The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau. (Faux Titre)

The Nothing Machine The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau

FAUX TITRE 298 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

The Nothing Machine The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau

Robert Ziegler

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007

Cover illustration: courtesy of Vivian Herzfeld. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2237-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Introduction

7 Part I: The Statue

1. 2. 3.

Art as Repair: Le Calvaire Iconoclasm: L’AbbJ Jules The Perfect Death: Sébastien Roch

19 37 57

Part II: The Matrix 4. 5. 6. 7.

Reaching Up: Dans le ciel A Way Out: Un gentilhomme The Undifferentiated Bed: Le Jardin des supplices Fetish and Meaning: Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

77 95 117 133

Part III: The Nothing Machine 8. 9. 10.

From Matter to Motion: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique The Novel as Machine: La 628-E8 Non-human Narrative: Dingo

Conclusion References Index

151 173 201 221 243 249

Acknowledgements I am fortunate to have received inspiration and to have enjoyed the support of numerous colleagues and co-workers in the completion of this project. For helping me in the researching of this material, I am especially indebted to Julie Buckley and Carolyn Kamrud. For her tireless and goodhumored assistance in the preparation of this manuscript, as with the others which preceded it, I am grateful to Evelyn Merkle. To the Montana Tech administration and research office, I owe thanks for their funding of travel to conferences from which I drew valuable information for this book. It is difficult to state how much I owe to Pierre Michel, President of the Société Mirbeau and preeminent Mirbeau scholar in the world. Pierre’s resources, knowledge, enthusiasm, energy, and friendship are truly inexhaustible. It is not an overstatement to acknowledge that this work could not have been brought to fruition without his unstinting support. My gratitude to him is profound and will be lasting. Finally, I thank my daughter, Mary, for her unfailingly penetrating insights into the material for this book. And to my wife, Louise, my trusted editor, my precious life companion, I give my thanks and my love. Portions of this work have appeared previously in other publications. For their permission to use this material in revised and expanded form, I wish to thank the editors of the Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, XIX, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Octave Mirbeau, passions et anathèmes (Actes du Colloque de Cerisy-la-salle).

Introduction “Ne pas sentir ton moi, être une chose insaisissable, fondue dans la nature, comme se fond dans la mer une goutte d’eau qui tombe d’un nuage, tel sera le but de tes efforts. Je t’avertis que ce n’est point facile d’y atteindre, et l’on arrive plus aisément à fabriquer un Jésus-Christ, un Mahomet, un Napoléon, qu’un Rien” (L’Abbé Jules to Albert Dervelle, in L’Abbé Jules 1888).

In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material, obsolete ideas, discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. Unlike his peers, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Whereas the Decadents stored the dead whose memory their writings venerated, Mirbeau killed the present in his impatience to move forward. In a fin de siècle obsessed with transience, the Decadents sought to compensate for their powerlessness to conquer death by enshrining the beloved as remains kept under glass. A tress of hair whose sheen never dulled (Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte), a bloodstained pillow whose vermilion never faded (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “Véra”), a sonnet by Baudelaire displayed on a mantel as on an altar (Huysmans, A rebours): art born of death was hallowed in a liturgy of remembrance. For the Decadents, the salon succeeded the chapel/crypt as the site of mortuary rituals meant to reverse the effects of narcissism, time, and healing. There, the art work substituted for a corpse subject to disappearance, as creation thwarted the obliterative power of adjustment and forgetting. For the Decadents, the indestructibility of art counteracted the ephemerality of love and beauty. However, Decadent art was also an anal affair. A loved one who left or died was retrieved as her aesthetic simulacrum. Protected against change, art substituted for the lost object in being fetishized and hoarded. Produced by the mourner and saved by the mourner, it was excrement become treasure. The body that disintegrated, the companion who slipped away was replaced by jealously guarded fragments laid out on a velvet bed, offered for view in an upholstered casket. The bookshelf or display case became another Decadent tomb where – deodorized and embellished – death was waste refined into gold. In the fiction of Mirbeau, there is little evidence of the funerary statelineness of Decadent creation. Renouncing his contemporaries’ predilection for stillness and preservation, Mirbeau evolved a fictional

8

The Nothing Machine

dynamic that extolled speed and heat, vertigo and combustion. Mirbeau rejected the commemorative function of literature that combatted loss and disintegration, instead presenting the book as an agent of transformation, a grave pullulating with growth, a site of corruption and resurrection. In place of the ponderous artifacts fashioned by Decadent embalmers, Mirbeau authored novels that aimed to unmake what he had made. Foremost among his contemporaries, Mirbeau was committed to the advancement of justice and the redressing of wrongs. At a time when studied apathy was the preferred political stance – when his peers kept their distance from the turbulence of public life or retreated to the solitary world of mysticism or the occult – Mirbeau occupied the public stage where he lashed his enemies with a tongue of fire. Denouncing conditions that contributed to the spread of hunger and the rise in infant mortality, Mirbeau was politically engaged when others embraced the fashion of aesthetic posturing. A native of Calvados, descendant of generations of notaries, Mirbeau rejected the autochthon’s insistence on unchanging tradition. Relocating from Rémalard to Paris in 1872, Mirbeau became involved in the world of journalism, acting as a literary hireling, serving as a personal secretary to the Bonapartist Dugué de la Fauconnerie. Obliged to prostitute his talent, Mirbeau espoused political views that were often contradictory, and antithetical to his own. Yet despite his appearance of ideological volatility, Mirbeau never lost his love of controversy and his passion for social causes. Initially writing for L’Ordre de Paris, Mirbeau became increasingly caught up in events that shaped politics and art, displaying his fondness for upsetting convention, rocking established institutions, infuriating the politically entrenched with his vituperation and bluster. In an era when the Decadents withdrew to the silence of the oblate’s monastery or the ornateness of the art collector’s sanctuary, Mirbeau filled the world of journalism, politics, art, and theater with his tempestuous presence. Renouncing the Decadents’ esotericism, their aloofness and lapidary style, Mirbeau adopted the angry diatribe as his favorite discursive mode, expressing his indignation over a host of public issues, espousing conflicting philosophical positions with the same immoderation and sincerity. The values that drove Mirbeau to champion the Impressionists, to defend Dreyfus, to lend support to the imprisoned Jean Grave, the anarchist and intellectual whose views Mirbeau adopted, inform the creative works that have earned Mirbeau the attention of cultural historians, the interest of literary theoreticians, and the admiration of political idealists. Many Decadents who sought to immortalize both the

Introduction

9

beloved object and their own reputations have been consigned to oblivion, whereas Mirbeau – recognizing the benefit of disturbing habit and promoting change – speaks more compellingly to modern readers than do fin-de-siècle custodians of tradition. Paralleling Mirbeau’s career, his evolving aesthetic describes a passage from material to motion. Reparative creative work that had once healed a damaged subject, restoring him to a state of equanimity and wholeness, gives way to art resembling nature’s seething laboratory. Swarming with vermicular life, the text is like a blood pool in which dead bodies swim. Subject to natural cataclysm and self-directed violence, Mirbeau’s characters break down, their fragmentation mirroring the disjointed stories that feature them. Torture for Mirbeau becomes a metaphor for catalysis, and the crucifix on which the sufferer dies is the place where his body changes – where matter, seemingly destroyed, turns into the energy that brings rebirth. In Mirbeau’s later novels, the matrix gives way to the machine. No longer released by heat-generating decomposition, energy is produced by the operation of engines powered by the destruction of superfluous objects. In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, it is knowledge that the hero flees. And in La 628-E8 and Dingo, the speeding car and wild dog lay waste to the things they pass, their jubilant massacre equated with creative work that emancipates in hastening onward. In the later phases of Mirbeau’s career, his aesthetic rejected material forms in order to advance the processes of metamorphosis. In this respect, he was the antithesis of his creatively conservative contemporaries, who clung to an art of self-replication, topologizing their hero as a thébaide crammed with knickknacks. As projections of imperilled self-love, most Decadent works served as denials of man’s fugitive existence. In being pulverized by the passage of eons, the Decadent body turned to dust, the material aspect of mortality that time blew away. However, canonic art whose consumption spanned generations seemed to ensure the creator’s eternal life through the endurance of his artifacts – “time-defying monuments” wrought in marble, bronze, or language, these “accumulations of stone and gold make possible the discovery of the immortal soul.”1 For the narcissist, the water in which he beholds his image must be calm and clear. Yet Mirbeau’s characters are careening, racing, restless people, never stopping long enough for their reflection to congeal. Mirbeau’s novels are never familiar faces transposing an author apotheosized as his writing. Even when they derive from the writer’s life 1

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Wesleyen UP, 1959), p. 286.

10

The Nothing Machine

experience, they are narrative deformations, alien brothers whose aspect is unrecognizable. They even cease to be expressions of a human voice, no longer projecting the protagonist’s identity as a coherently structured plot that withstands personality fragmentation. Adopting the organic model of existential randomness, his narratives do not show death as affording meaning and transcendence but as fertilizing the chaos from which art comes and then goes back. As his career advanced, Mirbeau became aware of the desuetude of traditional anthropomorphic fiction, stories structured by the artificial teleology of plot development and tension-alleviating dénouements. Eschewing the ordering principle of explanatory narrative, Mirbeau began to write books that acted like animals and machines, non-human agents replacing an autobiographical narrator. Rampage replaced epiphany as the goal of Mirbeau’s narrative. Obedience to instinct drove his plots, and not the search for wisdom. The dehumanization of Mirbeau’s writing allowed a different epistemological grasp of a reality explored by smelling, hunting, killing, and driving. No longer did Mirbeau’s novelistic venture end by raising a monument to the author’s gloriously discovered self. The terrain mapped by fiction was not the protagonist’s identity, but a shadowy continent of desires concealed by repression, guilt, and neurosis. Unlike the claustrophilic Decadents immured in the impregnable sanctuary of their ornate style and obscure intrigues, Mirbeau’s characters sought to escape from the house of conventional storytelling. La 628-E8, Mirbeau’s paean to automotive disorientation, focuses on the lyricism of the highway, the vanishing of roadside scenery blurred by velocity. Since his destination is the trip, not the temporary lodging of a finished anecdote, the narrator’s arrival brings a desire for immediate departure. Transposed as journeys whose premise is their prolongation, Mirbeau’s novels take as their subject the avoidance of completion. Not sealed like coffins with the caulk of tautological self-evidence, his stories disgorge ambiguity, spilling out unintelligible grotesqueness. This study follows the trajectory of Mirbeau’s evolving view of fiction: from a therapeutic instrument restoring the narrator’s sense of psychic wholeness to a vehicle of aggression targeting creative stagnation and paralysis. In Part One, the nothing machine is shown as being situated in the outside world and is identified with the apparatus of self-protecting social institutions that do violence to the individual whose interests they are entrusted with safeguarding. The nothing machine is the family that sacrifices the child’s sensibility to the parents’ prejudice. It is the schools that poison the intellectual curiosity of young minds, stifling them with a regimen of brutality and dogmatism. It is religion that promotes repression,

Introduction

11

self-hatred, and neurosis while obstructing the spontaneous expression of instinct and intuition. Victimized by autocratic fathers, hysterical mothers, sadistic teachers, and guilt-mongering priests, Mirbeau’s characters are broken on the nothing machine of society. In Mirbeau’s experienced-based, early fiction, the hero’s violation motivates a quest to be made whole using the healing power of narrative. The pedophilic attack that Mirbeau reputedly endured while attending the academy of Saint-François-Xavier in Vannes had destroyed the child’s sense of psychic equilibrium. Sébastien Roch (1890) decries this theft of innocence, condemns the brutalization of the defenseless, and laments the opening of wounds that prompt a longing for unconsciousness. Flimsy and breakable, Mirbeau’s child narrators develop into adults who retreat inside the armor of their cynicism. For them, love’s perversion entails a loss of affect, a horror of women, a pathologizing of the sexual response, guilt eroticized as masochism. Porous, incontinent, the subject who weeps or bleeds is a vulnerable being anxious to sheathe himself in indifference. It is the central figure of the statue that embodies the hero’s aspiration to transcendent impassivity. Smooth, hard, and cool, the statue is a human body impervious to emotion. The protagonist in Mirbeau’s inaugural novel, Le Calvaire (1886), Jean Mintié is emotionally orphaned at an early age. Neglected by a suicidal mother, Mintié recasts her as the loving Madonna he sees in a village chapel. As – undependable and inconstant – the mother is succeeded by the faithless mistress, so the Christ child with whom Mintié had initially identified gives way to the figure of the crucified redeemer to whom he likens himself as an unhappy lover. A self-styled artist who believes his sexual torment qualifies him to act in imitation of Christ, Mintié preaches the gospel of his misery. Unable to dominate his mistress, he evangelizes male disciples. As his thanatropic mother is euphemized as a plaster Virgin, Mintié adopts the model of love as heroic martyrdom. For him, Calvary is the stage on which his amorous tragedy unfolds, and the Cross a vertical indicator of the end of suffering as artistic rebirth. Redeemed through the immolating practice of self-narrative, Mintié dies as a lover in order to be resurrected as a storyteller. A symbol of ascensional deliverance, the crucifix becomes the page on which the writer effects the transcendence of his humanity. In L’Abbé Jules (1888), the renegade priest is the first of Mirbeau’s characters to advance the oxymoronic definition of creation as nothing production. Advocating the restoration of man’s original state of organicism and simplicity that preexisted the deformities created by society, Jules extols the nothing-man who is irrecuperable in language, which turns the perfection of natural life into its parody as expression.

12

The Nothing Machine

Denouncing society that erects monuments and builds churches, Jules recommends smashing them, promulgating a view of creation that disassembles, exposes, and undeceives. Jules deprecates the production of myths as an undemanding challenge. Salvation narratives are cheap. Messiahs are devalued by their commercialization. For Jules, the perfect object is one immolated by the subject, who renounces his organizing consciousness and structuring egocentrism, which, in relinquishing, he allows to disperse into the world. Jules’s iconoclasm is prefigurative of the gesture of the anarchist, whose political ideology Mirbeau would come to embrace. Inexorably dehumanizing, every perfect system is meant to be overthrown. Morbid in their resistance to change, governments, statues, bodies, philosophies must be broken down and returned to an original state of disorder and incoherence. In order to promote fertility, innovation, and renewal, old forms are destroyed and assimilated into a generative matrix of undifferentiation. In Part Two, this study identifies the manure heap, the puddle of blood, the soil of graveyards rich in phosphorus as chaotic sites from which new life springs. Thus, in Mirbeau’s most luminous, lush, and shocking novel (Le Jardin des supplices 1899), blood-saturated flowerbeds are the source of nature’s bounty, and the destination of dead flesh is the birthplace of new life. Earlier, Mirbeau’s orientation had been backward, as his characters had longed to restore the whiteness of the unwritten page, the purity of the unused conjugal bed, the unplanted garden, the pristine forest. For the first time, in Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau situates creation in a timeless realm where the cyclical processes of growth and decay turn the sprouting of a peony into its withering and reabsorption in the soil. In the unfinished novel Dans le ciel (1893), the nothing machine operates as an abstention from translating inspiration into works. Moving the matrix from the earth to the sky, Mirbeau examines the creative impulse, both as a longing for release from matter and as the opposing effort to give material form to the artist’s vision. Ultimately, the novel describes a fall, signalling the artist’s failure to achieve transcendence, his inability to regain his homeland in the heavens. The idea of creative expression as disfigurement, truncation, and mutilation is conveyed both in the final image of the painter Lucien’s severed hand and by the fact that Mirbeau’s text is itself an unfinished entity. In Dans le ciel, the sky is an artist’s mind churning with inchoate notions, vaporous intuitions that coalesce and dissolve. With his anarchist proclivities, Mirbeau was always drawn back to the unorganized state of potentiality. Before the artist’s rejection of inadequate creation, there is the

Introduction

13

sky, the garden, the chantier still holding the promise of totality. In Mirbeau, the artistic project culminates with the moment when the work separates from its maker, when, in standing free, it prepares to return to the ground. For L’Abbé Jules, too, the best life is the one lived by nameless forest creatures whose death is unremarked and who disappear, “volatilisés dans les choses.”2 Having abandoned the illusion of an inviolable self sculpted in marble, Mirbeau adopts the figure of the compost heap seething with energy. Creation ceases to be identified with nouns, books made of leather and paper, inspiration stabilized by its reification. Instead, art is an experience and an event, an instance of intermingling and crosspollination, ignition, inflammation, and change. No longer entombed in bindings or frames, the creative impulse initiates motion and sets things on fire. Instead of being a still, contemplative place, the cemetery smolders with radiant putrefaction, converting death into calories. The torture gallery becomes a hellish garden where spilled blood waters flowers and makes them flourish. “Le texte devient lui-même machine à ingérer et à digérer,” as Eléonore Reverzy writes, “sans qu’on puisse imaginer une limite à ce fonctionnement.”3 In his final novels, Mirbeau elaborates a kinetics of fiction where the temporality of storytelling is no longer framed by the first and final pages, but is spatially expressed as travel narratives and textual journeys. In Part Three, Mirbeau’s fiction is a nothing machine effecting its destruction as an object in order to generate the energy needed to conceive a newer model of itself. Not only a means of converting material into energy, the novel also serves as a vehicle that carries its passenger to unknown destinations. An instrument of reinvigorating expatriation, the text sets out from its premise but never aims to arrive anywhere. In place of the Decadents’ goal of centripetality and self-enclosure, Mirbeau evolves an aesthetic of exploratory dilation, moving out, encountering new experience, wishing to get lost. Gone from Mirbeau’s novel is the reassuring structural circularity of conflict and resolution. In its place, there is only a collection of unassorted episodes, bits of autofiction, miscellaneous cultural commentaries, a textual manure heap decomposing into constituent parts and reassembling in new guises. Mirbeau’s renunciation of the sculptural model of the creator’s identity, polished by artifice, made impervious to failure, protected by Octave Mirbeau, L’AbbJ Jules, Oeuvre romanesque l (Paris:Buchet/Chastel, 2000), p. 471. 3 ElJonore Reverzy, “Mirbeau et le roman: de l’importance du fumier. De Dans le ciel (1891) aux 21 jours d’un neurasthJnique,” Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: EurJdit, 2004), p. 103. 2

14

The Nothing Machine

fame, is evidenced by his production of heteronymous novels that are not novels at all. Loosely fitted jumbles of previously published materials, books that were unfinished or not intended for publication, Mirbeau’s later writings are unfamiliar bodies uncircumscribed by any sense of closure, any pretension to interpretive accessibility. Instead of fashioning works meant to be lasting and lofty, Mirbeau emulates the torture artist, cutting up bodies whose formation is unvarying, fitting them together in strange configurations, performing experiments in teratologic morphology. The novel, like the human body, is old and predictable. And so, in order to infuse it with novelty, it is liquefied or vaporized, its meaning dispersed as the dust of triteness and the gas of absurdity. In Le Jardin des supplices, victims had been subjected to transgendering mutations, degraded by starvation and turned into snarling dogs, flayed, their identities no longer bounded by epidermal envelopes. Whereas Mirbeau works with fiction, the torturer reshapes the body: “C’est-à-dire travailler la chair humaine comme un sculpteur sa glaise ou son morceau d’ivoire … en tirer toute la somme, tous les prodiges qu’elle récèle au fond de ses ténèbres.”4 Books and bodies undergo experiments in hybridization; disarticulated narratives fill up with characters unidentified by genus, class, or phylum. A typical case is Célestine in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), a chambermaid who sees herself as part mistress and part ancillary. Describing herself as both a parrot and a dog, she is a copy of employers and an anarchist avenger with ambitions to annihilate them. Like the twisted forms littering the torture garden, Célestine is broken by her subjection to dehumanizing working conditions, then haphazardly put back together. Yet, for all the violence done to Mirbeau’s novels and characters, there is still a belief in the hygienic value of destruction, the need to return to a zero state of homogeneity and confusion. Through suffering, Célestine experiences an identity fragmentation that is accompanied by “cette sensation, indiciblement douce, de redevenir un être nouveau.”5 This study concludes by arguing that, in his final novels, Mirbeau definitively abandons the conception of creation as assembly, embracing instead the model of art as catastrophe, an apocalyse machine, savagery run amok, the dingo as marauder, the car as a roaring purveyor of road-kill. Along with substituting energy for object, Mirbeau’s aesthetic also privileges displacement over installation, forsaking place in order to chart the journey. Waystations emptied of clearly articulated characters, Mirbeau’s narratives become transit points through which itinerant story 4 Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 269. 5 Ibid., p. 476.

Introduction

15

fragments pass. In voicing their fondness for enigmatic happenings and unexplainable events, Mirbeau’s impenetrable heroes defy interpretation, eliciting a hermeneutic response without ever satisfying it. Increasingly codified in Mirbeau’s epistemophobic narratives is his character’s horror for what is popular and clear. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Célestine is attracted to her future husband by more than his musky atavism. Suspected of violating and murdering a girl whose corpse is found in the forest, Joseph displays a violence that carries a sexual promise. Because Célestine is disappointed by the semiotic poverty of her mistresses, she is drawn to a man whose secrecy is both troubling and arousing. Uncastrated by evidence, fragmentary narratives and puzzling characters are the departure point for interminable analytical journeys. In its operation, Mirbeau shows his nothing machine converting the solidity of knowledge into the elusiveness of surmisal. As an engine of social criticism, Mirbeau's writings are ignited by injustice, powered by the corruption and imposture he transforms into diatribe. In Mirbeau, it is the barriers to understanding – walls, skins, roadblocks, taboos – that motivate the unfinishable work of narrative elucidation. As lyrical celebrations of open space and smooth highway, Mirbeau's novels develop a thematic of blockage that finally yields to communication and flow. Mirbeau's earlier ideal of the inviolable body as marble statue gives way to images of walls that are breached, skin that is pierced, mysteries that are explored. No longer seeking the immobility and permanence of the monument, his narrators desire instanteousness, ubiquity, and deliverance from history. In their pursuit of the impossible goal of universality and omnipresence, they dream of merging with the people whom they pass by on their journey. Wishing to become genuine cosmopolitans, citizens of the world, they seek repatriation in a utopia that they identify as everywhere. For Mirbeau, speed uproots prejudice and obliterates the past. In Dingo (1913), Mirbeau’s animal hero is a zoomorphic immigrant – lupine then canine, Australian then French. In La 628-E8 (1907), the narrator rockets down the road, and his ethnocentrism blows away. Bounded by the skin of frontiers, countries are bodies pierced by customs points, transfused by visitors who circulate in their cars. On the highways, there are no more Germans, Dutch, or Austrians, just motorists whose transience creates sympathy and kinship. The chance encounters of strangers who meet in Mirbeau’s narrative cause geographical and linguistic barriers to melt away: “l’automobile franchit les frontières,” as Enda McCaffrey writes, “réunit les ressortissants étrangers, unit les différentes cultures à

16

The Nothing Machine

travers le langage automobile et un code de la route commun nommé la solidité routière.”6 Unfortunately, the inevitable destination of every story is its objectification as a book, where the dynamism of creation freezes as the stasis of completion. But unlike the spellbound volumes lying asleep on Mirbeau’s shelves, the automotive text remains in circulation among readers. Mirbeau’s writing foments new interpretive undertakings, with texts in motion begetting hermeneutics in motion. McCaffrey describes these later novels as post-modern avant la lettre, since their forward movement is decoupled from the goal of destination. Instead of ending and experiencing their death as an arrival, their progress aims at creating “les conditions pour plus de progrès.”7 For Mirbeau, art as object is the target of art as destructive energy. The image of the severed hand at the end of Dans le ciel shows fiction’s gesture as reaching up for something unattainable. In Mirbeau, it is this the quest which divides the creator from himself and his material. Since his desires are self-replenishing and his satisfaction unrealizable, the traveler’s rush to his destination is what causes it to recede. The utopia of the journey’s end is a beckoning mirage, whose illusoriness creates the open road that lies ahead. Camus’s insistence that one imagine a Sisyphus who is happy applies to the idealism informing Mirbeau’s writing. It is the perfection of a future world, the purity of the sky that consecrate attempts to reach them in art ennobled by futility. Because his mission is impossible, the artist is impatient to continue, creating nothing, devouring distance, flattening impediments, turning frustration into prey. Bigotry, injustice, closed-mindedness, and habit are the fuel source powering Mirbeau’s text in operation. Resistance whets his appetite, sharpening the impulse to kill everything, the imperfections and mediocrities obscuring the horizon. In the face of platitude, complacency, oppression, and inertia, Mirbeau is the restlessly idling engine of his writing’s havoc engine: “Je suis comme la machine qu’on a mise au point mort, sans l’Jteindre, et qui gronde….”8

6

Enda McCaffrey, “La 628-E8: la voiture, le progrPs, et la post-modernitJ,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 6 (1999), p. 132. 7 Ibid., p. 139. 8 Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 303.

Part I The Statue

Chapter One Art as Repair: Le Calvaire By 1886, when Mirbeau published his first full-length novel, Le Calvaire, he had already been living and laboring in Paris for almost fourteen years. Forçat de la plume, he had found himself obliged to toil unremittingly as an underpaid pamphleteer – a wage slave forbidden to act or express himself as he wished. Beleaguered by creditors, earning his pittance by writing columns for Le Gaulois and La France, Mirbeau had been forced into a life of journalistic prostitution. Not an annihilating apparatus sweeping away iniquity and injustice, he had been dehumanized and humiliated by being reduced to the status of a machine, one he describes as “une machine à louange et à éreintement, comme la fille publique machine à plaisir.”1 Yet as an erstwhile champion of the royalist cause, Mirbeau was increasingly disinclined to conceal his own aesthetic and political convictions, and so began to praise the works of avant-garde artists like Rodin and Monet, innovators who, beginning in 1884, would also become Mirbeau’s life-long friends. Seven years before Mirbeau rallied to the defense of Jean Grave, the self-educated intellectual and spokesman for the anarchist cause, Mirbeau had also begun to show signs of his commitment to equality and justice. Thus, in an 1884 article in Le Gaulois, Mirbeau exposes the stereotypically caricatural misrepresentation of an old nemesis, the “vilain Allemand.”2 In other columns, Mirbeau denounces anti-Semitism, acknowledges the inevitability of class struggle, and aligns himself with the working poor. With its opposition to calcified systems, discredited ideas, and unjust leaders – with its inexpressible vision of a utopian future that could never be truly realized – anarchism expressed the political operation of Mirbeau’s nothing machine. While evidence of Mirbeau’s emergent political interests and artistic ideals informs Le Calvaire, the novel primarily addresses the theme of love and literature, sexual and redemptive passion. Inspired by Mirbeau’s disastrous affair with Judith, a woman of dubious morals and extravagant tastes, Le Calvaire presents an unflattering portrait of an author reduced to a state of humiliated impotence. Fictionalizing the 1

“Le journalisme,” September 8, 1884, Le Gaulois, qtd. in Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), p. 203. 2 Ibid., p. 223.

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devastating effects of a relationship begun in 1880, the novel offers an unadorned image of the ruthless female predator who, with her “cuisse légère” and her “cervelle d’oiseau,”3 leaves her lover helpless and ashamed. However, it is the attempt to transform unhappy love into an impulse to create that is at the heart of Mirbeau’s novel on salvatory art. In a text expressing a brand of vindictive pessimism that combines the influence of Sade and Schopenhauer, sexual victimization is ultimately rehabilitated and utilized in the hero’s aesthetic of heroic soteriology. Already in Le Calvaire, Mirbeau displays what Nivet and Michel describe as “une véritable gynécophobie,”4 one encompassing predatory courtesans and derelict mothers, neurotic, profligate creatures with their instinct for exploitation and cruelty. However, despite Mirbeau’s horror of women, his sense of the calamitous consequence of his attraction to them, it is gender conflict that informs his views on the economy of creation. For the first time in Le Calvaire, Mirbeau introduces the figure of the statue, symbol of the damaged self that is sexually victimized by woman and that is subsequently repaired by the triumphant male artist. In a novel that celebrates its hero’s literary unproductiveness, it is his artistically restored identity that emerges as the narrator’s greatest masterpiece. Mirbeau’s intrigue is a simple one that showcases the fecklessness of his hero, Jean Mintié, a man incapable of overcoming his debilitating sexual obsession. Chronicling the character’s unhappy upbringing in the fictional community of Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres, the narrative follows Mintié during his service in the Le Mans regiment at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. Mirbeau’s battlefield descriptions are among his most controversial writings, exposing the spurious glamor of patriotic heroism and exposing the futility of military strife between fraternal strangers from distant lands. The bulk of Mirbeau’s story depicts the humiliating sexual servitude that attaches Mintié to his soulless mistress, the imperious Juliette Roux, who plunges her helpless lover into selfdisgust and financial ruin. From the central love story that forms the basis of Mirbeau’s novel comes the aesthetic philosophy articulated by his protagonist, a belief that women produce the raw material of suffering and babies, which men then fashion into adults and the works of art that are their children. In Le Calvaire, Mirbeau sketches what will become one of his foundational aesthetic tenets: that women, rooted in and working through nature, are the generative principle of life. Yet because they initiate cycles of procreation 3 4

Ibid., p. 139 Ibid., p. 270.

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and decay, gestation and corruption, they also necessitate male efforts at artistic self-creation. Moving from the Normand countryside to the infernal corruption of Paris, from the ancestral home to the mistress’s boudoir, Le Calvaire chronicles its hero’s decline into impotent self-loathing and his final, selfproclaimed redemption through writing. Topologizing the hero’s innocence, the idealized childhood homeland is portrayed as a locus of benificence, sanctuary, peace, and abundance. These images stand in contrast to descriptions of depletion and barrenness characterizing Mintié’s actual family estate, where a dilapidated abbey is surrounded by “une pelouse teigneuse, deux sorbiers chétifs,” and a muddy pond haunted by the spectral shapes of “carpes maigres.”5 Because of the sickliness of his natural environment, it is not surprising that Mintié later dreams of an idealized Normandy blanketed with verdure, covered with purple orchards, golden with “belles moissons qui mûrissent au soleil.”6 Corresponding to the devitalized landscape of his youth is Mintié’s death-desiring mother, a languorous, bedridden figure presiding over a world conveying what JeanLuc Planchais calls an “épuisement ontologique.”7 In Mirbeau’s novel, an unnurturing progenetrix and inhospitable nature leave the hero feeling feeble and exposed – anxious to redefine his identity as an anagrammatic cure for his vulnerability and aloneness, giving Mintié the experience of what is protective – of what is “intime.” From the beginning of Le Calvaire, images of fertile earth, provident caregivers, security, protection, and plenty are presented as consoling fictions authored and consumed by men, illusory homelands that they can return to only in their minds. Already in Mirbeau’s novel, women and nature are situated below the level of language and intelligibility. Comprised of events in their pure adventitiousness, meaningless life is gendered as female, making the senseless things that happen the first offspring of the mother of heartbreak. Insignificant and accidental, Mintié’s birth is initially a phenomenon of nature, and is only secondarily redeemed by male interpretation. What, for the parents, is a godsend conferring generational continuity is, for the child, a fall into mortality, as Mintié’s arrival in the world is a narrative act marked by erroneous exegesis. Converted by male relatives into symbols, 5

Octave Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), p. 122. 6 Ibid., p. 302. 7 Jean-Luc Planchais, “La Mère fatale: clé d’un faux naturalisme dans les trois premiers romans d’Octave Mirbeau,” Octave Mirbeau: Actes du colloque international d’Angers du 19 au 22 septembre 1991 (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), p. 166.

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birth is equated with life’s inexhaustibility, associated with material plenitude. Thus, the happy event is celebrated by Mintié’s uncle, who marks the occasion by distributing coins and candy to less fortunate neighborhood children. Optimistically affirmed as a cause for joy, birth is incorporated into male narrative as a substitute for the mother, providing for all oral needs, donating all the confections and money that bountiful life is expected to supply. However, the life Mintié leads does not unfold on a sun-dappled meadow or a fertile plain. Instead, like a battlefield in the war of the sexes or the sweeping expanse traversed by the majestic Prussian scout that Mintié later encounters in battle, Mintié’s wretched existence plays out on the horizontal axis of biological ineluctability. Flat terrain unrelieved by the heroic topography of human striving and accomplishment, life moves from the darkness of the birth canal to the darkness of the tomb. Suggested by Zola’s despairing principle of genetic determinism, the family past is a thread, a bond, an uncut cord pulling the child back into the abyss of hereditary neurosis and generational disability. As sinners and weavers, women fashion the fabric of a baneful destiny, a fatality that ties and cannot be severed by the skills of male conquerors. For Mirbeau, war should not be waged against arbitrarily designated national enemies, but against the internal death drive that aims at a relinquishment of the struggle, an extinction of desire, and a return to a state of rest. Redemptive suffering endured on le calvaire is the creative work done by an artist lashed to a cross that stands above a supine landscape of passivity and resignation. Pain is given meaning in works done by a man, works that sunder the ropes binding him to a world of hopelessness and repetition, climaxing with an experience of spiritual and aesthetic transcendence that delivers him from the plain of temporal loss and existential futility. The Christological connotations of the title of Mirbeau’s novel are illumined by an observation made by Gilbert Durand: “Tout appel au Souverain céleste,” he writes, “se fait contre les liens, tout baptême ou illumination consiste pour l’homme à ‘délier’, ‘déchirer,’ les liens et les voiles d’irréalité.”8 At the start of Le Calvaire, Jean Mintié’s self-victimizing weakness is connected to an unfathomable maternal past governed by a longing for insentience. It is the same appetite for nothingness that draws Madame Mintié to the kiss of the flame, that impels her to chase a sicklewielding farmhand, beseeching: “Mort, ô mort bienheureuse, prends-moi, emporte-moi.”9 In Mirbeau’s novel, the inherited hunger for self8

Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969), p. 188. 9 Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 126.

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annihilation is equated with the principle of its transmission. The generational ties that kill recall the rope that Mintié’s grandmother used to tie the noose with which she hanged herself, as her cadaver, with its blackened face, dangled “légèrement dans le vide.”10 Even sheltering mothers who give birth inherit a yearning for extinction: “these guardians of life,” Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “were originally the myrmidons of death.”11 The link that binds a child to his maternal antecedents perpetuates a tendency on the part of all living organisms to “return to an earlier state of things.”12 Thus, the umbilicus stretching out across the generations is a weapon used by life against itself, “une longue chaîne de suicides, partie de la nuit profonde.”13 In Mirbeau, death at first is stronger than symbol production, the attraction of oblivion more powerful than male efforts to refine experience into art. Fêted by showers of “bonbons” and “liards,”14 Mintié’s birth incurs the misfortune of being alive, telescoping ends into beginnings, culminating in the death of one of the children fighting for his share of sweets and coins, as he trips and fractures his skull on a sharp stone and dies the following day. A similar tragedy befalls the uncle who, punished for his largesse, contracts the typhoid fever to which he succumbs a few weeks later. Mirbeau’s opening chapter opposes the derisory scope of little male aggression to the irresistible force of female destruction – things’ internal orientation toward inorganicism. Described in the opening chapter, Father Mintié’s rage against cats and birds is as unmotivated as the murderous xenophobia and anti-Semitism seen in other characters in Mirbeau. Later in the Frontispiece to Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau will elaborate on the difference between men’s recreational bloodletting, their ideological cruelty, and the cosmically obliterative energies channeled by women as the agents of nature. Whether it is Monsieur Mintié’s exasperation with stray animals or the shooting gallery customers who shatter plaster figurines with gunfire, men express the frustrations they cathartically alleviate by blowing up symbolic enemies that they fabricate themselves. Harnessing these impulses in the name of patriotism or racial purity becomes the objective of colonialists, anti-Dreyfusards, and warmongers. But no matter how violent the campaigns men undertake, 10

Ibid., 128. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 614. 12 Ibid., p. 615. 13 Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 127. 14 Ibid., 121. 11

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they are nothing in comparison to the operation of the female death instinct. Countering life’s tendency toward randomness and disorder is the aesthetic that Mirbeau outlines in his novel, the artistic expression of men’s insistence on the permanence of their memories and the solidity of their artifacts. The structuring activity of male intelligence is manifested in Mirbeau by a taxonomic interest in dividing, creating hierarchy, affirming men’s nominative authority. Opposing the anarchy of the natural world, the creative endeavor is predicated on the specificity of the law and the clarity of language, as nomos, the noun “names a person, place or thing, […] takes it out of chaos and confusion and gives it a definition.” 15 In Le Calvaire, Mirbeau shows the maternal pull of suicidal agraphia as being conveyed by Mintié’s lapses into linguistic flaccidity and lexical imprecision – his nominative exactitude drowned out by la musique divine des choses. Imagining his mystically sensual expiration in the bosom of the statue of the Virgin he contemplates in the chapel adjoining his home, Mintié experiences a fall into expressive vagueness. The subject’s mastery of objects, his ability to identify them gives way to the power of things to signify as their fragrance, their texture, and musicality. “Et ce langage inexprimé,” Mintié wonders, “qui coulait dans mon âme d’enfant des tendresses ineffables […], ce langage plus parfumé que le parfum des roses, ce langage n’était-il point le langage divin de l’amour?”16 In Le Calvaire, the painting, the autobiographical narrative, and especially the statue are celebrated as artifacts surviving the final dissolution of creativity in the female bed of quiescence and sleep. Mintié asserts the operation of a causality and design that rescues events from their desultoriness, that confers on them a new teleological purpose. The suffering inflicted by women becomes for Mintié the inspirational stuff of his art, the motivation for his narrative, and the subject of his text. A messenger of death heralding the end of language, pain is recuperated by the victim when he invests it in an economy of creation. The efficacy of Mintié’s religion of heroic martyrdom gives new meaning to his experience and brings salvation to his readers. Resurrecting the humiliated male and rejected lover, suffering transmutes self-disgust into the edifying material of Mintié’s gospel of masochism. Devoted to chronicling the protagonist’s unhappy childhood, the opening chapter of Le Calvaire depicts Mintié’s mother as a principle of self-destruction. Convinced she has communicated to her son the same world-weariness that makes her long for death, Madame Mintié is the dark orifice into which energy and meaning fall and disappear. Paralleling the 15 16

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 9. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 188.

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fantasmatic activation of the child’s castration fears, Mintié’s glimpse of his mother’s nakedness is accompanied by a mutilation of his power to communicate. Thereafter, Mintié’s narrative links paradisaical visions of nature with the writer’s descriptive incapacitation, as cuts in the text reflect the genital incompleteness of the woman that inspired it. As he is prepared for his bath, Mintié’s nudity – the child’s “langes dénoués”17 – mirror the opening of the mother’s peignoir. Transferring the empty place on the her body onto her son, she infects him with her morbidity, “[lui] communiquait les germes de son mal.”18 Projected as the black bathtub tile, the “quelque chose de terrible” that makes the child hide his face is what eliminates the richness of his vocabulary and swallows the diversity of his words. In place of Mintié’s nuanced language, there is the bottomless black hole, what Célestine, in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, refers to as la chose. For the adult Mintié, insignificant experience is redeemed by investing in its narrative reconstruction. Like the fetishist who denies maternal castration, Mintié overvalues symbolic substitutes for the empty space of genital elision. From the artist’s lips come insightful words that deny the inevitability of annihilation, the message of death issuing from the vulval labiae imaged in the painting by Mintié’s friend, Lirat: “un ventre hideux et vrai… une tête de mort […] vivante […] avide, goulue, toute en lèvres.”19 Like the fetishist who alternates between self-delusion and recognition, Mintié acknowledges the imposture that he perpetrates on himself. Proud of his artistic accomplishment, Mintié will also be ashamed of his unoriginality. Confessing his strategy of plagiarism, his rivalry with authors whose style he copies, Mintié affirms the nullity of his writing and the emptiness of its subject. Authorial fathers conferring a spurious legitimacy on the son who would displace them, Spenser, Scribe, Rousseau, Hugo, and Poe supply language that Mintié steals and claims as his own. Like the bibliomaniac who dreams of appropriating the generative potency of authors whose works he collects, the plagiarist attaches fetish value to another’s text, endowing it with the “magical powers of an ego quality […] which builds [his] self-esteem and reduces anxiety by allowing [him] to feel that [he] participates in the power, intelligence or historical significance of the author.”20 Mintié feels doubly threatened with being unmanned, left black and blank like the bathtub tile, incapable of displaying the paternal virility 17

Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 134. 19 Ibid., p. 202. 20 Norman Weiner, “On Bibliomania,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1966), pp. 220-221. 18

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of genuine artistic talent. Lirat’s jealous contempt for artists anointed by Salon juries intends the same castration of the father as does Mintié’s usurpation of the power and fame of established writers. But his plagiaristic hoax is doomed to fail, prompting Mintié to proclaim his ambition to author an authentic work fashioned from his own substance and expressed in his own words. As suffering transmutes humiliating experience into heroic narrative, life, as unprocessed material, is infused with new intelligibility. Distilled into the ink used to describe it, the blood of heartbreak covers pages with words that admonish future generations. Realized as a book, Mintié’s thought would be pain made into language: “elle secoue sur les pages douleureuses des morceaux de [sa] chair et des gouttes de [son] sang; [ses] nerfs y résonnent, comme des cordes du violon sous l’archet d’un divin musicien.”21 In Mintié’s formulation, his crucified body is still a text inscribed by a divine author, still the instrument from which God draws exquisite harmonies. The marriage of unhappy life to an art of edification is still not celebrated in an epithalamium whose author is Mintié himself. Before the scoria of imitativeness is fired away in the crucible of anguished passion for Juliette Roux, Mintié regards writing as a penitential exercise. Its only function is to deliver him from the misery of existence, enabling him to complete the passage from the inexpressiveness of infancy to a mystical reimmersion in “the divine music of things.” Before his liaison with Juliette, he still envies the brutishness, dormancy, and self-complacency of stupid people: “Ah! l’impassible sérénité!” he exlaims. “Ah! l’éternel contentement de soi-même des médiocres.”22 In Mintié’s conception of an artistic theodicy, the passion of a lover is modelled on the Passion of Christ. In the description of Mintié’s aesthetic, evil, adversity, the shame of sex addiction are redeemed of their status as circumstantial misfortunes by being recuperated as material for salvational creation. The prostrate, death-seeking mother is no longer the origin and end of things, but instead is reinterpreted as an icon fashioned by a male worshipper. The generative principle of death, Madame Mintié dies to be reborn in her son’s production of the sacred image of the mother. In Mintié’s narrative, the figure representing the indestructible artifact, the victorious transcendence of life’s organicism is the statue that transforms the human likeness into art. Seen from this viewpoint, Mintié’s inaugural creative act is purely a perceptual one, resurrecting the biological mother and making her immaculate in the son’s visualization of the plaster image of the Mother of God. More than implying the self-deification of the visionary child, the conflation of mother and Virgin exchanges transience 21 22

Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 187. Ibid., p. 187.

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for immortality, makes the lasting artifact the creative offspring of the male child. In his fantasy of a unitive merger, Mintié imputes to the image of the Virgin the same incommunicable goodness that robs the child of speech. The time of mortality and loss, olfactorily manifested as the stench of putrefaction, gives way to the odor of sanctity, a perfumed eternity redolent “d’encens et de myrrhe.”23 If the original work of art is the infant’s hallucination of the absent mother, 24 Mintié’s hyperdulia is his first creative inspiration. Through mourning his mother who has just passed away, Mintié is sexually aroused, interacting with the statue he adopts as a mother-substitute, one with whom he imagines coupling through the medium of his sketching. Art becomes an instrument used for remedying loss, art that resurrects the dead – not as nature’s shabby plagiarism – but as an ideal that Mintié fathers and with which he creatively engages. He notes his unwillingness to leave the Virgin: “C’était comme un besoin de possession, un désir violent de la prendre […]. J’eus l’idée de la dessiner: avec quel amour, il est impossible de vous l’imaginer!”25 Pierre Michel remarks on the mysterious identity of the unnamed interlocutor in this passage, incongruous, as Michel says, because the existence of this addressee supposes “que le récit […] est destinée à quelqu’un qui ne se nomme pas.”26 Perhaps this unnamed audience is the community of male writers whom Mintié brings to life when he leaves the indescribable plenitude of nature, death, and mothers, in order to enter the world of interpersonal discourse. At the same time that the creative “I” gives birth to the work of art, it also engenders its consumers and the fellow artists who understand it. Having identified the statue as a figure that withstands the disintegrative energies of biology and time – its verticality symbolizing pride in successful male achievement – Mintié takes the next step and defines men as both producers and subjects of the creative work. As the languid, disengaged caregiver is replaced by the silver-spangled statue of the Virgin, the neglected son also rediscovers himself in his healthy, cherished counterpart, the rosy infant on whom the Mother’s ecstatic gaze 23

Ibid., p. 140. As Joseph H. Smith affirms: “no matter the other level of meanings wrought, the work of art, I suggest, ultimately recapitulates original loss and celebrates the original imagistic recreation of the mother.” “Mourning, Art, and Human Historicity,” Telling Facts: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 138. 25 Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 140. 26 Pierre Michel, “Notes: Le Calvaire, “ Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), p. 1149. 24

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is trained forever. Even the iconographic stereotype suggests the immutability of the image, its imperviousness to change and the vicissitudes of interpretation. Yet the universality of the image is also an impediment to originality, preventing the artist from representing his subject in new ways. Protective, loving, immortal, the statue of the Virgin corrects Madame Mintié’s faulty embodiment of the maternal. But in order for the son to complete his reappropriation of the art work, it is necessary that the image made be an image of himself. Highlighted as the symbol from which the novel draws its title, the calvaire defines the axial structure of the narrative. Dominating the flat plane of decay and sleep is the heroic uprightness of the cross. On the cross, the seemingly gratuitous suffering inflicted by women is reutilized as material in expiatory art whose production changes the victim into a savior. Straight and indomitable, the cross is like a statue, as both convert bodies into images, and the randomness of experience into the clarity of its meaning. Covered with drops of blood and pieces of flesh, the page is the site of Mintié’s crucifixion, the place, where, in agony, he washes away his own sins and the sins of his readers. Raised up by the teleological purpose of his creation, Mintié escapes the horizontality of biology. Once a tree, the cross becomes a monument – “si l’arbre devient colonne,” as Durand writes, “la colonne à son tour devient statue […].” Thus, “le rôle métamorphosant du végétal est […] de prolonger ou de suggérer la prolongation de la vie humaine. Le verticalisme facilite beaucoup ce ‘circuit’ entre le niveau végétal et le niveau humain, car son vecteur vient renforcer encore les images de résurrection et de triomphe.”27 In Mirbeau’s notorious second chapter, where he evokes atrocities committed in the name of patriotism and proclaims solidarity with war’s victims, Mintié learns that women are not the only agents of death. Sent off to battle, Mintié discovers that it is not only sexual passion but also nationalist ideology that causes the uprooting of ancient trees, the desecration of nature, the profanation of man’s creation – not only mistresses but zealots who are “criminels iconoclastes, brûleurs de tableaux, démolisseurs de statues.”28 In its most coherent form, Mintié’s religion of rehabilitative suffering opposes Sade’s glorification of confusion and lawlessness. The division of dry land and water, darkness and light, things and their names contrasts with the violation of taboos against bestiality and incest. While Sade prescribes overthrowing the positional and moral opposition of high and low, repression and instinct, art classifies, abstracting itself from the 27

Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de limaginaire, p. 395. Octave Mirbeau, “Préface à la neuvième édition du Calvaire, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), p. 120.

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stuff of creation to which it gives beauty and form. In Mirbeau’s excoriation of war, he shows Sade’s violation of body boundaries, his programmatic endorsement of violence and degradation as being exacerbated by the hypocritical insistence on arbitrary divisions – between Prussian and Frenchman, officer and infantryman, soldier and civilian. In the same way that Mintié’s dead mother is rehabilitated by association with the Virgin as a divine model of nurturing dependability, Mintié’s image of the unheroic soldier is redeemed by his vision of the majestic Prussian horseman he glimpses on the battlefield, another ideal Mintié embodies as a “statue équestre de bronze.” 29 Silhouetted against the dawn-flooded vastness of the plain, the majestic verticality of the rider makes him appear gigantic. The polychromatic richness of the auroreal landscape, pink and blue, imbues the scene with an epic sweep of cinematic grandeur. Incorporated as the hero of Mintié’s conjectural narrative, the enemy soldier becomes an everyman, a citizen of all nations, a fraternal image of Mirbeau’s protagonist. In Mintié’s mind, the Prussian is visualized as taking leave of wife and daughter, departing from a home intimately furnished with a paper-cutter and rocking horse. In Mintié’s imagination, the awful Hun whom French troops envision as sowing devastation, incinerating peasant huts, disemboweling babies, is euphemized as a brother. It is a more benign but no less implausible fiction than the one that Mintié’s compatriots generate. Ultimately, the moral and aesthetic dimension of Le Calvaire is structured by a rigorous gender opposition, distinguishing the fraternal world of warfare and art from the nightmare sexual battlefield on which sanguinary maenads make up an unstoppable conquering army. Mirbeau’s pacifism in part springs from a recognition that men are ill-equipped for violence. Unless it is harnessed to the chaos-seeking female energy inhering in living things, male aggression is small in scale and ineffectual in practice, like Father Mintié’s shooting of cats and birds, like Mintié’s petulant attack on Juliette’s pet dog, Spy, which in a moment of jealous fury he kills by smashing in its skull. Soldiers in Le Calvaire enjoy a solidarity that supersedes nationalistic fervor and transcends cultural difference, not because they are stalwart fighters, but because they are pawns of sadistic generals or playthings of rapacious mistresses. In Mirbeau, men come together in the shared experience of their victimization. Mesmerized by women represented as black bathtub tiles, genital lacunae, blank pages of unwritten narrative, a misogynist like Lirat joins with Mintié in his credulous admiration of feminine pulchritude and 29

Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 167.

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fashion. It is only in Mintié’s imagination that men prevail in the war between the sexes, only there that a pathetic, suicidal specimen like Mintié can be iconographically immortalized as a victor sculpted in marble or cast in bronze. Heroic statuary remedies the indignity done to men in naturalist fiction, where the idea of male pride and prowess is unromanticized and demythified. In a scene at the end of Le Calvaire, Mintié imagines the ragtag remains of the Le Mans regiment being replaced by the city’s routed battailion of lovers. Stronger than the virile, serene Prussian rider is an army of women resplendent in their feathered hats and colored dresses, furies whose enemies line the Bois de Boulogne avenue with their corpses. Humiliated, Mintié sees himself as one of the defeated, imagining “des régiments de la conquête, s’abattre, ivres de pillage, sur Paris vaincu.” 30 Earlier, in a passage that scandalized readers who considered themselves patriots, Mirbeau had described Mintié’s embrace of the fallen enemy, bestowing a kiss on the Prussian’s bloody, drool-streaked face. In a simultaneous expression of fraternal identification and aesthetic narcissism, Mintié’s act marks the completion of his conversion of battlefield experience into utopian narrative. Like the unidentified fellowman who is addressed in Mintié’s narrative, the soldier becomes a reflection of the writer who imagines him, a character fashioned in the image of his author/ father, a multiple “vous” generated by a single creative “je.” The love that Mintié claims to feel springs from pride taken in creativity. The literary redemption of experiential degradation raises up the victim, conferring a godlike majesty on a writer who suffers for his craft, who consents to be nailed to the cross of his book in order to rescue his readers. In his aspiration to dispel his nightmarish vision of hellish brothels glowing with lust and fire, filled with writhing shadows of the damned, Mintié is motivated less by a wish to redeem his brothers than by a hunger for the glory that his verbal mastery affords. Acting on a desire “d’évangéliser les malheureuses créatures qui croupissent dans le vice,”31 Mintié preaches his religion of art to effect his own salvation. Once anchored in soil irrigated with tears, the crucifix ceases to be a tree, an organic, living thing, in order to become a monument its builder erects in honor of his self-awarded immortality. At first, Mintié’s literary ambition is fired by the same death drive that changes sexual desire from a principle of regeneration into a devouring, destructive force. Rather than originating in the creative imagination, Mintié conceives his future works as being inspired by 30 31

Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 289.

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hunger for Juliette. Born of lust and desperation, prolificacy would be an instrument of loss – as comedies, dramas, novels, overflowing from bookstores, would disappear, sold for money used to buy the furniture and clothes consumed in the furnace of Juliette’s greed. Rather than creating like a god whose works ensure his disciples’ salvation, Mintié would write as an expression of alienation: “comme un forçat, je travaillerai.”32 Yet in propounding his new doctrine of redemptive male creation, Mintié will go on to proscribe the iconolatrous practices of earlier times, contesting nature religions based on self-immolation and ego death, discouraging identity dispersal in the totality of living things, abjuring the silence that brings peace in favor of a language that empowers. In the battle of the sexes, oedipal desires that first had authorized a cult of “la mère divinisée” had emasculated a priesthood left “sans ongles, sans dents, brutes et domptés, sur le canapé de la maîtresse.”33 Effected by processes of natural metempsychosis, the mother as poison flower wilts, dies, returns to the earth before reappearing as her avatar in the bloom of the murderous love goddess. This is the figure whom Mintié’s friend Lirat depicts in his nightmare canvas, the Biblical harlot – voracious, flabby-thighed, adored by old men in fur-lined coats, their eyes revulsed in a mockery of religious ecstasy. As Eléonore Roy-Reverzy remarks, Mintié ultimately emerges as an artist whose sole product is his suffering, a martyr offering only “l’inutile sacrifice d’un hypothétique talent.” 34 It is the enormity of woman’s wantonness and evil that enables their male victims to deify themselves, re-creating the relation of savior and she-devil, “tout comme le rapport du masochiste à son bourreau.”35 The religious paradigm is reinforced by a definition of the artist whose parturition labor ends with the emergence of a work that renders the mother superfluous in her child-bearing role. God, the Father, begets God, the Son, whose art reenacts the work of Genesis, thereby eliminating the mother as life’s generative matrix. The disciples saved by consuming Mintié’s sacramental narrative form an exclusively male society whose goal is its self-perpetuation, effecting “a spiritual or social rebirth through the father or a community of fathers.”36 Yet Mintié’s view of parthenogenetic art is a problematic one, depending on the fantasmatic occultation of text and baby. If the pain of sexual longing is likened to the 32

Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 176. Eléonore Reverzy-Roy, “Le Calvaire: roman de l’artiste,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 2 (1995), p. 32. 35 Ibid., p. 30. 36 Harold Feldman, “The Illusions of Work,” The Psychoanalytic Review 42 (1955), p. 267. 33 34

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agony of childbirth, both conclude with a miscarriage, with suppression of the object. Mintié is revealed as a spurious progenitor: “Artiste sans faire, à l’instar des personnages de Huysmans, il est cependant artiste pour vivre et souffrir.”37 The monument that Mintié fantasizes about erecting would pay tribute to his glory and commemorate the loss of the art work whose production permits attainment of immortality. In Le Calvaire, there is nothing immune to the thanatropic movement of living things toward quiescence, nothing impervious to the corrosive forces of cowardice and desire that leave corpses littering beds and battlefields. Like raw experience that dies in order to be reborn as its fictionalization, the suffering artist perishes, returning as the author of his autobiography. A trafficker in myths, he creates, not texts, but their reception, not art, but the adulation bestowed by future generations. Mirbeau’s novel shows the protagonist appropriating and using in his own interest the central symbol of the statue-monument to proclaim art’s victory over time. Majestically representing man’s triumph over ephemerality, the monument, like the crucifix, is planted in death and constructed out of grief. Like the creative infertility it symbolizes, it embodies failure as achievement. “Symptoms and monuments both begin with loss,” as Peter Homans writes, “and both seek to soften the loss by building structures within the context of the activity of mourning.”38 In bypassing the labor of creation, Mintié – “artiste sans faire” – seeks to author posterity and bequeath celebrity to himself. Ensuring the unassailability of a reputation based on books he never writes, he imagines substituting praise for the actual work he cannot finish. Mintié’s most concerted effort may intend replacing the statue of the Virgin with an image of himself, shattering the idol before which helpless worshippers lie abject and prostrate. Only the destroyer of old creeds can herald the coming of the new messiah. Only the one imitating woman’s work can usurp the mother’s role, by giving birth to beauty and audience acclaim. After he replaces the image of the Madonna cradling a male infant “sans ongles et sans dents,” Mintié’s battlefield theophany presents him with the image of a powerful conqueror in the figure of the Prussian horseman. Yet Mintié also sees this man as a messianic rival who must be shot so that Mintié can take his place. However, the act of re-creating the self as God can never be completed, since the self-styled Christlike novelist cannot escape the phenomenal world, cannot rise above the 37

Reverzy- Roy, “Le Calvaire: roman de l’artiste,” p. 28. Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 271

38

Art as Repair: Le Calvaire

33

terrestrial plane of lechery and failure and enter a celestial realm of inexpressible perfection. As Mirbeau would come to realize, utopia is another disabling maternal sanctuary, a place where “artistes engagés” are rendered obsolete, as mankind’s universal happiness makes literature superfluous. This is why Mintié prefers the symbol of the crucifix, representing, as it does, the interminable Passion of the savior, which never ends with death and an indescribable resurrection. This is why Mintié projects himself as a suffering redeemer – imprisoned in the body, denied any real transcendence. However, since Mintié never writes, the Cross ceases to act as the site of symbolization. It no longer marks the point where speaking man beholds a divinity beyond language. Instead, like the unwritten book, it exists solely as an object whose indestructibility situates eternity in matter. There is no longer an expiatory transformation of sinful writers into literature, since Mintié escapes mortality by attaining fame directly – never writing books that earn the esteem of future generations. A denial of oblivion, a refusal of transience, the monument calls an audience to mourn the absence of the art work while celebrating the artist who achieves fame for doing nothing. In the presence of the grandeur of the uncompleted work, the collectivity of readers whom Mintié identifies as “vous” come together with the narrator to recall the loss of his creation. “Monuments,” Homans says, “take shape in society in response to […] mourning done together.”39 Not his book, Mintié’s masterpiece is an apotheosized self that does not hang from the Cross but is immortalized in statuary: “Je me voyais déjà, dans la postérité, en bronze, en marbre, hissé sur des colonnes et des piédestaux symboliques.”40 At the conclusion of the novel, Mirbeau’s protagonist catches a glimpse of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Lirat, consorting with his mistress. With the unmasking of the art father, the old god is cast down, and the hypocritical Lirat gives way to his disciple. In spite of learning the imposture of Lirat’s polemical misogyny, Mintié promulgates a new creed in which women are excluded – in which men are the only gods, officiants, and practitioners. Critics of Mirbeau’s novel have remarked on Mintié’s oedipally derived feelings of inferiority, subservience, and rivalry with Lirat. It is not surprising that the revelation of Lirat’s falseness acts as a symbolic murder of the father activating fantasies of repatriation, a wish to re-enter the lost sanctuary of the mother-garden. Given the fact that Lirat, “le Père a déserté

39 40

Ibid., 277 Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 283.

