[In the following essay, Cornford explores the connection between the narrator's expressions of his own grief and the construction of his narrated world in Pompes funèbres.]

The themes of death and murder recur like an obsession throughout Genet's texts, but it is in Pompes funèbres that the narrator's preoccupation with mortality is the most graphic and sustained. It is also in Pompes funèbres that the narrator's own stated circumstances and the themes he probes in his narrative are most tightly linked, as he explores his immediate preoccupations within the imaginary arena of the narrated world. This [essay] aims to examine the nature of this relationship between narrator and narrated world, between narrator and characters, and ultimately between theme and narrative form in Pompes funèbres.

Far from the narrative form of Pompes funèbres simply being an arbitrary framework within which themes are presented, the narrator uses the construction of his narrated world not just to explore the themes of death and murder objectively but, more personally, to deal with his own bereavement. The form of his narrative becomes at once the vehicle through which his immediate preoccupations are expressed and the tool he uses for their exploration. It is my contention that the narrator does not simply exorcise his grief by articulating it but exploits his relationship to his narrated world and its characters in an attempt to transform his relationship to his bereavement from unbearable passivity into activity.

Before examining the link between the formal and the thematic relationship of the narrator to the narrated world, it is important to establish the key characteristics of the narrator himself. Following Genette's terminology, the narrator of Pompes funèbres is a ‘fictional author’, an author-narrator who is not just story-telling but writing a book. As a fictional author, the narrator's relationship to his narrative is, significantly, not simply that of a witness but of a self-conscious creator who can take aspects of his ‘reality’ and transform them in his imaginary narrated world into pure fantasy over which he has total control. Genette also categorises narrators as homodiegetic (present as a character in their narrative) or heterodiegetic (absent from it). In Pompes funèbres the narrator is homodiegetic in relation to the primary narrative—Jean D's funeral, his visit to Jean D's mother's house, his cinema visit, memories from his relationship with Jean D—but heterodiegetic when narrating the secondary narrative, the Erik-Riton story. Generally, then, the narrator is homodiegetic when narrating what he presents as his real situation but heterodiegetic when constructing pure fantasy, although there is some slippage. The fact that the narrator's formal relationship to the secondary, fantasy narrative is different from the primary narrative is significant to the way he utilises his relationship to it in his response to bereavement.

The narrator also exploits his formal relationship to the Erik-Riton narrative by blurring and collapsing conventional distinctions between narrator and character in ‘narrative metalepses’. Although heterodiegetic, the narrator projects himself into his fantasy by merging with characters through the substitution of first for third person pronoun.¹ Camille Naish calls this ‘transgressive identification’.² As Naish suggests, rather than ‘becoming’ the character in a shift in focalisation, the narrator merges with him while simultaneously remaining himself and retaining his omniscience in a temporary dual focalisation. For example, when the narrator merges with Hitler, he still also reports Paulo's thoughts: he looks through the character's eyes through his own. By merging with his characters, the narrator does not just control his characters' experiences but participates in them vicariously. Thus, there is clearly a connection between the themes the narrator explores, his manipulation of narrative form to explore them, and what he is proposing to achieve.

It may appear problematic to suggest a narrator's motivation for constructing his narrated world. However, in Pompes funèbres, where the narrator's personal circumstances and his fantasy—his primary and secondary narrative—are inextricably enmeshed, the narrator states his intention explicitly. If the catalyst for his narrative is his bereavement—he talks of ‘the death of Jean D which provides the pretext for this book’³—the narrative itself aims to effect ‘the prismatic decomposition of my love and my grief’ (p. 17). The narrator experiences his bereavement as impotence in the face of an unalterable death—‘Jean had been taken from me’ (p. 22)—which emphasises his own inescapable mortal condition. His narrative constitutes an active imaginary response to this passivity, an attempt to transform the humiliation of impotence into the dignity of control by transforming the humiliating defeat of death, which Jean D's sordid state funeral magnifies, into the glorious victory of his own aesthetic ‘funeral (w)rites’: ‘Jean needed a compensation. My heart prepared to offer him the pomp that men refused him’ (p. 23).

