Octave Mirbeau's Fictions of the Transcendental 9781611495621, 9781611495614

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Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental

Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental Robert Ziegler

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Robert Ziegler All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ziegler, Robert, 1947Octave Mirbeau’s fictions of the transcendental / Robert Ziegler. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61149-561-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61149-562-1 (electronic) 1. Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Suffering in literature. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Transcendence (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. PQ2364.M7Z95 2015 848'.91409—dc23 2015000743 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction 1 2 3 4

1

The Pardoner The Seer The Stranger The Brother

27 77 93 133

Conclusion

185

Bibliography

199

Index

203

About the Author

213

v

Acknowledgments

I wish first to give my profound thanks to Pierre Michel, foremost authority and fathomless source of all information, contacts, and documents relating to Octave Mirbeau. What I needed to know, Pierre would tell me, and what I wanted to read, Pierre would unfailingly provide. I also thank him for granting me permission to use materials previously appearing in his journal, the Cahiers Octave Mirbeau. To my daughter, Mary, and to my dear colleagues Jennifer Forrest, Marc Smeets, Allan Pasco, and Elizabeth Emery, I am grateful for their editorial insights and their support for this project. I am indebted, as always, to Evelyn Merkle for her meticulous and professional assistance in the completion of this manuscript. During the work on this book and in the hard times that followed, my wife, Louise, was a source of unshakable strength. Her attentive reading helped me improve my writing and give greater coherence to my ideas. For more than her assistance in the completion of this book, I am forever grateful to Louise for her intelligence, her steadfastness, and her love. I am blessed to have her as the partner in my life.

vii

Introduction

Political firebrand, indefatigable reformer, champion of the avant-garde, crusader for new technology, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as a disturber of the peace. If, in recent decades, Mirbeau has emerged from critical oblivion, it is as much for his advocacy of anarchist ideals as for his authorship of works that count among the fin de siècle’s most controversial. More than was the case with many of his fin-de-siècle peers, Mirbeau’s career was imprinted by the central political events of the century’s final decades. Inspired by Kropotkin and Dostoevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of an era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology and defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the soldier sacrificed as cannon fodder. Mirbeau rightly stands out from his contemporaries for the singular role he played, “not only in the history of journalism, the novel, and theater, but also the fine arts, as well as the social and political history of la Belle Époque.” 1 After his turbulent years of toil as a meagerly paid journalist, Mirbeau turned to fiction as a forum for responding to the issues of the day—not only ventilating his views on government abuses but also refining his positions on art and metaphysics. 2 It is impossible to untangle the political, aesthetic, and spiritual threads of Mirbeau’s thinking since all reinforce the sense of his ideological extremism. Mirbeau’s hatred of moderation, his demands for social justice, and his quest for the sublime suggest an unwillingness to compromise. Struggling to reconcile an impossible utopianism with practical political goals consistent with his jaundiced view of mankind, Mirbeau exhibited the mystical fervor of a prophet and the disillusionment of a cynic. Paroxysmal expressions of the fin-de-siècle’s conflicting views, Mirbeau’s works conveyed his hopes for a perfectible society while cataloging the vices of a cruel and brutish race.

1

2

Introduction

While, in his political writings, Mirbeau dreamed of a golden era of egalitarianism, he was distrustful of the collectivism of homogenizing social movements. When the good of individuals was subordinated to controlling institutions, the potential for tyranny was commensurately increased. For Mirbeau, vindication of the many never justified oppression of the few. Mirbeau’s critiques of society seethe with indictments of indoctrinating agencies: the family, which stifled the child’s freedom and expressive creativity; the school, which besotted students with the aridity of its curriculum; the army, which privileged patriotism over the sanctity of life; and the church, which sanctified suffering, perverted instinct, and alienated the faithful from nature. Despite professing unbelief, Mirbeau was fascinated with the transcendental, with mystical intuitions—higher states of consciousness that elevated the individual out of the misery of existence. However, Mirbeau’s sense of the sublime was incompatible with institutional religion. A church concerned with the indisputability of its doctrine, the authority of the ecclesia, and the mechanisms for protecting that authority was hostile to the heterodoxy of independent spiritual seekers. As much as Mirbeau honored a personal quest for the infinite, he anathematized Christianity for codifying intolerance and repression. Mirbeau’s scathing anticlericalism and incrimination of Catholicism came from a conviction that the church was an asylum for the wealthy and perverted. Jesuit schools were lairs of predatory pedophiles (Sébastien Roch, 1890). Christian charities, disguised as philanthropic agencies, were hotbeds of iniquity where children were sexually exploited (Le Foyer, 1908). Yet Mirbeau shared the admiration held by fin-de-siècle Catholic zealots for the pariahs, tramps, and beggars rehabilitated in the scriptures. The personal trials of the misbegotten became an insignia of election. Those marginalized by society experienced damnation here below yet had glimpses of the bliss they hoped might await them somewhere higher. Two years before Mirbeau published Le Jardin des supplices (1899), he formed an unlikely alliance with the atrabilious Léon Bloy, one of the rightwing illuminati who had undergone a conversion at La Salette. Concurring with Mirbeau that society was ruled by a universal law of murder (see chapter 3), 3 Bloy called for evildoers to be exterminated in a fiery apocalypse. While sharing with Bloy “a flamboyant, trenchant style, a taste for invective and murderous formulas, a vocation as a pitiless critic and demolitionist,” 4 Mirbeau no doubt also sympathized with Bloy’s eschatological fervor, appreciating his messianic catastrophism while disallowing the possibility of a messiah. Like Bloy, Mirbeau was temperamentally combustible and disgusted with virtue in moderation, so he understood Bloy’s thirst for the superhuman and sublime. But the fanaticism that religion taught poisoned the faithful with self-hatred. The inerrancy of dogma, the unalterability of ritual,

Introduction

3

the monotony of the liturgy encouraged uncritical automatism. It was institutional religion that Mirbeau censured and abhorred: “Everything coming from religion aroused only his sarcasm and derision.” 5 With his hunger for an absolute, Mirbeau gravitated toward life’s mysteries, longing for experience that raised him above the plane of existential degradation. In Mirbeau’s quest for the transcendental, his goal was constantly evolving. The Savior of Christianity who sanctified the suffering of disciples gave way to the Buddhist sage (Lettres de l’Inde, 1885) whose teachings promised remission from life’s sorrows, an extinction of desire, and the quietude of Nirvana. Over time, Mirbeau’s spiritual search became an orientation toward the suprarational, a cultivation of states of ecstasy, anagogic intuitions, and an experience of the divine from which the divinity was absent. In his later writings, Mirbeau’s political and mystical interests began to dovetail as he found glimpses of the infinite in those whose plight he sought to mitigate. The anarchist, the mystic, the reformer, and the creative visionary came together in Mirbeau’s later fictions, where they were reconciled and were made one. Mirbeau has received due critical attention for his involvement in his era’s most incendiary and divisive social issues. His contributions as an anarchist and reformer have been rightly recognized and thoroughly documented. Too often, however, readers have accepted Mirbeau’s professions of irreligion. Yet it was because of the fierceness of Mirbeau’s defense of the forsaken, the poor, and the forgotten—because of his solidarity with the suffering—that he sought to explore man’s higher faculties. It was because of the strength of Mirbeau’s belief in human depravity and social injustice— because of the horrors of the world here below—that he turned his gaze toward the sky, seeking to discover the qualities in men that drew them to selflessness, transcendence, and beauty. The present volume is meant to complement and expand on my previous study of Mirbeau, The Nothing Machine (2007). There I characterized Mirbeau’s fiction as a throbbing engine of upheaval and scandal: decrying corrupt governments, overturning sclerotic ideologies, mocking stale aesthetic systems, and ultimately burning the textual remains of itself, reversing the process whereby it exhausts the energy of creation in order to come to rest as a book. Whereas this new work examines Mirbeau’s metaphysical quest, The Nothing Machine focused on the political and artistic dimensions of his writing, arguing that Mirbeau repeats the anarchist’s gesture, reducing previous creation to the tabula rasa on which new work can be raised up. Believing that the “values that drove Mirbeau to support the Impressionists, to defend Dreyfus, to lend support to the imprisoned Jean Grave,” as he would to Oscar Wilde, are what spoke most compellingly to modern readers, 6 I pictured

4

Introduction

Mirbeau as an agitator whose fiction was a crucible, a seething matrix in which old ideas and dusty conventions were broken down so that unsettling innovations could emerge. In Mirbeau’s early autobiographical novels, the “nothing machine” had directed energy against the families, schools, and creeds that perverted the character’s instinct, stunting his growth, preventing him from making himself anew. In analyzing Le Jardin des supplices and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, I claimed that in Mirbeau, people are tortured, “books and bodies undergo experiments in hybridization [and] disarticulated narratives fill up with characters unidentified by genus, class, or phylum.” 7 Part parrot, part dog, erstwhile saboteur and aspiring bourgeoise, Mirbeau’s chambermaid, Célestine, experiences an identity fragmentation that affords her “cette sensation, indiciblement douce, de redevenir un être nouveau” [that inexpressibly sweet sensation of becoming a new being]. 8 Of course the nothing machine as a vehicle of hygienic obliteration is best represented in Mirbeau’s final novels as his automobile (La 628-E8, 1907) and his pet dog (Dingo, 1913). It is in these works that Mirbeau “definitively abandons the conception of creation as assembly, embracing instead the model of art as catastrophe, an apocalypse machine, savagery run amok, the dingo as marauder, the car as a roaring purveyor of road-kill.” 9 Here, for Mirbeau, “art as object is the target of art as destructive energy.” 10 In The Nothing Machine, I characterized Mirbeau’s writing as forever straining toward an impossible anteriority, longing for a return to the innocence of creation as yet unmade. In the present volume, however, I explore Mirbeau’s quest for a social ideal, a mystical apprehension that drives the aspirant ahead. Generally neglected by critics, Mirbeau’s interest in mystery, the unknown, unusual states of consciousness, the sublime, and the inexpressible informed virtually all of his work and helped shape his views on artistic work and political struggle. Like the nothing machine, always running, always roaring, Mirbeau’s search for the transcendental animates his fiction, charging it with a metaphysical electricity that carries him farther from an imperfect self and higher toward something better. For this reason, the present volume charts a new course, setting out to analyze the spiritual politics of the author. As Mirbeau was becoming involved in the escalating controversy of the Dreyfus case, cementing his alliance with prominent anarchists of the era and recommitting to his advocacy on behalf of society’s most defenseless members, he was also undergoing a uniquely personal spiritual evolution. Here this volume breaks new ground, showing the development of the author’s secular metaphysic, his quest for the transcendental, the aesthetically sublime, spiritually transfiguring experience that redeems man’s desolate existence. What begins as Mirbeau’s incrimination of Catholicism’s death-glorifying ethos and his effort to find refuge from life’s pain in the blessedness of Nirvana becomes a pursuit of

Introduction

5

mystical diffusion into the community of others. Showing how Mirbeau controverts the existence of a Christian god, this study also argues that Mirbeau never abandons his exploration of life’s mysteries, supernatural intuitions, and apprehensions of the infinite that come from the refinement of his art and an identification with his brothers. Born in 1848 into a conservative Catholic family in Trévières, Mirbeau coupled his inchoate longings for the sublime with a horror of religion only after the time of his internment in the Jesuit Collège Saint-François-Xavier in Vannes. Fictionalized in his 1890 novel, Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau’s hellish four years of Catholic instruction give a picture of a stratified world of aristocrats and outcasts brought together in an institution ruled by child molesters and zealots. Mirbeau shows his hero subjected to a regimen of theological terrorism and stupefied by a diet of rebarbative classical literature and Latin grammar from which, as Pierre Michel writes, students emerged “flattened by the steam-roller of ‘educastration.’” 11 In Sébastien Roch, as in his preceding volume L’Abbé Jules (1888), Mirbeau blames religion for adulterating a child’s native spirituality. In a Rousseauist idealization of childhood innocence, Sébastien is shown as being in harmony with a nurturing environment. Inherently a mystic in harmony with the world, he is incomprehensible to adults who mythologize childhood as a lost Eden. In Sébastien Roch, the homeland that the spiritual aspirant is seeking is not the unbreathable ether of the sky. It is the point of departure from which the writer embarks and to which repatriation is forbidden by his literary undertaking. After undergoing the soul-murder of rape by an instructor, Mirbeau’s hero is caught up in war and dies pointlessly on the battlefield. Life beyond age seventeen would be painful and redundant, Mirbeau judged, and so he executes his character, sparing him a bleak and foredoomed future. After Sébastien Roch, children are found only infrequently in Mirbeau’s fiction, appearing in disguise as madmen, vagabonds, and dogs. They are visionaries in whose eyes rapturous images are unreadable. They come from unknown places to which the adult author cannot go. This haloing of childhood as a radiant royaume blanc foreshadows Marcel Schwob’s elegy to innocence in Le Livre de Monelle (1892–1894). Like Mirbeau, Schwob teaches readers how childhood can be recovered—through unlearning, cleansing an adult self of violent or sexual impulses, cultivating forgetfulness, abandoning self-awareness, and emerging from the stream of mortal temporality. Childhood is rediscovered when one stops mourning its loss, when one ceases to look backward and relinquishes one’s memories: “N’embrasse pas les morts: car ils étouffent les vivants. Aie pour les choses mortes le respect qu’on doit aux pierres à bâtir” [Do not embrace the dead, for they suffocate the living. Have for dead things the respect that one owes to building stones]. 12

6

Introduction

Schwob himself would write enthusiastically of Sébastien Roch, and of Dans le ciel, in which Mirbeau’s yearning for the absolute became more anguished and self-destructive. There Mirbeau’s nostalgia for lost childhood was expressed as longing for an ideal, dramatized in what Schwob called “un roman impressioniste” peopled by “les êtres vagues [qui] l’inquiètent et le fascinent” [an Impressionist novel peopled by vague beings (that) disturbed and fascinated him]. 13 After publishing Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau became increasingly demoralized by his creative unproductiveness, stricken by the futility of his fictional endeavors. To Mirbeau, it was the sciences that performed an archeology of the spirit, promising to map the way to a more enlightened future. In a letter to Monet (July 25, 1890), Mirbeau deplores the superficiality of art while praising the tangible accomplishments of science: Alors qu’elle interroge l’infini de l’espace et l’éternité de la matière, et qu’elle va chercher, au fond des mers primitives, la mucosité primordiale d’où nous venons, la littérature, elle, est en train de vagir sur deux ou trois stupides sentiments [. . .] engluée dans ses erreurs métaphysiques, abrutie par la fausse poésie du panthéisme idiot et barbare [While science interrogates the infinity of space and the eternity of matter, while it seeks at the bottom of primitive seas the primordial mucus from which we all spring, literature is still babbling over two or three stupid sentiments (. . .) bogged down in metaphysical error, stupefied by the false poetry of idiotic and barbarous pantheism]. 14

In Le Jardin des supplices, the scientific search for origins—for the protosplasmic jelly in which the primordial cell was incubated—is treated facetiously in that the narrator, a man of questionable integrity, is given false credentials as an embryologist and sent off on a spurious mission to find the birthplace of life. Still, in his later works, Mirbeau continued to look more to technology than to literature as a pioneering instrument in humanity’s progress toward a better future. To Mirbeau, the tormented seeker finds little consolation in art or faith since the abyss of man’s soul, like the firmament above, cannot be fathomed with a painting or a prayer. The practicality of the sciences directs him toward more rudimentary matters: “ce que c’est que l’eau que nous buvons, la viande que nous mangeons, l’air que nous respirons, la semence que nous confions à la terre” [what the water is that we drink, the meat that we eat, the air that we breathe, the seed that we entrust to the earth]. 15 This, to Mirbeau, is the legitimate domain of politics and science, which enable man to implement small improvements to society: to curb injustice just a little, to make governments less onerous, to give man the means to explore neighboring nations in his car.

Introduction

7

However, in Dans le ciel, Mirbeau’s emotionally raw and long-unpublished novel, he expresses despair at the incapacity of art to apprehend the sublime. Mirbeau’s experience of authorial dereliction left him discouraged in the face of his refractory talent, feeling as ill-equipped to find an image as to climb a mountain or storm the heavens: “Une phrase me paraît quelque chose d’aussi inaccessible, d’aussi démesuré que l’Himalaya” [A sentence seems as inaccessible to me, as enormous as the Himalayas], as he complains in an 1892 letter to Léon Hennique. 16 Frustrated with writing, Mirbeau began to question his vocation. As a novelist, was he not abdicating the duty to use his energies productively, in mitigating the suffering caused by economic inequality? Rather than trying to craft a sentence, could he not combat injustice more effectively by campaigning against colonialism, by denouncing the fraud of electoral politics? Anarchist activism seemed more practical and salutary than all his hopeless efforts to plumb the infinite in a book. Unlike novels, which to Mirbeau seemed impossible to complete, the hygienic program of the anarchists aimed at destroying a flawed system. As Reginald Carr writes, Mirbeau was one of the “many artists and writers” of his era “whose idealism looked beyond the evils of contemporary social organization to a world in which the faults they analyzed and criticized would be done away with.” 17 In the years when Mirbeau was struggling with his work on Dans le ciel (1892–1893), he was also offering his support to prominent anarchists across the country. Writing in L’En Dehors on the charismatic bomber Ravachol, whom a jury had voted to spare the penalty of death, Mirbeau used a prefigurative phrase to describe the course of human history: “cette lente, éternelle marche au supplice” [this slow, eternal march toward torture and death]. 18 The detonations set off by Ravachol are less bloody than those caused by mine owners, “qui ensevelissent en une minute d’horrible destruction, cinquante, cent, cinq cents pauvres diables dont les corps carbonisés ne remonteront jamais au soleil” [who bury, in a minute of horrible destruction, fifty, a hundred, five hundred poor devils whose carbonized bodies will never again see the sun]. 19 Mirbeau harbors no illusions that the poor might one day live in a utopia. He offers only compassion to those entitled to beauty as well as to bread: “Ils veulent avoir leur part de bonheur, au soleil” [They want to enjoy their share of happiness in the sun]. 20 While Mirbeau was working on Dans le ciel, the need to engage in social action—to advocate for the hungry and champion the downtrodden—seemed more pressing than airy quests to express the inexpressible. Was art not “a simple diversion in Pascal’s sense of the term”? Did it not entail “a desertion of one’s social obligations”? 21 Mirbeau’s literary, journalistic, and political career was structured by this conflict between effective social action and an effort to enclose in words a superhuman beauty. As much as Mirbeau’s writing detracted from his cam-

