Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  On a late autumn afternoon in 1838, what may have been the brightest bolt of illumination ever to flash out of an overcast English sky struck Charles Darwin right upside the head, leaving him stunned by what Richard Dawkins has called “the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to a man.” At the very moment the great insight underlying natural selection came to him, Darwin was reading An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus.1 If the measure of an idea is its endurance through time, Thomas Malthus deserves his spot as Wikipedia’s eightieth Most Influential Person in History. More than two centuries later, one would be hard pressed to find a single student of economics unfamiliar with the simple argument put forth by the world’s first professor of economics. You’ll recall that Malthus argued that each generation doubles geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32…), but farmers can only increase food supply arithmetically, as new fields are cleared and productive capacity is added in a linear fashion (2, 3, 4, 5, 6…). From this crystalline reasoning follows Malthus’s brutal conclusion: chronic overpopulation, desperation, and widespread starvation are intrinsic to human existence. Not a thing to be done about it. Helping the poor is like feeding London’s pigeons; they’ll just reproduce back to the brink of starvation anyway, so what’s the point? “The poverty and misery which prevail among the lower classes of society,” Malthus asserts, “are absolutely irremediable.” Malthus based his estimates of human reproductive rates on the recorded increase of (European) population in North America in the previous 150 years (1650–1800). He concluded that the colonial population had doubled every twenty-five years or so, which he took to be a reasonable estimate of the rates of human population growth in general. In his autobiography, Darwin recalled that when he applied these dire Malthusian computations to the natural world, “it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work…”2 Science writer Matt Ridley believes Malthus taught Darwin the “bleak lesson” that “overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence,” convincing him that the secret of natural selection was embedded in the struggle for existence. Thus was Darwin’s brilliance sparked by the darkest Malthusian gloom.3 Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the mechanism underlying natural selection independently of Darwin, experienced his own flash of insight while reading the same essay between bouts of fever in a hut on the banks of a malarial Malaysian river. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, “When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.” Shaw lamented natural selection’s “hideous fatalism,” and complained of its “damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.”4

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Like us, chimps and bonobos are African great apes. Like all apes, they have no tail. They spend a good part of their lives on the ground and are both highly intelligent, intensely social creatures. For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that bonobos get a “reproductive payoff that compensates them for their wasteful approach to hitting the ovulatory target.” The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes. The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers. They never leave the trees, have little to no interaction with other gibbon groups, not much advanced intelligence to speak of, and infrequent, reproduction-only copulation. Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us. Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, “Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”4 Primates and Human Nature If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee. This ape appears to confirm every dire Hobbesian assumption about the inherent nastiness of pre-state existence. Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior. Once these chilling observations were published in the 1960s, theorists quickly proposed the “killer ape” theory of human origins. Primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson summarize this demonic theory in stark terms, finding in chimpanzee behavior evidence of ancient human blood-lust, writing, “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”5

• From Querelle (1953)

  Querelle was an exact replica of his brother. Robert, perhaps a little more taciturn, the other, a little hotter in temper ( nuances by which one could tell them from each other, except if one was a furious girl ) . It so happens that we ourselves acquired our sense of Querelle's existence on a particular day, we could give the exact date and hour of-when we decided to write this story (and that is a word not to be used to describe some adventure or series of adventures that has already been lived through ) . Little by little, we saw how Querelle-already contained in our flesh-was beginning to grow in our soul, to feed on what is best in us, above all on our despair at not being in any way inside him, while having him inside of ourselves. After this discovery of Querelle we want him to become the Hero, even to those who may despise him. Following, within ourselves, his destiny, his development, we shall see how he lends himself to this in order to realize himself in a conclusion that appears to be ( from then on ) in complete accordance with his very own will, his very own fate. The scene we are about to describe is a transposition of the 18 I JEAN GENET event which revealed Querelle to us. (We are sb11 referring to that ideal and heroic personage, the fruit of our secret loves. ) We must say, of that event, that it was of equal import to the Visitation. No doubt it was only long after it had taken place that we recognized it as being "big" with consequences, yet there and then we may be said to have felt a true Annunciatory thrill. Finaiiy: to become visible to you, to become a character in a novel, Querelle must be shown apart from ourselves. Only then will you get to know the apparent, and real, beauty of his body, his attitudes, his exploits, and their slow disintegration. The farther you descend toward the port of Brest, the denser the fog seems to grow. It is so thick at Recouvrance, after you cross the Penfeld bridge, that the houses, their walls and roofs appear to be afloat. In the alleys leading down to the quayside you find yourself alone. Here and there you encounter the dim, fringed sun, like a light from a half-open dairy doorway. On you go through that vaporous twilight, until confronted once more by the opaque matter, the dangerous fog that shelters : a drunken sailor reeling home on heavy legs-a docker hunched over a girl-a hoodlum, perhaps armed with a knife-usyoq-hearts pounding. The fog brought Gil and Roger closer together. It gave them mutual confidence and friendship.