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les cieux [et] que le sacrifice de son fils est dénué de sens,”41 Mintié seeks a place where there are no more words, only the “divine music of things.” Metonymized as the richly fruited Normand motherland, Madame Mintié reappears in pastoral images of pre-human brutishness and repose, a haven where the writer abandons his craft in order to experience an inexpressible Nirvana. Here again, language disappears, dissolved in the ambient vagueness of sweet perfumes. Words once put out of the mouth become the pasturage that fills it. And longings for return, conveyed by a childish vocabulary, emphasize littleness, weakness, passivity, as Mintié is identified with “les fleurettes [qui] balancèrent, au bout de leurs tiges, leurs corolles menues,” and then evaporates into a whirlwind of birds scattering into the dreamer’s unconscious. In the novel’s final passage, the tone changes, and Mintié describes the terrible eschatological consequences of his redemptive aesthetic. Pregnant with the text he never delivers, Mintié had sought to supplant the mother in her childbearing role. Then, modelling himself on a savior transsubstantiated as the Eucharist of his mortified flesh, he had consented to be torn apart and distributed as food to men left hungry by an unnurturing caregiver. Gone is the mother who gives birth and who feeds, replaced by a self-begetting son who himself becomes aliment. In a nightmarish image of a derisory Parousia, Mintié imagines returning to the streets of the capital, which before he had envisioned as filled with the corpses of men fallen in the battle of love. In the fleshless skeletons of “spectres fous,”42 Mintié multiplies himself as his victimized followers, those who would be redeemed by consuming his narrative – those whose souls, once saved, as Mintié says, would allow “le rachat de la mienne.”43 In a distant apocalypse, Mintié contemplates the sacramental remains of the hallowed dead, shattered vertebral columns, ancient skulls, dry bones ringing as they fall to the pavement. Fragments of bodies are broken apart like crumbs given worshippers in a mockery of the Communion feast, as their mystical transports resemble the convulsions of their “fièvre homicide.”44 Having fought over the “immondes charognes” of their despicable mistresses, they compete for bits of their savior’s flesh, a cadaver left twisted, repulsive, yet holy by the sexual torture that changes a man into an artist. Like the writer objectified as his glory, the sculptor is re-created as his monument. Yet the image of Mintié’s sublimation of suffering into art, and the artist into his renown, is not the one that closes the novel. At the 41

Reverzy-Roy, “Le Calvaire: roman de l’artiste,” p. 32. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 303. 43 Ibid., p. 203. 44 Ibid., p. 303. 42

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end, the Christ who is jeered, spat on, and scourged is replaced by men still “fouettés par le plaisir.”45 There is no irresistible thrust carrying heavenward an author killed by lust and resurrected by literature. A nothing machine devalued by a failure to produce, Mintié leaves no works etherealized as their celebrity or immortalized as monuments. The only loss that Mintié mourns in his commemorative narrative is the literary masterpiece he was incapable of siring. Instead of being enshrined in a pantheon of the immortals, Mintié remains on earth in the aspect of his suffering materialized, as the “immonde charogne” of the narrative given in offering to his followers – in the book he hands them, saying: “Take, eat; this is my body.”46

45 46

Ibid. Matthew 26:26, RSV.

Chapter Two Iconoclasm: L’Abbé Jules Unlike Jean Mintié, whose self-awarded authorial celebrity had been the reward for writing nothing, Mirbeau – himself tormented by the difficulty of making the final editorial changes in Le Calvaire – was plagued by creative self-doubt, bedeviled by professional insecurities, filled with disgust for what he regarded as the mediocrity of his talent. “Cette incapacité de juger lucidement de son oeuvre, cette tendance obsessionnelle à l’autodévalorisation, […], cette exigence de perfection condamnée à une perpétuelle insatisfaction, autant de constantes dorévenant chez lui,” as Nivet and Michel remark. 1 Once embodied in the figure of the statue, with its smoothness and durability, Mirbeau’s literary ideal had become a chimera or mirage, elusive, mocking the paucity of his creative accomplishments. Despite the positive critical response accorded to Le Calvaire, whose sales exceeded 20,000 copies in a matter of weeks, Mirbeau began to evolve an aesthetic based on the dissipation of illusion, on exposure of the defects in every presumptively unblemished artifact. Increasingly for Mirbeau, the only honest art was one that dispelled dreams of the immortality of glory, that cast the artist down from his pedestal of achievement and adulation. Nevertheless, by early 1887, with the 27,000 francs earned by Le Calvaire, Mirbeau was able to pay his debts and found himself in a position to demand more substantive remuneration for his journalistic labor. Withdrawing from the confusion and tumult of the capital, Mirbeau repaired to his new residence of Kerisper, a picturesque property in the Morbihan, where he pursued work on a second novel he would later entitle L’Abbé Jules. What, in Mirbeau’s preceding novel, had been the theme of writing as a dolorist religion, an ascetic spiritual exercise that saved the author through art he never produced, becomes in L’Abbé Jules a reflection on literature as an expression of its own expendability. Often characterized as a paean to nature, an indictment of cultural institutions perverting man’s instinctual health, L’Abbé Jules is also Mirbeau’s most fully developed depiction of art as an argument for its exclusion. Along with offering “un message imprégné de rousseauisme, de

1

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 287.

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tolstoisme et de schoperhauerisme que le lecteur est invité à méditer,” 2 L’Abbé Jules also proclaims the superfluity of these philosophers, praising art that effects its disappearance, removing the veil of words and images that prevents reality from standing forth. Refining the anti-establishment views Mirbeau had articulated in the preceding years, L’Abbé Jules further adjusts Mirbeau’s anarchist ideals with his evolving view of art that builds by tearing down. The opposing face of Jules’s iconoclasm – his repudiation of fanaticism, asceticism, superstition, and repression – is his practice of acting as an advocate for the poor, the unlettered, and the children. Jules’s own sense of the value of the operation of the nothing machine is that it removes the social evils that stifle man’s instinctual self-expression, that obscure a natural self that Jules identifies as nothing. As an attack on religion that breeds neurosis and guilt, an indictment of literature that distances readers from the world that it depicts, L’Abbé Jules relates the story of its eponymous hero, an “adolescent mystificateur et méchant [qui] décide, contre tout logique, d’entrer dans les ordres.” Scandal-monger and iconoclast, Jules clings to the faith he denounces, all the while preaching “un anarchisme vague et sentimental,” before dying “au terme d’une longue et traumatisante agonie où l’atroce le dispute au luxurieux.”3 Despite his frequent outbursts of paroxystic rage, his violent displays of carnality and cruelty, Mirbeau’s hero in many ways resembles his creator. Temperamentally volatile, given to sudden ideological aboutfaces, both author and character succeed in ridding themselves of the hobgoblin of self-consistency. Fixated on the horror and glory of human physicality, both are obsessed with exploring the taboo subjects of death and sex. Both insist on debunking institutional myths designed to camouflage man’s animality and biological transience. With truculent derision, both denounce the futility of what J. S. Piven refers to as “human apotropaion,”4 cultural constructs that deny the ineluctability of man’s mortality and reject “anything that threatens the human sense of narcissistic importance.”5 Notwithstanding the vehemence of Mirbeau’s anti-Catholicism, the effects of his religious educaton left an indelible impression that 2

Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 348. 4 J. S. Piven, “Death, Repression, Narcissism, Misogyny,” The Psychoanalytic Review 90. 2 (2003), p. 231. 5 Ibid. 3

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explains in part his characters’ quest for an impossible utopia. Jules’s contradictory philosophical positions suggest Mirbeau’s palinodic inconsistencies; Jules’s passion and contempt for literature, his aspiration to experience more than the terrestrial reality which he maintain alone exists, show Mirbeau’s character as being a stranger to himself and reveal characteristics of the author of which he himself was unaware. As Nivet and Michel note, the tale of l’Abbé Jules expresses the protagonist’s unconscious, “les balbutiements de [sa] personnalité occultée par les règles sociales.”6 Writing, as Mirbeau realized as his career progressed, did not involve the construction of an ingeniously designed plot, the elaboration of characters the author was fully capable of analyzing. Instead, creation afforded a liberation from the prison of self-knowledge, revealing a hidden side of the author to himself, launching him on a journey of discovery as he followed a character “qui, d’une certaine façon, échappe à son créateur.”7 For the most part, the message of Mirbeau’s novel is a negative one, aimed at exposing the imposture perpetuated by doctors, judges, educators, and priests, dismantling the symbolic systems that culture creates in order to “provide their constituents with an account of the origin of the universe, a prescription for acceptable conduct in the context of socially delegated roles, and an explanation of what happens to people when they die that offers hope of immortality.”8 Yet the question remains whether, after unmasking the deceptions perpetrated by religion, law, and medicine, Mirbeau’s text still recognizes literature as a repository of meaning. After a mysterious absence of many years, Jules returns to his native village, and at the insistance of the child’s parents, agrees to tutor his nephew, Mirbeau’s narrator, Albert Dervelle. In conversations with his pupil and acolyte, Jules cites fears of death as the source of his hostility to myths of metaphysical consolation and poetic euphemizations of humans beings’ animal lust. “Dieu,” says Jules, “ce n’est qu’une forme de la débauche d’amour.”9 Despite being raised in the numbingly uneventful town of Viantais, Dervelle himself suspects that no place is truly a refuge from accident and upheaval. Before Jules returns, Viantais is a sleepy village 6

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle,” p. 332. Ibid., p. 333. 8 Sheldon Solomon et al, “Fear of Death and Human Destructiveness,” Psychoanalytic Review 90. 4 (2003), p. 460 9 Octave Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 485. 7

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regulated by unalterable routine, structured by ancient familial and neighborhood discord, governed by religious and legal ritual that diverts attention from the fragility of flesh and the unpredictability of death. Albert’s memories are of a depressing life of gray continuity where nothing interferes with traditional games of bog. Regular visits by family friends, the sharing of common complaints and mean-spirited gossip create an impression of life protected by boredom. Yet, while Jules is a bomb that blows up fragile constructs built of denial, anxiety, and habit, Mirbeau shows that, in Viantais, the institutions intended to guard against disruption are already weakened from within. Symbolic systems disconnected from the meanings they are entrusted with communicating, medicine and religion are illusory safeguards subverted by a perversion of the language that articulates their goals. A surgeon, Albert’s father, Dr. Dervelle, terrifies his son with references to the warm, liquid intimacy of gestation and birth, with descriptions of swelling, leaking, secreting female bodies to which he opposes the glittering cleanness of his obstetric idiom – precise, hard, sharp words like the surgical instruments he polishes before his family. Jules himself is like a disease or a crime that mobilizes the defenses of Viantais’s citizens. Previously divided by petty quarrels, the town’s inhabitants unite in their condemnation of Jules. With his disdain for empty courtesies, his loathing of hypocrisy, Jules – godless priest and book-hating educator – rallies the townsfolk because he “undermines the strength of the death-denying psychological apparatus”10 on which they have come to depend. The same necrophobia that torments Jules inspires the inhabitants of Viantais to invest in institutions that deny the ephemerality and cheapness of life. Disrespecting ceremony and challenging authority, Jules upsets tradition and overturns hierarchy and so subverts the religion he purports to profess. As a cultural iconoclast, he tears down defenses that guard against fears of loss and indignity. When Mirbeau finally shows Jules disembarking at the Coulanges train station at the end of his journey home, the renegade priest has already assumed the superhuman status of the malevolent beings thought to rain down cataclysms on primitive societies. Like thunderstorms and wild animals whose depradations motivate the invention of gods keeping chaos at bay, Jules is a force of disorder, violence, and lawlessness that human communities are formed to combat.

10

Solomon et al., “Fear of Death and Human Destructiveness,” p. 462.

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Mirbeau’s use of Albert as his narrator allows Jules to be presented as the product of a child’s pre-rational consciousness. In the magical world of a being whose mind is unstructured by reason and prejudice, death and disaster loom in the form of a bogeyman, a flesheating gargoyle fashioned by folklore and nightmare. Abbé Jules, as Albert imagines him, is an agent of liberating horror. As he contemplates the demonic clown he projects, Albert feels himself shivering with “[une] peur attractive.” He imagines Jules resembling the sideshow freaks he had seen in a traveling carnival. “N’allais-je pas être, tout à coup, en présence d’un personnage prodigieux, incompréhensible, doué de facultés diaboliques, plus hallucinant mille fois que ce paillasse à perruque rouge, qui avalait des sabres et de l’étoupe enflammée, plus dangereux que ce nègre, mangeur d’enfants, qui montrait ses dents blanches dans un rire d’ogre affamé?”11 In Albert’s production of colorful imagery, Mirbeau shows that fears of death and defenselessness not only motivate the establishment of stifling institutions but also inspire the creation of art. In Mirbeau’s story, the true killer of childhood is not the mythical monster, but the stultifying influence of unloving parents and uninspiring teachers, with their coldness, silence, and indifference. The religion that should uplift is reduced to a dinner table booster seat, “cette exécrable Vie des Saints,” Albert says, “qui me servait de siège.”12 However terrifying Jules appears in family legend, he enlarges a world shrunk by neglect and hopelessness. With his trickster’s supernatural cunning, he expands a universe in which he is capable of anything, bursting the confines of a dreary environment until “soudain [il] emplissait le ciel, plus massi[f …] qu’une montagne.”13 Since he is exposed to his father’s recitations of bloody operations, Albert’s imagination is subject to incisions, pierced by lancets, probed by forceps: “mes si beaux rêves d’oiseaux bleus et de fées merveilleuses se transformaient en un cauchemar chirurgical, où le pus ruisselait.”14 Women idealized as sensual constructs made of flowers, silk, lace, and caresses become, in the father’s professional idiom, a synechdochic collection of diseased organs and shameful body parts: cancers, tumors, placentas, and uteruses.

11

Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 336. Ibid., p. 332. 13 Ibid., p. 336. 14 Ibid., p. 328. 12

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In Dr. Dervelle’s use of gynecological terminology, Mirbeau indicates how medicine’s institutional goals are undermined by abuses of technical language, as the science that heals becomes a vocabulary that injures. Enemy of parents and pedagogues, Mirbeau shows that Dr. Dervelle’s medical professionalism is also what disqualifies him from acting as a father. Corresponding to the sanguinary exactitude of Dr. Dervelle’s description of surgical procedures is the limping obscurity, the unintelligible pronouncements made by Dervelle’s friend and neighbor, Judge Robin. Dependent on the clarity of its formulation, on the impartiality of its administration, the law is inseparable from its formal expression. Steeped in the minutiae of the Code civil, able to cite from memory the most recondite clauses, Judge Robin undercuts his “réputation de juriconsulte phénomène”15 by issuing rulings in a gibberish that bewilders all hearers. Involuntarily transposing consonants – B’s for D’s and P’s for T’s – Robin reconverts the language of law into a mystifying ideolect whose tortuous constructions call attention to words and divert attention from meanings. Litigants – like readers of Mirbeau’s novel – are immobilized by the character’s speech pathology, mesmerized by a glossolalia which, in their effort to translate it, serves to distance them from the substance of Robin’s utterances. Ordinarily arrayed in its ceremonial formality, legal language, as Judge Robin speaks it, is degraded to the level of an infant’s nonsense phonation, or associated with the argot of colloquial obscenity: “Quoi qu’m’chantez là, mossieu l’juge?” as one linguistically challenged appellant asks, “… C’est-y des saloperies?”16 Tellingly, Mirbeau’s narrator notes that none of Viantais’s defendants or plaintiffs is troubled by the obscurity of Robin’s pronouncements. Accustomed to bribing magistrates with baskets of food, inured to the opaqueness of legal discourse, citizens accept the ethical and linguistic perversion of an institution respected for its supposed fairness and clarity. On the other hand, Jules is regarded as intemperate, rude, and ugly, a person who, in his physical person and social demeanor, is a constant affront to the idea of decency. With his crude language and shocking behavior, he flouts rules of civility and violates codes of etiquette. Euphemistic notions of man’s emotional complexity and spiritual 15 16

Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 341.

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grandeur are swept away by Jules, who tears down defenses that block recognition of people as “sentient pieces of breathing, defecating, menstruating, fornicating, expectorating, ejaculating meat.”17 In creating the character of Jules, Mirbeau sketches out the dilemma of the anarchist, who, as an advocate of statelessness and personal liberty, describes a transitional position between the abolition of government and the founding of utopia. When exercising his role as the destroyer of myths, Jules demonstrates the anarchist’s ruthless dispassion, exposing the fictions of romantic love, egalitarianism, justice, compassion, and fraternalism – lies that culture tells to keep the disadvantaged in thrall. Yet in professing a faith he admits is chimerical, Jules shows his ambivalence about idealizing theories that proclaim man’s ability to progress toward enlightenment. Jules’s Catholicism is essentially a masochistic expression of guilty disgust, a penitential system of selfdirected violence meant to absolve him of the sin of being alive in a body. In the initial sermon he delivers to the people of Viantais, Jules displays the same self-punishing sexual rage with which he masturbates in a locked room with his pornography collection. For Jules, commission of a sin is the same as its confession, as both provide a fleeting, self-inculpating release, a discharge of poison that affords a moment of respite. The disease of religion supplies both an etiology and cure, causing the repression it diagnoses and articulating precepts that offer momentarily relief. A slave to the God who condemns and forgives, Jules is a slave to the sex drive he sees as natural and horrifying. Victim of the mystifications he perpetrates on himself, Jules professes a faith that is alternately hypocritical and sincere. Longing for substance to underpin the empty language of literature, law, and liturgy, he dismisses these institutions and their hollow formulations. As medicine denies that it loses its battle against sickness and death, religion and law are institutions that issue from a mourning disorder that represses life’s disorder and brevity. As Freud comments in “Mourning and Melancholia,” feelings of bereavement accompany not only the death of a loved one, but also “the loss of some abstraction.” 18 As a symbolic system of rewards and sanctions, of restitution and retribution, religion emerges as a maladaptive denial of existential absurdity and pointlessness. 17

Solomon et al., “Fear of Death and Human Destructiveness,” p. 459. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia,” A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud,” ed. John Rickman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), p. 125. 18

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In the case of religion, as Piven remarks, the “loss of an abstraction can be mourned and even induce melancholia because it is soteriological.”19 It is significant that, for Jules, the redemption provided by religion is predicated on redeeming religion’s formulaic language. An act of verbal self-flagellation, Jules’s confession from the pulpit is experienced by congregants as an act of homilectic aggression. Mendacity, hard-heartedness, concupiscence: each sin that Jules acknowledges is a word and a wound, a self-martyring reenactment of the Passion of Christ, an attack on the narcissistically healthy body of the faithful. Mirbeau’s narrator describes the effect of Jules’s self-accusation as a retrogressive movement toward man’s primitive awareness of his physical frailty and fear of extinction. In his confession, Jules uses the language of religion to discredit the illusory consolations that religion is meant to provide. While Mirbeau’s negative message stresses verbal inflation, the formulaic speciousness and ritual monotony of utterances that mask the fear of death, he also shows that awareness of mortality may inspire creative work. Illusion production not only enslaves those who exchange freedom for security but also engenders great art that rejects biology and denies transience. A breathtaking digression fracturing Mirbeau’s narrative, the story of Père Pamphile is perhaps the centerpiece of Mirbeau’s novel. A long meditation on delusional aesthetics, the tale of Père Pamphile acts, in Pierre Michel’s words, as “[une] composition en abyme [qui] tourne […] complètement le dos à la linéarité habituelle aux récits.”20 By interrupting conventional narrative flow, Mirbeau’s interpolation of the story of Pamphile destroys the illusion of fictive teleology, dispelling the belief that life can be rescued from its desultoriness by literature, which invests it with direction, structure, meaning, and closure. In the novel, Pamphile’s dream of rebuilding the chapel on the site of the ruins of the Abbey de Réno is immediately preceded by the account of Jules’s project to assemble a library. Replacing stones with books in the construction of his temple, Jules fantasizes about acquiring an enormous collection, raising a vertiginous tower of book-lined shelves interlinked by rolling ladders and infinite staircases, completing the project of incorporating the chaos of external reality into an edifice made of literature. The inevitability of loss and death, the unpredictability of 19

J. S. Piven, “Death, Repression, Narcissism, Misogyny,” p. 232. Pierre Michel, “Notes: L’Abbé Jules,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 2000), p. 1191. 20

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experience can be mitigated when life is housed within the structures and boundaries of art. Jules and Pamphile seek to minimize the threat of disorder by using literature as architecture and architecture as literature, organizing space so that it contains and explains. In Mirbeau, the greater the horror is of life’s amorphousness, the more all-encompassing is the edifice housing it. Built centuries ago, the Abbey de Réno had expanded beyond its original confines, as its outside walls receded until they merged with the horizon: “D’abord resserrée dans un étroit pourpris, composé de jardins potagers, d’un petit bois, de quelques prairies, l’abbaye étendit peu à peu ses possessions, englobant champs et forêts, étangs et villages, tout le pays, à perte de vue, autour d’elle.”21 Founded by Jean de Matha and Félix de Valois, the Order of the Trinitarians had originally been established to deliver Christians held in bondage by infidels. After the monks had been scattered and the chapel demolished during the Revolution of 1789, the Trinitarians, who returned to their sanctuary, had found their mission had become obsolete, and that ransoming the faithful from “corsaires barbaresques” had ceased to be necessary. Deprived of their purpose, unable to adapt, the brothers had finally dispersed for good, leaving the abandoned abbey in the hands of Pamphile as the solitary caretaker. Mirbeau’s story of Pamphile’s life restages on the microcosmic level of the conventual grounds the drama of primitive man stranded in a wilderness of vegetal luxuriance, an Eden untended by any divine gardener. Crazed by the unfocused energies of his mystical fervor, Pamphile illustrates the fact that the illusion of utility is an indispensable component in an individual’s self-esteem. Dedication to what is perceived as constructive work conjures away man’s anxious awareness of the world’s movement toward entropy and silence. Pamphile’s zeal in rebuilding the chapel and reestablishing the Order shows the true purpose of all social institutions. As doctors depend on disease, and as judges require crime without which their work would be superfluous, so religion is instituted to sanction the sins whose commission is needed for religion to exist. More honest than his brethren, Pamphile privileges religious art over the belief system that ostensibly inspires it. Since the Abbey de Réno must be rebuilt and the monks who lived there must be gathered together, the Trinitarians’ institutional mission must also survive. God, health, and justice are imaginary referents that the language of culture insists must be 21

Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 384.

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genuine. Since doxology creates a divinity to praise – since statutes are written to prove that equity exists – resurrecting the Abbey should bring back the monks and revalidate their duty to liberate Christian hostages. Mirbeau uses Pamphile to show that institutions, denying their goal of selfperpetuation, instead claim that they are originally grounded in nature. Citing “l’histoire miraculeuse de son ordre,” Pamphile sees reassembling the monks as an essential part of his narrative: “il croyait que les captifs étaient un nécessaire et permanent produit de la nature, et qu’il y a des captifs comme il y a des arbres, du blé, des oiseaux.”22 Having returned to an unorganized state of pure nature, Pamphile is abandoned in a place with no buildings, no co-religionists, and no rituals. Mirroring the dread of death as absence is the absent abbey whose reconstruction is a dream rather than an actual project. A prototypical utopianist like Mirbeau himself, Pamphile evolves a plan that is all the more magnificent for being unrealizable. Resplendent in its soaring granite spires, its polychromatic marble flooring, the rainbow fire of its sunignited stained glass windows, the Abbey de Réno is the perfect world that can be no more than an idea. Already in Le Calvaire, Jean Mintié had established a correlation between the monument and the uncompleted art work to which the monument pays tribute. In Mirbeau’s character’s fantasmatic aesthetic, creativity is ennobled by its unproductiveness. Thus, the profundity of novels or the beauty of paintings is proven by the fact that they are too glorious to finish. In Mirbeau’s conception of utopia, the sublimity of the artist’s vision is confirmed by his inability to realize or embody it. Genius is failure, the masterpiece is nothing, since its perfection is uncompromised by the fact of its expression. As he had with Jean Mintié, Mirbeau associates Pamphile’s greatness with his abjection, his threadbare clothes, his obsequious cunning being used in the service of an impossible goal. Cheating, wheedling, scheming, stooping to the most demeaning ruses, Pamphile displays an unscrupulousness that evidences his nobility. Mirbeau’s narrator prescribes the reaction expected of readers not scandalized by Pamphile’s servility: “les âmes clairvoyantes auraient pu y deviner un héroisme supérieur.”23 Like the anarchist’s agenda, which restores individual liberty by discrediting the institutions which inhibit and shackle him, Pamphile 22 23

Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., p. 390.

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begins with the removal of obstacles. Ultimately, for Mirbeau, creative energy is best utilized when it is directed at a program of hygienic destruction. In L’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau outlines his aesthetic of creative annihilation, the beauty of obliterating what is fossilized and stifling. Each artist’s antecedents have already littered the countryside with bodies, and, in the interest of creative health, these dead artifacts must be cleared away. But the only genuine art work is the production of new hecatombs. So as Pamphile prepares the ground for the chapel’s foundation, he turns his workplace into a battlefield strewn with mutilated trees: “troncs en l’air, râlant, appuyés sur leurs branches écrasées, comme sur des moignons.”24 Pamphile’s construction of a temple entails the felling of forests, so when contemplating “le spectacle de cette destruction,” he pantingly repeats: “Je la bâtirai!”25 An ascetic expression of the art of self-divestiture, Pamphile’s life aims at a demolition of ego, follows a humbling regimen of creative nihilism. With his patchwork greatcoat and dirty beard, Pamphile travels the globe, turning the mortification of homelessness into the glory of omnipresence. Picking coins with his teeth from the buttocks of atheists, he escapes moral, spatial, and occupational definition. After Jules is rebuffed in his effort to bully Pamphile into giving him money he plans to spend on his library, he later returns to find the anchorite dead, his remains intermingled with the rubble littering the work site. Scattered in the graveyard of his unfulfilled dream, Pamphile’s flyblown cadaver is debris mixed with debris. Black blood, yellow pus, the green liquefaction of rotting muscle tissue, Pamphile is the filaments whose corruption nourishes the forest, regrowing the pine and chestnut trees he had cut down before. Set on soil manured by the decaying flesh of the worker, the ruined Abbey de Réno becomes the original “jardin des supplices.” Watered by the sweat of exertion, fed on the substance of martyrdom, it is a bed that welcomes the vacant shell of a man tortured by obsession. Jules’s angry observation about the vanity of human and divine justice, their futility exposed by the “eternal law of Murder,” is itself the profession of a situational philosophy. Jules’s paean to instinct, spontaneity, and unrepression is revealed as another explanatory narrative, no more valid, no more cogent than Christianity or positivism. Hiding their faces from their inevitable death, Mirbeau’s characters author fictions that 24 25

Ibid., p. 384. Ibid.

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convey outrage or bring solace. However, Mirbeau’s works show that the more disinterested the undertaking, the less homicidal is the campaign to turn a dream into reality. As the architectural body of the brothers who built it, the Abbey dilapidates amidst the rotting shards of its last occupant. The bloody ideal against which Jules fulminates is a pretext for erecting sanctuaries, producing art works, writing novels, fashioning artifacts that outlive their creators for a while before returning to the generative matrix of the cemetery. Jules may assert: “La nature, ce n’est pas de rêver… c’est de vivre,”26 but when confronted with the world’s irrationality and violence – when forced to contemplate the prospect of death – men can do nothing but embody dreams that, in time, come to nothing. In Mirbeau’s fiction, it is not the horticulturally tortured artificiality of the garden that is the beginning and the end, but the uncharted immensity of the forest into which disintegrating human artifacts are reabsorbed. A place of homogeneity and confusion, the forest is an Urwelt preexisting maps that locate and systems that explain. Thick with growth, unplumbed by vision, it is in the forest where one gets lost. In the forest, there are no more medical, sacerdotal, or judicial authorities that shield against nature’s randomness and cruelty, no walls that hold in order and keep out the darkness. Since laws are promulgated by criminal tyrants, applied by bribetaking judges and corrupt police officials, Mirbeau’s anarchism may lead him to advocate abolishing laws. From anarkos to anomos, the elimination of government whose functions are codified in institutional language should free individuals by returning them to a state before the word. Then “anomie” would cease to signify the alienation that government causes and would instead suggest the instinctual liberty that culture aims to suppress. The forest into which Pamphile’s shredded body is reassimilated is the place of formlessness and namelessness that was there before the ordering work of human creation. In the forest, one regresses to the status of a primordium reengulfed in immemorial silence. The forest into which men and their constructs dissolve is the opposite of Jules’s idealized library. Where the monument falls, it is replaced by the tree. From the grave of the writer there again grows a plant. At the end, Pamphile’s dream of a firmamental sanctuary rising to the stars collapses and falls, leaving a forest floor covered with rocks, moss, and undergrowth. There, Jules “ne vit qu’un chaos de pierre de taille, de bois en grume.”27 Site of original 26 27

Ibid., p. 420. Ibid., p. 395.

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confusion unstructured by language or law, “[c]e chaos,” as Pierre Michel writes, “est à l’image d’un univers sans rime ni raison – par opposition au cosmos, univers organisé et harmonieux.”28 Through his characters, Mirbeau expresses nostalgia for an idealized childhood unadulterated by formal education and civic indoctrination. Like Jules, he imagines curing young men of culturally derived neurosis, disassembling “la mécanique poupée de la civilisation” and restoring “l’homme naturel, instinctif, gonflé de vie.”29 Social retrogression from government to statelessness entails a phylogenetic regression from human to vegetal. As Jules says to Albert: “Le mieux est donc de diminuer le mal […] en te rapprochant des bêtes, des plantes, des fleurs.”30 In Mirbeau, the embrace of oblivion, acceptance of one’s disappearance from others’ memories bespeaks a courageous affirmation of life that transcends the self. Whereas it is cowardice that prompts construction of a monument that denies death by concealing it behind the mortuary grandeur of marble, one’s own return to nothingness celebrates the life of everything. Reversion to anonymity ensures the fertility of chaos in which everything commingles before it is separated and named. One of Mirbeau’s heroes’ most cherished illusions is of nature as a maternal cradle offering security and rest. Succumbing to suicidal ideation, they welcome surrender, hoping to break off the fight, to lay down their weapons, and vanish in the forest. The disease of life, communicated by selfishness, symptomatized by disgusting corporeity, is cured by death which deliverers sufferers from guilt. In a recurring fantasm, Mirbeau’s characters are drawn to the cleanness of extinction, when they can shed reproductive organs associated with shame and remorse. When fire burns away the sin of personality, the character manifests what Bachelard calls the Empedocles Complex: “Love, death and fire are united at the same moment. Through its sacrifice in the heart of the flames, the mayfly gives us a lesson in eternity. This total death which leaves no traces is the guarantee that our whole person has departed for the beyond. To lose everything in order to gain everything. The lesson taught by the fire is clear.”31

28

Michel, “Notes: L’Abbé Jules,” p. 1191. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 471. 30 Ibid., p. 470. 31 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 17. 29

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Like cremation scattering ash in the cemetery of the air, atomization reconverts a fornicating something into the wordlessness, whiteness, and perfection of a nothing. In Mirbeau, death denial means a refusal of Clara’s model of the fertility of the torture garden, a rejection of corruption, the pullulation of maggots whose swarming proliferation frustrates the desire for finality and absence. Over time, Jules represses the memory of Pamphile’s gelatinous body parts, the pestilential stench of putrefaction, the larval growth that death promotes. In the forest, death does not turn into slime and stink and flies, but is elided and forgotten, returning to a state outside of language. For Jules, life is a disgraceful thing, not an opportunity to win glory, and those who live the best are those whose passing goes unnoticed. Jean Mintié’s dream of erecting a monument to books he never writes extends to Jules’s ideal of lives that are anonymous and discrete. To Albert, Jules describes the noblest existence as empty narrative, a text effaced by modesty, by the inattention of its readers: “Et tout le monde, ignorant ta vie, ignorera ta mort… Tu seras pareil à ces jolis animaux, dont on ne retrouve jamais la carcasse.”32 The finest novelist is one whose work is a cadaver lost forever; the greatest book is one which – if, by some misfortune, it is produced – simply vanishes and never touches an audience with its taint. The ideal of life as untold story, of death as self-evaporation, of art as undone work is expressed with an increasing poverty of language, with Jules and Mintié approaching a kind of lexical nirvana, in which the specificity of vocabulary dissolves in imprecision, “dans les choses.” Jules recommends that men submit to the rhythms of the world, that their instinctual coupling follow the law of Eros that joins together, and their relinquishment of self submit to Thanatos that sunders. Mintié’s excuse for creative insolvency becomes, for Jules, an aesthetic of unproductiveness, in his oxymoronic exhortation to “fabriquer un Rien.” 33 As with the anarchist who celebrates the art of demolition, the master’s works embody a self-abnegating inexpressiveness, humbling the individual who magnifies the totality of nature. There is no longer the clumsy dualism of creators and their objects, when the moment of self-realization changes an artist into his work whose perfection is signaled by its disappearance into everything.

32 33

Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 471. Ibid.

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Of course, Jules’s metaphysical pedagogy, his lessons on instinct, life, and happiness are often contradicted by longstanding personal practices. He may take the books that Albert brings and throw them “dans l’espace,”34 yet he continues to retreat to the secret precincts of his library. Jules’s professed ideal is to tear down social walls and conceptual barriers, to promote things’ intermingling in space uncircumscribed by prejudice. But in practice, Jules still structures his life by anxiety and repression, fetishizing containers in which he keeps his treasured, shameful objects. If institutions are established to deny human vulnerability, civilized man fears above all else that he may lose his sense of guilt, which he values for authorizing a belief in morality and meaning. In the novel, Mirbeau’s hero deplores literature as a product of neurosis. Yet there is also the terrible irony that Mirbeau’s own text may be included in libraries housing books whose message he condemns. In the same way that Jules collects the works of Spinoza and Auguste Comte, Mirbeau collects the social ills that his fiction combats. As his career advanced, Mirbeau increasingly shunned bibliophilia, art collection, construction of museums as cults of the dead. It was the misoneists Mirbeau execrated who venerated the carcasses of old works, insisting on the changelessness of the Comédie Française repertory. Embalmers and taxidermists, they refused to bury finished artifacts, and their attachment to old art prevented the exercise of fresh creativity. Already in L’Abbé Jules, there is a metonymic link between society, its institutions, and the formal expression of its principles. Paintings, sculptures, novels are like an artist’s deciduous body parts, dead epidermis sloughed off as part of the skin’s regeneration. The art works that a creator sheds and that disperse into his audience are little corpses mourned in the instant of their passing, as their surrender enriches the recipient on whom they are bestowed. Like l’Abbé Jules, the book collector is an invalid wedded to his disease, so that perusing Indiana reactivates symptoms whose remission only lasts as long as George Sand’s book is unopened. Reading from the novel, Albert experiences hallucinations, sees Jules exhibit respiratory distress, succumb to involuntary muscle contractions, indulge in convulsive masturbatory impulses that Mirbeau’s narrator describes as painful and debilitating. In the forest, the living tree displays its rich, exuberant verdure, but in society, it is cut down, turned into pulp made into pages that are finally sewn together like a shroud that wraps a corpse. Art replaces green 34

Ibid., p. 468.

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leaves with the feuilles mortes of a novel. After a reader internalizes texts with their unnatural imagery and unhealthy messages, he becomes the morbid embodiment of his library. Jules executes a perverted reenactment of nature’s dialectic of corruption and regrowth, as he simulates creation by assembling his collection, then purges himself of literature’s pathogenic influence, asserting: “il faudrait détruire […] cet affreux livre de mon coeur.”35 As he continues his instruction of Albert, Jules becomes more vociferous in denouncing, not only cultural institutions, but also their pictorial and linguistic expression. An extreme instance of sublimation, mysticism exacerbates the deviant expression of sexual desire, which is idealized by artists as romantic love. “Entremetteuses de l’amour,” organized religions work hand in hand with the arts in spreading the poison of perverted instincts. Unlike killing, which is natural, the practice of torture is an art form, and “les poètes [qui] n’ont chanté que l’amour, les arts [qui] n’ont exalté que l’amour”36 apply instruments of torture to the body of the love-slave. Replacing objects of desire with erotic imagery, the poet prizes creativity, values his salaciously suggestive lyricism more than mistresses whom he loves less than his descriptive virtuosity. Jules, who hates himself for displaying the entire spectrum of perversions, exhibits erethism instead of lust, prefers pornography to women, is susceptible to “le mysticisme des prières et l’onanisme moral des adorations.”37 In the interest of denying death, men recoil from life’s immediacy. What they worship are objects that, at one time, were vibrant, bright, and beautiful, but were later vacated of energy and turned into artful simulacrums. Life is whiteness, insignificance, empty pages, nature before words sully it, an eglantine unsmeared by poets’ “caca.”38 Comparing art to excrement, Jules stresses the superfluity of objects remaining after creation ends with the evacuation of works as waste. In Mirbeau, art memorializes the life it destroys. Yet genius can be manifested in the moment of denial, in the instant man rejects his animality and transience and draws on the energy needed to transform maladaptation into art. Acquiescence to the reality of biology and loss brings an experience of disillusionment that is fundamentally an-aesthetic. The construction of cathedrals, the production of great literature often comes from an insistence on adorning reality with fiction. The ingenuity of self35

Ibid., p. 483. Ibid., p. 485. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 473. 36

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deception sustains the creative undertaking, as man’s unwillingness to admit to his incomprehension and aloneness inspires him to fashion great masterpieces and manufacture great lies. In spite of his indictment of culture and his praise of nature, Jules finds value in the religion and art he claims to despise. While refusing to administer extreme unction to a dying girl, Jules still consoles her with the promise of the divine presence, reassuring her that her last breath, “C’est Dieu qui vient vers vous.”39 Despite his impeachment of literature, he undertakes his own writing project, the ambiguously entitled Semences de vie, “un ouvrage de philosophie religieuse,” in which Christ repudiates the blind embodiment of perverted human justice, and embraces “la Folie,” as the mother of creativity. It is neither the flight from death nor the denial of reproductive servitude that Jules laments but rather a submission to institutions that cripple those they claim to protect. If righteousness is found in a rejection of the world’s cruelty, if beauty is revealed in the denial of disorder, spirituality is manifested in affirming human dignity, and true art is born from the creative impulse to produce it. However, once longings for transcendence congeal as orthodoxy’s dogma, once creativity is frozen as fixed aesthetic principles, the vitality of art gives way to the deadness of artifacts. In Mirbeau, the work memorializes the death of what inspires it. In Jules’s formulation, the truly meaningful afflatus comes with the desire to produce (“fabriquer”) and the abolition of the product (“Rien”). Ultimately, like a cenotaph, the art work signifies by its emptiness, since in giving form to the idea, the idea is evacuated. As Rico Franses writes of monuments: “One mourns the loss of an object one never possessed.”40 In Jules’s affiliation with the priesthood, he exchanges epistemological denial for experiential self-denial, rehearsing death in the renunciation of companionship and pleasure. If, for Mirbeau’s character, creative work is a heroic mise à mort, the most meaningful endeavor is the performance of one’s passing. Unlike assembling medical treatises or compiling legal volumes – coffins containing death which, when opened, spread more death – Jules prepares to die as a process of self-emptying. In Mirbeau’s telling association, the casket in which the priest is buried is identified with the trunk containing his pornography. 39

Ibid., p. 492. Rico Franses, “Monuments and Melancholia,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society” 6.1 (2001), p. 4. 40

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Throughout the novel, Mirbeau shows that repression breeds hysteria. What is hidden, kept secret, forbidden as taboo engenders a conjectural phantasmagoria of images and stories, more frightening and alluring than what is concealed. The first nothing Jules produces is the mystery of his years spent in the capital: “Qu’a-t-il pu fabriquer à Paris?” as Dr. Dervelle asks unceasingly. Before his arrival in Viantais, Jules’s identity is like his trunk, an unknown thing eliciting the artistic work of speculation, depicting him as a monster, a mythical beast like the creature that Victoire, the Dervelles’ cook, imagines living in Jules’s case, with its “museau […] long comme une broche, une queue comme un plumeau, et des jambes, bonté divine! des jambes comme des pelles à feu!”41 In one respect, Jules’s interment offsets the dissemination of toxic literature, since – different from the book which contaminates its readers – the casket is buried, and the corpse sickens no one. On the other hand, since inhumation is a metaphor for repression, Jules’s subterranean body does not rest silently in the ground but haunts survivors’ minds with its “ricanement lointain.”42 For Jules, the act of mortuary hygiene is his disposal of the trunk, which is set on fire and symbolically enacts the cremation of its owner. With the incineration of the container and the ventilation of its contents, Jules posthumously accomplishes the lifting of repression, undoing the damage that social institutions had done in life. In a whirlwind arabesque of images of buttocks, breasts, and penises, the danse macabre becomes a model of the authentic art work, which exists in the fleeting time of its self-annihilation. Like many of Mirbeau’s novels, Jules’s flame-enveloped trunk is valuable for the truthfulness of the secrets it releases: “tout un fouillis de corps emmêlés, de ruts sataniques, de pédérasties extravagantes, auxquels le feu, qui les recoquevillait, donnait des mouvements extraordinaires.” 43 Mirbeau’s novel is meant to disappear in the expression of its message, wedding loss to creativity as with the burning of Jules’s trunk. As MariePaule Vanseveren and Albert Rombeault write: “La malle retient et semble pourtant être liée à la perte, au deuil. Ou à une nouvelle manière de

41

Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 453. Ibid., p. 515. 43 Ibid., p. 514. 42

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conserver par dissipation. Malle-sarcophage qui dévore ce qu’on lui donne à garder.”44 Mirbeau ends his novel by describing the snicker audible from underground, a reference to the comprehensive failure of repression. Along with Jules’s body, the townspeople bury the fears of their mortality, denying their venality, hypocrisy, and cowardice. Jules himself enjoys a derisory immortality by surviving in his testament, in which he bequeathes his worldly fortune to the first priest who will defrock himself. Jules’s final text proves that one thing is everlasting: human selfishness and greed that pose as piety and principle. In itself, Jules’s will exemplifies the paradoxical status of Mirbeau’s work as a nothing machine, in which creation is accomplished through its simultaneous dismantling. The unmasking of impostors, the exposure of charlatans is a destructive act whose goal is to “fabriquer un Rien.” But along with the anarchist’s aim of doing away with frauds and tyrants, there is the utopian idealist’s dream whose realization leaves no product. From the ruins of the abbey, Pamphile had planned to build a chapel, a structure whose perfection was assured by not existing. From the rubble of his home, he had raised the edifice of his vision. In Mirbeau, consummation and conflagration are the end points of creation, since completion of the work should bring its transformation into ashes. There is the swirl of flaming pages that dissipate in the air, then are extinguished and again come to rest on the forest floor. Phoenix-like, Mirbeau’s novel is born of its condemnation of literature, as he tells of a man inscribed by cultural teachings found in books, and who frees himself of their influence by burning the book of his heart.

44

Marie-Paule Vanseverin and Albert Rombeault, “La malle-poste,” Revue des sciences humaines (1979), p. 144.

Chapter Three The Perfect Death: Sébastien Roch By the middle of 1888, in the midst of toiling over the first draft of Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau was quickly becoming disenchanted with Emile Zola and his celebrity. Awarded the Legion of Honor Cross, Zola, in Mirbeau’s mind, had ceased to behave as a writer in order to be monumentalized as his glory. With his induction into the Académie, Zola seemed to lose his capacity for growth so that – hypostatized as the unassailability of his fame and reputation – Zola enjoyed success that betokened his functional death as a creator. No longer credited with the amazing prolificacy to which his output had attested, Zola was objectified, in Mirbeau’s mind, as finished, canonic writings. To be sure, Zola’s oeuvre was a vast, imposing edifice, and yet its mortuary grandeur was underscored by its being untenanted by its author. Accompanying an artist’s integration into the Académie Française was his evacuation of his work: “Vouloir entrer dans cette institution mortifère, c’est se condamner en tant qu’écrivain.”1 For Mirbeau, the controversial author of L’Assommoir, the Dreyfusard vilified as a traitor to the fatherland, was a dynamic, unstable figure not emasculated by adulation. As a sower of scandal, Zola was relevant and alive, but once he merged with the stereotype of the literary titan and father of the naturalist movement, Zola turned into an icon that Mirbeau felt should be destroyed. At the same time, Mirbeau regarded Zola as an uncontrollable force of nature, a voice of storm and thunder that upset reassuring preconceptions. Thus, in a November 4, 1889 article in Le Figaro, Mirbeau says of Zola’s fiction: “Cela se déchaîne en tempête, écume, bouillonne, soulève les rochers, entraîne les arbres déracinés aussi bien que les petites fleurs pâles de la berge envahie.”2 Images of natural upheaval, of tempest and conflagration, often characterize in Mirbeau’s writing the salutary hygiene of political violence. The raging waters of Zola’s prose, carrying gold nuggets and worthless pebbles, wash away the old ideas that thwart invigorating change. Either

1 2

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 372. Ibid., p. 374.

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Zola is a statue erected to commemorate his glory, or he is an elemental force that overturns the institutions praising him. It is not surprising that Mirbeau should note the revolutionary message of his own novel, claiming that Sébastien Roch is animated by winds of indignation, that it is filled with “une horreur presque anarchiste de tout ce qui est régulier et bourgeois.”3 The rage Mirbeau directs against enemies of change, his anarchist embrace of violent new beginnings is expressed by his aesthetic of fragmentation and inchoateness, by aggression directed against established views, old ideas, completed objects, and by a fascination with unfinished things like adolescents and suspended narratives. Recapitulating Mirbeau’s experiences at the academy of SaintFrançois-Xavier, Sébastien Roch has as its central episode the most traumatic event of Mirbeau’s childhood. In 1859, Dr. Ladislas Mirbeau, flush with his recent success in municipal government and politics, was anxious to give a scholarly imprimatur to his son and so was delighted when Mirbeau was accepted at the prestigious institution in Vannes, a school where “le fils d’un officier de santé ne manquerait pas de frotter sa cervelle à celle des rejetons des plus illustres familles de l’Ouest.”4 Once enrolled, Mirbeau felt immediately estranged from his privileged and overbearing classmates. Mourning his lack of freedom and his disconnection from the world of nature, he suffered from the imposition of an inflexible regimen of perfunctory assignments and arid courses of study. The reasons for Mirbeau’s sudden expulsion in June of 1863 have been the subject of persistent investigation by biographers and critics. The uncommunicativeness and secrecy of Saint-François’s administrators, the expunging of all records relating to Mirbeau’s dismissal have done nothing to dispel suspicions that Mirbeau was the victim of an attack similar to the one endured by his fictional alter ego. Mirbeau’s virulent anti-clericalism, his misogyny, and revulsion for the sexual act are also features characterizing the hero of his novel, and are the likely consequence of the soul murder whose horror Mirbeau details. One of the gravest consequence of pedophilic rape is perhaps the victim’s loss of hope, his sense of foreclosed possibilities. Indeed, Mirbeau’s image of his hero resembles the characterization of his story; both are rough outlines of evolving things, incipiencies, ongoing projects. Both are abandoned and put to death before they solidify as mature 3

Letter by Mirbeau to Catulle Mendès, December 1889, Correspondance Générale II (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), p. 176. 4 Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 29.

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creations. Mirbeau’s sympathy for spontaneous, unsocialized instinctual beings reflects his disaffection for people whose identities are stabilized and whose self-satisfaction inhibits their ability to change. Like a child or an outlaw, the tempestuous, gusty Zola blew away institutional conservatives, while the iconic Zola was an artifact housed in a museum to the dead. To Mirbeau, an adolescent represents his potential for idealism, but in becoming an adult, he is petrified as himself. Mirbeau’s reluctance to complete things extends to his protagonist and novel: having reached the age of seventeen and having surpassed 400 pages, the boy and book can go no further: “je suis forcé de le tuer,” as Mirbeau writes.5 For the anarchist creator, the constructive gesture is a suggestion, hypothesizing how the world might be before it stagnates and grows corrupt. Unlike governments and adults that resist criticism and correction, the unfinished narrative of adolescence conveys a promise of perfection. Characters like Sébastien are not objectified as their identities, but are potential for improvement, “diverses trajectoires possibles.”6 Sébastien Roch does more than issue an indictment of institutions that poison natural goodness. It also offers a detailed analysis of the psychological and social development of an individual human subject. Mirbeau’s novel shows the author riven by two contradictory impulses, at once solicited by utopian aspirations and dominated by the death drive. In Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau begins by presenting a character who lives outside of neurosis-breeding civilization altogether. Prior to the crystallization of his identity, Sébastien is unspoiled by the influences that pervert instincts, and so counts himself among the happy children who most closely resemble plants and flowers. Before Sébastien is uprooted from his home, he is an indigenous vegetable specimen, not yet a genuine human. Filled with vigor, irrigated by the rich sap of untainted youth, he is blessed with the robust mindlessness of a healthy shrub, endowed with “la grâce élastique des jeunes arbustes qui ont poussé […] dans les terres fertiles.”7 Spared the pain of self-awareness, he is inseparable from the sun and soil that nourish him, part of the river, trees, and grasses that are his shelter and his playground. Sébastien is not a subject capable of authoring a self-narrative, but an organism on which external stimuli impinge, a body

5 Letter by Mirbeau to Paul Hervieu, January 28, 1889, Correspondance Générale II (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), p. 31. 6 Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 379. 7 Octave Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, Oeuvre romanesque 1 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), p. 547.

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engaged in the play of muscles, the discharge of energy, harmonious in the indivisibility of his primitive consciousness and its object. Mirbeau insists on Sébastien’s imperviousness to thought. Undisturbed by any “impulsion cérébrale,” any “phénomène de spiritualité,” – unplanted by even “les premières semences de vie intellectuelle”8 – he is one with his environment, no different from the streams and woods and fields in which his life of unrepression seems to unfold in eternity. Blessed with “la candeur introublée d’[une] végétale vie,”9 Sébastien enjoys the wholeness preexisting the individual’s resolution into a speaking subject and his history. In his novel, Mirbeau equates the formation of an adult with the murder of the child, as the cultural being emerges with the destruction of his natural counterpart. In his early years, Sébastien benefits from his father’s selfish inattention, as paternal neglect allows him to continue in his plantlike state, unassimilated to the dusty hardware that fills his father’s store. The decision to send Sébastien to a famous Jesuit school is motivated by father Roch’s desire to experience the imaginary glory of proxy association with the scions of aristocrats. Having never been inculcated with society’s foundational values, Sébastien is at first unaffected by his father’s wish to embellish his self-image in a child accepted at an exclusive school. Yet when father Roch begins looking at Sébastien as his narcissistic image, the boy suffers the first pains of alienation. One aspect of the oedipal drama staged in Mirbeau’s book is the need to kill the progenitor who seeks a rebirth in his offspring. In A Child is Being Killed, Serge Leclaire attributes the subject’s first suicidal impulses to a need to eradicate the idealized figure that parents project on their children. Before Sébastien is taught the soul-destroying principles of inequality and privilege – before he is seduced and sodomized by a man entrusted with his moral education – he learns from his father that selfinterest often masquerades as generosity. For Sébastien to be himself, he must first put to death the image in which his father adores himself as a filial double. In Leclaire’s words: “The child to be killed, the child to be glorified, is the representation of the primary narcissistic representative. Accursed and universally shared, it is part of everyone’s inheritance: the object of a murder as imperative as it is impossible.” 10 8

Ibid., p. 548. Ibid., p. 547. 10 Serge Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed, trans. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 10. 9

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Only later when he is expelled from Saint-François-Xavier does Sébastien realize that his relationship with his father has been a fraud from the beginning. No genuine intersubjectivity had structured their exchanges, and the feelings of estrangement Sébastien experiences when leaving home do not extend to his father, who does not see Sébastien as a person. After Sébastien is accused of a homosexual dalliance with a schoolmate and is returned to his native village, his father soon exhausts his vituperative wrath. At this point, he begins to treat his son as if he were absent or invisible. Having failed to discharge his role as the parent’s narcissistic representative, Sébastien is denied the status of an autonomous entity and is murdered as an actual child. As he comments: “J’étais pour mon père une vanité, la promesse d’une élévation sociale; […] je n’existais pas par moi-même; c’est lui qui existait ou plutôt réexistait par moi. Il ne m’aimait pas; il s’aimait en moi [….] Du jour où rien de ce qu’il avait rêvé pour lui, et non pour moi, ne put se réaliser, je redevins ce que j’étais réellement, c’est-à-dire rien.”11 In this passage, Mirbeau refers again to the production of a nothing, in this case, the rien that is the exterminated subjectivity of a character. Children, Jews, and vagrants – people who are colonized and changed into simulacra of their oppressors – have their identities destroyed so that their original selves can be assimilated by their masters. This is the model of an autocracy built on self-love and intolerance, a world where the punishment for difference is relentlessly exacted. In this realm, only missionaries, teachers, generals, fathers, judges, and police officials are permitted to exist. In the garden of undifferentiation where Sébastien had once thrived like a plant, there was the euphony of natural sounds, the music of wind and flowing water. Deracination from the maternal bed had introduced him to the experience of discord, banishing him to the domain of language and loss. As in preceding novels, Mirbeau structures his narrative on gender oppositions, here picturing the mother as a figure of fullness, silence, insentience, and timelessness, and the father as a speaker whose words identify and separate. On the mantel, the photograph of a placid woman who had died in childbirth situates Sébastien’s mother in a shadowy, lacustral landscape of stagnant tranquillity. Immutable in her mortuary serenity, Madame Roch is the woman who has always been dead. Forever untouched by aging and upheaval, she fulfills the euthanasic promise of painlessness and peace. The delicate woman with her “visage 11

Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, p. 714.