8

Introduction

paigns for social justice, his anarchism entailed neglect of his duties as a writer. Plagued by fears of impotence, Mirbeau relates in Dans le ciel how artists trying to glimpse the infinite give up their attempts to represent it. At the time of his closest alliance with the anarchists—“in spite of this noble combativeness,” as Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel call it 22 — Mirbeau was spiraling into a depression that left him creatively disabled. Mirbeau’s political engagement, his incapacitation as an artist, and the interrelationship of these two aspects of his life all combine as the subject of Dans le ciel. Lucien, the painter who acts as a spokesman for the author, equates the majesty of an artwork with the impossibility of completing it. Mirbeau qualifies a masterpiece as inspiration unembodied in words or images. The only genuine art is creative aspirations that are unfulfilled. The clumsy human hand and humanity’s indigent vocabulary are pitiful implements with which to try to circumscribe the infinite. Poetry concedes defeat and makes way for humble silence. Lucien, respecting the incommunicability of his vision, resorts to self-mutilation rather than accept a profane compromise. In Dans le ciel, Mirbeau acknowledges the solitude of the mystic whose experience precludes an ability to share it. The empty canvas and the blank page are reflections of God’s face, visible alone to those who cut off their hands and put out their eyes. What emerges from the novel is an art of apophasis that honors perfect beauty by declaring it unsayable. Unfinished, truncated like its suicidal hero, it shows the artist giving up his work in order to blend in with his subject, becoming a bird that evaporates into the sky or a dying swan that turns into its song. Mirbeau’s impulse to engage in class struggle and social action and his desire for transcendence that portends the death of art are showcased in Dans le ciel; the novel marked a turning point in his career, which was henceforth devoted to reconciling his political and metaphysical objectives. Rejecting the isolation of the visionary, Mirbeau seeks ecstatic states not through a loss of self in God, but through joining with his brothers and channeling their energies. Thereafter Mirbeau abandoned what had been the verticality of his quest, since lofty things are what oppress those who stand beneath them. Mirbeau’s aesthetic would be marked by an antipathy for monuments and mountains, unclimbable Himalayas whose grandeur discourages attempts at change and innovation. The artist is like the anarchist who blasts tall oaks with his thunder, clearing away old growth in order to promote the emergence of new ideas. Described in the preface to Jean Grave’s La Société mourante et l’Anarchie (1893), revolutionary action destroys the canopy overhead. Discredited institutions, sclerotic art, and enslaving religions are abolished. Those held in thrall are freed and can rise up toward the sun. Art, like political action, carries out destruction that regenerates so that in the forest

Introduction

9

decimated by storms, plants can stand up on their stems. “Il ne faut pas trop, voyez-vous, s’émouvoir de la mort des chênes voraces” [You see, you must not be too troubled by the death of ravenous oaks]. 23 The Dreyfus case was the next political scandal that galvanized Mirbeau, yet his involvement came only after publication of Zola’s open letter “J’accuse . . . !” an incendiary critique of miscarried military justice. 24 Mirbeau had initially been unmoved by the courtmartialing of Dreyfus, a career officer who “par son métier même est un ennemi de classe” [by his very profession was an enemy of the working class]. 25 But Dreyfus’s manifest innocence, the obdurate anti-Semitism of his prosecutors, and the passion with which Zola came to the defense of the accused were enough to fire Mirbeau’s indignation and motivate him to join the fray. In a November 28, 1897, article titled “L’Illustre Ecrivain” (Le Journal), an anonymous speaker sententiously dismisses matters of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. For the army, for France, he says, to be indemnified and exonerated, Dreyfus—even if blameless—had to be convicted of the crime: “Il faudrait qu’il fût couplable quand même . . . il faudrait qu’il expiât . . . même le crime d’un autre . . . C’est une question de vie ou de mort pour la société et pour les admirables institutions qui nous régissent!” [He must be guilty all the same . . . he must make reparation . . . even if for the crime of another . . . It is a question of life and death for society and for the admirable institutions that govern us!]. 26 When proceedings were later instituted against Zola himself, prosecuted for defamation against the War Council, Mirbeau’s commitment to the Dreyfusards became more impassioned and wholehearted. The tortures to which Dreyfus was subjected on Devil’s Island—the even more barbaric ones his persecutors called for—became material Mirbeau incorporated in Le Jardin des supplices, where he again takes up the cause of the forsaken and despised. As Léon Blum wrote of Mirbeau in Souvenirs sur l’affaire, “L’Idée de la souffrance, souffrance d’un homme, souffrance d’une bête, souffrance d’une plante [lui] étaient littéralement intolérables” [The idea of suffering, the suffering of a man, the suffering of an animal, the suffering of a plant was literally intolerable (to him)]. 27 The most controversial, graphic, and lurid of Mirbeau’s novels, Le Jardin des supplices is foremost a political allegory denouncing a civilization that sanctions institutionalized violence. At the same time, it is a rehabilitation of nature governed by what Freud termed the death drive 28 (see chapter 1), whose operation ensures the circulation of vital energies, of bloodshed that sustains renewal and rebirth. Characters in Mirbeau’s early works had hungered for oblivion: Jean Mintié, whose sexual passion had been experienced as a crucifixion; l’Abbé Jules, whose guilt had made him seek respite in unconsciousness; and Sébastien Roch, whose defiled purity had driven him to thoughts of suicide by

10

Introduction

drowning. A hunger for extinction had impelled these anguished characters to seek remission from suffering in the peacefulness of the tomb. However, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, Mirbeau rejected the temptation of annihilation, the beguilement of insentience that had beckoned to the characters in Dans le ciel. For the first time, Mirbeau reconciled his aspirations to the infinite with his wish for solidarity with his fellow-sufferers here below. Publication of Le Jardin des supplices also marked a new phase in his career, as the newly prolific Mirbeau was no longer stricken by authorial paralysis: “Je travaille allègrement” [I am working cheerfully], he wrote to Jules Claretie. 29 By 1904, crowned with fame and adulation, Mirbeau was recognized for the theatrical triumph of Les Affaires sont les affaires. Performances abroad, numerous translations of Mirbeau’s comedy, income earned by representations at the Comédie Française, and author’s royalties generated by published versions of the play had made a millionaire of an author once condemned to work as un prolétaire de la plume [a proletarian of the pen]. Indeed, Mirbeau’s earlier bouts of creative impotence and the unstable sense of his authorial identity can be traced back to the inauspicious beginning of his career. When Mirbeau had first arrived in Paris in November 1868, afire with optimistic ardor, he had found himself obliged to rent out his talent to wealthy sponsors. Often professing political positions antithetical to his own, Mirbeau had served in the employ of Bonapartist Henri-Joseph Dugué de la Fauconnerie, had worked as a personal secretary for a variety of employers, and had hired his services out to a number of rightwing newspapers. As Mirbeau noted, “Le journaliste se vend à qui le paye” [The journalist is for sale to whoever pays him]. 30 As one who toiled for his daily bread, Mirbeau had endured humiliating experiences with the press that had denied him the freedom to speak in his own voice, requiring “la répudiation de ses opinions et de ses idées, si par hasard il se paie l’impertinence d’en avoir qui lui appartiennent” [that he repudiate his opinions and his ideas, if, by chance, he should be impertinent enough to have any of his own]. 31 Mirbeau’s twelve-year-long apprenticeship as a mercenary and factotum had allowed him to experiment with style and novelistic form without having to append his signature to a work. Able to take ideological positions, produce innovative fictions, and dissolve into the collectivity of his employers, Mirbeau could be everyone and no one. In Le Jardin des supplices, the agony and rapture of being stripped of one’s skin enable one to blend with one’s torturers, an experience foreshadowed by Mirbeau’s years of servility and writing for hire. The dependent artist subordinated to the man who pays his wages and assimilated to an employer who buys his words and steals his name is enriched by his experience of authorial itineracy. Incorporating what he wants from a variety of sources, he benefits from the practice of anthropophagie littéraire. He enjoys a loss of self that comes from the “holy prostitution” that

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11

Baudelaire praised for permitting the multiplication of identity. 32 In Mirbeau’s professional abjection, he learned “l’ivresse de cette universelle communion” [the intoxication of that universal communion] that comes from entering “dans le personnage de chacun” [into the personality of each person]. 33 In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau definitively abandons the image of a Christian God, whom he perceived as the progenitor of an accursed race and who survived only as the inflictor of punishments from which man sought asylum in unconsciousness or death. In Lettres de l’Inde, Mirbeau had considered the appeal of disengagement from a world of illusions and desires that freed the sufferer from the cycle of sin and self-reproach. What Mirbeau’s character had sought was not mystical ecstasy but the disappearance of affect that produced the peace of Nirvana. But dismantling the ego did not bring the euphoria of self-multiplication or diffusion of the self into the energy field of the many. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau embraces the notion of immortality as the inability of anything to die. Forms that are broken release heat, liberating the indestructible life forces that migrate to new forms. Metempsychosis, as the cycle of deaths and rebirths, appears as the interplay of corruption and regrowth in the garden. Commodities, stories, and bodies—engaged in constant circulation—are the property of no one and mediums of exchange for everyone. Torturers, exhausted by the arduousness of their labors, are turned into their victims: “Ils meurent en tuant” [They die while they’re killing]. 34 The jovial executioner who greets Clara and her companion tells of resculpting his subjects, turning women into men. An imprisoned poet, dehumanized by starvation, is reconverted into a poem that extols the beauty of corruption. Mirbeau’s own novel is positioned as the final embodiment of a narrative initially decomposed into the bits of intellectual banter with which the story opens—conversation lacking the presumptive gravity of the author’s attack on violence-justifying institutions. Torture, in breaching the skin, ruptures the container of identity, and so it is work that uses blood to create the beauty of the garden. In Lettres de l’Inde, the Buddhist sage Sumangala does not define God as the origin and end but as a problematic being, “un quelque chose qui conduise ce monde perpétuellement changeant; et s’il existe, ce quelque chose change lui-même à l’infini” [something that guides this perpetually changing world, something that, if it exists, is infinitely changing itself]. 35 Published in 1885 as a series of eleven letters, appearing first in Le Gaulois and subsequently in Journal des débats, Mirbeau’s reflections on Buddhism are more serious than what the apocryphal account of his voyage to India might suggest. According to Sumangala, each individual is formed from the spiritual fragments of his predecessors, his identity composed “de tout le détritus de

12

Introduction

préjugés ataviques que l’évolution de ses ancêtres a laissés dans les formes de son cerveau” [of all the detritus of atavistic prejudices that his ancestors’ evolution left in his brain]. 36 Like a human being, Le Jardin des supplices is composed of its journalistic antecedents, transient texts that die and are reassembled as Mirbeau’s book. It does not seem that the author’s aim is to escape an endless series of incarnations but to acquiesce to a death that ensures that vital energies are retransmitted. Torture is the price by which these immortal elements are liberated. Christ crucified on Calvary is metamorphosed into the Holy Spirit that, unballasted of flesh, rises like a dove into heaven. A novel is a body broken up and distributed among communicants, its containing property sacrificed to the greater good of feeding audiences. The dead laid out in tombs find no rest or equanimity but are subjected to the principle of perpetual change and constant movement. Corruption seeps into the ground. Books provide nutrients for their readers. Mirbeau, through his writing, commingles with the fellow sufferers who are his brothers. The metaphysic of violence that animates Le Jardin des supplices pictures nature as a matrix of disintegration and transformation. The stability of essences gives way to a proliferation of transient forms. The child who I was, the scattered detritus of my ancestors are lost things that cannot guide my journey into the past. One experiences the transcendental only in an agonizing present, whose death permits an ecstatic liberation from identity. The rapidity of change, the release of obsolete personas, and the attack on stale ideas and mossy institutions became hallmarks of Mirbeau’s later works, which celebrate a violence that disorients. Still, Mirbeau’s ideological grounding in the issues of the day—social inequality, anti-Semitism, exploitation of the poor, the hypocrisy of the powerful who counterfeit rectitude and probity—situated his exploration of life’s mysteries not in India or China but in the contemporary Europe that was familiar to his readers. Mirbeau’s most widely acclaimed and best-known book, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), restores the author’s focus on the malignancy of institutional Catholicism. Mirbeau condemns religion both as a soothing analgesic for the poor and as a vehicle whereby the rich make shows of public piety while pursuing their most mercenary and ignominious agendas. Mirbeau’s satirical intent is to attack a fossilized society that prevents the healthy intermingling of classes and identities. For the master and the ancillary, for the wealthy lady and the chambermaid, there is a structuring of space, a formalizing of interaction that militates in favor of keeping people where they are. Impertinent domestics, like partisans of anarchism, are chided in the novel for threatening hierarchical stability. A world of rigid stratification—of supposedly polarized antagonists: the patriot and the Jew, the vagrant and the magistrate—precludes the possibility of role reversals, of challenged preconceptions that might metamorphose into a chance for revo-

Introduction

13

lution. A system that assigns fixed roles to the affluent and indigent is complete, already sanctioned by the government and church. As Roland Barthes suggests, it enjoys the status of a myth. Removed from history, it is ordained by God, having been “drained of its contingency.” 37 The domination by the few and the dispossession of the many seem tautologically self-justifying, beyond man’s capacity to change them. But as Mirbeau shows, the system of exploitation is so pervasively corrupted that servants can become tavernowners and abuse the workers that they hire. A defective mechanism whose pieces have become functionally interchangeable is susceptible to malfunction, disassembly, and destruction. Mirbeau often delivers a pessimistic message that illustrates the operation of a universal law of murder, unmasks reformers as imposters and false prophets, and suggests that only an anarchist’s dynamite can eradicate widespread social ills. The subversive idea communicated in Le Journal is that servants are not subservient, and that occupational disparities are not fixed. Célestine’s demystifying gaze sees hypocrisy through the keyholes. The narrative of her discoveries is as politically destabilizing as a revolutionary manifesto or a bomb thrown by a terrorist. As Roland Barthes claimed, bourgeois ideology, like the notion of French imperialism, is a myth whose validity forecloses opportunities to challenge it. But as is demonstrated by Célestine’s decoding of social hierarchy, there are lacunae, gaps, and flaws in this seemingly complete picture of reality. Mirbeau’s novel is structured by the premise that truths are not identical to imitations or appearances and that a replacement is not as satisfying as the original missing thing. The central figure in Mirbeau’s novel, foregrounded in an early episode, is the fetish, whose production is at once a religious, artistic, and sexual act. First utilized to designate an object of veneration, the fetish seems to materialize a sacred object that is absent or unseen. For Mirbeau, whom Pierre Michel describes as an existentialist avant la lettre, God is a creation necessitated by an unanswered call for meaning. Because the world is senseless, God is created to compensate for the unintelligibility of his Creation. In sexual pathology, production of the fetish is motivated by disavowal of the missing maternal phallus. As Emily Apter writes, “Freud’s fetishist seems to operate entirely in the realm of the simulacrum, generating a copy or surrogate phallus for an original that was never there to begin with.” 38 For Mirbeau, the mystery of absence is what motivates creative work. Like the construction of sacred objects, which is the foundational act of fetishism, it creates gods to occupy the space left vacant by the world’s absurdity. The first creative undertaking for artists looking for transcendence is producing beauty that ultimately proves spurious or insufficient.

14

Introduction

In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, the most passionate fetishists are those who adamantly deny that the system is flawed or incomplete. Benefiting from an economy of marginalization and oppression, they protect against castration by insisting that nothing is missing. It is the rebellious poor and the insubordinate servants who are defective, like the criminal or the Jew expelled from an otherwise sound society. In L’Abbé Jules (1888), Mirbeau’s most extensive meditation on the psychology of religion, the title character suggests that in the dialectics of creative anarchism, the most essential act is destruction, not construction: “’on arrive plus aisément à fabriquer un Jésus-Christ [. . .] qu’un Rien” [It is easier to manufacture a Jesus Christ (. . .) than a Nothing]. 39 It is not so much that production of nothingness is important, but rather that nothingness must exist first so that Jesus can be created to fill it. Key moments in Mirbeau’s fiction, when characters experience the suprarational, coincide with their encountering a gap in understanding—aporetic states, moments of bewilderment when the operation of society is suddenly suspended. The breakdown of what purports to be a fully signifying system is what the anarchist sees as evidence of the creativity of destruction. Célestine, inoculated against vulnerability and disillusionment, believes that servants are all just as venal as their masters. Yet in her interactions with the brutish Joseph, a domestic like herself, she sees an abyss of inexplicable cruelty open up before her. When Célestine consecrates Joseph as a retributive divinity, operating outside the law and beyond human understanding, she performs an act of fetish magic that creates holiness where there was nothing. Mirbeau’s narrative later supplements the journal entries of Célestine, elucidating the motives for Joseph’s acts of thievery and violence. But when Célestine learns that human behavior may be governed by something more than lust, greed, duplicity, and conceit, she sees a mystery to which she responds as an artist. For all his professions of skepticism in matters of religion, Mirbeau never stopped probing these encounters with the inexplicable, these failures of intelligence that undercut the law of materialism he claimed to promulgate. With his enthusiasm for novelty and his delight in eccentricity, Mirbeau rebelled against confinement in the cramped precincts of the known. On the one hand, like Célestine, Mirbeau found little merit in his peers, whom he perceived as rapacious, homicidal, fatuous, and self-interested. Since hypocrisy and fraud were the truth beneath the mask, there was no point in learning to know others, all alike in their mediocrity. On the other hand, the mystery and multifariousness of people aroused curiosity that combined with Mirbeau’s compassionate fraternalism. The counterpart of the misanthrope, who encounters egotism everywhere, is the idealist/reformer, who identifies with life’s victims. It is through this process of doubling, as Nivet and Michel write,

Introduction

15

that Mirbeau anxiously interrogates his own role as a writer. He who demystified, who tore off others’ masks, wasn’t he, after a fashion, a mystifier himself? Didn’t he, with his struggles and enthusiasms, contribute to the belief, that against all evidence, progress was still possible, that man was still perfectible, that Truth, Beauty, and Justice existed and that man could come closer to experiencing them? 40

The first impression left by Mirbeau’s next novel, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901), is of a continuation of his arraignment of humanity. A fictionalized account of Mirbeau’s 1897 sojourn at the Pyrenean spa of Luchon, the story is a zoography of disparate grotesqueries, a portrait miscellany of miscreants and defectives that moves the reader joltingly from one vignette to another. The picture Mirbeau gives of the mountain sanitarium is of a dystopia that has entered its final stage of decadence. At the time, while Mirbeau was no less engaged in championing social causes—promoting population control, decrying a program of pronatalism that only increased the numbers of infant deaths and disadvantaged children—he had become more removed from the great causes of the past, the scandals involving Dreyfus, Zola, and Jean Grave. The polemical indignation that had burned in Mirbeau earlier began to give way to a humor that, while still trenchant, displayed more forbearance for his imperfect human brothers. Previously, as Reginald Carr explains, at the height of Mirbeau’s activism, he had shared with other anarchists “a belief that the world was evolving, through a series of cataclysmic events, toward a desirable and more perfect state” and that an impending revolution could rescue civilization from its decline. 41 However in Mirbeau’s final novels, the tone is both more pessimistic and more forgiving, less certain of the need for hygienic violence that would clear the forests of deadfall and allow new growth to occur. Always an enemy of dogmatism and fanatical extremism, Mirbeau began surrendering the utopian ideals that had once informed his thinking. So caricaturally exaggerated is Mirbeau’s picture of the Luchon spa patrons—“a colorful parade of freebooters and maniacs” 42 —that no political, literary, or hydrotherapeutic regimen could save them. Mirbeau rejects the naturalist author’s role as a diagnosing healer who, having identified an ailment, can prescribe a course of treatment. Mirbeau’s menagerie of star-born saviors, genetically defective children, paranoid psychiatrists, and homicidal alpinists is one in which pathologies are so prevalent that patients can be accorded only wonderment and pity. Just as idealism had fueled Mirbeau’s utopian aspirations, prompting attempts to devise an art that captured perfect beauty, his appreciation for human foibles tempered his longing for an absolute, leading him to explore life’s mysteries in the strange complexity of other beings.

