SOURCE: Flieger, Jerry Aline. “Dream, Humor and Power in Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.” French Forum 9, no. 1 (January 1984): 69-83.

In the following essay, Flieger examines the sense of “criminal gaiety” in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.

I

En un clin d'œil je vis un enfant isolé, porté par son oiseau de fer, semant la mort en riant.

—Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs¹

In Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, Sartre reads Genet's first novel [Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs] as a dream that contains its own awakening.² For Sartre, this waking dream begins as an infantile act of defiance directed against a world which has rebuffed the writer-criminal, a regression to the childish narcissism of the onanist. Indeed, Sartre suggests that it is only because the dreamer's self-induced reveries of pleasure remain incomplete that he must finally turn to the social act of writing to finish the job: by seeking to prolong and heighten his masturbatory pleasure, the dreamer is...