Although the narrator's poetic response to what is changes nothing in external reality—‘words are words … they did not alter the facts in any way’ (p. 42)—the imaginary is his only option. Powerless before ‘the facts’, he turns inward to take active control at least of his attitude to them. Using the ‘inner gaze’ (p. 53) of his imagination, he attempts, through a process analogous to Nietzschean amor fati, to ‘will backwards’ and declare with Zarathustra's Übermensch, ‘But I willed it thus!’⁴ The narrator endeavours to eliminate a grief which betrays his humiliating passivity by transforming it into something not only willed but actually loved. He cannot undo his grief because he cannot undo Jean D's death, so he aims instead to extinguish his grief by, paradoxically, willing its intensification in his narrative until he is no longer its passive victim but its active master: ‘I know this book is only literature, but I am hoping it will permit me to exalt my grief to the point of making it dissolve until it is no more—as a firework disperses after its explosion’ (p. 218). The narrator intends to bring his relationship to his grief and to death itself within his control by manipulating his relationship to an aesthetic medium which is within his control.

The most significant mechanism the narrator utilises in the poetic transformation of his response to his lover's death is the manipulation of his heterodiegetic relationship to his secondary, fantasy narrative to merge with characters through dual focalisation and explore various confrontations with death vicariously. He thereby fuses theme and narrative form almost indissolubly as he experiments with experiences in an imaginary, narrated world that would lie beyond his experience in his ‘reality’. The narrator does not, therefore, simply delegate characters to kill or die in his place, as the ‘narrator’ in [Fragments … et autres texts] suggests he will use his ‘enfant perdu’: ‘If he kills, he kills himself: prison, scaffold, penal colony, so many deaths that he will live in my place.’⁵ The narrator of Pompes funèbres moves beyond a ‘Heliogabalan’ relationship with his characters, no longer simply using them to live in his stead as the emperor Heliogabalus used his soldiers,⁶ but participating vicariously in imaginary experiences through them.

In the first incident of merging, exceptionally the narrator merges with Erik in the primary narrative before beginning his fantasy. Here, the narrator offers a straightforward reason: he is reconstructing Erik's past by thinking himself into Erik's life and being: ‘The first time I met him, leaving the apartment, I endeavoured to retrace the course of his life and, to make it more effective, I climbed into his uniform, his boots, his skin’ (pp. 31-2). The narrator shares Erik's sexual encounter with the executioner, and initially neither the experience nor the process of participation appears significant to the narrator's attempt to transform his relationship to Jean D's death. However, the second time the narrator talks of reconstructing Erik's past, he makes a direct connection between his bereavement and this fantasy. On the second occasion, which is narrated immediately after and grows out of his cinema visit, the narrator introduces into Erik's past Riton, a purely imaginary character who is not part of the ‘real’ primary narrative. The link between the Erik-Riton fantasy and the narrator's bereavement, and between the narrative form of this fantasy and the themes explored within it, is therefore to be found in the narrator's experience in the cinema.

In the cinema, as the narrator watches on screen a rooftop battle between a militiaman and a French soldier, he transforms it in his mind so that he is witnessing Jean D being shot. He then uses his imagination to transform his relationship to his bereavement from impotent victim to master of it by changing not the facts themselves but his role in them. Because Jean D's ‘real’ death is completely beyond the narrator's control, rather than using his imagination to prevent Jean D's on-screen representative from being killed, he transforms his passivity into a semblance of activity by ‘willing backwards’, willing Jean D's death after the event by instigating and demanding it at least in his imagination.⁷ He will then seal the event as absolutely chosen by loving Riton, who kills Jean D for him, in a literal expression of amor fati:

I was suffering so badly from Jean's death that I was prepared to use any means to rid myself of his memory. The best trick I could play on that savage monster we call fate, which delegates a kid to do its work, and the best trick I could play on this kid, would be to invest him with the love that I bore for his victim. I begged the image of the young lad: ‘I would like you to have killed him.’