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effacé”12 acts as a monument to transience, a reminder of life from which one is delivered. Eventually, the blurred likeness of the mother dissolves in her environmental symbol, bathing her in a Lethean waterworld in which forgetting drowns the dead. Like the consoling image that l’Abbé Jules creates of an aqueous afterlife, Madame Roch is metonymized as a place of quiescence and repose, where one floats “sur le lac immense, le lac qui ne finit pas et qui est sans fond.”13 Appearing against a background of unfathomable woods and paradisaical mountains, Madame Roch wears a gown patterned with funeral flowers, suggesting a death both distant and intimate, integrating her into the gallery of symbolist Ophelias that constellate Mirbeau’s early work. Figures of fog and melancholy, silence and idealism, these “virginités exsangues,” as Jean-Luc Planchais describes them, stand in contrast to women like Clara in Le Jardin des supplices, who embody “l’élément anarchique aux pulsions en accord avec la nature.”14 The thanatotic mother, “vierge de douleur,”15 deadens pain, obeying the Nirvana principle which had guided Madame Mintié in Le Calvaire, a woman who had begotten life only as its merciful liberation. Identified with “l’idée de la mort [qui] descendait en lui, endormeuse et berceuse,”16 Madame Roch synthesizes Sébastien’s recollection of all the fortunate deceased, becoming a memory that soothes and anaesthetizes, that cradles and pacifies. Inextricably linked with his sententiousness and bombast, Monsieur Roch issues demands that his child repeat the father’s name: “Joseph, Hippolyte, Elphège, Roch.”17 While Madame Roch commemorates a loss whose sorrow she assuages, Sébastien’s father calls attention to the disproportion between his insignificant ideas and their grandiloquent expression. Insisting on the majesty of patronymy, the paraphrastic self-referentiality of his language underscores the gap between the fullness of the world and the emptiness of his language – “Un abîme, ce que j’appelle!”18 Subverting the purpose of his harangues, he turns meaningful speech into the noises heard in nature. Sébastien listens 12

Ibid., p. 558. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 499. 14 Planchais, “La Mère fatale, clé d’un faux naturalisme dans les trois premiers romans d’Octave Mirbeau,” p. 172. 15 Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, p. 555. 16 Ibid., p. 588. 17 Ibid., p. 548. 18 Ibid., p. 556. 13

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no more carefully to his father’s droning tirades that he had “au ronflement du vent dans les arbres, ou bien au glouglou de l’eau, coulant sans cesse, par le robinet de la fontaine municipale.”19 Despite mocking the pompous solemnity of the father’s authority and name, Mirbeau still associates Roch with his son’s exile to the realm of the symbolic. Nowhere more clearly does Mirbeau delineate the parents’ differing roles as they orient their child toward death and dispossession. In the maternal figure of Madame Roch, Mirbeau illustrates the death drive as Freud defines it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the tendency by all living organisms to move to a state of immobility and extinction, in obedience to the Nirvana principle – as a response to “the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli.”20 In Father Roch, Mirbeau shows the death instinct redirecting the subject toward language, destroying the primary object which is forbidden or unattainable, then replacing it with words which formalize its loss. Since Sébastien is denied incestuous union with the mother, prevented from immersing himself in an abyssal lake of stillness, he is relegated to the realm of the symbolic where the father holds dominion. There he can only mourn the loss of the object he possessed, experience a renunciation of “the maternal thing [which] is a complete nothingness, a true a priori, the unnameable, the unassimilable.” As Donna Lopez writes, “it is that body of the Other from which an immense development will have to take place for a subject to be born. Man speaks, and through that speech something becomes separated and lost.”21 Like Mirbeau’s other early heroes, Sébastien is an unproductive artist, a narrator alienated from his language. His unrealizable artistic project expresses a desire for death and nothingness. Objectified in his works, he conveys a wish for immortality that masks a longing for the timelessness of instinct and unrepression. Creativity becomes an expression of the goal of self-annihilation, as the project to fabriquer un Rien is governed by the Nirvana principle. Leaving a cadaver/monument which is inanimate and thus imperishable, the act of suicide offers evidence of true artistic genius. Father Roch also expresses Mirbeau’s characters’ most deepseated urges by ceremonially staging Jean Mintié’s fantasy of building a 19

Ibid., p. 555. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 613. 21 Donna Bentolila Lopez, “The Enigma of the Death Drive: A Revisiting,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19.1 (1996), p. 18. 20

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memorial to absence. Hallowing the absurdity of his meaningless existence, he builds his grave as a monument to his denial of death and to the emptiness of his life. In his quest to triumph over ephemerality and accident, Roch erects a temple of narcissism. Having fenced off “un vaste terrain” accessed by an ironwork staircase wrought with wreaths of roses, he excavates a sepulcher overlooked by a granite stone inscribed with an epitaph lacking only the date of his demise. No longer an “artiste sans faire,” Roch recalls Jean Mintié by proleptically reproducing himself as a monument to his future corpse. Mirbeau structures the story of Sébastien and the formation of his identity on the dialectical alternation of births and deaths. Uprooted from the maternal soil, Sébastien reacts to the trauma of birth and accession to subjecthood as if to a cataclysm. Banishment from the realm of primary narcissism comes with a discovery of “l’horreur de la réalité révelée.” 22 Entry into the world of time, desire, and regret comes with a development of the language expressing them, as his identity crystallizes at the moment of “cette séparation de lui-même.”23 Once Sébastien is resituated in the illusory domain of anticipation and remembrance, his satisfaction with the present gives way to longings for an idealized future. Adjustment to the reality principle brings a rejection of reality, and culminates instead with “le rêve d’un au-delà.”24 An embodiment of the peace of narcosis, the mother is succeeded by neurosis-breeding Jesuit fathers, and Sébastien’s relegation to a wasteland of suffering, loss, and change is marked by Father Roch’s decision to remove the yellowing photograph of his wife and replace it with a clock: “il faudra que je remonte ta pauvre mère dans ma chambre, et que je mette, à sa place, une pendule!”25 The paternal manifestation of the death instinct converts mothers into hours, taking away the object which it commemorates in words. Susceptible to the disturbance of temporal dislocation, the child – once a plant whose existence was one of “insouciance tranquille” 26 – becomes a plant henceforth aware of its immobilizing limitations. “Tandis qu’il végétait, misérable, à d’autres étaient réservées des joies, des beautés, des magnificences.”27 The shabbiness of Eden is belatedly exposed, as 22

Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, p. 559. Ibid., p. 553. Ibid., p. 554. 25 Ibid., p. 558. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 559. 23 24

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Sébastien’s confinement to the village, to his father’s squalid shop, and his gossiping neighbors’ provincialism is revealed for the first time. Once the unexamined backdrop of contentment in Pervenchères is illumined by the spotlight of Sébastien’s critical appraisal, it is shown as cramped and dirty, a paradise revealed to be a prison. Yet it is only when he is uprooted from his environment and banished to the Jesuit school that Sébastien truly experiences the crystallization of his identity. In Mirbeau, this moment is accompanied by a sense of disabling loss, triggering wishes for liquefaction or atomization, a resolution of the self into infinitely small particles of smoke or vapor dissipating into the boundlessness of the sea or the maternity of the air. When an aristocratic classmate, the imperious Guy de Kerdaniel, hears that Sébastien’s father is a hardware seller, he reacts with jeering incredulity, convoking his pedigreed friends who scoff and snicker: “Quincailler! … hou! hou!”28 Chased from the illusory security of the school grounds as he had been banished from his native village, Sébastien feels transported from civilization to wilderness, from ordered society to hostile nature, where he recoils from the menacing snarls of “bêtes fauves.”29 Discovery of the reality of social stratification recapitulates Sébastien’s experience of the separation of words from things, the division of humanity into similar and dissimilar, the existence of value gradients and taxonomies distinguishing the powerful from the weak. Guy de Kerdaniel’s question “Es-tu noble?”30 opens Sébastien’s eyes to the truth of a broken, unbalanced universe organized according to rules of ownership and dispossession, acceptance and exclusion. The backward movement from natural harmony to jungle atavism encourages fantasies of phylogenetic regression: from animal ancestors back to the peace of the plant world, a burial in the grave soil of the telluric mother-garden. In a suicidal fugue, Sébastien sets off in search of the sea, embarking on an hallucinatory walk into the landscape in his mother’s photograph, past lakes stippled with reeds, toward a chasm of light, “un gouffre giratoire et candide,”31 into which the sufferer descends, spiralling in a gentle vertigo until his consciousness goes black. Sébastien’s journey to oblivion takes him from the fragmented world of names and classifications back to the water realm of the mother, past ponds encircled

28

Ibid., p. 586. Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 581. 31 Ibid., p. 589. 29

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by rushes, toward a welcoming orifice exuding the tang “des fermentations paludéennes,”32 where the child decomposes in vegetable corruption. Approaching death, Sébastien experiences a strange olfactory acuity, activated by the scent of mildew associated with his mother, evoking the connection of liquid women and temporal stagnation. The bed in which the flower decays exudes the pungency of rotting leaves, the astringent smell of rain-soaked grass. From the coitus of earth and water comes an “atmosphère […] lourde d’odeurs acescantes et de vénéneux parfums.”33 Yielding to the temptation of immersion in the sea, inhumation in the earth allows Sébastien to flee from life’s inhospitable terrain with its wounding topography, its surface pocked by traps, jagged with protruding obstacles. Instead, Sébastien walks onto a plain smoothed by resignation, a place inviting recumbency and sleep: “une prairie s’étendait, plane, unie, d’un vert argenté. Au milieu de la prairie, une nappe d’eau luisait, toute blanche, sans un reflet.”34 In his autobiographical novels, Mirbeau’s landscapes of suicide convey this sense of unfathomable peace. Bottomless yet flat, intimate yet boundless, they take the immensity of the elements and make them a shelter. Blackness, emptiness represent the breaking off of discourse, an aposiopesis into which the character falls back into silence. The ellipses fracturing the continuity of Mirbeau’s narrative are abyssal punctuation gaps into which even confident speakers may tumble, holes in the fabric of meaning, tears in the garment of communication covering the nakedness of futility and death. For one tired of being mocked and exploited, these interstices can widen, receiving the sufferer in a place of silence and surrender. The espace vide in Mirbeau’s text represents a break in the character’s explanatory narrative and an opening onto the soundless night preexisting the genesis of his language. Acquiescence to the Nirvana principle conveys more in Mirbeau’s novel than a desire to reduce the quantity of tension until a state of rest is reached. Born as himself, acceding to the self-awareness of a subject, Sébastien acquires an identity already informed by the past, preliminarily shaped by the narcissistic ambition of his father. As Freud writes: “The child shall fulfill those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in the father’s place.”35 Sébastien can enjoy no real freedom as long as he must embody 32

Ibid. Ibid., p. 590. 34 Ibid. 35 Qtd. in Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed, pp. 12-13. 33

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his father’s ideal. Generationally transmitted, the selfish goals, distorted viewpoints, and crippling fears of one’s predecessors create a child who is not a new being but a sickly composite of his parents. For him, identity formation means liquidating the debt of the past. Mirbeau ascribes the same ideas to the Buddhist sage Sumangala, whom he describes in Lettres de l’Inde, an apochryphal account of the author’s voyage to Southeast Asia. For Sumangala, who understands Nirvana in a religious and not a psychoanalytic sense, one accedes to true selfhood, only after ridding the mind “de tout le détritus de préjugés ataviques que l’évolution de ses ancêtres a laissé dans les formes de son cerveau.”36 Otherwise, the cycle of deaths and rebirths continues to propagate the sins and errors of the fathers. Echoing naturalist theory, according to which the child is hereditarily imprinted by the genetic legacy of his antecedents, Sumangala argues that each individual, “comme tout animal, étant sujet à cette évolution, subit les lois de la forme, de telle sorte que, lorsqu’il vient au monde, il a dans tout son être une marque prédestinée de bien ou de mal.”37 From the Buddhist standpoint, completion of the oedipal project means killing the father so that the child is purged of ancestral prejudice, satisfying incestuous desires for the mother, who no longer represents the generative principle of life but promises the annihilating rest in which one experiences “[une] cessation de la soif de renaître.”38 At Saint-François-Xavier, Sébastien again discovers his antipathy for the dissonant language of the father, his revulsion for cacophonous Latin texts celebrating bloodthirsty warriors and merciless gods. Rather than military histories and despairing theologies, Sébastien prefers the uplifting religious music of Handel, Bach, and Porpora. Unlike the minatory language of the father, which forbids and punishes, music is a wordless medium undivided into meaning and expression. In sacred music, God is no longer a saturnine ogre devouring the bones of his children, but is feminized, haloed by forgiveness. Mother of beauty, music is a goddess constellated with flowers and stars. From the mystical harmonies he hears in the school chapel, Sébastien grasps the inexhaustibility of life, the source of being in its multifariousness and bounty. Unable to experience the enlightenment of Nirvana, the quiescence of nothingness, Sébastien nonetheless understands in music the eternal propagation of forms, an 36

Octave Mirbeau, Lettres de l’Inde (Caen: L’Echoppe, 1991), p. 45. Ibid., p. 44. 38 Pierre Michel, “Notes: Lettres de l’Inde,” p. 102. 37

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endless succession of past lives assuming their place in “la suite sans fin des immortelles metem-psychoses.”39 Immersed in an acoustic sea of rapture, Sébastien associates the swelling of the organ music, the soaring of choral voices, with the ocean whose terrible glory had crushed him with its grandeur. In the susurrus of calm waters, the unfurling of waves, the thunder of storms smashing ships, Sébastien resonates with the sonority of the music. Finding release in a loss of boundaries, he emerges from Mass, “comme il était revenu de la mer, anéanti, chancelant, et gardant de longues heures le goût de salure fort et grisant dont s’étaient saturées ses lèvres.” 40 Enveloped in a symphony of the elements, Sébastien learns a new language whose sense is intuitively evident. Having rejected the wounding idiom of schoolmasters, and their message of contumely and desolation, Sébastien swims in an ocean whose waters encourage a reciprocal orality – drinking the drinker, swallowing the child in the cradling swells of its aqueous body. Joel Whitebook notes the sonorous origins of the oceanic feeling, the intra-uterine bliss of undiffferentiation. In the beginning, Whitebook writes, the “mother’s voice – with its particular melody, rhythm, and timbre,” together with “her heartbeat in the womb – not to mention the lullaby – precedes the father’s word, that is to say, linguistic communication, and serves as a transitional object to soften the pain of the emerging separation between mother and child.” It is the mother’s voice, Whitebook adds, that is “a fundamental source of music.”41 Translated into sound, Sébastien’s fantasies of oral union are later opposed to his inability to ingurgitate the Eucharist, the comestible body of an implacable divinity who terrifies the child with his mountain-shaking voice and blood-injected eyes, “[une] sorte de maniaque et tout-puissant bandit, qui ne se plaisait qu’à tuer.” 42 Holding God in his mouth, Sébastien feels as if he himself is being crushed, torn to bits in the inexorable machinery of a religion of unforgiveness. Stressing the homology of speaking and eating, Mirbeau’s scene suggests the unassimilability of Catholic ritual and doctrine. With the communication wafer lodged in his throat, Sébastien is filled with panic and mortification: “Tout, autour de lui, tourna: la chapelle, les officiants, les enfants du choeur, les cierges, le

39

Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, pp. 618-19. Ibid., p. 619. 41 Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), p. 35. 42 Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, p. 607. 40

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tabernacle, tout rouge, ouvert, devant lui, comme une mâchoire de monstre.”43 Repelled by the school curriculum of rebarbitative Latin texts and Old Testament theology, Sébastien is receptive to the linguistic blandishments of the soft-spoken Père de Kern. With his languourous mien, mild gaze, and despondently mellifluous voice, Father Kern acts as a male counterpart of the deceased mother. Steeping Sébastien in the writings of Lamartine and Chateaubriand, the Jesuit reintroduces a mother associated with tragic landscapes, melancholy imagery, sublimely ineffable things, the elegiac celebration of love and loss. Different from Father Roch with his windy disquisitions, le Père de Kern speaks in a soothing hush, consoling the mourner with sweet words of treacherously tender ambiguity. Inducing longings for the irretrievable body of the lost beloved, Sébastien’s teacher suggests “les pénitentes ivresses, les étreintes aériennes, les mysticismes désespérés, où l’idée de l’amour s’accompagne de l’idée de la mort.”44 Responsive to a symbolist aesthetic evoking a celestial reality toward which words reach in vain, Sébastien is easily convinced by de Kern’s assimilation of love to music. Celebrating the wedding of sound and feeling, music is resurrective in restoring an original state of fullness. While he is inexplicably apprehensive in the priest’s presence, Sébastien’s fears are mitigated by the voluptuous pleasure he derives from de Kern’s comforting voice and enervating messages. Fantasies of embracing the dead mother as the body of the bleeding Christ infuse his adolescent sensuality with spiritual aspirations for immortality. Mirbeau links Sébastien’s labyrinthine journey to the Jesuit’s lair with the irreversibility of the damage he will suffer at his teacher’s hands. Detailing the interminable passage to de Kern’s bedroom, Mirbeau describes a disorienting nightmare descent down vertiginous staircases, along blind and darkened corridors, past flickering lanterns, ending at a place from which the child cannot turn back. The Jesuit’s etherealized language, his “ardentes extases divines”45 are belied by the profane physical objects in the room: the glass of liqueur used to lower the student’s inhibitions, the glowing ember of a cigarette that burns in the darkness. The climax of the rape scene is signalled in the narrative by a

43

Ibid., p. 631. Ibid., p. 643. 45 Ibid., p. 657. 44

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hiatus which represents the unbridgeable juncture between an experience of soul murder and the banality of its aftermath. The ellipses on the page also mark a reevaluation of language by Mirbeau’s hero. Whereas Sébastien had once longed for access to things unabstracted by words, his victimization confers on him the status of a writer for whom narrative serves an explanatory or self-exculpatory function. An instrument of self-incrimination or a tool for unavailing ratiocination, Sébastien’s words aim to make sense of senselessness, to reason inexplicable moral deviancy. In Pervenchères, Sébastien had lived in a sensorium, attuned to the music of rain and wind. First torn out of the soil and then alienated from the interpersonal world of comradeship and trust, Sébastien retreats into a mind filled with guilt and rage, a solipsistic realm of nightmare and projection, The symbolic dimension of Mirbeau’s text becomes richer after the unrelated episode of sodomy in the dormitory. After he is awakened to the existence of aberrancy and evil, Sébastien repeats his discovery of monstrosity by entering a world of monsters. In the domain of language, dissimulation, and hypocrisy, wickedness poses as propriety; predatoriness masks itself as solicitude and gentleness. Tormented by a belief in his complicity in the assault, Sébastien is astonished that his depravity is not visible: “Dis-moi si je te fais horreur,” as he persistently asks his friend Bolorec. 46 Punished by feelings of ostracism and ugliness, Sébastien resembles the pilgrims who flock to Sainte-Anne d’Auray, deformed pariahs seeking miraculous absolution. Despite unblemished faces and healthy bodies, sinner and sinned against join the processional phantasmagoria of hydrocephalics and lupus-sufferers parading their oozing wounds and abscessed stumps. In Sébastien’s vision of the verminous travelers to the pilgrimage site, he links reality and appearance, moral turpitude and physical repulsiveness. For Sébastien, hallucination is a visual language that tells the truth. Having learned the painful lesson that words effect the loss of referents, he discovers the disturbing reality of the autonomous language of lies. There is no correlation between le Père de Kern’s verbal suavity and his marauding intentions. Experiencing the phenomenal world of school outings and instructional sessions as a fever-bred illusion, Sébastien retreats to a more accurate representation of his personal reality, in which naked, drunken boys – faces twisted in a lascivious rictus – file laughing into the Jesuit’s bedroom. 46

Ibid., p. 666.

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Damaged in his investment in people and things, Sébastien is stricken with self-loathing, crippled by apathy. Discredited as objects of desire, women are imagined as rapacious devourers, repulsive and terrifying. For Sébastien, guilty appetites incur imaginary punishments, as his attraction and revulsion for a neighbor girl, Marguerite Lecautel, cause him to visualize her as having been polluted and diseased, as he projects his sinful lust on her body already “couvert d’immondes souillures.”47 Repatriated in Pervenchères, Sébastien completes the backward journey from the institutional to the familial world, from society to solitude. Failing to fulfill his father’s dream of fraternizing with aristocrats, he is discredited in his role as the parent’s narcissistic double. Ironically, the movement from culture to nature is accomplished when the boy withdraws from the realm of ambition, work, and time. Whereas the flower lives obliviously in harmony with its environment, Sébastien can only spend days filled with idleness and monotony. Disenchanted with humanity, he has no professional objectives, is not oriented toward a future of conquest or achievement. The intermittency of Sebastien’s efforts at authoring a selfnarrative only underscores the pathological indifference he feels toward everything. The present moment in which the flower blooms, fed by earth and kissed by sun, bears no likeness to the dead time of self-reproach and despair. Sébastien’s disengagement from reality is suggested by his writing and masturbation, with their simultaneous distancing of referents and women. The compulsive, dreary onanism exhibited by Mirbeau’s heroes is not motivated by a morbid, self-directed quest for pleasure but by a pursuit of the torpor following a mechanically triggered orgasm. Ritual involvement in solitary practices brings “un redoublement de tristesse, de dégoûts, et de remords violents.”48 The contrition, regret, and shame that le Père de Kern had never demonstrated are thereby retargeted at the victim who tries to purge his misplaced guilt. At home, Sébastien feels exiled from the domain of natural phenomena, and soon after acquires an awareness of troubling social issues. He cultivates a lugubrious aestheticism, a sensivity to vulgarity, and manifests a sterile outrage over oppression and injustice. Once a natural organism, he complains of having been “transplanté dans un autre

47 48

Ibid., p. 671. Ibid., p. 711.

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milieu,”49 when he withdraws to his bedroom with its ugly floral wallpaper, becoming a flower sadly contemplating ugly images of flowers. The most serious consequence of his experience of violation is Sébastien’s moral incapacitation, his paralyzing apathy. For Sébastien, what is symptomatic of the operation of the Nirvana principle is his attraction to senescence, overripeness, and decay. His efforts to rejoin the mother in a distant, tranquil waterscape give way to his desire to possess her in her repellent physical aspect. Because of the Jesuit’s depradations, life holds no interest for Sébastien, who shrinks in horror from Marguerite and her precocious sexual advances. The incest fantasies Mirbeau shows as underlying Sébastien’s death drive, the quest for peaceful dormancy in the arms of Madame Roch, are complemented by the necrophilic promise of wrinkled female faces, drooping female flesh, graying female hair. Sébastien directs his attention toward Madame Lecautel, not her daughter – toward a lost beloved reembodied as her physical deterioration. Sébastien discontinues writing after having sex with Marguerite, becoming disenchanted with reality as it is reworked into narrative just as he lost interest in reality as he experienced it directly. At the conclusion, it is circumstances that reassimilate the disaffected youth, reawakening him to the immediacy of momentous world events. As Father Roch had used Sébastien to experience second-hand celebrity, Sébastien enjoys simulated passions and vicarious involvement by participating in the ideological campaigns of his friend Bolorec. Disabled by lassitude and guilt, Sébastien admires his schoolmate’s revolutionary fervor, his anarchistic vehemence, his willingness to bomb and burn and murder. The outbreak of war ushers in a spurious new democracy, as the sons of hardware merchants, doctors, and aristocrats are conscripted indiscriminately. Yet with the abolition of the civilian hierarchy of social class and history comes the establishment of the military order of authority, rank, and grade. In place of shabby nobles with their dilapidated castles, there are officers dispatching rich and poor indiscriminately to the slaughter. The battlefield narrative with which the novel closes illustrates Mirbeau’s impatience with bellicose patriotism. The profligate waste of life justified by xenophobia and nationalism, an unromanticized view of war depicting chaos, fear, and butchery, the practical subordination of ideological concerns to the violence of combat: this is the reality Mirbeau shows, one stripped of sentimentality and glory.

49

Ibid., p. 709.

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The novel’s conclusion also shows the dialectical interplay between the characters’ utopian aspirations and their subjection to the death instinct. As Mirbeau’s career advanced, the complementary relationship between an ideal world and a peaceful graveyard became ever more apparent. Cancellation of tension, reduction of excitation – hallmarks of the Nirvana principle – seemed increasingly indistinguishable from the flawlessness, balance, and changelessness of utopia. Mirbeau’s novel illustrates a familiar psychoanalytic principle – that man’s most distant aspirations arise from his rootedness in a past toward which he forever is traveling back, and that his ideal of future happiness is determined by his history. In Mirbeau’s novel, the prototype of the revolutionary idealist is Bolorec, the revenge-hungry anarchist whose inchoate ideas of a world without injustice make him seem like a child. In the unintelligible letter he sends Sébastien, he writes cryptically, incoherently, alluding vaguely to the secret political meetings he attends, where discussion ranges over plans of hygienic terrorism. Both in its strategy and objectives, Bolorec’s plan of violent action aims at realizing a nebulous utopian ideal, “une grande chose”50 whose perfection is a function of its indescribability. At the end of Sébastien Roch, scenes of carnage and confusion replace the image of pastoral tranquillity with which the novel opened. There is no progression toward world harmony. Instead, the combat scenes recall Sébastien’s suicidal fantasies, his wish for dispersal, vaporization, and disintegration into nothingness. The message Mirbeau sends is that one fashions an identity only by dismantling the counterfeit selves produced so that others can exploit them. Sébastien’s accession to subjecthood revealed the necessity of killing the narcissistic double that father Roch had sought to substitute for his son. Institutions that perverted the instinctual being found in nature created new simulacra: the diligent student, the obedient offspring, the dutiful citizen, the martyred soldier. To be free, the subject must operate like a nothing machine, exterminating spurious personas whose purpose is to tolerate the abusive violence of their makers. In Sébastien’s quest for autonomy, he redirects aggression inward, so that emancipation from the enslaving roles assigned by fathers, teachers, and officers, is achievable by suicide, since the true self is no one. Sébastien Roch is another text that ends with images of burning, the hero’s incineration and transformation into wind-borne ashes. Expressed before 50

Ibid., p. 720.

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as a desire for la volatilisation de tout son être, his need to vanish from before Guy de Kerdaniel’s contemptuously withering gaze, Sébastien’s wish for death had initially been a wish to blow away, “s’évaporer dans l’air comme une fumée,” as Mirbeau writes. 51 At the end, with his body torn by bullets, Sébastien recedes into the smoke, becoming, not a particle absorbed by the maternal universality of the world, but part of the choking condensation produced by battlefield destruction. When Sébastien disappears, it is not into the ocean’s welcoming uterus. Instead, he fades into the muddle of shattered cannons, fallen corpses, disemboweled horses, screams dissolving into silence. Opposing the character’s wish for the quiescence of an object, for a time before the word had been divided from la chose, there is the opaqueness of an unnatural world ruled by chaos and injustice. Mirbeau ends the story of his hero’s linguistic construction of the self by stressing the obstruction of vision by smoke from smoldering corpses and burning houses. Powerless to show the horrible reality of the present, Mirbeau’s text conveys impossible longings for a utopian ideal, where satisfaction empties mouths of words and fills them with the plenitude of things.

51

Ibid., p. 582.

Part II The Matrix

Chapter Four Reaching Up: Dans le ciel Completion of Sébastien Roch enabled Mirbeau not just to exorcise memories of the trauma he had undergone at Saint-FrançoisXavier, but also to relinquish the project of using fiction to effect creative repair of existing psychic damage. The end of Mirbeau’s autobiographical writing signaled his abandonment of the idea of a monumental self— serene, majestic, impervious to victimization. Henceforth, sculptural euphemizations of public figures appeared in Mirbeau’s writing only as objects of satire and derision. Beginning with Dans le ciel, the art work ceased to be a symmetrical, perfect object, and instead became a site of transformation where material decayed and was reborn. Rather than serving as an instrument of redemption or denial, the novel or painting was shown to be the scene of the creator’s public suffering, the hill on which his crucifixion was enacted before the world. Fragmentary and disjointed, the narrative mirrored the wounded psyche of the storyteller. Realizing that the disintegration of body and book was the precondition for their reassembly in original form, Mirbeau accompanied complaints about his creative insolvency with a hesitation to complete novels that increasingly thematized the issue of the creator’s expressive limitations. In these works, Mirbeau’s political, aesthetic, and philosophical concerns became more intertwined. Anarchist skepticism about the viability of government, utopian longings whose futility he knew all too well, were manifestead as dissatisfaction with the staleness of established novelistic form. Mirbeau’s intuition that the only worthwhile art communicated its striving for the incommunicable motivated his recourse to writing whose subject was the frustration of its goals. “Assez des vieux arts morts et des vieilles littératures pourries,” Mirbeau thundered in his endorsement of an aesthetic of the undefinable. “Du nouveau! Du nouveau! De l’inaccessible, de l’inétreignable, de l’inexprimé!”1 In their biography, Nivet and Michel chronicle Mirbeau’s growing involvement with the anarchist movement in the early 1890’s, his increasingly undisguised disdain for custodians of political and artistic 1

”Propos belges,” Le Figaro, September 26, 1890, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 464

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tradition, his dismissal of the hoary shibboleths of patriotism and public morality. Mirbeau’s sense of the salutary panic sown by terrorist bombthrower Ravachol suggests that that the writer coupled his rejection of obsolete forms of art with a belief in the indefensibility of all political systems. Aesthetic upheaval, attacks on institutional authority augured the coming of what Mirbeau called “le chambardement général.”2 Preliminarily vitiated by corruption, invalidated by mediocrity, no society that could be constituted, no work of art that could be realized deserved to be spared annihilation by fire or explosion. The decadence of a society whose death throes Jean Grave predicted in La Société mourante et l’anarchie (1891) reflected the moribund state of literature from which Mirbeau was becoming alienated. During the period of creative crisis that Mirbeau underwent between 1891 and 1893, the only legitimate art he acknowledged contained a confession of its impotence, admitting its failure to attain the ideals that made creative effort meaningful. It is therefore not surprising that in Dans le ciel, Mirbeau’s hauntingly impressionistic text, the artist’s orientation is upwards, toward the heavens where he locates the inétreignable. In his unfinished novel, Mirbeau presents the sky as a topological representation of the artist’s brain, blue space seething with diffuse inspirations, inchoate ideas, vaporous cloud-things that take form and then vanish, shredding into evanescent shapes that break apart in the air. The journey traced by Mirbeau’s story maps the broken passage from conception to expression – from an artist’s idea to the object embodying it. Between the head and the hand – between heaven and earth – the transmission of beauty involves disconnection and loss. A panoramic display of fantastic potential unconcretized in images and unbounded by frames, the sky is a painting of the dynamics of change. Published in serialized installments in L’Echo de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Mirbeau’s novel, as Nivet and Michel note, was destined to wait “cent ans avant d’être exhumé et publié en librairie.”3 Only after being edited and assembled by these two Mirbeau scholars was the work finally released as a complete volume some twentysix years ago. A novel imbued with Mirbeau’s fascination with the aesthetic of the Impressionists, whose cause he had begun promoting in 1880 in his journalistic writings, Dans le ciel replaces “l’unité artificielle de la 2 ”Réponse à L’Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire,” April 22, 1891, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle,” p. 451. 3 Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 476.

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concentration dramatique” with “l’unité naturelle des tons et des couleurs.”4 Just as importantly, Dans le ciel marks a critical transition from the author’s autobiographical fictions to a mature reflection on artistic expression as an impossible ideal. Embodying Mirbeau’s conception of the self-annihilating art work, the novel thematizes the inability to bring a creative project to fruition. What Nivet and Michel describe as “l’état d’inachèvement apparent du récit,”5 its breaking off with the suicide of one of the novel’s central characters, foregrounds Mirbeau’s interest in uncoupling creation from production. As Georges, the self-styled novelist, produces only his unfinished autobiography, the failed painter, Lucien, is chronically dissatisfied with his work. And when the latter cannot complete the canvas he had intended as his masterpiece, he amputates his hand so that the mutilation of the self enacts the mutilation of his work. The unfinished, interrupted, violently truncated appearance of Mirbeau’s text is evidenced by the disappearance of the intradiagetic narrator and by the suspended recitation of Georges’s story that had formed the novel’s opening section. While this fragmentary structure manifests Mirbeau’s desire to free himself from “les habituelles conventions romanesques,”6 the message Mirbeau offers is that beauty untranslated into imagery can only be experientially located in the creative process itself: in the exaltation of the moment of inspiration and uplift, and in the suffering endured in the artist’s failed effort to give form to his vision. Dans le ciel is, therefore, a drama of creative paralysis occurring in an intermediate zone of expressive effort, between celestial afflatus and mediation in art. Unable to picture the magnificent thing he intuits, the artist incarnates his fragmentary vision as a body from which the refractory hand is cut off. The image which can never be adequately communicated, the narrative which can never be satisfactorily concluded is represented by the dismembered form of the artist who fails. Like the symbolic self-blinding of a painter “réduit à crever ses toiles,”7 the expression of the artist’s frustration extends to the disfigurement of a text which had first appeared in piecemeal form. But Mirbeau’s novel does more than say what it regrets as inexpressible. Certainly, Dans le ciel stages the tragedy of an artist “[qui] ne pourra jamais parvenir à exprimer, avec les outils gauches et infidèles que sont la 4

Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 480. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 479. 5

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main et le cerveau, les beautés ‘impalpables’ et les mystères ‘affolants’ de la nature.”8 However, by interrupting his narrative, Mirbeau ensures that its consequences are as inexhaustible as the possibilities for the unwritten scene to come. If inspiration is a cloud that condenses momentarily, then disintegrates again into the purity of azure, then the perfect book is one that is uncompromised and unwritten. For the first time here, one sees Mirbeau’s conception of the nothing machine as an art work whose production entails its simultaneous undoing. “Dans ce contexte,” as MarieFrançoise Montaubin writes, “le seul roman susceptible de toucher l’art est celui qui s’anéantit.”9 Yet the impotence of Mirbeau’s characters also suggests the productiveness of the author, just as the story of artistic failure may succeed in its relation. Even when amputated from its audience, Mirbeau’s novel exists as a formalized expression of nostalgia for the unexpressed and the formless. As an embodiment of fragmentation, the book achieves its aims, offsetting the theme of mutilation by the completeness with which the text’s objectives are realized. Like Mirbeau’s preceding novels showcasing artists who, like Jean Mintié are incapacitated by self-doubt, their genius stunted by narrow-minded parents and soul-destroying pedagogues, Dans le ciel features creators whose eyes society has blinded and whose hands society has paralyzed. If the creative project moves from vision to execution, it is aborted when eyes turn from the beauty of the world and focus on a self seen as despicable or guilty. Art is undone when the hand no longer reaches for an ennobling ideal but is used in a campaign of self-punishing aggression – when one hand grasps a blade with which to sever the other. In the novel, Mirbeau’s artist characters are awestruck by the boundless, infinitely remote vault of the spangled firmament. They glory in the ever-mutating richness of nature and natural forms. Yet they also despair at the paltriness of their talent, the arbitrarily immobilizing reduction of nature to the lifeless fixity of a finished work of art. A telluric equivalent of the psychotic, turbulent cloud-matrix of the sky, the fumier is beautiful in its generative instability. Even Mirbeau’s internal narrator, the self-hating Georges, realizes that the individual is a transient, defective work of art, a fragile envelope in which life is enclosed for a season before reverting to its original status as “[un] petit tas de fumier, [une] menue 8

Ibid., p. 479. Montaubin, Marie-Françoise. “Les Romans d’Octave Mirbeau: Des livres où il n’y aurait rien! Oui, mais est-ce possible?” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 2 (1995), p. 52.

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pincée de pourriture […] où tant de formes, charmantes, qui sait? tant d’organismes curieux, attendent de naître.”10 The humiliated insignificance of an artist contemplating the passing clouds, his expressive power crushed by the enormity of the spectacle he beholds, is nonetheless counterbalanced by the acuity of his vision, his keen awareness of the world’s indescribable majesty. Mirbeau’s artist is not disabled by the immensity of his subject but by the selfdeprecating gaze that he redirects toward himself. Visionaries evaporated into their rapturous appreciation of the sky, they become larval beings when they train their eyes on their own worthlessness. In the symbol of the eye, Mirbeau interweaves his social commentary with a meditation on the artist’s unattainable ideal. Crippled not just by lack of talent, Mirbeau’s hero is also rendered impotent by the eye of an unforgiving father whose hostility he internalizes. The self who acts spontaneously, moved unreflectively by beauty, is petrified by the censorious gaze of a father who sees and disapproves. Banished from a maternal Eden, the artist is also cast down from the sky when the sun, heaven’s eye, relays the father’s visual rebuke. As Gilbert Durand says: “Le surmoi est avant tout l’oeil du Père,”11 transforming the artist as a seer into an abject visual object. Mirbeau redefines the sky as an inhospitable visual field in which the hated son is an intruder who is both unwelcome and unworthy. Carried over from his first three novels, Mirbeau’s denunciations of family and school directly influence his analysis of the unproductive artist. In Georges’s autobiographical narrative, he gives the child’s belated answer to the father’s injunction against speaking. Uncomprehending and disdainful, Georges’s father had reduced his son to silent mortification, and so, as a writer, Georges’s ineffectual attempts at creative expression come in response to the withdrawal of parental involvement. Absent a loving family, Georges produces language objects as surrogate companions, “[des] mots [qui] deviennent des êtres, des personnages vivants, des personnages qui remuent, qui parlent, qui me parlent.”12 The first interruption in the circulus of inspiration and expression – between artistic vision and the course of a pen on the page – comes when the father’s ironic gaze stops his son’s hand from moving. No longer satisfying any creative aim, the eye and hand become weapons used by a self-punishing artist. The self-critical regard produces 10

Octave Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 50. Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 170. 12 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 51. 11

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shame and not images; the hand does the father’s work of inflicting pain on the child. There is a masturbatory quality to Georges’s soliloquizing self-disparagement, which produces the same disgust as his compulsive self-fondling. If productivity depends on the cooperation of the artist’s head and hand, Georges’s lack of talent as a drummer, whose talent his father praises, foreshadows his subsequent artistic failures. Potentially a form of musical self-expression, drumming is reduced to mindless automatism and is itself a kind of artistic onanism. Deadening thought, diminishing consciousness, subordinating artistic self-awareness to an instinctual response to rhythm, drumming accompanies infantries off to slaughter on the battlefield. A former regimental drummer, Georges’s instructor maintains that the instrument, if mastered, can be good “pour s’entretenir la main.”13 It is not surprising that, ultimately, Georges rejects the instrument his father gives him, that he chooses a pen over drumsticks, and reattaches manual application to creative thought. Georges’s apprenticeship as a drummer, for which he receives his family’s praise, is recounted as a bewildering interval of nightmarish alienation. A protracted hallucinatory episode, it culminates in the onset of meningitis, which Georges experiences as the sweet quiescence of Nirvana. Georges recalls that in his single public performance, his music had reassumed its sacred property, reestablishing the role of art as doxological or petitionary – as a penitential lamentation or a hymn of thanksgiving to God. Liquefying his brain, leaving him in a state of incompetent confusion, Georges’s illness formalizes the status to which his father had relegated him. Georges’s subsequent inability to author a text confirms his father’s view of the boy as an invalid unfit for anything. The masturbatory sterility of Georges’s pathological self-deprecation represents the voice of the father which the child internalizes. Seen as a vengeful divinity, Georges’s father is further conflated with the parish’s patron, Saint Latuin, a figure famous for healing the sick, resurrecting the dead, and ridding the countryside of sanguinary Druids. During a procession celebrating the repatriation of Latuin’s relics, Georges’s drumming provides accompaniment to a canticle of prayer, a hymn pleading for mercy from an inexorable sky-god, a fantasmatic projection of Georges’s terrible father: “O père tendre/ Qui pourra rendre/ Les cieux plus doux?/ Saint Latuin, ce sera vous,/ Ce sera vous.”14

13 14

Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 39.

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In Mirbeau’s novel, aspiration to the celestial realm of beauty uncompromised by artistic expression is an act of oedipal insubordination for which the punishment is failure. Being blinded in one eye and suffering the amputation of one hand enact the retributive castration which is the price one pays for attempting to dethrone God. Throughout the novel, Mirbeau’s use of theriomorphic imagery, his description of the peacocks, swans, dogs, and spiders that fill his characters’ world, suggests his characters’ sense of inferiority or their dreams of elevation, their retreat to a plane of animal servility or their wish to take wing and fly over the world. From the outset, the creator’s ascensional ambition is represented by the vertical axis of the pic on which his abbey-home is situated. It is similarly suggested by the positional uprightness of the standing body and the raised hand, and by the grace of birds that are unfettered by gravity and whose dominion is the sky. The solitary stone outcropping rising up towards the heavens is a singular landscape feature in a terrain of “tranquil plains” and therefore betokens the artist whose incongruous idealism makes him stand out among other men whose concerns are horizontal, flat, and vulgar. Crowned by an abandoned abbey, the peak is a head housing the ghosts of spiritual yearnings, a wish for sublimation and transcendence, a desire to escape into a homeland of light. However, in Mirbeau’s symbolic geography, elevation does not bring increasing knowledge and clarity. Instead, the higher one climbs, the more chaotic are one’s thoughts, as he succumbs to an acrophobic vertigo that sucks him into the unfathomable abyss of space. Paradoxically, it is the sky, not the underworld, that is associated with what Durand calls “[le] grouillement de la larve, […] ce mouvement anarchique.”15 A swarming chaos preexisting the work of Genesis, the sky is the dark place unorganized by God’s Word. In Mirbeau’s novel, the sky is the locus of catamorphic change, a place of instability and turmoil where human intelligence holds no sway. As Georges’s brain is liquefied by meningitis, his lucidity is dissolved by his view of the sky, “un ciel immense, houleux comme une mer, un ciel fantastique, où sans cesse de monstrueuses formes, d’affolants faunes, d’indescriptibles flores, des architectures de cauchemar, s’élaborent, vagabondent et disparaissent.” 16 The phylogenetic commingling of plant and animal cloud-formations reinforces the image of

15 16

Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 76. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, pp. 22-3.

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the sky as a world antedating Creation. There, diffuse energies were still not harnessed to the formation of named entities and stable beings. The artist who is oriented upward longs to be reintegrated into this matrix where once all bodies and images coalesced. The desired ascension into the heavens is an expression of a death wish, like Georges’s longing to disintegrate into the manure heap of charming forms. It involves a reaccession to the infinite which floods the artist’s consciousness before engulfing him its it obliterative immensity. Like mystics whose experience of the divine is inexpressible, Mirbeau’s artists know that apprehension of their ideal would still their tongue and stop their hand. The higher they ascend, the more irresistible is the impulse to shut their eyes to their material, whose enormity exceeds the capacity to describe it. That is why Georges feels his sanity is threatened in his aerie, where his mind is scoured by winds, his eyes are quenched by sun, and his ability to produce images is overwhelmed by the turbulent flight of clouds. That is why he prefers the platitudinous realm of brutes, why he seeks asylum in an inn where the air is thick with cooking grease and tobacco smoke, where intelligence is dimmed by incuriosity and brandy. Fearful of the transcendent which sucks him up into endless blue space, he envies the blindness of the autochthons who share his summit-home, wishing to resemble “les taupes du ciel.”17 Humbled, Mirbeau’s prospective artists no longer emulate the uranic sky-father whose censorious eye discerns the child’s unoriginality and clumsiness. Instead, the lowly creature with whom the character identifies is the maternal spider that spins material issuing from her body. Karl Abraham, in commentary on “The Spider as a Dream Symbol,” remarks on the ambiguity of the insect as a signifier of genitality. While noting that “the long legs of a species of spider (Phalangium) [have been] interpreted as phallic symbols,”18 he claims that more often the spider represents the castrating progenetrix. Not a benevolent mother supplying needed nourishment and shelter, the spider becomes the devouring orifice represented by her black body. The orality of the child is thus displaced onto the mother, and the one who feeds is transformed into a predator that eats: “Vois-tu,” Georges imagines la petite araignée as saying, “dans la vie, il faut manger ou être mangé… Moi, j’aime mieux manger… Et c’est si amusant!”19 The spider may seek the warming comfort that comes from 17

Ibid., p. 30. Karl Abraham. “The Spider as a Dream Symbol,” The Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 326. 19 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 59. 18

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Georges’s lamp, but like the sky-mole, it also hides its loathsome body in the shadows. The winged artist ensnared by the arachnoid mother in her web (“Les mouches aiment le soleil, elles aiment la lumière, les fleurs, ce sont des poètes”)20 also symbolizes the writer entangled in his work. The painter standing at his easel, the writer sitting at his table are like the woman at the spinning wheel – producing linen, tales, or images. As Harold Feldman writes: “our word History […] comes from a Greek word for adorning or embellishing something, and both derive from ‘histos’ – a web, warp, or loom.”21 While, in Mirbeau, the father is metonymized as the super-ego’s watchful eye, an angry gaze embodied by the hand that smites, the mother is the fertile source of the objects she engenders, figuring the artist transfixed by the narcissistic contemplation of his works – captured by his canvas/toile as in the toile d’araignée’s sticky filaments. The art work striving to capture an unrepresentable ideal becomes a product of the artist’s own complacent self-regard. Fusing the eye and visual object, it reveals the blinded visionary, confining him to the terrestrial plane of his imprisoning reflections. Regressing to the anal stage and the pleasurable manufacture of fecal matter, the artist impersonates the mother creating life from her body. Artistic labor ceases to be disorderly and dirty, and instead is intellectualized, acquiring new “elements of oral masochism and female identification.”22 Whereas the artist’s transcendent movement caused his dilation into nature, he is henceforth concentrated in the generative source of his material. With his eye fixed on the omphalos, the originary point of his production, he is like the spider symbolizing “cette absorption de l’être par son propre centre.”23 Georges, whose most perceptive comments concern the cause of the artist’s impotence, discerns in his friend, Lucien’s anguished eye an imprisonment of the sky, sees an unreachable blue infinity circumscribed by the painter’s field of vision: “son regard était pareil aux regards hallucinants des figures de ses toiles, il ressemblait aux ciels tourmentés et déments de ses paysages.”24 Failing to capture the boundless celestial arch within his canvas, the painter instead is miniaturized by his own paranoia, 20

Ibid. Feldman, “The Illusions of Work,” p. 262. Ibid., 270. 23 C. Baudouin, Psychanalyse de V. Hugo (Geneva: Editions Mt-Blanc, 1943), qtd. in Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, pp. 115-116. 24 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 81. 21 22

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becoming the microscopic nothingness on which the firmament’s blue pupil trains its annihilating scorn. Rather than escaping and taking flight in a moment of soaring triumph, the artist is condemned to rediscover the monotonous expressions of his limitations. In letters written by Monet, a possible model for the character of Lucien, one sees the incurable dissatisfaction the artist felt with his own work. Of his sketches, Monet writes: “It is decidedly frightening to make something complete in all respects, and I think that there are scarcely any but those who content themselves with the approximate.” As a result, Monet felt obligated to “struggle, scrape, start over again.”25 In these letters, as Steven Levine says, there is often a nagging repetition of language that repeats, phrases like the slashing brushstrokes that simultaneously destroy what they create. “The contours of Monet’s circular dilemma,” writes Levine, “are further sketched in his sense of the elusiveness of the thing that is perfectly complete in all respects; his disdain for the merely approximate and for those who tolerate it.”26 Inarticulate wordsmiths, handicapped image-manufacturers, Mirbeau’s artist characters all resemble Lucien in their wonderment at the glory of a world untranslatable into art. Lucien’s creative disability is projectively assigned to the vagabond beggars he encounters one day on the road. A blind vagrant and his mute daughter, they are synecdochically identified as silent, vacant spaces, sockets and mouths pure in their emptiness, echoing and seeing nothing. In their presence, Lucien comes to realize that the only perfect art work respects the flawlessness of its subject and forgoes the effort to express it. In Mirbeau’s novel, the greatest masterpiece is a suspension of the creative process, an intuition of something beautiful without the attempt at mediation: voir, sentir, comprendre without the futility of the embodying gesture. Contemplating the cleanness of unspeaking lips and unseeing eyes (“ce regard firmamental,” “cette bouche d’astralité”), 27 Lucien knows the highest vision is the one he cannot capture: “ma main,” he says, “s’est refusée à peindre ce que je ressentais, ce que je comprenais d’intérieur.”28 Yet there may still be a narcissistic mirroring of the impotent artist in his blank 25

Claude Monet, from a letter to Frédéric Bazile, July 15, 1864, qtd. in Steven Z. Levine, “Monet, Madness, and Melancholy.” Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, ed. Mary Matthews Gedo (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1987), p. 113. 26 Steven Z. Levine, “Monet, Madness, and Melancholy,” Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, ed. Mary Matthews Gedo (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1987), p. 114. 27 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 110. 28 Ibid.

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canvas. Another artiste sans faire, Georges projects in his unwritten book an identity that he characterizes as “cette chose inconcevable et peut-être unique: rien.”29 More typical is Lucien’s effort to paint the gorgeousness of his aesthetic vision, which he substitutes for the transcendent object he is powerless to render. In the plumage of the peacocks with which he fills his atelier – in the green and blue ocelli that constellate their feathers, objective beauty sees the artist and returns his admiring gaze. The tableau he imagines of peacocks crossing fields of pansies paranomastically expresses his artistic motto – to see and understand. Art marries thought with vision in a picture of transparent associational symbolism – of “[d]es paons accroupis dans les pensées, des paons marchant dans les pensées.”30 Yet in Lucien’s choice of subject matter, he betrays his own ideal – no longer elevating painting to a level of celestial perfection but cheapening it by recycling imagery from the Pre-Raphaelites: the gaudy meretriciousness of chrysoprase and chalcedony, a morbid horticulture of tubercular orchids and expiring lilies, an art of doe-eyed androgynes “en robes semblables à des queues de paon.”31 A facile materialization of beauty unreachable in the sky, the peacock is not a bird but a fowl that struts and screams. Another image of the impossible work unconfined by frames and pages, the genuine bird in Mirbeau expresses the freedom of flight. Becoming “un simple accessoire de l’aile,”32 it vaporizes in the sky, unbound by a body that can be pictured or described. Mirbeau’s imagery recalls the bird consciousness, the “pteropsychology” described by Gaston Bachelard, “où convergent l’aile, l’élévation, la pureté et la lumière.”33 In Mirbeau, the counter-aesthetic impulse is the attempt to ground the bird, sullying its immaculacy by caging it in images. Bad art imprisons beauty in the effort to give it form. Made audible to Georges, brush strokes on canvas resemble rifle fire, des coups de fusil that bring down lofty, winged things. Despising men who shoot at swans, Georges marvels at their hatred: “L’homme ne peut souffrir que quelque chose de beau et de pur, quelque chose qui a des ailes, passe au-dessus de lui. Il a la haine de ce qui vole, et de ce qui chante.”34 29

Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 117. 32 Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 144. 33 Ibid., p. 145. 34 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 58. 30 31

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As Lucien transposes the artist’s vision as the ocellus-pattern on peacocks’ feathers, seeing the beauty of the object reflected back at the viewer, Georges, the prospective writer, associates another bird with language – as the swan song is said to be heard when the swan dies and its flight is transformed into music. A target of hunter-Philistines, the swan with blood-stained wings “était l’image même de mon rêve, et mon rêve est mort,” he says.35 Despite the antipathy for religion evident in Mirbeau’s writing, his evocation of art as Dolorism and of the artist as a crucified Christ had already been apparent in Le Calvaire. Thus, the depiction of the creator tortured by the practice of his craft, the image of his workplace as a Calvary or pic on which God’s son is executed, establishes a thematic pattern in the irreverent author’s work. Conversely, deflation of the novel’s Christological message is accomplished by Mirbeau’s ironizing the artist’s messianic grandiosity, the poet’s romantic glorification of his creative tribulations. Still, in Georges’s identification with the swan whose whiteness symbolizes grace and poetry, Mirbeau reinforces the novel’s emphasis on sublimation and disembodiment, refinement of art’s material into the insubstantiality of its expression. The process of rarefaction that changes the heaviness of earth into the buoyancy of air is the goal of Mirbeau’s artists, and their use of theriomorphic images as universal signifiers conveys their view that creativity involves the practice of symbolization. For Georges, the poet’s value lies in his voice since he resembles the swan, which is its song, death-music born from sacrificing flesh to language that transcends it. The artist’s crucifixion culminates with his performance of a swanlike deathsong. As Herbert Whone writes, this song “is the original sound, French son, or Son of the Trinity: it is the Logos or Spoken Word, of which the lowest manifestation is the sound of the senses, a pale reflection. Thus, the original Sound, the essence of purity, dies at the birth of the physical world, giving way to an earthly sound, described in the myth as a deathsong.”36

35

Ibid. Herbert Whone, Church Monastery Cathedral: An Illustrated Guide to Christian Symbolism (Shaftesbury, UK: Element Books, 1990), p. 183. Durand makes similar comments on the swan: “Jung,” he writes, “rapprochant le radical sven du sanscrit svan qui signifie bruire, va même jusqu’à conclure que le chant du cygne (Schwan), oiseau solaire, n’est que l’isomorphisme étymologique de la lumière et de la parole.” (Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 173). 36

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From this standpoint, Lucien’s amputation of his hand is not punishment for a failure to grasp, not an act of frustration provoked by an inability to match seeing with rendering. Rather, it is an expression of guilt for indulging the sacrilegious impulse to reach up to the sky, an attempt to embody beauty in vulgar images and profane forms. Chained to the ground by flightless poetry and discordant music, Mirbeau’s artist has no place in the sky. Lucien may profess to deny the artist’s alienation from an unknowable nature which, he insists to Georges, “n’est qu’une combinaison idéale et multiforme de ton cerveau.”37 Yet his aesthetic subjectivism does nothing to bridge the gulf separating heaven and earth, and has no effect in bringing the artist closer to an unattainable ideal. Limited to the conventional instruments of banalized words and shopworn images – forced to utilize oils and ink – Mirbeau’s painters and poets still long to mediate celestial vision in sublime expressions, replacing language with air, the breath from God’s lips, exchanging images for sunlight, the sight from God’s eyes. “Comprends-moi …,” Lucien says. “Ce que je voudrais, ce serait rendre, rien que par de la lumière, rien que par des formes aériennes, flottantes, où l’on sentirait l’infini, l’espace sans limite, l’abîme céleste, ce serait rendre tout ce qui gémit, tout ce qui se plaint, tout ce qui souffre sur la terre… de l’invisible dans de l’impalpable….”38 In Mirbeau’s novel, the idealized sky as a symbolic locus of purity, perfection, equanimity, and emptiness gives way to the phenomenological sky, a chaotic and turbulent space roiling with insane shapes that take form and disintegrate, a demented brain filled with obscene, unintelligible images. The isomorphism of eye, mind, painting, and sky contributes to the idea of art as a state of disorientation, inspiration preceding the concretizing of images as dead precipitates, the excremental byproduct of the dynamic creative process. Describing this confused state, Georges likens his consciousness to “un grand ciel immobile, que traversaient, de temps en temps, des vols d’oiseaux chimériques, des fuites de bêtes éperdues, métamorphoses de mes pensées en déroute.”39 Fearful of everything, Georges associates artistic exaltation with episodes of transient psychosis ending in collapse and exhaustion, as in the aftermath of his bout of meningitis, when he had also succumbed to “des prostrations semblables à la mort.”40 Whereas Lucien is maddened by the inadequacies of creative expression, Georges suffers from the effort to 37

Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 83. Ibid., p. 114. 39 Ibid., p. 90. 40 Ibid. 38

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rouse the fantastic creatures of his unfinished ideas, the haggard beasts and chimerical birds that are the embryonic forms of his disordered thoughts. Operating in the opposite sense of his idealistic friend, Georges projects transcendent inspirations into the perfunctoriness of his daily existence. Yet despite their differing orientations, both men confront the inevitable cheapening of something noble in experience and art. In his relationship with Julia, his concierge’s daughter, Georges fits the poignancy of his romantic feeling into the triteness of sentimental fiction. Supplying the melodramatic love stories that Julia asks to read, Georges constitutes himself as both their author and their hero, creator and star of “de beaux livres qui font pleurer.”41 Julia’s spurious virginity, her affected modesty and alarm temporarily rescue Georges from his loneliness and self-disgust. Like a dove comforting a swan, Julia’s gaze comes to rest on him, “comme un oiseau se pose sur une branche morte.”42 But as the artist’s desecrating consciousness turns eglantine into excrement, Georges’s sentimental fiction gives way to experiential disenchantment. No longer the diaphanous angel of Georges’s dream, Julia is identified with her sunken eyes, her livid complexion, her greasy collar, and carious teeth. Animalized by her mangy scalp and thinning hair, resembling “les poils des bêtes malades,”43 she is further regresssed by being likened to the vegetable specimen that symbolizes the poetry-destroying commonness of life. Like a wilted gillyflower, Julia is equated with the banality of the image that Georges assigns her. Whereas the peacock objectifies the gorgeousness of Lucien’s artistic vision – the beautiful ocellus mirroring the appreciative eye – the miserable flower that Georges contemplates reflects the “pauvreté végétale” of his sterile imagination. 44 Creative insolvency changes the brightness and clarity associated with the sky into images of lethargy and gloom linked to chthonic inhabitants of a shadowy underworld, the blindness of moles, the implacable baying of earthbound dogs. Instead of projecting glorious blooms out of the soil and into the light, poetry is a flower that collapses into its own root system, as petals and dirt commingle in the fumier of undifferentiation. In its trajectory, Mirbeau’s narrative describes creation as an asymptotic approach of the artist and his ideal, a near-fusion of the seer 41

Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 90. 43 Ibid., p. 120. 44 Ibid. 42

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and his vision. But ultimately, the sky and earth never meet. From the window of the abbey on the summit of the peak, the heavens appear just as dark and remote. Ironically, the central theriomorphic image that Mirbeau uses in his novel is one whose archetypal role is to escort men in their passage from one world to another, the dog as Anubis who, like Charon, “passe les morts de l’autre côté du fleuve infernal.”45 However, in Dans le ciel, the dog locates no bridge between life and afterlife but only barks because there is no point where the earth and sky intersect. With its traditional reputation for fidelity and companionship, the dog is associated with the master whom it never deserts, whose presence is as constant as the hardships its owner endures. Semiotically situating it en abîme, Mirbeau takes the existential lamentation of a dog barking at the sky and imputes it to Lucien, as an image of the artist’s need to express the inexpressible. Inconsolable, the hound bays at the heavens “comme la voix même de la terre” precisely, as Georges says, because one cannot paint “l’aboi d’un chien.”46 As the preverbal sound of mourning – grief before and beyond words – the barking of a dog is a primary response to loss. Psychoanalysis traces the origins of creative work to an original loss motivating recourse to image production and language use. Separated from his mother, deprived of the nourishment from her breast, the baby cries, but over time, oral distress gives ways to what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call “un auto-remplissement phonatoire.”47 The mother’s absence, the child’s empty mouth are subsequently experienced “comme cris et pleurs, remplissement différé, puis comme occasion d’appel, moyen de faire apparaître, langage.”48 While evolving into the aesthetic delights of language, the compensatory pleasure of phonation never brings an end to mourning. Desires for a prelapsarian repatriation in the garden express the same impulse to move backward, from speaking to crying to reexperiencing the peace that accompanies a restoration of the lost object. No matter how elegant the commemoration of the departed loved one, no matter how beautiful the elegy that an original loss inspires, hunger for the object can never be cheated by art. From this perspective, every creation reenacts a celebration of the failure to unite the artist and his subject. The creator’s 45

Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 231. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 113. 47 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce et le Noyau (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978), p. 262. 48 Ibid. 46

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goal is not a perfect representation of his ideal but possession of the object that he incorporates into himself. “Le vide de la bouche appelant en vain, pour se remplir, des paroles introjectives, redevient la bouche avide de nourriture d’avant la parole.”49 This is the utopia of infantile satiety that Mirbeau’s fiction often pictures: the orchard, its trees heavy with fruit, a cloudless sky illumined by sunlight, a boundless lake in whose waters one finds rest. Lucien’s ambition to paint the barking of a dog seeks to communicate the anguish that motivates creation of an art work, the pain that comes from being unable to return. It is because the sky is far away, because living beings are tied to the ground that men cry and dogs bark. While paintings and poems may be the intended bridge connecting heaven and earth, they are only momentary complaints, expressions of dissatisfaction that give way to silence and dissipate in space. In his autobiographical manuscript, Georges relates his own experience of abandonment that ended in shrieks and wails. He had seen both parents die during an outbreak of cholera: an anxiously materialistic mother who had fretted over the purchase of an expensive new house, and a contemptuously emasculating father bemused by his son’s discovery of the principle of artesian wells. Recast in the role of a caregiver called upon to soothe his terrified children, Georges had watched his parents suffer and plead until they had finally stopped writhing on their “lits souillés de déjections.”50 Recalling the scenes of battlefield slaughter with which Sébastien Roch concludes, the death of Georges’s parents conveys the writer’s outrage at the pointlessness of human existence and its dehumanizing end. Echoing the “râles des deux chers moribonds,” Georges had reacted to his parents’ loss by barking like a dog: “je hurlai de longues plaintes, de longues et inutiles plaintes, comme un chien perdu dans la nuit.”51 If, as Pierre Michel says, Dans le ciel expresses “une philosophie préexistentialiste,”52 the dog’s complaint is like the rock that Sisyphus must forever push upward. Animals demeaned by their instincts and corporeity, victims, plaintiffs, and rebels must never succumb to silence and defeat but must raise up the burden of their noisy discontent and throw it in the face of God. 49

Ibid., pp. 263-4. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 66. 51 Ibid. 52 Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Dans le ciel,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 9. 50

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In Dans le ciel, Mirbeau further refines his principle of art as ascetic denudation by having his characters reject their work as formal expression. The artist’s dignity stems from an acknowledgement of his work as a nothing machine, his refusal to satisfy himself with what Monet dismissed as “approximations,” and his resolve to continue striving despite the inevitability of failure. Freed from words and images, artistic inspiration remains, in Mirbeau’s novel, on the level of pain that cannot be voiced in words. Like a crying baby, the dog is a man incapable of speech and untainted by artifice. Uncontaminated by style, the barking of a dog is true. Until it dies, the dog-man standing on the earth projects its terror, rage, and confusion into the blue, in an upraised fist of sound that accuses. Loudly refusing reconciliation or surrender, he puts his art of defiance into the air. When his life is over, he melts back into the manure heap, an eternal brown firmament where all life commingles. A bed of undifferentiated matter, the earth mirrors the sky-cemetery where still-born inspiration decomposes like clouds. But in Mirbeau, there is no interval of silence or peace before new life takes form and another artist arises, launching up the stones of his angry revolt, giving wings to ideals that in vain he casts heavenward.

Chapter Five A Way Out: Un gentilhomme Published for the first time by Flammarion in 1920, Mirbeau’s unfinished Un gentilhomme (1920) has long engaged critics, forcing them to grapple with the mystery of the novel’s origins, its publication history, and the reasons for its discontinuation. A story of the humiliations endured by a Gentleman’s personal secretary, Mirbeau’s novel is a reworked account of the author’s employment in the service of Dugué de La Fauconnerie in the early 1870’s. Mirbeau’s plan to feature a character belonging to the landed aristocracy can be traced back to 1895, when, in a March 20 letter to Jules Huret, he had announced the impending completion of a book entitled Les Vaines Semences, which he described as “un roman sur la grande propriété.”1 Four chapters, subsequently excised by the widowed Alice Mirbeau from the published version, first appeared in May 1901 as installments in Le Journal. In fact, the integrity of the extant text has been a subject of debate, since questions remain as to whether, following Mirbeau’s death, Alice eliminated unflattering passages and inserted others reinforcing the image she wished to present of her husband: as a patriot and man of traditional values rather than a pacifist and social critic. As evidenced by remarks in a July 25, 1885 letter to Paul Hervieu, Mirbeau’s ambitious plan was likely inspired by an appreciation for Tostoy’s War and Peace, with its panoramic scope, the rich complexity of its image of the Russian land and people, the painstaking historical accuracy with which its setting is evoked. By contrast, French naturalism struck Mirbeau as meager and prosaic: “quand on compare Zola, Flaubert, Goncourt, et même Maupassant à Tolstoi, comme tout cela est petit, étroit, gringalet, stupide!”2 What, then, explains the apparent incompatibility of the breadth of the book’s conception and the narrowness of its finished form? A number of theories have emerged as to why Mirbeau’s project, as outlined in an unpublished letter to Jules Claretie, is so dissimilar to the work he undertook and abandoned – why the idea of a multi-layered intrigue, a cast of hundreds of characters, an incisive political message framed by “une 1 2

Letter to Jules Huret, March 20, 1895, Collection Pierre Michel. Letter to Paul Hervieu, July 25, 1885, Correspondance générale I, p. 411.

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action grouillante,”3 emerges in the published text as a static story told by a self-absorbed narrator, an unremarkable servant in the employ of an aristocrat. To begin with, there are formal and structural anomalies that raise questions as to the place of Un gentilhomme in the succession of Mirbeau’s writings. Pierre Michel is right to point out that the use of an omniscient narrator required by a multiplicity of characters would have led Mirbeau to readopt the explanatory, synthesizing viewpoint of an Olympian observer of the kind Mirbeau had ceased to use by 1901, when in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, he renounced all pretense of constructing a coherent story line. As Mirbeau conceived his book, the plot’s chronological development and historical framework, the changing and varied settings would have necessitated a breadth of perspective at odds with his predilection for narrators limited by error, dishonesty, and a penchant for self-reinvention. After writing Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, it is difficult to imagine Mirbeau utilizing a narrator as a “substitut de Dieu […] qui fait miraculeusement pénétrer son lecteur en tous lieux et toutes âmes.”4 Perhaps the most engaging mystery is the reason why Mirbeau chose to leave his book unfinished at all. Monique Bablon-Dubreuil has advanced what she calls “[une] hypothèse […] séduisante,” suggesting a connection between the novel’s subject and its form, “un lien entre le déclin d’une classe et l’impossible achèvement du roman.”5 Thus, the historical disappearance of the aristocrat might have caused the discontinuation of Mirbeau’s project, so that as the hero vacates his place in society, he takes Mirbeau’s narrative with him. If the idea for the project of Un gentilhomme follows by a few years the author’s work on Dans le ciel, one can reason that Mirbeau had chosen to focus on the notion of unfinishable texts themselves, and that, as a nothing machine, Mirbeau’s fiction addressed the effects of its own formal truncation. Instead of presenting a sweeping epic, Mirbeau offers a modest intrigue. In place of a populous cast of characters, he features a single, unaccomplished narrator, a small, self-analytical figure whose claim to understand the mystery of man is belied by his inability to elucidate the mystery of the Gentleman. This shrinking of the plan for the narrative focus – from the mobility of a migratory storyteller, able to enter 3

Letter to Jules Claretie, September 2, 1902, University of Texas, Austin, Library. Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Un gentilhomme,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 871. 5 Monique Bablon-Dubreuil “Un gentilhomme: du déclin d’un mythe à l’impasse d’un roman,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 5 (1998), p. 72. 4

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at will into the consciousness of everyone – to the imprisoning subjectivity of a self-involved character – seems to parallel Mirbeau’s view of fiction as a self-dismantling apparatus. As an epistemological instrument, the novel moves from pretensions to grasp everything to a disqualification from explaining anything. Readers’ first impression of Mirbeau’s airless, inward-looking narrative is that it is a form of self-indulgent nombrilisme. Critics encountering the text may feel they are facing the daunting task of locating a way out of a hall of mirrors. By its themes, structure, and techniques of characterization, Mirbeau’s tale induces a feeling of claustration, suggesting that fiction, rather than offering a chance for self-discovery, locks the audience in a prison of self-analysis. Mirbeau adopts the autobiographical format to trap his hero in the narrow space of his soliloquizing consciousness. Additionally, allusions to masking and imposture, concerns with apparel as disguise convey a sense that the novel’s point is to incriminate its own superficiality. Mirbeau has recourse to traditional novelistic form in order to delegitimize the very genre that he is utilizing. By discrediting accepted views about fiction and its reception, Mirbeau seems to offer his audience nothing but the empty shimmering of a mirror. But the suspension of the narrative does not leave his readers stranded – abandoned in an unmapped zone of an inoperative hermeneutic. Instead, the novel’s discontinuation opens a door out of the labyrinth, allowing passage into the domain of literature to come. As he described it to Claretie, Mirbeau originally envisaged his novel as an ambitiously sprawling political epic, a sweeping chronicle detailing “tout l’effort du parti catholique depuis le 16 mai [1877]).”6 However, what Mirbeau leaves his readers is a text emphasizing the depletion of its material, the narrowing of its scope, the decline of its feckless hero into moral and literary mediocrity. Having begun by aspiring to universality, Mirbeau’s novel dwindles and slows, formalizing the evacuation of its content with the interruption of the narrative in the middle of a scene. In clarifying his definition of literature as auto-disassembly, Mirbeau moves from one unfinished novel, Dans le ciel, in which a failed painter cuts off his hand, to another in which a writer is creatively mutilated by being a scribe. As the artist is reduced to his role as amanuensis, the severed hand that writes is disconnected from the head that thinks. 6

Letter to Claretie, September 2, 1902.

