Querelle de Brest (In Progress?)

Often the idea of murder evokes the sea, and sailors. This idea is not, however, like an image projected on the canvas of the mind, but rather the sea, the sailors unfurl it like waves. If the ports are the repeated screenings of this violence, that has been easily explained, and we will not reiterate the numerous histories in which you have read, if they are true, that the assassin was a captain – and if not, still the two are linked more intimately. After all, it is not from prudence alone that a man dons the sailor’s cloth. The disguise is a part of that ceremony whose jurisdiction is tribal atrocity. We say this first of all: that it envelops the criminal in clouds, detaches him from the horizontal line that links sea and sky; that in crowding, muscled undulations it pushes him to digress the ocean, like the Great Bear, the North Star, the Southern Cross; that it – but we refer always to this disguise, this criminality – lifts him up and places him on shadowy continents whence the sun flies and whither it roosts, under moons of bamboo clusters, witnesses to murder, and near the immobile rivers where alligators swim; that it allows him to act on a mirage, and he thrusts his arm, though one of his feet be resting still on the watery beach -- the other is rushing above its surface towards Europe; in advance and already it permits him to forget, since the sailor “returns from afar”, lets him believe that the terrestrial are nothing more than weeds. It bathes the criminal. It envelops him in the straightened pleats of his jacket, the capaciousness of his pants. It cradles him. It cradles its victim, who is already hypnotized. We will speak of the sailor's "mortal look". We have attended his seductions. Indeed, in the extremely long phrase beginning: "it envelops the criminal in clouds..." we abandoned ourselves to this facile poesy of the verb, each proposition serving only to amplify suspicions of authorial complaisance. It is in this way, that is, beneath the sign of a very peculiar interior motion, that we will present the drama unfolding in these pages. We would like to mention, also, that it is addressed to homosexuals. When thinking of murder and of the sea, the idea of love and passion suggests itself quite naturally -- and moreover, the idea of a love contrary to nature.