(p. 51)

There follows an extraordinary internal struggle in which the narrator desperately takes control of his situation by controlling his attitude to it, transforming himself from victim of Jean D's death to his posthumous killer using the murder weapon of his imagination. This is one of the most magnificent passages in Genet's prose fiction, yet it is often misunderstood. The narrator does not simply love the militiaman whom he hates because love and hate are the same in Genet, as some critics, rather oversimplistically, suggest.⁸ When the narrator says, ‘My hatred of the militiaman was so strong, so beautiful, that it amounted to the strongest love’ (p. 51), he is stating that his love and his hate are equivalent in intensity, not that they are the same or interchangeable. If they were, the narrator could love the militiaman immediately, but he cannot. He declares near the beginning ‘I want to love Riton’, but admits ‘I did not love Riton, all my love was still for Jean’ (pp. 51-2).

What is crucial is the effort required to transform his hatred of Jean D's imaginary murderer into love and thereby to take control of his grief, again reminiscent of Nietzsche: ‘The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.’⁹ This process costs the narrator dearly, but if crying out ‘Kill him!’ causes him intense pain, he can only augment his control by willing even more: ‘My heart felt torn apart. I wanted my suffering to be even more intense, to rise to the supreme song, to death itself’ (p. 52). Building up his love for Riton gradually, he has his first breakthrough, ‘a little love passed onto Riton’ (p. 53). He pushes his Nietzschean self-overcoming further:

A third silent invocation rose out of me and drew me out of myself:

‘Do him in, I'm giving him to you.’

From out of my motionless, bent body, slumped in the seat, another wave of love flowed firstly onto Riton's face, then onto his neck, his chest and his whole body imprisoned in my closed eyes.

(p. 53)

After a supreme effort, the narrator finally declares ‘The same rivers of love flowed onto Riton yet not a drop was removed from Jean’ (p. 54).¹⁰ As Maurice Chevaly comments, the agony of the narrator's ‘victory’ of self-overcoming resembles an extreme assertion of Cornelian stoicism; he is Chimène admiring her father's murderer and torturing herself with delight.¹¹ And as with Chimène, the pain renders the narrator's victory over himself all the more glorious. He has played the first leg in his ‘game which consists of conning fate’ (p. 54) and has won.

I wish to suggest that the narrator, having achieved a temporary inner victory in the cinema, constructs the Erik-Riton narrative to sustain and develop the experience of transforming his impotence before death into control. The narrator's superficial reason for the fantasy is to continue his reconstruction of the ‘real’ Erik's imagined past, and he incorporates Riton into the story as the militiaman Erik fought alongside in the ‘revolt of Paris’. But if this is the superficial connection between the narrator's ‘real’ situation and the fantasy, the deeper link is revealed by another statement: ‘I am trying to portray these characters to you in such a way that they are lit up by my love, not for them but for Jean, and above all in such a way that they reflect this love’ (p. 55). Crucially, the narrator has just transformed his love of Jean D into willing his death by killing him through a substitute. If, on a thematic level, the Erik-Riton fantasy represents the narrator's attempt to assume control of his grief by experimenting with further chosen confrontations with death and murder in his narrated world, on a formal level the way the narrator manipulates his relationship to this narrated world constitutes the formal, aesthetic means through which he brings about this imaginary experimentation.

Thus the narrator's relationship to what he sees on screen is duplicated in his relationship, both in formal and thematic terms, to the Erik-Riton story which he generates out of it, and the cinema scene itself constitutes the link between the primary, ‘real’ narrative and the secondary, fantasy narrative which becomes the arena in which he experiments with a method of dealing with ‘reality’ through fantasy. The method the narrator explores in the cinema to assert an active imaginary response to the passivity of his bereavement and thereby to effect the ‘prismatic decomposition of his love and grief’, the mechanism of Nietzschean amor fati, is gradually pushed to the limit in the Erik-Riton fantasy. Indeed, because this inner process for dealing with his grief is essentially imaginary, the narrator's further exploration of it is ideally suited to an aesthetic medium—the book he writes—where it can be more easily sustained.