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By constructing his novel as a container gradually emptied of contents, Mirbeau continues his practice of problematizing the premises of fiction. He invites the question as to what the next line of his text would have been, when its characters are uprooted and exiled from their setting, when the storyteller is denied access to and loses interest in his material, when the narrator’s enunciatory reliability becomes increasingly uncertain, and when the Gentleman, the fabled aristocrat awarded star status in the title, turns into a protean, contradictory, impossible being, part mythomaniac and part impostor. In seeming to readopt conventional novelistic form, Mirbeau appears to define the purpose of fiction as ordering and explanatory. In place of existential desultoriness, there is fictive teleology; in place of death as a random cut in a narrative biography, there is a dénouement that retroactively supplies meaning and infers causality. This ordering omniscience imputed to the artist would permit “au romancier-destin de rendre les événements rapportés totalement intelligibles au lecteur,” and would confer on the author, as Pierre Michel affirms, “un prestige” that Mirbeau “a remis en cause depuis des années.”7 Yet, in the novel, the narrative’s claim to explain is offset by the narrator’s failure to understand. Hearkening back to Mirbeau’s years as a fledgling journalist and personal secretary, Un gentilhomme offers a fictional reworking of Mirbeau’s painful apprenticeship in literary and journalistic prostitution, showing how the his association with Dugué had left him bitter and disabused. Adept in the ideological chameleonism required of hirelings who echoed their masters, Mirbeau became alienated from his craft, subsistence work that allowed him to live in the political and artistic capital of Paris, but that also commodified talent used to sell ideas that were not his own. The need to trick out the despised body of his employer’s views in Mirbeau’s stylistic finery was surely at the origin of the writer’s estrangement from his material. Reproduced as the subject of Un gentilhomme, this experience of artistic self-dispossession led, in the novel, to the opposition between form and substance, opinion and expression. The artist-for-sale who, personally, invests nothing of himself in his work is inevitably led to put nothing at the heart of his creation. Motivating the scribe’s ecdysiast performance are his original experiences of disillusionment and shame. His devalued status as copyist is redeemed by his storytelling acumen. While Mirbeau’s narrator, Charles Varnat, is 7

Michel, “Introduction: Un gentilhomme,” p. 871.

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incapable of solving the mystery of others, he shows unflinching lucidity in analyzing his public self-abasement. Self-pitying yet sympathetic, Varnat is intellectually and temperamentally well-suited to his task. Rhetorically gifted, narcissistically wounded, observant, shallow, and personable, he is unburdened of character and conviction. A parasite in need of a host, art lacking a subject, Varnat gravitates to the aristocrat as to a functional identity complement. In the novel’s opening pages, Varnat’s comments raise questions about the objective of his narrative and the audience it intends. As with all autobiographies, Varnat’s recitation of his professional history is an exercise in reparative self-absolution. In the tradition of Rousseau, the narrator’s humiliating admissions are designed to rehabilitate the penitent by virtue of the expiatory pain of his confession, recalling in this respect the salvatory purpose of Jean Mintié’s narrative. The mutilation of fiction as a communicative instrument comes initially through the exclusion of outside readers as evaluators. No longer operating as a medium of interpersonal exchange, Varnat’s story is a vehicle for self-vindication. Confessional remembering offsets experiential dismembering, as the narrator seeks to heal the broken self whose tale he tells. Rousseau had also sought to preordain his audience’s responses, demanding that they preliminarily accord him credence and forgiveness as the admission price for witnessing the spectacle of his abjection. Varnat’s apostrophe to the reader serves the same purpose, as he mirrors his complacent self-appraisal as others’ understanding and forbearance: “Que le lecteur se montre indulgent à la futilité de ces premiers souvenirs […], et qu’il sache que ce n’est pas seulement pour lui que j’écris ces pages, mais surtout pour moi, qui éprouve à les revivre, une joie âpre et forte.”8 Beginning with this preemptive admonition to the reader, Varnat announces that the text’s importance is not its subject but its reception. Indeed, autobiography is a dialogue between ego and ego ideal, between a defective self projected as the material of the book and an enlightened storyteller who accedes to recapitulative wisdom. The randomness and disorganization of immediate experience are stylized, euphemized, endowed with meaning and coherence when one objectifies his life and reworks it into literature. In Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion, he 8

Octave Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 877.

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shows that reexperiencing unpleasant circumstances allows the subject to change his status as the victim of tragic accident to the master of events as they are recollected or restaged. Yet Varnat’s literary goal is one that Mirbeau, the anarchist, rejects, since the idealized self emerging from the narrative processing of experience is as illusory and chimerical as the notion of utopia. Homeless, insolvent, crippled by the insensitivity and selfishness of his father, Varnat seeks an empowered and integrated version of himself in his aristocratic employer. A wealthy autochthon rooted in ancestral properties, confident in his lineage and entitlement, the Gentleman is as self-assured as Varnat is ineffectual, as whole as he is fragmented. Varnat’s relationships with his readers, with the Marquis d’Amblezy, with the historical self transposed as the material of his narrative, are all structured by his narcissism. Because the Marquis confides in him about his political machinations, describing the impending coup he is helping to orchestrate, Varnat’s role as listener confers on him a conspiratorial gravity, enabling him to participate vicariously in events of national significance. D’Amblezy is a man, and Varnat only a reflection, yet he still feels he enjoys an associational importance, haloing him, as his says, with “une sorte de majesté héroique.”9 Yet Varnat in no way contributes to the implementation of these schemes, and the light he basks in is the secondary illumination of a satellite by the sun. Varnat’s recourse to narrative as a source of textual cohesion, his reliance on powerful masters for a sense of status and significance show him suffering from a disorganized identity typical of Mirbeau’s marginalized characters. Alternating between depressive episodes of selfdisgust and bouts of self-aggrandizing assertiveness, Varnat is subject to experiences of depersonalization, a phenomenon connected to narcissistic disorders like his own. Varnat’s feelings of disconnectedness arise from his position as a spectator who stands apart and judges the shamefulness of his actions. Manifesting the narcissistic splitting of the gazer and his image, depersonalization results from a divorce “between the ‘experiencing ego’ and the ‘observing ego,’” in which the subject’s selfanalysis inhibits his ability to feel. According to Judith Schweiger Levy and Paul Wachtel, depersonalization is frequently accompanied by a sense of “alienation, unrealness, [and] fraudulence.”10 9

Ibid. Judith Schweiger Levy and Paul Wachtel, “Depersonalization: An Effort at Clarification,” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 38 (1978), p. 291.

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Particularly in the opening chapters, Varnat reports such experiences of detachment, dissociation, incomprehension, and bewilderment, describing incongruous events, perceptions allegedly distorted by hunger or exhaustion, hallucinatory visions, and inexplicable scenes. Throughout the story, Varnat eavesdrops on conversations that are only partially audible and half understood. Witnessing exchanges whose meaning eludes him, he is entrusted by the Marquis with correspondence whose import remains enigmatic. For Mirbeau’s narrator, events whose significance is unclear seem all the more meaningful because of their mystery and opaqueness. Marking his narrative with the stamp of unreality, Varnat lives in a world proleptically fictionalized by its nightmarish obscurity. Deformed by confusion, fatigue, and incomprehension, Varnat’s experiences take place in settings invested with symbolic importance, exposing him to events that seem artistically dramatized in advance. While writing is what he uses to awaken him from a dream, the oneirical text is one that he is unable to decode. Contrary to conventional fictional practices, Varnat’s narrative reworks the semiotically rich material of life and converts it into the banal evidence of literature. Reported in his stylized history, Varnat’s memories are of baffling, uncanny occurrences. So fixated is Mirbeau’s hero on his own image that the world and other people retreat to the borders of the mirror, a shadow zone of peripheral vision where reality loses focus and things twist into grotesque shapes and indecipherable symbols. When he introduces his memoir on March 1st 1877, Varnat begins by describing his arrival at the Sonneville-les-Biefs train station. The discomfort of the journey, his fatigue, and lack of food transform Varnat’s picture of the inn where he dines and spends the night into one in which sensory detail is eclipsed by inferential judgments about the vulgarity of the place and the pretentiousness of the people. Crowding out sights and sounds, the taste of raisins and almonds for dessert, are Varnat’s deprecating remarks about the innkeeper and the serving staff. Mirbeau’s protagonist is always separated from direct experience by the critical view of outside parties whose opinions he internalizes. Turning away from external reality, Varnat’s attention becomes self-directed, and his censorious appraisals of his character and appearance are so unremitting that other objects and people appear inconsequential and inauthentic. This compulsive self-detraction is itself a form of narcissism, since with self-scrutiny, libido is still invested in the ego.

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Even before Varnat is introduced to the Marquis d’Amblezy, he trains his employer’s disapproving gaze on the sorry spectacle of his own person. As he comments: “mes habits de voyage étaient fort peu honorables, pour ne pas dire dégoûtants, et j’avais une barbe de deux jours, ce qui sans doute n’êut point manqué d’impressionner fâcheusement le marquis sur mon compte.”11 Withheld from readers, starved of intrigue, the material impoverishment of Mirbeau’s novel continues with the exclusion of characters whom Varnat incorporates as aspects of himself. Outsiders whose autonomous reality has been eliminated, they operate as expressions of Varnat’s unforgiving super-ego, manifestations of guilty impulses that Varnat disavows by embodying them in other people. Replicated in Varnat’s relationship with his text, the union with a beloved who is fathered by the subject is realized in the incestuous coupling of the poacher Flamant and his daughter, an outlaw couple living in a remote part of the Marquis’s estate. In the character of Flamant, Varnat imagines his narcissism freed from accountability and responsiveness to outside sanction. A consummately gregarious and insubstantial social being, Varnat functions as a prosthetic extension of the people he serves, becoming a hand that transcribes their words and arranges their affairs. A reflection inseparable from the body standing before a mirror, Varnat’s existence is cooperatively negotiated by the people he works for. An object that disappears when an eye no longer contemplates it, he links solitude to annihilation and yet hates those whose contemptuous opinion is what he needs to make him real. Cut off from the world, inhabiting a remote hovel in the heart of the forest, dismissive of normative judgments issuing from society, the outlaw Flamant embodies Varnat’s self made strong and independent – oblivious to taboos, impervious to criticism, a subject who accepts himself and does not care what others think. Different from him, Varnat is disabled by depressive narcissism, paralyzed by shame that motivates his compulsive staging of the spectacle of his inadequacies and vices. As Paul Bradlow claims, shame is an “affective response to an ego-ego-ideal discrepancy,”12 causing the subject’s dissociative feeling that a despised self is unreal or inhuman, precipitating the sense of depersonalization that is characteristic of Varnat. Shame is the emotion that motivates Varnat to 11

Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 878. Paul Bradlow, “Depersonalization, Ego Splitting, Non-human fantasy, and Shame,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 54 (1973), p. 491.

12

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recreate himself as his text, fashioning a narrative that elicits pride instead of an image that provokes derision. Hypersensitive to imagined slights about his professional importance, Varnat takes umbrage at insinuations that he is a valet or a lackey. As an adjunct of his master, he is metonymized as his function and denied the right to have his own desires or opinions. While not required to wear a footman’s livery, he exists only as a surface, and like a narrative void of content and yet pleasingly expressed, he is vapid and agreeable, a decorated container that is empty. Conditioned by his job to expect dissimulation on the part of everyone, he is obsessed with unearthing secrets and discovering hidden truths. Varnat is the first of Mirbeau’s cynical ancillaries, and, like Célestine in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, he strips employers of their virtuous façade, revealing them in the undergarments of their iniquity and perversion. Because he wears no uniform, Varnat is stealthy and invisible, an unnoticed presence who silently witnesses and observes. Varnat wages a subtle campaign of innuendo, insinuating that the Marquis’s wife, embarrassed by her Judaism, practices Catholic philanthropy as penitential compensation. Interrogating the innkeeper, he collects gossip about his master, integrating him into his narrative as another incriminating text, “document négatif, en soi,” he says, “que je devrais soumettre à un plus sévère contrôle, mais qui, néanmoins, m’était utile.”13 One reason for Varnat’s unhappiness comes from his habitual practice of distancing and objectification. Rarely is Varnat so engrossed by life that he is unaware of its passage or unmindful of its direction. Typical is the identification of his shadowy future with the interminable, elm-lined avenue leading to the d’Amblezy estate, a boulevard wrapped in the sinister uncertainty of night, bordered by unseen woes, where the trees are like hours filled, as Varnat imagines, with “l’ennui, les déceptions, la solitude morale [qui] me rongeraient l’âme comme toujours.”14 The image of his future life as misery that devours, chewing and gnawing, assimilating a subject who is no longer separate and secure, reappears in the image of his past life, in which bad memories were rodents: “Ils surgissaient en foule, comme des rats, du fond trouble de mon enfance,

13 14

Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 881. Ibid., p. 887.

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traversaient en galopades effrénées ma vie, pour aller se perdre […] dans les effrayantes ténèbres du futur.”15 Despite working as a secretary, Varnat is not only a hand that works but also an eye that discerns. In Varnat’s preoccupation with impediments to vision, the construction of himself as something scrutinized or read, his insistence on maintaining the separateness of the viewer and visual object, he displays behaviors associated with scopophilia and exhibitionism. In Karl Abraham’s landmark 1917 study, he associates an inordinate need to look with anxiety about castration. Inappropriate visual behavior, he writes, “proceeds from a repressed pleasure in looking, which was originally directed in an excessive degree toward the mother, and especially toward her genitals.”16 It is the horrifying discovery of maternal castration that leaves the subject feeling vulnerable to a similar mutilation. For Varnat, these concerns are manifested by the threat of occupational emasculation, humilation, his relegation to a state of nonbeing. Compensating for the loss of his sense of wholeness, “l’abandon total de [m]oi-même dans les choses les plus essentielles de la vie intérieure,”17 Varnat visits the experience of castration on his superiors by covertly sullying their reputation and identifying their defects. Yet, as Freud says, the reverse of exorbitant visual hunger is the apprehension of being revealed as a charlatan. Wishing to see forbidden things, the scopophile fears he will be unmasked, compelled to relay the other’s look of mocking disapproval. While complementing it, “[t]he force which opposes scopophilia […] is shame,” as Freud concludes. 18 Varnat’s attention to neatness and grooming, his preoccupation with clothes convey a similar interest in disguising the reality of a damaged self. Varnat’s narrative is replete with episodes involving disrobing – scenes in which characters are pictured in varying states of undress, descriptions of threadbare garments that cannot cover a shameful body. Translated onto a textual level, Varnat’s concealment of castration prompts the disavowal of his story’s emptiness, his attempt to prevent readers from discovering that there is really nothing there. 15

Ibid., p. 905. Karl Abraham, “Restrictions and Transformations of Scopophilia in Psycho-neurotics: With Remarks on Analogous Phenomena in Folk Psychology,” The Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), p.178. 17 Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 890. 18 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 251. 16

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Varnat’s victimization by a father who required him to wear a tattered pair of trousers emerges as a defining experience in structuring Varnat’s relationship with male authority figures. Yellowing, thin, shiny, fulls of holes, worn at the seat, “le maudit pantalon,” “ce fâcheux pantalon”19 had acted as a vestimentary signifier of castration. The son can express himself, in his opinions and attire, only as a second-hand and worn-out imitation of the father. Paternal aggression directed at the oedipal usurper is expressed in the selection of clothes the child must wear. Porous, ripped, dirty, they are the son’s identity as shameful surface. With frayed cuffs and torn crotch, Varnat’s pants allow his shirt tails to protrude and dangle foolishly. “Je ne parle pas des genoux crapuleusement avachis,” he adds with apophatic bitterness.20 The target of scathing jibes by classroom bullies, Varnat remembers one mortifying incident when a schoolmate would approach and compliment him insultingly on his costume, inquiring about the name and address of his culottier: “Ce doit être un grand artiste,” he acerbically concludes. 21 Henceforth, Varnat becomes fixated on “l’état de [s]a garderobe,”22 apparel which deflects impudent stares and insolent comments. Varnat’s preoccupation with appearances, with impeccable dress and conversational ease betokens the visual paranoia of the anxious exhibitionist, his compulsive self-displays and concomitant anxiety that he might become the object of “[d]es regards ironiques et offensés.”23 Like an autobiographer, the exhibitionist controls what others see, and what he shows is meant to distract attention from the things he wants to hide. Another threadbare garment, Varnat’s narrative is like his pants, covering a fundamental deadness and insubstantiality at the center of his being. Existing only on a surface dressed in the fabric of his prose, Varnat answers readers who wish to know his true identity by disclosing the name and artistic qualifications of his culottier. Since he invests in the impenetrable beauty of a protective exterior, Varnat experiences stains on his clothes, gaps in the smooth flow of conversation as ontological fissures that adumbrate his final annihilation. When projected on the outside world, derealization extends the impostor’s feelings of inauthenticity, making his environment seem alien and dreamlike. Accompanying this sense of detached estrangement, 19

Mirbeau, Un gentilhommme, p. 903. Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 904. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 20

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Varnat often reports feeling hungry for substance. Dissatisfied with the disgusting cuisine he receives at the inn, sickened by grease, spoilage, and adulteration, he is repelled by dishes that are sour or cloying, that trigger un haut-le-coeur but that he still gobbles gloutonnement. Starved of honesty and warmth, Varnat finds sustenance when, in a richly symbolic scene, he is sheltered and fed by a compassionate prostitute, a love-peddler offering him affection for free. Varnat himself admits to trafficking in illusion, trading conviction for security, selling integrity for money. Hollow at his core, he has little difficulty donning different ideological costumes, espousing conflicting viewpoints: “Tour à tour, je suis resté auprès d’un républicain athée, d’un bonapartiste militant qui ne rêvait que de coups d’Etat, d’un catholique ultramontain, et je me suis adapté aux pires de leurs idées, de leurs passions, de leurs haines, sans qu’elles aient eu la moindre prise sur moi.”24 In Varnat’s admission of his promiscuous association with different masters, the insistence on his strategies of self-insulation, his protestations of inner purity untainted by shameful actions, he echoes the rationalizing language of the prostitute. Justifying himself, Varnat describes political views as masks worn for the sake of expediency, stylized faces put on in the morning and taken off at night. In Varnat’s experience, interpersonal exchanges involve mute, unintelligible, exhibitionistic displays, leering pantomimes, furrowed brows, contorted features, the swapping of rictus for scowl, vaudevillean ritual, a liturgy of the absurd. A superficial being, Varnat is always assigned the position of perplexed voyeur, an eavesdropping outsider watching the spectacle of other people’s lives. Thus, while he is returning from his nocturnal visit to the d’Amblezy estate, he glimpses a grotesque scene through the halfclosed shutters of a wig-maker’s shop. Silhouetted against shafts of light, the perruquier – eyes moist with emotion – wields an accordion whose bleating strains fill the darkness. Watched by his wife, half-dressed, her breasts drooping from an open camisole, the musician offers the spectacle of artistic self-excitation, caressing the collapsible phallus of his instrument “qui, entre ses doigts, se déroulait, se repliait, s’allongeait et se recourbait en mouvements annulaires comme une grosse chenille verte.”25 Sexualizing art as a performance from which onlookers are distanced, the replacement of physical contact by stagecraft which keeps participants 24 25

Ibid., p. 900. Ibid., p. 887.

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apart, this scene is an hallucinatory manifestation of Varnat’s longing for intimacy. Picturing the musician fondling his instrument as his undressed wife looks on, the scene incorporates Varnat as the cardboard head of a wig-coiffed mannequin, another mute, depersonalized spectator whom Varnat imagines as moved by the music. Weeping, drooling in imitation of the couple, the dummy represents Varnat, the emotionally desensitized voyeur rehumanized by sharing in others’ feelings. The nightmarish incongruity of the spectacle, the freakish people, the unusual instrument, the uncertain light, the uncanny mannequin identify the scene as a product of the derealization that Varnat experiences. Typically, Varnat’s vicarious participation in the musical/sexual/sentimental intercourse of the couple is blocked by attention to unpleasant detail: the wig-maker’s acne, the wife’s dirty camisole, her immodest posture, the flow of saliva. Conveyed by the couple’s state of slovenly undress, the scene suggests an unstylized spontaneity that Varnat finds distasteful. Reminiscent of the culottier/father emphasizing his son’s castration as the holes in his trousers, the perruquier uses the wig mannequin as another child mutilated and required to wear a ridiculous covering. The genital defect represented by the hole in one’s pants corresponds to the separation of emotion from intelligence. Figured by the decapitated head and its bloody incision, the “tête en carton, éclaboussée de carmin”26 is cut off from the heart, the body, the sex organs. With eyes that watch but cannot feel, it is another creation that its maker leaves unfinished. Like the “bizarre architecture” of Varnat’s account, the wigcoiffed mannequin is disconcerting because it is left “inachevée.”27 Conflated with his attire, Varnat associates political neutrality and ideological detachment with his exemption from having to wear distinctive apparel. Varnat is familiar with the practice of changing clothes as an expression of identity modification. The wig purchaser denies castration as baldness by covering an ordinary skull with the extravagance of art. It is not surprising that Varnat associates a state of undress with ego disintegration, a return to a disorganized state of uncontrollable instinct. Before Varnat first glimpses the Marquis d’Amblezy-Sérac in “un caleçon bleu,” a kaleidoscopic splash of black hair, ruddy features, and blue clothes, he has already made his acquaintance topologically, 26 27

Ibid. Ibid., p. 888.

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encountering him through his house, its grounds, and his furniture. Often stylistically spare, Varnat’s narrative acquires richness of detail when he creates a person’s psychological profile as expressed through possessions and place. Varnat achieves a level of inferential intimacy with the Marquis by identifying him with his Louis XIII château, his rhododendron beds, the campanile-style roofs of his buildings. Acquiring knowledge through a process of disassembly and unification, Varnat breaks the Marquis down into his clothes and their pastel colors, equating him with the mosaic work on his flagstone-covered floors, door panels painted with images of game birds, a Heudon-style statue. The Marquis’s wealth does not offset this impression of aesthetic heterogeneity, projecting the man as his vulgar taste: “luxe disparate,” “luxe sans unité.”28 Mirbeau’s fondness for Impressionism is evident in Varnat’s perceptual fragmentation: latticework visions through shuttered windows, shadow people receding into chiaroscuro uncertainty, subjective states of consciousness conveyed through effects of lighting. Varnat’s conception of human beings as unstable, mutating, shimmering, decentered entities opposes the archaic notion of fixed identity propagated by Classical art. Despite Varnat’s pointillist psychology, his grasp of people as the light and hue of their vagrant humors, he hungers for the fixity of an idealized self. Yet identity is always a narrative construct, transactionally negotiated by speaker and listener, writer and audience. Thus, in Varnat’s autobiography, he engages in a dialogue with himself, collecting and tailoring memories that rise to the surface, breaking through the wall of repression and forgetting. These he weaves into the fabric of a story that clothes and adorns a shamefully injured self. While stipulating that man is an everchanging thing, Varnat longs for constancy, the dependability of an unalterable identity reflected in the world, “un monde interne affectif […] insensible aux mouvements.”29 Monumentalized, this ideal self, as Lucile Durrmeyer writes, is “[une] construction illusoire,” “l’expression métaphorique du nirvana originaire: monde interne et externe aconflictuels à l’abri de la violence des affects et des conflits intrapsychiques.”30 Dating back to Mirbeau’s earliest novel and Jean Mintié’s fantasy of repatriation in the orchard of motherhood, Mirbeau’s characters voice longings for the insentience of Nirvana. Like Mirbeau’s other 28

Ibid., p. 910. Lucile Durrmeyer, “L’insaisissable nature de l’identité,” Revue française de la psychanalyse 4 (1993), p. 1196. 30 Ibid., pp. 1196-7. 29

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autobiographical protagonists, Varnat distinguishes between the impermanence of personas and the stability of the identity one aspires to build. Disjointed and episodic, the former correspond to the real writer and text, while fixity and perfection are properties of utopia, a sanctuary of changelessness where men, cured of neurosis, can live in eternity. The discrepancy between ego and ego ideal is also reflected in Varnat’s conception of literature. Homologous with Mirbeau’s hero’s castrated state is the narrative he writes and leaves uncompleted, the textual counterpart of the unkempt domestic with his expressive inadequacies and shameful attire. However, Varnat dreams of finishing the project of narcissistic repair by writing a book on a self universalized as l’homme. A miscellany of oxymoronic formulations, descriptions of an indescribably contradictory subject, Varnat’s project only reproduces his own inconsistencies, conflating him with man and his irreconcilable differences: “vertus funestes,” “mensonges sincères,” “sentimentalités féroces,” “cruautés naives.”31 Professionally required to multiply himself as obsequious images of his imperious masters, Varnat turns to literature to mend a fragmented subject. But a novel that can capture the indivisibility of man is unwriteable since it is impossible “d’exprimer intégralement un être si multiple.”32 Literature cannot keep its epistemological promise. There is no movement from experiential chaos to recapitulative synthesis, from a wardrobe of masks to the truth of the wearer. For Mirbeau, there cannot be a finalized text, one constructed according to “les règles d’une morale préétablie.”33 Instead, as Mirbeau’s fictional dynamic suggests, the stability of objects yields to the generation of energy. Un gentilhomme clarifies the central tenet of Mirbeau’s philosophy: that there is no single human truth that can be contained in one volume, but rather a dynamic portrait of protean man. Inexhaustible in his complexity, the human subject confounds efforts to represent him as stable and fixed, so that the only accurate way to portray him is as un texte inachevé. A reenergizing process of self-propagation, literature does not end but continues to chase its elusive subject – “dont on se transmet les grimaces, d’un livre à l’autre.” 34 Not only does Varnat entertain literary pretensions to capture the contradictoriness of man as he sees him. He is also an embodiment of this 31

Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 903. Ibid., p. 901. 33 Ibid., p. 902. 34 Ibid. 32

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inexpressible being who entertains him “par le composé, extrêmement varié, extrêmement grotesque, extrêmement fou, d’incohérences [et] de ridicules.”35 Aspiring to the prestigious generality of Everyman, Varnat finds he is threatened in his unremarkable singularity. No sooner does the Marquis – dancing spots of colored light – come into focus and greet his secretary than he challenges Varnat’s individual identity. Recalling that he had had a schoolmate also named Charles Varnat, an incorrigible fellow who required the regular administration of “coups de pieds au derrière,”36 the Marquis suppresses Mirbeau’s narrator and replaces him with a namesake. Varnat’s conviction in the sturdiness of a foundational self preexisting all epigones, modelling the literary abstraction of man, is threatened by the antecedence of an onomastic double. Varnat, the sartorially flawless, clean, dignified man, is displaced by the buffoon from d’Amblezy’s past. Defeating Varnat’s fantasy of colonizing the world with facsimiles, reproducing himself as his narrative, projecting his qualities as those shared by everyone, is knowledge of the existence of another Varnat. Instead of authenticating new selves with his signature, he finds he is a plagiarism of an original document. It is not coincidental that Varnat first encounters the Marquis when the latter is in the process of putting on his pants. Mirroring his vulnerability in the person inspiring it, Varnat puts d’Amblezy in a position of vestimentary disadvantage. Yet it is the secretary, collectivized by his servant class status, who is robbed of individuality as expressed by his name. Servants – like pets – are the property of masters who rechristen them with whatever appellation suits them. As Monique Bablon-Dubreuil says, it is not just the Marquis who is decomposed into assorted garments and effects of lighting: “la dialectique du maître et de l’esclave va plus loin puisqu’elle laisse, en morceaux, les deux protagonistes.”37 As an act of narrative undressing, Varnat’s confessional revelations presuppose an audience that accords him attention and interest. But in the Marquis, Varnat finds an apathetic reader, who, as Varnat says, never expresses “le désir de me connaître, de connaître ma famille, mon éducation, mon passé, un peu de ma vie ancienne qu’il devait bien deviner tourmentée et douleureuse.”38 D’Amblezy’s self-involvement and obliviousness to his secretary serve functionally to discredit the 35

Ibid., p. 901. Ibid., p. 913. 37 Bablon-Dubreuil, “Un gentilhomme: du déclin d’un mythe à l’impasse d’un roman,” p. 86. 38 Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 955. 36

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significance of Varnat’s text. With his political self-importance, “le culte de ses muscles,”39 the Marquis is more narcissistic than the secretary plagued by insecurity. It is not Varnat, but the Marquis who is multiplied by mystery, doubled as the suave aristocrat and the unscrupulous “chenapan.”40 Varnat follows the habit of disintegrating his master into constituent parts to which he assigns symbolic meaning: the predatory jaw, the sybaritic chin, the treacherous felinity of his suppleness and grace. The ideal subject for Varnat’s impossible novel, d’Amblezy “était un homme, et dans toute la force de ce mot redoutable.”41 Not a fictional character that Varnat creates, the Marquis is a text that his servant cannot read. When organizing the unrecorded documents of his memories, Varnat acquits himself of his responsibilities easily. But as the Marquis’s secretary, entrusted with classifying his papers, Varnat becomes increasingly ill-equipped to operate as an editor. When d’Amblezy resolves himself into personality quirks, behavioral tics, psychological anomalies, his multifaceted identity appeals to Varnat’s sense of his own complexity. The Marquis’s numerous personas elicit a multiplicity of readings, mobilizing what Varnat calls “l’ingéniosité polymorphe de mon intelligence.”42 But while the interpreter’s duty is to unify and synthesize, Varnat stalls in his effort to sort out d’Amblezy’s correspondence, letters to addressees whose history is murky, records of transactions whose significance is unknown, a confusion of documents exuding the futile smell of stale cigar smoke. As Varnat complains: “toutes ces lettres redisaient les mêmes histoires.”43 Frequently Mirbeau’s novels substitute repetition for explanation, since, like Varnat’s character, they form a patchwork of archaic features and unmatched qualities. Accustomed to cannibalizing earlier works, Mirbeau recycled old anecdotes, confecting novels that often “redisaient les mêmes histoires.” Finished books that decomposed in the cemetery of Mirbeau’s library were not always embodied in new guises. Mirbeau and his fictional avatars engage in relationships with material they look upon as their own creative progeny. Like Flamant and his daughter, the author couples with his work, offspring hereditarily damaged by their unoriginality. 39

Ibid., p. 932. Ibid., p. 915. 41 Ibid., p. 928. 42 Ibid., p. 954. 43 Ibid., p. 949. 40

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This prison of narcissism is inhabited by parents who wish to beget their child as a likeness of themselves, by artists whose works are mirrors that both flatter and ensnare them. As a fictional construct, Flamant is a father involved in an endogamous textual union, siring the same poacher described in words reused verbatim in Dingo. In both works, Flamant is assimilated to the animals he hunts, becoming a creature of stealth and darkness, “un être de silence et de nuit.”44 In Dingo, Flamant is engendered as a copy of his fictional forebear, having, in both books, the same “barbe très courte, d’un gris roussâtre,” scenting distant prey – as Mirbeau twice remarks – with “narines [qui] battaient sans cesse, au vent, comme celles des chiens.”45 Ultimately, the drama enacted in Mirbeau’s novel involves the dialectical interplay of ipseity and alterity, art as the practice of reproductive counterfeiting, haunting encounters with created works as ghostly doubles. As Varnat discovers that another Varnat preexists him, the writer must accept the role as copyist in the service of himself. Despite his sycophancy, Varnat is exiled to a world increasingly depopulated of reassuring images. Preliminarily identified as a work designed for his own consumption, Varnat’s narrative is subsequently handed over to other readers. Assigned a propadeutic value, it becomes a traditional realist ordering of events whose meaning emerges from their conversion into literature. No longer is the goal to ingratiate Varnat to himself. Instead, his account aims to introduce the Marquis to an audience of outsiders. Digesting Varnat’s story, “le lecteur sera préparé à mieux comprendre la nature complexe d’un homme dont je vais avoir à raconter la vie mouvementée.”46 No consummation of the author/novel union, Varnat’s narrative becomes the site of his experience of dispossession. Breezy, chameleonic, it is the Marquis – not Varnat – who is universalized as everyone. It is the Marquis who changes clothes so that he can assume a new identity, who chooses peasant garb over aristocratic finery, becoming a member of the electorate whose approval he solicits and with whom he shows solidarity by putting on la blouse de France. At a livestock show, d’Amblezy radiates an easy affability, quaffs Calvados, calms a stallion, slogs smilingly through manure, propagating himself as

44

Octave Mirbeau, Dingo, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 833, and Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 943. 45 Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 833, and Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 942. 46 Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 955.

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jokes,winks, and salutations. “A lui seul, il était toute la foire,” as Varnat notes admiringly. 47 Varnat’s unremitting self-monitoring, which had made the world seem unreal, gives way to a sense of depersonalization caused by being subsumed to his employer. Castrated, reduced to acting as the hand that copies, Varnat shrinks as the Marquis grows bigger, more expansive, invading others he uses as tools in the implementation of his schemes. Hyperbolic caricatures of d’Amblezy’s grandiose designs, the Marquis’s collection of toadies, dependents, agents, and victims forms a menagerie of supernumeraries simplified by their symbolic value and functional utility. Most colorful in the zoo display of flunkies, frauds, and fools is Baron Grabbe, whose stupidity is organically represented by his microcephaly. A comic stereotype of the aristocrat/equestrian, Grabbe is a figure for the disqualified horseman, a rider unfit for his mount: “il lui était arrivé un accident extraordinaire. En sautant, avec son cheval, un fossé, il s’était fendu le rectum.”48 Nurturing hopes for the restoration of the king, Grabbe and d’Amblezy consort to drink and plot and fantasize. Associating France’s political repair with the recovery of his bodily integrity, Grabbe wants as the emolument for his loyalty the aurefaction of his rectum. In the character of Grabbe, the constellation of associations developed by Varnat – nakedness, humiliation, shabby clothing, castration, torn pants – carries over in the condensation of the person as the body part. The gilded sphincter, the flawless appearance, excrement, gold, glittering image, stercoraceous reality, wounded author, repaired text, all combine in the rehabilitation of cul as culottier. In much of Mirbeau’s fiction, there is a functional equivalency between artistic creation and the production of body waste. Both are the end point of hidden processes of assimilation, culminating with the emergence of matter seen as precious and repellent. Excrement and literature can be despised as loathsome superfluities or can be valued, like the fumier, as fertilizer that encourages new growth. Grabbe’s privileging the anus as anatomy’s golden orifice may represent a refinement in Mirbeau’s understanding of creation. In a scatomantic variant on l’alchimie du verbe, Grabbe’s golden rectum locates value, not in the substance, but the site it issues from. Outfitted with un cul en or, the artist

47 48

Ibid., p. 951. Ibid., p. 953.

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evacuates his finished work, experience already processed into style, form, and beauty. With his gold posterior, Grabbe could climb back onto his steed, assuming the romantic posture of the aristocratic knight. A swashbuckling figure of virile intrepidity, he would recall the Prussian horseman that Sébastien Roch had killed in battle. But in Mirbeau, there is no paragon of nobility and heroism that is not immediately compromised by his lowly animality. Man’s essence as organic matter may be palliated by art, but, in the end, the dashing rider is the man repairing to the toilet. On a horse or in the privy, one goes “chaque jour à la selle.”49 A novel of claustration, Un gentilhomme is contructed as a mirror box, a labyrinth whose corridors double back or go in circles, never seeming to offer an opportunity for egress or escape. Seeking security and recognition, Varnat only experiences humiliation personified as himself. Situated en abîme, Mirbeau’s treatment of the theme of narcissism itself becomes the object of characters’ self-directed thinking. Instead of interacting, they break up into mirror shards, fragments that multiply as unfamiliar, partial doubles. Wishing to fill his narrative with a self unified by retrospection, Varnat finds his text is empty except for the chimera of l’homme. But the incompleteness of Un gentilhomme is an opening admitting light, allowing the unexpressed to revivify the novel’s tired material. The cul en or, the golden anus is a passageway or door, suggesting that fiction’s purpose its not to turn inspiration into objects but to end by indicating a point of exit out of itself. Mirbeau constructs his novel initially as a self-stoppering container, making reading an experience of entrapment and obstruction. Proposing his story as an effort at creative ontogeny, Varnat’s meticulously wrought psychological profile is still a text empty of plot dynamics, character development, and moral instruction. As BablonDubreuil argues, the gentilhomme himself is a montage of mutating historical fictions: an idealized projection for his admirers, a demonized nemesis for his detractors – a collection of masks reflected “dans un miroir éclaté.”50 Like identity construction, fiction involves the engineering of illusion, raising a scaffold of artifice and fantasy, revealing the truth only when the text is torn down and packed off. As it moves toward the door of its unfinished open-endedness, Un gentilhomme concludes by preparing 49

Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 470. Bablon-Dubreuil, “Un gentilhomme: du déclin d’un mythe à l’impasse d’un roman,” p. 85. 50

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for its own disappearance. Having attached his value as a narrator to his utility as a scribe, Varnat sits nonplussed before the Marquis’ correspondence. Unable to move forward in decrypting this pile of papers, Varnat loses his authority as the storyteller. As for d’Amblezy, a man rooted in the land from which he ruthlessly expels poachers, he cannot imagine his survival as a transplant in the capital. Without horses, cows, and peasants, he faces a succession of vexations, a muddled, dark, confused path toward an unhappy destination. Walking toward tomorrow down desolation boulevard, Varnat also imagines life as a journey past dark elms, through desperate hours. Reader, scribe, and gentleman can all say of the future: “De tout cela, ce qui m’ennuie le plus… c’est que je n’en vois pas la fin.”51 Unlike many of Mirbeau’s novels that end with burial and germination, the conclusion of Un gentilhomme is a structural anomaly, suggesting a continuation of events through the suspension of narrative description. Like the Marquis, whose reluctance to move from home has vanished by the time he reaches Paris, Mirbeau marks the novel’s end with a lacuna of forgetfulness. Whereas the immortality of memorial art is ensured by its consumers’ recollections, the germ of Mirbeau’s fiction lives in its continued retransmission. Works die and are consigned by the author to oblivion so that creativity can sustain itself by moving d’un livre à l’autre. Creation is thus perpetuated through migration and displacement. Conventional novel form, whose desuetude Mirbeau had heralded, is packed up and shipped away prior to its installation in new premises. Like the flower in the torture garden or the automobile on the highway, the final image in Un gentilhomme is of propulsive movement forward – the elasticity of the jarret souple as the Marquis rises up the stairs. Mirbeau’s novel is not a coffin securely enclosing a dead body. For the anarchist Mirbeau, destruction is never a conclusion. After razing obsolete structures, overthrowing corrupt systems – after killing sickly narratives – Mirbeau announces a new beginning. Varnat’s story stops, and by interrupting his self-analysis, he opens up a space that lets in air and light and possibility. No longer entombed alive in the stifling box of Varnat’s narcissism, the reader experiences the end of Mirbeau’s novel as a renaissance. There is no termination when Mirbeau executes the archaic concept of literary character, when he adopts established fictional form in his campaign to discredit it – when he leaves the novel to die in preparation for the genre to come. In Un gentilhomme, Mirbeau’s 51

Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 961.

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intimation of literature’s future is inchoate; the theoretical baggage he delivers to his audience is unencumbering. Having closed up the old home of readers’ experience of fiction, Mirbeau hands them his unfinished text as their nécessaire de voyage. 52 Falling in step with the Marquis, who has discovered an exit, they depart from Mirbeau’s novel and, with confident stride, climb up and out.

52

Ibid., p. 962.

Chapter Six The Undifferentiated Bed: Le Jardin des supplices By the time that Mirbeau’s incendiary masterpiece Le Jardin des supplices appeared in 1899, the intervening years had witnessed an intensification of the writer’s political outrage and cynicism. Mirbeau’s view of art as an expression of frustration over its impotence to capture an ideal was reinforced by his conviction that society was unamenable to reform. The shameful unfolding of the Dreyfus Affair revealed to Mirbeau a world poisoned by hatred, blackguardism, and bigotry. In place of the misty despondency of Dans le ciel, Mirbeau’s political and aesthetic pessimism led him back to an endorsement of hygienic violence, a belief in the need to water the soil of art with phosphorus and blood, to lay the foundation of a better world on top of the rubble of the old one. What Nivet and Michel describe as Mirbeau’s “philosophie dialectique”1confirmed his sense that love was indissociable from cruelty, and suggested that only a campaign of terrorism could pave the way for necessary social change. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau’s nothing machine is redefined not as an object, but an instrument of destruction, reconverting its material to an unorganized state from which new inspiration will emerge. The novel illustrates a dialectic in which violence resolves the dualism of word and referent, the art work and its subject, giving way to an original state of unity and inexpressiveness. However, Mirbeau realized that the nothing machine, in effecting its own disassembly, would signal the end of his creative work, leaving him superfluous and silent. So having abandoned the realm of logomachy for the ineffable beauty and horror of the torture garden, Mirbeau’s narrator returns with the author to the world of culture, alienation, and language. Infused with a metaphysic of revolt, Mirbeau’s aesthetic begins by expressing a demiurgic ambition to undo Creation, to chop up the world’s body, and reattach the pieces in new ways. In the operation of Mirbeau’s nothing machine, he adopts the surgical virtuosity of the torturer-surgeon, dismembering and redesigning society so that its monstruous form might be imaged in “une monstruosité littéraire.”2 The place where art is broken 1 2

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 607. Ibid., p. 610.

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down and reconfigured is the killing field of war, the penitentiary’s torture garden. Reflecting Mirbeau’s indictment of a society infected with opportunism and hypocrisy is an attack on his own audience. Readers engaged with the text in a quest for confirmation of their ideological beliefs are assaulted by Mirbeau’s image of a world in which all cultures are splashed with gore. No wonder that Le Jardin des supplices elicits strong reactions from its audience: “Ne l’a-t-on pas taxé,” as Pierre Michel asks, “d’immoralité, d’obscénité, et même de sadisme et de pornographie?”3 However, apart from its graphic images of crucifixions, flayings, and rectal invasions by rats, Mirbeau’s tale also intrigues readers because of its political and psychological ambiguity, featuring, as it does, a “decadent/naturalist nexus of obsessional themes [which] attain such grotesque excess that readers find themselves wondering whether or not to consider the excess parodic.”4 Like the prisoners in the Chinese bagnio whose bodies are artfully cut up and rearranged in grotesque configurations, Mirbeau’s narrative can also be dismantled into constituent fragments and then reassembled, “afin,” as Michel says, “d’en exposer séparément des morceaux qui, isolés, acquièrent une toute autre signification.”5 In the novel, governments, like bodies and books, are susceptible to fragmentation. Rotten with cynicism and greed, societies are decomposed so that their moral corruption may serve as a regenerative principle for their re-creation in a more just form. What Bernheimer sees as a flaw in the novel, the structural fissure separating the story’s political message from the author’s fantasmatic concerns, instead offers evidence of an underlying thematic complementarity. The critique of an oppressive state ruled by militarists, colonialists, and anti-Semites invites the salutary violence, the purifying destruction that prepares the way for growth and renewal. Mirbeau, the anarchist, recasts himself as a societal torturer, mirroring in his narrative the disintegration of a political apparatus that is cut to pieces with the saw of anti-positivist satire, burned by ideological vitriol, dismembered by attacks on disabling institutions. Repeatedly propounded by Mirbeau’s heroine, the sanguinary Clara, the novel’s central argument – that 3

Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Le Jardin des supplices,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 132. Charles Bernheimer. The Idea of Decadent Subjects: Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture in the Fin de Siècle in Europe, eds. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), pp. 91-2. 5 Michel, “Notes: Le Jardin des supplices,” p. 136. 4

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putrefaction fertilizes soil, that death excites a sexual response – is revalidated on the novel’s political level. The violence that Clara advocates may reflect the anarchist’s disordering energies, since both aim to dissolve boundaries and shatter stable structures, overturning systems and values, thereby “reconstituting chaos from which a new kind of reality will be brought forth.”6 In Mirbeau, the torturer works toward the same goal as the anarchist, embracing destruction as a way to begin anew. In his study of utopian thinkers, Joel Whitebook traces the desire to reform society to a rejection of oedipal subordination to an authoritarian father. Rather than acknowledging his smallness and inferiority, the subject rejects his father as an ideal whom only time and maturation will allow him to emulate. The value of maturation, self-betterment, patience, and effort required of the boy to become like his father can be found in Zola’s idealization of the figure of the scientist, his naturalist recognition of hereditary continuity, his affirmation of the importance of discipline, work, and progress. Unlike the positivist, who admits the possibility of success and invests in the promise of the future, the utopian is oriented toward a mythical past where time stands still and happiness is immediately available. Advocating the destruction of society’s hierarchical structure, he longs to return to an earlier, egalitarian way of life in which humility, labor, and delay do not stand in the way of universal satisfaction. As Whitebook says: “the postulation of the origin-as-goal [may] as such [be] utopian.”7 Structured by the opposition between an Occidental model of government exploitation, and an Eastern model of instinct and spontaneity, Mirbeau’s novel stages a conflict between what Bernheimer calls “bad decadence” – epitomized by “the negative, constricting qualities of European culture” – and “good decadence” – offering “the freedom of transgressive desire encouraged by Chinese culture.”8 However, all decadence, by definition, is situated at the end of time, condemning Mirbeau’s narrative to follow a reverse chronology, showing his characters as motivated by retrospection, nostalgia, and self-blame. Divided into three parts, Le Jardin des supplices introduces the unnamed narrator into a discussion among male intellectuals about the universal instinct of murder. Having returned from the Chinese torture garden and dissolved his liaison with Clara, he recounts his personal 6

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p. 393. Joel Whitebook, “Perversion and Utopia: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 11.3 (1988), p. 427 8 Bernheimer, The Idea of Decadent Subjects, p. 95. 7

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history, his involvement in governmental scandal, his having threatened an old acquaintance and political leader with blackmail and exposure. Supplied with false credentials, the narrator had been sent off on a spurious expedition where, as a noted embryologist, he claimed to seek the origins of life. On the ship transporting him to Ceylon, he had met the dazzling Clara, the sadist/nymphomaniac who teaches him the lessons of the torture garden, who shows him that death is not an end but a replenishing transformation. The novel begins by incriminating the decadent world from which the narrator is liberated, yet shows him surrendering to the need to return there at the end. In a Frontispiece featuring post-prandial conversation among academics, scientists, and philosophers, Mirbeau describes the movement from consumption to expatiation, as the pleasures of the mouth change from oral to verbal. Yet discussion of racial, aesthetic, instinctual, and state-sanctioned murder also offers satisfactions that stimulate hunger for new aperitive objects. Full of dinner, the men enjoy talk that whets their appetite for more food, so when the narrator prepares to tell his story of the Torture Garden, his host “demanda de nouveaux cigares et de nouvelles boissons.”9 The premise of the novel is the desire by Clara’s lover to leave and then return to the Western world of politics and business – a world where pleasure is delayed and sublimated into discourse. The seemingly utopian aim of Mirbeau’s text is the abolition of institutional mechanisms of corruption that promote criminal opportunists like the narrator’s friend, Eugène Mortain, a specimen who can thrive only in the realm of language and imposture. In the novel, Mirbeau begins by targeting the perversion of traditional systems of exchange: prostitution that dispossesses women of their flesh as commodity, demagoguery that exalts Mortain’s vacuous grandiloquence, “son charabia parlé,” “la suicidante pluie du vocabulaire politique.”10 Indeed, the reason the narrator returns to France at the end of his horrifying ordeal is that it is only there that he is able to stop acting and resume talking. During the voyage, the pivotal moment comes when the narrator reassesses the value of speech, when – having been conditioned to view language as a vehicle for self-inflation – he breaks down when talking to Clara and acknowledges the falseness of his celebrity as a scientist. The movement backward from a society structured by hierarchy and deception 9 Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel 2001), p. 178. 10 Ibid., p. 194.

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to a simple world of instinct comes when the narrator identifies language with truth. In the French society from which the narrator is exiled, there is a confusion of veracity and glibness, a subordination of the accuracy of the message to the persuasiveness of its delivery. In the world of Eugène Mortain and his unprincipled colleagues, there are no ideals worthy of embracing, no honest tradesmen, no honorable statesmen, no reputable scientists. Duplicity and fraud are so commonplace that even efforts to cover them up are deemed unnecessary. So pervasive are concupiscence and money-lust in Mortain’s world that he no longer sees a need for dissimulation or hypocrisy. Political office-holders who crisscross their district, proclaiming "J’ai volé… j’ai volé,”11 trumpeting their corruption along roadsides and in town squares, relativize truth’s value by proclaiming the truth of their dishonesty. Beloved of constituents whose thievery they consecrate, politicians climb to ever higher positions while falsely asserting their support of a democratic rule by liars. The confusion of high and low, father and son, virtue and money, is not the state to which the idealist longs to return. Mirbeau dissociates himself from true utopian aspirations, since reestablishment of a primordial reign of love and death also entails the obsolescence of art, the elimination of literature, the end of Mirbeau’s authorial practice. Despite its scathing satirical indictment of French society sick with scandal and vice, enfeebled by the Panama affair and the Dreyfus controversy, Mirbeau could continue to work only in a decadent world of moral invalidism. Like the narrator, he must abandon the lush realm of peonies and peacocks, depart from a garden whose atrocity and beauty strike man dumb, in order to reenter the gray precincts of late nineteenth-century Europe, a society choking on cigar smoke and stale conversation. In the novel, what Lawrence Schehr calls “nature’s general economy” 12 is opposed to the surplus economy of politics and business, where material reality is supplemented by its symbolic value as language and money. As sex and death sustain the biological circulus of putrefaction and new growth, in Europe, the same vital phenomena are culturally subsumed to the smooth operation of commerce and government. In the Frontispiece, murder and coitus are not primary activities but only food for discussion. No longer identifying man as a lustful hunter in a pre-verbal jungle, the speakers argue that the impulse to mate and kill must be 11 12

Ibid., p. 185. Lawrence Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” SubStance 27.86 (1998), p. 97.

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harnessed by politicians and industrialists to make profit for themselves and justify their own functions. Like the peacock, utilized by Mirbeau in the text as the symbol of symbolization, art is a parasite that feeds on death. Among the jaded male brandy-drinkers, there is no regression to a state of action without speech, life without stagecraft. For them, art kills death and resurrects it as a conversation topic. No longer governed by the biological imperative of survival, Mirbeau’s intellectuals operate in an otiose realm of language play, talking just to talk. Progression from consumption to speech, from comestible objects to words, does not bring an acceptance of self-restraint but a perversion of the values that French society both hallows and mocks. Goal-directed behavior – designed to support a temporal dynamic that opposes a present of self-denial to a future of achievement – instead becomes the object of contemptuous auto-subversion. In the European world of swindlers and miscreants, the object of work is the ridicule of work. Once it is disconnected from its communicative purpose, language becomes a toy for the clever, a cocktail snack enjoyed with tobacco and liqueurs. Discussion of issues of life and death does not yield new insights or wisdom. It is undertaken for its own sake. “Ayant copieusement dîné,” the Darwinian scientist, the member of the Academy of Moral Sciences, a loquacious philosopher, and their gracious host begin their debate about murder, “à propos de je ne sais plus quoi,” the frame narrator says, “à propos de rien, sans doute.”13 In their conversation, the men go on to posit a logical, causal, and temporal inversion whereby the mechanisms of control exercised by society’s institutions preexist the crimes requiring an application of the law. Instead of protecting against homicide and rape, courts, police, and prisons are protected against the evidence of their uselessness by the prophylactic incidence of homicide and rape. From this standpoint, murder provides indemnification against the lawlessness of freedom: “S’il n’y avait plus de meurtre, il n’y aurait plus de gouvernements d’aucune sorte, par ce fait admirable que le crime en général, le meurtre en particulier sont, non seulement leur excuse, mais leur unique raison d’être… Nous vivrions alors en pleine anarchie, ce qui ne peut se concevoir….”14 While one guest asserts the functional indispensability of crime as justification for establishing inequitable systems of punishment, another 13 14

Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, p. 165. Ibid.

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describes all law enforcement and judicial bureaucracies as an expense the poor incur to ensure the murderous impunity of the rich: “En cette affaire, comme en toutes autres, ce sont les petits qui paient pour les grands.”15 Murder is as much an excuse for discussing murder as it is a reason for building jails. But only fools, as the guests concur, are ever apprehended. They are the only ones ever locked inside the inflexibility of their arguments. In The Frontispiece, debate itself becomes a mild form of sublimated violence. Artfully shaped and assigned to proponents cunningly embodied as talking dolls, each theory on the necessity of killing becomes a shooting gallery target blown apart by other figurines wielding the rifle of their rhetorical acumen. Murder in Mirbeau’s text emerges as the foundational subject and motivation for all legislation, all art, all discussion – an idea dressed in the changeable finery of language whose style is ideology, aesthetics, or religion. In utopia, with the elimination of scarcity and want, abundance stifles words that describe an absent object of desire. Acquiring and killing cancel the painful sense of disunion, returning the subject to a state of contented self-possession. But in society, words make referents more distant and elusive, so the discussion about murder that entertains Mirbeau’s dilettantes is necessarily circular, pointless, and inconclusive, endlessly skirting with conjecture the truth that no one ever wants to capture. On the other hand, fusion with an object whose alterity is destroyed when taken into the self confers on murderers a power enabling them to rival with God. Rather than naming and separating, the killer restores an original state of indivisibility, becoming a divinity undiminished by the act of his creation. Synchronizing “la spasme de plaisir de l’un […] avec le spasme de mort de l’autre,” 16 the assassin is an artist whose medium is destruction. There is an oxymoronic futility to debates about violence since language only sunders what murder unites. What the male conversationalists enjoy is the endless foreplay of speculation, discussions never put to death by knowledge, certainty, or consensus. Lack is the point of departure of Mirbeau’s story, as the narrator, stung by jealousy and humiliation, accepts the sinecure Mortain offers him, and with his false certificates, sets off to find “l’initium protoplasmique de la vie 15 16

Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 166.

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organisée.”17 Departing from a world of logomachy, he travels back in time, to China, where murder is not a conversational hors d’oeuvre but a banquet whose copiousness kills the appetite for words. For the hungry, murder is not a matter of theory and conjecture. It exists in everyone, as one speaker says, “à l’état embryonnaire de désir.”18 Engendered by conflict, structured by the temporal dynamic of character development and the elaboration of themes, Mirbeau’s tale, like all narratives, describes a voyage during which the hero, navigating the fictional shoals of self-ignorance and danger, embarks on a specious pretext. Borne on a ship of plot toward an unreachable destination, he is kept alive by the language expressing his fear and desire to enter port, since writing ends with satisfaction and the origin is the goal: “jamais, jamais n’arriver quelque part,” the narrator says yearningly. “Car arriver quelque part, c’est mourir!”19 If, as Clara maintains, sex and death are complementary principles promoting change and rebirth, then the journey on board the Saghalien, the textual vessel Mirbeau captains, describes a metempsychosis taking the narrator from the cultural morbidity of Europe to the instinctual vigor of the Orient. Morally, psychologically, and expressively revitalized, the narrator changes during his passage from Marseille to Ceylon. Enjoying Clara’s sexual munificence, he surrenders the sham pretense of his virility and dignity, basking in the emasculating endearments with which his mistress addresses him, as she calls him “Pauvre bébé,” “petit enfant.”20 It is by being with Clara that the narrator learns the wisdom of Mortain’s words, his affirmation that truth impoverishes: “L’honnêteté est inerte et stérile, elle ignore la mise en valeur des appétits et des ambitions.” 21 However much Mortain benefits from his cynicism and immorality, however much merchants are rewarded by the cleverness of their imposture, Clara is the true expert in the operation of the nothing machine, praising open wounds and broken limbs as the raw material of poetry. In the Torture Garden, blood flows to enrich soil planted with hibiscus. In the surgeon’s amphitheater, on the operating table, bodies are cut open to satisfy the doctor’s sadistic cruelty: “L’art!… l’art!… le beau!… sais-tu ce que c’est?” the infamous Doctor Trépan asks his son. “Eh bien, mon garçon, le beau c’est un ventre de femme, ouvert, tout 17

Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 174. 19 Ibid., p. 231. 20 Ibid., p. 235. 21 Ibid., p. 203. 18

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sanglant, avec des pinces dedans!”22 From the physician’s hemostats to the torturer’s knives, the instruments used by artists, executioners, and writers vary little, and their purpose is fundamentally the same. Violence done to bodies, destruction of existing forms is a precondition to the creation of something vital and revolutionary. The narrator may leave the monochromatic dullness of parliamentary chambers and smoky gambling dens, may prefer the bright colors of the garden to the black and white monotony of texts. But in writing Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau reverses the trajectory of his narrative, turning the Oriental wonderland of indescribable experience back into the drab European realm of words and books. As Maurice Blanchot argues, 23 objects earn the right to die when they are transformed into literature. However, what the utopian thinker wishes for is a reversal of this process, whereby execution of the art work permits a rebirth of the object. More than structuring itself on cycles of destruction and regeneration, Le Jardin des supplices describes a dialectic of intimacy and divorce. Initially separating consumers and food, speakers and discourse, shooters and targets, eroticized bodies and carrion, Mirbeau later brings them back together, showing their underlying identity, since what time disjoins eternity reunites. Yet it is not just the humanitarian who is committed to assimilation and mixture. The desire to erase difference also expresses the instinctual urge to devour and kill. To borrow Bernheimer’s terms, “bad decadence” endorses murder at a distance. On the other hand, “good decadence” encourages the other to be eaten, incorporated, and taken into the self. The flaying of prisoners, a favorite torture technique used in the Chinese penal settlement, focuses on the removal of skin as a primary barrier. Identity, epidermis, body fluids leak out of porous envelopes, fertilizing the ground in which all life is rooted. Flowers are ephemeral forms that bloom for a day, perishable like people who are reabsorbed into gore-saturated soil, the arrival point and origin the narrator identifies with death. Mirbeau’s story operates in the same way as the Torture Garden, which takes bodies recognizable by their boundaries and blends them together until there is nothing left but dirt. In Mirbeau’s novels, the utopian ideal of equality through sameness resembles the sadist’s goal of eliminating names and categories, 22

Ibid., p. 173. “Dans la parole,” Blanchot writes, “meurt ce qui donne vie à la parole; la parole est la vie de cette mort, elle est la vie qui porte la mort et se maintient en elle” (La Part du feu [Paris: Gallimard, 1949], p. 316). 23

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returning to a primordial state of disorder. Clara, unlike her fastidious European counterparts, does not view the other with whom one copulates, whom one tortures or eats, as an enemy but as a lover whose suffering deserves appreciation. In the “bad decadent’s” attack on corrupt institutions, violence is clean, and targets are anonymous and remote. The warm intimacy of spilled blood, the scopophilic pleasure of examining body cavities and wounds, the glory of abjection and nakedness are made impossible by distance. When technology trumps art – when efficiency supersedes pleasure – the paradigm of the killer is the munitions expert whom the narrator and Clara meet during their voyage to the East. Designer of Dum Dum or Nib Nib shells, which vaporize victims, leaving no soil-enriching blood, no peacock food, no superfluous corpses, the “petite balle” the captain imagines would permit “une économie incalculable.”24 Like language, this shell is a nothing machine that eliminates objects targeted at a distance. The long-distance slaughter of anonymous collectivities reduced to “un tas de cendres, ou même une légère fumée roussâtre”25 effects what Emily Apter calls an “inversion of barbarism and civilization” as when “the master torturer bemoans the ‘waste of death,’ that is the killing without torture, characteristic of modern times.”26 What Mirbeau illustrates in describing the Torture Garden is the opposite of destruction from afar. In a cinematic succession of alternately nightmarish and paradisaical settings, Clara and her masochistic companion are shown rushing from place to place – from Clara’s garden with its golden kiosk and sparkling scarabs, past the harbor quays and markets teeming with fishmongers and meat vendors sounding gongs, hawking the carcasses of drowned dogs and bats impaled on spits, to the parched desolation of the outskirts of the bagnio, into the prison, past cells packed with starving inmates barking and howling, out into the sunshine and the magnificence of the garden designed by the celebrated botanist LiPe-Hang. Here characters and readers alike lose their sense of space and orientation. Heaven and hell blur; classifications collapse; everything flows into everything as the narrative topologically reenacts the dissolution of opposites: male and female, beauty and horror, good and evil. Of course, the garden is a structured space divided by alleyways, bordered by canals, dotted with pools, expressing man’s ambition to rival 24

Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, p. 223. Ibid. 26 Emily Apter, “The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau,” October 47 (1988), p. 102. 25

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with God and surpass the glory of Creation. But the alternation of benevolent Buddhas and blood-stained scaffolds, prayerful maidens and crucified prisoners, innocent blooms and carnivorous growths, effaces boundaries, undoing the principle of distinction and classification. In one of the novel’s central episodes, Mirbeau illustrates the impulse to reconvert words into things, restoring a state of universal anonymity in which there are no more definitions and no more meanings. Schehr notes that political torture intends the production of speech, as the infliction of pain is meant to extract information, while in the case of supplice, confessional disclosure is superfluous: “There is a difference between torture, before the speech act, and supplice, after the speech act but before death. […] Torture is pain and action exchanged for words. With supplice there is no exchange.”27 In a text in which nameless male characters are operationally identified – as “celebrated writers,” “Darwinian scientists,” “amiable philosophers,” “master executioners” – the prisoner whom Clara and the narrator visit in the bagnio is a Poet metonymically reduced to the single feature that can be seen by outsiders: “la Face.”28 Locked inside a cage divided by bars and stone partitions, divorced from his history, deprived of his humanity and name, he is disconnected from his body by an iron collar that inhibits movement and leaves nothing visible except his head. Among the other prisoners, “on eût dit d’effrayantes, de vivantes têtes de décapités posées sur des tables.”29 The versifier reduced to his face, then to the inarticulate cries, rattles, and snarls issuing from his mouth, is reconverted into the material of his poem: a filthy, gangrenous body awaiting execution, which will turn his corpse into fertilizer for the soil: “La pourriture en qui réside la chaleur éternelle de la vie,” as he had written in his poem Les trois amies.30 Dehumanized by the treatment he receives at the hands of his jailers, the Poet is assimilated to his work, reabsorbed into the imagery that he no longer understands. Fed on gobbets of sanious meat by women who frequent the prison, he becomes the purulent flesh destined to feed the garden, the first and last consumer in the Torture Garden’s food chain. In the penal settlement, torture intends the customary elimination of the victim’s bodily self-control, a theft of dignity. This is the state reached when the prisoner becomes a nothing machine operated by skilled 27

Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” p. 112. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, p. 267. 29 Ibid., p. 264. 30 Ibid., p. 269. 28

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technicians who elicit from his body a wide repertoire of involuntary reactions: writhing, twitching, screaming. Poets reduced to barking, men who once symbolically expressed themselves in the language of clothes, are stripped of skin that remains attached by a thread – revealing them in their nakedness which, as with Adam, is the signifier of guilt. Proficient in the science of pain infliction, the artists in the garden have designed an array of torments that turn pleasure into suffering: anal intercourse simulated by the torture of the rat, the torture of the caress, a form of execution by masturbation. But the most aristocratically applied procedure, as Clara says, is the torture of the bell. Whereas the punishments more commonly inflicted puncture skin, producing gushes of blood that water the ground and mix flesh with dirt, the torture of the bell respects the integrity of the body’s surface, damaging organs from within, killing with vibrations, destroying by marking time, the most expert executioner. In the novel, Clara’s atemporal realm of instinct contrasts with the European world of money and language, of desires postponed. The punishment for being born is to be put to death chronometrically, to be twisted and deformed by the marking of time’s passage. What is reenacted in the Torture is the torment of being alive – exaggerated variations on the pleasures and sufferings of human corporeity. To the extent that the novelist is assimilated to the torturer, Mirbeau shows that the creator seeks to invent new forms not encountered in the world, instituting change that overturns the natural order of things. The demiurge who rivals with God seeks to undo Creation, not to marvel at the multifariousness of the world of created forms. “Le gros patapouf” is not a judge standing above the transgressor he condemns but an artist separated from work whose purpose is to redesign the work of God, changing men into women, sculpting human flesh in ways unimaginable. Unlike an artist separated from his work, the utopian’s goal is his own death, his merger and reintegration into the maternity of the soil. On the other hand, the gardener dominates the ground he tills, living in time, waiting for the seeds he has planted to germinate, feeding the land with carrion, forcing it to yield fruit. Before God awarded him the prerogative of naming, man was inseparable from the prelapsarian garden he inhabited. It is to this state of stasis and harmony that the utopian longs to return, where the art of torture and the art of fiction are not needed to enrich the soil with the blood of violence and the sweat of exertion. Donald Moss says that such idealists “want ‘creative’ work to point toward an end in which the conditions making such work a necessity will have been

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rendered superfluous; [they] want to see a horizon on which is represented the last of a genre, its promises not only fulfilled, but exhausted.” 31 In comments that apply to Mirbeau’s novel, Whitebook distinguishes the reformer from the utopian. One identifies flaws in society and resolves to correct injustices in order to benefit the disenfranchised; the other postulates the irremediable oppressiveness of civilization itself. As Whitebook says, the first rebel “revolts ‘against some existing injustice’ and basically accepts the […] world of mutual renunciations, only objecting to the fact that the burden of these renunciations is not distributed equitably [….] The second type of rebel, on the other hand, rejects the entire […] framework itself. He does not seek a more equitable distribution of renunciations but an end to the system of renunciation altogether.”32 At the end of Mirbeau’s novel, the question remains as to which of these two positions the author takes, a question one must answer in order to define the operation of Mirbeau’s nothing machine. To begin with, the European system that rewards panderers and cheats is so vitiated that no piecemeal reform seems possible. Individual alienation is attributable to more than “[le] joug déformant de la famille,”33 and so Mirbeau leaves little hope that cultural remediation can be successful if it targets only religion, politics, or education. However, the utopian fantasy of matriculation in the bosom of the garden is as deadly a mirage as the lie of representative democracy. Murder is the organizing principle of both the French and Chinese systems. The only difference is that, in the latter, killing is personal and intimate, whereas in the former, men are vaporized by long-range Dum Dum bullets, annihilated, as Clara says, by “tout ce qui rend la mort collective, administrative et bureaucratique.”34 Yet Mirbeau also rejects Clara’s vision of the world. While she compellingly expresses the need to shun hypocrisy and tear down barriers – while she paints a vivid picture of moribund societies transfused by the blood of victims – Clara’s image of sex and death does not show the way to the establishment of utopia.

31

Donald Moss, “On the Fetishization of Creativity: Toward a General Theory of Work,” American Imago 54.1 (1997), p. 13. 32 Whitebook, “Perversion and Utopia,” 426. 33 Reginald Carr, “L’Anarchisme d’Octave Mirbeau dans son oeuvre littéraire: essai de synthèse,” Octave Mirbeau: Actes du colloque international d’Angers du 19 au 22 septembre 1991 (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), p. 69. 34 Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, p. 289.

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In the garden, death is never pictured as a state of rest and immobility. Instead, corpses seethe with maggots, “un pullulement de vie vermiculaire,” “larves immondes” that are the primal life form, not the simple organism sought by embryologists. While the utopian envisages a perfect world of changelessness and balance, Mirbeau’s narrative shows that nowhere does motion ever stop. The nothing machine is never turned off, since inhumation of one body allows the emergence of another. Clara’s nervous prostration and hysterical collapse prefigure her recovery and return to the Torture Garden, escorted by another man who is the narrator’s successor. And the termination of the narrative as told to brandy-drinking listeners allows its subsequent relation by a former member of the audience. As Ki-Pei, the Chinese boatwoman who transports Clara to the brothel, says: “Et ce sera à recommencer!… Ce sera toujours à recommencer!”35 Retransmission of a story embellished with apochryphal details, disassembly and recreation of forms encountered in reality articulate the impulse to reject a deathly status quo, and to embark from home on voyages whose destination is unreachable. The function of the nothing machine is to engender metamorphoses, breaking down existing structures, dissolving stable boundaries, returning flawed, imperfect bodies to their original formlessness. Utopians may seek shelter in the eternity of the garden, protected against time’s depredations by humanitarian selfdelusion. But Mirbeau’s character presses forward out of dissatisfied impatience: “Ce n’est rien encore, mon chéri,” Clara says, in urging on the narrator. “Avançons!…”36 Creation, for Mirbeau, is a principle of transformation which never admits there is a utopia where the struggle can be abandoned. As Moss explains, creative labor combines the dynamism of its processes and the static perfection of a final state toward which it endlessly is straining: “Its long and short-term ambition is to finish the job: to transform conditions so that more work will no longer be necessary. In this way,” Moss concludes, “work contains a utopian impulse.”37 Oppression and injustice may instigate Mirbeau’s revolt, motivating his denunciation of teachers, priests, and ministers. But completion of the project, destruction of the tyrant, attainment of the goal are thanatotic fantasies: “Car arriver quelque part, c’est mourir,” had said the narrator. Mirbeau’s characters shift uneasily in the casket of his books, like Clara, who imagines her foot pressed against 35

Ibid., p. 335. Ibid., p. 303. 37 Moss, “On the Fetishization of Work,” p. 9. 36

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the confines of her coffin – or like l’Abbé Jules, who shakes the ground where his remains have been interred. In casting down the flawless statue, in rejecting art’s mortuary changelessness, Mirbeau shuns the vision of utopia where there is immobility and peace. Finished works are useful only since new ones can destroy them, reutilizing material to fashion other selfdismantling models. If, in Mirbeau, fiction is a torture instrument and the author an executioner of the self, it is because the violence that they sow, the nothing they produce supplies the energy they reap in doing work that never finishes.

Chapter Seven Fetish and Meaning: Le Journal d’une femme de chambre Following Le Jardin des supplices and the success of Mirbeau’s sanguinary tour de force, the publication in 1900 of Le Journal d’une femme de chambre signaled the relocation of the killing ground to Mirbeau’s work itself, a textual gulag where social niceties are systematically exterminated. A Dum Dum shell whose detonation atomizes its targets, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre explodes the myth of middle-class virtue, military rectitude, national honor, and social stability. “Roman de démystification par excellence,”1 Mirbeau’s tale does more than expose the fraud of bourgeois modesty. Mirbeau’s “férocité envers le parisianisme, le snobisme, ‘l’uranisme psychique’ et le préraphaelitisme trouve également matière à s’exercer.”2 The clergy, the army, the priesthood of artists receive the blows of Mirbeau’s satirical bastinado. Critics of the novel often list the casualties inflicted by the writer’s attacks, enumerating vices that affect all social classes indiscriminately. Thus, in an early review, Romain Coolus catalogues the flaws Mirbeau uncovers, character defects found in the mistress and maid alike: “les moeurs dépravées, les idées saugrenues, les caractères faisandés, la veulerie, la médiocrité, la vanité, la sottise, la bassesse surtout.”3 In the novel, Mirbeau takes as his subject the indefensibility of established systems of class stratification, hierarchies contrasting wealthy land-owners and peripatetic ancillaries. No nation, house, or psyche can be divided according to such oppositional structures, those separating high and low, self-restraint and wantonness, head and sex organs, master and servant, upstairs and downstairs. It is the interpenetrability of these categories that proves Mirbeau’s jaundiced social views and illustrates the operation of his fiction as a nothing machine. Ultimately, Mirbeau’s demonstration of epistemological promiscuity depends on showing the inaccuracy of knowledge obtained by 1

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 633. Ibid., p. 645 3 “Un roman immoral,” Iris, August 1900, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 648. 2

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an uncritical use of language. Naming, organizing, classifying are the basis of explanatory systems that purport to yield information derived from distinctions and definitions. But as the high-society lady proves no different from the chambermaid, these structuring principles are shown to be defective and invalid. The oppressor in Mirbeau is the person with the power to assign meaning, and in overthrowing him, the nothing machine restores interpretive freedom, thereby centering Mirbeau’s anarchist activity at the heart of words themselves. In the novel, Mirbeau’s art of subversion begins by targeting the tradition of late 19th -century positivism that informed the intellectual climate of the era. A frequent object of Mirbeau’s satire, naturalism, with its sweeping epistemological goals, had sought to achieve the same explanatory clarity as did scientific discourse. Rejecting the imprecision of literature and art as systems of representation, the naturalists had assumed a defensive posture, displaying, as Cyndy Hendershot says, “the sense of inferiority experienced by non-scientists saturated with scientific terminology.”4 Disregarding evidence of their intellectual limitations and theoretical powerlessness, naturalist artists used science as a fetish that simultaneously enabled them to acknowledge and conceal the defectiveness of their method. Equating the health of society with the competence of the novelist/physician, Zola adopted the view of writing as a reparative activity. Because he proposed to fix the social ills that were the subject of his book, the author sought to cure himself through works that were an act of disavowal. With the globalizing breadth of its worldview, and the putative inerrancy of its objectivist approach, the Rougon-Macquart had stood as the model of a literature aspiring to comprehensiveness. Opposing the desultoriness of experience, the fragmentation and disorderliness of the world, Zola had proposed the naturalist text with its pretensions to synthesizing clarity. Denying the meaninglessness of life that it replaced with structured narrative, the naturalist desired to move outside of time, seeking eventual establishment of a utopian state of integrity and harmony. Unlike Zola’s works, where meanings are clear and progress is possible, Mirbeau’s novel features a decentered subject who alternately acknowledges and blinds herself to the mechanisms of illusion. Laying out the heroine’s own strategies of self-deception, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre chronicles a series of losses, frustrations, failures to grow and 4

Cyndy Hendershot, “Paranoia and the Delusion of the Total System,” American Imago 54.1 (1997), p. 19.

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acquire self-knowledge. Different from the scientist who believes he is the master in his house, Célestine is a character whose identity is informed by her vagrancy and marginality. Topologically suggested by her life of dereliction, Célestine is not a finished character but an aggregate of situational personas, serial roles fashioned and discarded by her employers. Never having received the positive mirroring of a loving parent’s gaze, Célestine is reduced to being a shattered reflection of her exploitative mistresses. Appreciative employers are rare in Célestine’s experience, so when she enters the service of an elderly mother of a frail, tubercular son, the woman’s goodness and consideration have a transfigurative effect: “Non seulement le miroir attesta que j’étais devenue subitement plus belle, mais mon coeur me cria que j’étais réellement meilleure,” as Célestine writes in her journal.5 Daughter of a drowned Breton fisherman and his abusive, alcoholic widow, Célestine is the child of no one. Without an idealized parent on whom to model her identity, Célestine – like her journal – is an episodic, broken entity that is reassembled by her employers. As servants are prized for their obsequiousness and loyalty, valued for the psittacistic repetition of their master’s views, Célestine is stripped of her sense of self, robbed of her humanity, reshaped into “quelque chose d’intermédiaire entre un chien et un perroquet.”6 Deriving its unity from the disconnectedness of its heroine’s selfnarrative, Mirbeau’s novel defines art, not as an instrument of explanatory coherence, but as an expression of loss and a movement toward rediscovery. By undermining the conviction that meanings inhere in things themselves, Mirbeau’s nothing machine destroys the certainties which impoverish and immobilize, and then recommends the practice of interpretive originality. By revealing the dialectical interplay of dismantling and reconstruction, Mirbeau’s text respects the disorganization of the diary it claims to be based on. Since he refuses to dilute “la force triste” of the apochryphal servant’s manuscript, Mirbeau rejects the function of naturalist art as restorative and healing. Declining to change the story of a psychologically damaged servant girl into seamless narrative, Mirbeau refrains from exchanging life’s complexity for “de la simple littérature.”7 5 Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 474. 6 Ibid., p. 472. 7 “Avertissement d’Octave Mirbeau,” Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 379.

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Reconsecrated by Luis Bunuel’s celebrated film adaptation, the notorious episode involving the boot-fetishist, Monsieur Rabour, establishes the centrality of the theme of castration as a loss of knowledge and an acquisition of the freedom deriving from interpretive creativity. Neat as a pin, impeccably dressed, polished like the environmental fetish of his house and furnishings (“astiqués à fond, cirés, vernis”),8 Monsieur Rabour is a textbook example of a fetishist driven by mutilation anxiety. Unwilling, Freud says, to relinquish “his belief that women have a phallus,”9 Rabour replaces the missing body part with another having a similar shape and smell, exchanging the object for its covering, the foot for chambermaid’s “chères bottines.” Rabour’s castration fears may be amplified by the prospect of losing the mother altogether, creating an absence filled by the servant with her versatile identity. An attempt to reestablish the mother/son relationship, Rabour’s positional submissiveness suggests his masochistic self-abasement: “Il s’agenouilla,” Célestine writes, “baisa mes bottines, les pétrit de ses doigts fébriles.”10 In Mirbeau’s brief scene, he suggests a colorful array of fetishist behaviors: fantasmatic stroking of the imaginary phallus, clitoral polishing of a maternal surrogate’s footwear, all mirrored by the obsessive selfsequestering of the old gentleman whose shoe-polishing masturbation occurs behind the closed door of his bedroom. Despite Célestine’s subsequent professions of disgust and shock, the episode involving Monsieur Rabour marks the beginning of Mirbeau’s exposition of fetish construction as an essentially creative act. Triggered by the spectacle of the mother’s nakedness, castration fears extend to an avoidance of all knowledge that threatens, all truth that curtails the subject’s ability to generate deceptions that empower. In place of a mutilated reality inspiring despair and terror, Mirbeau recommends recourse to the illusions of art that consoles. Compelled to endure a life of humiliation and homelessness, Célestine responds to her sense of fragmentation by writing a journal in which memory mends what experience has broken. Even as she mirrors her directionless existence in the episodic diary, by remembering adversity and keeping her journal, Célestine gains control over events which had caused her unhappiness. Authorship, for Célestine, affords understanding and dignity, transforming life’s servant into the master of her art. 8

Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 384. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” Essential Papers on Object Loss, ed. Rita Frankel (New York: New York UP, 1994), p. 64. 10 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 386. 9

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From this standpoint, Célestine’s diary becomes itself a kind of fetish, masking the writer’s awareness of her professional subordination, enabling her to disavow her powerlessness and shame. Obliged to work under a succession of predatory, abusive parent surrogates, she rejects her identity as a reflection of unloving mistresses in order to mirror herself in her journal as a whole and complete subject. As if corresponding to the fetishist’s fears of anatomical incompleteness, Célestine’s occupational fragmentation defines her as monstrous and subhuman: “quelqu’un de disparate, fabriqué de pièces et de morceaux qui ne peuvent s’ajuster l’un dans l’autre, se juxtaposer l’un à l’autre.” 11 Originating nowhere, belonging nowhere, she is characterized by her anonymity, her undefinibility, and lack. Identity formation becomes the inaugural creative act, a collaboration beginning when her employers rename her Marie, and ending when her suffocating role as a domestic provokes the insubordination that causes her dismissal. Mirbeau’s chambermaid is always an interloper trepassing in the house where another is the master who lays down rules and defines reality. In her writing and service, Célestine’s work is structured by building and destroying, authoring herself through the demolition of employers whose imposture and perversions are unmasked in her narrative. Each mistress is initially proposed as a worthy mother surrogate – disciplined, virtuous, principled, indulgent – then exposed as a fraud who is cheap and selfdegrading. Maternal desacralization repeats the experience of loss that Célestine undergoes every time she quits her job. Mirbeau shows Célestine herself exhibiting a constellation of behaviors reminiscent of the male fetishist’s proclivities: attention to the feet, manipulation of undergarments important for their contiguity to the genitals, caressing of furs suggestive of pubic hair, handling of intimate apparel and accessories as symbolic replacements for the maternal phallus, which the fetishist knows and does not know is non-existent. Célestine’s fetishistic ambivalence is motivated by a wish simultaneously to rehabilitate and defile the bad mother. Pleasure arises from the delusional conviction that silks, lace, adornments, and fragrances make the defective mistress whole, transforming the hateful impostor into a genuine, loving mother. “J’aime,” Célestine writes, “à jouer avec les chemises de nuit, les chiffons et les rubans, tripoter les lingeries, les chapeaux, les dentelles, les fourrures, frotter mes maîtresses après le bain, les poudrer, poncer leurs

11

Ibid., p. 496.

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pieds, parfumer leurs poitrines, oxygéner leurs chevelures, les connaître, enfin.”12 The women whose bodies Célestine beautifies also have characters that she sullies. Célestine’s fetishism is accompanied by aggression that reemerges with the truth she endeavors to bury. Tactile and olfactory stimuli – satiny lingeries, bottles of perfume – are offset by evidence of decay and the stench of corruption, as undressing the mistress becomes an act that sanctifies and profanes. The knowledge that Célestine acquires does not bring a sense of confidence or mastery, only the coprophilic satisfaction of exposing the filth underneath. As Mirbeau’s heroine is constantly engaged in building and tearing down a succession of functional personas, she also participates in the hieratic worship of women whose falseness she takes pleasure in uncovering. Feelings of disillusionment and betrayal explain why Célestine associates her self-exalting mistresses with images of dirt and hypocrisy. For the fetishist, discovering the truth inspires hatred of a flawed ideal, requiring that a consoling fiction be abandoned in favor of a text of revenge. Mirbeau’s novel is filled with similar incidents of cheating, trickery, and stagecraft, representations of people and things purporting to be undamaged or complete, and that are subsequently shown to be disfigured and unclean. The presumption of connubial complementarity – of husbands and wives as two halves of a whole – is contradicted by the conjugal defaulting of both the Lanlaires, the couple who are Célestine’s primary employers. Suffering from some unspecified sexual dysfunction or genital abnormality, Madame Lanlaire abstains from her spousal duties. And when she asks her confessor “si elle pouvait tricher avec son mari,”13 she is forbidden to have recourse to oral or manual stimulation unless she contributes to the upkeep of the altar of the Virgin. Indeed, the plenitude of heterosexual genitality as the foundation of marital bliss is the first illusion that Célestine’s experience dispels. Unable to see that she is a fetishist like Rabour, Célestine fails to recognize the creativity of perversion. Wondering why people depend on prostheses, sexual aids, masturbation instruments, leather boots, decontextualized partobjects as substitutes for whole people, she asks: “Et où vont-ils chercher toutes leurs imaginations, quand c’est si simple, quand c’est si bon de s’aimer gentiment… comme tout le monde….”14 12

Ibid., pp. 406-7. Ibid., p. 404. 14 Ibid., p. 387. 13

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Of course, Célestine’s question ignores the fact that normality impoverishes while deviancy enriches, offering a plethora of improvisational possibilities. Throughout the novel, Mirbeau mounts a multi-pronged attack on political conservatism and sexual convention, decrying the myth of utopian stability, the immutability of things deemed unchangeable and perfect. Indisputable like laws governing a harmonious world, the formula for healthy sex diminishes what it standardizes. In Mirbeau’s novel, creativity and pleasure are derived from using substitutes, resituating objects in unfamiliar settings, breaking what is whole and reassembling the pieces. The instability of the fetish comes from the fact that it is portable, susceptible to recontextualization in unlimited new ways. Here, the nothing machine acts as an instrument of semioclasm, showing that objects need not be construed as usable in just one way, disputing that things belong in a single place and can have only one meaning. Célestine’s journal, while documenting the mobility of the writer, shows how metonymy and movement redefine the object and its user. With Mirbeau’s inclusion of specific episodes detailing a decontextualized, moving penis, he literalizes the fetish by equating it with the phallus, then metaphorizes it by setting it in incongruous positions. As a symbol of the subject’s prerogative to symbolize, the movable phallus represents the freedom to reinterpret. The consummate anarchist act is the subversion of institutional definitions, castration of those who wield the power to legislate and enforce meaning. In a colorful anecdote, Célestine recounts a train trip taken with a former mistress, a journey interrupted by a rigorous customs inspection. Foreshadowing La 628-E8 and Mirbeau’s reflection on the topological symbolism of la douane, this episode explores the policing of body boundaries, the skin of national frontiers where crossing points are orifices, sites of commodity or sexual exchange. At the bottom of an expensive trunk covered “en peau de truie” (the container analogue of the physical person of its owner), the customs officer finds a velvet jewel case nestled in a bed of lingerie. Confirmation of the functional castration of the husband, the jewel case holds a dildo whose existence is inadmissible, evidence of the usurpation of man’s signifying power by the wife who, fetishistically, is restored to autonomy and wholeness. A first utterance in the lingua franca whose meaning is universally accessible, the phallic woman is like a magic word combining expression and significance. Lacking nothing, she crosses borders, punctures surfaces, transgresses limits. Circulating freely, she is universal currency. Yet since

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the fetish must negate the secret it affirms, the woman cannot say that she has the power to say everything and so is reduced to being violated by the douanier’s rough hands, as he reconverts the talisman into another bijou indiscret. Mobile, complete, unbounded by national identity, the uncastrated female traveler is the potential founder of utopia. But the version intégrale of unexpurgated female narrative proves to be a fake whose true creator is Mirbeau, the male author. The dildo-wielding woman is reappropriated by male readers, whose interpretation makes whole the mutilated text. “Fallait le dire que vous étiez veuve,” the customs agent scoffs.15 Yet even if idealism is delusional and paradise is a hoax, the impulse to establish one inspires every artistic undertaking. Destruction is the precondition to each fresh creative enterprise. Mirbeau’s novel is structured by the repeated need to discredit myths of immutability and completeness. Nation, social class, gender, religion: all issue from systems of explanatory synthesis yet are only fetishistic disavowals of people’s vulnerability and separateness. The other portable phallus showcased in Célestine’s diary is the detached member of a priapic gargoyle that falls off the church of PortLançon. Framed by a keenly observant, erudite commentary on the building’s architectural history, Célestine’s story is itself an incongruous bit of narrative – its significance affected by disconnection from its surroundings. Conveyed in the tale of the movable stone phallus is the issue of the transferability of interpretive power. It is castration that encourages the creative hermeneutic response, both in the removal of the erect member of the leering demon overlooking the sanctuary, and in the unwriting of the symbolic text that originally covered the building. Here, Mirbeau’s nothing machine destroys the religious meaning of the gargoyle penis, representing the diabolically transformative power of lust, then showing how the object is susceptible to being invested with fresh meaning. Once adorned with a Rabelaisian display of allegorically ribald figures, vagrant saints, and hybrid monsters, the church is a palimpsest scratched clean by erosion and vandalism. Scandalized by the devil’s granite tumescence, the deacon, with hammer in hand, had climbed a ladder and broken off the offending organ which fell onto a pathway where a devout parishioner had discovered it. Mistaking it for a sacred object, she had enshrined it in her home, erecting a makeshift altar flanked by vases 15

Ibid., p. 460.

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filled with artificial flowers, laying it on a red velvet pillow, so that the reliquary case succeeds the dildo box as a container of the talismanic signifier. As suggested by Célestine’s account, the paternal phallus leaves everyone mute, inspiring awe or disgust so intense that its enormity strikes them dumb. Yet when taken out of context, it loses none of its iconic power, but confers on possessors a new eloquence with which they express its personal meaning. Throughout Mirbeau’s novel there is a rich array of precariously full communicative instruments, comprehensive systems of explanatory exegesis – from the original stone grimoire covering the Port-Lançon Church, the hate-filled nationalist ideology embraced by Joseph and his anti-Semitic brethren, to the Lanlaires’ hyper-cathected collection of silver plate, including the 25,000-franc Louis XVI cruet stand, also kept in a chest lined with “velours rouge,”16 material fetishized because of its contiguity with objects of power. Dazzled by the brilliance of its incontrovertible meaning, Mirbeau’s character is frozen in a position of unquestioning adoration, cut off from interpretive freedom, since meaning is thought to reside in things that dictate their method of use. In her journal, Célestine describes the transfixed wonderment elicited by the spectacle of the total object. Yet every time perfection is embodied, its meretriciousness is revealed. Skilled in the art of emasculating demystification, Célestine is expert in exposing the fatuousness of self-exalting males. But in the presence of Joseph, she is left pensive and disarmed, aroused by the scent of his brutishness and violence, “une sorte d’atmosphère sexuelle, âcre, terrible ou grisante, dont certaines femmes subissent, même malgré elles, la forte hantise.” 17 More than his hairy chest and oxlike neck, it is Joseph’s impenetrability that Célestine responds to. Accustomed to undressing mistresses of their virtuous façade, she also unmasks men who pose as confident sexual conquerors. Infirmed by insecurity or conceit, they are inept Lotharios, ineffectual Don Juans – endearing, sickly babies like the consumptive Monsieur Georges or hirsute buffoons like the fumbling Lanlaire. Impervious to Célestine’s sexual blandishments, Joseph is different from other men. Despite his hyperbolic masculinity, Joseph does not resort to seduction’s empty rhetoric. It is because Joseph does not speak that his identity remains a mystery. Like the customs officer who insists that the woman open up her jewel box, Célestine is driven by a need 16 17

Ibid., p. 545. Ibid., p. 505.

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to experience visual certainty. Possessing “cette auréole de mystère, ce prestige de l’inconnu,”18 Joseph remains unreadable, unfeeling, selfsufficient. An unfathomable mystery whom the woman cannot penetrate, he represents the unviolate thing one fears and wishes to unlock: “Il doit posséder de nombreux secrets,” as Célestine surmises, “mais il les cache jalousement […] comme on renferme des trésors dans un coffre de fer, armé de barres solides et de mystérieux verrous.”19 Unwilling to accept her excluded subjectivity, Célestine reverts to her customary practice of reading as déshabillage. For her, knowledge is acquired by invading private spaces, rifling through personal articles kept in a dressing room or boudoir, handling the fetish that hides the user’s incompleteness. “Je soupirais après les armoires, pleines de lingeries odorantes, les garde-robes où bouffent les taffetas, où craquent les satins.”20 Yet time elapses, and Joseph becomes no more familiar or approachable, only adding to the mystery of the esoteric text of his identity. In a typically Mirbellian characterization of women’s sanguinary prurience, he shows Célestine enflamed by the thought of Joseph’s criminality, intrigued by the belief that he is the mysterious assailant who had raped, mutilated, and killed a 12-year old girl whose body is found in the forest. Violence only adds to the luster of Célestine’s image of Joseph as the integral male who is destructive without motivation. Yet in Joseph’s sadistic exsanguination of ducks slaughtered for dinner, in his strident antiSemitism, he shows himself to be susceptible to the same castration fears that inspire his violence against others. Joseph’s strategy for obviating threats of dismemberment and loss is preemptive and repetitive, reinflicting wounds on the bodies of those already wounded. Joseph masters the fetishist’s horror of female castration by making a second cut, by becoming the agent of mutilation and not its helpless discoverer. He blocks his anxious identification with victims by victimizing them again in a manner he controls. The vaginal opening in “la petite Claire” is mirrored by the gash that Joseph makes on the “petit ventre ouvert d’un coup de couteau.”21 It is significant that the targets of Joseph’s hostility and aggression display weaknesses that he projectively assigns to his own person: breaches in the skin, exclusion from the social body, consignment to the 18

Ibid., p. 511. Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 569. 21 Ibid., p. 498. 19

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outer world of the poor, the Jews, the children. The enemy, as Jerrold Post observes, “is an object that is available to serve as a reservoir for all the negated aspects of the self.”22 Joseph’s fantasy is to establish a utopian microcosm in the Cherbourg café he buys later, where servants become proprietors who rule over a stable, structured world. The mistress is valued less for her anarchic sexuality than for her ability to bring in customers, promote business, and increase profit. For Joseph, Célestine represents an incompleteness that completes. “Vous êtes une bonne femme, Célestine… une femme d’ordre,” as he says. 23 Joseph’s antipathy for Jews comes from a similar desire to personally injure those whom circumstance has injured. Perpetrating acts of redundant aggression, Joseph castrates the child castrated by her gender, seeks to cast out the Jew whom society has marginalized. Joseph’s antiSemitism derives from a view of the nation that is not a place of incorporative assimilation turning outsiders into citizens. For Joseph, the homeland is not the good mother that feeds, forgives, and shelters, but a woman vulnerable to attacks like those that Joseph commits himself. Already defiled by the unwise hospitality she offers itinerant cosmopolitans, interlopers unrooted in her nurturing soil, France is the polluted mother who must be revirginized. The utopian ideal toward which the fetishist is striving is patterned on an original world of stability and satisfaction. His quest for an ideal world maps a journey toward a maternal Eden. In his image of the nation as mother, Joseph defines France as a woman whose integrity is protected by her devoted, watchful children, their vigilance ensuring they are spared the trauma of mutilation. The incision Joseph makes reflects Claire’s genital incompleteness, as disembowelment repeats castration, and the guilty child is punished twice. Circumcised, despised Jews are metonymized as “bouts coupés,”24 inciting the same defensive rage in Joseph as do girls. Inured to the experience of loss, cut off from the mother and her bounty, Jews are starvelings and pariahs relegated to the outside. The fate the Jew has chosen is the fate imposed on him by anti-Semites, so that the stereotypical vagabond, the citizen of nowhere, is obliged to relive forever the journey from homecoming to banishment – like Dreyfus shuttling back and forth 22 Jerrold Post, “The Loss of Enemies, Fragmenting Identities, and the Resurgence of Ethnic/Nationalist Hatred and Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 1.2 (1996), p. 22. 23 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 584. 24 Ibid., p. 465.

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between France and Devil’s Island. Mirroring himself in the disadvantaged and excluded, Joseph identifies the handicap from which the downtrodden are suffering and then reinflicts the same wound so that it is not done to him. Regarding Joseph as a paradigm of closed-mindedness and bigotry, Célestine transforms Joseph’s meaninglessness into a rich source of conjecture. She disavows the reality of Joseph as blank page, and her fascinated speculation about him becomes a fetishistic act. Where there is nothing, Célestine creates her hypotheses as works of art. Reverting to her customary hermeneutic practice, she seeks to read Joseph as his secret places and private articles. Like her mistresses’ dressing rooms, their armoires stuffed with taffetas and silks – like their countertops arrayed with peroxide and perfumes – Joseph is his room, synechdochic evidence hidden in a drawer. But after she searches through his quarters, the emptiness of his personal space extends to Célestine’s description. Unspeaking like its absent occupant, the room communicates its impersonal blandness to the neutrality of Célestine’s inventory of Joseph’s personal effects: the portrait of Déroulède, the devotional bric-a-brac, the drawers containing seed packages, floor polishing ingredients, and dormouse traps. Not a coy, flirtatious woman who exhibits and then conceals, Joseph’s room is public space that is accessible to anyone: “Les clés sont sur les meubles et sur les placards; pas un tiroir n’est fermé.”25 In Joseph’s room, things are stripped of their signifying power or are reduced to the banality of their functional use value. Joseph’s bed is where he sleeps; his closet is where he keeps his shoes: “Joseph communique à tout ce qu’il touche son impénétrabilité… Les objets qu’il possède sont muets, comme sa bouche, intraversables comme ses yeux.”26 Like the fetishist who, in responding to the reality of maternal castration, creates an illusion that consoles, Célestine converts experience into narrative. As his interpreter, Célestine transvalues Joseph’s nothingness into everything, conferring on him the magical properties of the fetish as an object of veneration. After she accuses Joseph of killing Claire, he kisses Célestine violently: “Je me souvins avoir vu, dans un petit salon, chez la comtesse Fardin, une sorte d’idole hindoue, d’une grande beauté horrible et meurtrière… Joseph, à ce moment, lui ressemblait…,” as Célestine writes.”27 25

Ibid., p. 590. Ibid., p. 591. 27 Ibid., p. 659. 26

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Like a merciless god, Joseph destroys without reason, displaying the capricious cruelty of a being answerable to no one. Monstre sacré, he perpetrates abominations whose enormity situates him outside the purview of laws, police, and prisons. Célestine tries to reason that Joseph’s theft of the Lanlaires’ silver is meant to rectify the injustice done by the powerful to the weak. But the virulence of his anti-Semitism, the brutality of his suspected child murder elevate his violence to the level of the metaphysical. Not emasculated by the littleness of protocols and rules, Joseph is a whole man uncompromised and undomesticated by society. His crime, says Célestine, “a quelque chose de violent, de solennel, de justicier, de religieux,” which, while appalling, still inspires in her a certain admiration.28 One can also argue that Mirbeau’s anarchism is the political expression of his interest in freeing things to signify in new ways. Decontextualized, the fetish loses its limiting use value – so that the boot no longer serves as just a covering for the foot, and the journal no longer simply records the perfunctoriness of daily life. The 19th century witnessed the triumph of an impoverishing utilitarianism that defined “the property relationship between people and their possessions [as] primarily one of Cartesian rationality.”29 Along with pragmatist materialism came a belief in the object’s functionality, its specific use and purpose. But even in the phenomenon of collecting, objects acquired a fetishistic value, counteracting what Max Weber described as science’s “[d]isenchantment of the world.”30 Since fetishism reinvests objects with their original magic properties, the first creative act is to resituate the object, reenacting the loss accompanying the thing’s disconnection from its purpose. Art’s foundational moment restages the destructive gesture of the anarchist, who dismantles the totalitarian systems that mass-produce consumers for whom meanings are always standardized, unquestionable, and changeless. In Mirbeau’s novel, identity is destabilized and intersubjectivity renegotiated: Célestine is not Célestine when she enters the service of an employer who, in response to onomastic fetishism, insists on renaming her Marie. A caricatural pastiche of the mistresses she despises, Célestine fashions a new self from the debris of obsolete personas. This patchwork identity is reproduced and objectified on paper, in a diary assembled from 28

Ibid., p. 655. Russell Belk, “The Ineluctable Mysteries of Possessions,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 6.6 (1991), p. 17. 30 Qtd. in Belk, “The Ineluctable Mysteries of Possessions,” p. 17. 29

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stationery stolen from different women. Pieces of Célestine, “tantôt rose, tantôt bleu pâle,”31 make up a colorful collage of transient attitudes and self-images, forming the quelqu’un de disparate that is the essence of the domestic. Mirbeau’s novel and his heroine’s narrative describe no discernable story arc, have no teleological direction, achieve no explanatory dénouement. Another anarchist subversion of science’s claim to synthesizing unity, the text is a farrago of reminiscence and social commentary, “une juxtaposition de souvenirs pêle-mêle,” writes Pierre Michel, “[qui] ne présente ni cohérence, ni continuité, et reste ouvert sur un futur incertain, ce qui convient admirablement à une vision nonfinalisante de l’univers.”32 Mirbeau’s rejection of utopia as an ordered, stable world reflects his aversion for any fiction supplying sense and resolution. Metaphorizing literature as a vast digestive apparatus – consuming unintelligible events, expelling explanatory narrative – Mirbeau ridicules the Lanlaires’ neighbor, the irascible capitaine Mauger, an anxious omnivore who manages his fear of the unknown by trying to eat everything. Asserting the species privilege of dominating what he devours, Mauger brags of eating flowers, rats, caterpillars, and garden snakes. It is through oral aggression that he expresses his feelings of vulnerability, so that the more unfamiliar the life form, the more urgent is his need to eat it: “L’hiver surtout, par les grands froids, il passe des oiseaux inconnus [.…] On me les apporte… et je les mange… Je parie qu’il n’y a pas, dans le monde, un homme qui ait mangé autant de choses que moi.”33 Unlike Mauger’s alimentary model which processes and assimilates, Mirbeau’s novel repeats the breaking up of unrelated but constituent episodes. If the future is a mirage of stagnant happiness and harmony, the present is the terrorist’s bomb exploding the illusion of a balanced self, destroying the safe place that it should occupy in a world of clarity and reason. Only the past supplies the building blocks of identity as narrative, remnants of a life left over from self-deception and forgetting. Once Célestine stops getting letters from acquaintances in Paris – fresh mnemonic fragments collected and sent by others – she is exiled to a dormant time of monotony and solitude, in which the snoring of the Lanlaires’ scullery maid conveys “les écoeurements du présent.” But when her memories are arranged in new configurations, they are revitalized and 31

Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 381. Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 2 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 349. 33 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 442. 32

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enriched, potentially signifying anything. Alone in her room, Célestine disintegrates her past, “afin de reconstituer avec ses morceaux épars l’illusion d’un avenir.”34 Mirbeau’s political message is that the ruling class, insisting that everything belongs in its own place, tries to assert the tautological evidence of majority opinion. Masters tell the truth because their power makes it so, and Joseph thinks that people who give false testimony against Dreyfus rehabilitate their lies by the justice of their cause. Like the fetishist who adopts an object as a defense against castration, the artist produces images as the manufacture of illusion. When things again can signify whatever people wish them to signify, the world is delivered of “possession rationality” and objects are “remystified,” reendowed with magic power.35 Mirbeau’s political and aesthetic aims seem to dovetail in this endeavor, as governments are targeted as oppressive meaning-giving entities. The underclass is denied the right to narrate and interpret, and the disadvantaged are forbidden to speak against the wealthy who exploit them. As a justice of the peace points out to Célestine: “Que deviendrait la société si un domestique pouvait avoir raison d’un maître?... Il n’y aurait plus de société, Mademoiselle… ce serait l’anarchie….”36 Capitalism’s economic psychology that prescribes how things are used, science’s totalitarian epistemology that defines what things must mean are the underpinnings of the system that the anarchist attacks. With its ambitious program of sexual, semiotic, and political subversion, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre aims to break down existing structures and recreate an earlier state of disorganization and ambiguity. Society can be freed of the rigidity of hierarchy when the discourse of the powerful can be contradicted by a chambermaid. In his novel, Mirbeau challenges the controlling ideology of people who defend a society founded on an illusion of plenitude and changelessness. Whereas, for fetishists, castration fears motivate creation of the object, for scientists, aristocrats, and government officials, the fear of loss militates against production of the art work. Seeking to return the world to its original disordered statelessness, the anarchist disengages people from the convictions that imprison them. Mirbeau’s novel ends by undermining the principle of closure, disproving that the successful are entitled to have the last word. Now a 34

Ibid., p. 471. Belk, “The Ineluctable Mysteries of Possessions,” p. 19. 36 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 565. 35

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sexy café hostess whose décolletage draws in customers, Célestine becomes a bourgeoise who disparages her servants. Decontextualized, the silver sevice stolen from the Lanlaires destroys the identity of one privileged couple in order to shape the identity of another one. Joseph’s blank inscrutability gives way to dapper self-assurance, but he is still the unknowable other who had always fascinated Célestine: “Jamais je ne saurai rien de Joseph,” as she writes, “jamais je ne connaîtrai le mystère de sa vie… Et c’est peut-être cet inconnu qui m’attache tant à lui.”37 Signifying the emptinesss that fetishes conceal, Joseph represents the uncertainty that motivates creation. Lost convictions, like anxiety caused by the prospect of castration, occasion recourse to works of art denying ignorance and death. The rich man and the scientist may pose as masters of the universe, but they are susceptible to contradiction by terrorists and servants. Repeatedly exposing the shocking reality of castration, the anarchistic text of Mirbeau’s nothing machine restores the disorder of existence. Toppling governments, dismantling systems that purport to explain and reassure, Mirbeau’s goal is the tabula rasa of the self-unwriting novel. Like the empty page on which incongruous images combine, or on which fetishist illusion dispels the evidence of reality, the velvet bed is where a gargoyle penis becomes the relic of a saint.

37

Ibid., p. 664.

Part III: The Nothing Machine

Chapter Eight From Matter to Motion: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique No longer required to toil anonymously as a member of the prolétaire de la plume, Mirbeau, by 1901, increasingly found himself in a position to enjoy the professional and material benefits accruing from his publishing successes. Heralded by an emerging generation of artists, Mirbeau was also regarded with suspicion by others for whom fame often entailed a betrayal of one’s principles. Having achieved star status, Mirbeau had become a celebrity/monument of the kind he formerly had railed against. “[U]n monsieur arrivé, un ‘notable’ respecté en tous lieux,”1 he risked seeing the operation of his nothing machine interrupted by professional accomplishment. In their biography, Nivet and Michel dispute allegations that Mirbeau abandoned his convictions or that, as an artist apotheosized by adulation, he ever defaulted on his ideals: “Va-t-il, par peur d’ébranler un ordre social dont il profite désormais, atténuer ses attaques, mettre des bémols à ses enthousiasmes, et s’engager sur le chemin compromettant des ‘honneurs’, c’est-à-dire des lâchetés récompensées?”2 Mirbeau’s continuing political and social battles indicate that this was not the case. Ironically, Mirbeau’s achievements also afforded him access to one of the cultural institutions that, for decades, had been the object of his most unrelenting denigration. The Comédie-Française, bastion of misoneist Classicism, was the site where Mirbeau staged his greatest theatrical masterpiece, Les Affaires sont les affaires. Agreeing to have his play performed in France’s most conservative artistic venue, Mirbeau entered the pantheon of authors whose work was ratified by those he execrated. Certainly, his gift for dialogue, for fashioning convincing comedic characters made writing for the theater a natural outlet for his multi-faceted talent. But whereas the classical unities, and Mirbeau’s facility for balancing tragic and comic elements may have situated the author “dans la lignée de Molière,”3 his abiding sense of the

1

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 658. Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 669. 2

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fragmentariness and incoherence of existence redirected him toward fiction where he showed confusion prevailing over order. Published in 1901, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique charts the evolution of Mirbeau’s growing disaffection for conventional novelistic form. Reflecting “l’infinie multiplicité des êtres”4 in the episodic jumble of its structure, the novel marks a new phase in Mirbeau’s career as a writer. In his revolutionary experiment in fictional dynamics, he relinquishes all pretense of developing a unified intrigue in order to elaborate a theory of narrative kinetics. He communicates the perceptions of an unstable, decentered subject whose organizing consciousness cannot structure his experience. This impression is conveyed in a story whose enunciatory source is scattered, whose constituent plot elements are loose and unrelated, and whose conclusion does not provide a sense of closure or resolution but instead a feeling of ambiguity, openness, and possibility. Les 21 jours … underscores its dissimilarity to contemporaneous works in which fin-de-siècle writers seek to compensate for their sense of dereliction in the modern world by building narrative houses that are impregnable and protective. The center-seeking tendency of the reclusive Decadent subject, whose ego is inflated to fill the space it occupies, stands in contrast to the practice of Mirbeau’s narrator, a peripatetic gadfly whose accounts are as directionless as his transient existence. Mirbeau’s satirical disparagement of traditional Decadent novels may be understood by likening them to a prominent figure in his novel, the hedgehog whose body is used as both a refuge and a container. In order to ward off attacks on the soft underbelly of its meaninglessness, the Decadent text rolls itself up in a ball bristling with piercing stylistic quills on which an unsuspecting reader might impale himself and die. In its anxious centripetality, the Decadent work becomes a fortress outfitted with barbed defenses against audience apprehension. Topologized as its setting, the Decadent text resembles des Esseintes’s retreat at Fontenay ( J.-K. Huysmans, A rebours 1884) where, the more time the hero spends adorning his surfaces and boundaries, the emptier his life becomes as it passes inside his walls. In protecting against encroachment from the outside, the Decadent subject empties his narrative from the inside. Fictions objectified as ornamental containers of nothing, the writings of the Decadents are immobilized by their pointlessness. With their movement arrested like the turtle whose carapace des Esseintes covers with gold, they are mortuary enclosures of suffocating opulence. 4

Ibid.

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By contrast, as his career advanced, Mirbeau distinguished himself from his contemporaries, idle aesthetes with whom he had little in common. 5 Taking as the novel’s departure point the narrator’s own departure, Mirbeau constructs the story as an act of packing up and moving out. Having rejected the tired machinery of traditional novelistic form, he creates a text whose elaboration charts the process of its disassembly. In place of the established Decadent themes of solipsism and sequestration, Mirbeau describes the experience of expatriation, disorientation, renewal, and discovery. Whereas the claustrophilic Decadent retreatant exhausts his life’s material in reinforcing walls, Mirbeau’s character, the unremarkable Georges Vasseur, pares his narrative down to what he can fit inside his suitcase. Les 21 jours… presents a fictionalized account of Mirbeau’s brief stay at the Pyrenean spa of Luchon four years before. There, the boring otiosity of days spent taking baths, waiting for dinner, and loitering in casinos had sharpened his appreciation of the striking distastefulness of the other patrons. This “pittoresque défilé de maniaques et de forbans à une portée symbolique,”6 appears in haphazard fashion and structures an equally desultory narrative. The meaning of Mirbeau’s novel is the impossibility of finding one, since “la contingence du récit reflète l’universelle contingence.”7 It is precisely by staying at home and cleaving to routine that the subject-hedgehog protects himself against awareness of the incongruity of everyday life. Since identity is articulated through repeated acts and routine behaviors, the little discomforts accompanying a relocation to unfamiliar surroundings effect a change in the self that awakens the subject from the existential sleep of habit. Seen from a new perspective, Vasseur’s uninteresting countrymen assume a level of monstrousness that makes them appalling, nightmarish, and colorful. As André Beaunier says: “Les caricatures de Mirbeau sont prodigieuses, excessives, comme pour constituer une grande épopée de l’infamie humaine, mais ressemblantes et vraies.”8 5

Christopher Lloyd sees a temperamental link between Mirbeau and the hedgehog, his theriomorphic brother, one distinguishing him from the languid aesthetes Mirbeau derides in his works. Mirbeau, writes Lloyd, “may have well been a prickly customer, with his short-sighted vision and range, but his barbs retain their sharpness and guarantee his survival” “Mirbeau’s Hedgehog,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (1992), p. 163. 6 Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 678. 7 Ibid., p. 680. 8 André Beaunier, Revue bleue, August 31, 1901, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 681.

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In his novel, Mirbeau shows that, by changing place, accelerating, slowing, or otherwise altering the customary processes of perception, one makes reality emerge from behind the preconceptions that usually conceal it. Reason, Truth, Beauty: values and the institutions enshrining them are unsettled by Mirbeau, who opens up to question traditional ideals. Modeled on the principles of mechanics, Mirbeau’s aesthetic of iconoclasm opposes life’s reinvigorating susceptibility to change to its decline toward equilibrium, contrasting the volatility of creative thought to its material accretion as expression. The remorseless process of condensation that turns energy into matter, love into ritual, bodies into corpses, and inspiration into books is the movement of conventional storytelling that Mirbeau replaces with his narrative dynamic. Mirbeau’s narrator knows that it is easy to stay at home in a gilded shell of incuriosity, shrinking from “transmigrations [that] disrupt personal identity.”9 Likewise, the conventions of fictional form are an agreeable domicile from which one is reluctant to set forth on a journey to innovation. But as Mirbeau expresses fascination for vagabonds and outcasts, believing that “l’errance peut aussi être […] une recherche de la libération,”10 he also despises artists whose unoriginality imprisons them inside walls of repetition. In Les 21 jours…, Mirbeau extols the salutary discomforts of transience, fashioning an episodic plot that follows Georges Vasseur as he moves from one hotel room to another. In the course of the narrative, stories are told in which the putatively safe house of the self is invaded by burglars, and the stale precincts of identity are ventilated by fresh ideas. Mirbeau’s text shows that the cutaneous envelope delimiting body boundaries can be a permeable wall subject to rupture or breach. Orderly thought is not necessarily a permanent occupant of the brain. Rather, as is revealed by the narrator’s conversation with an inmate in an asylum, it may escape like a butterfly splashing the sky with colors denoting mood change. It may be abducted by malefactors who expel reason and enthrone madness, making the self into contested territory governed by occupying forces. More often than being invaded by the foreign influence of impulse or dream, Mirbeau’s characters, like Vasseur, take vacations from themselves. Having inhabited the temporary dwelling of a narrated event, 9

Howard Stein, “Culture Change, Symbolic Object Loss, and Restitutional Process,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 8 (1985), p. 307. 10 Jean-François Wagniart, “Les Représentations de l’errance et des vagabonds dans l’oeuvre d’Octave Mirbeau,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001), p. 306.

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they move on when it is finished. In Les 21 jours…, Mirbeau’s travelling narrative unfolds against a moving backdrop of changeable scenery, where airy landscapes of protean mutability oppose a mountanous terrain of rigidity and absolutism. Emancipating the self from Schopenhaueran enslavement to attachment and desire, Mirbeau’s character relinquishes will in order to maximize adaptability. While he is estivating at the spa, Vasseur is not the master in his house. By submitting to a regimen of hydrotherapeutic treatment, he obeys, not himself, but fad and fashion: “L’été, la mode, ou le soin de santé, qui est aussi une mode, veut que l’on voyage.”11 Like the narrator, his story does not go where he wants, but is subject to the randomness of chance encounters he has with old acquaintances during his travels. The engine driving Vasseur’s narrative is not an artfully designed plot, but the unpredictability of rencontres, unplanned meetings with various miscreants whose foolishness may make for uninspiring reading. Of the riffraff whom he describes, Vasseur says: “je ne saurais recommander la lecture aux jeunes filles.”12 Mirbeau’s story is unlike conventional fictional fare which pauses only briefly before offering readers a tension-reducing dénouement. As Edward Jayne states, the popular novel performs a homeostatic function, fulfilling audience wishes for explanation and mastery. Such a text “delivers the hero and reader from one state of affairs to exactly its opposite, from imbalance to resolution, from uncertainty to apparent clarification, from chronic if modest anxiety to temporary relief through ‘closure’ as literary accomplishment.”13 The more undeviatingly the narrative moves toward intelligibility and order, the faster it carries readers toward utopian inertia. Mirbeau’s novel is a pointillist canvas of colorfully isolated episodes that showcases its theme of desultoriness and disconnection. An ironically neutral recording instrument, Vasseur directs his attention indiscriminately at sanitorium patients, genocidal military officers, mountain-dwelling recluses, and eccentric psychiatrists. Different from tourist guide-books whose authoritarianism helps other tourists, Vasseur’s narrative is a congeries of anecdotal memories, loosely written diary notes, wry remarks on human nature.

11

Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 21. 12 Ibid., p. 23. 13 Edward Jayne, “The Dialectics of Paranoid Form,” Genre (1978), p. 141.

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Les 21 jours… marks a turning point in Mirbeau’s authorial development, as he begins to subordinate his story’s message to the dynamics of its relation. Mirbeau’s narrative, like the regenerative phenomena it celebrates, equates death with reproduction, burial with liberation from the confining shell of identity. Mirbeau’s nothing machine effects the transformation of matter into matrix. As forms decompose and mutate, the story does not end but instead is retransmitted. Everything in Le Jardin des supplices had expressed Mirbeau’s abhorrence for completed projects, stalled vehicles, and perfected systems. With his aesthetic of foreplay, Mirbeau prefers the pleasure of the voyage to the disappointment of reaching shore, enjoys the sensualism of torture more than the mechanistic science of killing. Like le gros patapouf who regaled Clara with accounts of his virtuosity, the novelist as torture-artist maintains intimate contact with his subject, delaying the moment when completed texts are discarded as dead objects. In his fiction, Mirbeau often describes discovering the frustrating limitations of demiurgic attempts to create like a god. Incapable of creating ex nihilo, the artist is reduced to destroying old forms and shaping new ones. Making nothing, he returns again and again to the granite block, the ordinary body, the unshaped clay mound, the unplanted garden. Grounding his aesthetic in a repeated implementation of its destructive propadeutic, Mirbeau repeats the smashing, skinning, and disassembling of the art that preexists his own. As with the anarchist, his work is limited to unmaking flawed systems. Images of puncturing, wounding, and cutting convey Mirbeau’s insistence on breaking through container walls, enabling their contents to spill and settle, achieving the flat horizontality of stuff that returns to its predifferentiated state of muddle and homogeneity. As a political gesture, the preliminary abolition of old forms enacts a rupture of the “Skin Ego” which, as Didier Anzieu writes, is what delimits the boundary between self and other. The anarchist’s destruction of that boundary fulfills an original masochistic fantasy: “that the mother and child share a single skin […] figurative of their symbiotic union, […] and that the process of detachment and the child’s attainment of autonomy involves a rending of that skin.” 14 In Mirbeau, the torturer, artist, and terrorist perform a similar role, compelling an evacuation of the house and a reentry into a communal world. Obliged to vacate homeland, skin, domicile, and clothes, Mirbeau’s character is also exiled from fiction’s 14

Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987), p. 42.

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familiar body, banished to an unstable world of inchoateness and possibility. Described in Les 21 jours…, experiences of homelessness are structurally repeated by a story stripped of teleology. While Anzieu identifies a primary function of the “Skin Ego” as containing the self, regulating drives, limiting excitation, he also stresses its protective value, shielding “the organism […] against physical attack, some forms of radiation and an excess of stimuli.”15 As Mirbeau’s narrative fails to demark the parameters of its intrigue, it is also filled with stories of penetrative X-rays, inseminating starlight, and scientific analysis. Studied, probed, wounded, the bodies that Mirbeau tells of are porous things. “This Skin Ego is a colander: thoughts and memories are only with difficulty retained; they leak away.”16 In place of health, an impervious container of narcissistic equilibrium, Mirbeau describes the reluctantly dynamic adaptability of the invalid. Unlike the robust man – ensconced in the fortress of his well-being – the neurasthenic like Vasseur endures the therapeutic and social discomforts of dislocation. In a novel enacting the erasure of its boundaries, there is a clear opposition between those who reject change and those who embrace it. Formalists, embalmers, permanently tenured politicians, custodians of the Comédie-Française repertoire obey the inclination to replace life with order and endow it with the majesty of a mountain. Those who prize stability strive to thicken walls; they police the boundaries of body and nation, and, like Isadore-Joseph Tarabustin, a visitor at the spa, they see le dernier bec de gaz de France at the end of a village road as defending the light of civilization against a tide of atavism. Doctors, hypochondriacs, knowledge-fetishists combat the liberating dissolution of sickness with the structuring principles of nosology, believing the best way to fight pathology is to classify and name it. Describing the compartmentalization of reason and madness, Mirbeau opposes the space of interpretive authority to the space of analytical victimization. Thus, each therapist whom Vasseur meets is recognizable as the person occupying the doctor’s office while the mental patient is the person locked in the basement. All professional titles and occupational designations are walls that imprison, hence Mirbeau’s story of Vasseur’s visit to a lunatic asylum, which he sees as being mirrored by the barracks 15 16

Ibid., p. 102. Ibid.

