companied them from a distance. I knew that my place was in their midst, not because I was one of them, but because their shrill voices, their cries, their extravagant gestures had, it seemed to me, no other aim but to try to pierce the shell of the world's contempt.

Faulkner's style has been likened to viewing an old-time flickering silent movie and with the reels not in sequence but all crazily mixed up. Genet even outdoes Faulkner in this respect, for with his (seemingly artless) rambling first-person accounting he can abruptly jump from one thing to another only because writing one scene has reminded him of another through a similarity of words (and often not even with that connection). Take, for instance, the following passage, pure magic, in which a tube of vaseline, from a sign of abjection, becomes a shield, a secret grace, precious, then "unctuous," from that to an oil lamp, then a night-light by a coffinwhich recalls an old hag he once saw under a lamp-post he fancies his dead mother:

I was dismayed when, one evening, while searching me after a raid-I am speaking of a scene which preceded the one with which this book begins-the astonished detective took from my pocket, among other things, a tube of vaseline. We dared joke about it since it contained mentholated vaseline. The whole record-office, and I too at times, though painfully, writhed and laughed at the following:

'You take it in the nose?' 'Watch out you don't catch cold. You wouldn't want to give your guy whooping-cough.'

I translate but lamely, in the language of a Paris hustler, the malicious irony of the vivid and venomous Spanish phrases. It concerns a tube of vaseline, one

one

of whose ends was partially rolled up. Which amounts to saying that it had been put to use. Amidst the elegant objects taken from the pockets of the men who had been picked up in the raid, it was the very sign of abjection, of that which is concealed with the greatest of care, but yet the sign of a secret grace which was soon to save me from contempt. When I was locked up in a cell, and as soon as I had sufficiently regained my spirits to rise above the misfortune of my arrest, the image of the tube of vaseline never left me. The policemen had shown it to me victoriously, since they could thereby flourish their revenge, their hatred, their contempt. But lo and behold! this dirty, wretched object whose purpose seemed to the world-to that concentrated delegation of the world which is the police and, above all, that particular gathering of Spanish police, smelling of garlic, sweat and oil, but prosperous-looking, stout of muscle and strong in their moral assurance utterly vile, became extremely precious to me. Unlike many objects to which my tenderness gives distinction, this one was not at all haloed; it lay on the table, a little grey leaden tube of vaseline, broken and livid, whose astonishing discreetness, and its essential correspondence with all the commonplace things in the record-office of a prison (the bench, the inkwell, the regulations, the scales, the odor), would, through the general indifference, have distressed me, had not the very content of the tube, perhaps because of its unctous character, by bringing to mind an oil lamp, made me think of a night-light beside a coffin.

In describing it, I recreate the little object, but the following

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