On a formal level, the shift from ‘real’ to fantasy narrative involves the narrator's transition from participating observer to creator-fantasiser. This transition is illustrated by Erik's passage between ‘reality’ and fantasy. There are two Eriks in Pompes funèbres, the ‘real’ one whom the narrator meets at Jean D's mother's house, and the fictional Erik, an imaginary construct partly based on the ‘real’ one, whom the narrator invents in his fantasy about Erik's life. The narrator describes the way fantasy Erik is pieced together: ‘I take gestures chosen from young people passing by. Sometimes it's a French soldier, an American, a thug, a barman … They suddenly offer me a gesture which could only belong to Erik’ (p. 67). Fantasy Erik's status as pure construct is reinforced by a transgression of chronological coherence: fantasy Erik is shot dead before the narrator meets ‘real’ Erik and begins the fantasy about him. Shifting his narrative from ‘reality’ to fantasy, the narrator even asserts his control over logic and time.

On a thematic level, the significance of the shift from ‘reality’ to fantasy, and the key to the relationship between theme and narrative form, also involves taking control: when the narrator alters his formal relationship to his narrative he changes his thematic relationship to his grief, and thereby brings about his own transformation from victim of circumstance to master of it.

In the fantasy, the actual moments when the narrator projects himself into his creatures are not arbitrary but follow a pattern or progression which both reflects and embodies the narrator's endeavour not to be a victim of Jean D's death. In the cinema, because the narrator could not alter the fact of Jean D's death, he chose rather to transform his passivity into activity by willing his death, using an imaginary substitute killer to shoot an imaginary substitute for Jean D. In the Erik-Riton fantasy, the narrator reinforces and extends the decomposition of his grief through a sustained exploration of confrontations with death in which the narrator participates vicariously. There is a clear progression in the experiences the narrator shares, from indirect confrontations with death through to outright murder, reflecting the narrator's own progression from victim of his lover's death to his imaginary killer.

When the narrator first merges with Erik, he appears simply to be reconstructing Erik's past, but even here, before the cinema and the fantasy, the sexual encounter with the executioner which the narrator experiences through Erik reflects his aim gradually to assert control over death. The narrator uses this sexual experience to begin to overcome his horror of death and killing. The executioner repeatedly asks whether the narrator/Erik is frightened of who he is, forcing the narrator/Erik to transcend his terror. Even before merging with Erik, almost in preparation, the narrator emphasises the self-overcoming required for Erik/himself to love the executioner: ‘To hate is nothing, but to love what one hates is sickening. Kissing him or being kissed by him was not terrible but getting an erection and coming because of these kisses received and given certainly was’ (p. 111). In order not to be defeated into passivity by death's apparition, he must push his willing to the limit, and ‘follow it through to the end’ (p. 72). To assert his liberty from death's reign of fear he must not just tolerate but actually love the executioner, as he must eventually will and love death itself to avoid being its victim: ‘He had without doubt overcome the first fits of disgust and, little by little, had got used to the idea of being the executioner's lover’ (p. 83). For Erik, loving death's accomplice constitutes his first indirect step towards domesticating death, while for the narrator, his vicarious experience through Erik represents a further step in his endeavour to alter his relationship to his bereavement by first of all altering his attitude to it.

The second occasion that the narrator merges with Erik occurs within the fantasy. Before entering his creature, the narrator emphasises that, although externally Erik is a composite of the ‘real’ Erik and various other attributes taken from passers-by, internally Erik is a vehicle for the narrator himself: ‘The feelings are mine’ (p. 67). Later the narrator states explicitly that he is at once participating in Erik's experiences and pursuing his own through him, ‘reliving Erik's anguish and bringing him to life through my very own anguish’ (p. 126). This time, the narrator/Erik progresses from familiarity with killing gained through intimacy with an executioner to assisting with an execution. The narrator/Erik declares that assisting another to take life is his psychological preparation for committing a murder himself:

One day I insisted on being present at the execution of a criminal as an assistant, a second-in-command. I was the one who held his head on the block. I was not aspiring to the executioner's position as a state employee, but I was killing myself so that I would be able to kill later without danger.

