Querelle [Paperback]

I often found myself reminded of my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, while reading _Querelle_, not only for the redolent, foggy atmosphere but for the extended meditation on evil. While Dostoevsky's works concerned themselves with redemption from evil, however, in many ways Genet writes about evil (or at least criminality) as itself redemptive in some way--that is, when he isn't calling the very notion of redemption itself into question as a liberal humanist fantasy.

But what I like the most about this book is not its intellectuality, though there's plenty of that. I most enjoyed how his characters--unbelievably, even uninimaginably bizarre--became in his hands almost commonplace and real. Like Toni Morrison in a different, evil register, Genet's cast is quirky and out-there yet, somehow, not odd at all. Through their very strangeness they become the best exemplars of our real selves.

Genet's premise is that all male-to-male social interaction--however overtly innocent or benign--is in fact a semi-conscious game of dominance and subordination that leads, under the right set of circumstances, directly towards its secretly-cherished goal of homosexual submission, violence, or, and in extreme or frustrated cases, murder. According to Genet's rules, men's heterosexual impulses are merely an adaptation resulting from severe, socially-conditioned but also spontaneous repression of an ardent, instinctive homosexual desire. Caught between equally powerful forces of desire and repression all of their adult lives, most men exist in a twilight state of continual psychological ensnarement, says Genet.

The novel takes place in the anarchic French seaport town of Brest, a liminal space that is itself symbolically semi-conscious: neither quite land or quite sea, its wharfs, dockyards, ramparts and seawalls are perpetually fog-bound; an abandoned penitentiary, the 'ancient prison' of unconsciousness that fetters the all-male population, dominates the landscape. In this Dionysian environment of hard rules, hard bodies and hard organs, the lead characters-Georges Querelle, Lieutenant Seblon, Mario, and Gil--are nonetheless simultaneously fighting themselves and one another to both avoid and become the passive or 'feminine' sexual partner.

The book's characters are largely itinerant, uneducated, and probably illiterate sailors, dockers, petty thieves, informers, and pimps; the area police are barely distinguishable from the criminal element, and mirror their psychology exactly. For all of these men, every encounter with another male, however brief, represents a veiled but unavoidable challenge for situational control and mastery. Perfectly illustrating Camille Paglia's theory that 'men are really only men when other men say they are,' the novel's characters allow themselves a slow, languid, and continuous series of retreats and advances around one another, fist-fighting until bloody and waving their [behinds] slyly at one another in turn. They mark territory, strut for each other, tease, bluff, mock and intimidate who they can, and, though infrequently allowing their 'violent emotion' and 'metaphysical hatred' to break into consciousness, satisfy their sexual urges with one another through displacement, sublimation, intoxication, extortion, coercion, or, in Querelle's case, serial murder.

Querelle is a sailor, narcissist, sociopath, and serial killer; his victims are former accomplices he needs to silence, easy targets for robbery, and 'pederasts.' But murder, the ultimate act of transgression and show of force, is also the means by which Querelle attempts to hide from himself his constantly fluctuating and continually diminishing sense of fragile identity. His knowledge of the dead men he has killed and buried, and the wealth he has stolen and hidden, represent to him not-wholly convincing evidence of his masculine superiority. The murders also act as a substitution and sublimation of his sexual desire for other men, which he continually dismisses, mocks and projects, as do all the other characters. Regardless of their own actions, sexual relationships with one another or tender feelings towards those they have partnered themselves with (macho stallion and police officer Mario thinks to himself, as he is kissed and caressed by hero-worshiping Dédé, "He's powdering me with mimosa blossoms"), the 'faggot, fairy, or auntie' is always someone other than themselves, and perpetually in disgrace.

Querelle also kills in search of a greater guilt than the one he feels in response to his emotional and sexual longing for other men, and to strike out in some fashion at the thing he most loathes within himself and desires in others.

Lone female character and brothel owner Madam Lysiane carries on a long-standing affair with Querelle's identical twin, heterosexually-identified Robert. But she becomes confused and irritated after meeting bisexual doppelganger Querelle, in whom she perceives the raw sexual power and totality that Querelle constantly searches for within himself but never finds. Lysiane lives a hazy, uncertain, and languorous existence, the feminine principal that she embodies frustrated and all but made extinct by the homosexual cloud that hangs permanently over the town.

Why are all of the men active (Norbert), self-identified (Theo, Lieutenant Seblon), latent or repressed homosexuals? Is Querelle de Brest nothing but a sustained homosexual fantasy? Is there any truth in its premises?

As Camille Paglia has said, "Whenever social controls fail, homosexuality will out," something that's a familiar fact in prison life and the history of British public schools. In the absence of women, heterosexually-identified men turn to one another for sexual satisfaction and affection with remarkable ease and completeness. It's an easily observable fact that it is the most physically masculine and virile men who enter easily into bisexual affairs (especially those who are either adventurous, fun-loving, self-secure or highly-sexed), having nothing to risk in terms of their masculine reputations by doing so, so unquestionable is their status as men in the eyes of other men. Like the cast of characters in Querelle, all they need is a pretext, a little shrewd knowledge of psychological game playing, and a quick tongue to obtain their ends.

Querelle de Brest is greatly slanted in favor of homosexuality, but beneath its surprisingly warm, human surface a paean to bisexuality--the natural key that could free men from the trap of their ensnarement and allow for emotional love among men as well as sexual freedom--can be sensed.