>Anyway, this may interest the list and then again it may not. Who am I to
say?
>Chris Jones.
>
>
>In the introduction to Prisoner of Love Edmund White writes:
>As Genet puts it, emotions live on and only the people who entertain them
>die: 'The happiness of my hand in the hair of a boy another hand will
know,
>already knows, and if I die this happiness will go on.'
>
'The happiness of my hand in the hair of a boy another hand will know,
>already knows, and if I die this happiness will go on.'
This quote from Genet is the definition of the real 'homo heroticus', the
ability and the knowledge that love transcends the self, that nothing can
be claimed in possessing the illusion to possess a body, ‘the body’ of the
other.
With my great surprise, given his habitual composure, an idea of the same
kind is in my author - Franco Fortini - as the notion that real eroticism
is the ability to acknowledge the passage of one body from you to the
next....
(Thank you, Chris, for this beautiful quote: I think in our erotic dreams,
this is always the case: we fear and desire 'betrayal', to be
betrayed)...Maybe I am wrong. Erminia
Erminia
>Such is the wisdom of a book that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze compared
>recently in a seminar to the Bible. Like the Bible _Prisoner of Love_ is
>about chosen people (Panthers, Palestinians) without a homeland. ....
>Like the Bible it is the Only Book, one meant to be read and read again
and
>that is constructed canonically, as though the first time reader has
already
>read it. Indeed Genet has invented a new sort of book altogether - a new
kind
>of prose and a new genre. ... Like Celine, Genet appears to be casual and
>conversational, but through recurrence he heightens each subject until it
>turns mythical.
>
>Genet has always constructed his fiction like cinematic montage,
alternating
>one story with one or two others. In _Prisoner of Love_ the intercutting
>becomes rapid, constant, vertiginous --- a formal device for showing the
>correspondences between elements where no connection had been previously
>suspected.
>
>In _Prisoner of Love_ metaphors have been replaced by a different method--
-
>radical juxtaposition without copula, that is, the tight sequencing of
>different subjects without transition. This method emphasizes the
sovereignty
>of the observer--- makes him into a god.
>
>(I find this suggestion of replacing metaphor very intersting as metaphor
is
>an indirect image with a referent. What happens if you get rid of the
>referent is the question I am playing around with. What new images become
>possible? Chris Jones.)
>
>Barbara Bray, English translator of _Prisoner of Love_ writes:
>
>At its most inspired moments it produces new and exhilarating insights
into
>the way mind may function--- a twentieth-century 'dissociation of
>sensibility'. And perhaps, after all, disdain for 'finish' was only one
>aspect of the state of being that enabled Genet to set down his last,
>strange, 'Metaphysical' poetry.
>
>
>From, Jean Genet, _Prisoner of Love_:
>
>Betrayal is made up of both curiosity and fascination.
>
>But what if it were true that writing is a lie?
>
>The various scenes in which Hamza's mother appear are in a way flat. They
>ooze love and friendship and pity, but how can one simultaneously express
all
>the contradictory emanations issuing from the witnesses? The same is true
for
>every page of this book where there is only one voice. And like all the
other
>voices my own is faked, and while the reader may guess as much, he can
never
>know what tricks it employs.
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