On View

Blown away by Jean Genet

This was, honest, the scene on the back of the couch this morning.

The Orphan Reds look like sweet little girls––everyone on Facebook reads them that way––but they are unreconstructed wild things; I never should have let them near Jean Genet, which they got into last night after I went to bed.
 

And his Funeral Rites, of all things!

You know they like bee burials. I fear this has given them unsanitary ideas.

"Let's eat the bees!"

I'd never read Genet; I picked him up in a Little Free Library yesterday and skimmed Funeral Rites last night.

It was outrageous! 
I loved reading it, and then checked myself, "Do I love this?"
I'm not sure.

When have I read anything that isn't entirely clear?
Most writing these days is quite clear about where it stands, its political (sexual, racial, gendered) identity labelled, curated, crafted, positively artisinal!
 

Godknows I wouldn't post this photo of the Reds & Genet on Facebook, where uncertainty and contradiction are not allowed. The book's politics are obscure to me--Genet hates the Germans, who killed his lover, yet worships the Nazi's hard body--is this anything more than [currently in vogue in liberal circles] Tom of Finland–style worship?

I googled to see if Genet's considered anti-Semitic. Not blatantly (not like Céline!). But the jury is out. Someone who knows the received wisdom on Genet's politics would skewer me if I got it wrong. 

Genet's treatment of his dead lover's fiancée, a vulnerable little housemaid, is tender, wonderful:
the final paragraphs of the book describe her funeral rite––laying a faded daisy in a patch of sun on the floor. 

After all Genet's pyrotechnics of grief––Genet imagines his dead lover presenting his (the lover's) corpse to be eaten––this final scene is, the girl is, as the Internets said last year, a cinnamon roll, "too good for this world, too pure."

For now, I just want to enjoy the complicated brilliance---it bounces off the writing like sheen off a beetle.

Here, Genet worships his dead lover by locating with his tongue a pubic crab––transferred, he imagines, from his lover's body––in another man's groin:

"With my head in the hollow of his legs, my eyes sought out the sacred crabs, and then my tongue, which tried to touch that precise and tiny point: a single one of them. My tongue grew sharper, pushed aside the hair very delicately, and finally in the bushes, I had the joy of feeling beneath my papillae the slight relief of a crablet. . . . My mouth was filled with tremendous tenderness. The insect had left it there...."

I was thinking I'd never read anything like that, and then I realized---sure I have!  
John Donne's "The Flea".

"Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be..."

I have to go to work now. This post is as much about feeling angry at how sanitized the literary culture has become as it is about Genet. I'm angry that I'm afraid to write about this on Facebook. Even if I was brave and did it, what would be the point? 
None, I think.

Of course I wish we could wipe away racism and sexism and all that tripe.
Of course.
But the problem with cultural sanitation is it hides things away.
The sewage is still there, it's just out of view.
With Genet, it is fully out in the open, glistening like crazy in words.