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The Notion of Saintliness in Jean Genet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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There can have been few novels published in the twentieth century which have more firmly rejected the traditional Christian bourgeois morality than the one I propose to study in this article. It is the novel of a counter-culture par excellence, and has come to be seen as the definitive literary statement of a radical alternative. Its main character, a homosexual prostitute with a criminal record, moves in and epitomises the specific milieu of his culture, carrying with him all the detail of its particularity. He is arguably the last literary figure, if judged solely on his superficial reputation, to whom most people would turn for enlightenment on the notion of saintliness, and yet it is precisely this notion that is at the centre of much of his significance, and to which this article is devoted. Genet does not simply describe his creation periodically as a ‘saint’, without further qualification, but rather carries this epithet through in the context of a developed understanding of what he considers it to mean. Our possible initial reaction of feeling that ‘saint’ is probably used as a more eye-catching term for ‘hero’ or ‘star’—a sort of linguistic shock-tactic—is thus, on closer examination, transformed into a conviction that the word ‘saint’ is used simply because it is the only word that is right; it is the only word that means what the author is trying to say, and as such deserves, and indeed demands analysis.
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- Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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1 The French title of Genet's novel is Notre‐Dame des Fleurs. It is very reluctantly that I quote throughout in English, since much of Genet's genius is in his language, but given the difficulty, even now, of acquiring Genet's works in French, and the relative facility of buying them in English paperback editions (The Miracle of the Rose and The Thief's Journal are currently available in Penguin Modern Classics, Querelle of Brest and Our Lady of the Flowers in Panther Fiction), it seemed the only realistic solution. It is perhaps also appropriate to point out here that I have included examples of the use of the word ‘saint’ where the word occurs in the original French, even if it is translated by the English ‘holy’. For example the sentence ‘Divine est morte sainte et assassinée—par la phtisie’ (Oeuvres Complètes, II, 14), which is translated ‘Divine died holy and murdered—by consumption’ (Panther, p. 60).
2 A note on pronouns! When Genet refers to his character as Divine he always uses the feminine forms. When he refers to ‘her’ as Louis Culafroy, however, he uses the masculine. The translation follows this procedure, and I have done likewise. The references to Louis Culafroy are exclusively concerned with the character's childhood.
3 All references to Panther Fiction edition.
4 This whole question is very problematic, but in the long final meditation entitled ‘The saintliness of Divine’, beginning on p. 274, God and Genet are clearly synonymous. Divine is obviously a sufficiently convincing character, in whose existence we believe, for it to be inconceivable for her to refer to her destiny being in the hands of ‘her author’, for example, and so it is with God that she generally concerns herself. There is no doubt however that the creator of her destiny is Genet, who says of this character: ‘I want … to refashion in my own way, and for the enchantment of my cell … the story of Divine’ (p. 59–60). There is also a whole allegory of free will and predestination to be drawn from this section, but for the purposes of this article it is perhaps enough to say that Genet has ultimate power over a character who believes she is free—Genet finally gives to Divine the destiny that was planned for her, although she believed she was fighting against it.
5 This massive essay forms Volume I of Genet's Oeuvres Complètes. Sections are reproduced in translation as an introduction to the Panther Fiction edition, pp. 9–52.
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