16

Introduction

In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, the freakishness of the characters and the unintelligibility of a world unredeemed by an ordering intelligence are reflected in a narrative unguided by an explanatory teleology—in which “the contingency of the story reflects universal contingency.” 43 When Mirbeau’s writing no longer aims at internalizing meaning, it rewards the author with the freedom to migrate into others, compensating for lost knowledge with an enrichment of experience. Mirbeau’s satire in this novel may deflate the pomp and expose the treachery of the powerful. But his narrator, Georges Vasseur, is also drawn to the lunatics and outcasts whose independence is uncompromised by mechanisms of control. While he casts a lucid eye on others, Vasseur is also critical of himself, cognizant that his sense of superior discernment is what locks him in a prison of self-satisfaction. The principle animating Mirbeau’s novel is the value of the bonds of brotherhood enabling a perceptive narrator to find connections with other people. The novel opens with Vasseur admitting a reluctance to leave the comforts of home and habit to embark into the unknown in his search for a cure for neurasthenia. Mirbeau suggests the disease itself is caused by experiential onanism, by the subject’s enclosure in his immobilizing selfishness. In a later chapter, Vasseur interpolates the story of a dream in which a paralyzing incuriosity prevents him from getting on a train. Mirbeau projects onto his character the perils of constant fault-finding, as the purveyor of mystifications sees beneath masks of inauthenticity yet is also isolated by the cynicism of his disabusing gaze. The derelicts and asylum patients that people Vasseur’s narrative are those with whom he shares a sense of sympathetic solidarity. Impervious to the irony with which he envelops his other countrymen, they are unspoiled innocents deserving his esteem. In them, the incredulous “arracheur de masques” [remover of masks] finds vestiges of the True, the Beautiful, and the Just. The conversational exchange with which Mirbeau’s novel closes is indeed “a dialogue between the two sides of himself.” 44 Should Mirbeau, like the disillusioned Roger Fresselou, withdraw to the summit of his misanthropic disdain? Or should the author, like the humanitarian Vasseur, go back down to the society of his brothers, striving to elucidate the mysteries that they pose? While, in Mirbeau’s eyes, God may seem remote and irrelevant, a problematic being lost in his pointless immensity, there is still the infinite diversity of life here below. Cured of neurasthenia by his fugitive acquaintance with others, Vasseur elects to descend again into the valley of men. With his character’s return to the world, Mirbeau’s fiction loses its ascensional direction, its hopeless upward pull toward an unreachable divinity.

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17

In the first years of the new century, Mirbeau, blessed with celebrity, remained faithful to the political causes that had first fired his idealism, still thundering against the abuses of Jesuit education, warning against the dangers of utopian collectivism, inveighing against war-mongering and colonialism, and fulminating against the brutal excesses of Tsarist Russia, which had moved from the openness of violent repression and mass arrests to more covert attacks on individual freedoms: “Après la tuerie au grand jour de la rue, le meurtre silencieux, le meurtre étouffé dans les prisons et dans les mines” [After the slaughter in the street, done in broad daylight, the silent, hushed-up murder done in the prisons and the mines]. 45 A contributor to the literary newspaper L’Humanité when it was founded in 1904, Mirbeau continued to advocate for the poor and plead for the disinherited, displaying in his fiction the same cosmopolitanism seen in his political writings. Wise enough to realize that “the revolution was not for tomorrow,” Mirbeau was still roused to indignation by “continents plagued by misery and injustice” and remained steadfast in his commitment to ensuring “more freedom and more happiness for all men.” 46 No longer tormented by the aspirations of the mystic seeking fusion with God, Mirbeau gave up his quest for the ineffable, choosing instead to blend into myriads of others, escaping the prison of singularity by mingling with the multitudes. After the frustrating vertical thrust of Dans le ciel, after the gravitational depression of the mountain climber in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Mirbeau succumbs to the dizzying velocity of lateral movement, the joys of kaleidoscopically reconfiguring panoramas glimpsed through a car windshield, the pleasure of muscular engines and smooth pavement, and the conversion of speed into ubiquity in La 628-E8. What in Le Jardin des supplices had been a fantasy of undressing oneself of skin and self becomes a rush to cross borders and blend nationalities, to originate nowhere en route to everywhere. The ridiculed munitions expert on board the Saghalien in Le Jardin des supplices is rehabilitated in La 628-E8, his dumdum shell redesigned as an automobile bullet whose metallic exoskeleton encapsulates a motorist shot through corpses of familiar experiences, piercing the skin of the old and fired into the openness of the new. Nivet and Michel describe the feverish consumerism of the car enthusiast who replaces a first car bought in 1900 with a Renault in 1902; an 8-cylinder, 1300-franc Panhard six months later, then another in 1903; a CGV in 1906; and a Charron in July of the same year. Moving through vehicles as if along a purchasing highway, Mirbeau discards the conveyance of well-traveled style in favor of the open road of fugitive impressionism. Given the universality of Mirbeau’s political interests and the sympathies prompting his travels across “continents of misery,” it is natural that his book becomes a method of conveyance.

18

Introduction

Growling in frustration like an idling engine, Mirbeau is impatient with stopping, raging against the curiosity-obstructing misoneism of historical preservation societies and Comédie Française repertoires. Mirbeau hates to be delayed at border crossings, importuned by customs officers who inspect his luggage. Once a sentence has been written, it is time to press on, past the dissipating exhaust fumes of observations made and forgotten. Driven by the urgent need to advance into the unknown, what has already been seen and experienced is enshrouded in a haze of uncertainty born of amnesiac dismissal. After traveling through a bit of himself, Mirbeau’s record becomes a problematic account. He asks himself, What did I see or dream? What did I hear or imagine? The textual pollution left after my vertiginous passage, what is it? “Est-ce bien un journal? Est-ce même un voyage?” [Is it a journal? Is it even a trip?]. 47 What is reality or fantasy? At the end, does it matter? The 1907 chronicle of Mirbeau’s highway fugue through the pastiche artificiality of Belgium, the floral riot of Holland, and the industrial modernity of Germany is itself a travelogue of the author’s flight from himself and escape into alterity, “à travers les beautés de la nature, les diversités de la vie et les conflits de l’humanité” [across the beauty of nature, the diversity of life, and the conflicts of humanity]. 48 Mirroring his passion for novelty is an antipathy for tradition: for seventeenth-century tragedy, the gilt and excrement of Versailles, an academician’s immutable opinions on cultural icons. In order to reach escape velocity, the traveler must be unballasted of conventional wisdom, freed from the obligation to worship obsolete gods. Unhinged by speed, Mirbeau experiences momentary ecstasies, flashes of the transcendental when the illusion of old truths falls away. God is not found in church where unchangeable ritual activates worshippers in their performance of repetition. The anarchist begins with an iconoclastic gesture. Only then is it possible to imagine new gods and better worlds. The most scandalous of Mirbeau’s deicidal acts is the account that he gives of the death of Balzac, who is agonizing in one room while his wife, Madame Hanska, is amorously engaged with painter Jean Gigoux in another. More than Mirbeau’s alleged misogyny, what motivates his denigration of a literary titan is an anarchist impulse to demolish a figure whose posthumous glory had raised him up as a monument. The same feeling emanates from Mirbeau’s sarcastic account of Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier, who had been commissioned to complete a statue of Zola. Like the living Zola, “qui semblait respirer la vie, toute la vie, avec une si forte passion” [who seemed to breathe in life, all life, with such great passion], 49 Balzac had been a fiction machine without brakes until fame, immortality, and critical consensus killed him. Mirbeau pays tribute to Balzac as a bottomless reservoir of energy, a genius catalyzing ideas as literature. The best way to honor Balzac is to burn his reputation as fuel for Mirbeau’s narrative scandal. In place of the ceremonial coldness of Balzac-

Introduction

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worship, there is the flammable material of a story that outrages. Assimilated to their effects, the novel and car therefore become vehicles for amusement, consternation, suspicion, and amazement as provincials gather by the side of the road and gawk at the sleek and turbulent chariot. The wanderlust prompting Mirbeau’s travels through Europe is what also suggests his trip’s destination, or lack of one. One must never arrive, as Mirbeau had earlier written, lest one turn into a cadaver or statue petrified by satisfaction with the place where one finds oneself. Sojourners at hotels can have sex with the maid, while at home they are as prudent as they would be in a cemetery. In La 628-E8, Mirbeau’s most lyrical passages are devoted to the magical moments of leave-taking: “Mirbeau undertakes a long excursion to the port of Anvers where, like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and others still, he succumbs to a wish to travel longer and farther, deeper into the unknown in order to satisfy his curiosity.” 50 The unresponsive divinities and unattainable ideals that had spurred Mirbeau’s quest in his earlier novels are topologized as the unknown places that are most distant from here. In the port, as Mirbeau writes, money, commerce, and war supply the energy that launches a ship on its voyage. The constant arrivals and departures of vessels turn rigging and masts into the motion of things that are gone. Like a car creating a hallucinatory landscape that blurs, the departing ship becomes a fading memory of the harbor it sails from and a vision of the lands it will reach in the future: “des paysages de feu et de glace, des flores, des faunes, des humanités que je voudrais connaître et que je ne connaîtrai, sans doute, jamais” [landscapes of fire and ice, flora, fauna, aspects of humanity that I would like to know and in all likelihood will never know]. 51 The city of God, the gleaming utopia, the homeland to which the mystic hopes to return are places whose remoteness is proof of perfection. As Mirbeau might put it, The self I am not, the thing I know not, the place I am not—these are the goal of my search; the great oneness of man that is far from myself. In his later years, notoriety and comfort did not shield Mirbeau from the indignities of old age, nor did they temper the vehemence with which he pursued his campaigns against the social evils that had always enflamed him. Instead, the aging Mirbeau turned his activist energies on injustices occurring closer to home. Le Foyer, a play that, by its title alone, suggested that domestic corruption was a grave enough problem, gave Mirbeau a chance to denounce institutional charities whose benevolent claims concealed iniquitous practices. After expending himself in the defense of a play whose conclusion had aroused widespread indignation (one performance had been cancelled by the mayor of Angers, another disrupted by protesters from Action Française), Mirbeau had reined in the motorist’s expansive enthusiasms. However, with the narrowing of Mirbeau’s narrative focus came a concentration on myster-

20

Introduction

ies that were more personal and intimate. No longer an idealist beleaguering the fortress of heaven, Mirbeau turned his gaze to the mundane world of a man and his dog. In Dingo, Mirbeau again looks at the permeable membranes, the porous boundaries between the self and the world. As he had reflected on flaying as a method of torture that removed the epidermal surface separating a subject from others, so in Dingo, Mirbeau considers the cross-species relations that animalize humans and humanize animals. The Australian wild dog taken on as a pet that accompanied the author to Germany and Italy becomes an instinctual counterpart to the civilized self. Dingo acts more or less in the capacity of writer. The writer is more or less relegated to the role of dog-like observer. All owners are caricatural deformations of their pets. All pets assume the behaviors and physical traits of their masters. As Simone Korff-Sausse remarks in an analysis of “animality in psychic life and artistic creation,” “Representations of animals are mirrors that lead us to an interrogation on the identity and nature of man.” 52 She prefaces her essay with a quote from Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert: Tous les êtres circulent les uns dans les autres, par conséquent, toutes les espèces . . . Tout est un flux perpétuel . . . Tout animal est plus ou moins homme; tout minéral est plus ou moins plante; toute plante est plus ou moins animale. Il n’y a rien de précis dans la nature [All beings circulate in each other and so, consequently, do all species . . . Everything is a perpetual flux . . . Every animal is more or less a man; every mineral is more or less a plant; every plant is more or less an animal. There is nothing fixed in nature]. 53

Using Dingo as a lens trained on society and self, Mirbeau divides his novel, as he often does, between political satire and a serious attempt to fathom the mystery of the human soul. Modeled on the squalid hamlet of Cormeilles-en-Vexin where Mirbeau had resided between 1904 and 1908, the novel’s setting showcases embezzling notaries, lubricious widows, and matricidal tavern-keepers, each more comic and insalubrious than the other. Like the townspeople who cast a suspicious eye at the exotic Parisian outsider, Dingo trains his nose on the autochthons’ shameful habits and secret vices. At first, Mirbeau’s narrator is enchanted by the sagaciousness of a dog whose artlessness, he believes, makes him a reliable judge of character. Opposed to civilization judged as bad, Dingo embodies nature seen as good. But as in Le Jardin des supplices, these dichotomous positions prove unsustainable. China, where torture is unapologetic and colorful, is no better than France, where violence is reasoned and technologically efficient. Yet while

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Mirbeau seemingly doubts the value of all civilizations, he concludes that the animal he had first chosen to emulate requires the domestication that would make the dog like a man. Still, Dingo’s virtue is to represent the tabula rasa of the anarchist, a primitive state of things preexisting the institutions that pervert them. But this does not mean that Dingo is better than his human counterpart. The same law of murder informs the French technology of warfare, the Chinese art of torture, and the Australian predator’s hunting practices. The same blood enriches the soil of the battlefield, the garden, and the Outback, and Mirbeau’s books are laid out as identical tableaux de chasse. This is why Mirbeau’s impulse to seek the infinite had never oriented him forward, toward a future in which evolution had absolved man of his flaws. Mirbeau’s retrospective gaze had always been turned toward an idealized paradise of lost childhood, the imaginary purity of the prehuman, or the blessed oblivion of the inorganic. Better, Mirbeau believes, to be a dog, a stone, or a boy than to endure the sufferings that are the lot of a man. Even if Dingo’s nocturnal predations leave the countryside strewn with disemboweled sheep and mangled chickens, he is exonerated by his unintelligence. A figure for unrepression, for aggression without malice, the animal is a projection of what is inhuman in humans. Can one not invert Enda McCaffrey’s characterization of Dingo, seeing Mirbeau’s hero as “the portrait of a dog as an old artist”? 54 Certainly Mirbeau’s portrait of his pet is an exercise in self-rehabilitation. Contrary to the inhabitants of Ponteilles, the man/dog is impervious to affectation, unimpressed by status and money. A polyglot like all dogs fluent in the idiom of their masters, Dingo, like Mirbeau, recognizes the futility of words. Only when an ideal cannot be caught and devoured is the mouth used to emit frustrated lamentations. Dingo, like Lucien in Dans le ciel, would sooner internalize an object than mourn its loss in works of art. To an extent, Mirbeau and Dingo are temperamental brothers. Mirbeau, like Dingo, is unmoved by sophistication, rarely dazzled by “cet éternel vocable: la beauté [. . .] qui ne signifie rien . . . rien du tout,” [that eternal vocable “beauty,” (. . .) which signifies nothing . . . nothing at all]. 55 This is the direction taken in Mirbeau’s final novels, where the goal becomes more terrestrial and common. Rather than an impossible perfection located above—an inscrutable god who ordains suffering that redeems—the enigma of man and beast solicits the author’s attention. When Mirbeau admits his inability to plumb his companion’s secret thoughts—“les pensées de derrière la tête” [the thoughts in the back of his head] 56 —it is as if he contemplates for the first time the unmapped territory of himself. As Lucien had suggested in Dans le ciel, the artist’s interrogation

22

Introduction

of the sky is like the barking of a dog, another unanswered plea directed heavenward. It is because the dog is unpracticed in clothing his ignorance in imagery that the mystery of his nature seems more poetic and profound. Toward the end of Mirbeau’s novel, Dingo escapes the shackles of domesticity, sowing havoc across the countryside. Townspeople who had always viewed Dingo as an uncanny canine specimen begin to see in him a biblical scourge portending the coming of the end-time. Thus, as the novel’s serialized publication began in February 1913, the story’s eschatological harbingering seemed all at once less implausible. Mirbeau’s own declining health appeared to crystallize Dingo as a symbol of catastrophe. In the aftermath of a vascular accident that paralyzed his right side, Mirbeau found himself unable to complete what would be his final novel, requiring that he enlist his friend Léon Werth as a collaborator to help bring the narrative to a close. The novel that had opened as a boisterous tribute to the irrepressibility of animal spontaneity ends in a tone of dispirited resignation, an acknowledgment of civilization’s triumph over instinct. In Paris, Dingo’s etiolation parallels the writer’s own infirmity. Mirbeau no longer needed to look toward an impending world conflagration to see an end announced by his debilitating insomnia, by all manner of bodily infirmity, and by the prosaic horrors of old age. Until the end, the suffering writer stood “on the side of the suffering,” 57 writing on behalf of soldiers fighting at the front, advocating for the abolition of the death penalty, dependably taking the side of the victims. The mystery that attracted Mirbeau in the last years of his life was not the metaphysical puzzle of a divinity hidden in the sky. Rather than surcease from pain through experiencing the blessedness of Nirvana, Mirbeau sought to know himself through understanding the plight of others. Both man and dog are chaos-breeding engines of destruction, their appetite for killing matched only by the strength of their devotion. The same animal that rips out the throats of livestock in the night is the friend whose look of loyalty, to Mirbeau, contained the world. Unfathomable like the sky where no god may be enthroned were Dingo’s eyes, where Mirbeau saw infinity reflected. These were the eyes of deaf-mute children and vagabonds on the roads of France. Their expression was like that of boys enthralled by the spectacle of the sea, their look like that of priests awaiting release from the body. Mirbeau’s world was always richer for the things he did not understand, deeper for the enigmas he knew he could not solve. No longer was the transcendental sought far away up there; it was instead found in the gaze of a dog who stood beside his chair. In his final days, as Monet and Sacha Guitry report, Mirbeau contemplated his own death as neither frightening nor unjust, speaking of it “as he spoke of all things, with evident curiosity and lively interest.” 58 For Mirbeau, the

Introduction

23

end of life was as personal as his concern for other people and the attachment to his dog. Violent, uncontrollable, selfless to the point of death, both men and dogs give love as immeasurable as the secret of their nature. Mirbeau’s works stand as testament to his ignorance and desire to learn—to his belief “qu’on ne sait rien, qu’on ne saura jamais rien, qu’on ne pénètre, qu’on ne pénétrera jamais rien de tout ce qui nous entoure” [that we know nothing, that we will never know anything, that we cannot fathom and that we will never fathom anything in what surrounds us]. 59 It is in the space of the unknown that Mirbeau’s artist does his work, exploring secrets as boundless as the seeker’s unawareness. With sacred beauty, the love of others, and flights from identity into freedom, he creates mysteries as art that charts his search for understanding. Chapter 1 of this volume begins in 1886 when, following his years of journalistic servitude, Mirbeau completed Le Calvaire, the first of three autobiographical novels centering on the interrelationship of religion, sexuality, and guilt. In 1885 Mirbeau had published, in installments of eleven letters, the account of an apocryphal voyage to Southeast Asia: Lettres de L’Inde. He signed it with the pseudonym “Nirvana,” thereby indicating his fascination with the Buddhist state of blissful quiescence and extinguished desire. Discussing the appeal of states of painlessness, sleep, extinction, and death as they appear in Le Calvaire, L’Abbé Jules, and Sébastien Roch, chapter 1 describes how Mirbeau uses suffering to bring suffering to an end. While criticizing Catholic doctrine for sanctioning repression, self-hatred, and alienation from nature, Mirbeau explores the idea of the suffering that redeems. As chapter 1 argues, these three novels begin with Mirbeau’s characters’ fearing a God who condemns and end with their recovering the self who forgives. Chapter 2 examines a crisis moment in Mirbeau’s career when the lure of suicide, exorcised in Sébastien Roch, reappears as the temptation to accept his death as an artist. In 1891 and 1892, when Mirbeau was struggling to complete what would remain the unfinished manuscript of Dans le ciel, he was tormented by an inability to write and at the same time drawn to an art of the inexpressible, capable of apprehending the infinite and capturing the absolute. Dans le ciel illustrates what Mirbeau saw as conflicting obligations to continue fighting for worthy social causes and trying to develop an art of the transcendental. As chapter 2 suggests, the suicide of Mirbeau’s central character and the author’s abandonment of a story that remains in suspense express a desire to experience the mystical rapture of inspiration uncompromised by a foredoomed effort to embody it in art. Chapter 3 turns to Mirbeau’s most celebrated and controversial novels, Le Jardin des supplices and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre. Recognized foremost as critiques of society, these two works show the author’s reorienta-

