Reading Order
Notre-Dame des Fleurs Reading Order
Notre-Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943) by Jean Genet is the founding text of French literary transgression in the postwar period — a novel written in a Paris prison cell on brown paper bags that guards confiscated and that Genet rewrote from memory, a fantasy of the Montmartre criminal underworld narrated by a voice that is simultaneously Genet himself masturbating in his cell and the fictional characters he creates to people his fantasy. The novel centers on three characters: Divine (the aging queen), Notre-Dame des Fleurs (the young murderer), and Mignon (the pimp between them), but the logic of the narrative is associative and lyrical rather than sequential — it is a novel made of fantasy, prose poetry, and criminal autobiography simultaneously. Sartre's preface 'Saint Genet, comédien et martyr' (later expanded into a book, 1952) remains the most important critical account; Genet himself disowned the Sartre book as too definitive. Notre-Dame des Fleurs created the aesthetic of transgressive lyricism that would influence French literature from Genet to the Tel Quel group to contemporary fiction.
Where to start
Read Notre-Dame des Fleurs first — it is the most radical and the most beautiful of Genet's novels, and it establishes the lyrical-transgressive mode that all his later work develops. The Bernard Frechtman translation (Grove Press, 1963, later reprinted) is the standard English version and is remarkably faithful to Genet's extraordinary prose. Genet's other novels (Miracle de la rose, Pompes funèbres, Querelle de Brest) should be read in order of composition; Journal du voleur (1949) gives the autobiographical dimension explicitly.
Complete Notre-Dame des Fleurs Book List
- 1Buy
Notre-Dame des Fleurs
Jean Genet·1943·Start here — written on brown paper bags in a Paris prison; the founding text of Genet's lyrical-transgressive world - 2Buy
Miracle de la rose
Jean Genet·1946·The prison-world sequel — Mettray reform school and Fontevrault prison; read after Notre-Dame - 3Buy
Pompes funèbres
Jean Genet·1947·Funeral Rites — the novel of collaboration and grief written after the death of his lover Jean Decarnin; the most politically ambiguous Genet - 4Buy
Querelle de Brest
Jean Genet·1947·Querelle of Brest — the most formally controlled of the novels; the sailor-murderer and the myth of masculine beauty - 5Buy
Journal du voleur
Jean Genet·1949·The Thief's Journal — the autobiographical account; read last, as the explicit key to the novels' fantasy world
Notre-Dame des Fleurs — Frequently Asked Questions
What are the conditions in which Notre-Dame des Fleurs was written?
Genet wrote Notre-Dame des Fleurs in 1942 while serving a sentence in Fresnes prison near Paris. He wrote it on the brown paper bags that prisoners used, which guards periodically confiscated and destroyed; Genet rewrote the novel from memory after each confiscation. The novel published in 1943 (a clandestine edition of 25 copies) is the version that survived this process of writing, destruction, and rewriting. Genet later told the story in Journal du voleur (1949), and the conditions of composition are essential context for understanding the novel's quality of sustained, improvised fantasy.
Who are Divine, Notre-Dame, and Mignon?
Divine is an aging Montmartre queen (a gay man who performs as a woman) — the central consciousness of the novel, based partly on a real figure Genet knew. Notre-Dame des Fleurs is the young murderer, beautiful and amoral, who enters Divine's world and ultimately kills for aesthetics rather than necessity; his name (Our Lady of the Flowers) is the novel's title and its organizing paradox — the most beautiful name for the most transgressive figure. Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds is the pimp who connects them; his masculinity is the foil against which Divine's femininity and Notre-Dame's beautiful criminality are defined.
What is the narrative voice in Notre-Dame des Fleurs?
The narrative voice is one of the most unusual in French fiction — it is explicitly the voice of Genet himself, a prisoner masturbating in his cell and creating the characters of Divine, Notre-Dame, and Mignon as fantasies. The novel repeatedly breaks its own fictional frame to acknowledge this: the narrator comments on his characters, explains why he invented them, describes his physical situation in the cell. This doubling — fiction and the explicit acknowledgment that it is fiction — creates a peculiar intimacy and a peculiar distance simultaneously. The fantasy is real in its effects (it produces the most intense prose Genet ever wrote) even as its unreality is never concealed.
What is Sartre's account of Genet?
Jean-Paul Sartre's Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) — originally a preface to Genet's complete works, expanded into a 600-page book — is the most important and the most controversial critical account of Genet's work. Sartre analyzes Genet through an existentialist framework: Genet as a child designated 'thief' by adult society, who accepts this designation and transforms it into an aesthetic and ethical program — choosing to be what society has called him, and choosing it so absolutely that he becomes the saint of his own transgression. Genet himself said that Sartre's book 'froze' him — made it impossible to continue writing the novels — and he largely abandoned fiction after it.
How does Genet's work relate to Bataille's?
Genet and Bataille are the two major French writers of transgression in the mid-twentieth century, and their work is in dialogue though they were not close. Both treat transgression as a form of the sacred — the criminal, the erotic, and the violent as modes of an encounter with the absolute that conventional religion has lost. Bataille's approach is more theoretical and more philosophical; Genet's is more lyrical and more autobiographical. Bataille published Notre-Dame des Fleurs in his review Critique in 1945 and was one of the first critical champions of Genet's work.
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