scene adopts a more and more explicitly sexual rhythm: ‘I had to make several attempts […] I didn't want to finish too quickly […] I was abandoned.’ This thrusting rhythm pervades the writing itself, pounded by [p]s and [t]s, notably in the sequence: ‘travail tant étaient épais’. Every level of the text manifests the narrator's desire for Pilorge.

THE MASCULINE SLIT

However, the scene is yet more complex. The anus is not a sex; were the phallus to be in symbolic exchange with the anus alone, the effacement of sexual difference which is prevalent at all levels of Western culture would remain unchallenged. On the contrary, Genet's writing is exceptional in that the fantasmatic structure it inscribes makes space for a symbolic exchange between two different, equal sexes.¹⁵ Thus, in this passage, the more the anal penetration progresses, the less Genet ‘cuts’ between the sexes. If, for example, ‘a certain eyelid’ which dazzles the narrator and stops him cutting can be assimilated to the anus, on the other hand its shape, like that of the two open blades of the scissors, evokes the vulva. The penetration leaves Genet abandoned in a space of sexual (con)fusion, as can be seen in the division of Pilorge—both face and name—into a peak (un pic) and a gorge (une gorge). This (feminine) ‘gorge’ clearly functions as a sexed alternative to the peak, rather than as a neutral, asexual plain throwing into relief the sexual space of the phallic peak. The French word gorge is a homonym with at least three meanings; it is used twice in quick succession in the passage, first in the sense of throat, then in the sense of ravine. This antanaclasis invites us to read the second inscription of the word as a lower version of the oral cavity.¹⁶ Furthermore, the passage contains two mouths (bouches), the first hidden/revealed in the verb boucher, the other highlighted precisely where the text is slit in the middle by an indented line in direct speech:

I thus caressed that insolent lad a last time, as one caresses a word, thinking one possesses it. That is how, by taking them unexpectedly, by approaching them from unusual angles, one discovers the extraordinary composition of faces and postures, and some of Bulkaen's virtues were revealed to me just as accidentally. By saying to me, on the tenth day of our encounter, on the stairs, while he took my mouth [bouche]:

‘A peck [Une bise], Johnny, just one.’

Bulkaen had opened for me the door to René Rocky's heart. I was in the habit of calling a kiss a smacker [un bécot], Bulkaen had said ‘a peck’. Erotic language, the one we use in games of love, being a sort of secretion [sécrétion], a concentrated juice which leaves the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of moaning, being if you like the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, heavy with a perfume, an odour sui generis, which belongs only to that couple. By saying ‘a peck’ to me, Bulkaen was still secreting the juice specific to the couple he formed with Rocky. A foreign, because new and unsuspected, body [un corps étranger parce que nouveau et insoupçonné] was entering my love for Bulkaen, but at the same time, by that word, I was brought into contact with the intimacy of the couple Bulkaen-Rocky.¹⁷

It becomes clear that the passage which seemed initially to be an exploration of Divers actually deals with a whole series of ‘fabulous’ men, all of whom display an unexpected side: it is now Bulkaen's turn to reveal an unsuspected side of himself by his choice of vocabulary. Divers' ‘unknown perspectives’, Pilorge's ‘shadowy perspectives’ and ‘chasms of pain’ give way to ‘certain virtues’ of Bulkaen which surprise the narrator. Genet makes the transition by again turning a common analogy back to front: he speaks of caressing the ‘lad’ (but the ‘lad’ is a photograph—the difference between image and reality is blurred) ‘as one caresses a word’—here the caress of the word comes first. Language and body seem to be equivalents. Just as the narrator was wrong to think he ‘possessed’ Pilorge, the reader would be wrong to think s/he ‘possessed’ the sense of Genet's words; it is only by following his example—‘by taking them unexpectedly, by approaching them from unusual angles’—that one discovers the ‘extraordinary composition’ of his writing. If we take unexpectedly the mouth that Bulkaen takes, its surprising side turns out to be not only what comes out of the mouth, but also the fact that Bulkaen possesses an unsuspected mouth.