24

Introduction

tion from what had been a preoccupation with his inadequacies and failures to an interest in sharing in the experience of his forsaken brothers. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau rejects the Christian view of linear temporality, culminating with an end-time and a messianic return, in favor of eternity as cycles of death and regrowth. In chapter 3, it is argued that the promise of suicide is abandoned in favor of the death of transient identities and the subsequent migration of vital energies to different beings and new forms. As in Le Jardin des supplices, where Mirbeau chooses the appeal of universality over the temptation of annihilation, in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau associates the infinite with the unknowability of others. While Célestine’s diary purports to be a text that reveals, unmasking hypocrisy and exposing imposture, what magnetizes the gaze of the heroine and author are the inexplicable wellsprings of human behavior. Chapter 4 describes how Mirbeau—crowned with public adulation and financial success—expanded the range of his exploration of the infinite in his travels through neighboring countries and his encounters with other people. Arguing that neurasthenia, the fin-de-siècle’s most faddish affliction, is a condition born of self-centeredness, chapter 4 begins by following Georges Vasseur, narrator of Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, in his desultory interactions with the other patrons he encounters during his sojourn at the Pyrenean spa of Luchon. While initially Vasseur’s judgmental superiority and ironic condescension limit his travels and interfere with his ability to identify with others, he is gradually awakened to the otherworldly incongruity of the people he meets. From here, Mirbeau’s fiction moves forward from Vasseur’s prudent steps to the dizzying exuberance of writing as vehicular rampage as described in La 628-E8. Here, as chapter 4 argues, Mirbeau was guided by the principle of epektasis, desiring to experience the ecstasy induced by speed, disorientation, novelty, leave-taking, and ego disintegration, rocketing forward in the vehicle of his books, traveling always higher, faster, and farther from himself. However, at the end of his life, as this volume concludes, Mirbeau realized that the most profound mysteries could be encountered much closer to home. Fictionalizing Mirbeau’s relationship with an Australian wild dog, Dingo shows how men and animals learn from each other. As chapter 4 explains, there is no need to climb to the mountaintop, travel to exotic and far-away lands, or try to see God’s face in the depths of the sky when the transcendent is visible in the eyes of a dog. NOTES 1. Pierre Michel, “Octave Mirbeau romancier,” in Oeuvre romanesque, by Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:31. 2. A man of profound contradiction, Mirbeau is described by Christopher Lloyd as a destabilizer of the status quo: “In our own era of revisionism, of right or left, we can at least claim that writing has the function of bearing witness. A non-conformist writer like Mirbeau is

Introduction

25

both journalist and witness, a chronicler of everyday history who sets out to unmask the lies of officialdom, even if the new truth which he serves up might strike some readers to be as perverted as the old one.” Christopher Lloyd, Mirbeau’s Fictions (Durham, UK: University of Durham Press, 1996), 99–100. 3. The term “universal law of murder” is Mirbeau’s and is discussed at length in chapter 3 of this volume. 4. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 546. All translations are mine (including passages translated from Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle), except when the source has a translator listed in the citation. 5. Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau, s.v. “Christianisme,” http://mirbeau.assoc.fr/dictionnaire/. 6. Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 8. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:476. 9. Ziegler, The Nothing Machine, 14. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. Pierre Michel, introduction to Sébastien Roch, in Oeuvre romanesque, by Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:528. 12. Marcel Schwob, Le Livre de Monelle, in Les Oeuvres complètes de Marcel Schwob (Paris: François Bernouard, 1928), 4:17. 13. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 481. 14. Mirbeau to Claude Monet, July 25, 1890, in Octave Mirbeau, Correspondance générale, ed. Pierre Michel (Lausanne, France: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 2:262. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 421. 15. Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:286. 16. Mirbeau to Léon Hennique, 1892, in Mirbeau, Correspondance générale. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 470. 17. Reginald Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1977), 38. 18. Octave Mirbeau, “Ravachol,” May 1, 1892, in Combats politiques, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 122. 19. Ibid., 123. 20. Ibid., 124. 21. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 478. 22. Ibid., 463. 23. Octave Mirbeau, “Préface à La Société mourante et l’anarchie,” in Combats politiques, 130. 24. Émile Zola, “J’accuse . . . ! Lettre au président de la République,” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898. 25. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 577. 26. Mirbeau, Combats politiques, 178. 27. Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’affaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 92. 28. “Death drive,” or “death instinct” (French, pulsion de mort; German, Todestrieb), was a term coined by Sigmund Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920 by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (Liepzig). 29. Mirbeau to Jules Claretie, 1900, in Mirbeau, Correspondance générale, 3:665. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 657. 30. Les Grimaces, September 29, 1883. 31. Octave Mirbeau, “La Liberté de la presse,” Le Gaulois, June 7, 1886. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 89. 32. The concept of “holy prostitution” is from Charles Baudelaire, “Les Foules,” in Petits Poèmes en Prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962).

26

Introduction

33. Baudelaire, “Les Foules,” 59. 34. Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:313. 35. Octave Mirbeau, Lettres de l’Inde (Caen, France: L’Echoppe, 1991), 44. 36. Ibid., 45. 37. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 119. 38. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turnof-the-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 13. 39. Octave Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:470. 40. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 681. 41. Carr, Anarchism in France, 58. 42. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 678. 43. Ibid., 680. 44. Ibid., 681. 45. Octave Mirbeau, “Réponse à une enquête sur le tsarisme,” in Combats politiques, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 205. 46. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 745. 47. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 295. 48. Ibid., 288. 49. Ibid., 359. 50. Martin Schwarz, Octave Mirbeau: Vie et oeuvre (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 153. 51. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 385. 52. Simone Korff-Sausse, “Les Identifications déshumanisantes: L’Animalité dans la vie psychique et la création artistique,” Revue française de psychanalyse 75, no. 1 (2011): 91. 53. Quoted in Korff-Sausse, “Les identifications déshumanisantes,” 87. 54. Enda McCaffrey, “Le Portrait d’un artiste en jeune chien: Incarnation et mouvement dans Dingo d’Octave Mirbeau,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 7 (2000): 66–74. 55. Octave Mirbeau, Dingo, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:653. 56. Ibid. 57. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 895. 58. Sacha Guitry, from the narration of his 1915 film, Ceux de chez nous. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 918. 59. Mirbeau, Dingo, 665.

Chapter One

The Pardoner

LE CALVAIRE During the summer of 1883, Octave Mirbeau’s pamphleteering virtuosity was most conspicuously on display in the polemical journal Les Grimaces. There the writer drenched with vitriol the enemies of France who had left his suffering countrymen despairing, jobless, homeless, and hungry for revolution. For months, Mirbeau’s execration of President Grévy, railway tycoons, ministers, landless Jews, bankers, capitalists, and “all the Republican world of finance” had been bubbling in a cauldron of political invective. 1 So it was with perplexity that Mirbeau’s friends, readers, and nemeses learned in December of his reclusion in remotest Brittany, where the author had gone to exorcise the demoness who had possessed him for three infernal years. It was on his torturous relationship with the spendthrift sadist Judith Vimmer that Mirbeau constructed the edifice of his early misogynistic paranoia, and from this liaison he drew inspiration for his inaugural novel, Le Calvaire. From his affair with Judith, Mirbeau took the idea of sexual passion as martyrdom that makes the tormented lover into an epigone of Christ. In the novel, Mirbeau’s obsession with Judith is invested with an unusual religious significance. “Love is not only a stain,” as Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel describe Mirbeau’s portrayal of passion in Le Calvaire, “it is also a means of mortification and expiation.” 2 Transposed as Juliette Roux, the villainess of Le Calvaire, Judith is assigned the role of the Babylonian harlot of Revelation, the harbinger of an apocalypse soon to wash over a depraved capital. The city and its queen in Le Calvaire are cast as eternal wantons, insatiable prostitutes reigning over a debased humanity that only the artist-penitent can save. 27

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In Le Calvaire, passionate love is what disturbs a timeless equilibrium. Crucifying pleasure and exquisite tortures must cancel each other out, returning the lover to a state of insentience and calm that is the promise of suicide. Coupling mystic aspirations with a longing for deliverance from the agony of love, Mirbeau equates Christian salvation and the quietude of Nirvana with an implementation of what Freud would later term the death drive. As Mirbeau wrote in a letter to Paul Hervieu while crossing the stormy Atlantic Ocean, “Je me disais en contemplant ce gouffre qu’on devait bien y dormer” [I said to myself while contemplating this abyss that it must be good to sleep there]. 3 Seeing the world as a killing ground planted with gibbets and crucifixes—torture implements like those later featured in Le Jardin des supplices— Octave Mirbeau propounds in Le Calvaire a view of human existence unredeemed by a messiah who comes down and saves. Everywhere violence and aggression are institutionalized as militarism, religious fervor, and nationalist hatred. Human justice is a travesty, hope in an afterlife is a chimera, and the stages of love mark off the Stations of the Cross. Thus the greatest wisdom, as the exiled Burmese prince affirms in Lettres de l’Inde, is to seek the equanimity of disillusionment: “La Suprême Sagesse a dit que tout est douleur” [Supreme Wisdom has said that everything is suffering]. 4 For Mirbeau, death brings no remission of pain, no end to the struggle, no arrival in the fields of the Lord. There is no end-time accompanied by unconsciousness and sleep. As each corporeal shell breaks and decomposes in the dung, the matrix fertilizes new life forms condemned to suffer in their turn. The evanescence of beings that live for a season is mirrored by the constancy of energy that generates change and enables rebirth. The blood pools that soak into the ground of the garden enrich the soil in which a new peony grows; it is these living substances that enforce a derisory immortality. Freud’s notion of the death drive, a controversial theory that appeared soon after the publication of Mirbeau’s major works, captures much of the pessimism prevalent in France at the century’s end. If anything, Mirbeau’s view is even more discouraging since death brings no finality or deliverance. Thus for Mirbeau, what is forever seeking death and the repose that it brings is forced to move forward through an endless cycle of metempsychosis. The power of Eros that checks a return to oblivion operates, as Freud says, on a cellular level. It is “the driving factor that will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet’s words, ‘ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt’” (Goethe, Faust, 1.7). 5 Mirbeau’s fiction is haunted by nostalgia for an earlier state of immobility and painlessness before man’s incarceration in a succession of prisons from which he escapes only to die, forget, and be subjected to more torture. As Freud regretfully acknowledges, man is not governed by “an instinct to perfection” propelling him upward—toward a world of more loving, more high-

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ly sublimated, and more civilized beings. Instead, he is driven by a need to go back, obeying the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.” 6 As the Buddhist sage Sumangala in Lettres de l’Inde asserts, the temporal debt incurred by sin, error, or material attachments traps man in a cyclical exchange of forms—corpse, mud, flower—that never allows for finality or transcendence. Signing “Nirvana” to the collection of letters chronicling his apocryphal journey to Southeast Asia, Mirbeau often structured his fiction along a horizontal axis, gravitating toward homeostasis, a reduction of tension, a flight from the exile of life to a homeland of unconsciousness. Mirbeau’s goal was not a quest for enlightenment, a desire “de s’éthériser” [for self-etherealization], or an aspiration “de vivre la vie intellectuelle des planètes futures” [to live the intellectual life of future planets], as Sumangala says, 7 but rather an impulse to return to the quiescence of inanimate matter. However, Mirbeau was too caught up in the fight against intolerance and oppression to become an advocate of detached impassivity. Instead, because of man’s exile to a world of strife, the Nirvana that he sought was more consistent with Freud’s death drive. Mirbeau’s conviction that human life is governed by the universal law of murder—his image of existence as imprisonment in a terrifying bagnio—was mitigated only by a belief in natural and artistic beauty. As Pierre Michel explains, it was from Schopenhauer that Mirbeau drew his sense of ontological futility, an intuition that relief comes from “the extinction of the will to live.” 8 Rather than moving toward greater wisdom and happiness, life is oriented backward toward the blankness of inorganic matter. “Pourquoi redouter la mort?” [Why shrink from death?] as Mirbeau asks in “Le Suicide.” “Pourquoi craindre ce que nous avons été?” [Why fear what we have been?]. 9 In Mirbeau’s conception of the Nirvana principle, man’s desire to die orients him toward a simpler state, an anterior existence characterized by a prehuman dormancy. The temporal dimension of Mirbeau’s fiction is initially retrospective, as it was for much of fin-de-siècle literature. Such writing, as Vladimir Jankélévitch remarks, seeks death as a return to an earlier time: “It is as if the weight of the past, through a kind of senile geotropism, prefigures old age and a descent to the grave.” 10 Freud’s notion of the inorganicism toward which all living forms gravitate is seen in the mineral sterility of Mirbeau’s inhuman mountains, the cold rock summits of the Pyrenee, the blasted landscape inhabited by Mirbeau’s reclusive misanthrope, Roger Fresselou, in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901), a topography of stasis and nihilism, a deficit of calories and compassion. The refrigerated geologic isolation of the contemplative Schopenhauerian sage situates him at the opposite pole of the disciple of Sumangala, who studies the moving pageantry of nature and who enjoys life’s dance of

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ephemeral beings that appear, mutate, and dissolve. Unlike the inertia of inorganicism, the petrifaction of detachment, Sumangala recommends that the wise man match life’s agitation with “la gymnastique de son esprit” [the gymnastics of his mind]. 11 Elasticity of thought and the spontaneity of creative response position the philosopher/artist’s work in the phenomenal realm of impermanence, adaptability, and play. The property of life is motion; the promise of death is rest. In Le Calvaire, the pull of extinction is already strong, and an existence filled with suffering motivates a religion extolling suffering. Just as the convict in the Torture Garden desires only that the torture stop, so the aim of Mirbeau’s stories of corruption and renewal is the blankness of their termination, the peace of the white page. In the role of Urmutter, the generative source of the children of Mirbeau’s naturalist novels, Madame Mintié in Le Calvaire is the death drive embodied in a mother desirous of the death of all mothers. Fecund in retransmitting the wish for inexistence, Madame Mintié is the principle of creative negation. Threatening to unwrite the novel featuring her as a character, she is less a childbearing agent than the daughter of a hereditary wish for suicide. As it emanates from Madame Mintié, Le Calvaire is a fiction that wishes it had never been born. As Isabelle Saulquin writes, Mirbeau’s first novel is set against a melancholy backdrop of water lilies and stagnant pools, finality and exhaustion. The death wish of Madame Mintié determines the morbidity of her surroundings—just as the despondency of her environment exacerbates her longings for annihilation. The Priory, where Jean Mintié spends his early years, “contains every manifestation of death, with black branches, stagnant waters, hushed flowers accelerating his mental decline.” 12 Adumbrated by the novel’s title, the theme of religious Dolorism carries over to the name of the Calvados estate where the hero passes his lonely childhood. The Priory, “dépendance d’une abbaye qui fut détruite par la Révolution” [annex of an abbey destroyed during the Revolution], 13 is a quiet and damp domain haunted by jackdaws and ravens, conveying the mournfulness of a devotion culminating in martyrdom. There, preexisting Jean Mintié and his death-seeking mother—situated in a shadowy, ancestral history—the hunger for oblivion had originated and radiated outward. Pulling backward toward an infinitely receding, immemorial past, the death drive begins in the blackness of the womb and ends in the blackness of the tomb. The existential family portrait gallery of forbears murdered by accident, violence, or biology is mirrored in the tragic links in the Mintié line of selfdestructive melancholics: “longue chaîne de suicidés, partie de la nuit profonde, très loin, et se déroulant à travers les âges, pour aboutir . . . où?” [a long chain of suicides that had begun far away in the darkest night and that was now unfolding across the ages in order to end . . . where?]. 14 Longing to

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31

burn in the caress of the flames or be reaped like wheat, Madame Mintié is not the first to wish for evaporation into nothingness or to float like Ophelia among the reeds. Completing “son noviciat du néant” [the novitiate of her annihilation], 15 she had been schooled by her own predecessor in the serenity of disembodiment. From her own mother, Madame Mintié had inherited a longing for the tightened noose. Unfortified by milk, she had been suckled on the nepenthe of despair: “[c]était au flanc de sa mère [. . .] qu’elle avait aspiré le poison, ce poison qui maintenant emplissait ses veines, dont les chairs étaient imprégnées, qui grisait son cerveau, rongeait son âme” [It was in her mother’s womb that she had drunk the poison that now filled her veins, imbued her flesh, intoxicated her brain, and gnawed at her soul]. 16 Seeking a prophet to show her a way out of the world, she had found no magus whose forehead was emblazoned with “l’étoile magique qui la conduirait jusqu’au dieu” [the magic star that would lead her to God]. 17 The nearly extinguished candle of Nirvana had been evident in her failing heart, “vacillant comme une petite flamme fumeuse” [flickering like a small, smoky flame]. 18 The wasted flesh and diaphanous complexion, the uncontrollable weeping and convulsions of hyperesthesia, show Madame Mintié as having a tenuous foothold in the world of the living. Her aspirations to holiness explain Jean Mintié’s conflation of his mother with the plaster statue of the Virgin in the Church of Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres, a figure restored to health in the homeland of heaven: her pink flesh draped in a mantle constellated with silver. With her horror of biology, Madame Mintié had proven her descendancy from the Immaculate Mother. Having dreamed of celestial kisses and mystical embraces, she had been revolted by the coarseness of conjugality. Jean Mintié’s assumption of Christ’s mission is suggested by his sacred birthright, his exemption from original sin. As an avatar of Jesus engendered by his mother’s rejection of reproductive servitude, Mintié sees death as the embarkation point, death as the goal of life’s journey. His guilty passion for the harlot Juliette can be expiated only by undergoing the Passion and Crucifixion. Climbing Golgotha, he submits to the sacrifice that teaches his followers to break free of the body. In imitation of his mother, Jean is drawn to the beatific insentience of the unliving. Thus the first sign of his creativity is his identification with the infant son of the plaster Madonna, the baby resembling the mother as a “morceau de matière inerte” [piece of lifeless matter]. 19 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. 20

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In this early scene, as the son of a statue, Mintié is extricated from the ancestral chain of suicides and awarded a sanctity that paradoxically allows his rebirth—absolved of hereditary determinism and released from the curse of depression and madness. As Jesus’s death and resurrection liquidate the debt of humanity’s sin, so Mintié dies to his old identity and is reborn as a savior. Near the Virgin, he says, “[j]étais vraiment un autre enfant; je sentais mes joues devenir plus roses, mon sang battait plus fort dans mes veines, mes pensées se dégageaient plus vives et légères” [I was truly another child; I felt my cheeks grow pinker, my blood throb more strongly in my veins, my thoughts become lighter and clearer]. 21 The miracle of virgin self-engendering affords Jean a momentary illusion that creativity and life may prevail, that Eros may supersede Nirvana. But when he seizes hold of a pencil and tries to capture the Madonna in “un fond de brume opaque” [a background of opaque fog], he is again paralyzed by a past which holds him enthralled, fearful of casting “un coup d’oeil sur l’avenir” [a glance toward the future]. 22 Assuming the role of redeemer, Mintié imagines becoming a successor to the mystic bridegroom whom his mother had pictured with a star on his forehead. Impervious to her son’s oedipal desires, Madame Mintié had remained undefiled, unrepresented in Jean’s impassioned sketch. If incest is a wish to resolve duality—reintegrating the subject into the matrix, assimilating the plaster son to the plaster Virgin—then it is an expression of the death drive that would return Mintié to the unitive state of sleep. Even if he is born of inanimate matter, Mintié dreams of becoming a Pygmalion-god: awakening his dormant mother to new life with his pencil, coupling with her in the interplay of creative energies and created objects. At first, Mintié’s art is opposed to Nirvana, working instead in the service of Eros, which, as Jean Laplanche writes, “tends to form perpetually richer and more complex unities, initially on the biological level, then on the psychological and social one.” 23 Following the intercourse between two beings that results in the birth of new life, creativity ends with the production of works of art. “In this way,” as Freud says, “the libido of our sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together.” 24 For a moment, Mintié imagines drawing as having a generative power that likens art to sex, taking the statue and transposing it on paper, where it would become “vivante et parlante” [alive and able to speak]. 25 Then the offspring of the Madonna would be the miraculous baby of Bethlehem, the new life of a god that would bring a rebirth of the race. But when words fail and the pencil does not adapt “à la douceur des lignes” [to the softness of the lines], 26 Mintié accepts that the artist is reassimilated to his material, engulfed in the mother, and dispersed into nature. Like Abbé Jules (L’Abbé Jules, 1888), who dreams of animal carrion disintegrating into the vastness of the forest, Mintié euphemizes the death drive as a nobler death of the ego.