• From Querelle (1953)

  examined every crack in the stone wall along the ditch . At one spot the brambles grew thicker and closer to the wall. Their roots were caught in the masonry. Querelle looked closer. The place appealed to him. No one had followed him there. No one was behind him, nor was there anyone on top of the wall. He was all alone in the old moat. \Vith his hands thrust deep into his pockets, to protect them from being scratched, he deliberately forced his way through the shrubs. Then, for a moment, he just stood at the foot of the wall, looking at the masonry. He discovered the stone he would have to pry loose in order to create a niche in the wall : a small sailcloth bag, containing some gold, rings, broken bracelets, earrings, and some Italian gold coins, did not need a lot of space. He stared at the wall for a long time. He hypnotized himself. Soon he had induced a form of sleep, of self-forgetfulness, and this allowed him to become part of his surroundings. He saw himself entering the wall, its every detail clearly apparent. His body penetrated it. There were eyes in the tips of his ten fingers; even all his muscles had eyes. Soon he became the wall, and remained so for a moment; he felt every detail of its stones alive in him, the cracks like wounds, invisible blood flowing from them, with his soul and his silent cries; he felt a spider tickling the minute cavern between two of his fingers, a leaf gently attach ing itself to one of h is damp stones. Finally, becoming aware of himself again, flattened against the wall and feeling its damp, rough contours, he made an effort to leave it gain, to step out of it, but as he did so he was marked by 1t forever, by this most particular spot near the ramparts, and i t would remain in his bodily memory and he would be certain to find it again in five or ten years' time. As he turned to leave he remembered, without giving it much thought, that there had been another murder in Brest. In the morning paper he had seen a photograph of Gil, and he had recognized the smiling singer. Aboard Le Vengeur, Qucrelle had lost nothing of his sulky arrogance and irritability. Despite his duties as a steward he 132 I JEAN GENET

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The neat rectangles of two-story, red brick barracks for political prisoners at Auschwitz—and the rows of wood sheds at the nearby Birkenau camp for the extermination of Jews—are built on a grid. 185 Birkenau means “Birch Wood.” The empty fields among the birch trees had once been farmland. The men’s camp at Birkenau, opposite a railroad siding, was almost a perfect square. Inside, the wood sheds were separated by packed earth. Each one was on its own rectangular island, oriented precisely east and west. Each shed was 36 feet wide and 116 feet long. Each had been built to house 550 prisoners. When more space was required, the number of men in each shed was increased to 744. Expansion did not require remodeling the structure. The men were simply packed closer together on the three tiers of square, wooden shelves on which they slept. Oriented north and south on each shelf, four bodies could lie where three once had. Other aspects of the camp’s design were less efficient initially. When spring thawed the waterlogged ground of Birkenau, frozen corpses rose to the surface. 186 Louis Boyar’s wife told her husband to redesign the street plan he had sketched. She wanted him to add parkway panels and parallel service roads to separate the residential streets from highway traffic. She told her husband that children like to play in the street, and how dangerous the streets were in Chicago where she grew up. When construction began in 1950, the Los Angeles Daily News said the new community was “scientifically planned.” 187 Louis Boyar took his engineering drawings to Los Angeles to meet with the county planning commission in 1950, shortly before the sale of the Montana Land Company was complete. The commissioners met in the Hall of Administration, a few hundred feet from where Colonel de Neve had opened his notebook and begun to draw. 188 The planning commission was responsible for approving Louis Boyar’s subdivision plan. The commissioners unrolled the thick bundle of blueprints that Boyar handed them. He pointed out the relevant sections. The first sheet of blueprints showed the street grid. Beneath it lay more sheets with plans of water lines, sewer laterals, and storm drains. 189 The county planning commission was not impressed with the original design of Ben Weingart’s shopping center. The commissioners felt that a pedestrian shopping mall surrounded by 10,580 parking spaces, each one nine feet wide, would probably fail. They allowed Weingart to build, but only on condition that the subdivision’s street grid break up the shopping center’s parking lots. If the center went bankrupt, its acres of parking could be subdivided for business lots without forcing the county to pay for streets. 190 The commissioners were more impressed with another design feature. The intersections of the main streets in the new suburb, each one exactly a mile apart, were to be developed as neighborhood shopping centers. There would be sixteen of them.

