To the priests, the soldiers, the judges
to those people
who educate, instruct and govern men
I dedicate
these pages of Murder and Blood
CONTENTS
Title
Dedication
Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden
Frontispiece
My Mission
First Part
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Second Part: The Torture Garden
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Copyright
Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’s
TORTURE GARDEN
By Brian Stableford.
Octave Mirbeau was born in Europe’s year of revolutions, 1848. From his family he inherited the conservative bourgeois values of the rural middle class, which were to have been solidly cemented by the Jesuits, to whom he was sent for schooling in 1859, but his sufferings at their hands instead sowed the seeds of future resentment and conversion to a very different world-view. His rebellion was not immediate; he went to Paris to study the law before serving as an officer in the Army of the Loire during the Franco-Prussian War, and it was a family friend who subsequently found him a job as the art critic for the Bonapartist newspaper L’Ordre. Once he had taken his place in the literary community of the nation, however, he began to reformulate his values and began a drift to radicalism which ultimately became a determined charge taking him to extremes which none of his contemporaries reached.
Mirbeau’s career parallels in many significant features that of his contemporary Anatole France (born 1844), who similarly abandoned his conservative heritage to embrace a fierce radicalism. Both became extraordinarily passionate in their anti-clericalism and both were numbered among the most outspoken supporters of the ill-fated Captain Dreyfus, who was malevolently fitted up on a preposterous charge by the Army Establishment. But France’s literary career was born from the groves of Academe while Mirbeau’s was launched from the platform of popular journalism, and their literary armaments were of a markedly different character; it is not entirely surprising that France was eventually drawn to doctrinaire Communism (though he later split from the party over ideological differences) while Mirbeau became a devout Anarchist.
France’s anti-clericalism was first given free rein in the short novel La tragedie humaine (1895; tr. as The Human Tragedy), in which a truly virtuous priest is bitterly disappointed to discover that the only mercy and charity to be found in a world dominated by the hopelessly corrupt Church is the compassion of Satan. No stronger contrast can be imagined, given the basic similarity of feeling, than that between this neat and poignant fable and Mirbeau’s L’Abbe Jules (1888), which offers a complex and somewhat paradoxical portrait of its eponymous anti-hero, a veritable monster of a dishonest priest. Mirbeau’s clear intention is to demonstrate that the abominable Jules is really a victim of society, a mirror of the corruption inherent in his environment, but the achievement of this end is subverted by the grotesque exaggeration which he uses to melodramatise his argument. To be widely misunderstood because of his extravagance was to be Mirbeau’s perennial burden.
The literary work which represented the culmination of France’s radicalism was La revolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels), in which a young idealist among the fallen angels – whose elder counterparts have long been the tutors and comforters of mankind – sets out to raise an army of revolution against the tyrant demiurge Jehovah, and searches for Satan in the hope of finding a general fit to lead the campaign. Typically, France’s novel ends quietly, when Satan – who has been following the advice which Voltaire offered at the end of Candide and cultivating his garden – declines to play the Napoleonic role, on the grounds that were the battle to be won he would only end up (as Napoleon did) as a vainglorious emperor, no better than the king who had been toppled. On the surface, at least, there is little which this witty, urbane and sentimental book has in common with Mirbeau’s Le jardin des supplices (1899; tr. as Torture Garden) but at heart they share the same motives: to expose the hypocrisies of Church and society; to shock the reader into a realisation that much of what he or she complacently takes for granted is cruel and ugly.
The difference between the delicacy of France – who was always at his most punctilious when dealing with implicitly shocking premises – and the luridness of Mirbeau is a matter of method. France’s method won him the Nobel Prize, while Mirbeau’s created sufficient embarrassment to have his work condemned as obscene, but that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that their accomplishments were not so very unalike. Mirbeau’s rhetoric proved a little too effective for his own good, both in his own lifetime and afterwards, but the undermining of his literary reputation – the amount of space devoted to Mirbeau in reference books in no way does justice to his contemporary importance as a force within the French literary community – has little to do with the aesthetic merit of his books or the moral weight of his arguments. He is a writer of considerable power and originality, who is one of the most striking and most interesting products of the great French tradition of philosophical fiction.
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Reg Carr, whose excellent book Anarchism in France; the case of Octave Mirbeau (1977) is the only substantial study of the author in English, pinpoints the year 1885 as the crucial turning-point in Mirbeau’s life. It was the year in which there appeared French versions of two works which were to have an enormous impact on his ideas about life and literature: Kropotkin’s Paroles d’un revolte and Tolstoy’s Ma religion. Both helped to give form and force to Mirbeau’s developing anarchism, and the second – although it failed to shake the dogmatic atheism which he had adopted in opposition to the Jesuits – must have made him think long and hard about the ideological functions of literature. His journalistic pieces became much more outspoken in the defence of writers and artists under attack – 1885 was also the year in which a storm blew up over the government’s censorship of the stage version of Zola’s Germinal, and Mirbeau was already involved in ongoing controversies regarding the poetry of the Symbolists, the painting of the Impressionists and the novels of the Naturalists; he had long been a friend of Maupassant and Zola, and had been a significant early champion of Monet, Gauguin and Rodin.
