Spectral Mourning and Carceral Masculinities: Jean Genet's Miracle de la rose

Abstract

This article will argue that Jean Genet's 1946 novelistic memoir of his adolescence at the boys' agricultural colony of Mettray, Miracle de la rose , is a mournful elaboration of the abjections of discourses on the boys' penal colonies. In the seductive tones of nostalgia, Miracle evokes pleasures — such as the sweetness of submission, the excitement of virile display, and the intensities of pederastic love — figured as deviant and unmournable within the discursive field of the boys' penal colonies. In addition, Miracle explicitly thematizes both the queering effects of such remembrance and the masculinizing rewards of forgetting, suggesting that certain masculinities are built on the melancholic foreclosure of ambiguous adolescent affects. In so doing, I argue, it explores what Derrida terms 'spectral mourning', an alternative relation to memory that, in Miracle , is constitutive both of the gender of the elder pederast within a carceral couple and a 'feminine' form of writing associated with poetry, fantasy, and 'le merveilleux'. Whereas Derrida describes spectrality as a supremely ethical relation to the past, Miracle shows spectral mourning to be less the result of an ethical choice than of an inability to mourn the abject conditions of adolescence in the boys' penal colonies.