Jean Genet, _Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs_

 CONTINUING MY TREK through outlaw lit (Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana, Michelle Tea), it made sense to look back to the canonical literary outlaw, Jean Genet. I read Querelle of Brest in translation many years ago--1975, it must have been--and had not liked it enough to try another, but what the hell, I thought, let's try a different one.

I read Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) in French, which was a little tricky since Genet employs a lot of underworld slang, but his French is otherwise classical and often elegant--a lot easier to read for me than Céline, in other words. The narrator is in prison as he writes. He evokes the petty criminals, drug users, drag queens and other marginalized folks he used to run with in Paris. Three characters in particular get most of the attention: drag queen sex worker Divine, her manager (let's say) Mignon, and her sometimes boyfriend, the handsome young criminal Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.

The narrator respects and admires these three, even exalts them one could say, while manifesting a consistent dislike, even disdain for the straight world of authority, power, and wealth. Genet lays the groundwork for such soon-to-be-ascendant icons as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley, not to mention all the romantic rebels that followed in their vast wake.

It so happens (I learn from Edmund White's thorough 1993 biography) that Genet really did write the novel in prison (he was caught stealing books) in 1941 and 1942, and its characters are based on people he actually did hang with when he wasn't in jail. 

The dates of composition set me thinking--what did it mean to be imprisoned during the era of Vichy and the Nazi occupation? More to the point, how does someone in prison go about getting published during the era of Vichy and the Nazi occupation?

According to Harry E. Stewart and Rob Roy McGregor, authors of Jean Genet: From Fascism to Nihilism, Genet used literary contacts who were collaborators or maybe-collaborators (e.g., Cocteau) to get Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs published. They further make the case that he was, at least in the 1930s and up until the liberation, anti-semitic and sympathetic to Nazism. 

It's not a great case, though. Their study's publisher, Peter Lang, does not inspire confidence, and neither does their panicky tone (Genet sought "to diminish man's achievements, to dismantle all authorities, to crush human dignity and human society everywhere"). White's soberer assessment is that Genet was willing to use any ally to get published, whatever the ally's politics (e.g., Sartre). Whether Genet really ought to be an icon of the left...eh, I don't know. 

For a case that he really does deserve to be an icon for queer expression, check out Elizabeth Stephens, Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction.