Funeral Rites

by Jean Genet

  Actually it's hardly possible for a theatrical service to take place in daily life and make the simplest acts participate in that service, but one can realize the beauty of those performances before a hundred thousand spectator-actors when one knows that the sublime officiant was Hitler playing the role of Hitler. He was representing me.

  Curled up inside my grief, I nevertheless paid close attention to the performance, in which there was not the slightest hitch. I dispatched my orders from beside the coffin. The entire German nation was entering a state of trance at the celebration of my own mystery. The real Fuhrer was standing beside a dead boy, but a high priest was performing magnificent rites for me at a kind of gigantic fair.

  If my feelings are real only through my consciousness of them, ought I to say that I would have loved Jean less if he had been born in China? And that neither the living Jean nor the charming, handsome Jean of my memory would have been able to reveal to me one of the most painful, most intense feelings I have ever had, whereas Jean seems to me to be the sole cause of it? In short, all that grief of mine—hence the consciousness of that beautiful love, hence that love—would not have existed if I had not seen Jean in a state of horror. If I am told he was tortured, if I see him in a newsreel being mutilated by a German, I shall suffer more and my love will be exalted. In like manner, Christians love more when they suffer more. And the sentence, “My grief at Jean's death revealed to me the force of my love for him,” can be replaced by “My grief at the death of my virtue revealed to me the force of my love for it.” The desire for solitude, which I spoke of briefly a few pages back, is pride. I want to say a few words about the admirable solitude that accompanied the militiamen in their relations with Frenchmen and with each other and finally in death. They were considered to be worse than whores, worse than thieves and scavengers, sorcerers, homosexuals, worse than a man who, inadvertently or out of choice, ate human flesh. They were not only hated, but loathed. I love them. No comradeship was possible between them, except in the very rare case when two boys had enough confidence in each other not to fear that the other might inform on him in their marginal world where informing was a matter of course, for, loathed like reptiles, they had assumed the morals of reptiles and made no bones about it. Thus, any friendship between them was uneasy, for each of them wondered: “What does he think of me?” It was impossible for them to pretend that they were acting out of idealism. Who would have believed it? They had to admit: “It's because I was hungry; it's because I'll have a gun and may be able to plunder; it's because I like to squeal, because I like the ways of reptiles; in short, it's in order to find the grimmest solitude.” I love those little fellows whose laughter was never bright. I love the militiamen. I think of their mothers, their families, their friends, all of whom they all lost in joining the Militia. Their deaths are precious to me.

  Members of the Militia were recruited mainly from among hoodlums, since they had to brave the contempt of public opinion, which a bourgeois would have feared. They had to run the risk of being murdered at night on a lonely street, but what attracted us most was the fact that they were armed. So for three years I had the delicate pleasure of seeing France terrorized by kids between sixteen and twenty.

  I loved those tough kids who didn't give a damn about the blighted hopes of a nation, whose distress in the heart of everyone, as soon as he spoke about it, merged systematically with the most beloved being of flesh and blood. And the armed youngsters were perhaps thrilled at moving in the halo of shame with which their treason surrounded them, but there was enough grace in their gazes and gestures for them to seem indifferent to it. I was happy to see France terrorized by children in arms, but even more so because they were crooks and little rats. Had I been young, I would have joined the Militia. I often caressed the handsomest of them, and I secretly recognized them as envoys of mine who had been delegated to operate among the bourgeois and carry out the crimes that prudence forbade me to commit myself.

  At a time when the death of Jean D. ravages me, destroying everything within me or leaving undamaged only the images that enable me to pursue doomed adventures, I want to derive incomparable joy from the spectacle of the love of a militiaman and a German soldier. It was no doubt natural for me to couple a warrior, whom I want to be as subtly cruel as possible, with the person whose moral nature is vilest in the eyes of the world—and sometimes in mine—but how could I justify that with respect to the friend I loved most who had died fighting against my two heroes, fighting against what my two heroes defended? You can't have any doubt about the pain that his death causes me. For a few days my despair made me fear for my life. I was so grief-stricken at the thought that Jean had been lying in a narrow grave for four days, with his body decomposing in a wooden coffin, that I was on the point of asking a scientist:

  “Are you sure he can't be brought back to life?”

  I don't see the folly of that question even now, because it's not my reason that asks it but my love. Not having a scientist at hand, I put the question to myself. I waited for the answer, quivering with hope. In fact, hope made everything in and around me quiver. I was waiting for an invention that only hope could devise.