• From Querelle (1953)

  If one considers that seaports are the scene of frequent crimes, the association seems self-explanatory; but there are numerous stories from which we learn that the murderer was a man of the sea-either a real one, or a fake one-and if the latter is the case, the crime will be even more closely connected to the sea. The man who dons a sailor's outfit does not do so out of prudence only. His disguise relieves him from the necessity of going through all the rigamarole required in the execution of any preconceived murder. Thus we could say that the outfit does the following things for the criminal: it envelops him in clouds; it gives him the appearance of having come from that far-off line of the horizon where sea touches sky; with long, undulating and muscular strides he can walk across the waters, personifying 4 I JEAN GENET the Great Bear, the Pole Star or the Southern Cross; it (we are still discussing this particular disguise, as used by a criminal) it allows him to assume dark continents where the sun sets and rises, where the moon sanctions murder under roofs of bamboo beside motionless rivers teeming with alligators; it gives him the opportunity to act within the illusion of a mirage, to strike while one of his feet is still resting upon a beach in Oceania and the other propelling him across th� waters toward Europe; it grants him oblivion in advance, as sailors always "return from far away"; it allows him to consider landlubbers as mere vegetation. It cradles the criminal, it enfolds him-in the tight fit of his sweater, in the amplitude of his bell-bottoms. It casts a sleepspell on the already fascinated victim. We shall talk about the sailor's mortal flesh. We ourselves have witnessed scenes of seduction. In that very long sentence-beginning "it envelops him in clouds . . . ," we did indulge in facile poeticisms, each one of the propositions being merely an argument in favor of the author's personal proclivities. It is, admittedly, under the sign of a very singular inner feeling that we would set down the ensuing drama. We would also like to say that it addresses itself to in· verts. The notion of love or lust appears as a natural corollary to the notion of Sea and Murder-and it is, moreover, the notion of lave against nature. No doubt the sailors who are transported by ("animated by" would appear more exact, we'll see that later on) the desire and need to murder, apprenticed themselves first to the Merchant Navy, thus are veterans of long voyages, nour·

• From Querelle (1953)

  It is as if a fierce and devoted watchdog, ready to chew up your carotid artery, were following him around, trotting, at times, between the calves of his legs, so that the beast's Banks seem to blend with his thigh muscl�, ready to bite, always growling and snarling, so ferocious one expects to see it bite oil his balls. After these few excerpts picked (but not entirely at random) from a private j6umal which suggested his, character to us, we would like you to look upon the sailor Querelle, born from that solitude in which the officer himself remained isolated, as a singular figure comparable to the Angel of the Apocalypse, 11 I QUERELLE whose feet rest on the waters of the sea. By meditating op Querelle, by using, in his imagination, his most beautiful traits, his muscles, his rounded parts, his teeth, his guessed·at genitals, Lieutenant Seblon has turned the sailor into an angel (as we shall see, he describes him as "the Angel of Loneliness" ) , that is to say, into a being less and less human, crystalline, around whom swirl strands of a music based on the opposite of harmony-or rather, a music that is what remains after harmony has been used up, worn out, and in the midst of which this immense angel moves, slowly, unwitnessed, his feet on the water, but his head-or what should be his head-in a dazzle of rays from a supernatural sun. They themselves tending to deny it, the strangely close resemblance between the two brothers Querelle appeared attractive only to others. They met only in the evenings, as late as possible, in the one bed of a furnished room not far from where their mother had eked out her meager existence. They met again, perhaps, but somewhere so deep down that they could not see anything clearly, in their love for their mother, and certainly in their almost daily arguments. In the morning they parted without a word. They wanted to ignore each other. Already, at the age of fifteen, Querelle had smiled the smile that was to be peculiarly his for the rest of his life. He had chosen a life among thieves and spoke their argot. We'll try to bear this in mind in order to understand Querelle whose mental makeup and very feelings depend upon, and assume the form of, a certain syntax, a particular murky orthography. In his conversation we find turns like "peel him rawl" "boy, am I Hying," "oh, beat offl" "he better not show his ass in here again," '1Ie got burnt all right," "get that punk,'' "see the guy making tracks," "hey, baby, dig my hard-on," "suck me off," etc., expressions which are never pronounced clearly, but muttered in a kind of monotone and as if from within, without the speaker rea�ly "seeing" them. They are not projected, and thus Querelle's words never reveal him; they do not really define him 12 I JEAN GENET