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that face it. Soldiers wielding bayonet-equipped rifles are reflections of the mental patients, as authority is inevitably modeled on the disorder it represses. As Mirbeau suggests, it is the nominative, diagnostic, and legal authority of the powerful that controls and immobilizes the weak, stealing their names, caging them with reason. It is only when the butterfly of his common sense takes flight that the anonymous patient whom Vasseur sees might finally be set free. Mirbeau’s own narrative overflows its walls, centrifugally dilating into regions beyond understanding. In his conception of stellar birth, the onomastically ambiguous Clara Fistule, a sanitorium employee whom Vasseur had known years before, rejects copulation as the colliding walls of a mating pair, and instead imagines the collapsing of a universe whose farthest reaches are concentrated on an “oeuf stellaire” fertilized “par le pollen tellurique.”17 Equating cosmogony with personal history, Fistule focuses infinite space on the point of his identity, cancelling alterity by taking everything into himself. Eliminating the spontaneity of sex and the leakiness of reproductive organs, he forecloses the possibility of accident and protects against the possibility of disruption. Like the hedgehog that, in its self-enclosed sphere, projects its quills out from the center, stellogenetic starlight moves from the edge of the universe to the self. Dr.Triceps, the psychiatrist/doctor with whom Vasseur speaks repeatedly, operates in a similar fashion, simplifying the inexhaustibily diverse spectrum of pathologies by subsuming them under the rubric of neurosis. To Triceps, anyone who travels or creates, anyone who enjoys a change of place or self is a neurasthenic like Mirbeau’s narrator. Formerly an employee at the madhouse, Triceps conflates economics, philosophy, politics, and art as subsidiary fields deriving from the original and allinclusive discipline of psychiatry. In the character of Triceps, Mirbeau opposes medicine and literature, showing that as fiction tears down walls, science erects them, and as art thrives on mystery, science embraces reductionism. Corresponding to Clara Fistule’s stellar ovum is the malady that Triceps sees when he uses his X-ray technology. Whereas Mirbeau’s narrator departs, embarking on a journey radiating out from the house of identity, Triceps follows the center-seeking movement of analytic reason. In place of an expanding universe of disconnectedness and conjecture, Triceps proposes a medical cosmology in which stars are lesions and astronauts are doctors. According to him, scientific thinking is a new 17

Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 31.

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cartography laying out grids of logic, mapping routes crisscrossing the space of infinite ambiguity. “Et remarque, mon ami, comme tout s’enchaîne… comme une découverte en amène une autre,” Triceps tells his listener. “Astre et cerveau, comprends-tu?”18 In place of a conventional thematic foundation, Mirbeau’s novel illustrates the marriage of literature and physics, offering a meditation on force, trajectory, and momentum, a thermodynamic reflection on the refrigerated zone of mountain summits and the blood-washed luxuriance of colonial jungle killing-fields described by a military officer in his recollections about Africa. Instead of plot, Mirbeau’s story examines different states of matter, the gravity of commonplaces, the despairing solidity of truth, the evanescence of change as a passage from material to immaterial. Foreshadowing Sartre and Roquentin’s sense of existential texture, Mirbeau uses passages in the novel to describe the viscosity of triteness, the lithification of cliché, as stupidity becomes an attractive force, a deadly center stopping the centrifugal flight of genius and pulling it into an orifice of unreflection. Operating in the cold domain of mortality and motionlessness, Mirbeau’s physicians like Triceps traffic in scientific certainty. Like Doctor Fardat-Fardet, another caricature of the scientist, they show that their goal is not to heal their patients’ bodies but to embalm their cadavers, introducing them into a clandestine economy of hearse drivers and morticians. As the naturalist requires a sick person to justify the diagnostic acumen utilized to ensure the health of the social organism, Fardat-Fardet appraises clients as the expressive richness of their symptomatology, complex illnesses he reduces to the impoverished simplicity of his analysis. When greeting patients, he substitutes their condition for their name: “Ha! Ha! Fit-il… sang pauvre… poumons atteints?… neurasthénique?… alcoolique?... syphilitique? Parfaitement… Voyons ça… voyons ça.”19 Etymologically, for the doctor, diagnoses yield information that separates, and, as walls dividing physician and patient, they are the opposite of love that joins. In a subsequent scene, Vasseur remembers finding a hedgehog one day in his cellar, a creature that had acquired a taste for brandy, rolled itself up in its addiction, and finally embalmed itself with the poison that preserved what it destroyed. The autopsy report that Vasseur had received

18 19

Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 33.

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from Doctor Triceps was as incontrovertible in its findings as the fact of death itself. Like naturalist aesthetics, medicine depends on an epistemology of sameness. Rigorously excluded, unpredictability and change are influences destabilizing what they revivify and cure – hence, Triceps’s 1898 address to the Société de Biologie, in which, as Vasseur says, “il préconisait l’inceste comme régénérateur de la race.”20 Similarly, while new experience refreshes the traveller, buoying up a mind made heavy by routine, travel science sanitizes trips by removing their capacity to surprise. Recommended panoramas and four-star vistas, as Vasseur observes, are sticky surfaces on which mindless tourists adhere. With their thoughts and movements growing sluggish, they coagulate around the ancient oak and dried-up well praised in the pages of their Baedecker guidebooks. Advocating disorientation, Vasseur deplores the sight of nature-lovers, curiosity-seekers, and novelty-enthusiasts surrendering the dynamism of their quest for the stasis of their satisfaction. For visitors to Dournenez, intelligence dulls and inquisitiveness gives way to reflexivity. As visual openings in the wall that separates a subject from the world, les points de vue instead become obstructions to new insights – “les points de vue, où l’on voit, agglutinée en cristallisations lentes, en stalactites prodigieuses, la sottise énorme et pareille et toujours suintante de tous ceux-là qui les visitèrent.”21 Metaphorizing whimsy as clouds, intellectual inertia as rock, Mirbeau institutes a rheology of consciousness, showing how routine perceptions always slow the flow of thought. On the other hand, fresh perspectives allow partitions to become membranes, turning boundaries into threshholds, abolishing distances, and replacing division with interpenetration. In a subsequent episode, Vasseur describes an evening spent eavesdropping on guests in an adjoining room in the spa hotel. In his story, interstitial space comes alive, mediating a conversation between speakers and a listener they do not address. Instead of deadening sound, walls speak and act as amplifiers, with murs transmitting murmures in the way Rabelais had mentioned in his description of the Abbey of Thélème. It is because they block understanding that walls are eloquent, enriching information that would be banal if intelligible. Listening in to marital squabbling, cooing, and lovemaking in the room next door, Vasseur uses 20 21

Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 138.

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the wall as a medium for conjectural dialogue, a text collaboratively authored by two unrelated parties. Creating meaning out of the accidental collision of interpretive speculation, Mirbeau fashions an account coauthored by unsuspecting performers and their unintended audience. Unlike transparent texts whose interest is killed by clarity, Vasseur’s record of an overheard conversation is rich in ambiguity. In the other room, the wife complains of her chambermaid’s impertinence. “Ou-ou-ou-ou-ou,” responds her husband with the sound of a watch being rewound. It is not the triteness of the couple’s bickering nor Vasseur’s phonetic transcription of the husband’s garbled words, but the listener’s ignorance that gives meaning to the story. Art is born in the gap separating the artist and consumer, and the wall preventing communication is what fosters creativity. This is why Mirbeau’s narrator avoids the confluence of likeminded individuals, people whose intellectual flexibility becomes brittle, whose imaginative singularity solidifies as agreement. Incomprehension, alienation, and loss are what guide Mirbeau’s fiction, as distance motivates the journey, justifying the movement that sustains life’s dynamism. Les 21 jours… proliferates with impossible allegories, cautionary tales of suicide by mineralization. There is the story of the circulatory system – like traffic on a road – that is disrupted by the elderly lover who languishes from self-exsanguination, having extracted iron from his blood to make a ferruginous ornament for his mistress. An anhedonic descendant of Voltaire’s Pococurante, the American billionaire Dickson-Barnell is an acquaintance of Vasseur’s for whom money creates death and transforms lilies into gilding. Having adopted the Decadent aesthetic exalting beauty over utility and artifice over nature, Dickson-Barnell is miserable in his plutocratic anality. Spurning women, he prefers mounds of snow to authentic breasts, coral labia to real lips, spun gold to blond hair. Wealth accelerates the entropic transformation of life into art, depriving Dickson-Barnell of the pleasure of osculation, the warm sensation of a caress. Whereas Mirbeau’s text contributes to the plurivocality of the world, Dickson-Barnell subjects experience to an ascetic metallurgy ridding it of its playful superfluity. Smelting, extracting, he is an alchemist of death transmuting beauty’s evanescence into the corpselike permanence of its representation. Along with women and flowers, books undergo the refining process of his scorifying nihilism, as he separates the precision of meaning from the slag of ambiguity. Once rid

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of its impurities, life is unpleasurable and cold: “il n’est en resté, jusqu’ici,” he complains, “que de la matière inerte et du poids mort.”22 In Vasseur’s narrative, the geriatric lover and despondent tycoon resemble the Classical artist in destroying the reality they turn into value. The iron jewel produced from human blood, the inhuman gold facsimile of female pulchritude are mineral deposits heaped up at the base of the mountain that forms the backdrop in Mirbeau’s novel. They are the monuments left after the organicism of creativity has been exhausted. What Mirbeau’s despairing capitalist cannot realize is the selfcancelling contradictoriness of his two conflicting impulses: toward aurefaction, on the one hand, and toward vaporization, on the other. In Mirbeau’s aesthetic of gratuitousness, it is the delightfulness of the supererogatory that is the most interesting and worthwhile. Like gas for his car, experience is combustible matter burned by excitement, producing smoke inhaled by a traveller on his incendiary journey through life. But when literature solidifies as the canonic works of Paul Bourget, when – like des Esseintes’s tortoise – bodies are suffocated in gold containers, they are discarded on the mountain of stuff disqualified by Dickson-Barnell as infumable. In two related scenes, Mirbeau moves his discussion of the physics of change to the realm of politics and culture. First, there is the ideologically chameleonic minister, Georges Leygues, a man whose story Vasseur tells. Having witnessed the alternation of nationalist and socialist administrations, having seen governments come and go, only Leygues endures as the embodiment of institutional unalterability. Superior in all respects, he is remarkable in none. Committed to no position, he is able to embrace them all. With his opportunism conferring a kind of empty universality, he becomes a politician/mountain endowed with “inamovabilité ministérielle.”23 Perhaps less like a mountain subject to tectonic shift or geological catastrophe, Leygues survives because of his ideological vacancy. History’s storms may blow around him, but, like the tree referred to by the narrator’s friend, Roger Fresselou, Leygues may shake and bend, but, in the end, when calm returns, he is still there, unchanged. It is because Leygues is devoid of loyalty and opinion that he enjoys a position of bureaucratic indestructibility, because his power serves no purpose that it lasts forever. 22 23

Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 60.

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In his parable on the vicissitudes of politics and the permanence of corruption, Mirbeau reprises his attacks on hoary cultural monuments, institutions sanctified by their seventeenth-century provenance. Unlike trees left unruffled by tumult and revolution, the Conservatoire and the Louvre are vulnerable to earthquake and conflagration. It is because museum artifacts, state library holdings, and national theater repertories are hallowed by time and sacralized by unreflection that people venerate them, like the scenic points that tourists flock to. It is because Leygues is Janus-faced that he lives on and on. Nothing is everlasting except what was not real to begin with. But institutions desiccated by mindlessness and tradition can easily catch fire, as Leygues airily observes. Inside the Comédie-Française, there is nothing that is infumable. Appearing in the succeeding tale, the eternally wandering, irrevocably banished pariah, Emile Ollivier, is the mobile counterpart of the politically unshakable mass of Georges Leygues. Mirbeau’s narrator, who dreams of missed trains and late departures, still feels a condescending pity for a man victimized by self-righteousness. Mirbeau’s story features another model of ideological volatility, as Ollivier – “député républicain sous le Second Empire, s’est cependant rallié au régime impérial en 1869 et a été chargé de former le gouvernement en 1870.”24 Unlike Georges Leygues, blandly absolved of conviction, Ollivier wears his stigma like a badge of honor. Obstinately affirming positions that make him a figure of public obloquy, he fulminates against a country bereft of tradition, religion, patriotism, and respect for law. Opposing the rigidity of his dogmatism to his life of nomadic ostracism, Ollivier is condemned to endless travel on steamers, trains, and camels. Impervious to the sting of infamy following him everywhere, he flees to avoid repatriation in his incriminating history. Despite Vasseur’s professed sympathy for the hated public wanderer, Mirbeau’s own fictional aesthetic is based on transience and forgetting. Textual emigrants from Le Journal and L’Echo de Paris, numerous episodes make up a novel that is a “patchwork déconcertant,”25 a novelistic miscellany thematizing the vagrancy of its material. Like the blue butterfly of the asylum inmate’s psyche, Mirbeau’s stories escape from newspapers and alight in new books. In stories of itineracy that are

24

Pierre Michel, “Notes: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 1123. 25 Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 10.

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itinerant themselves, characters and narrative circulate and never come to rest. In a novel set in transit points, vehicles, temporary lodgings, and outdoor scenes, Vasseur describes dreams of creative ataxia and muscular unresponsiveness. Train station clocks with yellow faces gaze down ironically at a traveller powerless to depart; a hunter watches helplessly as partridges emerge from thickets, and his rifle, like the voyager, “ne part pas; il n’est jamais parti.”26 Extending the symbolism of sexual dysfunction as the misfiring gun, the narrator describes vainly attempting to climb a flight of steps. The story recalls Freud’s interpretation of stairclimbing as coital exertion, 27 yet here the exhausting movement brings no triumphal ascent, ends with no orgasmic arrival. Instead, his body glistening with sweat, his breathing shuddering and labored, the dreamer “n’avance point.”28 The stationary subject, unable to effect his movement forward, is only transported involuntarily by “le cauchemar [qui] galope.”29 In Vasseur’s account, oneirical paralysis carries over to a waking lethargy, an indecisiveness that prevents him from packing his trunk, boarding a bus, catching a train, and leaving the spa for new places. The symptomatology of neurasthenia identified in Mirbeau’s title stresses the immobilizing effects of Vasseur’s apathy and abulia: “tous les tourments de la dépression nerveuse et de l’affaiblissement mental.”30 The vanishing train, the unshot bullet, the viscous stairwell – instead of signifying velocity, transcendence, and escape – are rematerialized as static objects associated with futility and impotence. Doctor Triceps’s universal diagnosis of neurosis, as causing creative genius, maladjustment, and poverty, applies in Vasseur’s case to an equation of identity and corporeity. Instead of a pliable instrument utilized to implement the subject’s wishes, the body is refractory and disobedient. Engendering a nauseating dualism, sickness alienates thought from flesh. 26

Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 136. Considering “steps, staircases and ladders in dreams,” Freud concludes that they are “unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover,” he adds, “the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasingly breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs” (qtd. in Juhani Pallasmaa, “Stairways of the Mind,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 7-8 [2000], p. 10). 28 Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 136. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 137. 27

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Unlike vaporous ideas propelled by the breath of intelligence, the diseased body is the site of a divorce between the self and its container. Rather than seeking a cure at a sanitarium situated amidst mountains physically manifesting the death of time, Vassseur dreams of a liberating disincarnation, merging with luminous mists that coalesce and dissolve, filling the azure with the pageantry of their indecipherable beauty. Speaking in the rhythm of a cloud processional, Vasseur creates an ekphrastic picture of an ever-changing spectacle: “Comme cela doit être doux et consolateur d’être malade parmi des choses claires, mouvantes, lointaines, dans des lumières argentées, sous ces grands ciels légers, capricieux et profonds, où les jolis nuages passent, glissent, disparaissent, et reviennent.”31 Just as – fleeting, imponderable – the episodes making up the book are airborne forms that condense and disintegrate, so Mirbeau’s book is a sky made beautiful by its unreadability. Space into which visionaries project their dreams, art accommodates all creation that forgets its history and welcomes death. All the despondent Vasseur wants is to read a kindred spirit’s sky book, to float among “les jolies pensées qui traversent sans cesse le ciel léger, capricieux, et profond d’un cerveau ami.”32 Both in theme and structure, Mirbeau’s novel rejects a definition of the art work as an object to which the creator relates as its proprietor. No book is a secure home furnished with cleverness, protected by walls of interpretive concurrence. In the story told by Arthur Lebeau, another of the novel’s supernumeraries, Mirbeau transposes himself as the burglar and his victim, property owner and thief. Whereas the crazed vagrant Jean Loqueteux, the subject of another story, is free to wander the highways since his treasure is just pebbles, the rich man is condemned to be the prisoner of his possessions. In his narrative, Lebeau recounts being awakened one night by the sound of his apartment being ransacked. Apprehensively emerging in his nightshirt, he had discovered a dapper home invader, reassuring with his unflappable demeanor and uncreased suit. A gentleman standing serenely amidst the debris of empty drawers, shattered glass, overturned furniture, fragile objects “neurasthéniques, comme tout le monde,”33 the unnamed thief had spoken to Lebeau in his own idiom. Skilled at using his polished diction, insouciant air, and confident reserve, the criminal had succeeded 31

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 185. 32

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in mirroring himself in the man he was robbing (“Ca doit être un homme de cercle,” as Lebeau had told himself). 34 In the dialogue between clubman and clubman, Mirbeau examines the idea of socially legitimate despoliation. It is only the unwashed, illiterate, inarticulate, unkempt stranger who is a dangerous malefactor, while the glib, sartorially impeccable intruder is a brother, a double, oneself. So prevalent are embezzlement and fraud – so corrupt are the putatively honorable institutions of finance, politics, and journalism – that theft is justified as the inevitable reallocation of resources. Money pathologized by being economized or hoarded is restored to health when it again begins to circulate. Forced by want to traffic in his own intellectual property, Mirbeau, the erstwhile nègre who, in the 1870’s, had been obliged to sell his talent, had come to understand the uncertain ownership of his work. Once commodified, published, and disseminated as newspaper columns or ghostwritten novels, art enters the public domain, becoming the property of all. In a world in which everyone steals from everyone, the selfplundering author, who takes from himself to give to himself, multiplies and thereby inflates the value of texts whose sameness becomes different when they are located in new settings. In Arthur Lebeau and his suave exploiter, Mirbeau resolves himself into the capitalist/guardian of his own writings and the opportunist who recycles them, showing that literary creation is a form of auto-cambriolage. One can choose virtually any episode in Mirbeau’s narrative to document his opposing the despair of solidifying like a mountain to the joy of flying like a cloud. In one account, Vasseur ascribes the voyager’s decontextualization to stories he tells himself, surmisals about people he sees fleetingly in hotels and trains. When it is set in Vannes, “près du collège des Jésuites.”35 Vasseur’s narrative unfolds in a place like the one where Mirbeau likely experienced a violation of his own body boundaries, a pedophilic attack on his own “Skin Ego,” a shattering of his boyhood identity. The invalid child and heartstricken father at the center of Vasseur’s account may transpose Mirbeau as the victim of sexual abuse and the parent guilty for having placed him in jeopardy. Reader conjecture about the autobiographical basis of the story extends the notion of storytelling as speculation without end. Vasseur begins his narrative by acknowledging his fondness for making up the 34 35

Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 225.

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histories of strangers, imagining their age, advancing theories that are impossible to verify. Conjectural narrative never repatriated in a home of confirmation is born of “une forme aigue de la curiosité” related to the discomforts of travelling. The trip becomes a story told to oneself – inspired, as Vasseur imagines, by “l’ennui inconscient que ressentent les gens jetés hors du chez-soi.”36 In place of the revealing metonymic fragment of the face, Vasseur focuses on the father’s defeated stoop, his bent back, which forms the subject of an entire short narrative: “un dos accablé, aux angles tristes, aux omoplates remontées, un dos implorant, un dos pathétique, le dos d’un homme qui a toujours pleuré.”37 Another wall preventing facial/visual deciphering of the person of interest, the back is a body part privileged because of its unreadability. Paucity of information is related to the compensatory wealth of theory, and the less Vasseur knows, the better he feels in making up stories he tells himself. As ephemeral as the little journeys inspiring it, Vasseur’s speculative narrative dies when he installs himself in temporary lodgings. Walls containing the corpse of the story are replicated by the walls of the room in an inn. Plagued by the feeling that he owes a comforting word to the inconsolable father, Vasseur transforms “cet insaisissable mot” into the words making up his story. Thus, the comforting language that could break down barriers that separate unhappy people are built up to enclose Vasseur in the sanctuary of his narrative narcissism. Here, Vasseur’s story is a vehicle distancing him from truth and experience, facilitating enjoyment of its construction, enabling him to forget its content and meaning. Memory thus becomes another heavy suitcase, burdensome property discarded so that one can fly. Vasseur sets aside interpersonal debt, the human obligation to succor a stranger, and after dining on oysters, contemplates the whitewashed walls of his room, clean like his conscience, and enjoys relinquishing a story whose conclusion brings absolution: “J’oubliai le siècle, j’oubliai la vie, la douleur humaine, j’oubliai tout, et je passai là une heure délicieuse et sans remords.”38 After all, what does it matter if Vasseur offers no solace to an anonymous wayfarer, or if his version of the man’s tragedy is accurate or true? As art supersedes its material, creativity is more important than objects, obsolete byproducts that the narrator throws away as he continues on his journey. Like Baudelaire, whose narrator invents a woman’s 36

Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 227. 38 Ibid., p. 229. 37

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biography as he looks up at her window, Vasseur makes no distinction between fiction and fact as long as his narrative transports him: “Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis?”39 By the end of the novel, Mirbeau’s nothing machine eliminates its original narrative pretext. Encounters with spa patrons confiding their personal history become increasingly infrequent, and Vasseur expands to fill the frame. Membranous walls through which Vasseur had eavesdropped on neighbors are effaced. Dermal boundaries dividing bodies, cranial cavities marking the space between people’s consciousness melt away, as the novel’s form and content promote intermingling and flow. Celebrating art as play, Mirbeau deplores the imposition of bureaucratic regulations that define a world of sanctions and punishments. In another episode, Vasseur tells of a wall that neither shelters nor beautifies, that does not structure space nor extend the skin of its owner. Instead, its sole function is to express unilateral authority, denying appeals, rejecting petitions, issuing decisions that are inhuman and irrevocable. Structurally articulating negation, the wall is the ear of a god who is deaf to prayer. Crowned by irises and dotted with poppies, Père Rivoli’s crumbling wall conveys its functional uselessness, creating, by its collapse, a sense of openness and ubiquity. But when Père Rivoli takes up a trowel and mortar and sets about repairing his wall, he is informed by the highway surveyor that he is liable to be fined if he performs unauthorized work or if the wall falls down and damages the road. Instead of creating a locus of anarchic confusion, the empty space of the wall forbids what it promises and retracts what it says. Threatened with penalties if he heeds the injunction, Père Rivoli is an exile on both sides of his wall. Instead of enclosing him in understanding and safety, the wall relegates him to a place of dispossession and impotence, so that, in despair, he hangs himself from the branch of a walnut tree. While it no longer exists, Père Rivoli’s wall is the barrier repelling communication, a surface on which words of a dialogue crash and fall back without joining in agreement or confluence. In Mirbeau’s novel, the most self-righteous characters are those confined inside the shell of their autistic dogmatism. Impervious to others’ ideas, they insist on the inviolability of their houses and the indisputability 39

Charles Baudelaire, “Fenêtres,” Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier, 1962), p. 174.

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of their values, citing institutional authority as more compelling than fact. An habitué of the spa casino, Colonel de Présalé invokes his patriotic sentiment as an ideological filter that protects him from hearing contradictory ideas. Etymologically defined, the cosmopolitans he excoriates are citizens of the world, inhabitants of a polis/city that is hospitable to all, a welcoming utopia that is universal and inclusive. For Présalé, however, nativism is a fortress protecting him from cultural miscegenation, preventing contamination by intellectuals and Jews, securing him inside the asylum of his bigotry. Unlike vagrants, tourists, and sojourners at sanitariums, the authochthon stays home, safe in the narrow space of his monocultural autonomy. Ethnocentrism performs the function of a “Skin Ego” by shielding against original thinking. Hedgehog-like, the militarists who appear in Mirbeau’s novel resort to the tautological reiteration of beliefs whose profession is proof. The racist prefers to evaluate by naming, erecting walls of pejorative stereotypes that differentiate self from other. Judgments emanating from institutional spokesmen are perceived as correct because the powerful pronounce them. Dreyfus is guilty because a guilty verdict requires it, and “un lascar qui se permet d’être innocent, sans l’ordre formel de ses chefs, c’est une crapule,” as Présalé adds categorically. 40 In the novel, the delirium of self-enthroning centripetality reaches a paroxysm in the character of General Archinard, a man whose walls Vasseur sees adorned with jaguar heads and human scalps. Enshrined in a trophy room covered in African tegument, Archinard shrinks to a point of narcissistic paranoia, in which victims and enemies are the world’s outer surface. Yet he also expands to fill a universe in which body boundaries are the skins of those he conquers, so that, as their glorious murderer, he is the occupant of everyone. Pathologizing des Esseintes’s plan to bind his library with Maroccan leather, reconverting other writers’ ideas into books that he flays and uses to cover walls, Archinard’s house embodies a megalomaniacal geometry. Usually situated on the other side of the wall, alterity is eliminated by being taken in and incorporated. Archinard’s room expresses the colonialist’s dream of making the self a center that is everywhere, the skin a circumference so vast that it is nowhere. Cosmos and ego, astre et cerveau – there is no need to travel or experience newness when there is a homology between the self and the infinite that is positioned inside an unmoving subject.

40

Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 74.

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Discussing gravity and flight, immortality and change, Mirbeau’s novel concludes in a place where its own material form is sloughed off on top of a mountain representing the waste deposits of history. Beleaguered by nightmares of unclimbable stairs, Vasseur first ascends, and by rising, increases the mass of the mountain, then goes down, and by descending, lays down the burden he forgets. Before going home, Vasseur describes paying a visit to an old friend, now living an eremetic existence in a windblasted, sparsely populated village high in Ariège in the Pyrenees. As Pierre Michel suggests, the conversation between the two acquaintances may be, in reality, “un dialogue intérieur, où, à l’instar de certains dialogues de Diderot, s’affrontent deux facettes de l’écrivain: d’un côté, le nihiliste, qui ne croit pas à la possibilité de parvenir au beau, au vrai ni au juste, et ne juge pas l’homme amendable; de l’autre, l’écrivain engagé, qui a besoin d’y croire – ou de faire comme s’il y croyait.”41 Set in an inhospitable landscape of despair, the final chapter substitutes place for plot, examining the chronotope of the mountain peak as a point from which one can go no higher. As the top of the world, the summit also marks the end of time, a cancellation of the future. There, all ideas have already been materialized as words as old as the geologic grave of their resting place. To Vasseur’s friend, Roger Fresselou, art is the corpse of its expressive futility, the mountain an accumulation of creative energy that petrifies, its growing stone triteness rising up toward the stars. Contrasting with the mountain’s immutable silence is the wind which, to Vasseur, is reoxygenating, a vehicle of original thought effecting movement and change: “Le vent est plein de germes, il transporte les pollens, charrie les graines… il féconde,” Vasseur says. Hearing this, Fresselou disagrees, describing wind-agitated trees as imitating the spastic dance of people convulsed by enthusiasms that are extinguished in an instant. Passions are the breath of illusion that stirs men and falls silent; love a susurrus of energy that expires and goes still. They pass, and the mountain of death is still dead. Everything is “immobile comme avant… Il n’y a rien de changé.”42 Ultimately, as Fresselou argues, all stairs and paths go nowhere, only ending at a wall that closes off further movement and hope. To what end does one dream and chase the chimera of better things? “Pourquoi t’agiter de la sorte?” he asks Vasseur. “Reste où tu es venu!”43 In Fresselou’s invitation to stop and be matter, he extols the selfsufficiency of death, recommends the blessedness of hibernation. Unlike 41

Michel, “Notes: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique,” p. 1149. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 265. 43 Ibid., p. 266. 42

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the seething manure pile, the rock mass and marble monument are cold memorials to ataraxic disengagement. On the mountain, Fresselou appreciates the beauty of the embalmed. For him, there is only vertical movement upward: rising from the base of the mountain and the formless mass of existence, until the cynosure of a perfect death is attained, when one reaches the zenith and can go no further. Different from him, Mirbeau and his narrator flee the colorless lichen and schistous sterility of mountanous wastelands. Leaving the utopia of white perfection, they choose a life of travel over the disappointment of arrival. Rejecting the stellogenetic model of insemination by the divine, Mirbeau develops a fictional dynamic that neither radiates out from the center nor collapses the universe onto the point of identity. For Clara Fistule, Emile Ollivier, General Archinard, the gravitational pull of the ego gathers everything, shrinks everything, twisting it into a vortex created by the abyssal pull of the self. Hedgehogs and paranoiacs follow this radial movement: from bristling quills to visceral softness, from danger to safety, from excitation to knowledge. But there is no creative eschatology that informs Mirbeau’s writing, directing his course toward death and completion. Mirbeau erects his own walls as motivational barriers, since their penetration or removal is what impels him to write. In Le Jardin des supplices, Clara had imagined, not resting in the sleep of the dead, but pushing with her feet against the sides of her coffin. With the nothing machine, the need to make a textual home for oneself is less urgent than the impulse to vacate it and start building a new one. A novel which begins with an involuntary departure toward neurasthenia, conformity, fashion, and mountains, Les 21 jours… ends with another departure the narrator chooses himself. Having experienced the refrigerative wisdom and paralyzing superiority known to heaven’s denizens, he descends from the cold peaks of muteness and knowledge and goes down to the valley – “vers les hommes, la vie, la lumière,” as he says 44 – where his voyage continues and his artistic work does not stop.

44

Ibid.

Chapter Nine The Novel as Machine: La 628-E8 By the time that Mirbeau published in 1907 the novel whose title bore the number of his licence plate, he had been an avid consumer of automobiles for almost seven years. Financially secure, Mirbeau had risen to the status of “une institution parisienne” 1 and so found himself in a position to indulge his appetite for cars – sleek, powerful vehicles affording him a new visual apprehension of the world. Electrified by celerity and disorientation, the motorist witnessed the frantic unfurling of landscapes animated by changing effects of light and perspective, exposing him to a succession of Impressionist tableaux: fields disintegrated into dots of sun and color, twitching telegraph poles, livestock on the roadside deformed by the traveler’s unhinged perspective. Nivet and Michel chart Mirbeau’s history as a car-buyer, his acquisition of various models having different ranges of horsepower: a Renault purchased in 1900, another in 1902, exchanged two weeks later for a 13,000-franc Panhard, two Charrons with dissimilar engines: some larger, more expensive, but each one new and exciting. “Quelle frénésie de consommation automobile!” Nivet and Michel exclaim over “la boulimie de notre dilettante.”2 Much of Mirbeau’s text is based on the author’s 1904 car tour of Belgium, Holland, and Germany. On a superficial level, Mirbeau’s travel narrative accomplishes the traditional purposes of expatriate chronicles – revealing to the writer the flaws of his homeland, stimulating interest in the cultural novelties of his host countries, combatting provincialism, promoting tolerance and fraternalism. Mirbeau had long been proficient in authoring narratives of dislocation: stories told by discharged chambermaids moving in and out of employers’ houses, tales of unsavory characters sojourning in China, vagabond neurasthenics making the summer rounds of spas, apochryphal accounts of Mirbeau’s own trip to India. Interested in the effects of narrative fracture, Mirbeau turns his attention from the character who travels, focusing instead on the divorce of the viewer from his viewpoint. In La 628-E8, the nothing machine effects 1 2

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 729. Ibid., p. 766.

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the perceptual disunion of the subject and the reality he experiences. Carrying on where he had left off in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Mirbeau abandons traditional concerns with character and plot, examining instead an array of abstract forces: inertia, momentum, mass, density, gravitational pull, escape velocity. For Mirbeau, human subjects merge with the landscape seen from cars, the amnesiac motorist’s consciousness blurring like the things he passes by. More interesting than moving people is the phenomenon of transience. In place of the perceiving subject, there is his perceptual dynamic. It is natural that in his panegyric to speed and change, Mirbeau likens himself, not to the traveler, but to the vehicle transporting him. In La 628-E8, the creative imagination becomes a fuel-thirsty engine, consuming experience, carbureting it with style, oxidizing life, burning it efficiently, expelling textual emissions that are odorless and clean. Unlike stale reservoirs of cultural artifacts, midden-like museums rank with the smell of putrefying art, Mirbeau’s novel exists only in the moment of combustion. Before inspiration is converted into literature, it is an energy source that sets the artistic enterprise in motion. Mirbeau’s vertiginous account of automotive tourism celebrates a narrative dynamic that never decelerates or parks. Taxonomically uncatchable, it is an hallucination and a travelog, a kaleidoscope of memories, and a montage of dreams. “Est-ce bien un journal?” he asks. “Est-ce même un voyage?”3 Since it never stops, Mirbeau’s novel does not answer the central question that it poses: What is the usefulness of art works not arrested as finished objects? Do created works, like novels or painted canvases, have value other than as raw material to be utilized in new production? What happens after they are removed from galleries or archives, pestilential places that generate corruption? With its zigzagging, hurried motion, Mirbeau’s book drives off the road that had determined the direction of conventional works of fiction. In place of sequential narrative, governed by necessities of plot development, La 628-E8 follows Mirbeau’s highway journey in its movement from place to place. Characterized by meanders, contradictions, and reversals, Mirbeau’s commentary seems occasioned by circumstance and location. As he eschews the linearity of train travel that denies the chance for spontaneous detours, he stops his narrative when he wishes in order to make associational observations. Casually changing tone in the same way 3

Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 295.

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that he modifies his itinerary, Mirbeau ironizes the seriousness of his earlier pretensions, deflating the image of the motorist as an elemental force of nature, showing the machine-man of the future stopped by sheep crossing the road. Episodic structure, palinodic inconsistency are features of Mirbeau’s exercise in fictional innovation, one not pictured on any map of conventional novelistic form. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau intends his text not to be a graceful, static object, but a machine that channels forces in the performance of a task. From the beginning, Mirbeau identifies his text with the vehicle it praises, not just considering what his perceptions are from his privileged vantage point in his vehicle, but investigating how the outside world reacts to the phenomenon of car travel. Racing ahead, provoking wonderment and outrage in those it hurtles by, the novel-as-car is frightening in its bright, ballistic passage. Because it is alive, it restores life in those it touches. Activating the mind, sharpening the eye, the automotive novel is also a force for progress – not in the sense of the hoary shibboleth that defends institutional conservatism, but as a means of advancing into a future that is rich with uncertainty. In his opening dedication to automobile manufacturer Fernand Charron, Mirbeau discusses the interaction of literature and journalism. Mirbeau thunders against the press as a judge of cultural artifacts, because its normative evaluations assume an authoritative tone that stifles differing opinions. Dissension for Mirbeau is evidence of life while unthinking unanimity is a sign of death. With its diet of conventional works of art, journalism as an institution betrays a morbid inflexibility. In its anal preoccupation with revenue and profit, it never deviates from its regimen of cultural commentary and fails to publicize news of technological innovation. While criticizing the press for its venality and commercialism, Mirbeau acknowledges the value of commodity exchange, condemning journalists for discussing only statues, books, and paintings while disdaining the pleasure coming “d’un objet fabriqué et qui se vend.”4 Like decay that sustains new organisms, exchanging immortality for growth, commodities are material that remains in constant circulation. The marketplace succeeds the cemetery as the site of metamorphosis, as money and goods change hands, and, in changing hands, are changed themselves. For Mirbeau, creativity should not involve devaluation of the self as object, but commitment to work that combats complacency and stagnation. The purpose of the art work is not to mummify the artist, allowing him to 4

Ibid., p. 290.

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cheat death by exchanging the future for posterity. Unlike the incurious creator whose products are cadavers, true geniuses, as Mirbeau says, are those “qui travaillent, luttent et trouvent.” 5 Mirbeau’s hostility to monuments and enthusiasm for machines are the result of his insistence on the healthiness of creative work. Admiring the car whose speed compresses the time and space that it crosses, Mirbeau is receptive to the view that automobiles may be aesthetically appealing. When their motion is arrested, they can be appreciated for their symmetry, whence Mirbeau’s praise of Charron for giving his machine “une forme harmonieuse,” for endowing it, “comme un objet d’art, de sa part de beauté.”6 But with its lungs and heart of steel, its electrical innervation – with “son système vasculaire de caoutchouc et de cuivre”7 – the vehicle, like the body to which it is assimilated, comes alive with its ignition that sets it in motion. Showcasing a creative dynamic that shuns completion of its project, Mirbeau’s novel illustrates fanciful variants on the laws of physics. Zooming in his car, Mirbeau notes the engine’s deafening roar, the epileptic dance of pedestrians and hedges, speed’s frenzied abolition of stationary objects. Non-motorized life, “animée d’un mouvement fou, d’un mouvement de charge de cavalerie […] disparaît cinématographiquement.”8 If velocity cancels gravity, then an object becomes lighter the faster that it goes. Conversely, slow motion produces material precipitates, as things that were invisible in their crazed and blinding passage become heavier, clearer, easier to see, and yet less interesting to look at. Mirbeau’s speculator friend, Weil-See, may forecast the establishment of a gnosticracy, government by knowledge-brokers instead of domination by the rich, but the position of Mirbeau’s narrator is one of epistemophobic hurry. Ideas half-understood are rich in hermeneutic possibility. Before supposition can solidify as knowledge, all theories are valid, and future possibilities are limitless. Like a monument to the dead, a definition narrows meaning, forbidding language-users from engaging in ambiguity as play. By problematizing the status of his book (Is it a diary? Is it a trip?), Mirbeau restores the signifying potential of his novel to mean anything. Thus, the nothing machine targets fiction with its undefinability as a genre. A highway poem, a chronicle of stops in customs houses and 5

Ibid. Ibid., p. 291. 7 Ibid., p. 290. 8 Ibid., p. 299. 6

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hotels, a farrago of comments on Belgian aviculturists and Jewish refugees, La 628-E8 offers a reflection on its own polysemic richness. Streaking across the incoherence of its varying terrain, Mirbeau’s novel never stops so that one can identify what it is. Initially, the hyperkinetic race from place to place brings a sense of temporal overlapping and telescoped experience. Yet the intensity of impressions seems paradoxically to correlate with Mirbeau’s withdrawal of attention from everything he sees. It is because nothing absorbs the traveler that he flees from Rocroy’s desolation to the flowering expanses of the Netherlands. In a study of temporal dynamics, Peter Hartocollis explains why time moves quickly for adults while it seems to slow for children waiting for pleasurable events. Like the automobile conveying the blasé motorist across Europe, time, in Hartocollis’s view, is another means of transportation, moving fast for those indifferent to “contact-dependent sensory gratification,”9 progressing torpidly for the young in whom instinctual drives remain predominant. “The stronger the wish,” writes Hartocollis, “the more impatient one gets with the flow of time, which experientially represents the vehicle of getting to the source of gratification – the means of achieving wish fulfillment. The stronger the wish, the slower the flow of time appears to be; and, vice versa, as the wish loses its urgency, […] time appears to move […] faster.”10 From this standpoint, it is not a superabundance of life experience that propels Mirbeau in his drive from stimulus to stimulus. Rather, it is the fear of slowing down, seeing the immobilizing influence of apathy, that causes him to confuse the paucity of his interest for the diversity of the spectacle. Mirbeau is less impatient to arrive than he is anxious to depart. Stopping overnight in Amsterdam, he notifies his chauffeur that he plans a prolonged stay – a few weeks, perhaps a month – to savor the Rembrandts in museums, the teeming ports, the colorful tulip gardens. But in no time, Mirbeau again succumbs to the impulse to move on, giving in to the lure of “la vitesse névropathique” which he calls “une maladie mentale.”11 Outside his car, Mirbeau still emulates its forward-charging recklessness, as rubber tires turn into rubber soles that bounce like tennis balls on pavement. As he runs through portrait galleries, along canals and over bridges, filmic scenery seems to unspool as he hastens ever faster – like a tourist who stands still while the world around him flashes past. It is the 9

Peter Hartocollis, “On the Experience of Time and Its Dynamics: With Special Reference to Affects,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 24.2 (1976), p. 367. 10 Ibid. 11 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 299.

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traveler’s disconnection from reality that deforms the visual objects he flies by in hurried panic, leaving as the only recognizable picture “une image forcenée, une image de vertige et de vitesse: la mienne,” as Mirbeau says.12 The inescapability of the self defines the dimensions of a prison housing the compulsive border-crosser in his quest for transformative alienation. Mirbeau’s antipathy for customs checkpoints, his interest in national boundaries suggest a search for a homeland that can be universalized as everywhere. The idealized native country that is imagined as ubiquitous corresponds to the narcissistic inflation of a subject who aspires to be limitless. Fixed identities are like novels read too often, like familiar paintings that elicit formula responses. A stable sense of self becomes another set of walls, more confining knowledge whose incontrovertibility obstructs self-invention and renewal. G. Raymond Babineau describes a chronic traveler dissatisfied with every country that he visited, for whom “[g]eographical flight and expatriation were defenses […] used in his psychological distress.”13 For this figure, happiness could be found only in a place without a border line, where the dilated self could expand to fill the world. Too disabused to believe that utopian dreams could be fulfilled, Mirbeau uses his automotive novel to combat his countrymen’s parochialism, creating an image of the motorist as a citizen of all lands, designating the highway as an escape from ethnocentrism and closed-mindedness. He describes his apprehension when, on a sunny April morning, he had set out on a car trip to Germany and Holland. The alarming national stereotype of a race of militaristic brutes extends to Mirbeau’s image of the primitivity of the German highway system: “Des cloaques…, des fondrières…, des abîmes,” as he imagines.14 If national borders are body boundaries, points of contact between self and others, facility of access is topologically represented by roads and bridges, whose condition is equated with the hospitality of the populace. Gruff, cold, belligerent, Teutons are expected to express their unfriendliness as highways whose disrepair discourages outsiders from coming in. Yet what Mirbeau finds is a mild, pipe-smoking gentleman, interested in cars and welcoming in his demeanor – like German roads which he describes as “comme du parquet ciré.”15

12

Ibid., p. 301. G. Raymond Babineau, “The Compulsive Border Crosser, Psychiatry 35 (1972), p. 288. 14 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 313. 15 Ibid., p. 316. 13

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Added to the sexual symbolism of metal cars penetrating unfamiliar lands, exotic bodies accessed by smooth pavement and lubricated canals, is the motorist’s dual objective to enter others and leave himself, the wish to refresh an identity made stale by its well-mapped familiarity. Corresponding to Mirbeau’s excoriation of technophobes as misoneists is his horror of things that are old and fossilized, a phobia for monuments that is evident in his fiction. As bodies are reinvigorated by cultural exchange, activated by the healthy circulation of vehicles, products, and ideas, they are also sickened by complacency and routine. The coprophilic stagnation of a nation fixated on the treasures of its history is evident in France’s attachment to the gilded grandeur of Louis XIV furniture, law, architecture, court protocol, and geometrical gardens. Here Mirbeau opposes the hygienic rapidity of cultural advancement to an institution’s static admiration of its magnificence. The stylistic heaviness of Mirbeau’s description fills his picture of Versailles with his references to excrement: “draps […] souillés par les déjections,” “chaises percées,” “ambulantes ordures,” “une persistante odeur de musc et de merde.”16 Soiled by his immobilizing attention to the uncleanness of le grand siècle, Mirbeau restarts his vehicle, eager to escape a fetid past in favor of a better ventilated present. Singing the praises of the ideologically progressive Cour contemporaine, whose “vertus rafraîchissantes” wash away the stain of his description, Mirbeau cultivates an ahistoricism that moves him from the Sun King’s stifling chambers to “les appartements enfin aérés, enfin désinfectés de Rambouillet.”17 Corresponding to his embrace of unfamiliar cultures is Mirbeau’s derisive denigration of Belgians’ Francophilia, their besotted infatuation with French art and Parisian mores, which obstructs Mirbeau in his exploration and puts him back where he had left. The worshipful aestheticism of the narrator’s convives is materialized as the gourmandise that makes painting another foodstuff. Canvases seen in the Salon des Indépendants are assimilated to comestibles, consumed like grilled lobster, cream pastries, or bottles of Clos Vougeot. Belgian taste – like the Belgian diet – is too heavy, rich, and cloying, preventing a healthy and original assimilation of French art. Deploring the reiteration of popular opinion, Mirbeau illustrates the dialectical interplay of novelty and triteness. Mirbeau’s view of Belgium is that it is a miniaturized Paris, that its imitativeness does nothing to enrich the diversity of Europe’s culture. 16 17

Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 322.

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Evident in the Belgians’ infatuation with Paris, the alluvium of derivative opinion is a materialization of mass taste that has solidified and hardened. Every time another idiot contemplates a painting by Van Eyck, his interpretation obscures the picture with an overlay of stupidity, la crasse that makes the work increasingly difficult to see. Better than the dirty film of academic criticism are the idiosyncratic, personal responses of untrained individuals – like the woman who, when standing before a painting by Vermeer, tells her children: “Examinez bien ce vieux-là, mes enfants. Comme il ressemble à votre grand-père!”18 Mirbeau realizes that meaning-giving institutions like academies are unreceptive to points of view at variance with the official one. The energy and work required to set things into motion are overwhelmed by the inertia that keeps things where they are. In what is itself a kind of allegory whose significance is unmistakable, Mirbeau illustrates this point with a story of creative petrifaction. Commissioned by the president of La Ligue des Droits de l’homme, a nationally recognized Belgian artist, Constantin Meunier, undertakes to produce a sculptural representation of Emile Zola. Different from the ekphrastic passage from visual to verbal imagery, the equation of books with authors who are converted into stone takes life’s volatility and freezes it as sculpture’s coldness. Mirbeau’s own description of the celebrated naturalist titan is filled with an unstable array of catachreses, paradoxical formulations suggesting the complexity of Zola and his life. Corresponding to the mobility of Zola’s physiognomy is the storm of adulation and censure with which his works were greeted. Like his novels, Zola was a machine that generated controversy, always stirring up the winds of vehemence and passion: “Zola a créé, toujours, autour de lui, de la tempête. Il n’est pas étonnant que la bourrasque souffle encore.”19 It was Meunier’s unfortunate job to depict a machine turned off by death, capturing Zola as he was permanently cast as his reputation among survivors. The impoverishing dismemberment of Zola’s sprawling oeuvre, rich in its thematic multifariousness, is what Meunier best communicates in his failed, reductive sculpture: the author flanked by a miner, a clod of earth, and a naked statue of the Truth. Worse than the symbolic penury and triteness of Meunier’s work, it is his medium that is hostile to the activation of ideas. As a sparkling Impressionist image is extinguished by its frame, sculpture kills its subject with its marmoreally static 18 19

Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., p. 361.

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changelessness. Instead of being a machine pulsating with energy and sound, performing work, affecting users, sculpture is art that objectifies, leaving behind works exuding “l’imbécillité lâche et surnoise des choses, car l’on dirait,” as Mirbeau theorizes, “que les choses elle-mêmes ont de la haine, une haine atroce, une haine humaine, contre ce qui est juste et beau.”20 From Belgium, where the only motion was the recycling of received ideas, Mirbeau’s narrative vehicle continues on to Anvers, a commercial port and point of confluence for waterways from everywhere: “Les fleuves qui sont humains s’y unissent à la mer surnaturelle.” 21 If rivers are moving roadways, supplying their own propulsive force, the sea enchants Mirbeau because of its infinite size and omnidirectional movement, confounding the human tendency to shrink big phenomena to small explanations. Like a car devouring the pavement that it covers, consuming space in its rush to reach unknown sights and new experiences, Mirbeau adjusts his appetite to the present opportunity for satisfaction. Contemplation of the ocean arouses the spectator’s omnivoracity, a limitless hunger matching the boundlessness of the visual object. As Mirbeau writes: “Le chant des sirènes enfièvre, jusqu’au délire, ma curiosité du monde entier.”22 The intoxicating sights, sounds, and smells of the port – the glistening torsos of longshoremen hefting barrels of lard, the iron arms of cranes wheeling in the sky, the grinding of men and machinery, the screech of seagulls – the sensory overstimulation of a spatial and temporal present triggers Mirbeau’s flight into an unexplored future elsewhere. No longer travelling in an automobile following a limiting network of highways, Mirbeau imagines boarding a ship, setting sail into the ocean’s tracklessness. Here again, Mirbeau assimilates the structural rigidity of conventional novelistic form to maps of space that eliminate mystery with knowledge. Like tautologically unambiguous fiction whose didacticism prescribes a reading, the locomotive offers the train traveler no surprises but only carries him down the predetermined linearity of its rails. With its morbid emphasis on geometry and clocks, its confinement to a Euclidean universe of planes and intersections, trains pervert the marriage of humans to machines. Articulating a kind of technological Darwinism, Mirbeau 20

Ibid., pp. 361-2. Ibid., p. 384. 22 Ibid., p. 385. 21

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criticizes the locomotive as an inadequately evolved, overspecialized, insufficiently adaptable mechanical species: “De même que tant de formes régressives, qui ne correspondent plus aux besoins de l’homme nouveau, elle doit fatalement disparaître.”23 For Mirbeau, hermeneutics is like cartography. The best art is art that resists oversimplifying analyses, wiping out all traces of previous explanation. No steel tracks or paved surfaces prescribe a route across the sea or define the ascending path of a balloon into the sky: “L’esthétique des objets d’art est infiniment plus mystérieuse et, par conséquent, infiniment plus confuse,” as Mirbeau says. 24 In La 628-E8, as in Mirbeau’s other novels, he describes the malaise he experiences in mountanous terrain. The summit is not a place where one rises into heaven. Instead, with the crushing enormity of its geologic mass, a mountain only increases the gravity that pulls the climber down. Since he is impatient with the futility of metaphysical conjecture, Mirbeau’s narrative is rarely structured by the vertical axis of religion, but instead is situated along the horizontal plane of human interaction. It is not a person’s place to travel through the air, and as Dans le ciel attested, man formulates ideals of unattainable perfection and then projects them into the sky, the realm he is forbidden from inhabiting. Dirigibles and flying machines are swollen, grotesque vessels, their inflation like the hubris of the engineers who make them. Airships resemble pterosaurs in being destined for extinction and, along with locomotives, are another means of transport that will vanish. “Ces monstres d’avant l’histoire […] devaient faire de bonds inutiles, et leur stupidité seule les empêchait de s’étonner de leur maladresse énorme.”25 For Mirbeau, different modes of transportation are like different modes of expression, and because it offers a balance of freedom and structure, Mirbeau adopts the model of fictional narrative as car travel. Thus, in comments that apply to his own work, Mirbeau shows deference to traditional aesthetic principles, reflecting on the harmony between an automobile’s form and function. Decrying the disproportion between a chassis and an engine, he ridicules bombastic cars with big bodies and puny motors, bemoans the ugliness of hoods resembling insect elytrons, and equates the value of a vehicle with an ability to transport users. Always in flight from the prison of self-consistency, the motorist drives away, “toujours plus haut et toujours plus loin.” Chasing the chimera of his 23

Ibid., pp. 386-7. Ibid., p. 389. 25 Ibid., p. 387. 24

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dreams, the mirage of his ideals, he seeks uncompassed life, “vague, vague, hélas,” Mirbeau says, “comme nos désirs et nos destinées.”26 In their displacement of air and water, the car and ship unsettle their environment. Similarly, for Mirbeau, art not only transports its consumers, but, by its turbulence, destabilizes a set of fixed aesthetic principles. Critics’ hostility to Impressionism is like the astonished indignation of the fist-brandishing pedestrians Mirbeau passes on the road. Mirbeau’s ecstatic appreciation of the dissolution of body boundaries is paralleled by the art work’s disintegration as an object and its diffusion into a universe of renewal, change, and motion. Like the effects of his vehicular novel on the audience it traverses, the author unleashes wind and fear, churns up confusion’s swirling dust: “j’ai conscience que je suis moimême un peu de cet espace, un peu de ce vertige.”27 Art’s purpose is to merge with the tumultuous world that it infuses with its energy, becoming another cog in “cette inconcevable usine: l’univers.”28 A similar impulse motivates the author’s disparagement of historic preservation societies, organizations dedicated to saving lichen-covered ruins, enshrining crasse-encrusted collections of cultural artifacts. Instead, Mirbeau extols the modernity of Romanche’s hydroelectric plant, its harnessing the energy of rivers, its channeling the power of waterfalls, converting “toutes les farouches forces que la nature n’employait qu’à la destruction,”29 and turning chaos and cacophony into order and light. In a novel that embraces motion and eschews stasis and stagnation, Mirbeau focuses on characters who are undefinable and vagabond, undomiciled in systems of taxonomic explanation. Readers of Mirbeau are familiar with his unusual fictional universe, its being peopled with reprobates and outlaws, lunatics and pariahs. These maladjusted and marginalized figures are unassimilated by society and resist attempts to process them into demographic data. Mirbeau’s novels often thematize the rage that respectable people feel when confronted by those undomesticated by civilizing institutions. They are the jobless and the homeless like the visionary madman Père Pamphile, who lives amidst the debris of his failed utopian dream, or the itinerant chambermaid Célestine, whose impertinence uproots her and makes her move from place to place. It is unsurprising that a travel narrative like La 628-E8 should showcase tramps

26

Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., p. 389. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 393. 27

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and transients, emigrants and exiles, misanthropes and missionaries who belong nowhere and live everywhere. For Mirbeau, wanderlust experienced as daydream is a luxury undiminished by the discomfort of an actual voyage. Projecting his fantasies beyond the sea’s horizon, Mirbeau experiences a pleasure uncompromised by embarking on a ship. But when it is not a means of refreshing a perspective dulled by the crasse of routine, vagrancy can be a hardship that deadens the mind and breaks the spirit. Delaying the progress of Mirbeau’s fictional journey, his long commentary on the plight of the persecuted Jew constitutes a detour into a shadowy corner of the narrator’s mental landscape. Unloaded like unwanted cargo on the dock, the Jew is arrested motion, part of a bright but static spectacle of tired children and their mothers, vermin-ridden women in red rags and copper jewelry. Mirbeau’s narrative usually follows the trajectory of a bullet, rarely deviating from its path into ideological commentary, ordinarily advancing into a future unclouded by self-analysis or retrospection. As subject matter utilized to fuel his novel’s engine, Mirbeau’s memories, anecdotes, and desultory reflections are burned up and forgotten as they propel the story forward. That is why Mirbeau’s ambivalent remarks on anti-Semitism and its victims are like exhaust left in the wake of the passage of his book. More than the Jew whom he interrogates, it is Mirbeau’s own descriptions that form an evil-smelling pile in the middle of his narrative, “entassés là, pêle-mêle, dans la puanteur […] de leur crasse.”30 It is as if residual prejudice dating from the era of Grimaces is pollution that Mirbeau’s otherwise clean engine spews from its tailpipe.31 In a catalogue of horrors – storefront windows shattered by volleys of rifle fire, businesses looted, children violated by the Russian soldiers who have murdered them – Mirbeau repeats the old Jew’s heartbreaking story, interspersing the second-hand narrative with parenthetical remarks on infelicities in the speaker’s French, his deformed pronunciation, the drool that streaks his chin, his sour, mephitic breath. As if mirroring the stoppage 30

Ibid., p. 400. With its first issue appearing on July 21, 1883, Les Grimaces, a bi-weekly pamphlet, struck a frequently strident polemical tone. Despite its Bonapartist sentiments, Les Grimaces enjoyed popular support, presumably because of its attacks on the powerful and the rich. No doubt Mirbeau’s anti-Semitic feelings were motivated by his antipathy for the mythically wealthy, landless Jews. “Aujourd’hui,” he wrote in “L’invasion,” an article of September 15, 1883, “ils roulent leurs sacs d’écus sur nos consciences et nos dignités. Paris s’est laissé envahir, puis conquérir par le juif qui l’exploite âprement: le mâle avec la toute-puissance de son argent, la femelle avec la toute-puissance de sa beauté” (qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 166).