This reading is corroborated by the end of the quoted passage, where it becomes finally impossible to disentangle body and word. According to Genet, ‘the essential expression of passion’, generally considered to be the union of bodies, is a word, which is in turn a body, a ‘sort of secretion’ (an anagram in French as in English of ‘erections’) or ‘concentrated juice’ which flows from the lips. In other words, the specificity of two lovers' union is most intimately embodied in the language they use together. Each couple has its own erotic language, charged with an ‘odour sui generis’ (reminiscent also of the ‘vapour’ emanating from ‘porous’ men which makes communion possible). Are we then to interpret the word ‘peck’ or Rocky's body as the first meaning of the foreign body which enters Genet's relationship with Bulkaen, and which in turn allows Genet access to the ‘intimacy of the couple Bulkaen-Rocky’?

Or is yet another interpretation possible? Let us approach the ‘odour sui generis’ from a different angle. Literally, the Latin expression can mean ‘specific to its gender’. Given moreover that the French word bise, unlike the alternative bécot, is feminine in gender, does the ‘foreign, because new and unsuspected body’ whose lips secrete a juice with a particular strong smell in moments of the most intense emotion, not incontestably evoke the female body? In this passage, the supreme repressed of our culture, the female sex, comes—obliquely—into view, both as another body in the series of bodies the text explores and as the ‘unsuspected’ side of each. The writing in fact insistently disseminates the ‘con’, the vulgar word for the female genitals: connerie, continuant, connus, communion, reconnais, inconnues, composa, locomotive, fonçaient, on caresse, qu'on, composition, concentré, continuait, insoupçonné.

Etymologically, Achilles' name signifies without lips. Just as the warrior's vulnerability evinces the impossibility of foreclosing femininity, the ‘crack’ which furrows Divers, Pilorge, Bulkaen—indeed, all of Genet's ‘heroes’, however phallic they may seem—endows them with a symbolic femininity. The difference with Genet is that this femininity is conceived, not as a lacking sex, but as a second sex. We may recall that ‘fabulous’ means both ‘marvellous’ and ‘improbable’. ‘He appeared more and more fabulous to me. Everything about him still surprises and enchants me’: the rare value of this text exploring Divers' sexual diversity is that it represents femininity not as a tragic flaw, but as one of several glittering attributes which make a hero ‘fabulous’.

Notes

1. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), pp. 391-2.

2. Another passage in the novel focuses attention on the nickname's ambiguity, all the richer in that the singular and the plural are indistinguishable phonically: ‘In his mind he heard himself addressed as ‘Jewels’ [‘Bijoux’] with the aristocratic x. But, when it was pronounced, nobody knew whether or not there was this x.’ (Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), p. 317.) As a thief of jewel(s), Bulkaen's sex is undecidable.

3. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), p. 279.

4. The three first names listed all begin with the same consonant, [zh]. Added to his surname, this causes Divers to ‘diverge’ from the homogeneous identity with which the text is investing him.

5. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), p. 292.

6. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), p. 387.

7. This is emblematic of Genet's ambivalent attitude towards the classic forms of French literature. He defiles them by using them in relation to the basest of subjects, while at the same time he derives the full advantage of their beauty.

8. But his masculine attributes are feminine in gender: Mes couilles.

9. It is interesting that there is no such widespread equivalent vulgarity designating the female sex in English. One could of course debate whether the greater taboo value that attaches to the English expression ‘cunt’ is indicative of a more or a less misogynist culture …

10. Literally, Divers' cold head numbs ‘your wrists’; the text addresses the reader at the very moment it speaks of the impossibility of communion.

11. The change is also inscribed in the play of the signifiers detailing Divers' evolution: the whole which ‘enchants me’ (m'enchante)—the same verb that was used to describe the effect Divers' name produced on the narrator—at the beginning of the paragraph later becomes ‘less mean [méchant] than strange [étrange]’.

12. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), p. 388.

13. One of the first sounds the narrator hears on his arrival in Fontevrault is a voice shouting: ‘Hi to your ass [lune] from my cock [bite]!’ Thibet may thus be read as the reverse side of the ‘bite’.

14. The invasiveness of the hole can also be discerned in the sudden proliferation of o sounds: ‘Soudain, avec la rapidité d'une locomotive emballée, fonçaient sur moi des perspectives d'ombres, des gouffres de douleur.’

15. This symbolic heterosexuality is all the more extraordinary in that it appears in a portrayal of male homosexuality which shocked—which can still shock—on account of its explicitness. The point I wish to stress is that Genet's unprecedented attention to the specificity of homosexual relations is not symbolically repressive of sexual difference.

16. This reading is all the more compelling since the third meaning of gorge, breast, refers specifically to the female body.

17. Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose in Œuvres Complètes II (Paris, 1951), pp. 388-9.