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Genetically, the chimps and bonobos at the zoo are far closer to you and the other paying customers than they are to the gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, or anything else in a cage. Our DNA differs from that of chimps and bonobos by roughly 1.6 percent, making us closer to them than a dog is to a fox, a white-handed gibbon to a white-cheeked crested gibbon, an Indian elephant to an African elephant or, for any bird-watchers who may be tuning in, a red-eyed vireo to a white-eyed vireo. [image file=image_rsrc67Z.jpg] The ancestral line leading to chimps and bonobos splits off from that leading to humans just five to six million years ago (though inter-breeding probably continued for a million or so years after the split), with the chimp and bonobo lines separating somewhere between 3 million and 860,000 years ago.1 Beyond these two close cousins, the familial distances to other primates grow much larger: the gorilla peeled away from the common line around nine million years ago, orangutans 16 million, and gibbons, the only monogamous ape, took an early exit about 22 million years ago. DNA evidence indicates that the last common ancestor for apes and monkeys lived about 30 million years ago. If you picture this relative genetic distance from humans geographically, with a mile representing about 100,000 years since we last shared a common ancestor, it might look something like this: Homo sapiens sapiens: New York, New York. Chimps and bonobos are practically neighbors, living within thirty miles of each other in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Yorktown Heights, New York. Both just fifty miles from New York, they are well within commuting distance of humanity. Gorillas are enjoying cheese-steaks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Orangutans are in Baltimore, Maryland, doing whatever it is people do in Baltimore. Gibbons are busily legislating monogamy in Washington, D.C. Old-world monkeys (baboons, macaques) are down around Roanoke, Virginia. Carl Linnaeus, the first to make the taxonomic distinction between humans and chimps (in the mid-18th century), came to wish he hadn’t. This division (Pan and Homo) is now regarded as being without scientific justification, and many biologists advocate reclassifying humans, chimps, and bonobos together to reflect our striking similarities. Nicolaes Tulp, a well-known Dutch anatomist immortalized in Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson, produced the earliest accurate description of a nonhuman ape’s anatomy in 1641. The body Tulp dissected so closely resembled a human’s that he commented that “it would be hard to find one egg more like another.” Although Tulp called his specimen an Indian Satyr, and noted that local people called it an orangutan, contemporary primatologists who have studied Tulp’s notes believe it was a bonobo.2

