synopsis:

'miracle of the rose' is an account of genet's youthful incarceration in the Mettray penal colony and subsequent imprisonment in the adult facility of Fountevrault. The author portrays Mettray as a womb like hive of sunless corridors and constricting passages that both shelters the prisoners and guards and incubates their stark attempts at individual development. The formless men of Mettray constantly meld and mesh into one another, existing between mental and emotional states of absolute being and permanent dissolution and drift. Surrounded by 400 other confined men, many who are attractive and apparently virile, young Genet searches for potential lovers and models upon which he might base his coreless identity. 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.

While the broad shouldered "big guys" gather in all alpha male groups, Genet loves 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 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.

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.

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.'miracle of the rose' takes the most shocking of circumstances and turns them into a beautiful love story showing the endless triumph the beauty of the willing thug that is the 'miracle of the rose'.

on this book:

Discovered and championed by Jean Paul Sartre, Genet was an orphan, thief, and homosexual who had spent most of his youth in prison. There he developed his personal credo: to harden himself against pain. Reversing the Christian mystic's ascent toward a state of holiness, Genet in the 1930s embarked on a satanic pilgrimage with the goal of reaching the lowest possible state of evil. While still in prison, Genet wrote his first novel, 'Our Lady of the Flowers' (1943). in 'Miracle of the Rose', his heroes - monsters and saints - represent aspects of the men he knew in prison, as well as extensions of himself - rootless, troubled personalities in revolt.

Although his writings were at first considered pornographic, Genet was soon recognized as an existentialist grappling with problems of identity and alienation, and he came to be regarded as one of the most influential 20th-century writers. Genet wrote the type of imaginative fiction which not only fuelled the writings of William S. Burroughs and Samuel R. Delany, but attracted the critical attention of such writers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.