  That quivering was the flapping of wings which is the prelude to flying. I know that a resurrection isn't possible and wasn't then, but I won't allow the order of the world not to be disturbed for my sake. I thought for a moment of paying a man, a gravedigger, to unearth what remained of the child in order to hold in my hands a bone, a tooth, so that I could still realize that a wonder like Jean had been possible. My poor Jean-in-the-earth. I would even have allowed him to return to us in any form: that of two pieces of veneered black wood streaked with white lead, glued together, like a fantastic silent guitar lying in a bed of dry grass in a shelter made of boards, far from the world, which he would never leave, not even to get air, not even at night, not even during the day. What would his life be like in the form of a crude, stringless guitar without a pick, which could hardly talk and complain of its lot through a crack in the board? It doesn't matter. He would live and be present. He would be in the world and I would clothe him in white linen every day. The fact is that my grief, which made me rave, invents this riot of blossoms, the sight of which gives me joy. The more Jean changes into fertilizer, the more the flowers growing on his grave will perfume me.

  The appetite for singularity and the attraction of the forbidden in concert delivered me up to evil. Evil, like good, is attained gradually by means of an inspired insight that makes you glide vertically away from human beings, but most often by daily, careful, slow, disappointing labor. I shall give a few examples. Of the tasks involved in this particular ascesis, it was betrayal that was hardest for me. However, I had the admirable courage to move further away from human beings by a greater fall, to turn my most tormented friend over to the police. I myself brought the detectives to the apartment in which he was hiding, and I made a point of being paid off for my betrayal before his very eyes. Of course, that betrayal causes me tremendous suffering, which reveals to me my friendship for my victim and an even deeper love for man; but in the midst of that suffering it seemed to me, when shame had burned me through and through, that there remained amidst the flames or rather the fumes of shame a kind of imperishable diamond with sharp clean lines, rightly called a solitaire. I think it is also called pride, and humility too, and knowledge too. I had performed a free act. In any case, refusing to let my act be magnified by disinterestedness, to let it be purely gratuitous, an act performed for the fun of it, I completed my ignominy. I required that my betrayal be paid for. I wanted to strip my acts of anything beautiful that might be involved in them despite everything. However, the most heinous crimes are embellished with a bit of light when they are committed by a handsome person who lives in the sun and is bronzed by the sea, and I had to rely on a little physical beauty in order to attain evil. May I be forgiven for doing so. Because I envisage theft, murder, and even betrayal as emanating from a bronzed, muscular, and alw
ays naked body that moves in the sun and waves, they transcend this ignominious tone (which was an attraction for me) and find a nobler one, which is more closely related to solar sacrifice. But despite my life in the sun and my live body—the sort of life which I have been living since Jean's death—I am still attracted by so-called somber people, those in whom something reveals darkness, those who are wrapped in darkness (even if it is the darkness that is also the brilliance they radiate), those who are dark or fair with dark eyes, or with a tense face, an evil smile, nasty teeth, a large member, a thick bush. I feel they have dangerous souls.

  “What is the soul?”

  “It is that which emerges from the eyes, from tossed hair, from the mouth, from the curls, from the torso, from the member.”

  It has only two qualities: it is good or it is bad. Erik's soul was bad. He killed whenever it was bad to kill, because it was bad. At first, in order to be worthy of the fate betokened by the strange sign of that nation of pirates. The swastika contains not only the particular exaltation of dangerous banners, but also devastation and death. No doubt he had got over the first shudders of disgust and little by little grown used to the idea of being the executioner's friend. In the small Berlin apartment where he spent his time when he was away from the barracks, Erik became accustomed to certain comforts of which his working-class youth had dreamed. His friend treated him with motherly concern (contained entirely in the gesture of flicking Erik's lapel) rather than with that of a lover, and each day, Erik's arrogance quickened. It was intensified by the fact that he wore boots (he liked to hear the clack of their heels). And the executioner had him play the male role in bed. Pressed against the older man, clinging to his neck as in the Tiergarten, but with his hands now clasped on the Adam's apple rather than on the back of his neck, Erik knew he was a kind of quickening excrescence of a beautiful monster. It was not that he himself would have tried to play the male. In fact, he was greatly surprised one night when the executioner rolled over onto his belly and asked to be reamed.

  Some time after his arrival in Paris, Erik, who was on his way to a brothel all by himself, caught sight of the militiaman at a crossing of four streets. The boy was walking toward him. Erik, in order to see him at closer range and enjoy the sight of his face, stepped away from a group of soldiers. He was willing to lose sight of him for a second, but suddenly the kid committed the discourtesy of turning to the left and vanishing in a colonnade before Erik could get a look at him.