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings. While the room was very old, the acoustics were perfect, and there was a balance and precision to the space that seemed almost magical. I studied the hundreds of Scandinavian teenagers seated in the hall while I was being introduced. I was impressed by how eager they appeared. I spoke for forty-five minutes to the strangely silent and attentive group of teens. I knew English wasn’t their first language and had real doubts about how much they were even following what I said, but when I finished, they erupted into vigorous applause. Their response actually startled me. They were so young but so interested in the plight of my condemned clients thousands of miles away. The headmaster joined me onstage to thank me and suggested to the students that they offer their own thanks with a song. The school had an internationally famous music program and student choir. The headmaster asked the choir students to stand wherever they were in the auditorium and briefly sing something. About fifty giggling kids stood up and looked around at each other. After a minute of uncertainty, a seventeen-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair stood on his chair and said something to his choirmates in Swedish. The students laughed, but they became more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line. Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Though bonobos surpass even chimps in the frequency of their sexual behavior, females of both species engage in multiple mating sessions in quick succession with different males. Among chimpanzees, ovulating females mate, on average, from six to eight times per day, and they are often eager to respond to the mating invitations of any and all males in the group. Describing the behavior of female chimps she monitored, primatologist Anne Pusey notes, “Each, after mating within her natal community, visited the other community while sexually receptive…They eagerly approached and mated with males from the new community.”14 Whatever the truth regarding relations between unprovisioned groups of chimpanzees in the wild, unconscious bias rings out in passages like this one: “In war as in romance, bonobos and chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different. When two bonobo communities meet at a range boundary at Wamba…not only is there no lethal aggression as sometimes occurs in chimps, there may be socializing and even sex between females and the enemy community’s males.”15 Enemy? When two groups of intelligent primates get together to socialize and have sex with each other, who would think of these groups as enemies or such a meeting as war? Note the similar assumptions in this account: “Chimpanzees give a special call that alerts others at a distance to the presence of food. As such, this is food sharing of sorts, but it need not be interpreted as charitable. A caller faced with more than enough food will lose nothing by sharing it and may benefit later when another chimpanzee reciprocates [emphasis added].”16 Perhaps this seemingly cooperative behavior “need not be interpreted as charitable,” but what’s the unspoken problem with such an interpretation? Why should we seek to explain away what looks like generosity among nonhuman primates, or other animals in general? Is generosity a uniquely human quality? Passages like these make one wonder why, as Gould asked, scientists are loath to see primate continuity in our positive impulses even as many clearly yearn to locate the roots of our aggression deep in primate past. Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female-centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. FRANS DE WAAL17 Because they live only in a remote area of dense jungle in a politically volatile country (Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire), bonobos were one of the last mammals to be studied in their natural habitat. Although their anatomical differences from common chimps were noted as long ago as 1929, until bonobos’ radically different behavior became apparent, they were considered a subgroup of chimpanzee—often called “pygmy chimps.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  These creatures travel in mixed groups of males, females, and young…. Individuals come and go between groups, depending on the food supply, connecting a cohesive community of several dozen animals. Here is a primal horde…. Sex is almost a daily pastime…. Females copulate during most of their menstrual cycles—a pattern of coitus more similar to women’s than any other creature’s…. Bonobos engage in sex to ease tension, to stimulate sharing during meals, to reduce stress while traveling, and to reaffirm friendships during anxious reunions. “Make love, not war” is clearly a bonobo scheme.21 Fisher then asks the obvious question, “Did our ancestors do the same?” She seems to be preparing us for an affirmative answer by noting that bonobos “display many of the sexual habits people exhibit on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, and behind apartment doors in New York, Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong.” “Prior to coitus,” she writes, “bonobos often stare deeply into each other’s eyes.” And Fisher assures her readers that, like human beings, bonobos “walk arm in arm, kiss each other’s hands and feet, and embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”22 It seems that Fisher, who shares our doubts about other aspects of the standard narrative, is about to reconfigure her arguments concerning the advent of long-term pair bonding and other aspects of human prehistory to better reflect these behaviors shared by bonobos and humans. Given the prominent role of chimpanzee behavior in supporting the standard narrative, how can we not include the equally relevant bonobo data in our conjectures concerning human prehistory? Remember, we are genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos. And as Fisher notes, human sexual behavior has more in common with bonobos’ than with that of any other creature on Earth. But Fisher balks at acknowledging that the human sexual past could have been like the bonobo present, explaining her last-minute 180-degree turnaround by saying, “Bonobos have sex lives quite different from those of other apes.” But this isn’t true because humans—whose sexual behavior is so similar to that of bonobos, according to Fisher herself—are apes. She continues, “Bonobo heterosexual activities also occur throughout most of the menstrual cycle. And female bonobos resume sexual behavior within a year of parturition.” Both these otherwise unique qualities of bonobo sexuality are shared by only one other primate species: Homo sapiens. But still, Fisher concludes, “Because pygmy chimps [bonobos] exhibit these extremes of primate sexuality and because biochemical data suggest [they] emerged as recently as two million years ago, I do not feel they make a suitable model for life as it was among hominids twenty million years ago [emphasis added].”23

• From Querelle (1953)

  A twin escutcheon of France and Brittany is the principal ornament of the majestic fa�de of the old penitentiary of Brest, whose architectural features derive from the days of sailing ships. Bracketed together, these two oval shields of stone are not Bat but convex, protuberant. They imply the presence of a sphere which the sculptor did not carve in its entirety, but 113 I QUERELLE which nevertheless lends these fragments the power of perfect form. They are the two halves of a fabulous egg, dropped, perhaps, by Leda after she had known the Swan, containing the germ of a power and wealth both natural and supernatural. No joke, no clumsy decorator's puerile fancy called them into being, but a tangible and terrestrial power resting on armed and moral force, despite all the fleurs-de-lis and the. ermine motifs. Had they been flat, they could never have possessed such fecund authority. In the morning, from very early on, they are gilded by the sun. Later on in the day the light slowly glides over the entire front of the building. \Vhen the galley convicts clanked out of the prison in their chains, they stopped in this paved courtyard which stretches down to the Arsenal buildings adjoining the Penfeld quays. Symbolically perhaps, and to render the captivity of the inmates more evident, yet making light of it, this yard is bordered by a row of huge stone posts1 connected to each other by chains, but chains heavier than any anchor chain, so heavy, in fact, tJlat they look soft. In that space, to the crack of bullwhips, the warders used to lick the gangs into shape, yelling their weirdly phrased commands. The sun descended slowly upon the granite of that harmonious fa�de, as noble and golden as that of a Venetian palazzo, and then it penetrated into the yard, shining on the cobblestones, the dirty and crushed toes, the bruised ankles of the convicts. Looking ahead, at the Penfeld quays, all was still shrouded in a golden and sonorous mist behind which one could vaguely perceive Recouvrance and its low buildings, and beyond that, quite close by, Le Goulet-the Brest Roads, already busy with boats and tall ships. From dawn on the sea was constructing its O\vn architecture of hulks, masts and rigging, under the still sleep-blurred eyes of the men chained together in pairs. The galley convicts stood shivering in their outfits of gray linen (known as ,.faggot" ) . They were served a weak and tepid broth, in wooden bowls. They were rubbing their eyes, trying to ungum the lashes sealed by the secretions of sleep. Their hands 114 I JEAN GENET