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As Mirbeau had asked in “Le Suicide,” Is not death a path to universality? “N’est-ce point elle qui est la vraie liberté et la paix définitive?” [Is not death true freedom and definitive peace?]. 27 After he abandons the impulse to draw, harkening instead to a voice celebrating the sunlight filtering through the trees, Mintié ceases to think. After bathing in the radiance of nature in Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres, he succumbs to acedia and then, after he relocates, is swallowed up in the incoherence and cacophony of Paris. The Virgin’s tenderness is succeeded by the stridency of the capital’s wantons. The compulsive masturbation practiced by Mirbeau’s protagonist aims not at pleasure but at a discharge of sexual tension. As Pierre Michel writes, using the language of Freud, “It seems to act as a physiological safety valve, designed to lessen tension and ensure the individual’s psychic equilibrium.” 28 Remembering his first days in Paris with disgust, Mintié says, “Une sorte de torpeur crapuleuse m’envahit. Je restais couché plusieurs jours de suite, m’enfonçant dans l’abrutissement des sommeils obscènes” [A dissolute torpor overtook me. I remained in bed for days at a time, sinking into the stupor of obscene dreams]. 29 No longer antithetical, sex and death work together in effecting the cancellation of desire, the extinguishing of consciousness, and the cessation of suffering. Following Mintié’s sojourn in the city and his bouts of moral masochism, he welcomes the news that war has broken out and joins an infantry regiment in Le Mans. Mirbeau’s antiwar digression culminates in the controversial chapter where Mintié, posted as a sentinel, shoots a passing Prussian scout. Self-tormenting melancholia, once directed at the subject’s self, is projected outward in targeting a stranger. Mintié’s passage from the joylessness of mechanical autoeroticism to combat is accomplished with little change in the tone of his narrative. Like a corpse accorded an awareness of its deadness, Mintié has experienced the blankness of his thoughts, the anesthetizing of his feelings, the self-loathing that had deposited “l’ordure sur la peau” [filth on his skin]. 30 From there, he moves to a vision of universal annihilation, the death drive enacted as an apocalypse. In this scene, Mirbeau takes what will later be the war between the sexes and stages it as battlefield carnage that assumes its own erotic dimension. The chapter in which Mintié shoots a scout illustrates a campaign of random vandalism conducted by officers overseeing a ragtag band of terrified vagabonds. Marched across the countryside where they desecrate cemeteries, chop down trees, and despoil isolated farmhouses of food and firewood, the regiment moves from bivouac to sickbay, always anticipating the approach of the enemy army. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Sac au dos (1878), another chronicle of military fecklessness and disorder, Mirbeau’s text offers an unromanticized picture of war without heroism or glory.

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A sentinel watching over a night-blackened plain, Mintié is left alone with his thoughts, wondering about the reason for the hatred between brothers, polarizing ideologies that pit against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same mother. The pretext for war is presented as another oedipal struggle: a rebellion against a tyrannical fatherland and a quest for reimmersion in protective nature: “Qu’était-ce donc que cette patrie, au nom de laquelle se commettaient tant de folies et tant de forfaits, qui nous avait arrachés, remplis d’amour, à la nature maternelle?” [What was this fatherland in the name of which so many follies and crimes were committed, which tore us away, while we were still filled with love, from maternal nature?]. 31 Here as elsewhere, Mintié’s narrative draws on utopian images of nature as a place of shelter and bounty, clear rivers, orchards, bubbling springs, sheep grazing in lush pasture. “Que faut-il que je fasse pour ne plus souffrir?” [What must I do not to suffer anymore?], as he later asks of a similar landscape, to which the meadows, trees, and flowers respond, “Nous aimer!” [Love us!]. 32 But the longed-for reunion with the mother is a rehearsal of euthanasia; it is not a wish to live and love, but to stop suffering and feel nothing. Like Abbé Jules, who imagines death as bathing in a borderless lake of milk, Mintié envisages life’s journey as walking along “une route, toute blanche” [a white road] 33 until he can lie down and disperse into the elements. Commingling with stalks of wheat, singing waters, and flocks of birds, he flees from consciousness and separateness. Like Madame Mintié, who had welcomed the kiss of the fire, Jean wishes for death as a loss of self in nature. But the peacefulness of the grave brings an immobilizing narcissism, and so what Mintié will present as compassion for humanity is just the self-pity of a savior who would share his crucifixion’s pain. J’ai remarqué que l’on ne s’attendrit bien sur les autres que lorsqu’on est soimême malheureux. N’était-ce point sur moi seul que je m’apitoyais ainsi? Et si, dans cette nuit froide, tout près de l’ennemi qui apparaîtrait peut-être dans les brumes du matin, j’aimais tant l’humanité, n’était-ce point moi seul que j’aimais, moi seul que j’eusse voulu soustraire aux souffrances? [I have observed that we are never so moved by the plight of others as when we are unhappy ourselves. Was it not for myself that I felt pity? And if, in that cold night, so near an enemy that might appear at any moment in the morning mist, I loved humanity so much, was it not myself alone that I loved, myself that I wanted to spare from suffering?] 34

When the Prussian soldier rides up, backlit by the golden light of the sunrise, Mintié envisions him as a superhuman being, “comme une statue équestre de bronze” [like an equestrian statue of bronze]. 35 The superiority of inanimate figures, of plaster or bronze, positions the enemy scout as a de-

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scendant of the Virgin Mother in the Priory chapel. A statue is a lifeless thing that is esthetically embellished, invulnerable to suffering and death redeemed as art. But the horseman whom Mintié shoots is a robust, clear-eyed figure brimming with vitality. It is this stranger who overflows with energy and vigor that invites the homicidal bullet, like the cats that Mintié’s father used to hunt for recreation. Before killing him, Mintié neutralizes his threatening alterity by recreating him as the hero in an imaginary narrative. By fabricating the story of the soldier’s provenance and history, Mintié takes another’s life and assimilates it to his own. There would be fewer casualties, fewer corpses strewn on battlefields if the enemy were constructed as the narrative counterpart of the subject. “C’est un poète” [He is a poet], 36 Mintié thinks of the rider, a euphemized brother who, like all combatants, feels exiled from his homeland. As a source of danger, the Prussian is dispatched by an involuntary gunshot, then resurrected by the shooter as a tale of cheerful domesticity. He is imagined as a man who had adorned his wife’s hair with a rose, who recalls the blue ribbon in his daughter’s hat the day he departed for the war. Not disgusted by the corpse and the bloody drool that streaks its face, Mintié kisses the fallen enemy he has turned into himself. A figure feared for his autonomy, cherished for his susceptibility to storytelling, the Prussian is the self that Mintié imagines loving in the predawn mists of morning. After the statue of the baby Jesus, he is the first Christ figure with whom Mintié identifies. Fallen from his horse as Jesus was taken down from the Cross, the Prussian is laid out on the ground, “la face contre le sol, les bras en croix” [his face against the ground, his arms forming a cross]. 37 Most of Mintié’s narrative is a chronicle of his demeaning relationship with the notorious Juliette Roux, to whom he is introduced by his friend Lirat after returning to the capital. An engine of sexual destruction, enslaving victims before consuming them, Juliette is the kind of character that earned Mirbeau his reputation for antifeminism. As an aspiring writer who leaves behind a record of his downfall, Mintié sees his role as a messenger, evangelizing lovers, preaching the gospel of gynecophobia, proselytizing those victimized by instinct and desire. As Freud affirms, art and religion supply the medicine of illusion, refuge from the suffering that comes from three directions: bodily decay; the external world’s destructive forces; and, “finally,” Freud concludes, “from one’s relations to other men.” 38 The doctrine Mintié propounds is to flee from Eros and sever bonds with friends and lovers: the man-eaters who destroy one’s financial solvency and reputation, the pusillanimous colleagues who give in to women’s blandishments. The infantile aspiration that Mirbeau’s character expresses is to return from others to the self, from object relations to pure subjectivity, and to enter the heaven of primary process, which Freud sees as the religious seeker’s destination, the “oceanic feeling” that he equates with “the restoration of limitless narcissism.” 39

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Mirbeau, who described his work on Le Calvaire as an encounter with creative impotence, wrote of identifying with Zola’s Claude Lantier (L’Oeuvre, 1886) in enduring “le plus épouvantable martyre qui soit” [the most horrible martyrdom that there is]. 40 In Mirbeau, the aim of art, as Mintié suggests, is to suffer in giving birth to art that rescues readers from their suffering. If “en lisant ces pages” [in reading these pages], as Mintié says of his unhappy love story, one is spared the ignominy to which he himself had succumbed, “il me semble que le salut de cette âme commencerait le rachat de la mienne” [the salvation of that soul would seem to begin with the salvation of my own]. 41 The goal of the novelist-as-Christ is to complete the masterpiece of his martyrdom and be resurrected as the inspirational record of his sacrifice. Mirbeau had intended Le Calvaire to be followed by a companion volume, La Rédemption, in which the agony of authorship would earn remission from pain. As in Le Jardin des supplices, one undergoes creative torture in order that it be finished and one no longer feel the need to work. In Le Calvaire, every setting is a killing ground: the beech groves of Mintié’s childhood that are littered with dead cats, the battlefields where soldiers’ bodies are “livrées au croc des chiens rôdeurs” [left to the jaws of stray dogs]. 42 Paris is a war zone overrun by invading Lust battalions, where even death brings no release, but where skeletons, enflamed “par la fièvre homicide” [by homicidal fever], 43 fight over the carcasses of prostitutes. It is an egress from this charnel house that Mirbeau’s characters are seeking: into the tracklessness of cathedral forests, the Providence of nature, the prelapsarian garden that is the death drive’s destination. As with religion, art’s value is as a source of solacing illusion, respite from life’s struggle, with the love of beauty as anesthesia. Yet creative work may never end lest the illusion be dispelled and the reality of suffering resume. The narcosis induced by art, Freud writes in a discouraging remark, “can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and is not enough to make us forget real misery.” 44 Responsive to the influence of his mother and the ancestral pull of suicide, Mintié uses his narrative to warn against the snares of Eros. Advising followers to be on guard against the danger of attachments and to forswear friendship, passion, and the demeaning obedience to instinct, he counsels them to move from society to selfishness. Yet he cannot escape the injuries suffered by Juliette’s suitors, who see their self-respect eroded, their identity dissolve—who are lovers made interchangeable by their abjection. While Eros privileges one woman over another, chooses one confidante over another, Juliette’s entourage resembles the gewgaws littering her apartment: garish furniture, a terra-cotta Cupid—bad taste combined with ostentation punctuated by a yapping dog.

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When Mintié supplants Charles Malterre as Juliette’s latest lover, he is just the latest in a succession of humiliated supplicants, lost in the night of their disgrace like the long chain of maternal suicides that distinguishes Mintié’s family. During his sorties into society—visiting theaters, cafes, and racetracks—Mintié is pluralized as the members of Juliette’s retinues, “toute une chiennerie internationale et boulevardière que nous trânions à nos trousses” [a whole international pack of boulevard mongrels that we dragged along at our heels]. 45 The Mintié band consists of interlopers and cocottes whose insolence and cynicism defile everything they touch. From a table, Juliette’s confidante, Jesselin, points out the denizens of their underworld: disgraced dukes, ruined speculators, and usurious valets. Mintié’s hope for recognition as an author is submerged with his descent “dans ces milieux répugnants de la débauche” [into this loathsome world of debauchery]. 46 Every man is Juliette’s sugar daddy, her consort, or her customer. Her bedroom is a transit point where honor enters and shame emerges. The breakdown of identity into anonymous multiplicity enacts the death drive, which eliminates the tension required for the self to cohere. As the signature on his books, Mintié dissolves into a list of plagiarized influences. Thus, in reexamining his most acclaimed volumes, he finds, as he remembers, a little bit of everything: “de l’Herbert Spenser et du Scribe, du JeanJacques Rousseau et du Commerson, du Victor Hugo, du Poe et de l’Eugène Chavette” [Herbert Spencer, Scribe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Commerson, Victor Hugo, Poe, and Eugène Chavette]. 47 A patchwork assembled from a repertoire of sources, he is everyone, and in being all, he ends up being no one. “De moi, dont le nom s’étale en tête du volume, sur la couverture jaune, je ne retrouve rien” [Of myself, the person whose name is featured on the yellow cover, I find nothing]. 48 Wishing to deny the reality of his derivative style, Mintié entertains a fantasy of completeness and self-sufficiency. Not beholden to a caregiver for nourishment and shelter, he incorporates the mother and administers her functions to himself. Following his friend Lirat, Mintié demythifies the divine mother who had brought forth a misbegotten race of invalids and neurotics. Both Mintié and Lirat would exchange the mother’s impure womb for the bountiful genius of the novelist or painter. Already Mintié has dreamed of holding out the hundred breasts of Isis, suckling the wounded soldiers who wandered dazed across a battlefield. As a writer, he imagines becoming an epigone of the mother, his Passion’s blood and tears replacing the Virgin’s life-giving secretions. But while the Immaculate Mother gives birth to a son who saves the guilty engendered by Eve, Christ enacts the death drive that brings deliverance from the body and a passage from earth into paradise.

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Tortured by lust, man endures damnation every day, as his body is the cross where he undergoes a quotidian crucifixion. Mintié’s writing and his friend Lirat’s paintings depict the banality of the Passion, whereby, in imitation of Christ, man is scourged by wickedness and repentance. Contemporary man as he appears in Lirat’s canvases is un damné effroyable, au corps miné par les névroses, aux chairs suppliciées par les luxures, qui halète sans cesse sous la passion qui l’étreint et lui enfonce ses griffes dans la peau [one of the damned, a frightful being whose body is sapped by neuroses, his flesh tormented by lust, who pants under the whip of the passion that clasps him and sinks its claws into his skin]. 49

Mirbeau’s character is at once the suffering Savior, the soldier who lashes him to the Cross, the penitent, and the jeering demon who impales him on his claws. An anatomy of his obsessional relationship with Juliette, Mintié’s account follows the arc of his fall—from a nurturing mother country where trees sheltered him with their leaves, “comme autant de mains protectrices” [like so many protective hands] 50 —to the electrified inferno of Paris with its sulfurous gambling dens and lurid brothels whose portals glow red “pareilles à des bouches d’enfer” [like the mouths of hell]. 51 Mintié’s spiraling descent into degradation expresses both a horror of and nostalgia for the helplessness of infancy. His fascination for the torture apparatus of the female body is traceable to the early trauma of glimpsing his mother’s nakedness when, in the bath, he had seen her peignoir open and reveal her body underneath. Trembling, screaming, as if he had glimpsed something terrifying, he had displaced castration fears from a black bath tile to the empty space, the absent thing generalized as any horrifying lack: the emotional vacancy of Juliette, her predatory heartlessness, his own creative unproductiveness projected as unwritten pages. There is a jubilant masochism in Mintié’s celebration of his downfall. The abyss in which he wallows is a cradle of pleasurable impotence. He advises his reader/acolyte, [n]e croyez pas que l’abîme où j’ai roulé m’ait surpris brusquement . . . Ne le croyez pas! Je l’ai vu de loin, j’ai vu son trou noir et béant horriblement, et j’ai couru à lui” [Don’t believe that the pit in which I wallowed took me suddenly by surprise . . . Don’t believe it! I saw its black, yawning hole from far away, and I ran toward it]. 52

Having assumed the Dolorist role of Christ on Calvary, Mintié describes his affair with Juliette as a sweeping Manichaean drama in which the cancellation of sin and evil results in a deathly equilibrium. Every action and event requires a neutralizing counterweight. The misfortune of Mintié’s birth in-

