And I Write Amid the Disorder — Patrick Autréaux

A power haunts the margins, repeating through the day-to-day quiet. It disturbs us, stubbornly reminding us that our lives are an illusion: fleeting moments of stability and love. Sometimes it insinuates itself in our affairs delightfully, through perversion or an inability to contain it. It hypnotises us and puts the diamond collar of fantasy around our necks. Hence the urgent need to disarm its ambush: so that no doubt can contaminate us, and we can preserve, with as few cracks as possible, our belief in permanence.

As for those who embody, as though it were their own skin, this taciturn irony and disavowal of naked things, it is a prison, a cell or a dungeon, an asylum or the condescension of suspiciously judgmental diagnoses. And for those who are gagged by their social standing, generally before they are silenced, anger concentrates, pressure mounts, gnawing then turbulent, before exploding into a desire to punch walls, hammer at them, and then dance. Transgressing the law is the first barrier through which they have to break, becoming therefore escape artists. That is how he fell under the spell of the waltz, caught by “the drunkenness of the turn in which you leave for one job and then, carried away by the panic of the whirlwind, do ten or fifteen more.” 

Nothing is obvious at first. The victim he is going to abuse by breaking in on is a voiceless absentee, an as-yet unconscious victim, who, unforced, is made to surrender as though it were nothing: you just grab what’s there, in the wardrobe the living room the bedroom or on the bookshelves, in anxious haste, and with the childlike joy of pilfering what nobody is protecting. 

And when the owner, more so a screw than a landlord, proud of the power that the belief in the possession of objects confers, opens their eyes or comes home, they notice nothing, or almost nothing, only the simple observation of a strange I-don’t-know-what, a clue that has yet to dispel the mystery—but where did I put that book that ring my wallet, I don’t understand, everything goes missing here. So many little phrases uttered by the innocent before awareness of the perpetrated wrongdoing hits, and hard in the gut, before the law gets involved lending a voice that demands justice and punishment. A voice draped in its own legitimacy, but more shameful, perhaps, than that of the crooks themselves. After all, there was a someone to write The Thief’s Journal, but has anyone ever read the diaries of those preyed upon? 

Wouldn’t, then, the awakening guilt not feel like the cry was based on a culpability denied? You steal too, you who possess, the thief says to their victim: so we are brothers in loss. They are nothing of the sort, however. Or, if they are brothers, enemies. The origin of the world again, only this time through a forced lock. But before the cry resounds, before the deferred blow of the thief strikes (being that the theft is perhaps less brutal than the victim’s awareness on discovering their cozy home has been rifled through, felt up and frisked unbeknownst to them), before the theft has been laid bare or, let’s say, before the deflowering (as the house left to itself is a mute virgin, offered to strapping young lads with crowbars, and tattooed sailors; or perhaps she sleeps eternally, and the crime is the “rape of death” in which Genet believed as he loved his handsome Bulkaen), we will have advanced with the trembling thief, the transom threader, straddler of unshut windows, picker of guileless locks, scathing breaker of bolts, diamond cutter of glass, plunderer of precious books, Fêtes galantes and other jewels in verse: we hone our skills to pass between raindrops, to steal away, to slip by, until suddenly caught red-handed, confused in the face of our petty crimes, when we feel placed on our shoulder “the hand which comes from behind” (Note 1) and brings about the “fall into the abyss” (Note 2), that which signals we have been hit by “the ineluctable” (Note 3). And so, the invisible walls through which we had passed with such ease surround us again with their embrace of reinforced concrete; caught in a trap, we can no longer escape the words of the gavel: the judge will soon have decided, six months, a year or worse. Straight to La Santé, Les Tournelles, Fontevrault. A scrapper’s cell or sometimes solitary confinement.

It is there, in that retreat, in a purifying reclusion, romanticizing invisibility is conferred, so Genet wrote to little Franz; there, another door is unhinged, a vision more sensational than freedom: the mug of a rough and divine child, the approach of an angel who cuts screws’ throats or buries knives, a former boarder at Mettray or a condemned man, borne by a diary as are martyrs on the pages of a missal. And as horizon, as though the Virgin had appeared, rose-scented and crowned with flowers, a pale and gentle halo like a petal, free of aphids or ants around the calyx, emerges: an almost mythical window, that of the deaths of criminals admired as saints, untouchable, and anointed with the seminal holy chrism of pleasure—not through a taste for blasphemy but for love. It is there, an opening hidden in the wall, that we must patiently discern a writing which has not yet fallen into the womb and which an invisible angel holds between its fingers like a promise, an inner voice, a felt word. 