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Her face was perfect to him, and her embroidered gown had fallen deep into the crease between her legs so that he could see he shape of her sex beneath it. He drew out his sword, with which he had cut back all the vines outside, and gently slipping the blade between her breasts, let it rip easily through the old fabric. Her dress was laid open to the hem, and he folded it back and looked at her. Her nipples were a rosy pink as were her lips, and the hair between her legs was darkly yellow and curlier than the long straight hair of her head which covered her arms almost down to her hips on either side of her. He cut the sleeves away, lifting her ever so gently to free the cloth, and the weight of her hair seemed to pull her head down over his arm, and her mouth opened just a little bit wider. He put his sword to one side. He removed his heavy armor. And the he lifted her again, his left arm under her shoulders, his right had between her legs, his thumb on top of her pubis. She made no sound; but if a person could moan silently, then she mad such a moan with her whole attitude. Her head fell towards him, and he felt the hot moisture against his right had, and laying her down again, he cupped both of her breasts, and sucked gently on one and then the other. They were plumb and firm, these breasts. She'd been fifteen when the curse struck her. And he bit at her nipples, moving the breasts almost roughly so as to feel their weight, and then lightly he slapped them back and forth, delighting in this. His desire had been hard and almost painful to him when he had come into the room, and now it was urging him almost mercilessly. He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft, deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his left hand, he thrust his sex into her. He was holding her up as he did this, to gather her mouth to him, and as he broke through her innocence, he opened her mouth with his tongue and pinched her breast sharply. He sucked on her lips, he drew the life out of her into himself, and felling his seed explode within her, heard her cry out. And then her blue eyes opened. "Beauty!" he whispered to her. She closed her eyes, her golden eyebrows brought together in a little frown and the sun gleaming on her broad white forehead.

• From Querelle (1953)

  18 I JEAN GENET event which revealed Querelle to us. (We are sb11 referring to that ideal and heroic personage, the fruit of our secret loves.) We must say, of that event, that it was of equal import to the Visitation. No doubt it was only long after it had taken place that we recognized it as being "big" with consequences, yet there and then we may be said to have felt a true Annunciatory thrill. Finaiiy: to become visible to you, to become a character in a novel, Querelle must be shown apart from ourselves. Only then will you get to know the apparent, and real, beauty of his body, his attitudes, his exploits, and their slow disintegration. The farther you descend toward the port of Brest, the denser the fog seems to grow. It is so thick at Recouvrance, after you cross the Penfeld bridge, that the houses, their walls and roofs appear to be afloat. In the alleys leading down to the quayside you find yourself alone. Here and there you encounter the dim, fringed sun, like a light from a half-open dairy doorway. On you go through that vaporous twilight, until confronted once more by the opaque matter, the dangerous fog that shelters: a drunken sailor reeling home on heavy legs-a docker hunched over a girl-a hoodlum, perhaps armed with a knife-us yoq-hearts pounding. The fog brought Gil and Roger closer together. It gave them mutual confidence and friendship. Though they were hardly aware of it as yet, this privacy instilled in them a hesitation, a little fearful, a little tremulous, a charm ing emotion akin to that in children when they walk along, hands in pockets, touching, stumbling over each other's feet. "Shit-watch your step! Keep going." "Th at must be the quay. Never mind 'em." "And why not? You got the jitters?" "N b t t' '"' o, u some 1mes . . . Now and again they sensed a woman walking by, saw the steady glow of a cigarette, guessed at the outline of a couple locked in an embrace. "Howzat ... ? Sometimes what?"