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curs other tragedies offsetting it: Mintié’s uncle dies of typhoid fever; an urchin slips and cracks his skull when fighting over candy distributed in celebration of Mintié’s baptism. Thus the opening chapter of the novel illustrates the economy of the death drive, as the dawn of life is telescoped into a mortuary twilight. Suffering is the work done to return vital energies to zero. If life’s destination is oblivion, pain is endured until one gets there. Once Mintié is entangled in his liaison with Juliette, he no longer distinguishes between the pure and the corrupt. Abulia and prurience are such homogenizing agents that no one is immune, and even Lirat is finally compromised. Alternately convulsed by murderous and suicidal impulses, Mintié imagines an Armageddon that will engulf a fallen world. Defilement retroactively envelops the innocence of Mintié’s past. Always sleeping at the heart of things, evil is only waiting to reveal itself. When the infant’s imaginary omnipotence encounters the hardships of reality, the illusion of his innocence is dispelled by a history of guilt. Mintié’s capacity to redeem himself with his Dolorist creation proves ineffectual when he discovers he is not the child of the Virgin. There is no immaculacy in him or in the mother who has begotten him. Delirious with erotic exaltation and desire, he transforms the religious statue that had held the baby Jesus into Juliette, whose otter-fur hood replaces the Virgin’s golden halo. Laughing as she removes her lilac plaster gown, she reminds Mintié that she receives her callers every day from five to seven, promising to give him the pants worn by Charles, her former lover. Mintié’s archaic oedipal wish to be the original father ensures that the desired woman is still intact, that his books are unplagiarized and fresh. But the fantasy proves unsustainable; everything is already old and shopworn. The Holy Mother is a prostitute, and Mintié’s romance is a pair of trousers worn by his predecessor. No longer the baby Jesus blessed with the insentience of plaster, he is the Messiah on Golgotha who undoes the world’s wickedness. Mintié’s affair with Juliette is both the sin and the expiation, as he compromises honor and spends ruinous sums to buy her pearls and other baubles. While he is alternately tempted by thoughts of suicide and murder, he must experience damnation and complete the work of suffering until the narrative of his crucifixion edifies future generations of disciples. 53 Before Mintié (as Mirbeau had done) leaves for a detoxifying retreat in Brittany, his friend Lirat assures him that it is not God’s forgiveness that he needs, not the forgiveness of his fellow man, but pardon from himself. Desire and remorse upset the homeostatic balance that Mintié henceforth struggles to recover. Counseling Mintié that he adapt himself to the rhythms of the world, the barren heaths and empty beaches of the Breton wilderness, Lirat directs him to exhaust his body and empty his mind. The desolate landscapes of Le Ploc’h with their shrieking winds and crashing surf are different from the saccharine image of Mintié’s imaginary Eden, where little flowers whisper words of reconciliation. No longer a death-mother enfolding him in

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oblivion’s loving arms, nature is again a place of exile that man must wander forever doing penance. Having slept in watery ditches, climbed rocks, and gathered seaweed, Mintié finds no peace in nature, which suggests only thoughts of sacrilege and violence. But then—absolved by wind and ocean— Mintié experiences a momentary respite, encounters a solicitous mother surrogate, la mère Gannec, in whose house he lives. He meets a revirginized version of Juliette, “la demoiselle Landudec,” with whom he dreams of sharing an idyll beneath a fairy moon. But the mother’s pull is always backward toward the black hole of extinction, and the pull of woman is always forward toward unremitting sexual frenzy. Desire that disturbs the equanimity of Nirvana triggers a nightmare of universal coitus. Fantasms of necrophilia on altars and in cemeteries accompany the coalescence of all women in the figure of the harlot of Revelation, the image of Juliette, the prostitute, combining all the women from Mintié’s past, who file by in immodest poses, making lewd expressions. The biblical dimension of Mintié’s narrative is evident in the move from paradise lost to hell on earth—from the Christ child in the Church of SaintMichel-les-Hêtres to the Messiah who returns when a cataclysm destroys the world. By its title, Mirbeau’s novel suggests a theodicy that justifies the sacrifice of those crucified by love. More importantly, Mirbeau couples Mintié’s experience of the Passion with the creative work that documents his ordeal for his followers. As Donald Moss writes, creativity contains a regressive utopian impulse, an ambition to recover an inaccessible, lost ideal. “The ‘creative’ object represents foresworn possibility,” as Moss avers. “We celebrate it compensatorily and melancholically. We love it for reminding us of what we have foresworn.” 54 The aim of Mintié’s narrative is to recapitulate his suffering so that, in telling it, it may end. Its destination is the garden of delight that is the province of primary narcissism, and, beyond that, the immemorial past toward which the suicidal mothers point. It is the trou noir of oblivion that is the death drive’s destination. Thus the person ostracized from paradise strives only to return there. As Freud writes, “The finding of an object is, in fact, a re-finding of it.” 55 Seen in this light, Mintié’s travails and Mirbeau’s fictionalizing of them are work whose reward is relief accompanying their completion. Yet a rebalancing of the scales of good and evil is never finished. Homeostasis is not achieved. Sinners necessitate new redemptive suffering, and despite Mintié’s cautionary story, men continue to be enslaved by sexual longings. Mirbeau’s novel occasionally trivializes the pain of living as an annoyance. Solicitations of the flesh are dismissed as mere disturbances that the sage ignores. Yet they may also be distractions that provoke an exaggerated response: stray cats that must be shot, a barking dog whose head is smashed against a fireplace. The author’s own utopian principles often conflicted with

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a disabused appreciation of a reality resistant to attempts at perfection. The crystal rivers, heavy fruit trees, and whispering flowerets are idealizations in the midst of which the creative work aspires to find rest. But this place is far away if it is not just a mirage, and the blood pools and scaffolds of the Torture Garden are more proximate and threatening. Innocence is a lie, virtue a lullaby used to soothe a restless child, and Lirat, who had earlier sermonized against the woes of sexual obsession, becomes the emblem of apostasy, the latest lover of Juliette. As work seeks a cancellation of the reasons for undertaking it, authorship is a crucifixion that aims at restoring the innocence that precedes the Fall. Its goal is a deathly preterition, before life’s struggle had been joined. As Moss says, “We want ‘creative’ work to point toward an end in which the conditions making such work a necessity will have been rendered superfluous; we want to see a horizon on which is represented the last of the genre, its promises not only fulfilled, but exhausted.” 56 When, in shock over Lirat’s betrayal, Mintié falls into a syncope and sees houses and streetlamps turning dizzily overhead, he returns in his swoon to Eden resonating with “la musique divine des choses” [the heavenly music of things]. 57 But when he asks the singing springs and mossy nooks how he should live and they answer, “Nous aimer!” he again resumes the journey: “L’homme reprit sa route” [The man set out again]. 58 No repose is there awaiting him in the black hole of unconsciousness. The ascent up Calvary begins again. Sisyphus puts his shoulder to the rock and starts to push, and the next novel is undertaken. Mintié’s journey had initially taken him from multiplicity to unity; from Eros, “the gatherer,” to Thanatos, the principle of inertia. As with the conjectural story of the Prussian scout and his idealized family history, Mintié’s narrative—instead of turning toward engagement with another—allows selfmirroring, the narcissist’s inflections of identity. But the desire to go back to the trou noir of the homeland is unrealizable, so Mintié decides to sell the Priory and discharges his loyal servants. Like Adam, Mintié is expelled from Eden and condemned by God to work. Having recovered from his swoon, Mintié still sees Paris as a battlefield, but not as one on which the dead lie motionless on the ground. Instead the capital is an ossuary emptied of disarticulated skeletons, skulls knocked off vertebral columns by the blows of raging enemies, old and fleshless warriors fighting over the carrion of fresher corpses. Having set forth from a land of harvest sweetness, Mintié again takes up his journey in the clothes of a worker. In Le Calvaire, Mirbeau establishes the setting of the novel’s final scene with no idea of closure or completion. Like the conclusion of a book that ensures a retransmission of its theme, the garden, the cemetery, and the war zone are not resting places but laboratories that promote new growth, work-

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shops that never can fall silent. The hill that Christ and Sisyphus are obliged to climb forever is Golgotha, which etymologically signifies “the place of the skull”—the skulls that fall “sur le pavé, avec d’étranges résonances” [on the pavement, resounding strangely]. 59 In Le Calvaire, there is no return to a peaceful antecedence. Work designed to eliminate the conditions that necessitate it does not finish in Mirbeau’s stories of injustice and instinctual bondage. Mirbeau’s writing may have been undertaken in hopes of cancelling its premise. Born as a narrative of suffering, it may express a longing for remission, yet there is no dissolution in a lake of milk, no sleep in childhood’s fields. Because the pain of others does not stop, the artist must carry on the Passion, recommitting himself to walking down the white road of new creation. L’ABBÉ JULES Religions traditionally offer dogma and faith to the pragmatic self as a substitute for the experience of God in the inner self. But religions also offer mystical traditions that express discontent with the religiosity of the pragmatic self. Mystics are people who are not satisfied with theological reflection and instead strive to experience God or Truth directly.—Kevin Fauteux, The Recovery of Self

With the critical acclaim and modest commercial success of Le Calvaire, Mirbeau, by 1887, found himself increasingly in a position to pursue his career comfortably, unencumbered by the nagging requirement to write daily columns for the Paris press. In 1884, having ended his affair with Judith, Mirbeau had taken up with Alice Regnault, a femme galante and mediocre actress he would soon marry and with whom he would share the next thirtytwo years of his life. No longer driven to perform martyrological analyses of unhappy love, Mirbeau turned to writing to express his hunger for absolutes and his quest for the sublime. Understandably, La Rédemption, an intended companion piece to Le Calvaire, was a project that never came to fruition. Mirbeau’s idea of a pastoral idyll hymning the beauty of orchards, bowers, and singing flowerets would have rehabilitated the death drive as euthanasiac pantheism. Too disabused, “too imprinted by the legacy of materialism and science, too conditioned by the automatism acquired after twelve years working for the tabloid press,” 60 Mirbeau finally judged his plan to be unrealizable. However, Mirbeau’s 1888 novel, L’Abbé Jules, shows how much the author had freed himself of the scientific legacy of naturalism. Inspired by reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Mirbeau showcases a renegade priest whose indictment of orthodox Catholicism is not easily reconcilable with his longings for the transcendental. In his hero, Mirbeau mirrors the insoluble mys-

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teries of heaven with the hidden wellsprings of human behavior: “the profound soul of beings, the first uncertain expressions of a personality deformed by social rules, in short, what in a few years would be called ‘the unconscious.’” 61 Seen through the deforming lens of childhood naiveté by Albert Dervelle, the narrator of Mirbeau’s novel, Abbé Jules is also a victim of the prejudice of the adults who inhabit Dervelle’s world. For all, Jules is a secret as unfathomable as the God he seeks and whose existence he questions. A figure composed of shadow and light, Jules is a product of his judges’ preconceptions and ignorance, gaps in their memory, long stretches in Jules’s life about which even his family had remained ignorant. If our fellow man, Mirbeau says, is fundamentally unknowable, so is the God that we seek and whom we construct as an illusion, one we constantly modify, adapt, and refine in order to guide us forward in our quest for harmony. In L’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau incriminates religion as an institutional practice while honoring it as a quest for the supernatural, creating in his sexually and spiritually conflicted protagonist a mystic who strives to know God directly. Mirbeau creates in Abbé Jules an unforgettable picture of a character tormented by competing impulses toward exaltation and abjection, drawn at once toward acts of depravity and perversion, then moved by benevolent wishes to succor the poor and soothe the dying. At one moment, Jules locks himself in his library, where he is convulsed by screaming fits of masturbatory rage. At the next, he emerges to deliver to his young charge, nephew Albert Dervelle, a lyrical encomium to nature, in whose bosom, Jules says, instinctual man diffuses himself into the immensity of living things. From one perspective, Jules’s behavior may be an implementation of his philosophy of creation as destruction, a personal metaphysic that depends on accepting his inevitable annihilation. It is easy, Jules says, to construct a religion that inculcates repression, but harder to create the nothingness that is the fate of human organisms. In the novel, 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 return to nothingness celebrates the life of everything. 62

However, acquiescence to extinction is not only a profession of one’s transience, assigning precedence to the majesty of Creation over the smallness of a created self; it is also the consummate expression of art that proceeds from an inaugural destructive act: “As with the anarchist who cele-

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brates the art of demolition, the master’s works embody a self-abnegating inexpressiveness, humbling the individual who magnifies the totality of nature.” 63 Yet the story is about more than the dismantling of identity; it charts the refinement of Jules’s religious faith. His slow and arduous spiritual quest does not just begin with an incrimination of institutional Catholicism and end with an acceptance of his mortality. Life is more for Jules than a cyclical process that is endlessly repeated, constructing hope that is forever doomed to be exposed as an illusion. As with Mirbeau’s own impulse to move higher and farther from himself, Jules’s faith is a growing thing; his God is a Being who changes with Jules’s understanding of him. Mirbeau’s novel begins by blaming Jules’s religious education for his moral disorder and metaphysical unease. Indeed, Mirbeau’s often caricatural portrayals of pleasure-loving, venal, slothful, incurious clerics give an unflattering impression of a church whose officials seek comfort for themselves in this world, not deliverance for their flock into the majesty of the world to come. On the one hand, the rigidity of Catholic teachings, the sacerdotal requirement of chastity, and the conflation of sin and happiness, of psychological wellbeing and spiritual weakness account for the corruption of natural man, whose predicament Jules embodies. On the other hand, the exceptional individual exemplified by Jules—repelled by the mediocrity and materialism of his fellow man—turns to religion as a source of the mystical and the sublime. The novel serves as a forum in which Mirbeau elaborates his contradictory image of religion, both as a body of teaching aimed at regulating behavior and as an outlet for human aspirations to ascend to a state of oneness. While Mirbeau is best known for his denunciations of Catholicism and of priests as sexual predators, parasites, and dolts, there emerges from Mirbeau’s fiction—and especially from L’Abbé Jules—a picture of the spiritual quest that sustains the seeker’s continued growth. Seen in flowers that blossom in the corruption of a graveyard, the dialectic of life and death that structures Mirbeau’s work extends to believers who destroy their God in order to reimagine him as something higher. As much as L’Abbé Jules delivers an anticlerical polemic, indicting religion for perverting natural man, the novel still accords serious attention to the pursuit of higher states of consciousness, spiritual insights elevating the subject out of the realm of everyday experience. While Abbé Jules may be the hereditary product of a mystical mother and an alcoholic father, Mirbeau refrains from describing his hero as a cyclothymic welter of malicious and compassionate impulses. Like the puzzle of Jules’s character and the mysteries of religion, the enigma of Jules’s history is captivating because it is unknowable. What is the purpose of God’s handiwork? What awaits man after death? What accounts for Jules’s behavior? What was he doing in the

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mysterious six-year absence that precedes the novel’s opening? As the inhabitants of Viantais wonder, “Qu’a-t-il pu fabriquer à Paris?” [What could he have been up to in Paris?]. 64 Mirbeau’s novel begins approaching these unanswerable questions by examining the reasons that they are raised to begin with. While Jules’s life is structured along a vertical axis, alternating between paroxysms of angry rage and transcendental yearnings for incorporeity and forgiveness, the novel’s action unfolds against a flat, horizontal backdrop of monotony and routine. As Albert Dervelle says of the uneventfulness of his native village of Viantais, “Lente, sans cesse pareille, s’en allait la vie” [Never changing, life slowly ebbed away]. 65 Among many of the characters, a desire for beauty and a hunger for absolutes are prompted by the despairing banality of life in the body and life in society. In opposition to longings for supernatural purity and perfection, Mirbeau offers a dismal image of man’s origins and ends. Loosely narrated by young Dervelle, the story charts the child’s transition from primary process, magic thinking, wish fulfillment, and superstitious ideation to an adult adaptation to the demands of reality. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud likens the religion of grownups to the child’s indulgence in fantasy and illusion. Like the child at play, fleeing the truth of his powerlessness and dependency, the believer discounts a reality seen “as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering,” choosing, Freud argues, to construct instead a higher, nobler, more gratifying reality in which the “most unbearable features [of this world] are eliminated and replaced by others in conformity with [his] wishes.” 66 Like Freud, Mirbeau often situates religious behavior in the domain of delusion or psychosis, but both authors acknowledge man’s desire to escape the hell of quotidian existence and ascend to a place where guilt, loss, and separateness are no longer. To be sure, Mirbeau deplores the effects of religious sanctions on forbidden behavior and of threats of an afterlife of eternal torment and unquenchable fire. However, it is the infernal triteness of small-town life that impels the child and prelate to invent their images of paradise. From cradle to sepulcher, human life in Viantais is governed by pain and stupidity, ugliness and cowardice. Romantic notions of childhood are dispelled by Mirbeau’s account of Albert Dervelle’s exposure to his obstetrician-father’s glittering forceps and bloody scalpels. The child’s capacity for illusion is destroyed by instruction in the grim realities of childbirth, as Albert’s “beaux rêves d’oiseaux bleus et de fées merveilleuses se transformaient en un cauchemar chirurgical, où le pus ruisselait, où s’entassaient les membres coupés, où se déroulaient les bandages et les charpies hideusement ensanglantés” [beautiful

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dreams of bluebirds and marvelous fairies were transformed into a surgical nightmare of streaming pus, heaps of severed limbs, loosening bandages, and hideously bloody linens]. 67 Mirbeau’s novel begins with the beginnings of life but then shows that Albert Dervelle is given little time to enjoy the optimistic fantasies of childhood. Babies issue from the ignoble congress of bestially coupling adults, the saletés [filthy acts] that traumatize Albert’s friend, Georges Robin, when witnessing the copulation of his parents. Infants are not found under cabbages in fairy gardens filled with bluebirds. The child’s storybook paradise turns into a hospital amphitheater, and the heaven of maternal bodies is no longer fragrant, pink, and blonde, like Georges’s comely neighbor, Madame Servières, but becomes an amalgam of taboo horrors, of uteruses and placentas deformed by cancers and tumors. Birth, as Freud acknowledges, is a fall into time and mortality. For Dervelle, it is an encounter with the violence of surgery. On a discursive level, the marriage of Albert’s parents has converted conversational intimacy into formality, distance, and silence. Thoroughly versed in the prejudices and dreary personal history of their partner, the Dervelles see each other as vessels devoid of interest and mystery. Dinner table conversation, when it takes place at all, exchanges language as currency for money as subject. Celebrating a difficult delivery or the remunerative treatment of a wealthy patient, they economize talk except when it concerns material increase. In this removal of commodities and referents, money and speech operate like religion, according sacred value to symbols. The Dervelles also counsel reticence to their son, noting “qu’un enfant bien élevé ne doit ouvrir la bouche que pour manger” [a child who has been properly raised ought to open his mouth only to eat]. 68 Like religion, the secular institution of matrimony forbids indulgence, requires silence except on the subject of monetary gain. Denied the pleasures and products that money buys, residents of Viantais abide in a time of waiting, hoping for eventual accession to an eternity of abundance. But in a world without transcendence, satisfaction never comes. Those hungering to learn the mystery of Jules’s history are not made full. Jules’s conspiring, grasping consorts are not rewarded with rich bequests. The Robins never enter their hoped-for paradise on earth, never inhabit an opulent mansion filled with chandeliers and banquets, never leave their shabby dwelling, and never come into possession of “leurs meubles” [their furniture]. 69 In L’Abbé Jules, the heaven of materialists is a place of superfluity and excess where a plethora of goods outstrips the capacity for consumption. For Jules, however, paradise is the home where natural man lives free from selfcensure—where, unburdened of guilt orienting him toward a past filled with remorse and toward a future promising doubtful absolution, he enjoys the Sabbath of eternity. Instructing his catechumen in the science of unlearning,

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Jules advises Albert to forget society’s injunctions, so that his satisfactions match his desires. Live like animals, Jules advises, “en vivant, comme elles, de la vie splendide, qu’elles puisent aux sources mêmes de la nature” [leading the splendid life they live by drawing on the wellsprings of nature]. 70 Constructing theologies is a simple matter, as Jules advises his student: “l’on arrive plus aisément à fabriquer un Jésus-Christ, un Mahomet, un Napoléon, qu’un Rien” [Sometimes it’s easier to make a Jesus Christ, a Mohammed, a Napoleon than a Nothing]. In Norman O. Brown’s utopian reading of Freud, Brown describes the Genesis narrative in a way that Jules would recognize: “We [. . .] cling to the position that Adam never really fell; that the children do not really inherit the sins of their fathers; that the primal crime is an infantile fantasy, created out of nothing by the infantile ego in order to sequester by repression its own unmanageable vitality.” 71 But as Mirbeau shows, there is no repatriation of man in Eden. In Mirbeau’s fiction, Zola’s Paradou 72 is nothing more than a literary trope, and childhood’s flowering sanctuary turns into un jardin des supplices. Resigned to village life, the people of Viantais teach their children to husband their words and satisfactions and to respect the sacredness of lyrical verses and religious doctrine as instruments of sublimation. They are unlike Jules, who denounces poetry and religion as excremental smears on the purity of a lily. To be sure, Mirbeau’s fiction offers a damning inventory of abusive social institutions: the family that perverts the child’s inherent goodness and curiosity; the schools that, with their regimen of brutality and inflexibility, teach fearfulness and conformity; the teachers who sodomize; the armies that exploit bloodthirstiness and xenophobic nationalism; the church that promotes self-righteousness and intolerance; and the law that rewards the rich and punishes the misbegotten. Nature’s landscape is already blighted, its roses already soiled by injustice, and it is this that drives the exile to seek refuge in art and religion. In the world of banality and routine that Mirbeau depicts in Viantais, it is easy to see how mysteries become sacred. Just as religion enshrouds God in the unknowable and ineffable, so all secret things assume a supernatural prestige inspiring dread and awe. Jules’s six-year sojourn in the capital and his history of exorbitant and outrageous behavior are fantastic events eliciting fantastic theories. However, it is usually to the immature and gullible that Mirbeau ascribes a belief in the supernatural. A child like Albert, who longs for fairy kingdoms, is easily impressed by descriptions of Jules as a leering, disarticulated, and baneful character who, by his strangeness, no longer occupies the realm of the human. It is the unanswered questions about Jules’s past that halo him with the prestige of the diabolical, likening him to the fireswallowers, clowns, and ogres of street fairs.