(p. 67)

On the next occasion, the narrator merges with Riton after killing the cat. The narrator/Riton tells us that before this he had tried to attack a stranger but his nerve had failed him:

Before the incident with the cat, I had tried in vain to beat a guy up … At the top of the rue du Temple I spotted a guy, not too tall. I have a good cosh … Every yard I said to myself, ‘No one's around, I'll do him in here’ … I jostled him as I passed him, then I insulted him and hit him: a punch in the face. He was the stronger. I had to get the hell out.

(p. 99)

The narrator does progress to shooting a victim, but significantly he firstly merges with the executioner meeting Erik, as though using this brief self-insertion into an experienced ‘killer’ to boost his own courage to kill. The narrator does note the way Erik's relationship with the executioner has inspired him, and it is certainly with redoubled courage that, when the narrator next projects himself into Erik, he dares to share the experience of shooting a young boy.

The way the narrator/Erik describes killing the boy places it firmly within the progression of vicarious experiences up to this point: ‘The moment that I looked at the face of the boy, which had an ironic boyish delicacy, I understood that the moment had come to know what a murder was like’ (p. 120). In his desire to uncover ‘the secret of death’ (p. 121) through this experience, the narrator shares every detail through Erik, from noticing the boy to pointing the gun, pulling the trigger and watching the boy fall. The instant of firing is described as a supreme victory of courage and self-possession, of self-liberation from the fear and horror of death, a triumphant moment of control over death itself: ‘My finger on the trigger. The highest moment of freedom had been attained. To shoot at God, to wound God and make of Him a deadly enemy. I fired. I fired three shots’ (p. 122). In the cinema the narrator willed the shooting of Jean D by a substitute, but now he overcomes his impotence before the death of another by not just willing such a murder but performing it in his imagination. He does not want to understand Erik's experience of murder, but uses him for his own vicarious experimentation. CJ Rawson also makes this point, commenting on the ambiguity when the narrator (whom she calls Genet) merges with Erik:

Genet's lordly determination not to clarify emphasises that it is of little consequence whether the act was done or who is deemed to have done it, and that the real issue is his own involvement in it in the now of the narrative … He is … enacting a total unconcern with understanding Erik as a separate being, at the very moment of giving him and his introspection the centre of the stage. What he is in effect declaring is his participatory exploitation of the personage.¹²

Rawson's comment re-emphasises that the characters within the narrated world are not primarily independent agents but the narrator's pawns exploited as vehicles for his own experimentation.

Once the boy is dead and the moment of control over death is passed, the narrator/Erik's self-possession diminishes as his horror of the physical reality of the death grows: ‘I felt horrified at being in contact, physically and magically, with a warm corpse’ (p. 122). Having fought to transform his passivity into activity and won, the narrator/Erik is loath to let his victory over himself be undermined by a return to the humiliation of inner limitations: ‘I was ashamed of my cowardice’ (p. 123). He draws on the executioner's influence to strengthen his power to will: ‘He taught me courage. I will’ (p. 123). Imagining the executioner holding his waist,¹³ the narrator/Erik confirms and reinforces the self-overcoming he has achieved in willing the boy's murder by forcing himself to look at the corpse. When Erik becomes afraid now, having sustained his self-assertion to the end, the narrator emphasises that he is ‘frightened, not by remorse or by possible punishment, but by his glory’ (p. 124).

If shooting the boy vicariously constitutes a major victory for the narrator over himself and over death, the subsequent occasions of merging reflect and further explore this new control over his impotence. The next time, he merges with Juliette when she is exploring the possibility of informing on Jean D. The connection between this experience and the narrator's situation is that the narrator describes his willing of Jean D's death as betrayal, and the narrator now experiments with mustering enough self-possession to betray Jean D through Juliette, as though testing further the freedom he has won thus far. He draws strength from this vicarious experience—‘I felt strong with my freedom, intoxicated by my freedom, a little intoxicated’ (p. 131)—and even though Juliette does not go through with this betrayal, the episode constitutes a testing out of ‘I can’ before the act is completed in ‘I will’.

