Masturbatory Writing in Genet’s ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’

CW: sexually explicit

Gisele Parnall

Column III

CW: discussion of sexually explicit themes.

Over my last couple of articles, I have explored the types of intimacy which must establish themselves across distance and the types of intimacy which must transgress the confines of bodies deemed grotesque. Finally, I would like to examine a type of intimacy which turns back in on its own body, which shies away from any interaction with another. Masturbation is sex which has learnt to transgress solace. It has detached itself from any need for the reality of a desired object. It survives on a fantasy.

Jean Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers from the confines of a prison cell. As a narrative birthed from masturbatory fantasy, it is an utter indulgence in the enchantment of self-pleasure. With every erotic gesture, Genet spins a poetics of escapism which allows him to inwardly transgress his confinement. Yet for Genet, masturbation is also a privilege, reserved for solitude. Imprisonment grants him self-pleasure through its denial of alternative gratification. 

“I've got lots of time for making my fingers fly! Ten years to go! My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race, and also to find you there.”

The narrative of Our Lady follows several figures of Genet’s imagination who are introduced and dismissed from the text to fuel his masturbatory fantasies. Within the four walls of his cell, fantasy - with all its liberatory powers - is essential for Genet. The characters of Genet’s imagination are brought to life from the newspaper cuttings on his wall which he has saved exactly for this purpose. Via a viciously masturbatory gaze, Genet sees through these images to perceive a fantasy-driven narrative world, yet one which is merely a reflection, a projection, of his own desire. By constructing his story out of masturbatory fantasy, Genet makes explicit the text’s nature as an analogue of desire.

“So, with the help of my unknown lovers, I am going to write a story. My heroes are they, pasted on the wall, they and I who am here, locked up. As you read on, the characters, and Divine too, and Culafroy, will fall from the wall upon my pages like dead leaves to manure my tale.”

In Our Lady, Genet juxtaposes the spaces of reality and virtuality by framing his fantasies within the meta-narrative of his actual masturbation. Although we are engaged in the “enchantment” of his cell as fashioned by the characters Divine, Darling Daintyfoot and Our Lady of the Flowers, we are constantly thrust back into the Real, where, we are reminded, Genet strives to keep the narrative (and all its characters) alive with every repetitive stroke. We are never allowed to disengage with the uncomfortable necessity of the act which allows both Genet and the reader to escape his cell. The narrative is produced by  this act which is required of Genet on account of his imprisonment. It is dependent on that which it is designed to escape. Masturbation is a framing device which also becomes the conditions of existence for the text. The strokes of his penis generate the text. 

‘'With my head still under the covers, my fingers digging into my eyes and my mind off somewhere, there remains only the lower part of my body, detached, by my digging fingers, from my rotting head.”

As a means of textual production then, his body is perhaps reduced to its lower half. The fantasies of Genet’s ‘rotting head’ must give way to the phallic accentuation and they decompose after ejaculation. 

“At night I love them, and my love endows them with life.”

Construction of desire is unavoidably caught up in idealisation. This text accepts that the raw carnal form of a sexual partner perhaps can never be truly desired, they must be wrapped in a sheath of projected fantasies. In their actuality, they become repulsive, yet in masturbation, the object of desire can be kept clean from the abject. Bound to virtuality, the masturbatory imagination reserves a certain liberty of irreality.

Credit: Gisele Parnall

“I know that we were chaste, while, I, all attention, felt you flowing into me, warm and white, in little continuous jerks.”

For Genet, this impossible sex, which he imagines ‘flowing’ into him ‘in little continuous jerks’, must remain in its necessarily contradictory relationship to satisfaction. Through the frame of masturbation, Genet makes explicit the unfulfillable nature of desire. Once climax is reached, desire dissipates; consummation is the extinguishment of desire. Desire must in fact be kept in process; it must, for as long as possible, be kept safe from its own becoming. Genet’s text, like his very own body, keeps itself in development, and like masturbation, this text is both fuelled and restricted by desire.

In an introduction to Our Lady of the Flowers, Sartre tells the reader that the entire work was written in pencil, on scraps of brown paper given to the inmates. One day, however, Genet’s “epic of masturbation” was found by a guard and burnt. So Genet wrote the story all over again.

What was lost between these two editions? The words surrendered to the flames push this work further into the realm of the intangible, into deferral. For me, there is something in the utter indulgence of Genet’s masturbation that demands that this story delay its own becoming. If Genet’s fantasy was ever truly consummated, it would undoubtedly retreat into the repulsiveness of actuality. The bodies of the text would stick to reality, along with the imperfections of materiality. 

In fact, this tale doesn’t want to be realised. Climax is deferred and emphasis is shifted back from goal to process. For Genet, the writing and the burning and the subsequent writing is all just a vicious embodiment of the requirement that the text be kept in a state of generation. The writing of Our Lady, through the necessity of its deferral, keeps itself in masturbatory construction. Beginning with Divine’s funeral, the plot starts towards its own destruction, as Genet knows that his desires can never be actualised. Yet through masturbation, Genet sheds the need for consummation, exactly what he is denied in his confinement. It is in this way that masturbation is liberating for Genet, and in general, I suppose. Masturbation turns its back on the reality of the desired Other and thus makes possible an intimacy which becomes transgressive in its vicious independence.