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As a priest whose role is to cultivate a sense of the sublime, Jules surrounds himself with sacred icons and talismanic fetishes. Like the tabernacle whose interior is concealed from the profane, the trunk that Jules arrives with is a repository of mystery. Another unnavigable space, Jules’s brain is assimilated to the library to which no one gains admittance. The Dervelles’ housekeeper, Madeleine, imagines Jules’s trunk as a cage holding mythical animals, his library the site of infernal Sabbaths where books come alive and swarm like rats or hoot like screech owls. The evocative power of Mirbeau’s writing comes from its own mysterious and equivocal elements, situating it in the ellipses that his readers fill with conjecture. Citing Barbey, who writes, “Ce qu’on ne sait pas centuple l’impression de ce qu’on sait” [What one doesn’t know multiplies by a hundredfold the impression of what one knows], Pierre Michel says that as a faithful disciple of the Connétable, 73 “Mirbeau knew how omissions acted on the imagination.” 74 Jules, whose existence is an affront to science and psychiatry that are incapable of analyzing his baffling contradictions, is a suitable servant of God, whose majesty is greater than man’s cranial dimensions. In L’Abbé Jules, both the rich and the wretched long for something beyond the quotidian, seek a paradise exoticized by being unreachable and secret. However, for the wealthy, heaven is a place where enjoyment is everything, while for the poor, it is a place reached by the ascetic recovery of nothing. For example, the consonantally challenged Judge Robin imagines a utopia in which godliness is equated with gold. Judicial pronouncements, firmly anchored in the civil code, favor petitioners who reward the judge with baskets full of poultry. For Judge Robin, justice is administered with the practicality of commerce. Law assumes the rational clarity of a transaction where money changes hands. Since, in this world, the righteous man cannot be profligate or ostentatious, Robin imagines heaven as a place in which one can enjoy extravagance and superfluity. Paris becomes a mockery of the truth of celestial bounty, a site of plethora, decadence, terrestrial immoderation. Le luxe! . . . le luxe! . . . s’exclama M. Robin . . . À Taris, c’est le luxe qui terd le monde! . . . [. . .] Ainsi, chez le sénateur, dans le vestidule, figurez-vous qu’il y a deux nègres en dronze trois fois grands comme moi, et qui tortent des flamdeaux dores! . . . C’est incroyadle! . . . Le soir, ca s’allume! . . . J’ai vu cela, moi! [Luxury! . . . Luxury! . . . exclaimed Monsieur Robin . . . In Paris, it’s luxury that is leading the world to perdition! . . . (. . .) Just imagine, in the senator’s vestibule, there are two bronze Negroes, three times bigger than I am, holding gold flambeaux! . . . Unbelievable! . . . And at night, they’re lit up! . . . I’ve seen it myself!] 75

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However, for the ostracized and disinherited, heaven is a blessed place where the dominion of powerful oppressors has been overthrown and where the infernal agencies of school, church, and family no longer exert their noxious influence. Held captive in a home where his parents impress him into performing the chores of an unpaid domestic, Georges Robin imagines paradise as an America filled with parrots and birds of paradise, a garden of delight where there are “pas de père, pas de mère” [no fathers, no mothers]. 76 It is on a foundation of splendor and surplus that Mirbeau’s fortunate characters construct their fantasies of a happier world, not heaven but a sublunary realm of greater luxury and comfort. For the wretched, however, the dream is of a place rid of ugliness and injustice. Thus in L’Abbé Jules, the children and visionary clerics seem to ground their view of heaven in the author’s own anarchistic principles, feeling the need to undo wrongs, abolish fossilized institutions, and restore the innocence of nothingness from which a better world can rise up. For them, the promised land that seems to await them in the future is a re-creation of an idealized past. While, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud describes religion as infantilism, recent psychoanalytic theorists have undertaken the work of relating spiritual yearnings and psychological wellbeing. What Mirbeau sketches as religion’s link to unrepression, to an emancipation from the yoke of reason and self-denial, is connected in these studies to a recovery of the child’s capacity for illusion and play, filling the gap between wish fulfillment and adult reason. Mirbeau’s visionary clerics, Abbé Jules and Père Pamphile, often picture heaven as nature’s universal temple, a world of harmony existing in a mythical anteriority, a paradise located in the fleeting interval between the demolition of a flawed society and the inevitable and foredoomed attempt to establish a more equitable successor. It is in this transitional stage between what Jules calls the manufacture of a Nothing and the establishment of a defective Something that the possibility of perfection exists. It is from what Donald Winnicott calls a transitional object that psychoanalysts derive their concept of a God who is at once illusory and real, who is both a purely subjective construct and a figure collectively ratified as existing. In Winnicott’s foundational study, Playing and Reality (1971), 77 Winnicott describes the cloth toy, the blanket fragment that the child uses for the purpose of self-soothing. Facilitating the child’s adjustment to the absence of his mother, the transitional object is not the caregiver, not the breast that fills, nor is it a hallucinated substitute. Neither purely imaginary nor altogether real, the object’s value is illusory, yet its authenticity is never challenged, its reality never contravened. Finding comfort in the object, the child operates in potential space, producing an illusion that serves as his inaugural creative act. Thus the child at play, investing reality in his plaything, becomes a prototype of the artist or the believer who authors God.

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Yet as Winnicott remarks, the child’s experience with the transitional object helps to prepare him for his passage to the reality of his lost omnipotence. The mother is not identifiable with the cloth toy or piece of fabric. The child’s feeling of completeness alternates with a repetition of her disappearance. Next to “providing opportunity for illusion,” “the mother’s main task is disillusionment.” 78 Paradise, once discovered, is lost again. The everything that the believer seeks always turns back into nothing. Mirbeau’s own sense of the value of art and religion seems to be based on this dialectical interplay of illusionism and disenchantment, the overthrow of an old belief system and the hopeful erection of a new one. Faith becomes a creative extension of the child’s participation in a life of fantasy. Winnicott, as William Meissner writes, describes this same evolving pattern of selfsolacing, noting “a direct development from the appearance of a transitional phenomenon to the capacity for play, from isolated play to shared playing, and from shared playing to the capacity for cultural experience.” 79 For Jules, if religion is viable—if God’s existence is admissible—it must be built in the transitional interval between the re-creation of un Rien and the community’s ratification of the reality of a Jesus or Mohammed. Despite his scathing denunciations of the abuses of Catholicism, Jules expresses longings for spiritual comfort, replacing a paternally censorious God with a poeticized image of Mother Nature who takes lost children to her breast. It is the deus absconditus or unresponsive mother who motivates the anxious child to pick up the piece of fabric—that motivates the adult to turn to the religious icon, to assuage his fear and dispel his feelings of abandonment. On his deathbed, Jules imagines nothingness as a boundless, tranquilizing, environmental mother liquefied as the milk that fills. In this expanse of white, Jules sees his separateness dissolving into oneness and peace. Sky, water, earth, and heaven are reconciled and rejoined, as Jules feels himself “traîné parmi des blancheurs d’onde, des blancheurs de ciel, des blancheurs infinies” [trailing among the whiteness of waves, the whiteness of skies, infinite whiteness]. 80 No longer terrifying in its threat of disunion, death has “des clartés admirables et profondes” [a brightness that is admirable and profound]. 81 These notions recall Jules’s conversations with Albert, where he had said that the best one could hope for was a sacrificing of the adult’s critical intelligence, his reverting to the instinctuality of an animal that lives and dies anonymously in the forest and whose carcass disappears there, “volatilisé [. . .] dans les choses” [evaporated (. . .) into everything]. 82 Reflecting his skepticism of religion, Jules’s pantheistic teachings take on the views of his author, becoming a vague, sentimental expression of anarchism. This is why Jules’s idea of religion is predominantly negative, involving demystification and ridicule, pronouncing judgment on the inflexible dogma of Catholicism, which—like economic activity and the principle of

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money use—depends on symbolism and the abstraction of objects. Jules’s regressive idealization of nature-as-infancy, an incommunicable experience of oneness, parallels mystical religions in seeking a return to primary process, a heavenly eternity of indivisibility and bliss. Kevin Fauteux describes this state of being as “not subject to delay, to time or space, to realistic limitations, but is instead based on wish fulfillment, [. . .] fluid psychological structures, and immediacy.” 83 Unlike reality, governed by frustration, waiting, and suffering, primary process operates in accordance with the pleasure principle. Yet Jules’s longing to go back—to the trackless forest, the Edenic sanctuary, the garden of the Capuchins where he finds refuge from society—is offset by his jaundiced lucidity, by an awareness of reality that undoes religion’s consoling illusions. Jules may take Albert’s schoolbooks and throw them in the air, but at the same time, he aspires to build a universal library. Jules’s campaign against institutional religion usually aims at the church’s unhealthy enforcement of secondary functions: an alienation from the self as body, obstruction of energies directed at instinctual satisfaction, and the inculcation of guilt. Jules may join Freud in regarding civilization as the breeding ground of neurosis. He may abhor culture as a perversion of instinct, and spurn poetry as excrement on a lily. But Jules still asks Albert to read suggestive passages from George Sand’s Indiana, still appreciates the profundity of the Pensées of Pascal. Like Mirbeau, Jules cites literature to incriminate literature, takes recourse to culture to prove the sickness of culture. For Jules, the Catholic Savior is an illusion, Jesus the product of sublimation taken to its most extreme. More than a mistress exalted in flights of lyrical romanticism, it is God who divorces sexuality from love, God who is “une forme de la débauche d’amour! . . . la suprême jouissance inexorable, vers laquelle nous tendons tous nos désirs surmenés” [a debauched form of love! . . . the supreme pleasure toward which all our overwrought desires are inexorably straining]. 84 But as Mirbeau suggests, the contradictions in Jules’s character, his alternating impulses toward benevolence and malice, the derision with which he treats the church and his yearning for spiritual comfort show him rejecting religion on the level of reason while longing for maternal succor on the level of wish. Without explicitly characterizing God as a transitional object, William Meissner describes religious belief as an ongoing attempt at adaptation, enabling the subject to pass from the solipsistic world of wish-fulfillment to an acceptance of objective reality, which is still judged as inhospitable. According to Winnicott’s conception, the passage to the reality principle is never finished, the transitional object never altogether relinquished. As the absent mother is re-created in the talisman of the transitional object, Jesus, in the

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Christian narrative, dies in order to be recovered as an inspirational belief. This is the view of psychologist Hans Loewald, who argues that “the death of Christ represents for the believer the radical loss of the ultimate love object,” a loss offset, Loewald says, when the subject regains his Savior “by identification with Him as an ego ideal.” 85 As the child matures, the cloth toy is replaced by new transitional objects in which creativity and faith mix illusion and reality. Each object becomes obsolete as the believer’s ideals are refined. Old systems are torn down by the disappointed anarchist, who himself dies repeatedly to be reborn as a new utopian optimist. As reflected in his character Jules, Mirbeau’s political views were always changing, from the reactionary anti-Semitism of his contributions to Grimaces to the revolutionary anarchism displayed in his alliance with Jean Grave. Perhaps one might argue that Mirbeau’s views on religion displayed a similar dynamism. No sooner did the idea of a divinity congeal as a fixed, unquestioned construct than it was rejected and replaced by another transitional belief. Once institutionalized as a system of ritual and dogma, religion ceases to facilitate further change and adaptation. God’s growth must parallel the spiritual development of his worshippers. Like utopia, the perfection of God is inspirational because it is unattainable. Thus the function of religious belief as a transitional phenomenon is to enable believers to nurture an ever-stronger wish for an impossible consummation, to define religion as faith and the divinity forever ascending toward an unachievable completion. The use of transitional objects never ends with an arrival at a final state of rest and satisfaction. The process is never finished, as Ana-Maria Rizzuto maintains. Each developmental stage has transitional objects appropriate for the age and level of maturity of the individual. After the oedipal resolution God is a potentially suitable object, and if updated during each crisis of development, may remain so through maturity and the rest of life. Asking a mature, functioning individual to renounce his God would be like asking Freud to renounce his own creation, psychoanalysis, and the “illusory” promise of what scientific knowledge can do. This is, in fact, the point. Men cannot be men without illusions. 86

In L’Abbé Jules, the work of finding God and of elaborating a system of belief is essentially a negative one, designed to dispel disabling illusions. Once a man claims to speak with unimpeachable authority, his message is untrue. Once a set of doctrines becomes absolute and unassailable, it breeds sickness and intolerance. The only God that Jules accepts is ever-changing and lifeaffirming, an instrument of Eros as self-regenerating energy.

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Only in the moment when an old faith is repudiated and the nothingness of unbounded potential is reestablished can the sacred come alive again as a future possibility. For the mystic and the utopian, the most fulfilling creative moment is a moment of destruction when a discredited system is dismantled and the debris is cleared away. Then God exists again in the pure capacity to reimagine him. On the sprawling grounds of the ruined Abbey de Reno, which Jules visits one day, Père Pamphile continues to praise God according to the doxology of transitional activity. Felling trees, attacking nature, making way for blessed emptiness, he creates room for the infinite chapel that will be raised up everlastingly. Engaged in a dialectic of loss and recovery, Pamphile imagines rebuilding the Renaissance chapel destroyed during the frenzied days of the Revolution. He dreams of ending the diaspora of the Trinitarian brothers, recreating the monastery that ceased to function years before. Radiating out into infinity, Pamphile’s vision of the chapel becomes a universal House of God, a reconsecrated nature: “Le ciel était sa voûte, les montagnes ses autels, les forêts ses colonnes, l’Océan ses baptistères, le soleil son ostensoir, et le vent ses orgues” [The sky was its vault, the mountains its altars, the forests its columns, the ocean its baptismal fonts, the sun its monstrance, and the wind its organ]. 87 As God-representations die to be resurrected as nobler avatars, the rotting planks of the chapel’s ruins, the collapsing scaffolding, and the crumbling masonry must continue to disintegrate so that the final edifice can climb higher. Pamphile himself practices this same mystical asceticism, dismissing the monastery’s remaining caretakers, living alone on a diet of soup and bread, having nothing, being nothing in preparation for the elevation of the cosmic shrine. Pamphile’s obstinate cry “Je la bâtirai” [I will build it] 88 is accompanied by a whirlwind of frenzied disassembly as he chops down chestnut trees, sells everything, and embraces a life of mendicant abjection, creating the nothingness on which the sanctuary can be built. This mortification of self and nature ensures the subsequent embellishment of the worldcathedral in which God is as ubiquitous as man is absent. To “fabriquer un Rien” is to magnify the Creator, mirroring the totality of the divinity in the nullity of the worshipper. From the nothingness of the vacant cloister and its humble tenant, Pamphile moves toward the Being of the God in whose immensity he drowns, like Jules in the shoreless lake of milk that stretches outward from his deathbed. This is the dynamic principle of what JeanClaude Polet calls “a theology of apophasis” that proceeds “by negation, with the intention of establishing the foremost qualities of the divinity, saying that God is unknowable, infinite, incorruptible.” 89 In order to extol God and bear witness to God’s purity, Pamphile uses his teeth to extract coins from between the buttocks of unbelievers. To raise up the chapel, he must die and be broken down into shards of bone, puddles of

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pus, muscle filaments, “boue mouvante que des millions de vers gonflaient d’une monstrueuse vie” [moving slime swollen by millions of worms with monstrous life]. 90 Pamphile’s corpse and the ruined abbey are more of Mirbeau’s manure piles: discarded ideologies, archaic gods, corrupt governments that decompose so that their remains can serve as nutrients for whatever new thing will be born. In Jules’s case, sudden flights of mystical absolutism succeed episodes of brutishness and cruelty: the violent assault on a peasant girl, the plan to humiliate his bishop, the exploitation of the gluttony of his aunt Athalie who, in her desire for chocolate candies, drinks a bottle of cod liver oil. Impossible longings for self-redemption are followed by the concoction of elaborate mystifications. Applying the anarchist’s agenda to his own life struggles, Jules re-creates the nothingness on which he erects the towering edifices of his elaborate pranks. Yet in Mirbeau’s novel, the instability of the self-contradictory character is what proves the sincerity of his wish to grow. Only the closed-minded zealot wants the indisputability of dogma. Only the avaricious Philistine craves the immutability of gold. The life trajectory of the uninquisitive, materialistic residents of Viantais moves from the baseness of their animal origins to the baseness of their animal ends—from the anality of moneyworship as the foundational principle of their existence to the anality of immortality as the derisory preservation of the corpse-as-treasure. As a child, Jules is taught to want the ten-sous coin that is defecated by the wooden dog on his grandmother’s mantel. As an adult, Jules is shown an image of the indestructible body in the stuffed polecat that an acquaintance, General Debray, poses with a nut between its paws. Immortality as taxidermy, eternity as the regularity of money excretion: coins as days, time as money, continue to propagate forever. This is Mirbeau’s caricature of man’s perverted fantasy of transcendence. Opposing the denial of death that motivates the worship of gilded statues, Mirbeau offers the model of building and razing, showing his characters making cathedrals and making rubble, constantly reinventing a God who changes as those seeking him continue to grow. Before dying, Jules sees heaven as a cessation of the struggle, as the evaporation of his thoughts and their commingling in space. But all along, his quest for God has been for something greater than abdication. At one moment, Jules is oriented toward the maternal equilibrium of nature, a place of nothingness affording “la plénitude du repos de mon cerveau” [the plenitude of my mind at rest]. 91 The next, he dreams of a house of globalized intelligence, books containing all the noble madness and lofty aspirations of

