Funeral Rites by Jean Genet

gruesome sights, of the preparations for burial. My contact with the concrete wounds my sensibility cruelly: the black escutcheon adorned with the silver-embroidered “D” that I saw on the hearse waiting at the gate of the hospital, the coffinand the poor quality of the wood, the singing in the church, the Dies Irae, the blood-red moiré ribbon on which was inscribed in gold letters: “To our leader, the Communist Youth Movement,” the priest's remarks in French, these were all knives that slashed my heart. And all these wounds gave me knowledge of my love. But Jean will live through me. I shall lend him my body. Through me he will act, will think. Through my eyes he will see the stars, the scarves of women and their breasts. I am taking on a very grave role. A soul is in purgatory and I am offering it my body. It is with the same emotion that an actor approaches the character whom he will make visible. My spouse may be less wretched. A sleeping soul hopes for a body; may the one that the actor assumes for an evening be beautiful. This is no small matter. We require the rarest beauty and elegance for that body which is charged with a terrible trust, for those gestures which destroy death, and it is not too much to ask the actors to arm their characters to the point that they inspire fear. The magical operation they perform is the mystery of the Incarnation. The soul, which without them would be a dead letter, will live. Doubtless Jean can have existed momentarily in any form whatever, and I was able, for a span of ten seconds, to contemplate an old beggarwoman bent over her stick, then a garbage can overflowing with refuse, egg shells, rotting flowers, ashes, bones, spotted newspapers; nothing prevented me from seeing in the old woman and the garbage can the momentary and marvelous figure of Jean, and I covered them, in thought, not only with my tenderness but also with a white tulle veil that I would have loved to put on Jean's adorable head, an embroidered veil, and wreaths of flowers. I was officiating simultaneously at a funeral and a wedding; I merged the symbolic encounter of thetwo processions into a single movement. And even from here, I was able, by fixing my gaze and remaining motionless, or almost, to delegate my powers to the famous actor in Nuremberg who was playing the role in which I was prompting him from my room or from my place beside the coffin. He was strutting, he was gesticulating and roaring before a crowd of spellbound, raving Storm Troopers who were thrilled to feel that they were the necessary extras in a performance that was taking place in the street.
    Actually it's hardly possible for a theatrical service to take place in daily life and make the simplest acts participate in that service, but one can realize the beauty of those performances before a hundred thousand spectator-actors when one knows that the sublime officiant was Hitler playing the role of Hitler. He was representing me.
    Curled up inside my grief, I nevertheless paid close attention to the performance, in which there was not the slightest hitch. I dispatched my orders from beside the coffin. The entire German nation was entering a state of trance at the celebration of my own mystery. The real Fuhrer was standing beside a dead boy, but a high priest was performing magnificent rites for me at a kind of gigantic fair.
    If my feelings are real only through my consciousness of them, ought I to say that I would have loved Jean less if he had been born in China? And that neither the living Jean nor the charming, handsome Jean of my memory would have been able to reveal to me one of the most painful, most intense feelings I have ever had, whereas Jean seems to me to be the sole cause of it? In short, all that grief of mine—hence the consciousness of that beautiful love, hence that love—would not have existed if I had not seen Jean in a state of horror. If I am told he was tortured, if I see him in a newsreel being mutilatedby a