Miracle of the Rose
by Jean Genet

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Book Reviews of Miracle of the Rose

Book Review: A Sinking Ship Shall Cast The Light Upon The Land
Summary: 5 Stars

The narrator identifies these young men as his literal brothers, born from the same maternal body of childhood desolation leading to crime, and is highly drawn to this incestuous angle of his attractions. He describes the other boys "stroking themselves" in unison alone in their single unit cells, the mixed perfume of wisteria and rose vines creating a "vegetable incest" which wafts over their dreaming heads; he "yearns for a mother," feels he's returned, via Mettray, to "the mother's throbbing breast," and describes the prison and his mood as permanently tinted in autumnal shades. The female principle reasonably dominates the state of male immaturity, and in both benevolent and malevolent fashion, for Mettray is surrounded by a minefield of "traps laid by women's hands" that create an "invisible, undetectable danger" which throws would be escapees into "wild panic." For hoping to gain the fifty franc reward that comes with each capture, local women lie in silent, unseen wait like archetypal witches, accompanied by shotguns, pitchforks, and dogs.

Unloved, cast out, and uneducated, the instinctively virility-seeking boys of Mettray are little more than unindividuated eggs united in a desperate search for a master sperm bearer to fertilize and transform them into legitimate men. Each acts as a 'double' for another, but combined, the two halves still add up to less than one definite being. Though some "big guys" and "toughs," especially mysterious Christ figure Harcomone act as witting or unwitting father substitutes to those in need, Mother conquers in the end. Returning years later to find Mettray in ruins, Genet sadly notes that swallows have built their nests in its window ledges, grass sprouts between the impregnable stones, and thorn bearing vegetation covers and "pierces" the place. The rugged house of troubled, fragile lads has returned to the soil forever.

Fifteen years later, at Fountevrault, Genet finds hero and double murderer Harcomone locked in irons in solitary confinement, condemned to death. He discovers Fountevrault's foundational hub when he stumbles upon former Mettray lover Divers, a powerful and handsome tough, freakishly squatting atop the central iron cone which serves as a toilet, his genitals exposed and hanging as he defecates loudly, surrounded as he is by the circle of punished and endlessly marching prisoners he oversees and verbally abuses daily. Thus the lord of Fountevrault is an unconscious, ridiculous clown and fool, his pointed punishment and dunce cap under him instead of atop his head. Nonchalant Divers, "a barbaric king on a metal throne" gets up "without wiping" and actively resumes command as Genet allows himself the pleasure of sniffing Divers' "vast and serene" bowel gases. Drunk with sensation, Genet commits a willful infraction and happily joins Divers' marching circle, which becomes his new microcosm of "eternal reoccurrence."

While the broad shouldered "big guys" gather in all alpha male groups like a huddle of mountain gorillas, Genet loves--and often confuses--three men. Divers; dying, crown-of-thorns bearing god and great subject of prison gossip Harcomone; and mercurial "chicken" Pierrot, who straddles the safer middle ground and whose essence contains elements of both men. Genet sees Pierrot as a Sphinx and himself as a "questioning Oedipus," he describes their desperate lovemaking, clandestine stairwell meetings, and risking note passing, but later says they were never lovers and met only on twelve occasions. Divers and Harcomone are the twin father kings of Fountevrault: earthy, feces smeared Divers, who upholds macho postures even while defecating, symbolizes the Genet's reality principle. Supernatural Harcomone, the single complete man, "the emanation of a power stronger than himself," is even loved and cherished by the stars, moon, and seas -- by nature, his transcendent bride. Paternal Harcomone had once read nightly to the youths at Mettray from a book intended for very small children; now his chains blossom fragrantly into white roses before the astonished prisoners, an experience divinely denied the guards. Harcomone's rapidly approaching execution by beheading becomes a crisis for everyone under Fountevrault's roof.

Active mystic Genet calls himself "the spirit that hovers over the shapeless mass of dreams," "a dead man who sees his skeleton in the mirror," one who "sings the void" and who strains "every fiber to see very high or very far within himself." By "cutting all threads" that hold him to the world, he "plunges" into "prison, foulness, dreaming, and hell," believing this will land him in a garden "of saintliness where roses bloom." Exhausting himself with the effort, he manages, by a kind of remote viewing, to project himself into the condemned man's cell during the last nights of Harcomone's life, where he finds Harcomone already a ghost, his spirit drifting through the prison, and visited by specters.

Perhaps Genet's most deeply felt novel, the meditative Miracle of the Rose finds the author alternately confronting and avoiding his deepest obsessions and the shadowy motivators stirring uncomfortably within him. The archetypal "ghosts" of the male and female parental figures, in both their nurturing and paralyzing aspects, constantly overwhelm Genet's consciousness, are projected, embodied (Genet, the bride, is officially wedded to Divers in an elaborately structured midnight ceremony) or obscurely grappled with during moments of reverie. Transvestite figures and shifting configurations of gender and persona abound; male identity, like the ever shifting and unsustainable ocean shoreline, is in constant, painful flux, perpetually threatened with an obscuring inundation that will reduce man back to his earliest, in utero female state of existence.

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