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens—not even the famously libidinous bonobo. Although we and the bonobo both average well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of intercourse per birth—way ahead of any other primate—their “acts” are far briefer than ours. Pair-bonded “monogamous” animals are almost always hyposexual, having sex as the Vatican recommends: infrequently, quietly, and for reproduction only. Human beings, regardless of religion, are at the other end of the libidinal spectrum: hypersexuality personified. Human beings and bonobos use eroticism for pleasure, for solidifying friendship, and for cementing a deal (recall that historically, marriage is more akin to a corporate merger than a declaration of eternal love). For these two species (and apparently only these two species), nonreproductive sex is “natural,” a defining characteristic.5 Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound “animalistic”? It shouldn’t. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more “human” than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more “animal” than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting “human,” while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, “acting like an animal.” Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of upright, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang “rock and roll.” But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock ’n’ roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase “hadn’t meant the name of a music, it meant ‘to fuck.’ ‘Rock,’ by itself, had pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least.” By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys “either didn’t know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Was this the meaning of the odd conversation that had passed between the Prince and her father and mother? No, they could not have served like this. She felt an odd mingling of torrential jealousy and comfort. It was a ritual, this treatment. Others had suffered it before. It was fixed and she was all the more helpless. She felt herself soften as she thought of it. But her Lord, the gray-eyed one, was speaking: "Now, for your second lesson. You have seen the Princesses who are tributes here. Now look to your right and you shall see the Princes." Beauty looked to the other side of the hall as best she could through the shifting figures about her, and there, on another high ledge, in the ghastly shadow-light of the fire, stood a row of naked young men, all of them in the same position. Their heads were bowed, their hands behind their necks, and they were all of them very handsome to look at, as beautiful each in his own way as the young women on the other side, but their great difference lay in their sex, for their organs were erect and hard to a one, and Beauty could not take her eyes off this sight, for they appeared to her even more vulnerable and subservient. She knew she had made a little noise again, because she felt the Lord's finger on her lips, and she sensed almost from the air itself that she was now being left by the Lords and Ladies. Only one pair of hands remained and these she felt touching the tenderest flesh around her anus. She was so frightened by this -- for almost no one else had touched her there -- that involuntarily she struggled again, only to have the gray-eyed Lord stroke her face again gently. There was a great commotion in the room. Beauty could just catch the aroma of cooking food, and dishes being brought in, and now she saw that most of the Lords and Ladies were seated at the tables, and there was much talking and lifting of cups, and somewhere a group of musicians had begun to play a low rhythmic music. It was full of horns and tambourines and the strumming of thick strings, and Beauty saw that the long file of naked men and women on either side was moving. "But what are they?" she wanted to ask. "To what purpose?"