At the end of his life, Genet liked to repeat that he had needed prison to write his books. We know what a natural liar he was, capable of saying the opposite of what, to him, had become his legend. Little matter. Let’s leave him to the legend he invented for himself, and which we have reconstructed so as to have him appear before us. A legend into which he must have slipped a little truth, as always, when he confided to François Sentein, Little Franz: “I don’t write anymore. It disgusts me. I’ll write when I’m in choky.” And then, once locked up: “My intentions are to work hard, and to finish my novel here.” Being complicit, we believe him when he lies more beautifully in old age in front of journalists and cameras. Let’s believe him even if he isn’t telling the whole truth, even if he complained to Little Franz: “Life here isn’t as fun as you lot commonly think. This is my 3rd fight. And I write amid the disorder, my papers upset every half hour, if not by the cells being searched, by guys beating each other up! It can’t go on like this”, and further: “And the hassle in the cell where every lag’s an idiot, and worse”, “Oh, my honest friend, what thick cunts are in the nick!”: it is true that idiocy makes it harder to concentrate than chaos.

By prison, I indeed mean prison, and not that erotic or romantic euphemism which some might imagine, without the smells, without the noise or promiscuity, without the walls, without the oozing or the heat. “Prison is the worst misery that can befall those with characters drunk on the taste of freedom—I said prison and not solitude,” he wrote in Miracle of the Rose. Prison is a misery which cuts us off, or threatens to, from the solitude in which worlds are created or by which windows multiply.

Having been locked up against your will once in your life, truly locked up, whether in a camp, a detention centre, by the passion of love, by drugs, by sickness or in a rotting bedroom at the bottom of the world, in a ghetto which nothing allows you to leave, only once ever locked up against your will, you are left with a scar which shows up at random and often when you don’t want it to. This scar sketches out a kind of constraint without walls, a formidable mental prison, as it may have no end, a stigmata or skin which doubles the ramparts and penetrates the soul, cutting off the surrounding world, suffocating the sounds and sweetness of what is beyond, and transforming us into straightjacketed outsiders, who are difficult to reach.

But strangely, this prison sometimes allows arrow slits to pierce the walls, through which words and images slip. For some, they become a womb, the black womb of art.

A scar, then, which shows that instead of enclosure we have felt an intensity similar to that of the desire which begins to glow when we are constrained and shackled, and which transforms all our strength into a deferred power, into words that seep like sweat, into secretions that flow, a mark that penetrates us so intimately that we keep its mould imprinted on us. It is then that we begin to cherish our confinement—imagining great wings which trace tattoos under the sun.

Naturally rebounding, it is also this black womb which gives birth to new ways to burn. Little by little, we become entirely made of coal and are consumed. We end up living only in the enclosure where we bake in the heat of words and remarks, where we cook and cook again, where we rehash and remake, where we recount, and smoke the strange tobacco of sentences we refine, adhesives that we sniff and chew. We come to have wild eyes, we bury our noses in bags and never manage to breathe the fresh blue air again. It has to stop. The womb that offered us freedom within has delivered us poison, and a space which gradually closes in. We lock ourselves away in order to escape prison; we deprive ourselves of freedom so as to find it, and we rarely, if ever, enjoy it. We want so badly to get back to the open ocean and get a taste of travelling. We rest in place. Freedom shuts us out. Like the old cup-and-ball toy, we are tethered to a spike, a grotesque and pathetic, decapitated head being led in procession toward its tomb. 

We become a guy who “is preoccupied by transforming this moment into a volume, into several volumes” (Note 4)—a writer who, henceforth, is trapped inside a choky without walls.

For me, it was a sudden awareness, and ultimate adjournment, of immanent death which shut me away and drove me to write. Since then, I haven’t stopped: I have scribbled, I have noted, it has flowed, and when it does no longer, I want to squeeze the breast to make the milk-blood spring again, because we have to force the stream, we have to feed the larva which still wants to grow and, from book to book, demands its meagre fair. 

Then one night I was turned out. A conversation dragged me from my dungeon and sent me toward another world. The other world, however, was that of a thief who had just broken in through my window, and it had an immediate effect: I started to get hard confronted with this harsh reality, which hit me calmly in the face, like a cock for which my mouth had grown impatient.

In a breeze of warm air, the spirit of Genet leapt through the window and reminded me of past favours, me who had previously read him and left him to his celebrations. Whispering to me “you must know how to hear that which goes unspoken,”  he shattered my life’s small, monastic order, and presented a bitter, sad, exciting and funny scene at the heart of my neighbourhood, my part of town, Paris, the whole world even, which made it unforgettable. 

I was shut away in my room, a solid and self-appointed isolation which gave not a day of respite, and while I was looking at the aligned slices of all the disorder my books contained, I was suddenly struck by a little dialogue coming from the balcony next to my window, which only let in a sliver of light, and that day was offering up a domestic scene.   