31

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in his automotive story, Mirbeau comments on the old Jew’s inability to weep, an emotional dysfunction occasioned by the atrocities he witnessed. Mirbeau similarly remarks on his own dumbfounded shock, a gap that the novel’s recitation fills in only later. Finally, Mirbeau explains his own inadequate response, inviting readers to consider the inappropriateness of the story. More advisable, perhaps, than disclosing his personal sensibilities would be the exclusion of a passage that only incriminates the storyteller. “Et puis à quoi bon parler?” Mirbeau wonders apophatically. “Que pouvais-je dire qui n’eût pas été ridicule et glacé devant un si affreux exemple du malheur humain?”32 Mirbeau’s vestigial anti-Semitism is incorporated in a project involving abolition of the art work and its transformation into movement. In Mirbeau’s recycling of ancient stereotypes, the Jew first disappears, renouncing the cacophonous patronym that facilitated identification, then comes back no longer stinking of his repellent, old ethnicity, but appears “sous des noms d’emprunt, des noms ronflants et qui n’ont pas d’odeur.” 33 No longer objectified as a human being with a history or proper name, the Jew is money washed of guilt that no longer smells of excrement (pecunia non olet). Mirbeau absolves himself for repeating familiar scurrilous opinions by claiming that anti-Jewish views leave their target still unscathed: “elles s’émoussent et se brisent sur sa cuirasse d’or.”34 Mirbeau’s equivocal position may be based on the idea that the commerce Jews initiate resembles circulating traffic, integrating them into a dynamic of barter, trade, and selling whereby goods cannot be appropriated but exist only as their transmission. Yet unlike the moving car, the eternally wandering Semite is still susceptible to incrustation by other people’s bigotry. Professing horror at the barbarism of colonial exploitation, Mirbeau implicates himself in the process of refining raw materials into finished consumer products, as matter passes through unstable states of transformative manufacture. In his reflection on the commercial use of Congolese red rubber, Mirbeau begins by recounting his contemplation of an unremarkable Belgian store display. On tabletops, in back room cases, he sees an array of random merchandise: raincoats, machine joints, cable sections, automobile tires, molded dogs, figurines whose navels are formed from mechanical incisions. Like unoriginal art, these objects are 32

Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 411. Ibid., p. 401. 34 Ibid. 33

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uninteresting to Mirbeau because they have reached their final form as incorruptible cadavers, static things whose use and meaning resist reformulation: “Tout cela est vieux, usagé, comme on dit.”35 Of course, the magic of the author’s creativity takes these dormant specimens, spellbound by their functional simplicity, and, through style and imagination, succeeds in bringing them to life. Gone are the nondescript clerk and the colorless shop merchandise, and in their place emerges the lavishness of sun-flooded African plains, the beauty of indigenous people with their glass beads and gleaming teeth. Mirbeau distinguishes between a production dynamic that takes an African tree extract and converts it into waterproof jackets, and the acquisition of objects that reinforces their users’ narcissistic selfpossession. Mirbeau describes the fantasm of building secondary bodies, appropriating others as material with which to fortify the self. As colonies are the expanded body of the nation that exploits them, so General Archinard in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique covers the surfaces of his room with the flayed skins of African women, making his victims’ cutaneous envelopes into the walls of his residence. Similarly, in La 628E8, King Glé Glé of Dahomey paves his palace roof with skulls of the subjects whom he murders and utilizes as material for construction. The centripetal orientation of these self-immuring impulses is the opposite of the radial dilation of the restless, roving car traveler, who drives away from guilt on tires made of Congolese red rubber. More than to Belgium or Germany, Mirbeau is intially drawn to Holland because of the hum of its industry, the vitality of its commerce, its dedication to the dynamics of manufacture. In Holland, movement never stops. Dutch vessels constantly encircle the globe; the air rings with the pounding of hammers and the screech of pulleys. Rather than being used in the production of objects, technology designs “machines à construire des machines,”36 making the Netherlands, like Mirbeau’s ideal novel, an instrument “en travail de vie.” It is natural that it is in Rotterdam that Mirbeau should meet his friend Weil-See, a fanciful madman whose own objective is the obliteration of matter, knowledge, and certainty and their translation into “futures.” Formerly “un marchand d’énergie à Grenoble,”37 Weil-See had begun trafficking in abstraction. Once Weil-See’s business interests had focused him on subterranean materials, a hyper-embodied reality to be 35

Ibid., p. 377. Ibid., p. 445. 37 Ibid., p. 453. 36

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transmuted into money. As with Mirbeau’s other artist characters, WeilSee’s goal is the spagyrical refinement of nature’s materia prima into something rarer, lighter. Working with buried substances, he had dreamed the alchemist’s dream of concentrating and purifying, taking Siberian graphite and Transylvanian manganese and turning them into gold as the perfect symbol. As Gilbert Durand says: “l’or n’est rien d’autre que le principe substantiel des choses, leur essence incarnée.”38 The teleology of Weil-See’s speculative magic is the movement from physics to metaphysics, from information to probabilities, and from bodies to statistics. Unballasted by reason, Mirbeau’s conversations with Weil-See are like balloon trips in which the passenger is buffeted by the winds of his interlocutor’s insane genius. For Mirbeau’s narrator, Weil-See’s tendency toward rarefied intellection defines the limit beyond which the fantasy of destroying objects should not pass. Proficient in the distillation of referents into language, the fiction writer knows the technique of converting consensual reality into the expression of his stylized vision. Weil-See goes further, trying to destroy all points of reference, inducing a stomach-churning horror born of weightlessness and floating. As Mirbeau says, Weil-See “avait cette puissance extraordinaire de communiquer son malaise, sa peine, son vertige, sa torture, à la matière la plus inerte.” 39 In Weil-See’s resolution of phenomena into mathematical uncertainties, stable meanings are lost, explanatory narratives, like Judeo-Christianity and capitalism, are disintegrated, and no longer protect man against existential drift. Conventional symbols – “so important,” as C. Fred Alford has observed, “because they provide the framework within which we may contain our dread”40 – begin to leak and then collapse. While he is listening to WeilSee’s anti-gravitational expatiation, matter is turned to value, value into wealth, wealth into knowledge, and knowledge into imagination. Hearing this, Mirbeau begins to feel a nauseating buoyancy: “Un dégoût de vivre, pire que la peur de mourir, me tenait suspendu en l’air… Non, en vérité, je ne pesais plus.”41 In La 628-E8, the traveler hastens so that his identity does not calcify. Anxious to escape dusty temples for the freedom of the highway, Mirbeau flees all institutions entrusted with certifying meaning. Receding in the distance as his vehicle speeds away are the Comédie-Française 38

Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 300. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 459. 40 C. Fred Alford, “A Psychoanalytic Study of Evil,” American Imago 56.1 (1999), p. 37. 41 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 460. 39

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repertoire, collections of Louis XIV artifacts, museum halls congested with cultural relics from the past. But in Weil-See’s speculation on adventitiousness and accident, life’s uncertainty is material to be commercially exploited. The insurance policies that Weil-See sells indemnify the holder against truth and lies, war and peace, tyranny and freedom. They protect against the experience to which Mirbeau subjects his readers, offering compensation for exposure to “l’amour, la littérature.”42 The gnosticracy that Weil-See predicts will succeed the despotic rule of oligarchs only replaces wealth with knowledge as the socially petrifying agency. Shielded against spontaneity, gnosticrats learn a hopelessness born of wisdom, ineluctably evolving “au nihilisme parfait de l’indifférence absolue.”43 Paradoxically, Weil-See’s statistical framework, exchanging life for actuarial data, works in the opposite sense of the theory that he claims to be propounding. Weil-See gains neither wealth nor fame by forsaking empirical knowledge in favor of hypothetical purity. Intellectually dispossessed of everything he discusses, he lacks the passionate convictions that comfort ideologues and zealots. He writes no novels, builds no monuments, acquires no fortune, earns no glory, but only dissipates himself in chimerical conjecture. Weil-See is contemptuous of the divinity who made the world, the God whose creativity was objectified as Creation: “Voyons!... il pouvait continuer à penser, à rêver le monde, pendant l’éternité des éternités… Et il l’a créé?... L’imbécile!... Et il l’a créé tel qu’il est encore?”44 In a universe where reality is regressed to potentiality, where finished objects revert to their embryonic forms, all knowledge disappears and one loses his direction. Weil-See’s world is rid of monuments and mummies, funereal art celebrating the permanence of old ideas. Yet, for him, meaning and history are also vain and fleeting notions that can be entertained momentarily and unceremoniously discarded. In this unmapped realm, one experiences disorientation and anxiety, “experienced as a feeling of leaking or dissolving, disappearing or falling into shapeless, unbounded space.”45 Unanchored in the physical reality to which they ostensibly allude, Weil-See’s words become autonomous entities evoking, not

42

Ibid., p. 453. Ibid., p. 458. 44 Ibid., pp. 458-9. 45 Alford, “A Psychoanalytic Study of Evil,” p. 36. 43

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objects, but other words. Ideas beget ideas without epistemological weight, as Weil-See’s conversations become a gyre of pure association. The vertigo that Mirbeau feels while he listens to his friend is most incapacitating when the two are crossing the bridges of Rotterdam. A topological compendium of descriptions of borders, highways, customs offices, and canals, Mirbeau’s novel is a rich source of psychogeographical allusion. Ordinarily, Mirbeau subordinates the spatio-temporal presence of an object to the problematic future goal of a distant destination. The bridge itself is a link, structural evidence that here can be augmented and enriched by its connection to an elsewhere. But in his dialogues with Weil-See, the bridge no longer facilitates transitions from one thought to another, no longer is a means of intercultural communication. According to Sandor Ferenczi, the conventional symbolic meaning of the bridge is a phallic one, suggesting “the powerful organ of the father, which unites two landscapes.”46 However, in this passage, the bridge no longer is an architectural construct connecting two societies. Instead, it becomes a “word-bridge,” indicating “a mental or logical relation,” a signifier “without a material parallel, that is, one relating to ideas of objects,” and therefore functioning, as Ferenczi says, as “a pure autosymbolism.”47 After a few days, Mirbeau tires of Weil-See’s ratiocinations, and his interlocuor complains of feeling trapped inside the mirror-box of his solipsism. Each thought is just a bridge whose completion constructs another bridge, enabling the vehicle of Weil-See’s ideation to travel farther into nothingness: “Le passé est mort… le présent agonise, et demain il sera mort aussi… […] rien que l’avenir… les hypothèses… les probabilités… ce qu’ils appellent l’irréalisable.”48 Conversations with Weil-See are opaque and gaseous things like the clouds of smoke coalescing above the heads of Amsterdam’s speculators, who take the pipes from their mouths to speak in an archaic, cryptic French and are happily uncomprehending of the responses Mirbeau proffers. Like the page of Salammbô Weil-See recites to an African king, they are mellifluous noise enveloping the head of an indifferent addressee. While the highway sign shows the motorist the way to his destination, Weil-See’s verbal signs only designate themselves as pure pathways, each thought another span of pavement his listener covers en route to nowhere. 46

Sandor Ferenczi, “The Symbolism of the Bridge” (1921), Maps from the Mind, eds. Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), p. 6. 47 Ibid., p. 8. 48 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 467.

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Ultimately, Weil-See effects his rhetorical self-erasure, his language underscoring the inability to sustain an interest in itself. Less genial and intriguing than he is baffling and boring, Weil-See is a character-bridge that Mirbeau crosses and forgets without looking back. As Mirbeau’s attention wanders to a prostitute plying her trade across the street, Weil-See’s comments are slowly evaporated by his listener’s inattention. The ellipses always fracturing the smooth pavement of Mirbeau’s narrative grow wider and deeper, as Weil-See’s sentences begin to crumble and, like the streetwalker, are swallowed by the night of Mirbeau’s withdrawn interest. No longer a colorful airship bearing Mirbeau’s mind aloft, Weil-See’s speech collapses and lies inert in the middle of the text, deflated by its own immateriality and vagueness. No longer teetering on a summit as was Jesus when Satan tempted him, no longer paralyzed by vertigo on Mont-Vallier or Rotterdam’s bridges, Mirbeau stands and watches as Weil-See’s hypotheses lose their air: “son verbe n’était plus le même,” Mirbeau impassively observes. “Il s’enflait bien, un moment, mais pour retomber ensuite, flasque et mou, comme un ballon qui se dégonfle.”49 From the speciousness of language unmoored in reality, the narrative moves to the nightmare entropy of matter made heavy by its inexpressibility. Promoting a dialogic interchange between the Netherlands and France, the system of Dutch canals, with their liquid, glassy surface, is opposed to the rutted highways connecting other countries. Mirbeau suggests that water roads lead to diplomatic agreement. Belligerence caused by bumps in the communicative surface gives way to a gliding, conciliatory confluence of views. Such is the topographic harmony that is cultivated in The Hague, a city emptied of the cacophony of war engines and armaments, a place of eurythmic calm: “Jamais rien qui grince,” as Mirbeau writes. 50 But as Mirbeau recognizes, beneath the surface of pacifist suasion – underneath the limpid sky and the people’s placid physiognomies – lie centuries-old deposits of fratricidal hatred, fermenting “dans les bas-fonds de la misère et du travail.”51 So toxic are these conflicts, so virulent are these antagonisms that no benign environment can successfully dispel them. Earlier in describing Amsterdam as the capital of industry, Mirbeau had reflected on this submerged stratum of poison and injustice. It 49

Ibid., pp. 467-8. Ibid., p. 477. 51 Ibid. 50

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is at this point in his fictional encomium to simultaneity and sublimation – in his glorification of car travel that shortens distances and joins nations – that Mirbeau offers the clearest articulation of his excremental vision. On the one hand, no dirt clings to a vehicle as it races toward oblivion. The faster it goes in its amnesiac flight from time, the cleaner it remains, unsoiled by the crasse of old grudges and remembered injuries. Whereas the automobile that stops is heavy and mud-encrusted, the car that flies is innocent in the immaculacy of its weightlessness. According to Mirbeau’s conception of the psychodynamics of creation, art is produced more freely when the artist escapes his history, through the instantaneous detachment from and abandonment of his works. On the other hand, Mirbeau’s coprophobic horror of static cultural history is evident in his vision of Amsterdam’s sewage. Opposed to WeilSee’s dematerialization of reality as numbers is time’s accumulated waste rising from Amsterdam’s canals, auguring, as Mirbeau imagines, the triumph of matter over intelligence. Creating a shimmering mirage of calm contentment, residents cling to the status quo and, in so doing, breed pestilence. Weil-See’s interest in theory is belied by his fixation on getting rich, showing that he makes no fundamental distinction between plutocracy and gnosticracy. The unimaginably large figures that Weil-See always talks about are mathematical representations of the fortune that he covets, filthy lucre, the billions that Mirbeau says emit “une si mauvaise odeur.”52 Glittering like coins, the waters of Amsterdam’s canals cover the disease-bearing purulence of countless layers of submerged waste. A perversion of the circulatory health of rivers, the detergent energy of flowing water, Amsterdam’s sewage is a liquid that has solidified, creativity killed by its objectification. One day, when Amsterdam’s waste finally breaks the water’s surface, it will signal, as Mirbeau indicates, a vengeful return of the repressed. In Mirbeau’s description of Holland and its cultural history, he explores the dialectical interplay of corporeity and sublimation. Dutch rejection of the body and the unclean stuff that it produces is paralleled by a valuation of the material forms of culture, yet there is no acknowledgement that art is excrement that creativity expels. Mirbeau contrasts the Dutchman’s tendency to abstract consumer goods as capital with the Boers’ disregard for the fecal treasures of the earth. The telluric

52

Ibid., p. 454.

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waste of gold and diamonds is unrecovered by Boer farmers, “qui prétendaient ne tirer de la terre que le seul or du blé.”53 Manifested by death’s dynamic that dissolves cadavers into fertilizer is evidence of the natural cycles of putrefaction and rebirth. Mirbeau’s paradoxical affirmation of biophilic death is based on the selfreplenishing energy of organisms that decompose and live. In a world governed by movement, circulation, and transformation, there is no death, only the emergence of new forms from the manure heap. Replacing life with objects valued for their gilded immobility, the Midas touch destroys the swarming vitality of nature, contaminating what Mirbeau calls “les inépuisables réserves du trésor commun.”54 While interment of clean corpses in the soil that they enrich maintains the healthy operation of a biological economy, exhumation of gold’s body releases sickness and insanity, propagating the miasma of avarice and its “contagions mortelles.”55 What horrifies Mirbeau is not the submerged mountain of Amsterdam’s waste, but the people’s poisoned denial of their human physicality. In an aphoristic profession of naturalist ideology, Mirbeau insists on the futility of cultural sublimations. Echoing Zola, he asserts that physiology trumps psychology, that matter rules the mind: “L’intestin commande au cerveau.”56 In the Jew Weil-See’s relationship with the Christian God whom he derides, metaphysical guilt is abstracted as a debt that only intelligence can liquidate. “[L]e plus vieux juif,” he thinks, was wrong to prefer Creation to creativity, to choose the body of the world over its conceptual design. Emulating Jesus, whose crucifixion saved humanity, Weil-See uses capital as an instrument of redemption. Substituting for “Christianity as a theology of unpayable debt,” 57 he evolves a form of capitalism involving renunciatory sacrifice, whereby reality is redeemed by its transformation into value. Weil-See intuits the ascetic spirituality of masochistic money-love, since both the anchorite and the miser forego the pleasure of consumption. Capitalism is another religion based on resurrection and multiplication, as investment reanimates objects through the promise of their increase. As the infant equates his stool production with the fathering of offspring, money, as Norman O. Brown says,

53

Ibid., p. 447. Ibid, 449. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid, p. 470. 57 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 267. 54

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“inherits the infantile magic of excrement and then is able to breed and have children: interest is an increment.”58 As a city ruled by plutocratic abstractionists like Weil-See, Amsterdam embraces a culture based on disincarnation and transcendence. Choosing numbers over things, the Dutchman buries bodies and elevates systems, mathematizing the world in his commitment to sublimation, “converting human love to a suprasensual life.” 59 But entombment of an excremental reality cannot prevent its reemergence. Water killed by stagnation is reborn when it circulates, when it begins to flow again and washes money clean with movement. “Elle est faite,” as Mirbeau writes, “pour courir, s’épandre et chanter sur les cailloux d’or.”60 Yet such images of cleanness do not offset Mirbeau’s gloomy vision. While La 628-E8 suggests an ontogeny predicting victory over the death drive, endorsing an acceptance of the transience of individual forms, Mirbeau is still obsessed with the loathsome body of the unregenerate human animal. Deserving the fraternal compassion of the world, the itinerant Jew has breath that stinks. A literary giant whose artistic accomplishments were immeasurable, Balzac is ridiculed as phallically under-equipped, a sorry figure “que la nature […] avait parcimonieusement armé pour l’amour.”61 History’s greatest philosopher, “le divin Platon allait chaque jour à la selle.”62 In Mirbeau’s bitter images of self-incriminating disillusionment, he is shown as suffering from the same neuroses that his novels sought to cure. Despite authoring a poetics of dung, Mirbeau is haunted by the biological abjection of human beings. The more etherealizing the sacred myths of purification and ascension, the more strident is Mirbeau’s insistence on man’s rootedness in dirt. The cadavers of the blessed are not redolent of hawthorn; the Virgin’s reproductive organs are not perfumed like spring flowers. Because man’s body is a shameful thing, malodorous and prurient, the social body is also sick with poverty and injustice. As Mirbeau comments, man’s incarnation “veut que ses organes vitaux soient une infection et une honte.”63 Yet Mirbeau also differentiates between a stalled and moving automobile – between the material gratuitousness of a machine that is shut 58

Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., pp. 296-7. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 470. 61 Ibid., p.559. 62 Ibid., p. 470 63 Ibid. 59 60

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off and the music of the work that it performs when it is running. While creativity is clean, dead artifacts are toxic. When Plato is an engine of philosophical intelligence, he is superhuman and inspirational. “Constipé, le divin Platon devient aussitôt une bête quinteuse.”64 Like the free expression of sexual desire, which is lyrical like nature, an unimpeded journey through the alimentary tract is a smooth ride along a highway. Yet when energy is blocked and converted into objects, life’s transformative movement stops, becoming repellent and pathologized. While fueling the human engine is wholesome and essential, the excretory organs are repulsive and abominable. A costive regimen of unoriginality obstructs the highway, mind, and bowel, but fresh insights propel the vehicle along the way to new discoveries. So while the body disgusts Mirbeau, its functioning transports him; while the genitals are appalling, reproduction is sublime. In the course of the narrative journey through his automotive novel, Mirbeau learns to satirize his tendency to sanitize biology as machinery. Rejecting an organicist perspective metonymizing humans as intestines, speech as flatus, creative products as feces, Mirbeau adopts physics as his metaphor and model. A microscopic examination of life as particles – moving, multiplying, colliding, exploding – a fermentation of atoms en travail de vie, focuses Mirbeau’s vision on human action occurring on the level of impersonal forces. Issues of agency, volition, and responsibility are evaded when the motorist who runs down livestock and children is abstracted as “la Splendeur et la Force de l’Elément.” 65 Mirbeau’s mechanistic worldview, his images of vectors, velocities, and trajectories confer on the car traveler a majestic irresistibility. Peasants guiding sheep across the roadway no longer compete with the motorist in a contest of wills when the latter is assimilated to Storm and Wind and Thunder. Sitting behind his chauffeur, Mirbeau is no longer an impatient tourist with no privileged access to the public highway. He is instead a force of nature: “C’est l’Elément qui passe!”66 In “La Faune de la route,” Mirbeau’s facetiously superb expression of species self-aggrandizement, he exonerates the human car traveler of his animal provenance. Classifying the creatures one encounters on the roadside according to the deference they show to the vehicle approaching,

64

Ibid. Ibid., p. 505. 66 Ibid. 65

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Mirbeau anoints the motorist as a highway god, describing his behaviors as “les manifestations de cette mégalomanie cosmogonique.”67 However, as is typical of the author’s self-satirizing propensities, Mirbeau insists on a demythifying reembodiment of the human animal, not as the light of his intelligence nor as the odor of his sanctity, but as the shamefulness of his organs and the matter they produce. Like Plato, one’s mistress goes every day “à la selle,” and like philosophy, her love depends on the bowel’s regularity. Scatet totus orbis, as Luther observed. Recalling the Poet imprisoned in the Chinese bagnio in Le Jardin des supplices, an artist reduced by famine and terror to barking like a dog, Mirbeau shows man as an animal that his civilization has concealed. Subject to a violent death arresting movement and preventing change, man is reconverted from energy to mass. Inert, his body resembles the squashed dogs and flattened piglets that fall beneath the squealing tires of Mirbeau’s passing vehicle. Rarefied as his genius, the artist is an excremental being whom accident reduces to his ignoble physicality. The cadaver of the greatest man is still “un tout petit pâté,” 68 the charcuterie of roadkill, “[une] masse de lard et de viande.”69 In celebrating the unleashing of elemental energies, Mirbeau’s novel – racing down the road “comme un boulet sur la courbe de sa trajectoire”70 – is taken from the same arsenal as the Dum Dum shell. Weaponized fiction, Mirbeau’s novels rip through obstacles, incinerating enemies whose ashes blow away. Counterbalancing Mirbeau’s lifeaffirming expression of creativity is art’s salubrious destructiveness, as un atome en travail de mort. If the goal of Mirbeau’s writing is abolition of the object, then killing is good while the production of corpses is bad. Rocketing artillery shells filled with polemical gun powder, Mirbeau’s works forget the targets that they utterly eradicate. Jesuit pederasts, souldestroying parents, torture virtuosos, sadistic mistresses are no longer repressed memories, the nemeses Mirbeau’s text has not yet altogether executed. So total is the intended annihilation of Mirbeau’s adversaries that there is only a little smoke left for his Dum Dum book to dissipate. But despite the chimera of the body’s purifying transformation, its imaginary resolution into elemental energies, man is not washed clean of memory nor laundered of his excremental history.

67

Ibid. Ibid., p. 492. 69 Ibid., p. 499. 70 Ibid., p. 296. 68

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At the conclusion of La 628-E8, Mirbeau is faced with clearing away the dead. In his early autobiographical fiction, he had staged his novels’ dénouements as his heroes’ self-immolation in a ritual auto-da-fé: Jean Mintié’s fantasmatic multiplication as skeletons and skulls of the victims of the sex wars; the shocking publication of L’Abbé Jules’ pornographic fantasies, the opening of his burning trunk, the swirling images of breasts and buttocks; the individual’s sacrifice to homicidal institutions, the evaporation of Sébastien Roch in the chaotic haze of battle. Set in an urban necropolis, in the killing fields of war, in the emerald luxuriance of the torture garden, Mirbeau’s works explore death’s thematic as the expiration of the narrative. Cremation, inhumation, dispersal in a cemetery of wind or soil: his books become an exercise in the mortuary art of their disposal. Racing though material like a bullet piercing a body, the car-text reaches the final page, but the pulp of it remains, meat, fat, memories, and dreams: evidence of the novel’s “transgénéricité.”71 As reflections on experiential temporality, Mirbeau’s works argue for renunciation of fame materialized as marble statues, as granite expressions of man’s longing for the soulless grandeur of an indestructible object. If feces are the proleptical manifestation of corruptible flesh, man buries his waste in order not to have to bury his body. Opposing the subterranean repression of mortality, the elevation of monuments affirms man’s preciousness and permanence. But as Norman O. Brown remarks: “to endure through time, the same yesterday, today, and forever, is not the same as to abolish time periodically and periodically return to the primeval plenitude.”72 Signalled by the oxymoronic title of his closing chapter, Mirbeau uses writing to kill the imperishable Balzac. “La Mort de Balzac” is cruelly unsentimental in reembodying the figure monumentalized as his oeuvre, a man whose work was great and whose penis was small. Despite assigning narrative responsibility to Jean Gigoux, the alleged lover of Madame Hanska, it is Mirbeau who provides the complex portrait of Balzac, a figure carnal and sublime, stercoraceous and cerebral. Having given an unflattering characterization of the author as a money-obsessed social climber, an inept businessman, and greedy sexual satyr, Mirbeau accords Balzac the highest compliment – by describing him cybernetically, as a 71

Marie-Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin, “Mort de Balzac,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 4 (1997), p. 278. 72 Brown, Life Against Death, pp. 283-4.

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voracious life-consumer and generator of great fiction, whose genius functioned with the tireless precision of a machine. Simultaneously producing plays and novels, pursuing love affairs and lawsuits, Balzac demonstrated “une force d’élément”73 and so was similar to a car. Mirbeau’s admiration for Balzac is manifested indirectly: in his insistence on Balzac’s unsuitability for induction into the Académie, in his description of Balzac as unsusceptible to anthropometric study. In his agony, Balzac emerges as a torture garden flower, dirty as its roots yet brilliant as its bloom. Because his intellect was unimpaired by premature decay, Balzac “mourait par le bas, mais le haut, la tête, restait toujours bien vivant.”74 The iconoclastic aim of Mirbeau’s irreverent necrology is evidenced by the progressively descending focus of the narrative, from the genius of the head to the putrefaction of the limbs. With legs swollen from edema, Balzac is an immobilized machine, his circulation blocked by arteriosclerosis, the heart’s engine failing from hypertrophy. Yet the living death that the bed-ridden Balzac undergoes is an organic demonstration of the fecundity of his art. If corruption in Mirbeau is generative of new life, Balzac may be frustrated in his dream of aurefaction. Yet by his work and by his death as narrated in the text, Balzac inseminates posterity, as Mirbeau ascertains: “Le génie sème et passe. L’habilité reste, attend et récolte. Balzac a semé, souvent sa semence fut bonne.”75 By the shockingly controversial and incongruous image Mirbeau gives, he demolishes the monumental Balzac who was dead and, through this scandalous account, effects his resuscitation as an author. MarieFrançoise Melmoux-Montaubin claims that this episodic detour is less a burial of Balzac than “un tombeau offert par Mirbeau en hommage au créateur.” The obituary/gravesite becomes another privileged locus, like the manure pile in which corruption nourishes new growth. From this standpoint, “le récit de la mort de Balzac se présente comme un lieu choisi, dans lequel s’élabore la poétique qui féconde le texte dans son ensemble.”76 Having begun with an escape from corporeity and sluggishness, a rejection of the unalterability of old, familiar objects, Mirbeau ends his novel with a story of another border crossing, signalling his repatriation in 73

Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 563. For a similar comparison, see Pierre Michel, “Notes: La 628-E8,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 1194. 74 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 584. 75 Ibid., p. 566. 76 Melmoux-Montaubin, “Mort de Balzac,” p. 272.

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France and his own skin. After substituting highway intercourse for xenophobic impenetrability, Mirbeau had looked in Europe for a place that was not culturally uniform but an unbounded land utopianized by its diversity. In his Baudelairean search for the novelty found elsewhere, he had embarked from Anvers harbor on imaginary voyages. His fantasy had not been of exotic destinations but of the experience of movement – setting off ripples in the water, displacing air in the sky, being a vehicle and the disturbance in the atmosphere that it crossed. In his effort to abolish objects, Mirbeau became an instrument of change and, at the same time, the consciousness of the change he had effected. On a molecular level, nothing ever stops or comes to rest. There is only the disintegration of forms and the reassembly of their particles. Economics connects the principles of circulation and exchange, as the slaughter of Congolese natives, with their black skin and red blood, had permitted the manufacture of red rubber and black tires. In conversations with Weil-See, Mirbeau had recognized the pointlessness of attempting an absolute sublimation of matter as ideas. The mania for word-production and mathematical abstraction had not only done away with objects but had induced a sense of existential drift. Escaping into the purity of numerical probability, Weil-See had exiled himself from the domain of human agency and purpose. After leaving the insane speculator, Mirbeau had come home to the body, consenting again to handle the waste deposited by man’s history. Scatology, as Mirbeau recognized, was the true science of every culture, creation of art as the surplus that no other animal produces, and the symbolic/ritual practices by which excremental art is treated. First dehumanized, then commodified, massacred Africans are made money, raw material from the colonies as precious feces to be gathered and then transformed into gold as the final concentrate. Similarly, created objects are treasured superfluities, proving, in art and commerce, “the omnipotence of the products of the bowel.”77 At the end, Mirbeau anticipates Marinetti’s futuristic worldview, not as an ideology glorifying “[un] univers métallique et déshumanisé,”78 but as an aesthetic extolling the mechanical efficiency with which human genius operates. In his celebration of Eros, Mirbeau harnesses his narrative to everything that changes, eveything that dies and becomes. Through contradiction and self-renewal – through shedding the skins of archaic 77

Karl Abraham, Selected Papers in Psychoanalysis, qtd. in Brown, Life Against Death, p. 302. 78 Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 812.

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textual selves, Mirbeau proves his abhorrence for the funeral art of monument construction. Constipation, automotive breakdown, Hugo’s apotheosis as marble statuary depict the failure of machines that stop and are transformed into objects. It is by continually metamorphosing that Mirbeau attains Baudelairean drunkenness, adapting life “à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante.”79 Like the automobile and bowel, the book must move to function healthily, shunning the morbidity of stasis that is the aftermath of wreckage. First designed as an experience of invigorating disembodiment, Mirbeau’s car trip had concluded by returning him to France, reintroducing him to the body at the anus of the customs station, “[u]n trou puant, un cloaque immonde, un amoncellement de fumier.”80 But the living, everchanging, smoothly operating human organism is man’s only authentic homeland, as Mirbeau had intuited. Readers encounter Mirbeau’s novel, not as an object but as a journey, which moves them through the alimentary machinery of his fiction. After they travel through the looping coils of his disorienting narrative – after the sphincter of the last line closes and expels them from the book – they are left there in a state of entertained confusion, their imagination throbbing from the succession of frantic scenes. Consumers of a novel that assimilates them in turn, they burn text and convert its fuel into the energy of their responses.

79

Charles Baudelaire, “Enivrez-vous,” Petits Poèmes en Prose (Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier, 1962), pp. 167-8. 80 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 610.

Chapter Ten Non-human Narrative: Dingo In 1912, a year before Le Journal began its serialized publication of Dingo, Mirbeau suffered a grave deterioration in his health that threatened his continued ability to work. “[V]ictime d’un accident vasculaire qui lui [a] paralys[é] tout le côté droit,”1 Mirbeau was barely able to wield a pen and therefore had to consider renouncing plans to finish his book in progress. Undaunted by his physical limitations, Mirbeau prevailed on his long-time friend, political activist, art and literary critic Léon Werth, to assist him in finishing the novel, with Werth performing an undefinably complex and multifaceted role: taking dictation, deriving inspiration from conversations with Mirbeau, suppressing his own identity as stylist, acting as a true amanuensis. Werth describes his task with selfabnegating modesty, saying: “Je m’efforçai de faire du Mirbeau, qui ne fût point pastiche, qui ne fût point à la manière de… et de renoncer à tout trait, à tout accent, qui me fût personnel.”2 Despite Werth’s gracious acquiescence to Mirbeau’s request and the speed and ease with which the manuscript was completed, one can only imagine Mirbeau’s reaction to his loss of authorial control. No doubt the ordeal awakened memories of the indignity he had suffered during his early experience as a ghostwriter, but it also served as an enlightening lesson in surrendering narrative authority. Mirbeau’s interest in problematizing the writer’s identity had already begun in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, where he had posited an imaginary relationship between the character of the chambermaid/diarist and himself as the stylizing editorialist who fitted her journal into acceptable form. And as early as the time Mirbeau was writing Dans le ciel, he had foregrounded the issue of the disconnection between the artist’s conception of his work and the inability to execute it. It is ironic that Mirbeau’s authorial marginalization brought about by his crippling infirmity corresponds to the central theme of the novel, which extends beyond a rejection of anthropomorphism in determining narrative perspective. In the relationship between the master and pet, it is the latter that assumes ascendancy, 1

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 886. Papiers de Léon Werth, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 886.

2

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illustrating the supersession of instinct over a disciplining intelligence, showing how the most honest and inspired creation is done when the writer is dictated to by his subject. In Dingo, the operation of the nothing machine extends to the definition of authorship. In describing his relationship with a canine companion over the span of more than five years, an animal that Mirbeau “dotait de capacités carnassières et mythologiques.”3 he takes to its fanciful conclusion his effort to escape from the distorting, unnatural, and burdensome constraints of traditional narrative. No longer does he acknowledge the storyteller’s responsibility in the choice of material and the arrangement of events – in the provision of a dénouement that delivers synthesizing meaning. No longer is he willing to construct a plausible story while orchestrating and explaining material that is both pleasing and instructive. Dingo marks the final stage in Mirbeau’s decision to decline the role of a narrator guiding audiences through the existential tangle of unaestheticized reality. Muddying the distinction between autobiography and fiction, Mirbeau strips his novel of its epistemological pretensions, choosing instead to use his writing, as Pierre Michel asserts, “comme un moyen de rendre sensible la fondamentale ambivalence de toutes choses au lieu de n’en donner qu’une vision unilatérale, mutilante et mensongère.”4 Unwilling to impose his organizing consciousness on artistically unprocessed life, Mirbeau had also begun to experiment with assigning the narrative role to a host of natural, inhuman, animal, and mechanical sources. When it is no longer Mirbeau’s narrative self that determines plot direction, his story ceases to express authorial mastery and wisdom. It no longer appears to be a product of the writer’s creativity, an intellectual reworking of the formless stuff of his existence. When Mirbeau’s attention is drawn to something by his chauffeur or his dog – when the narrative path is laid out by the nocturnal expeditions of a dingo or is obliged to follow the highway system along which his vehicle is traveling, the material does not come from the narrator but from the world. It is not an idea that he transmits but an adventure that he discovers, not an insight he communicates but a story that he finds. Published to favorable reviews beginning in February 1913, Dingo carries on Mirbeau’s project to redefine the novel as something revolutionary, even non-human. After authoring his “roman automobile” in La 628-E8, Mirbeau adopts the idea of entrusting his narrative to an 3

Pierre Michel, “Introduction: Dingo,” Octave Mirbeau, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel 2001), p. 618. 4 Pierre Michel, “Mirbeau et l’autofiction,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001), p. 128.

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animal: “Ca me changera des hommes,” as he had written in a letter to Francis Jourdain. 5 In part, Mirbeau uses the wild dog as an intermediary to exact revenge on the xenophobic populace of Cormeilles-en-Vexin where, for four years, he had lived in “un immense hôtel du XVIIIe siècle qualifié de château par les autochtones.”6 Having recourse to the dingo as an instrument of salutary terrorism, Mirbeau repays the inhospitality of his countrymen by engaging in vicarious animal attacks on avaricious peasants, venal shopkeepers, and corrupt municipal officials. What particularizes Mirbeau’s identification with his theriomorphic hero is his dual objective: both to engage in fantasies of proxy violence against the natives who had mistreated him and to relinquish personal and human direction of the narrative he delivers. In Dingo, Mirbeau’s decision to shun didacticism and retreat to the periphery of his story allows him to assume a position of ironic selfdeprecation, one consistent with his condemnation of egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and anthropocentrism, his controverting the presumed superiority of the Frenchman, the self, and the human being. Since the person who relates is the person who instructs, Mirbeau’s narrator begins by reporting what others say, so that in Dingo, he talks for his dog or infers what his dog is saying. The newly constructive, informational value deriving from Mirbeau’s novels comes, not from the wisdom he imparts, but from the truths that others tell him. The writer’s eclipsing by his material is especially evident in Dingo, where, as Enda McCaffrey comments, “c’est le mouvement créé par le chien lui-même qui contribue à faire disparaître le narrateur.”7 In Mirbeau’s celebration of primitivity and wildness, he structures the narrative as an alternating deflation of traditional repositories of knowledge and a rehabilitation of the dispossessed whose insights go unvoiced. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau had interrupted the chronicle of his automobile tour of Europe in order to comment on Belgian aviculture or the inadequacy of Amsterdam’s sewage disposal. Promoting a sense of disorientation and simultaneity, he had become the motorist’s moving consciousness flooded by intense impressions, the attention of a self no longer particularized by one viewpoint. In this vagabond account, Mirbeau’s emphasis on enthusiasm and bewilderment creates the image of a narrator whose perspective is refreshed by new experience. Unconfined 5

Cahier d’aujourd’hui 9 (1922), p. 179, qtd. in Michel, “Introduction: Dingo,” p. 615. Michel, “Introduction: Dingo,” p. 618. 7 Enda McCaffrey, “Le Portrait d’un artiste en jeune chien-Incarnation et mouvement dans Dingo,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 7 (2000), p. 72. 6

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to the jail of a limiting subjectivity, Mirbeau practices a ventriloquistic identification with his material. A cyborg welded to his vehicle, Mirbeau speaks in the voice of a speed-crazed traveler, half man and half machine, not a fragile human emitting a monotonous opinion, but “la force de l’élément” that burns fuel to create movement. In Dingo, the trajectory of the narrative is no longer determined by the quality of paved surfaces but is mapped by the bloody forays of the wolfish predator. Knowledge need no longer be conveyed through human speech or writing but may emanate from the natural world that Mirbeau inhabits with other beings. Mirbeau argues against science’s dismissal of inter-species communication, “based largely on the linguicentric Cartesian assumption that, lacking the ability to use symbols, nonhuman animals are qualitatively distinct from humans.”8 Indeed, it is because Dingo is nonhuman, unproficient in symbol usage, that Mirbeau adopts this grotesque neonate as his storytelling agent. Arriving one fateful day some nine years earlier – delivered in a black pine crate by the bibulous courier Vincent Péqueux – Dingo is an unwanted gift, an unwelcome disruption of Mirbeau’s life. A springboard for Mirbeau’s tale, this inaugural event is not precipitated by a storyteller exercising narrative control but issues from an irrational world governed by misfortune and contingency. Frustrating the narrator’s accession to a position of masterful logocentrality, Dingo’s appearance manifests the influence of disorder and accident. In Dingo, humans no longer structure existence with their discourse. Barking dogs, the voice of chaos, drown out man’s explanatory reasoning, and uncivilized animal narrative goes wherever it may go. With Dingo’s displacement of a human narrator as the novel’s structuring agent, Mirbeau unsettles reader expectations about traditional fiction’s form and function. Who chooses the novel’s theme? Who imparts information? Who decides the direction of a narrative, ensuring its orderly sequentiality? Whose consciousness delivers intelligible intersubjective exchanges, sorting out a miscellany of characters occupying a disorderly fictional world? Who recapitulates and summarizes material after organizing it as a story, changing undomesticated experience into a narrative with closure and meaning? Conflating the dog, its arrival, and its revolutionizing effect on his life, Mirbeau equates his novel and the eponymous hero so that the writer is subordinated to his subject. 8

Clinton R. Sanders, “Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Close Relationships Between Humans and Nonhuman Animals,” Symbolic Interaction 26.3 (2003), p. 406.

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Embodying experience untainted by reflection, Dingo becomes an expressive vehicle for life prior to its refinement into literature. Initially, Mirbeau assimilates the animal to a car, as an instrument of transformative self-renewal whose dimensions can be measured and whose operation can be analyzed. Mirbeau begins his appraisal of Dingo with a morphological examination of the creature’s head and body, the inharmonious adjustment of its parts, its undeveloped musculature, its rudimentary motor skills. As Mirbeau had anatomized the organic arrangement of his automobile, its steel lungs and electrical innervation, he assesses the admirable machinery of the dog, its “raison d’être supérieure, inconnue de lui, raison d’équilibre physiologique, d’ajustage mécanique, de canalisation musculaire, d’endurance.”9 Despite mocking the pretentious jargon of scientists like Sir Edward Herpett, donor of Mirbeau’s dingo, he, too, asserts explanatory mastery over his subject, exercising control over the animal by caging it in the detail of his zoological description. As Herpett had followed the gift of the dog with an explanatory letter, classifying Dingo, “son mécanisme et la manière de m’en servir, ” as Mirbeau says,10 the animal is viewed as an instrument put at the disposal of its user. However, while a person steers his vehicle, the dingo eludes man’s control, leading his master on frantic, nocturnal marauding escapades. Guided by instinct rather than by maps and planned itineraries, Dingo takes Mirbeau’s narrative to unpredictable destinations. Following Herpett, Mirbeau uses science in an effort to replace the richness of phenomena with the smallness of their explanation. Like the shipping box filled with animal excrement and a bone, classificatory discourse is a coffin whose contents are suffocated by clarity. Resembling the delivery crate, pictured as a cradle and a casket, science is a system of tautological explanation that moves from identifying an embryonic problem to providing a death-delivering answer. Of course, in emphasizing the dryness of technical, scholarly language, in discussing the effects of a monopolistic narrator, Mirbeau himself is trapped in a box of scientific terminology, making the limitations of conventional narrative the subject of his own sometimes conventional narrative. Conjecture about dogs’ vocabulary, their expressive body movement – about canine intuition and animal epistemology – is adapted to fit the single medium available to Mirbeau. His innovation is to go beyond the ironic, self-referencing disparagement 9

Octave Mirbeau, Dingo, Oeuvre romanesque 3 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 651. Ibid., p. 640.

10

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of literary language in an attempt to experiment in sympathetic animal narrative. With its structural randomness and abrupt changes in narrative focus, Mirbeau’s text follows the moving spotlight of the dingo’s attention, tracing the undefinable pattern of the dingo’s attractions and antipathies, delivering knowledge obtained outside the usual channels of naturalist observation and analysis. Using satire, Mirbeau sets out to undo the work of science that fences wild behavior inside a system of taxonomic nomenclature. Neither wolf nor dog, Dingo is a composite creature similar to the author, whose work is neither novel nor autobiography, but a member of a mongrel species whose classificatory value, as Pierre Michel says, is to “effacer les frontières des genres narratifs.”11 Unlike the chambermaid, hybridized by her working-class origins and bourgeois aspirations, Dingo remains uncastrated by the master who rechristens him. Science’s goal – to civilize raw experience using definition and description – takes the aleatory singularity of an unfamiliar entity and neutralizes its foreignness by grouping it with like others. As Anselm Strauss remarks: “To name is to know and the extent of the knowing is dependent on the extent of the naming.”12 Replacing the feral alterity of the wolf with the recognizable servility of a dog, the master names an animal, and with his word, creates a pet. Linguistic naturalization of a wild thing follows a path of increasingly narrow differentiations: from species to order to family; from dog to my dog; from the complexity of a mechanism to a guidebook on how to use it. However, Mirbeau attempts to return from the one to the many, naming his dingo Dingo, revoking science’s nominative authority, collapsing the walls created by definitions, noting that the word dingo expresses the failure to contain its referent. Neither altogether institutionalized nor entirely anarchic, Mirbeau’s novel is written in dingo language. An idiom that eludes capture, it resists appropriation by masterusers, frustrates programs of education, escapes from classificatory pens, refuses to obey, and is unwilling to be housebroken. Like the Malaysian word defining a dingo as what it is not, Mirbeau’s animal communicates by drawing on its inhumanly accurate repertory of barks, growls, glances, and postures: what Mirbeau’s narrator calls “une langue ingénieuse, concise, pittoresque et qui dit bien ce qu’elle veut dire.”13 11

Michel, “Mirbeau et l’autofiction,” p. 121. Anselm Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), p. 20. 13 Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 641. 12

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In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note that there is never one wolf, only packs. Incapable of catching the animal or grasping what it symbolizes, the hunter is afforded an “instant apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves.” 14 Unlike zoological families, bands of wolves are unstable, uncountable, constantly reconfiguring collectivities unstructured by hierarchy. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, Freud was unable to understand the Wolf-Man as a fluid, changing welter of libidinal impulses beyond the analyst’s nosological reach, and so insisted on capturing the fragmentariness of the man inside the fixity of a diagnosis. “Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least unity and identity in the word.”15 Mirbeau’s readers are familiar with his strategies for dismantling fixed definitions, impermeable classifications, stable identifications and names that contain a knowable self, rigorous designations of literary genres that order and divide, notions of character that house a fictional being within a pattern of recognizable behaviors and beliefs. When Dingo rampages through forests and barnyards, Mirbeau’s novel showcases a hero that runs away from the author. Unbounded by Mirbeau’s direction and his readers’ understanding, Dingo roams free, becoming a unity that disintegrates into multiplicity. “Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is.”16 Sometimes Mirbeau, unable to cure himself of the wish to domesticate and master, derives comic effect from self-satirizing descriptions of his efforts to fence in his uncivilized pet. Then Dingo is attractive, not because of his spontaneity and violence, but because of the challenge he poses to his owner to humanize him. For Mirbeau, the more savage the material, the more glorious the literature that tames it. In the words of encouragement that conclude Herpett’s letter, he recommends following the same program of behavioral engineering and educational deformation that Mirbeau had decried in his autobiographical novels. “Elevez-le bien,” Herpett says about Dingo, “surveillez-le bien, étudiez-le bien.”17 Yet what Mirbeau enjoys are his dog’s resistance to discipline, his inscrutability and unresponsiveness to instruction and training.

14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 27. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 32. 17 Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 645.

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With his love of novelty and change, Mirbeau could not help but be fascinated by dogs that compensated for a lack of longevity with lives of intensity and action. Unlike humans, decaying in the lethargic time of their habits, dogs “brûlent les étapes de la vie, et ils courent très vite, comme des fous, vers la vieillesse et vers la mort.”18 Accelerating out of the clumsiness of infancy, Dingo enters the adolescence of Mirbeau’s novel, where the author’s assimilation of animal wisdom is projectively described as his pet’s education. The homologous mirroring of Dingo’s learning and Mirbeau’s unlearning determines the regressive orientation of the narrative – away from culture and back toward nature. When not perverted by education, taste is not aesthetic but gustatory. For Dingo, as Mirbeau says, “la beauté des choses, c’est leur comestibilité.”19 In place of intellectual growth, there is muscular development. In place of an assimilation of ideas, there is the swallowing of objects. In the same way that Dingo rejects foodstuffs adulterated with chemical additives, he shuns Empire sofas upholstered in glaring reds and greens. Eschewing Rousseau’s insistence on austerity, Dingo shows a fondness for cooked meat and down pillows. While having a sophisticated palate and gourmet tastes, Dingo uncovers from beneath piles of dead leaves “d’innommables ordures”20 and so instructs his teacher how to be both animal and human, how to combine the passive pleasure of eating with the aggressive purposefulness of hunting. Mirbeau downplays Dingo’s linguistic shortcomings by indulging in what John Archer calls the “human tendency to project feelings and thoughts onto animals.”21 Those who think like Archer view this overattribution of intelligence to animals as motivating dog-owners to engage in dialogues with their pets, imaginary exchanges consisting of “short utterances, with many imperatives and questions, repetitions, simple sentences.”22 Mirbeau goes further, imputing a greater linguistic versatility to dogs than to people, remarking that canines understand all human languages while humans can speak no word of dog. Canine polyglottism, sensitivity to their master’s vocal inflections, facial expressions, and mood restructure the language relationship between dogs and people to the advantage of the former. 18

Ibid., p. 663. Ibid., p. 653. Ibid., p. 655. 21 John Archer, “Why Do People Love Their Pets?” Intuition and Human Behavior 18. 2378 (1997), p. 252. 22 Ibid. 19 20

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Passages in which Mirbeau credits dogs with fluency in Russian, Hindustani, Telegu, and German underscore his own expressive limitations. In so doing, Mirbeau suggests that the informational value of his text depends on minimizing his narrative’s misrepresentation of animal intelligence. Mirbeau’s comments about dogs’ linguistic proficiency establish an inverse correlation between knowledge and expressiveness, so that the more eloquent the delivery, the more hollow the message. It is because dogs cannot talk that their wisdom is great. In Mirbeau’s novel of expressive self-derogation, he empties his plot of cultured, rich, educated characters whose language spreads lies, so that he can people his story with indigents and vagabonds whose simplicity assimilates them to dogs. Escorted by Mirbeau’s cook, Marie, into the squalid hamlet of Ponteilles-en-Barcis, Dingo mingles with an undifferentiated populace of roving bands of dogs, subhuman shopkeepers, brutish municipal employees, “des troupes d’oies et de dindons,” a phylogenetic assortment of bestial humans and personified animals: “peuplades sauvages primitives [où] les choses […] prenaient instantanément – les choses, les bêtes, et les gens – un caractère de déformation démesurément tragique.”23 Of course, such literary deformations are caused by the author’s inability to fit himself to his subject. The gap between Mirbeau’s intellectual, ethical, and linguistic refinement and the coarseness of his animal and human characters is what explains the anarchic emancipation of the story from its teller. As it progresses, Mirbeau’s narrative increasingly focuses on the author’s inability to domesticate his material. When Dingo is introduced to the local villagers, he inspires uneasiness and perplexity. Refusing the butcher woman’s offer of a lump of sugar, Dingo is identified as an uncanny subject, as unreadable to the townspeople as he is to Mirbeau’s audience. Dingo’s frequent escapes from Mirbeau’s narrative, his chapter-long absences, his disappearance into a textual wilderness of disconnected anecdotes and unrelated social commentary confirm the impression of the author’s relinquishment of control over his exuberant canine hero. Rather than producing an artistically falsified conventional narrative, Mirbeau finds a novel plot device, sets it free, and then follows it. In the story, Dingo’s multiplication as thieving notaries, murderous vagrants, and taciturn poachers defines him as Deleuze and Guattari’s wolf-become-pack. Mirbeau’s provincial bestiary pictures plant, 23

Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 666.

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animal, and human life as existing in primitive homogeneity. Language ceases to be a uniquely human faculty, as Mayor Théophile Lagniaud, after engaging in solitary debate about the desirability of bringing train service to the village, resumes “ses divers colloques avec les poules, les oies et les boutiquières” before returning “chez lui, à petit pas.”24 Normally formalized by walls preventing inter-species communication, the distinctions between wild and tame animals, farmers and livestock are blurred. Dovecotes, stables, chicken coops, houses, shops, places of worship offer indiscriminate asylum to all creatures, as the village church, its tabernacle defiled by pigeon dung, is assimilated to Noah’s ark with its innumerable pairs of zoomorphic cargo. Universalized as all organic life, Dingo represents the superiority of animal culture over the brutishness of human instinct. Repeatedly Mirbeau emphasizes his countrymen’s deviation from behavioral norms, their transgression of rules of decency. Driven by impatient greed, local tavernkeeper, Evariste Jaulin, conspires to bring about his mother’s death as he weakens the cement support for the barn loft where she is made to sleep. Disconnected by the townspeople from his family history, Jaulin becomes a fungible component of his role as drinkprovider. Changeless and timeless, he is an ahistorical necessity, a generic barkeeper whose indispensability particularizes him as his name. In the same way that Mirbeau’s dingo is Dingo, the local publican operates as a pack-become-wolf: “Même pour ses camarades d’enfance, Jaulin est Jaulin, brièvement, simplement, comme Dieu est Dieu.”25 Building on lore about peasant incest and cruelty, Mirbeau transforms his human characters into matricidal beasts, an animal mass unorganized by intelligence or virtue. A degraded species made classless by the interbreeding consequences of their promiscuity and materialism, Ponteilles’s population is like its dogs, an ignoble, copulating menagerie of rat-faced scroungers, sluts, bastards, and pariahs, “nomades louches,” “réductions bouffonnes de loups, d’hyènes et de lions,” “chiens sans race et sans métier.”26 Like a medieval town square swarming with mendicants, bishops, pickpockets, and lords, Ponteilles’s dog world is preyed upon by the violent and the homeless, policed by shepherds and Bas-Rouges, a breed ennobled and perverted by being inculcated with human values. Not privy to the mayor’s conversations with chickens and geese, Mirbeau reports the argument between the Bas-Rouges and Dingo, 24

Ibid., p. 672. Ibid., p. 675. 26 Ibid., p. 683. 25

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characterizing it as a dialogue of sublimation and instinct. Neurotic products of a repressive civilization – “très disciplinés, un peu tristes, ennemis des vains amusements, réfractaires à toute fantaisie”27 – the BasRouges embody a super-ego that forbids. More human than their lubricious owners, they are animals absolved of their animality, dogs trained in their own alienation. Staging a conversation between superintendance and spontaneity, order and lawlesness, Mirbeau recreates the same exchange when he tries later to teach his dingo obedience. While Mirbeau functions as the voice of social insitutions that denature, Dingo expresses the anarchist inclination of an author who, as McCaffrey writes, “incarne dans le chien, et dans sa primitivité, une résistance à toute conformité politique et sociale.”28 If Bas-Rouges are animals reeducated to resemble the author, Mirbeau is an artist who has forgotten how to act like a dog. Life’s raw material – like sheep over which one keeps watch – can be an object from which one remains abstemiously disengaged. It can offer a lesson in renunciation and discipline, or it can be a source of pleasure, as food to be consumed. In the dialogue between culture and nature, Mirbeau divides himself between id-driven impulses to kill and eat and controlled inclinations toward sublimation and creation. In order to dramatize the predicament of man, the civilized animal, Mirbeau chooses to give voice to both his warring halves. But it is only by surrendering the prerogative to devour his prey that the hunter learns how to speak, filling his mouth with words instead of the meat that he craves. For Dingo, who says of sheep, “Eh bien, moi, je les égorge,”29 there should be no movement from comestible to verbal objects. It is only by relinquishing instinctual behavior, by guarding things instead of swallowing them, that one acquires language, describing the world instead of incorporating it. It is this original loss that enables an animal to be civilized, stripping it of its status as a lone hunter in order to attach it to a collectivity of unhappy speakers, affiliating it with what Abraham and Torok describe as “une communauté de bouches vides.”30 Unlike humans – often deceived by power, perfume, money, and glibness – dogs are adept at deciphering personal character. Seemingly incapable of self-appraisal, animals are devoid of narcissism. They 27

Ibid., p. 684. McCaffrey, “Le Portrait d’un artiste en jeune chien,” p. 69. 29 Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 686. 30 Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le Noyau, p. 263. 28

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appreciate furniture for its comfort rather than for its elegant design, enjoy eating food rather than admiring its culinary presentation. In Dingo’s repertoire of growls, barks, whimpers, and grunts, there is no word for beauty, “et s’il employa ce malencontreux vocable,” Mirbeau says, “ce fut toujours avec une parfaite ingénuité.”31 Unlike animals whose clairvoyance depends on symbolic illiteracy, Mirbeau and his human peers read the natural world as an anthropomorphic reflection of themselves. Despite Mirbeau’s claims to the contrary, a dog may be an occasional aesthete, susceptible to death by ugliness as befell Mirbeau’s terrier in Noirmoutiers. An impressionable creature fond of beribboned poodles, Mirbeau’s dog had awakened one afternoon from a dream of beauty to the shocking spectacle of a neighbor lady whose mustache and tangled hair had strangled its bark and stopped its heart. For Mirbeau himself, animals are theriomorphic expressions of human characteristics, like his cat, Miche, whose Baudelairean languorousness and treacherous sensuality made her a common symbolic embodiment of her owner’s misogynistic fascination. With their lucidity clouded by vanity, people’s responses to others are conditioned by faulty self-representations. Attending to information arriving from a complex network of channels, a person reacts to others as to projections of his own insecurities. The other is as unreadable as coffee grounds in a cup, as the striations on a marble or the procession of clouds across the sky. He is as unfathomable as the bottomless black pool of a dog’s eyes, a mystery whose richness supplies the motivation to create: “Il n’y a que l’ignorance de la vie,” Mirbeau writes, “de la vie que, faute de la comprendre, les poètes ont peuplée de songes puérils et de mensonges à dormir debout.”32 It is by relearning lost animal wisdom that Mirbeau tries to avoid making his work another childish daydream or soporific lie. Not needing to empty his mouth of prey in order to fill it with words, Dingo can ignore the casuistry of status, the subtle language of respectability, wealth, and clothes. Instead, he is able to interpret others according to their smell. “[A]n animal, archaic faculty, but one that is necessary for preservation, touching as it does the very sources of life,” smell has “close links with appetite, desire, and all of sexuality,” and therefore, as Annick Le Guérer

31 32

Mirbeau, Dingo, pp. 653-4. Ibid., p. 665.

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claims, has long been subject to repression, “for smelling and sniffing are bestial.”33 For dogs, the nose knows, and olfaction delivers information. As bipedalism distanced man from the earth and its scents, the incest taboo sundered the child’s bond with his mother, removing him from the intimate smells of excrement, blood, and sweat, requiring him to fill with language the space separating him from bodies. Civilization brought a forgetting of the olfactory pleasure Freud called Riechlust, causing old objects of desire to turn into new sources of disgust. But dogs, undeceived by masquerades of intimidation and seduction, engage in pheromonal communication whose information is reliable. Without the unmotivated connection of words and referents, the language of smells is somatically universal, promoting proximity and contact between addressee and sender. The vocabulary of animals, body odors transmit confessional messages that audiences are often reluctant to heed. Unmediated statements about estrus or menstruation, smells are disclosures stifled with fragrances and soap. But whereas human language is the language of rationalization and hypocrisy, olfactory language is truth made intelligible. Adopting his master’s sympathy for the disenfranchised, Dingo spurns decent people, whose cleanness is aphonic, and gravitates to a transient populace of pungent, unwashed outcasts. When Mirbeau asks an acquaintance about Dingo’s predilection for the poor, the friend responds simply: “il aime tout ce qui sent mauvais.”34 Greeting the “mendiants, chemineaux, vagabonds affamés” who stop at Mirbeau’s gate, 35 Dingo answers the wayfarer’s malodorousness with happy noises of recognition, “un léger roulement de la gorge, une sorte de ronron très doux.”36 With sounds answering smells, the need for symbolic language is circumvented, so that in dog speech, the message becomes indissociable from its expression. An olfactory signature guaranteeing the identity of the sender, body odor encapsulates individuality and character. Thrusting muzzles into crotches, making the acquaintance of canine peers with nose-to-anus salutations, dogs change emunctory passages into channels of communication, using sensory organs as organs of expression. Mirbeau is 33 Annick Le Guérer, “Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Fliess, and Emma Eckstein: Three Nasal Narratives at the Origins of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Review 83.8 (2001), p. 447. 34 Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 691. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.

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different from multi-lingual dogs, capable of understanding masters from all nations, and so is limited to interpreting Dingo’s speech with admiring conjecture. In Mirbeau’s narrative, Dingo’s laconic statements are translated into their wordy French equivalent, as the complexity of the formulation risks making the message more inaccurate. Uncomplicated by humans’ narcissistic dualism, their resolution into gazers and images, speakers and eloquence, ideas and style, animals utilize an expressive form that is adequate to its purpose. This is why Mirbeau, adjusting form to content, chooses to let his subject, Dingo, guide him through the story of his life. Perplexed by the seeming directionlessness of Mirbeau’s plot, its detours and digressions, readers may repeat Nestor Roqueplan’s question as cited by Baudelaire: “Où vont les chiens?”37 Stopping to wonder at an insect, urinate on a lamp post, or decipher the scatographic message left by a fellow dog on the sidewalk, Dingo follows a narrative path that seems to zigzag haphazardly. The innovation that Mirbeau accomplishes is not to offer facile answers to the enigma Dingo poses. What is Dingo saying? Where is Dingo going? In his novel, Mirbeau surmises but never reaches a conclusion. Suggesting the groping inaccuracy of human communication, Mirbeau appreciates the beauty and richness of an elliptical canine idiom. He respects the nuanced intersubjectivity uniting dog and owner by occasionally losing track of Dingo so that his mystery cannot be impoverished by explanation. Like every organism, Dingo finishes the narrative journey of mortality, emerging from the coffin of the delivery crate to enter the burial hole at the foot of Mirbeau’s oak tree. As the destiny of a dog is to live and move until it dies, the novel’s eponymous hero determines the book’s trajectory and length. While Mirbeau guesses but never elucidates the meaning of Dingo’s vocalizations, his tail-wagging, and postural expressions, what he learns from observing animals is the pride and dishonesty of men. Dingo’s fidelity, intuitiveness, candor, and good sense offer compelling lessons in the inconstancy of human friendships, the vanity of human art, the faultiness of human judgment. Despite his murderous depradations and imperviousness to training, Dingo is a companion Mirbeau prefers to all his human counterparts. The plain but powerful message of Mirbeau’s novel is that a human is more bestial than the beasts he treats inhumanely.

37

Charles Baudelaire, “Les bons chiens,” Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier, 1962), p. 223.

