A Vision Of The Life Infernal

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31071, 28 May 1966, Page 4

A Vision Of The Life Infernal

Miracle of The Rose. By Jean Genet Blond. 291 pp.

Two volumes of Jean Genet’s revelations of criminal and prison life have already been issued by an enterprising London publisher: and with the appearance of the third, “Miracle of the Rose,” it might be worth while to speculate about this writer’s place in contemporary literature. Prison is the centre of the narrator’s life: and, as he sees it, prison is a world apart Life in “the colony,” as the inmates call it. is always violent, both emotionally and physically so. Love and hate nearly always find dramatic expression, it being taken for granted that homosexual behaviour is the norm.

For many of “the colonists” prison is home, and life there is far more real and satisfying than life outside. The narrator himself is one of these; but with a difference,

for he is an artist in words. He writes, “We live beneath the stern gaze of the prison, like a village at the foot of a feudal castle inhabited by steel-clad knights.” This single sentence is characteristic. It suggests that Genet himself is a romantic, who offers a lyrical interpretation of what most people would regard as hell on earth. For Genet, on the other hand, it is heaven on earth, at times. Each reader must decide for. himself whether such an attitude is the ultimate in perversity, or whether it is an expression of the human spirit that can find beauty and comfort even at the lowest level of desolation. Is Genet throwing a deceiving veil of beauty over a hideous reality, or does he, in fact, reinterpret a part of life previously thought to have no moral or spiritual values at all, to be beneath contempt? In trying to come to a conclusion, it is perhaps worth while remembering that people can deceive them-

selves. They will sometimes dally with pictorial or literary representations of events that they could never face in reality. Readers of "Miracle of the Rose” will be certain to find this thought ever present.

Genet’s world is mediated in terms of poetry. Even in translation, he is clearly a genius, with the persuasive powers of an enchanter. This beautiful language, this poetic view of horror indeed produces the miracle of the rose. The so-called decadent writers of the last century, J. K. Huysmans. for example, thought of themselves as matured satanists; but when compared with Genet, they are seen to be timid bourgeois experimenters. Rimbaud alone could confront this author on his own ground. Whatever decision readers may come to about the value of “Miracle of the Rose,” they will never be able to forget that they have been accorded a vision of the life infernal.