I was suddenly electrified, me, poor vestal virgin, abstinent nun, hearing a rollicking, humiliating voice, and I started to shake overhearing something I couldn’t identify: the pimp and his harlot, or the gigolo and his old mark. “Lend us three hundred, fuck’s sake what a miser,” then after an inaudible exchange, “you don’t piss and moan when you want to suck me off”. A timeless scene, and one which only indiscretion or promiscuity could present, at least in that the gigolo had, from a taste for glamour, opened the door and called out loudly from the balcony to his old man. “Don’t shout so loud,” the other said, “shut the door.” “Don’t order me around, understood? What do I give a shit about your neighbours? Come on, let me crash at yours, you knew what would happen if you hit on a doxy.” 

The fact that this neighbour, who I had never suspected of liking to caress the balls of beautiful men (because the stud was handsome, a tad irritable and bursting with that energy which promises bracing fisticuffs—and I must confess that, immediately aroused by the brusqueness of his voice, my penis began to fixate on the words I had heard and demand I jerk it off it with base reveries), was sharing his life with a rent boy picked up in another black womb, the darkroom of a sex club, stunned me. Discovering that lifeless drunk was in fact a john with a weakness for the inconvenient lad I thought was his kid (as under the anaesthetic naivety in which I had been plunged from years of writing, every time I had crossed him in the hallway, I had taken him for the prodigal son); discovering that near simpleton was an old queen; imaging him on his knees before his hunk of a boy and delicately taking his soft organ, feeling it grow, while the other smoked and texted on his phone, occasionally declaiming “Put some neck into it!” (a very plausible, if here imaginary, scene), it was astounding. And all the more so because it awoke an unease which came from a reoccurring dream, wherein a beautiful man, a pimp who hid that he was one, offered me his cock. Because between these scenes, one overheard, the other oneiric, an electric arch started to flicker, transforming the corner of the courtyard where I lived with an explosive revelation. Thus, through the effect of this coming-and-going between what was being said outside and the screen of the wall papered in books from which my troubling dream perhaps emerged, suddenly I saw opening within my voluntary seclusion, less a window than a hidden corridor, wherein a labyrinth was revealed.

It was that misunderstanding that made me shudder the most, because to my fright, I had made the story of an old man shackled to a young one (a couple allowing for contradictory and sacrilegious projections) into an incestuous relationship. In the lightning speed they had passed from father-son to lovers, I was shaken by an unexpected rumbling. The prison in which my writing was striping me bare was leading me, unquestionably, to incongruous comparisons, to shady areas, shadier even than those from which my writing had made me retreat: because the pimp from my dreams always turned out to be my father, and his sex had a stubborn magnetism. I was rock hard with my mouth full of that cock, but, as soon as I woke up, I would shrivel like a man electrocuted. 

Now, observing the effects of this nasty shock, like a fish which appears in a twinkling from the only angle which makes its scales glow, in this incestuous confusion, I saw the living Genet standing before me, descending from the bookshelves, smoking and with a serious look (like that of the old neighbour), ironic and almost haughty (like the handsome doxy), both at once, certain of his status as a martyr and also a great unknown, an unattainable and dishonest summit, as fascinating and unstable as a volcano covered in snow. 

It was as a result of this short-circuit that I understood Genet in a different way, and also understood what I had missed in many of his contemporary commentators, who were fond of the committed author but almost embarrassed by his audacity. Because in the depths of the courtyard, at once in broad daylight and concealed, these neighbours and I were hiding unutterable secrets, unutterable dreams, which had suddenly become warrior phalluses spurring us on: struck by our own desires. 

When it comes down to it, transgressors need the aristocratic discretion of mafiosi to become saboteurs of dreams, laws and language itself; which is to say (as it was, no doubt, the starkness of writing that made me sensitive to these miniscule, fornicating big bangs) to slyly become a writer who fucks with literature, as our blasted Jeannot said, and returns it to its primal scenes, loving it the hard way, but always ready to shove it back into some womb or other black hole to implode in ecstatic coincidence.  

***

1 Interview with Nigel Williams, in L’Ennemi déclaré

2 Ibid.

3  Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs

4  Interview with Antoine Bourseiller, in L’Ennemi déclaré

Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge (USA). The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Verdier). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His novel L’Epoux was published by Gallimard in 2025, soon to be followed by Avenue des Amériques later this year.

Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English at UIT Books (USA), and his fiction and essays have appeared in Asymptote, AGNI, Socrates on the Beach, The Kenyon Review (forthcoming, Winter 2026) and elsewhere.

Tobias Ryan is a writer, translator and editor from Wales, UK, living in France. His writing and translations have appeared in Asymptote, TOLKA Journal, Hyperion Magazine and elsewhere. A novella, GLANTZ was published by Equus Press in 2025. Alongside Yanina Spizzirri, he is Editor-in-Chief of minor literature[s].