  Riton had spotted the soldier, but out of discretion he walked in another direction. He did not realize the pleasure he would have given. Erik felt like a fool in the suddenly empty crowd that was rushing ridiculously toward the useless. No presence had ever been so present to him as the child's absence. He felt insulted, for he had a sense of his individuality. Usually the world unfolded around him reverently, the houses drew aside, the trees shook, the sky grew overcast. You sometimes feel a respect that things owe you or a respect that you owe them.

  When I saw him in front of me, the sun was warming the forest. He was carrying neither a gun nor a knife. It was by his smile that I could tell he was a hunter. My hair quivered. I took his hand. But at that very instant the following prayer rose up within me:

  “Don't let me touch you. Never speak to me. . . .”

  The image of him within me was astonished. Its forehead, its eyebrows, each of which was as strange, but naturally so, as those of clowns (a mouse whose head is the eye, a cherry leaf whose eye is the cherry . . .), its eyebrows contracted. The image clenched its fist in order to strike. Yet I kept talking to it:

  “. . . for one mustn't touch beauty. Stay quite far away from me. . . .”

  My hand was in his, but mine was four inches away from the hand of the image. Although it was impossible for me to dare live such a scene (for nobody—including him—would have understood what my respect meant) I had a right to want to. And whenever I was near an object that he had touched, my hand would move toward it but stay four inches away, so that things, being outlined by my gestures, seemed to be extraordinarily inflated, bristling with invisible rays, or enlarged by their metaphysical double, which I could at last feel with my fingers.

  What a demonstration of geometrical force there was in the angle of light, the mobile yet rigorously immobile legs of the compass which his legs were when he walked! I sometimes moved my hand close to the edge of him, careful not to touch him, for I was afraid that he might dissolve or drop dead or rather that I might die; that is: either I would realize I was suddenly naked in a crowd that saw my nakedness; or my hands would grow covered with leaves and I would have to live with them, lace my shoes with them, hold my cigarette, open the door, scratch myself with them, or he himself would know spontaneously who I really was and would laugh at the knowledge; or I would shit out my guts in his presence, dragging them far behind me in the dust, where they would pick up bits of straw and wilted flowers (black and green flies would alight on them and he would shoo them off with his flabby white hand, and he would brush them away with disgust as they swirled about him); or I would see and feel my penis being eternally devoured by fish; or a sudden friendship would allow me to stroke toads and corpses to the point of orgasm; for evoking these torments—and others—my death may well be the knowledge of my shame appearing in the play of those manifestations most dreaded in the presence of the loved one. I therefore kept him at a distance.

  Once, however, I touched his hair.

  In the camp at Rouillée, Paulo was the victim of a mock execution. One morning he was taken to the yard and stood against the wall. Twelve soldiers took aim. The officer cried: “Fire!” Shots. A cloud in Paulo's eyes. When he was untied and started to walk, he thought he was walking in death. Twenty-four hours after touching Jean's hair, I thought I was walking in death. Rather, I was flying, flying lightly over fields of asphodels.

  These encounters, which were never perfect, exasperated Riton, distressed him, made him feel queasy. Paulo was in the jug, and he himself could not summon up courage to steal. He hardly ever left his room.

  He withdrew from society, and his withdrawal was helped along by hunger. For a long time he suffered from it, and from the cold, in a small room he didn't pay for. One night he couldn't stand it any more. His hunger was so great that it could have nourished him. He felt it in his stomach as if it had the consistency of food about to be assimilated. It rose in waves from his stomach to his mouth, where it expired from exhaustion at being only a desire. He rolled over in bed and tried to think about Paulo, who had given him the scarf that was hanging from a nail on the wall. Friendship did not resist the thought that he might get enough money for that faded silk rag to buy bread. To whom could he sell it? It was a souvenir, but Paulo would not mind if his scarf helped to ease his friend's hunger.

  “If I cut my leg, he'd think it was natural for me to stop the blood, even if the scarf was spoiled after that.”

  An appeal was made in his body, as if an organ were being slightly twisted by a delicate hand. He got up. As the room was small, he was at the door immediately, and he went out. These few movements and those he made to go down the stairs caused him to forget his hunger, but as soon as he was on the boulevard and was wondering whether to turn left or right, it rushed at him with the speed of a galloping horse, that is, he had the sensation of being knocked down by a victorious animal that would trample him till doomsday. He turned to the right. The boulevard was dark. The trees were living in glory, in an infernal joy. The very darkness was cruel. Riton walked. He had to rely on a miracle. On a ground-floor window sill—the concierge's—he saw a cat. Riton stopped and took the animal in his arms without even stroking it. The cat did not stir, but joy was already giving the boy wings. He headed for home, transported by hope and an already satisfied belly. The torn was big and fat. The murder was ghastly.