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A modest anthropology of small French village life, Mirbeau’s novel adopts the dog’s perspective to record its citizens’ foibles more naturally. Antipathetic characters are those most alienated from their animal qualities, those whose appetites are served by duplicitous human cunning. Conversely, in the animal menagerie of transients, laborers, and poachers, Dingo finds human kin who share his directness and simplicity. Crowned by society’s adulation, scientists, artists, and public officials are the frauds whose criminality is detected by the exquisite forensic instrument of Dingo’s nose. In the novel, Mirbeau intimates that the subjects of zoological investigation are the features of animal behavior scientists find most disturbing in themselves. Man’s descent from apes suggests a potential for atavism that the scientist works to neutralize with explanatory scholarship. The threat of reverting from technical language use to the oral aggressiveness of primates – of going from speaking to biting – is the subject of Edward Herpett’s monograph, La Dentition des Grands Singes. The verbosity of scholarly publishing identifies it as a defense, a strategy civilized man adopts in order to speak instead of bite. Mirbeau’s other scientist friend, Edouard Legrel, is an entomologist specializing in the myology of spiders. In the narrowness of Legrel’s research, Mirbeau satirizes the irrelevance of science, its focus on minutiae, on topics of microscopic interest. More importantly, in Legrel’s work, he arrests the insect’s darting motion, life’s swarming pullulation that Mirbeau associates with fertility – like the maggots in the blood pool described in Le Jardin des supplices. In Dingo, as in Mirbeau’s other works, sudden bursts of random movement are reminiscent of the chaos from which humanity evolved, the undifferentiated confusion preexisting God’s Creation, when all life forms intermingled and animal species were unseparated. Mirbeau’s conception of creativity depends on periodic reintegration into this primordial muddle, dispersal in the manure heap from which individual forms emerge. In Mirbeau, monuments embody a wish for the indestructibility of marble while larval movement inspires fears of instability. In Legrel’s arachnologic studies, he keeps his subjects in glass enclosures, inhibiting spiders’ movement by studying myology, trying to understand experience by replacing life with vivisection. But Mirbeau’s novel demolishes science’s taxonomic walls, as his unclassifiable hero, that is neither dog nor wolf, eludes capture and continues on his peripatetic journey. Inquilism, expressed as the owning of a pet, conveys the same desire to civilize the instincts, as lust and violence, projectively assigned to

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housebred animals, should be exorcised and mastered, made obedient and tractable. Conversely, Dingo’s disregard for civilization’s rules reflects the hostility of his master toward proscriptive institutions. Dingo’s interspecies straddling of the canine/lupine barrier is reflected in the identification of the animal and man so that a composite Mirbeau/Dingo despises poseurs and impostors, and spurns the material and moral benefits of European culture. The return to namelessness and unity is articulated in the novel by Mirbeau’s insistence on boundary transgression. When Mirbeau takes his dog to visit his friend Legrel, the scientist’s daughter wishes to introduce Dingo to her pet sheep. But there is no paradisaical lying down of the lion and the lamb, no bloodless coexistence of predator and prey. The derivative designation of animals as pets, whose nominative uniformity should foster harmony and peace, gives way to the primitive clash of the hunter and the hunted, and Dingo rips the throat out of his defenseless ovine counterpart. As an incarnation of savagery, Dingo expresses Mirbeau’s failure to sublimate aggression and transform existence into literature. In his letter, Edward Herpett had predicted an approaching cultural decadence represented by the spectacle of dingos left to waste away in zoos. Herpett’s long description of dingos’ classification and behavior had been a cage of explanation in which science confined exotic fauna. But in response, Mirbeau writes as a way to frustrate Herpett’s project, opposing to the science that imprisons life the art that liberates. If Mirbeau’s animal fiction expresses freedom from control, it is empty of sentimentalism and pictures violence with dispassion. Dingo’s pleasing disobedience and independent spirit are counterbalanced by the ferocity with which he goes on killing sprees. “C’est que Dingo n’est pas seulement un de ces ‘bons chiens’ chantés par Baudelaire […] Il est aussi,” as Pierre Michel says, “un grand carnassier, qui a autant besoin de carnage que de liberté et de grand air, et qui ne tue pas seulement pour se nourrir […] mais aussi et surtout par plaisir.”38 Dingos’ superiority to humans lies is their spontaneity and artlessness. Dogs do not premeditate; they are not conceited or acquisitive. With recklessness and profligacy, they live in the moment: “Est-ce que j’économise, moi?” Dingo inquires of his master.39 In the novel, Mirbeau uses Dingo to comment on creativity and art as byproducts of a culture of 38 39

Michel, “Introduction: Dingo,” p. 623. Mirbeau, Dingo, p. 721.

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anality and necrophilia. Unlike artists who stop to mirror themselves in their productions, animals do not admire their kill or their virtuosity as predators. In Dingo’s murderous forays, he may seem to move from butchery to cygenetics, from hunting alone to joining dogs in their pursuit of a stag, from mangling prey to aligning it by size and species on the ground. But it is Herpett who takes credit for discovering the origins of the tableau de chasse, since the predator forgets his work in his hurry to continue. Animals do not economize or surround themselves with fetish trophies; they do not enshrine cadavers or adorn themselves by putting on their victims’ skins. Nostalgic for the hot blood of the ecstatic instant of the kill, Dingo sinks his teeth into mink stoles and sable furs in an attack on the mausoleum art of a culture of the dead. For Mirbeau, art is a voodoo charm that captivates the soul, bewitching the creator with love for the beautiful death that he fashions. Mirbeau’s dilettante acquaintance, the painter Pierre Barque, regards his friends as fauna to be caged inside his canvases, zèbres whose exoticism can be domesticated by his talent. A caricature of Dingo, he hunts tirelessly for subjects that his art can capture and transform into images of hares. The creatures Dingo slaughters are left to wither in Barque’s portraiture, so when the painter undertakes his work on a picture of Mirbeau’s pet, first projecting “sur la toile la tache énorme d’un chienlièvre,”40 he finds his subject is resistant to its conversion into imagery. Life fights back against an aesthetic of morbidity, and Dingo runs away with his deadly metonymic likeness. Having sniffed the painting and substituted the dog’s nose for the artist’s paintbrush, Dingo “saisit la toile dans sa gueule et l’agita violemment, comme il avait fait autrefois des fourrures qu’il déchiqueta.”41 Barque reaches to stop the thief he had tried imprisoning in his portrait, but like the hero that escapes from Mirbeau’s narrative control, Barque’s material eludes him: “déjà Dingo avait fui.”42 Chased out of Ponteilles by the baying pack of angry citizens, Mirbeau relocates with Dingo to Paris, where the dog that literature could not tame is slowly poisoned by acculturation. Once an expression of jubilantly anarchic life that had raced ahead, overflowing the container in which art would have put him, Dingo begins to decline, as age and resignation slow his movements, weaken his muscles, and curl him up in hopeless docility on Mirbeau’s floor. Where Mirbeau’s lessons in civic40

Ibid., p. 841. Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 842. 41

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mindedness had gone unheard, Dingo is made sick by affection for his masters. Where reason failed, love kills. So when Mirbeau’s wife takes to bed in the aftermath of a riding accident, Dingo falls ill sympathetically, contracting jaundice. Unresponsive to threats and persuasion, Dingo is domesticated by loyalty. In his prime, Dingo had been an expertly crafted machine of destruction: precision, volatility, élan, muscle, passion, a force of obliterative hygiene that had scoured barnyards of fowl and emptied forests of partridges. An embodiment of Mirbeau’s nothing machine, sanitizing its material by annihilating it, Dingo had passed and left behind only reverberation and turbulence. Ballistic motion like cars and bullets, Dingo is a hurtling narrative that careens towards its amnesiac conclusion. “[U]n chien épatant,” as the laborer Pierre Piscot calls him, Dingo runs, and where he has been, there are no rabbits, no birds. “Pour tout dire,” Piscot says, “il n’a pus rien de rien.”43 Once Dingo is contaminated by exposure to humanity, his vehemence cools, his wildness moderates, and his speed diminishes. Like a writer wielding his pen with prudent circumspection, Dingo “lève la patte… mais sans ostentation.”44 Made well-behaved by advancing age, Dingo loses his diabolical aggressiveness, but the only devil inside him is the one that human beings saw there. So when Dingo works to suppress the wild dog of the bush country, “[i]l tenta de tuer en lui le dingo, le vieil homme.”45 Like rare predators introduced into zoological treatises, or quick spiders paralyzed by myologic analysis, Dingo is cured of his enthusiasm for life by being subjected to a veterinarian’s diagnosis. Dogs do not suffer from irrationality or rabies; “il n’y a pas de chiens enragés,” says the doctor, whereupon he hands Mirbeau a certificate verifying Dingo’s health.46 In its final, limping paragraphs, Mirbeau’s narrative no longer exhibits the vitality of its satirical verve, is no longer animated by its hero’s fugitive unrestraint. With the luster of its stylistic coat growing dull, the elasticity of muscles growing flaccid, emaciated, the skeleton of its elegiac structure showing through, wasting away to a last few pages, Dingo ends and is transformed into Dingo. Having completed the trip from birth to extinction, Dingo is returned to the crate from which 43

Ibid., p. 803. Ibid., p. 820. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 826. 44

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Mirbeau had extracted him, “la boîte de sapin noirci, le menu cercueil d’enfant.”47 Both coffin and corpse, Mirbeau’s finished book is an object whose inertia attests to its evacuation of the life it contained. The eloquence of Mirbeau’s necrological tribute to the vanished breath of his dog and the inspiration for his narrative is evidenced by the neutrality of his tone, the style that turns colorless when his protagonist starts to die. Mirbeau’s story does not rise to an eschatological crescendo; it does not aspire to immortalize its subject or its glory. When a human being dies, it is impossible to accept: there must be something more than its biological finality. But as Mirbeau says, when a dog-book ends, it means no more than itself. True art, Mirbeau believes, should not celebrate the exhaustion of its premise. The cadaver of a completed novel should not be commemorated with a monument. Because death should be unaccompanied by agitation or fanfare, a mourner can only note the disappearance of ephemeral forms and their reabsorption in the manure pile. Dingo had been killed by being humanized in literature, so it is right that the author not be the one interring the body, but rather Dingo’s anthropomorphic twin, Flamant, the poacher. “[U]n être de silence et de nuit,” Flamant had the tawny color of a predator, the stealth, the abyssal eyes, the pricked ears of a hunter, “les narines [qui] battaient sans cesse au vent comme celles des chiens.”48 Between the ceremonial grandeur of a famous man’s obsequies, and what l’Abbé Jules describes as the disintegration of carrion in forests, there is the dignified account of a life turned into art. It is fitting that the hunter give thanks to his prey, that the novelist acknowledge the material he consumes. When Flamant shoulders the body and disappears behind the house, he consigns Dingo’s remains to the empty grave on Mirbeau’s page. No granite or marble is set over the hole, only earth whose disturbance soon will no longer be evident. What Mirbeau leaves readers is not the wisdom he gathered, not knowledge objectified as funerary art, but reflections on how a dog changed his notion of fiction. No symmetrical alignment of corpses on paper, Mirbeau’s novel as nothing machine ceases resembling a tableau de chasse. Accustomed to mastering an animal subject, Mirbeau surrenders control so that he can learn from his dog – so

47 48

Ibid., p. 851. Ibid., p. 833.

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that the immediacy of experience not pass away into meaning, but so that literature can be revived with the heat and violence of life.

Conclusion In an April 22, 1894 article that appeared in Le Journal, Mirbeau reflects on a recent innovation in military technology, one prefiguring the invention of the Dum Dum shell, the obliterative ordnance he describes in Le Jardin des supplices. In a demonstration witnessed by the German Kaiser, a murderous new rifle had been shown to fire bullets that could penetrate fifteeen bodies at a time. The fact that, for the occasion, the targets were corpses allows Mirbeau to remark on modern warfare’s lunatic excess, the pleonastic gratuitousness of killing victims twice. More important is Mirbeau’s speculation that the real point of designing new armaments is that they render old versions of themselves obsolete. In Le Jardin des supplices, the efficiency of the Dum Dum is such that it vaporizes the enemy, and in so doing, eliminates the utility of combat medicine. When the wounded are annihilated, there is no longer a need for doctors, nurses, military chaplains, ambulance drivers, or stretcher-bearers. Gone with corpses is the ancillary service performed by casket-bearers, morticians, and gravediggers. Death becomes so hygienic that it eliminates the dead, cancelling at the same time both memory and mourning. In its operation, the nothing machine becomes so technically perfect that it is transformed from an object into the work that it performs. In his fiction, Mirbeau often seems to regret that he acts as a battflefield medic, patching up the mangled bodies of literature’s old conflicts. Instead of fitting textual amputees with a prosthesis of style, Mirbeau dreams of writing a Dum Dum bullet so precise and so violent that its target is atomized and leaves behind no work as casualty. Invoking what Maurice Blanchot calls the literary object’s droit à la mort, Mirbeau envisages a utopia in which commemorative art is no longer necessary. Like advancements in military technology “[qui] rendent la guerre désormais impossible,”1 future art will accede to a level of pure transitivity, occurring on the plane of movements, verbs, energy exchanges, message transfers, communication interfacing. No longer will creation be made heavy by nominative waste, the redundant cadavers of books, the unsightly superfluity of art’s material expression. At its most perfect, the art of war will become a science of irenics, Mirbeau’s violence will target violence, and his aggression will put death to death. As his career advanced, Mirbeau’s emphasis moved from presences to absences, from fixing things to breaking them, from the 1

”Nous avons un fusil,” Le Journal, April 22, 1894, Collection Pierre Michel.

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narcissist’s investment in ego repair to the anarchist’s embrace of an anonymity that liberates. It is tempting to trace the evolution of Mirbeau’s revolutionary aesthetic – his art of convulsiveness, amnesia, and discontinuity – to his early experiences of traumatic psychic damage. No doubt, as a nègre obliged to rent his pen for money, Mirbeau suffered from the painful dualism of creators and their products. As a ghostwriter required to hide the authorial provenance of his works, Mirbeau experienced the disconnection of objects from names, the separation of publications and the signatures authenticating them. To be sure, Mirbeau was compensated for his professional imposture, and pseudonymity afforded him the chance to experiment with writing as self-invention. At the same time, however, irresponsibility is not freedom, and universality is not the reward of being no one. Mirbeau as nègre could not have helped but see his books as the body from which the self was detached. Yet Mirbeau’s early autobiographical narratives represent more than an effort at repossessing an alienated self through narrative. Transposed as his characters, the author is able to mend psychic wounds, repair existential defects, project a facsimile identity invulnerable to injury and depreciation. The fantasm of a perfect self embodied in the statue expresses a death drive manifested as a wish for insentience and changelessness. Immortality is earned only by being dead, being safely interred inside works that live eternally as fame. In Le Calvaire and Sébastien Roch, the image of the statue-maker appears at times when the hero has experienced a devastating loss. Threatened with dissolution, a collapsing of boundaries dividing inside and outside, self and other, the character sees a form that is integral and perfect. In the figure of the Virgin that Jean Mintié contemplates, the derelict mother is resanctified and the absent caregiver is returned. The bond joining protector and infant that was sundered by madness and mortality is established again, in the image of the smiling Madonna cradling her baby. The primitive homology of infant and mother is reproduced in the relationship of the artist and his work. In a state of primary narcissism, the nursing infant enjoys the bliss of fusion, one preceding his fall into disunion and time. Illusions of omnipotence suggest that the child makes the mother, not that the baby is the original fruit of maternal love. In his miserable liaison with Juliette Roux, Mintié tries to reestablish the generative superiority of the artist over his progenitrix. Compensating for his dependence on a disturbed, suicidal mother, Mintié restructures the relationship with his mistress so that it is she who is begotten by his

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idealism, she who is under his control. Juliette is forbidden to be an inconstant mother bestowing endearments on her barking dog, Spy. For Mintié, sexual union should restore the indivisibility of a devoted Virgin and her Christlike offspring. In a telling analogy, Mintié compares orgasmic dissolution to a loss of self in God, which he imagines as a loss of God in self. In place of the breast, it is sacramental bread that is swallowed, permitting the communicant to incorporate and become the divinity. Coitus, Mintié says, affords “une sorte d’extase eucharistique, semblable à celle où me ravit ma première communion. Je retrouve le même mystique enivrement, la même terreur auguste et sacrée. […] Il me semble que Dieu est descendu en moi, pour la deuxième fois.”2 Mintié likens himself to a crucified Redeemer, whose sexual torment qualifies him to found a religion of masochism. But it is only when he tries to be a procreative God, introjecting the mother and acting in her place, that he can sire his narrative as a child conceived in love. Juliette cannot be an unnatural mother who chooses her freakish dog over him. The ideal mistress must be as flawless as her lover’s undamaged psyche, polished, unbroken, harmonious, serene. A perfect woman transposed as Mintié’s idealizing love, she is the artist’s genius embodied in beauty. Not a mercenary slut, Juliette is dressed in “la chair idéale des anges […] Et ne l’aimais-je point,” he wonders, “comme on aime un beau livre, un beau vers, une belle statue, comme la réalisation visible et palpable d’un rêve d’artiste?”3 For a man, statue-making is childbearing as narcissism, engendering mistresses as obedient children who are re-creations of an omnipotent self. “J’aimais Juliette ainsi,” as Mintié elaborates; “je l’aimais d’une pitié immense… ah! ne riez pas!... d’une pitié maternelle.” 4 In Mirbeau’s first novel, creative work is the antithesis of a nothing machine, expressing hyperdulic self-adoration, projecting the artist’s imagination as a womb from which issue perfect avatars of the subject and the mother who loves him. Rather than the uninterrupted, relentless destruction of material fueling the creative project, the artist’s goal is to establish a state of wholeness, equanimity, and immobility. For l’Abbé Jules, the Crucifixion as work ensuring the faithful eternal life is a fraud perpetrated on dupes complicitous in their victimization. A metaphor for institutions that pervert instinct and corrupt 2

Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, p. 121 Ibid., p. 227. 4 Ibid. 3

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nature, the statue is the object of Jules’s programmatic iconoclasm. It is Jules whose ideal is to fabriquer un Rien, and, in Mirbeau’s novel, this negative goal can be pursued only negatively – not in the constructive sense of the verb fabriquer – but by the static finality of the inert pronoun Rien. A prototypical anarchist who tears down old edifices, clearing the terrain, demolishing discredited ideological structures, Jules leaves the work of founding utopia to optimists and dreamers. Since children are the perfect bodies that statuary imitates, Jules reluctantly agrees to teach his nephew, Albert Dervelle. Having fantasized about authoring a book entitled Les Semences de Vie, a revolutionary tract “qui devait régénérer le monde,”5 Jules instead reverts to the task of removing brambles, uprooting weeds, clearing the child’s soul of culture’s poisonous vegetation. From the standpoint of the novel’s temporal frame, Jules is always striving to reestablish a better early state – before society was planted with the dogma of intolerance, before teachers ruined children, and eglantine was smeared with caca. Yet as a prisoner of human time, as a product of human culture, Jules operates in a present moment of permanent Revolution. “[C]omme un Ravachol en soutane,” as Nathalie Proriol describes him, Jules is a Mirbellian voice of defiance. A solitary scourge, Jules “est Robespierre, il est La Terreur.”6 For Jules, perfection is not housed in formal works of marble, but is the original state of nature, pure in its irretrievability. In Jules’s Rousseauist aesthetic, primitive beings are statues that society defiles. To Jules, it is the family, the academies, and churches that do the iconoclastic work of sabotaging beauty. Art for Jules means preempting artists’ attempts to denature nature. Education means inculcating the benefits of ignorance, teaching children, who know nothing, the value of unlearning. In L’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau delineates the operation of the nothing machine – as a book whose hero despises books and who seems to apostrophize Mirbeau’s reader, admonishing him as well: “je vais te dégoûter de la lecture.”7 Mirbeau’s text is filled with sumptuous, poetic images of Jules’s garden, where the priest escorts his pupil and denigrates poetic imagery as excrement polluting the pristine wholesomeness of things. In the character of Père Pamphile – in Jules’s sentimental pantheism – Mirbeau’s disabused philosophy is tempered by nostalgia, a 5

Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 429. Nathalie Proriol, “La temporalité dans L’Abbé Jules,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 9 (2002), p. 96. 7 Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, p. 473. 6

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longing to reach a state of innocence and goodness before art perverts them in works that call for their return. In Jules’s celebration of an impossible, Edenic anteriority, it is nature defined as art that is prehuman and anonymous, making art’s encomiums to nature an expression of cultural decadence. This textual self-invalidation, whereby Mirbeau incriminates his practice, is reflected in Jules’s tendency toward self-mortifying masochism, as he locks himself in a library filled with books like L’Abbé Jules, and masturbates with pornography while heaping invective on himself: “cochon!.. abject cochon!... Pourriture!” he cries in orgasmic fury.8 In its conclusion, L’Abbé Jules articulates a capital theme in Mirbeau’s fiction, identifying the second phase of the nothing machine’s performance. Death is not an end but a subversion of the structuring principles that rob life of its dynamism by making it a literary construct. Jules consistently frustrates narrative efforts to establish him as a plausible fictional character. Biographical lacunae deny him the illusion of a personal history; his year-long absence from Viantais and unknown activity in the capital create a sense that his existence does not extend beyond the story. Before the novel starts, Jules is only a cause for speculation, apprehensive theorizing by those who collaborate with Mirbeau in inventing him. Jules is a mystery whose elucidation becomes the work of readers, as they follow the townspeople in creating the myth of l’Abbé Jules. Throughout the book, this generalized epistemological indeterminacy is communicated to the institutions that Jules himself attacks. Knowledge is unattainable. Verisimilitude is problematic. Certainty and truth are nowhere to be found. So assertions of inerrancy by doctors, priests, and judges are as sham as the reality of the hero who disputes them. Mirbeau’s cleverness is to fabricate a hero who, out of perverseness and self-hatred, unmakes what Mirbeau makes, showing that in L’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau’s nothing machine works on the level of characterization. Mirbeau’s anarchist aesthetic enables him to demonstrate that selfsatire and auto-demystification are themselves creative acts. The idea that identity is harmonious and stable is an illusion that is exposed by Jules’s penchant for self-contradiction. The inconsistency of Mirbeau’s hero is evident in the religious fervor that occasionally conflicts with his 8

Ibid., p. 452.

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professions of unbelief. This auto-subversion culminates with Jules’s posthumous editing of himself as text, in the reading of his will with its instructions to bequeathe the entirety of his fortune to the first priest to defrock himself. Jules’s testament is a work whose writer is proven to be honest by unmasking the fraudulence of others with false piety like his own. The documentary manifestation of Jules’s sepulchral laughter is the opening of his trunk, a textual repository like a coffin, which, when set ablaze, releases its obscene contents in the air, acting as a lifting of repression that occurs beyond the grave. In the character of l’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau gives full expression to his impulse to topple monuments, question institutional authority, locate cracks in the polished surfaces of sculptural ideals. The skeptic’s insistence on denying that any entity is everything reinforces Mirbeau’s belief in the fecundity of nothing. Any monument that is raised up inspires a wish to tear it down. Thus, the universal acclaim accorded to La Comédie humaine is what instigates Mirbeau, in La 628-E8, to write “La Mort de Balzac.” In Sébastien Roch, the narrative is bracketed by indications that the beatitude of nothingness that preeexists one’s birth is what one seeks in the oblivion that is the destination of life’s journey. Freud’s conception of the death drive is illustrated in Mirbeau’s novel, where exile to a world of cruelty and injustice, where imprisonment in a corporeal shell subject to indignity and attack, elicit expressions of existential outrage and inspire the anarchist’s work of undoing and starting over. For Jules, death should be a return to undifferentiation, a scattering of one’s body in the immensity of the forest floor. In Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau begins by situating his character outside society. Solitary, his boyhood spent amidst the sounds of wind and flowing rivers, Sébastien has already achieved Jules’s goal of a dispersal in the elements, since in Sébastien’s vegetal existence, the subject and milieu are inseparable. In moments of crisis, Sébastien longs for molecular disintegration, reassimilating the self into a nurturing environment. It is his father, with his desire for surrogate celebrity, who imposes on his son the ideal of monumental majesty. But Monsieur Roch’s vainglory is not communicated to his offspring, who wishes only for reintegration into the anonymity of the natural world. Sébastien is vulnerable to the blandishments of Père de Kern, who seduces him with music and the sensual imprecision of lyric poetry. Without the painful divorce of referents from words, music is the medium in which the child is immersed, an acoustic sea or sound-mother in which Sébastien bathes in rapture. Before birth as expulsion and banishment to

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the realm of language, music for Sébastien is the source in which “[i]l voyait […] naître des formes adorables.”9 Father Roch, who insists Sébastien repeat the syllables of his name, is the vengeful oedipal father linked to words that inflict pain, a thundering, raging deity with bloodshot eyes and bristling beard, who is linguistically transposed as “une cacaphonie de mots barbares.”10 Sébastien, who wants only to commingle with things, is uprooted from the maternal soil of his home in Pervenchères, and then violated in the most intimate recesses of his identity. The self, once a secure and impenetrable entity, is broken like a statue that is shattered on the ground. The selfdispossession he experiences in the aftermath of the assault makes him shun all sexual partners with whom he feels vulnerable and impels him to seek the autonomy of solitary auto-eroticism. Mirbeau ends Sébastien Roch by granting his hero’s wish, showing him evaporating into the chaos and smoke of battle, merging with the air, disappearing into everything, in an apocalyptic scene of conflagration and confusion. As Mirbeau’s nothing machine effects the disintegration of the character, Sébastien’s dispersal into the wind of war is a celestial interment that restores him to his original state of ubiquity and namelessness. In Dans le ciel, Mirbeau elaborates on his vision of a sky-Eden, the firmament as a matrix in which the artist seeks repatriation. In the cemetery of the heavens or the soil of the forest, pain and anger can be covered with the material of creation. “To bury the rage,” as Leonard Shengold writes, “we need the ‘dirt’ from the ground from whence we are taken.”11 Psychoanalysis claims that the experiential motivation for creation is loss of an object which art tries unsuccessfully to retrieve. Before the vocalizations that are the foundation of language, there is the wailing of the infant, his plaintive cries of abandonment, the terrified impotence in being unable to bring his mother back. Yet at the start of the journey that leads from everything to nothing, there was the peaceful silence of unconsciousness of a being rooted in his environment. Similarly, at the end, when all efforts have proved unavailing, there is the dignified muteness that renounces art as revolt, the pre-existential silence that Samuel Lair describes. In Mirbeau, Lair says, “toute acte et toute pensée 9

Ibid., p. 619. Ibid., p. 606. 11 Leonard Shengold, “Father, Don’t You See I’m Burning?” Reflections on Sex, Narcissism, Symbolism, and Murder: From Everything to Nothing (New Haven, Yale UP, 1991), p. 5. 10

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anarchiste auraient leur origine dans une parole tue, un cri opiniâtrement contenu; l’écrivain nous présenterait alors les tribulations de vie des protagonistes ‘avant le cri.’”12 The ideal of perfection toward which the artist’s work is straining is the object, not its inadequate representation, the mother, not the disappointing insubstantiality of the hallucination. In Dans le ciel, the artist’s gesture is to reach up and fail to grasp, to project his works toward the sky and see them fall back to the ground, to convey his anguish in images that are re-engulfed in meaninglessness. The unsatisfactoriness of images, art’s general expressive failure, the refractoriness of language are the subject of Mirbeau’s novel, which features a host of important, if incidental, characters that are inarticulate, dumb, yet also wise since they are animals. In Mirbeau’s depiction of these creatures, he shows them unaffected by the dualism of the creator and his product, the gap between art and what it aims for. There is a perfect commensurability between the purity of a beggar’s gaze and the unfathomable sky reflected in the depth of her blue eyes. A spider that spins a web draws its intricate design, creates its geometric art with material from its body. Only dogs, the beasts cursed by their fidelity to humans, bark and echo with their complaints the existential alienation of their masters. Dans le ciel marks an important development in Mirbeau’s fiction as a nothing machine, as art ceases to produce objects that are finished, formed, and static, and instead becomes indissociable from the dynamics of creative labor. The transformational, operational significance of art as work resituates creation in a constantly renewed present. Ongoing efforts are never interrupted and are opposed to the dead artifacts that are assigned to the immobilized preterit time of loss. The statue that is still in its funereal completion reflects the unity of death that restores the individual to his purely bodily condition. On the other hand, Le Fumier, the subject of Lucien’s planned canvas, conveys the pullulation of life in its disordered temporality: forms not yet decomposed, embryonic shapes not yet solidified, conjugating Eros and Thanatos in a seething, excremental pile, “un tas d’ordures” whose energies Lucien likens to “des machines.”13 In Un gentilhomme, Mirbeau’s unfinished novel he had started sketching in the same era, it is the art work’s incompleteness that is the subject of the story. Mirbeau considers and then rejects the discredited 12 Samuel Lair, “La Loi du silence selon Mirbeau,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 5 (1998), p. 35. 13 Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, p. 88.

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convention of omniscient narrative. He imputes to his inept storyteller ambitious explanatory notions, a wish to act as a perceptive analyst and observer of humanity. But as a nothing machine, the narrator defaults on his promise to deliver truth, so that the unintelligibility of his experience is transposed as the suspension of his narrative. Unable to shed light on the rich complexity of the entity he calls man, Mirbeau’s narrator, Charles Varnat, cannot fathom the mystery of the aristocrat employing him. Not an interpreter or creator, Varnat is no more than a scribe, a personal secretary charged with ordering the correspondence of the Marquis d’AmblezySérac. Emasculated by servility and narrative incompetence, Varnat regrets that chance had not oriented him “vers la littérature” as he had hoped, 14 yet he ultimately provides no exegesis for the text of his retrospection. He cannot stabilize the dancing mirage of his employer: part showman, part charlatan, political schemer, and country squire. Mirbeau’s conception of the novel as described in a letter to Claretie was of a sweeping epic supplying “une vision synthétique de tout un pan de l’histoire contemporaire.”15 It is as if the book as planned was to offer a globalizing vision, a coherent, ordering narrative of existence that fiction could not provide. Mirbeau’s original blueprint for the book was thus the hypothetical everything that shrank until its hero’s ineptitude finally turned it into nothing. In the novel, the Marquis is the proteiform gentleman whose serialized identity has been catalogued by Monique Bablon-Dubreuil: the true aristocrat as endangered species, the “fausse aristocrate millionaire,” the bourgeois parvenu, the “gentilhomme maquignon.”16 Varnat may claim to have the perceptiveness to unriddle the mystery of human nature. But he can no more tame the Marquis with explanatory insights that Mirbeau can imprison life within the confines of traditional narrative. The apparent purpose of Varnat’s tale is as an autobiographical apologia, but the narcissistic self-referencing of Varnat’s interests and commentaries leaves him unequipped to decipher the enigma of the Gentleman, or to reconcile the contradictoriness of man in general. A structurally centripetal document, Varnat’s text risks becoming just an airtight box of literature, sufficient only to suffocate the material it contains. Varnat repeats fiction’s murder of a subject so that analysis can autopsy it. But in Mirbeau, the box cracks open, spilling out its dirty secrets; the 14

Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, p. 901. Michel, “Introduction: Un gentilhomme,” p. 870. 16 Bablon-Dubreuil, “Un gentilhomme: du déclin d’un mythe à l’impasse d’un roman,” p. 77. 15

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beautiful body decomposes; the elegant tomb teems with vermicular life. Varnat would take the unstable, ever-mutating figure of the aristocrat, inject him with the embalming fluid of his simplifying appraisal, apply the mortician’s cosmetics of character delineation, and stand him as a statue in the showroom of his narrative. Perhaps that is why the novel stops in the middle of a sentence, watching from below as the Marquis rises up the stairs and out of the novel, since not even death, but only monuments are silent, still, and complete. Le Jardin des supplices, with its ill-assorted tripartite structure, its stress on regenerative corruption, Clara’s hurried movement through the garden, the clashing imagery of ranunculi and gore, elephantiasis and horticulture, transposes the theme of confusion as fecundity onto the level of the narrative. Beautiful and horrible, the bagnio supplies the compost in which divisions are effaced, boundaries are broken, oppositions are reconciled, and difference becomes sameness. Imprisoned, the Poet who had penned a hymn to putrescence and uncleanness is subjected to degradation that assimilates him to his poem. Executioners charged with carrying out the Torure of the Bell often perish with the condemned during the performance of their job. Murder, whose prevention is the pretext for forming governments, is the practice that these governments most assiduously engage in. It is natural that in his trenchant indictment of Western decadence, Mirbeau’s narrative is predicated on an alleged quest for origins. Eugène Mortain, a flower blooming in manure, is the product of a moribund culture that is living its final hour. And so the appointment of the narrator – a potential blackmailer and enemy – as a prominent embryologist sent to find where life began reflects the anarchist’s disposition to dismantle flawed systems and, in an optimistic affirmation, to start over from the beginning. Everything in Mirbeau’s book disproves the faulty teleology that moves from amorphousness to the order and symmetry of statues. Instead, finished objects are tortured and disarticulated, resolved into constituent parts that are assembled in new ways. Le gros patapouf sees no need for women to be women and for men to be men. Unconstrained by established novelistic form, Mirbeau sees no need to respect the traditional organicism of narrative. The celebration of the fumier that had begun in Dans le ciel reaches its lyrical conclusion in Mirbeau’s layout of the torture garden, where cruelty and sadism are the wellsprings of floral beauty, and decay sustains the generative inexhaustibility of life.

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At the same time, Mirbeau acknowledges that the garden is different from the forest. With its petal beds, its Buddhas, its graceful ponds and kiosks, with its sacerdotal herons with their undulating necks, the garden is not a place but an expression of the cult of the artificial. In Mirbeau’s extravagant botanical catalogues of rare floral specimens, in the horticultural hysteria contained by the garden’s disciplined design, there is a sense that the love of flowers – like the love of beauty or love of women – is a neurotic byproduct of man’s disconnection from the natural world. Having abandoned his place in the silence and anonymity of the forest, man relocates to the hothouse realm of eroticism and language. The most discouraging conclusion that readers draw from Mirbeau’s novel is that death brings no finality, no blessed extinction. Clara’s nymphomaniacal voraciousness may reach a paroxysm that causes her collapse and convalescence in a brothel, but as the boatwoman Ki-Pei explains to the narrator, the whorehouse bed is a just another grave from which Clara will rise, obedient to the instincts of aggression, lust, and life. In Le Jardin des supplices, the only clean annihilation is the expunging of the audience to which the narrator tells his story. The elision of their reaction to the narrator’s ghastly tale effects the single surgical removal of material from the book. Otherwise, Mirbeau shows that a spurious quest for origins – a search for the gastropod in the ocean’s pelagic ooze – is telescoped into a repeated experience of endings, as the barbarism of China mirrors the decadence of France. Since the sum total of matter can never be diminished, since life cannot be eradicated, only transient forms can mutate, wilting, rotting, and reappearing in the garden as new blossoms. Having identified the functional limitations of the nothing machine, Mirbeau turns in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre from murder to semioclasm. Célestine, who trades “son tablier de servitude contre un costume d’Alsacienne revancharde,”17 is the vehicle through which Mirbeau reassigns the authority to give meaning. Célestine reveals the soiled undergarments beneath her mistresses’ finery, just as Mirbeau lifts the skirts of words, exposing their dirty ideological motivation. In his study of Célestine’s journal as déchet, Gaétan Davoult notes that masters are consumers of experience while servants perform the task of waste disposal; “le rôle de ce dernier est […] de prendre en charge le produit de la digestion. […] Le maître ne peut assumer ses déjections et les relègue à

17

Jean-François Nivet, “Le Journal d’une femme de chambre: Année zéro,” Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), p. 124.

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ce qui a une valeur moindre à l’echelle sociale.”18 If the prerogative of the rich is to live, eat, and forget, the duty of their ancillaries is to collect the scatographic record of their employers’ deeds, preserving them in the form of textual memories. In Mirbeau’s oeuvre, the art work is ambivalently regarded, both idealized as the ordered expression of desultory experience, and depreciated as fecal stuff consigned to the past as the time of death. In comments that apply to the bourgeoisie collectively, Davoult remarks that for the Pre-Raphaelite painters whose affectation Mirbeau satirizes, it is not the reality of woman that the artist admires, but a preliminarily aestheticized image that he reproduces on his canvas. Characterized by Davoult as Pygmalionism or fetishism, the artist’s relationship with his work is also defensive and narcissistic, as he adores an image reflecting the beauty of his gaze, an image that protects against unmediated contact with the world. In the baroque domain which Serge Duret sees Célestine as occupying, there is also no direct apprehension of the real. Everything is glamor, scintillation, and imposture, sparkling jewels, carmine cheeks, shiny fabric, rouged lips. An excess of stimulation concealing a paucity of substance, it is “le royaume du trop, c’est-à-dire du ‘factice’ et du ‘toc.’”19 Duplicity as theater, falseness as dramatization make it impossible for the eye to come to rest on the truth. Yet hypocritical masters insist on the authenticity of the counterfeit, reaffirming their exclusive right to attach purposes to objects and significance to words. But as the accuracy of vision is deceived by masks of meretriciousness, knowledge proves unattainable, and meanings become unmoored from things. Plutocrats and scientists may invoke the rightness of their viewpoint, but in a world of dissimulation, all perspectives are legitimized. Not surprisingly, in the journal kept by Mirbeau’s vagrant heroine, the first instance of epistemological instability comes in the context of Célestine’s boots. For the fetishist Rabour, a woman’s footwear is not limited by its functionality. Once polished and worn on feet that walk, they lose their etymological commonness. Ceasing to be pedestrian, they fit the fetishist’s desire. Inanimate matter is mobilized and loses its monosemic plainness, coming alive and radiating out into the fertile realm of

18

Gaéton Davoult, “Déchet et corporalité dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 11 (2004), p. 126. 19 Serge Duret, “Le Journal d’une femme de chambre: oeuvre baroque?” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 4 (1997), p. 248.

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ambiguity. “Marche un peu que les vois remuer,” as Rabour orders Célestine, “… que je les voie vivre… tes petites bottines.”20 Here the corpse that decomposes in a humus of ambiguity is not the body of the oppressed but the linguistic authority of the oppressor. Fetish objects, as Mirbeau illustrates, are those the anarchist emancipates. Institutions that legislate the distinction between right and wrong, truth and falsehood are undermined when their interpretive tyranny is challenged. When shoes are not just shoes, and a tumescent gargoyle member is not just an outrage, things are free to acquire meaning according to the language user’s needs. In the baroque domain which Duret sees as a world turned upside down, where mistresses and maids exchange places and become identical, pronatalism, anti-Semitism, heterosexual monogamy are no less neutral ideological stances than the assertions that boots should cover feet. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, decontextualization of familiar objects expresses what will henceforth become a central theme in Mirbeau’s fiction: movement and energy required to effect displacement and transformation. When Célestine’s boot is moved from her foot to Rabour’s teeth, the freedom of objects to signify in new ways is reaffirmed. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau deplores the constraints of railway travel, ineluctably predictable journeys laid out as straight as iron track, undeviating from their unalterable schedule of arrivals and departures. In Mirbeau’s nightmare of missed trains, he shows the incompatibility of human time – flexible, spontaneous, inaccurate, and playful – with the rigidity of train travel that is as implacable as death. On the other hand, car trips can be as unplanned and non-linear as Mirbeau’s novel, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique. In a book that opposes stasis to motion, solids to gases, Mirbeau monumentalizes the statue, a ponderously graceful, inanimate form that he enlarges into a landscape feature, in the crushing sublimity of a mountain. Since, for Mirbeau, geologic time is time that is arrested, a mountain is material so massive, so heavy that it symbolically negates the human impulse to effect change. Set in a sanitorium amidst the summits of the Pyrenees, the novel’s backdrop suggests that people’s foibles and shortcomings are as fatally permanent as the rock peaks surrounding them. In the face of the merciless, towering accretions of sediment and time, Mirbeau’s anarchist aesthetic is unleashed with comic vehemence. The view of things as 20

Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 386.

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having an incontrovertible, intrinsic nature is an argument that Mirbeau is anxious to take up. Whereas Le Journal d’une femme de chambre featured moral and positional inversions, the demeaning of the mistress, the rehabilitation of the chambermaid, in Les 21 jours …, the work done by the nothing machine affects the mechanics of the story. Like Clara Fistule in his gender undefinability – neither man nor woman, but rather “un interhomme,”21 Mirbeau’s text occupies the interstice between novel and episodic miscellany. Like Fistule, weary of bearing “le poids écrasant de [s]on génie,”22 fatigued by the redundancy of his healthy corporeity, Mirbeau’s text aspires to sublimate its matter into energy, transforming mountains into clouds, and dogmatism into fancy. The hoax Mirbeau exposes is the possibility of evading death or embellishing its horror through the embalming of cadavers, imbuing them with the seeming indestructibility of statues. The premise of a narrative whose theme is its itineracy is the summer migration of hypochondriacs to spas in search of cures. As Célestine’s diary showed the poverty of conventional sex, revealing the experimental diversity and richness of perversion, Les 21 jours… contrasts the sterility of health to the multifariousness of neurosis. Mirbeau rejects the homology of author and book, textual object and narrative process, that is most evident in novels like Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris. There the corpulent writer reproduced as his novel’s stylistic excess shows healthy, fat people assimilating life so effortlessly that their easy digestion turns them into rulers of the world. In Mirbeau, the alimentary model is no longer viable, since the narrator, Georges Vasseur, does not rework others’ stories, ordering and expelling them as narrative excreta. Instead, Vasseur bounces from one anecdote to another, colliding with interlocutors who redirect the path of his account. A tale of haphazard movement, random trajectories, chance encounters, Vasseur’s story is about his fractured experience that never comes together as meaning. Vasseur’s aim is to disprove the claim made by billionaire Dickson-Barnell that the inherent changelessness of material reality makes it insipid and infumable. With its seeming insubstantiality, Mirbeau’s novel converts the gravity of gravity into the impermanence of mist which, as in the celestial panorama described in Dans le ciel, coalesces as chimeras that dissolve in space. In the novel, Mirbeau equates self-righteousness with inert solids. However, uncertainty, ideas still unorganized as fact or knowledge, are 21 22

Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, p. 29. Ibid.

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permeable, porous things that take the shape of one’s desires. Since space in the novel is structured along epistemological boundaries, intersubjectivity is limited by body surfaces, room walls, national frontiers. The closed places of others’ identities are mysterious and intriguing, inviting scrutiny, eavesdropping, eliciting interpretive conjecture. Ignorance is not the obstacle that imprisons a person in himself, but rather the certainty that stifles curiosity and immobilizes speculation. In his fiction, Mirbeau’s most scathing derision targets the self-anointed expert, the scientist whose global knowledge leaves him petrified and proud. Since Doctor Triceps has an explanation for every possible anomaly, he is paralyzed by erudition. Unable to learn or grow, he is autonomous and complete, and as a casualty of his learnedness, he is doomed to death by wisdom. In Les 21 jours…, mountains exhibit the immodesty of omniscience. Vasseur, as Mirbeau’s spokesman, abhors majestic edifices, houses of good taste, musty repositories of stale consensus, shrines to the truth. And so he avoids libraries, museums, guidebooks extolling the vistas that every tourist stops and admires. Images of costiveness, viscosity, and agglutination suggest the sluggishness of thought slowed by unoriginality. Mirbeau’s nothing machine takes aim at the adhesiveness of popular opinion, uncritical views whose perceived validity allows for unquestioning acceptance. Counteracting the deadly appeal of automatic thinking, the menagerie of freakish specimens who file by in Vasseur’s narrative provoke attention by their grotesqueness. The effect of Vasseur’s story is one of uncanny defamiliarization. His goal is to show that the ciphers who are our neighbors and fellow-travelers hide an interesting reality beneath their unremarkable appearance. In Vasseur’s narrative, people look as peculiar as they are. Using caricature and hyperbole, Mirbeau rouses readers from their torpor, revealing the disturbing alienness of a world they thought they understood. Thus, an unprepossessing hotel guest throws another down a chasm. The walls of adjoining rooms communicate the secrets of their occupants, and Vasseur learns that the people he encounters in hotels always conceal some secret vice, inevitably harbor some depravity. When elevated to the level of symbolic consequence, even mediocrity and blandness seem sinister and strange. Because he operates on the assumption that he knows nothing and fathoms no one, Vasseur’s interest is always mobilized, his inquisitiveness structurally modeled as exploratory travel. Life, as he experiences it, is rich and ever-changing; beliefs that solidify soon disintegrate again into doubt.

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The nihilism of his friend, the recluse Roger Fresselou, reveals the philosophic tendency toward icy petrifaction. The antithesis of Vasseur, Fresselou thinks that everything is pointless. His detachment and indifference are positionally reflected in the Olympian impassivity of the mountain-dweller contemplating everything with scorn. The architectonics of organized knowledge systems protect the scientist, the psychiatrist, the misanthrope from the threatening complexity and unintelligibility of existence. Unballasted of certainties, Vasseur leaves the inhuman empyrean of the mountaintop, descending to the human plane of chance and possibility. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau’s narrative itinerary is again a journey of discovery, in which experiences of vertigo, weightlessness, and disconnection replace the development of a character who moves toward understanding and self-awareness. Paralleling the centrifugal direction of Mirbeau’s storyline, its radiating out from a center of self and home, is its abandonment of a macrocosmic focus on metaphysics and abstraction, its return to the swarming particulate realm of the infinitely small. Fearful of impotence, shame, and humiliation, Jean Mintié had evolved a monumental vision of himself as Christ, a savior, sage, and textual proselytizer whose sexual suffering on Calvary had elevated him to the mountaintop of importance. In the design of his nothing machine, Mirbeau turned toward the aftermath of disintegration, when grand, majestic things crumbled into their tiniest components: filaments of decaying flesh assimilating Pamphile to the forest, squirming maggots in the bloodpools in the alleyways of the torture garden. Instead of a statue – unmoving in the uselessness of its perfection – Mirbeau aspired to be part of the cosmos as machine, acting, as he says, as an atom doing the work of life. Like his automobile, Mirbeau’s novel is a mode of transportation, a vehicular missile rocketing ahead in space and time. Like the miraculous rifle of which the German emperor had been enamored, the car is both a technical innovation and a weapon. Piercing the present moment, smashing impediments to change, scattering the corpses of the conservators of history, the automobile, like the firearm, is a force of temporal disturbance. Fleeing the threat of entropy, Mirbeau drives or runs on foot into the future, which is the realm of “Histoire-Action.”23 That is because “Mirbeau se décrit toujours en mouvement: fixer, se figer, c’est mourir.”24 Like 23

Anne-Cécile Pottier-Thoby, “La 628-E8: opus futuriste?” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001), p. 110. 24 Ibid.

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books, which transform authors and carry readers to new destinations, the car is not an object, but “un vecteur téléologique.” 25 With self-deprecating humor, Mirbeau demands that those on the roadway step aside and let him pass – “Place au progrès!” he shouts peremptorily. But progress, stripped of its connotation of ethical amelioration, is no longer a step forward toward the perfection of utopia. Progress is just the urgent impulse to move ahead, to throw away the refuse of memory and guilt, and to enter a new mechanical age of simultaneity and omnipresence. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau offers his final meditation on monument design, the funeral art that empties subjects of contradictoriness and vitality, in order to commemorate them as impoverished simplicity. The ordeal of the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier is to try and fail to honor Emile Zola in a statue, stone as bombast, formal triteness, Zola allegorized as truthsayer. Unlike Rodin, whom Mirbeau praised for putting motion into marble, Meunier’s statue captures nothing of Zola’s richness and complexity: “cette physionomie mobile, ardente, volontaire, timide.”26 For Mirbeau, Zola’s grandeur came not just from his fight against injustice, but from his resistance to the existential malignity of things. Opposing the thanatotic tendency of life to come to rest as matter, Zola’s art was quick and fugitive, dynamic and inconsistent. The ochlocratic powers controlling social insitutions recoil from originality, celebrating their bigotry by building, as Mirbeau says, “au Mensonge, à la Haine, au Crime, à la Stupidité, des monuments formidables et dérisoires.” 27 In Mirbeau’s automotive narrative, he explores the possibility of relinquishing the principle of a guiding narrative agency, experience passed through the lens of a single organizing consciousness, a centering subjectivity ruled by self-consistency and habit. Mirbeau’s car-book does not always follow the route that he has chosen: Brossette, Mirbeau’s chauffeur, leaves on an unauthorized detour to see his mother who has dementia and is living in a rest home. The disrepair of highway surfaces alters the traveler’s planned itinerary. And Mirbeau’s own impulsiveness, his responsiveness to sudden urges, redirects his trip and story toward places unforeseen. The unfamiliar landscapes that the motorist traverses correspond to the unmapped regions of his psyche. Like texts that devolve into a medley 25

Ibid. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 359. 27 Ibid., p. 362. 26

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of disjointed anecdotes, the mind of Mirbeau’s storyteller is not a synthesizing machine, an apparatus processing randomness into continuity. Each successive novel illustrates the dethroning of an ego that, once victimized by life, is rehabilitated by art. Mirbeau’s palinodic playfulness, his jubilant disharmonies express the libidinal pleasure of disintegrating an artificial self. Mirbeau’s characters had always been the plaything of unseen forces, puppets made to move by repressed desires, unreasoned fears, the chaos-breeding influence of primitive id impulses, tendencies toward dissolution into nonsense and confusion. Passengers in the rear of a car driven by a mysterious chauffeur, Mirbeau’s narratives may be told in the voice of disciplined intelligence, but they are increasingly conducted by ungovernable energies. In his last book, Dingo, Mirbeau shows a theriomorphic bullet, an animal illustration of massacre as movement. A wild creature acting in the capacity of nothing machine, a creature negating culture, obeying appetites beyond control, Dingo is a welter of urges to hunt and kill and feed. Mirbeau’s human characters had often sought to split off their desires, embodying them in monuments to their undeserved celebrity, or locking them in trunks that they buried underground. In Dingo, the vertical axis of repression gives way to the horizontal plane of instinct. Not moving along the linear course of plodding human time, Dingo is a site of temporal confluence, where beginnings and endings coincide. A new life, he is delivered in a crate resembling a coffin. An efficient instrument of predatory annihilation, Dingo resembles the artillery shell that vaporizes enemies. He hates the vestigial waste left after his livestock slaughters and attacks the furs that Mirbeau hangs in his closet. In addition to being a roving agent of butchery and chaos, Dingo is a non-human intelligence more discerning than his master. In the multiple digressions constituting the bulk of Mirbeau’s novel, he shows the inhabitants of Ponteilles as blinded by cupidity, duped by the cunning of embezzling notaries and matricidal tavern-keepers, dominated by their fear of change and their suspicion of outsiders. Dingo – while occasionally confusing honesty with squalor – uses his nose and animal common sense to identify hypocrites and fakes. Profiting from opportunities for selfdeflating humor, Mirbeau shows the man as trained and instructed by his pet. Additionally, Dingo’s rampages supply the structure of the narrative, which cuts off in erratic paths, exuberant zigzags across the book. The complexity of the dingo as explorer, sage, and killer is reflected in a text unclassifiable by genre. As Sandor Kali writes: “Le récit de Mirbeau est, avant tout, une expérimentation esthétique: en

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réfléchissant sur les possibilités du genre romanesque, l’auteur invente un chien fabuleux et mythique: la forme traditionnelle cède la place à un mélange surprenant de différentes traditions: autobiographie, fable, farce, conte philosophique.”28 Dingo functions in the role of animal as missile, racing across fields strewn with disemboweled sheep, defying efforts to neuter him by making him a conventional protagonist, clamping murderous jaws on the principles that render fiction tame, reconverting the text as lapdog into something uncontrollable. The unavoidable transformation of Dingo into Dingo – taking the incomprehensibility of animal life and domesticating it as literature – is what communicates the sickness of culture to Mirbeau’s hero, sapping his strength, making him despondent and docile, as his extratextual marauding stops and he remains on Mirbeau’s page. The principle of the nothing machine is that in designing something new, it destroys the model that innovation renders obsolete. It is a principle that, in practice, is impossible to follow since, despite Mirbeau’s professions of bibliophobia, the finished text survives after creative energy is exhausted. To build each time a novel whose point is to disintegrate is to adopt the dialectical processes of the manure heap to literature. New writing should pierce as many corpses of old fiction as possible. If matter cannot be destroyed, it can be transformed into motion. Atoms doing the work of life are in movement all the time, doing their job of disturbing the course of things toward inanimateness and inertia. In designing his fiction as an engine of destruction, Mirbeau was mindful that creation depended on an economy of resources. The targets that fired Mirbeau’s outrage were also a power source, igniting the indignation that switched on the machine. The greater the resistance, the more forceful the reaction. The more intolerable the injustice, the stronger the resolve to overcome it. Mirbeau’s productivity as an author derived from an absence of equilibrium, a lack of proportionality that art moved to reestablish. Utopia is only a restoration of the lost paradise of infancy, and with no transgressions, no guilt, no judge, no chastened exiles, Mirbeau would have no evil to redress and no enemy to fight. Balance for Mirbeau was correlated with stagnation, as the formal harmony of Classical art stank of excrement and fetor. Art for Mirbeau was a hygienic practice. Flowing water was the music of cleanness regenerated by movement. But

28

Sandor Kali, “Tel chien, tel texte (Octave Mirbeau: Dingo, et Tibor Déry: Niki),” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 11 (2004), p. 168.

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still and sleeping water only incubated malaria, its mirroring surface blue with sky, its depths black with toxic sewage. It is not surprising that, coinciding with Mirbeau’s greatest triumphs, he became increasingly involved in campaigns against the pollution of water, air, and mind. In an environmental metaphor for society’s ethical impurity, Mirbeau inveighed against a policy whereby the dejecta of the rich were transported underground and contaminated the places of the poor. All men, Mirbeau insisted, had the right to healthy soil, pure air, and productive work: “De légitimes revendications, qui révèlent la fibre écologiste de Mirbeau.”29 As technology learned to reutilize the materials of life – fecal strata of anthracite, industrial and biological byproducts – these helped ensure the continued movement of commerce, goods, and people. Seeing the fecundity of death, Mirbeau worked against repression, harnessing the energy of indignation, believing that waste should not be wasted. Beds for corpses are not taboo sites if they are also beds for flowers. Decomposition is repellent only if it is inspiration unexpressed – the matrix where “tant de formes, charmantes, qui sait? attendent de naître.” The only truly lifeless things, in their unsanitary changelessness, are sclerotic beings set in stone and installed in public squares, objects of necrophilic veneration enshrined in chapels and museums. Subjected to attack, violated at his core, Mirbeau for a while had sought to undo narcissistic damage by projecting a self made whole in art and then raised victoriously as a monument. But statues are denials of life’s complexity and dynamism. Set in eternity, they forgo the chance that time might change them and let them live. Thus, the environmentalist Mirbeau protested against congested municipalities, where every park was fouled by imposing stone excreta. Incensed by “la ‘statuomanie’ [qui] fai[sait] rage, souvent en dépit du bon sens,”30 Mirbeau deplored the fact that even mediocre artists were denied the right to die, dressed in marble trousers, draped with the Legion of Honor insignia, and erected in a way that blocked people’s view of the horizon. L’Abbé Jules had argued for welcoming the anonymity of death, the scattering of remains in the silence of the forest. Mirbeau saw that those most insistent on the immortality of their fame were also the most deserving of oblivion and neglect. It it was their names Mirbeau forgot,

29 30

Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 624. Ibid., p. 625.

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since, as he says, “les hommes me sont indifférents, quand ils sont en pierres.”31 Combining his utopian yearnings and his anarchist’s recognition of the need to return to the tabula rasa, Mirbeau started to deemphasize decay as the composting of change. The urge to flee the mountain, to vaporize objects, and murder death made him refine in later years his conception of the nothing machine. At the end, Mirbeau’s ideal of annihilating art left behind no deformed bodies, twice-shot corpses, bloody sheep, no pulp of dogs who heeded the thoughtless summons of their masters – creatures slaughtered by obedience and crushed beneath the tires of people’s cars. Still, with jaundiced humor, Mirbeau stipulates that motorists are not chrome and steel gods, nor are their vehicles dematerialized and transformed into movement. Automobiles, like men and dingos, are subject to malfunction. They break down and must be thrown away on the metal manure pile of the scrap heap. But just as the founding of utopia makes reformers obsolete, the perfection of texts as nothing machines, once achieved, negates their author. When, at the end of a protracted illness, Mirbeau died in 1917, he had witnessed the adoption of murder-as-mechanics on the battflefields of war. He had seen French cities bombed and burned, women widowed, savagery triumphant, and he could no longer contemplate, with Sébastien Roch, the heroic pose of a Prussian cavalryman. In anticipation of the Existentialists, Mirbeau knew the absurdity of death, the cruelty and senselessness that left sufferers dispossessed. Like Dingo, Mirbeau stopped evolving and growing because he died, succumbing to mortality’s interruption of his work. Readers need not follow him in distinguishing novels and machines, nor prefer a car to books, that, in their covers, sleep on shelves. If Mirbeau achieves his goal, his works are vehicles transporting readers, moving them out of a familiar terrain of preconceptions, old ideas, carrying them “à travers les beautés de la nature, les diversités de la vie et les conflits de l’humanité.”32 In its optimal functioning, the nothing machine consumes itself to produce the energy it needs to fuel the more efficient model that succeeds it. If the nothing machine destroys itself in the performance of its work, the passengers in Mirbeau’s text hold no object in their hand. They only see an amazing blur of scenery, hear his 31

“Regard derrière une planche,” Le Journal, May 9, 1897, qtd. in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle, p. 625. 32 Mirbeau, La 628-E8, p. 288.

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engine’s droning music. Not disposing of literature as matter, they experience his fiction as a force.

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Index Abraham, Karl, 85; 108; 206 Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, 95; 96; 219 Alford, C. Fred, 196; 196 Anzieu, Didier 164; 165 Apter, Emily, 130 Archer, John, 216 Babineau, G. Raymond, 186 Bablon-Dubreuil, Monique, 100; 114; 118; 237 Bachelard, Gaston, 49; 91 Balzac, Honoré de, 201; 204; 205 Baudelaire, Charles, 176; 207; 222; 224 Baudouin, C., 89 Beaunier, André, 161 Bernheimer, Charles, 122; 123; 129 Belk, Russell, 149; 151 Blanchot, Maurice, 129; 229 Bourget, Paul, 170 Bradlow, Paul, 106-7 Brown, Norman O., 9; 200-201; 204 Bunuel, Luis 140 Camus, Albert, 16 Carr, Reginald, 133 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 24; 123 Claretie, Jules 99; 101; 237 Coolus, Romain, 137 Davoult, Gaétan, 239-240 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 215; 217 Dreyfus, Alfred, 8; 121; 125; 147; 177

Dugué de la Fauconnerie, 8; 99; 102 Durand, Gilbert, 22; 28; 85; 87; 91; 92; 95; 195 Duret, Serge, 240; 241 Durrmeyer, Lucile, 112-113 Feldman, Harold, 31; 89 Ferenczi, Sandor, 197 Franses, Rico, 53 Freud, Sigmund, 23; 43; 63; 108; 110; 140; 221 Gigoux, Jean, 204 Grave, Jean, 8; 19; 82 Hartocollis, Peter, 185 Hanska, Madame, 204 Hendershot, Cyndy, 138 Hervieu, Paul, 59; 99 Homans, Peter, 32; 33 Huret, Jules, 99 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 7; 160 Jayne, Edward, 163 Jourdain, Francis, 211 Judith, 19 Kali, Sandor, 246-7 Lair, Samuel, 236-6 Leclaire, Serge, 60; 66 Le Guérer, Annick, 240-1 Levine, Steven, 90 Levy, Judith Schweiger, and Paul Wachtel, 104-105 Lloyd, Christopher, 161 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, 206 McCaffrey, Enda, 15; 16; 211; 219 Melmoux-Montaubin, MarieFrançoise, 204; 205

250

Michel, Pierre, 27; 44; 49; 67; 96; 100; 102; 122; 150; 171; 178; 210; 211; 214; 224; 237 Mirbeau, Alice, 99 Mirbeau, Ladislas, 58 Monet, Claude, 19; 90 Montaubin, Marie-Françoise, 84 Moss, Donald, 133; 134 Nivet, Jean-François, 239 Nivet, Jean-François, and Pierre Michel, 20; 37; 38; 39; 57; 58; 81; 82; 83; 121; 137; 159; 161; 181; 192; 206; 209; 248; 249 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 172 Piven, J. S., 38; 44 Planchais, Jean-Luc, 21; 62 Plato; 201; 202 Post, Jerrold, 147 Pottier-Thoby, Anne-Cécile, 244; 245 Proriol, Nathalie, 232 Rabelais, François, 168 Ravachol, 82 Reverzy, Eléonore, 13; 31; 33-4 Rodenbach, Georges, 7 Sade, Marquis de, 28; 29 Sanders, Clinton, 212 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 167 Schehr, Lawrence, 125; 131 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20 Shengold, Leonard, 235 Smith, Joseph H., 27 Solomon, Sheldon, 40; 43 Stein, Howard, 162 Strauss, Anselm, 214 Tolstoy, Leo, 99 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, 7

The Nothing Machine

Vanseverin, Marie-Paule, and Albert Rombeault, 64-5 Wagniart, Jean-François, 162 Weiner, Norman, 25 Werth, Léon, 209 Whitebook, Joel, 68; 123; 133 Whone, Herbert, 92 Zola, Emile, 22; 57-8; 59; 138; 188; 242; 24