The narrator briefly merges with Erik, trying to leave the executioner, as though his personal victory over death means he no longer needs the executioner's influence, and then, significantly, the next merging is introduced explicitly as a betrayal of Jean D. The narrator overcomes his pain faced with his lover's corpse and asserts his self-possession by replacing his respect for Jean D with the shameful insult of indulging in a sexual fantasy about Hitler. It is not in spite of but because of his recognition that ‘one feels somewhat ashamed at thinking about acts of sensual pleasure while in mourning’, that the narrator proves his control over himself and his grief by doing just that: ‘I had to force myself to write the preceding erotic scenes … I mean that, once I had overcome my disquiet at having defiled a corpse, this game of which a corpse is the pretext gives me a great freedom’ (p. 148).

The ‘erotic scene’ between Hitler and Paulo represents a progression from Erik confronting his fear of killing through a sexual encounter, since this episode does not involve a mere executioner, who has taken perhaps hundreds of lives, but Hitler who has ordered the death of millions, the very personification of death. It is also a progression since the narrator does not merge with the one who must overcome his fear of death but chooses to savour through Hitler the experience of inspiring the fear of death in others.

The fantasy Hitler has not just murdered one lover, and not just in his imagination, but many, in the secret alcove where ‘Hitler loved and killed his victims’ (p. 148). This Hitler has not simply shot a boy but explored death in all its conceivable forms. The narrator shares in this as the narrator/Hitler declares ‘I have already done the rounds of every possible kind of death’ (p. 157), for the first time exploring the deaths of others as vicarious rehearsals for his own as equally willed and chosen: ‘I have chosen every kind of death. None will surprise me. I have already died often and always magnificently’ (p. 158).

Having reached these heights there is apparently nowhere further for the narrator to progress. The remaining instances of merging simply play out further opportunities for self-assertion, such as the narrator/Riton daring to instigate sex with the older, more powerful Erik, and the narrator/Erik deciding he wants to kill the executioner, to kill the ‘killer’. And then, like the narrator's momentum in creating his narrative, the instances of merging simply peter out.

The penultimate scene of Pompes funèbres, in which Riton shoots Erik, is rather hurried as the narrator's creative energy dwindles. The narrator does not project himself into the killer this time, but the scene is significant because it brings the narrator full circle to a final re-enactment of his original endeavour, first attempted in the cinema, to achieve the prismatic decomposition of his love and grief and transform the passive humiliation of his bereavement by willing the shooting of his lover. Riton's whole raison d'être within the fantasy is as the narrator's chosen substitute for carrying out his willed killing of Jean D after the event: ‘I have the soul of Riton’ (p. 133). Moreover, this re-enactment of that earlier scene, this time with Erik as victim, parallels the narrator's own situation more closely than the cinema film, since now Riton is not killing the enemy but has to find the added strength to shoot his lover. As such, it represents a fantasised, symbolic compensation for the earlier episode in which the narrator imagined himself putting his gun in Jean D's mouth at a fairground but was unable to pull the trigger: ‘I tremble with shame at the memory of that instant … I was the one who lost his nerve’ (p. 92). Characteristically, the narrator achieves vicariously what he cannot even imagine achieving himself. The parallel between Erik and Jean D is reinforced in an earlier remark that ‘Erik was fulfilling his destiny with the same ardour that Jean D fulfilled his’ (pp. 115-16).

There is another important difference between the two re-enactments. Whereas, at the end of the cinema scene, the narrator treats his initial victory there as a starting point for further exploration in the fantasy he begins, the final scene ends, after the narrator's extraordinary inner struggle, with a final assertion by his substitute of victory over death: Riton does not simply kill his lover, but dances on his body. Through a sustained process of merging with his characters and self-substitution, the narrator of Pompes funèbres has finally transformed his humiliating passivity before his bereavement into a supreme moment of active control and self-possession. He has exploited his relationship to his narrated world in order to alter his relationship to his grief and indeed to death itself, and has apparently emerged victorious.