In 1885 Mirbeau gave up writing for the monarchist paper Le Gaulois and firmly nailed his colours to the mast of the radical La France. In political articles of that year he launched the vitriolic attack upon the penal code which culminated in some of the more savage passages of Torture Garden, while his career as a writer of fiction – previously pursued in somewhat desultory fashion through the medium of rather derivative short stories – also took a leap forward with the publication of the collection Lettres de ma chaumière, which featured material of a more personal and polemical kind, reflecting acidly on the life and folkways of his native Normandy.
This mixture of the personal and the polemical was carried to greater lengths in his first novel, Le Calvaire (1886), where the bitterness of his reflections on the iniquities of social injustice are compounded by the emotional residues of an unhappy love affair. The novel proved controversial because of the way in which Mirbeau transformed his own experiences of the Franco-Prussian war into a savage portrayal of military stupidity which seemed ant
ipatriotic to many – the relevant chapter was dropped from the serial version for that reason – but its most remarkable feature is the portrayal of its chief female character, whose seduction, betrayal, mental torture, ruination and final abandonment of the hero constitutes the slow crucifixion to which the title refers. This helped to prepare the ground for the characterization of Clara in Torture Garden.
Although the misogyny of Le Calvaire is very remarkable it is by no means without parallel in the French literature of the period. One of Mirbeau’s closest friends was Jules-Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose most famous work is the classic collection of short stories Les diaboliques (1874), which displays the conviction that the facades of social convention and politeness conceal awesome depths of moral depravity, and that women in particular have become expert in using the mask of virtue to obscure a murderous callousness. Barbey d’Aurevilly was a subtle writer, but he was one of the chief sources of inspiration for the rather less subtle Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose Comes cruels (1883) lent its title to a subgenre of tales which were later to become part of the staple diet of Grand Guignol theatre. In the same year that Mirbeau published Le Calvaire Villiers de l’Isle-Adam published his extraordinary L’Eve future, in which a nobleman disappointed by the appalling perfidies of womankind commissions Thomas Edison to manufacture a beautiful machine embodying the virtues of fidelity and love – of which real women are held to be incapable. The illustrator of Les diaboliques was Felicien Rops, one-time friend and associate of Baudelaire, who frequently produced vivid and bizarre illustrations of the myth of the femme fatale; Carr suggests that Rops’ drawings were a key influence on Mirbeau’s most graphic passages, which are to be found in greatest abundance in Torture Garden.
Mirbeau followed Le Calvaire and Abbe Jules with a more explicitly political novel, Sebastien Roch (1890), which offered a minutely-detailed retrospective analysis of his experiences at the Jesuit college at Vannes which he had attended in infancy. The ruination of his hero is much more complete than Mirbeau’s own spoliation – the nightmarish hangover of his “education” drives Roch to an early grave – but this tragedy is compounded by the fact that within the beleaguered mind of the youth a rebellion of compassionate feeling has begun to take shape, only to be cruelly aborted. As in previous novels, Mirbeau derives affective force only from a recapitulation of his early tribulations and not from the fact of his own eventual triumph; there is thus a seeming discrepancy between the apparent pessimism of his fiction and the relative optimism of his political articles.
Such discrepancies are not uncommon, and are frequently misunderstood; the fact that the rhetoric of fiction is fundamentally alarmist has much more to do with the essential nature of dramatic tension than the attitudes of writers. All Utopian fiction is weak and anaemic; whatever its virtues as a form of political analysis it has none as engaging narrative. By contrast, the Dystopian fiction of Brave New Worlds packs a powerful affective punch; the fact that the real world of 1984 bore no resemblance at all to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is quite irrelevant to the novel’s success in telling us what we ought to be afraid of and what we must at all costs resist. The end of Nineteen Eighty-Four should not be seen as an acceptance of the inevitability of despair but as a reductio ad absurdum to show conclusively what result is entailed by the ways of thinking against which it warns us. It is important that the reader should bear this in mind in considering Mirbeau’s works – and imperative that it should be noted in the preface to any analysis of the nature and merits of Torture Garden.
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Although Torture Garden was not published in full until 1899 it drew upon some earlier materials and it is possible that Mirbeau had begun work on it as early as 1892. It seems, however, that it was his involvement in the Dreyfus affair between 1896 and 1898 which confirmed his determination to write a more scathing attack on the hypocrisies and injustices of French society than any which had gone before. Unlike Anatole France’s similarly-motivated L’ile des pingouins (1908; tr. as Penguin Island) Mirbeau’s novel contains very few overt references to the injustice of the treatment meted out to the luckless captain, but its scalding sarcasm when it deals with the hideous callousness and injustice of the workings of the law and its human instruments embody a particular fury which the case certainly helped to awaken. The form and manner of the novel had already been set, but it was the Dreyfus Affair which provided the fervent impetus necessary for its completion.
