Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

Lori Schreiner¹

Genet sets the scene by describing his dingy cell. On the walls he has pasted with "chewed bread" (65) photos he pilfered from other prisoners, newspaper clippings, and the torn jackets of novels. From this gallery of pictures, he creates the characters of his alternate reality. "At night I love them and my love endows them with life" (65).

The reader is then drawn into a world of tubercular, ambiguously gendered, young gay men who struggle with sexuality, love, criminal impulses, and survival. The omniscient narrator appears as puppet master controlling the lives of Divine, Darling, and Our Lady of the Flowers. He coldly tells us of their obsessions and forecasts their demise at the beginning of the story. "Divine died yesterday in a pool of her vomited blood" (67). Slowly we become aware that the omniscient narrator who creates this doomed dark reality is Genet’s prisoner. Creating this fantasy landscape allows the prisoner to project his fears, loss of faith and control, desperation, sorrow and passion, onto dream characters that can act out his inner conflicts and perhaps resolve them. "I shall have happened to strike my forehead at some door, freeing an anguished memory that had been haunting me since the world began…Forgive me for it. This book aims to be only a small fragment of my inner life" (66).

The reader experiences a bit of whiplash as the here-and-now prisoner continuously reappears in the midst of the daydream, gripped by the stark reality and powerlessness of solitary confinement.

I would like to dream them both in many positions if when I closed my eyes, my dream still obeyed my will…But during the day it is disturbed by anxiety about my trial and will end by my being swallowed very very slowly by a giant crocodile formed by the whiffs of the foul prison air. (Genet 138)

As the book progresses, the prison narrator interjects, talking to the reader more and more, interrupting the omniscient narrator’s tale, drawing parallels between his real life and the characters in the story. This narrative voice appears to be pleading with the reader to be understood and forgiven, and accepted in all his complexity, including his obsessions, thoughts of murder, and need to be loved. The reader begins to understand that this book is actually a monologue, the author weaving different fractured voices through the narrative, a multiple personality seeking variegated expression and eventually wholeness. "I mean that the solitude of prison gave me the freedom to be with the hundred Jean Genet’s glimpsed in a hundred passers-by…" (267).

It becomes clear to the reader that the voice of the master lives in the mind of the imprisoned slave who is lying under a dirty woolen blanket, with only the thoughts in his head and the touch of his hand against his penis for release and comfort. The prisoner’s hand stroking his penis and the thoughts that drive his masturbatory fantasy is the consistent action that repeats throughout the text, the touchstone that grounds the story in the body and mind of the narrator. This repetitive primal action also grounds the reader in the arc of the narrator’s telling of the story. "We are now there. The longest detours finally lead me back to my prison, to my cell" (259).

At the conclusion of this memoir/novel, the tensions between the splintered selves begin to resolve. Alchemy of power acting on powerlessness, good vs evil, victim vs victimizer occurs. The reader is left with a man who has found peace and wholeness, a man who has faced the reality of his fear, loss of friends, the mark of destiny, the madness of solitary confinement. The integrated narrator has found healing by writing himself through fracture to integration. The author has created a piece of art while brilliantly chronicling the process of psychic fragmentation and reorganization that is possible when facing one’s suffering in the midst of deprivation and trauma. The narrator has found inner freedom even in his greatest confinement. He shares the joy of his transformation. "I have made myself a soul to fit my dwelling. My cell is so sweet" (316).

I found this book both disturbing and moving. As one who was confined in a mental hospital, I understood on a visceral level the fragmentation and disorientation that happens when one is imprisoned and powerless. Genet was able to authentically illustrate the psychological construct of warring selves that interact and can find balance and integration in relationship. The reader shares the journey as the initial chaotic form of the text follows an organic organizing principle, and eventually creates a sense of order and resolution. This book is very relevant to my process as a writer. I have also experienced fragmentation and splintered aspects of self, which are beginning to interact to create a unified, but still multifaceted, narrative voice.

Work Cited

Genet, Jean. Our Lady Of The Flowers. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

¹ Written for semester coursework with Kenny Fries.