Notes

1. This process of substitution is apparently prefigured, although for different reasons, in Miracle de la Rose, although attention is only drawn to this fact in Journal du Voleur when the narrator makes the following comment: ‘In a book entitled Miracle de la Rose, when the friends of a young convict are spitting on his cheeks and in his eyes, I assume the disgrace of his position myself, and speaking of him I say: “I”.’ (Jean Genet, Journal du Voleur (Paris, 1949), p. 181.)

2. Camille Naish, A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet (Massachusetts, 1978), p. 119.

3. Jean Genet, Pompes funèbres (Paris, 1953), p. 8. All references are to Gallimard's ‘L'Imaginaire’ integral edition of Pompes funèbres, and will hereafter be signalled in the text by a page number in brackets.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated by RJ Hollingdale (London, 1990), p. 163. The idea of the Superman constituted one of the two key concepts in Nietzsche's philosophy that Genet told Barbezat he found particularly pertinent to his own thought. See Jean Genet, Lettres à Olga et Marc Barbezat (Décines, 1988), p. 261.

5. Jean Genet, Fragments … et autres textes (Paris, 1990), p. 91.

6. Indeed, Genet was fascinated by this idea (Edmund White, Genet (London, 1993), p. 203; Jean Genet, Fragments … et autres textes (Paris, 1990), p. 90), and wrote a play for Jean Marais entitled Héliogabale in 1943 (Jean Marais, Histoires de ma vie (Paris, 1975), p. 151), the year before Pompes funèbres was completed. We find a similar idea expressed by the narrator in Journal du Voleur who calls Lucien ‘my ambassador on earth’ (Jean Genet, Journal du Voleur (Paris, 1949), p. 275).

7. White suggests a Freudian explanation for this process: ‘Partly, of course, this action arises from what Freud called the repetition compulsion—the desire to repeat painful events from which one suffered passively but which this time one engineers, precisely in order to overcome the original sense of helplessness’ (Edmund White, Genet (London, 1993), p. 279).

8. For example, Richard Coe states that ‘Genet finds himself not hating but loving Riton’ because ‘at this point of white-heat, the two emotions become interchangeable’ (Richard Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London, 1968), p. 149).

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophise with a Hammer and The Anti-Christ, translated by RJ Hollingdale (London, 1990), p. 102.

10. Michael Stephen Henderson describes the narrator's achievement in the following terms: ‘In an effort to rid himself of his grief, the narrator begins an operation of betrayal, negating all that Jean D represented by transferring his desire onto the image of his killer’ (Michael Stephen Henderson, ‘Discourses of the Self: Confession in the Works of Jean Genet’ (doctoral thesis, University of California, 1991), p. 139). However, this statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the narrator's inner process. The narrator himself makes it quite clear that his aim is not to transfer his love from Jean D to Riton but to love Riton as much as he loves Jean D. The narrator's entire attempt to transform his relationship to his bereavement is not undertaken in order to stop loving Jean D, but precisely because of his continuing love for him.

11. Maurice Chevaly, Genet II: L'Enfer à Fleur de Peau (Marseilles, 1989), p. 52.

12. C J Rawson, ‘Cannibalism and Fiction, Part II: Love and Eating in Fielding, Mailer, Genet, and Wittig’ in Genre, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1978, p. 305.

13. The narrator later comments that, just as Erik draws his inspiration and support from the example of the superior self-assertion of the executioner, so too the power of the executioner is supported by the figure of Hitler, who stands hierarchically above him, not just in terms of social standing but chiefly in terms of the degree of control over death that each man has achieved: ‘The great shadow of the executioner was walking at his side supported by the greater and slightly paler mass of Hitler’ (p. 83). In this context, ‘size’ is clearly a question of degree of inner self-overcoming as it is manifested in outer acts rather than actual physical mass.