It is probable that Mirbeau had found Torture Garden very difficult to write because it was the first of his novels to break away – and the only one to break away entirely – from the autobiographical resources which had fuelled his earlier works, and it embodies a keen awareness of the various literary traditions to which it belongs: the tradition of Utopian fiction; the tradition of the critical conte philosophique; and the tradition of French Orientalism.
In its basic construction Torture Garden echoes – probably quite deliberately – the form of More’s Utopia. Where More’s book had an introductory letter introducing its narrator Mirbeau’s has a preface introducing “the manuscript”. More’s book then presents a dialogue in which contemporary society is subject to various criticisms, before moving into its partly satirical and partly homiletic account of the imaginary island of Utopia. Mirbeau likewise divides his main story into two, first presenting a satirical examination of contemporary society via an abbreviated autobiography of the author of the manuscript, then moving on to a detailed description of the allegorical Garden of Tortures, which the narrator discovers in China in the company of his remarkable mistress, Clara.
Torture Garden is frequently represented as a work which owes much to the Marquis de Sade, and Clara has been deemed the perfect exemplar of a connoisseur of Sadism. There are indeed certain affinities between Torture Garden and some passages to be found in Juliette, because the method of both works requires detailed description of particularly nasty methods of torture and execution, but these similarities are compounded with vitally important differences, and the philosophical discourses to which the two writers affiliate their arguments are quite distinct.
The argument of Sade’s Juliette, if it is to be reduced to its simplest possible form is that once we accept (as in his opinion, we must) that there is no God, then the foundation-stone of human morality has been removed. If there is no God to reward us with salvation or punish us with eternal damnation, his characters argue, then what good reason can we possibly have for preferring good to evil? Is it not the case, they propose, that once the fear of retribution is eliminated, then the decision is merely a matter of taste – of arbitrary aesthetic preference? Sade is, of course, here providing a challenge to convention, dramatically posing a question rather than stating a conclusion; we should not accept his grotesque characters as representations of the way in which he would have liked to live his own life. There is, however, an element of special pleading in his work; he found himself to be sexually stimulated by the contemplation of various forms of behaviour usually considered perverse and/or disgusting and by lurid fantasies of extreme violence. Like others so afflicted – John Cowper Powys is perhaps the most notable literary example – he was both fascinated by and anxious about this curious susceptibility.
To what extent Sade could or did import the substance of these fantasies into his actual behaviour we cannot be sure, but it is probably safe to assume that like everyone else in the world his real accomplishments had very little connection with his daydreams. Although people occasionally do try to act out their fantasies – sexual and otherwise – in a spirit of extreme optimism, they invariably find that reality cannot match the vivid promise of fantasy. Much of the excitement of fantasy derives from the fact that it is fantasy, and that it has all the power of the imagination to draw upon in envisaging an impossibly gorgeous and sensual experience which mere mundanity could never offer. The alchemy of fantasy permits excitement to be isolated and miraculously purified, while the mere chemistry which
cannot be excluded from actual sexual intercourse and the actual cruelties of bullying and other assorted blood sports insists upon compounding it with the vagaries of physiology, with dirt, with discomfort and with injury – and thus, alas, with a necessity to make moral judgements from which fantasy can easily be freed. The only way in which fantasy can sensibly enter actual behaviour is as play; whenever the acting out becomes serious it becomes ridiculous, and also dangerous.
Mirbeau was, like Sade, a committed atheist – but he lived in an age where atheism was less implicitly outrageous. In Sade’s day the desertion of faith carried an inevitable sensation of implicit wickedness, with which Sade coped by declaring it to be delicious. For Mirbeau, atheism was something which could simply be embraced and then taken for granted. There was for him, as for Anatole France and the historian Jules Michelet, no particular difficulty in considering religion – and therefore the object of religious worship – as a recognisable evil in itself. For Mirbeau the death of God did not imply that the very notion of morality must be thrown overboard; to the contrary, it was the perception of a better and truer morality which had contrived to throw God overboard.
What was for Sade a fascinating, appalling and difficult problem – how to construct a secular morality – was for Mirbeau a matter to be taken very much for granted. He knew perfectly well what Good was – it was compassion and justice – and that Evil was its negation; what seemed to him fascinating, appalling and desperately problematic was that in civilized society there was so much Evil masquerading as Good, which the majority of people seemed not even to see, let alone to care about. In Torture Garden he set out to show people what their world, behind its careful facades and hypocrisies, was truly like; he set out to use analytical discussion (in the preface), satirical caricature (in the first part of the main narrative), and fantastic allegory (in the second part of the main narrative) to strip away all the masks and illusions of custom and philosophy, thus to display all the callousness and perversity of the underlying psyche of “civilised” man. Where Sade had set out slyly to create moral unease, Mirbeau set out forthrightly to call forth moral outrage.
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