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special, too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps nothing is more personal by implication and hence more relevant than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the closing moments of Lolita , and he speaks for more than one of Nabokov’s characters. It was the major émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich who first pointed out, more than fifty years ago, that whatever their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the artist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the creative process. 28 Khodasevich died in 1939, and until the 1960s, his criticism remained untranslated. If it had been available earlier, Nabokov’s English and American readers would have recognized his deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of Lolita , where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not obscured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But what may have been a brilliant formulation in the thirties should be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a commonplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about itself (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau, Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Fellini’s film 8½ —to name but a baker’s dozen). What is not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of involution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strategies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations. 3. THE ARTIFICE OF LOLITA Although Lolita has received much serious attention (see this edition’s Selected Bibliography ), the criticism which it has elicited usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommodate the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described in the Notes to this edition, makes Lolita one of the few supremely original novels of the century.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O V I I In significant connection with the Empire comes the treatment of the Redcmption, the chief theological discourse in the Paradiso. Justinian and the other spirits vanish with hymns of triumph. Dante would fain ask a question, but when he raises his head to speak, he is overcome by awe, and bends it down again. Beatrice reads his thoughts, and bids him give good heed to her discourse. After man’s fall, the Word of God united to himself in his own person the once pure now contaminated human nature. That human nature bore on the cross the just penalty of its sin, but that divine Person suffered by the same act the supremest outrage. At the act of justice God rejoiced and heaven opened. At the outrage the Jews exulted and the earth trembled; and vengeance fell upon Jerusalem. But why this method of redemption? Only those who love can understand the answer. God’s love ungrudgingly reveals itself, and whatever it creates without intermediary is immortal, free, and god-like. Such Was man till made unlike God by sin, and so disfranchised only to be reinstated by a free pardon, or by full atonement. But man cannot humble himself below what he is entitled to, as much as he had striven to exalt himself above it; and therefore he cannot make atonement. So God must reinstate man; and since “all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth,” God proceedeth both by the way of mercy, and by the way of truth or justice, since by the incarnation man was made capable of reinstating himself. Beatrice further explains that the elements and their compounds are made not direct by God, but by angels, who also draw the life of animal and plant out of compound matter that has the potentiality of such life in it; whereas first matter, the angels, and the heavens are direct creations of God; and so were the bodies of Adam and Eve, which were therefore immortal, save for sin; as are therefore the bodies of the redeemed who are restored to all the privileges of unfallen man. “HOSANNAH! Holy God of Sabaoth! making lustrous by thy brightness from above the blessed fires of these kingdoms!” So, revolving to its own note, I saw that being sing, on whom the twin lights double one another: 1 and it and the others entered on their dance, and like most rapid sparks, veiled them from me by sudden distance. I, hesitating, said, “Speak to her, speak to her,” within myself, “speak to her,” I said, “to my lady who slaketh my thirst with the sweet drops”; but that reverence which all o’ermastereth me, though but by Be or Ice, 2 again down-bowed me, as a man who slumbers.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  As we move along from bottom left to upper right with her father Chuck’s car, we can read embedded in the landscape: “Not All Scars Are Visible.” Soldier’s Heart ‘s fantastic opening main motif, “Not All Scars Are Visible.” RED RIBBONS This page: some of the many instances of Tyler’s “red ribbons.” Red ribbons weave through the book, with German text here, signifying rivers of blood here, paths between parents and children here, enclosing scenes and characters, being used as panel borders, and also manifesting as Chuck’s suspenders, which are echoed as crisscrossing flowers on the back of Carol’s jacket, subtly reminding you that the generations are constantly connected in this story of wounds and trauma. Soldier’s Heart does so many smart and powerful visual things that it’s impossible to catalogue them all, but they add to the complete personal, intimate quality of this book about that most global experience—World War II. Carol by Carol EPILEPTIC by David B. David B. has crafted a graphically complex, challenging, and visually sophisticated style. His book Epileptic (2006, Pantheon Graphic), about growing up with his severely epileptic brother, is rich with visual allusions to history and myth. The drawings in Epileptic are bold and striking and heavy with symbolism and every line is perfect. VISUAL SYMBOLISM David B. (real name: Pierre-François Beauchard) is someone for whom imagination and reality are closely linked. As a child, he imagines typhoons are coming to get him at night, and believes his brother’s seizures are also typhoons. “I really wanted to work out the drawings. How can I draw an epileptic attack, for example. Is it possible to draw that with a pencil and a piece of paper?” he said in a 2005 interview with Time magazine. Pierre-François by David DRAWING THE INTERNAL WORLD Like Raina Telgemeier’s style, B.’s visual style is meticulous and consistent, in part because he is trying to render a cosmology. I think visual storytelling for him is a bridge between the conscious and unconscious, and I imagine that mastering the craft of it gets him closer to that other side and lets him experience it more fully. The drawing below shows just one cosmology in his book, which is filled also with private myths and subconscious symbols, all meticulously rendered. The experience of penetrating and traversing that internal landscape is one he shares with his readers through his drawings and storytelling. Epileptic moves forward as his family searches for decades for a solution to his brother’s disease. He and his brother are fascinated as children by war, and spend hundreds of hours drawing warfare together. They are each at constant battle with inner demons. David’s imagination expands as he reads occult magazines and he begins to believe in ghosts, devils, and other spirits. The child who was drawing silly battle scenes becomes the artist who chooses to depict his brother’s epilepsy as mythic—an enormous, patterned dragon that the family is constantly battling against.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Angeles River. Bouton knew the residents of Long Beach, about five miles away, needed a reliable source of water. He knew the new city’s wells went down only eighty feet. The wells ran nearly dry in summer. The Long Beach wells were on the wrong side of the underground barrier between the “artesian belt” and the ocean. Bouton’s property was on the right side. 258 General Bouton brought in his first producing well at 339 feet. He immediately sold stock in a new water company. Most of the company’s stock was bought by the owners of the Terminal Railroad. Bouton began another well, a few dozen feet away. When the second well came in at 750 feet, the force of the water ripped the two-inch-thick iron cap from the wellhead. Cobblestones and gravel rocketed out of the twelve-inch casing. For days, the jet of water stood eighty feet above the well mouth. The well shot four million gallons of water a day into the air, turning the well site into a temporary lake. Special rail excursions from Los Angeles brought gawkers to watch the water gushing from Bouton’s well. Local papers said the column of water, shining with the afternoon sun behind it, could be seen from as far away as Whittier, ten miles north. 259 The water from General Bouton’s well was slightly yellow and tasted of hydrogen sulfide. Bouton said the yellow color came from the buried peat beds through which the water flowed. The peat made the water naturally soft. He also said the water was well known in Los Angeles as a cure for kidney and rheumatic diseases. He said that Professor E. W. Hilgard and Professor R. H. Loughbridge, chemists from the state university at Berkeley, had examined the water.