But Genet cannot resist scandalizing his reader who, if homosexual, must also be prude and a hypocrite-indeed, Baudelaire's “hypocritical reader, brother, counterpart.” Thus Genet can write, after a violent scene, that he trusts the reader “to complete, with his very own malaise, the contradictory and twisted windings of our own vision of the murder.” Not only is the reader made an unwilling accomplice to Genet's fiction, he is also bullied and confused by the narrator. At the beginning of his novel, he announces that he is writing for homosexuals. Genet is in an awkward, dishonest-no, an ambiguous relationship with his reader and his characters. We are treated to many excerpts from the Lieutenant's diary, and Genet mentions parenthetically: “While the other characters are incapable of lyricism, which we are using in order to recreate them more vividly within you, Lieutenant Seblon himself is solely responsible for what flows from his pen.” What flows are poetic effusions celebrating desire and masochism-and Querelle. Whereas Querelle and all but one of the other adult men in the book are heterosexual and stupid, Lieutenant Seblon is clandestinely homosexual and as brilliant, devious and eloquent as Genet himself.

The charming little queens who graced “Our Lady of the Flowers” have disappeared, but they have been replaced by the more complex Lieutenant Seblon, naval officer who maintains a severely masculine exterior in order to disguise the fits of ecstasy he rehearses in daydreams about his steward, Querelle. He wrote “Querelle” in the late 1940's after he had finished “Our Lady of the Flowers,” “Miracle of the Rose,” “The Thief's Journal” and “Funeral Rites.” In many ways “Querelle” is the purest and the most austere enactment of those romantic situations that Genet's envy of handsome young men caused.

Jean Genet's five novels have secured him international recognition as one of the masters’ of modern French fiction.

Querelle jean genet