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human history. Most often, Jules seeks origins, a recovery through mysticism of primary process, the magic thinking of a child unscarred by laws and lessons. In his projected work of theological philosophy, Semences de vie, Jules imagines Christ reflected in the pure and empty gaze of babies. He imagines Jesus walking on the tranquil waves of skies, standing on the churning waves of oceans, inhabiting “le regard des femmes, des idiots, des pauvres et des nouveau-nés” [the gaze of women, idiots, the poor, and the newborn]. 92 More often, Jules pursues a regimen of detoxification, exposing the hypocrisy and sickness of controlling institutions, voiding the poisons they have introduced into his system. Jules’s compulsive masturbation, “far from bringing him the peace of satiety, only makes his discomfort worse.” 93 Likewise, his rage against himself and those who formed him leads to furious and futile efforts to return to harmony and vacancy. When his bibliomania and obsession with pornography are finally purged, when the door to his psyche is opened and its precincts are ventilated, he hopes to see God’s face in the space that is newly cleared away. Jules’s posthumous identity as a bogey and blasphemer is linked to his insistence on exposing Christianity as imposture. For Jules, there is no difference between a venal, grasping clergy and the child who collects the fecal coins falling from the anus of a wooden dog. In a perversion of the wish to refine maternal reality into symbolism, the Church teaches Mammon worship. Denouncing this sacrilege, Jules’s testament is the “ricanement [. . .] qui sortait, là bas, de dessous la terre” [snickering (. . .) that came down there, from beneath the earth], 94 the text-as-truth that outlives its author and rises from his coffin. The secret of the cupidity of the priesthood is as obscene as the lurid images that swirl in flaming fragments as they emerge from Jules’s trunk. The incineration of Jules’s pornography is a belated act of spiritual hygiene, emptying guilt, burning documentary records of sin. It is a variant on the sacramental Confiteor, destroying deception and concealment, propagating images out of emptiness, and substituting confession for silence. Buttocks and breasts, “nudités prodigeuses” [prodigious images of nudity] and “pédérasties extravagantes” [extravagant scenes of pederasty]: “his former idols” are what Jules sets ablaze, as Yannick Lemarié affirms. 95 In the ongoing creation of God as transitional object, Mirbeau’s narrative incorporates elements of iconoclasm. Only when the old divinities of lust and prurience are immolated in fire can God as an inspirational construct be creatively refashioned. Fault, failure, incompleteness: these are the qualities of corporeal man that suppose the existence of a transcendent Being who is perfect, steadfast, and finished. William Meissner relates the changelessness of a God whom man cannot fully compass to the tortuous path that the believer follows in trying to find him. This is “the via eminentiae, which

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claims that whatever perfections are predicates of God must exist in Him in a transcendental form that supersedes the imperfections and limitations of the created order.” 96 Crippled by self-execration, enraged by the sanctimony and falseness of his peers, Jules feels exiled in a world that is more than limited, worse than imperfect. Simulating the anarchist’s obliterative gesture, Jules summons God by attacking the institutions that purport to exalt him. In Mirbeau’s meditation on the faith of the prosperous, he locates the God of the rich in gold figures set in gaudy vestibules, in the shabby dreams of gain dreamed by the avaricious. The first priest to defrock himself and lay claim to Jules’s inheritance commits no apostasy but declares himself a member of the church of money. In Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object, it is God whose identity is always changing, whose image is made and unmade, found in the ruins of an abandoned abbey and in the radiant image of a future chapel. After the anarchist’s dismantling of enslaving regimes and perverted ideologies, there is the inevitable return to hope and illusion, as his successor, animated by visions of utopia, resumes the labor of construction. But such a place, as Mirbeau shows, is only a euphemized image of a lost Eden, an irrecoverable garden to which adults, deformed by education, desire, and reason, can never go back. Driven by his hatred of fraud, Jules takes up the work of scourging idolaters, smashing their gold gods and mocking their hypocrisy, despising himself for being duped by their lies. There can be no return to the infinite lake of milk, and only animal carrion can disappear into the nothingness of the forest. In extending the notion of transitional objects to the treatment of religion in L’Abbé Jules, one must shift the focus from endpoints to process. In refining and reimagining God, Mirbeau’s character does not come to the end of his struggle. In Winnicott’s conception of transitional phenomena, the spiritual quest never moves from transition to completion. After uprooting trees, Pamphile sets the chapel’s foundation. After the exasperated, deicidal re-creation of Nothing, Jules starts again the search for Mohammed or Jesus. In Mirbeau, the renewed effort is a flower blooming in blood-irrigated gardens or in rich piles of manure. There are still mysteries to elucidate, secret places to air out, and aspirations that raise man above the plane of material existence. In L’Abbé Jules, religion is built on a foundation of incipience: the infinite chapel rising from the scattered stones of the cloister, Jules’s self-forgiveness beginning by burning his trunk’s dirty secrets. The passage to reconciliation, the quest for divinity is marked by experiences of dissatisfaction.

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The sincerity of the search and the spiritual reality of growth are signaled by frustration and a resolve to go on. Heaven is not here, Mirbeau’s narrative suggests. God is not this. The repose of eternity is not yet. SÉBASTIEN ROCH Bolstered by the literary community’s warm reception of L’Abbé Jules, Mirbeau began work in 1889 on a new novel, Sébastien Roch, designed simultaneously to serve as an exercise in autotherapy and an arraignment of a society willing to immolate its most innocent members. Already in November 1886, Mirbeau had informed editor Paul Ollendorff of his hopes to complete within a year both a companion volume to Le Calvaire and a second novel on unhappy childhood to be titled Le Petit Meuble, no doubt meant to recall Alphonse Daudet’s Le Petit Chose (1868). By coupling the idea of redemption with a transparent fiction of his traumatic school years in Vannes, Mirbeau suggests how the reparative work of writing might redeem and heal the adult author Sébastien would have become if he had lived. To be sure, Mirbeau uses autobiographical fiction to enact the anarchist agenda of denouncing the family, the school, the church, and the army for conspiring to perpetrate the murder of a child. But when Mirbeau admits his decision to euthanize a character whose seventeen-year, four-hundred-page lifespan has been filled with suffering, he acknowledges his own role in the death of Sébastien. In Mirbeau’s textual implementation of the Freudian death drive, he takes the fictional counterpart of the child he was and recognizes that, finally, “je suis forcé de le tuer” [I was compelled to kill him]. 97 By murdering Sébastien, Mirbeau commits suicide as his character while ensuring his rebirth as an author, now healed, redeemed, and sufficiently strengthened to survive and prosper as a successful creator. The state of transcendent happiness that Mirbeau pictures in the novel is lost childhood characterized by the subject’s harmony with the world. Because of the abusiveness and cruelty of the institutional fathers featured in the text—progenitor, priest, the Creator as paternal tyrant—the child is driven from a paradise that the adult author cannot reenter. Yet as the autobiographical novelist, Mirbeau suggests how he would have raised his hero differently. In place of the feckless Father Roch, the viperous Père de Kern, or the fulminating Yahweh that Sébastien imagines at Sunday Mass, Mirbeau would have been a guardian of the innocence that is inevitably compromised. Of Sébastien, Stéphane Mallarmé comments in a letter to Mirbeau, “Ce pauvre enfant aura eu un père, que vraiment vous fûtes: auctor” [this poor child would have had the father that you were: auctor]. 98

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The celebrity of Octave Mirbeau’s 1890 succès de scandale, Sébastien Roch, comes from telling the story of the rape of a child. Based on Mirbeau’s own experiences at the Jesuit Collège Saint-François-Xavier in Vannes between October 1857 and June 1863, the novel climaxes with a somber account of the seduction and violation of an impressionable boy. An instance of what Leonard Shengold calls “soul murder,” 99 the victimization of author and character connects childhood inextricably with traumatization and loss. Subjected to “the inflexible antagonism among castes,” 100 deprived of contact with the natural world, and stupefied by a regimen of classical rhetoric and Latin declensions, the child is also indoctrinated in Catholic dogma prescribing sexual repression, imbued with so much religious poison that he is vulnerable to the predations of a teacher like Père de Kern. Having been sodomized and spurned, and then falsely accused of engaging in unnatural practices with a schoolmate, Sébastien is expelled and returned to the world where he cannot long survive his emotional scarring. With its atmosphere of hopelessness, its message of defiled innocence and warrantless suffering, Mirbeau’s novel consigns childhood to the domain of illusory ideals. The only deserving subjects for literature are those that exceed its ability to capture them: a God whose unresponsiveness and inhuman perfection mock the creature exiled to the earth; beauty that cannot be reached with the trite words and profane images in which the artist tries to enfold them. Mirbeau’s novel thus serves as an expression of the writer’s estrangement from his material—his humiliation over the inadequacy of his talent, his nostalgia for a homeland whose existence he can only intuit too late. In Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau writes of the poverty of language to mourn the loss of childhood paradise, using autobiography to confess to the inability of description to reinstate a happiness that had always been indescribable. In later works, Mirbeau shows retrospection and longing as breeding a frustration that kills the child and then resurrects him as the cynical, diminished version of the self he was predestined to be. These novels picture the child as encrusted at birth with the mire of heredity—defiled by the original sin of a poisonous family legacy—not a clean thing even when it comes into the world. Mirbeau describes babies as already tainted from the moment of their birth, so that the best that an education can do, in its etymological sense, is to lead them out of corruption that is the ransom of existence. The later contribution made by parents, pastors, and teachers can only continue the deformation of a preliminarily denatured entity. Having fallen into the vitiated microcosm of the family, the child is then assimilated into the vaster hell of society, where old prejudices and immemorial vices complete the process of his perversion. For the disillusioned Mirbeau, the myth of childhood is a romantic commonplace, proclaiming the virginity of the child’s intellect, the spotlessness of the child’s soul. Yet the reality is that the child is the product of a vitiated

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race. Imbued from the outset with the senility of decadence, “les enfants euxmêmes ont l’air de petits vieillards. Si pauvrement éclos dans les marais putrides du mariage” [children themselves look like little old people. So miserably hatched in the putrid swamps of marriage]. The child, as Mirbeau writes, “c’est déjà du passé!” [is already of the past!]. 101 Subject to the homogenizing forces of automatism, tradition, and received ideas, the child already speaks in commonplace expressions. Introduced into the closed linguistic circulus of home, school, and nation, the child finds his capacity to innovate is ruthlessly stamped out. What words should reveal is instead left obscure, and the literature of childhood, with its promise of authenticity, is only a machine producing pleonasms that social institutions transmit eternally. As an unattainable ideal, the child is imagined as a fresh idea, but as a practical reality, he is the impossibility of originality. It is for this reason that Sébastien Roch, while purporting to be a Bildungsroman, is an unrealizable undertaking. Transposing Mirbeau’s “four years of hell” at Collège Saint-François-Xavier, 102 the novel offers a retrospective analysis of how childhood is murdered. The autobiographical text positions the author in the present, narrating how, in the past, he died as his material. The autobiographer is free, as Jean Starobinski claims, because he is no longer responsible for a past he is powerless to change: “It is because the finished self is different from the present self that the latter can lay claim to all his prerogatives. He recounts not only what happened to him in another time, but also how from the other person he was, he became himself.” 103 What Starobinski’s observation implicitly acknowledges is that the creative versatility that the autobiographer enjoys corresponds to the lifelessness and inalterability of his subject. The time to act has passed. The subject has ceased to live, so the autobiographer is able to reflect only on an irremediable history. Like the diarist, the autobiographer lives parasitically off his material, his word draining the life and possibility from its referent. A mortuary ornament, the use of literary language makes a journal a posthumous document of the end of experience. Childhood is born of the nostalgia of adulthood literature, existing as a fictional idealization of past events: “It is this that constitutes the esthetic aura that haloes childhood, since childhood is always and universally a memory of childhood, an archetype of the euphemistic being that is ignorant of death.” 104 Autobiography is the afterlife of the existence it recapitulates. In heaven, the autobiographer bestows praise on those whose benevolence ensured salvation. In hell, he apportions blame to those responsible for his damnation. The autobiographical work inevitably appears too late, except as an expression of recrimination, self-justification, or remorse.

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If childhood, as Gilbert Durand says, is always the memory of childhood, it is given meaning, made intelligible, ordered, and stylized. A subject stands in relation to his childhood as an author stands in relation to his text, the “je actuel” [my present self] seeking reconciliation with the “moi révolu” [my past self]. 105 The dualism of literature is more pronounced in retrospective narrative, undertaken when the subject is alienated from his life. When Adam’s eyes are opened and he becomes cognizant of his nakedness, he is driven forth from innocence, which becomes the goal of his quest for repatriation. The true aim of the autobiographer is not to memorialize but to live again, to reenter the garden from which God has sent him forth as the narrator of his exile. In Sébastien Roch, Mirbeau deconstructs the story of his protagonist’s pathology, using writing to disassemble the story of his hero’s childhood and adolescence. Compared disadvantageously to the simplicity of the hero’s early life, Mirbeau’s novel expresses envy of art unconscious of itself. Dumb like saplings, possessing “la candeur introublée de leur végétale vie” [the untroubled candor of their vegetal life], Sébastien is beauty absolved of sophistication, a work of art no more esthetically crafted than “une carnation saine, embue de soleil” [a healthy carnation filled with the sun]. 106 From the outset, Mirbeau’s novel deplores the need for a language of mourning to replace the fullness of a life now lost. Because Sébastien is muscle, blood, and the vigor of unintelligence, he is imaged in the novel as the being that language denatures. Like the healthy pink carnation that does not know itself as such, Sébastien’s bloom is not yet dulled by botanical nomenclature. In presenting Father Roch as sententiousness and bombast, Mirbeau makes an inverse correlation between rhetorical displays and the sincerity of the message. The more grandiloquent Father Roch’s pronouncements, the more hollow his meaning. The more mellifluous the instructions of the sexual predator, Père de Kern, the more treacherous his intentions. Unlike Sébastien, who grows with the artlessness of a flower, his father aspires to the architectural importance of a two-story, slate-roofed house. Citing his descendancy from Jean Roch, martyred while defending the church of Pervenchères against the vandals of the Revolution, Father Roch equates his ancestral grandeur with his hyphenated name—Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch—whose ornate syllables he requires that his son repeat. It is because of his illustrious lineage that Father Roch sends his son away to the storied Jesuit school. In the novel, Mirbeau presents the most etiolated children as those to whom originality is denied by their patronymic burden. Despite Father Roch’s claims of a lofty pedigree, he is no one, and so he bequeaths to Sébastien the gift of anonymity. Unlike his classmate Guy de Kerdaniel, a withered offshoot of the aristocracy—“chétif de corps, malsain de peau, marqué sur son front pâli, rétréci, déjà fané, du stigmate des races épuisées”

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[puny body, sickly skin, his pale, narrow, already shriveled brow marked with the stigmata of exhausted races] 107 —Sébastien grows not in a dusty château but in the fertile lands beside a river. Strong and new, he is different from his inconstant friend, Jean de Kerral, symbolically topologized as his father’s dilapidated manor with its cracked walls, weed-choked avenue, rusty gate with detached escutcheon, ditches filled with stagnant water, and adjoining farm redolent of horse manure. In the language of genealogical decadence, the exhaustive record of the aristocrat’s moi révolu overwhelms the voice of the je actuel. While a comprehensive family history prevents Guy de Kerdaniel from speaking for himself, Sébastien has no past and is therefore able to say nothing. Since childhood can be expressed only in terms of its loss, Sébastien Roch can be no more than an account of postlapsarian decline. Mirbeau’s novel is most famous for its account of priestly pedophilia, the long, dreamlike scene when during a night at school, Sébastien descends down endless staircases and shadowy corridors into the lair of his teacher Père de Kern. But the sexual assault by Père de Kern only formalizes the repeated rape of childhood occurring in episodes that the novel has already enumerated. Signifying an uprooting of the flower, Sébastien’s banishment to the school in Vannes and his acquisition of a knowledge of social hierarchy, class affiliation, marginalization, shame, and ostracism lead to thoughts of suicide as a way of recovering his “candeur introublée.” Once Sébastien’s father’s words become vehicles of painful meaning, no longer sounding like water pumped from the faucet of the municipal fountain, his son is exiled to a distant academy, cast out into a world of time and dislocation, schooled in adult protocols, instructed in the idiom of inferiority and isolation. Father Roch’s pontifical utterances on the excellence of a Jesuit education no longer have the empty harmlessness of natural sounds like those of wind and water. Instead, the noise of “conseils mille fois rabâchés” [pieces of advice repeated a thousand times], “aphorismes saugrenues” [absurd aphorisms], and “raisonnements magistraux” [magisterial arguments] take on a deadly intentionality that targets his interlocutor. Being forced to think prefigures being assaulted by Père de Kern: “En lui infusant la semence d’une vie nouvelle, ce brusque viol de sa virginité intellectuelle lui infusait aussi le germe de la souffrance humaine” [By instilling in him the seeds of a new life, this sudden violation of his intellectual virginity also instilled in him the source of human suffering]. 108 Previously, Sébastien’s exposure to language had been limited to the crash of his father’s thunderous pronouncements. Their unascertainable meaning had been located in the gap between the majesty of their utterance and the foolishness of the speaker: “un abîme, ce que j’appelle” [an abyss, as I call it]. 109 But once Sébastien grasps the inevitability of his banishment to school, the benign environment of his father’s store and speech seems shabby

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and embarrassing. Dirty surfaces, cracked plates, stunted furniture, shoddy merchandise, and aborted aspirations are the junk display of secondhand meretriciousness like his father’s sham eloquence—like the gossip of townspeople pouring forth from gutters—“eaux pourries [. . .] des bouches noires [qui] vomissaient des puanteurs, s’écoulant vers un caniveau commun” [dirty water (. . .) from black mouths that vomited their stench and flowed toward a common gutter]. 110 This pollution of the world foreshadows a later scene when, after his expulsion from Saint-François-Xavier, Sébastien begins to keep a diary. There his own disgrace and the ignominy of humanity project the pages of his journal as the horror of his bedroom wallpaper, a scatograph documenting the defilement of childhood’s flower: un papier horrible, d’un brun sale, d’un brun de sauce brûlée, avec des fleurs qui ne sont pas des fleurs, qui sont quelque chose d’inclassable dans l’ordre des ornamentations tapissières, quelque chose d’un jaune terreux, n’évoquant que des idées abjectes et d’ignobles comparaisons [a horrible paper of a dirty brown color, the brown of burned sauce, with flowers that weren’t flowers but something unclassifiable in the order of wallpaper decorations, a dull yellow that evoked only base ideas and ignoble comparisons]. 111

In the beginning, when Sébastien knows nothing, he has no sordid intuitions. Heaven is the here and now, beyond which he cannot imagine. Not yet a conflict between an idealized object and inadequate expression, art is the congruence of his childhood vision and the world’s innocence. Not an artifact that is made, beauty is the child’s consciousness and what fills it before he experiences “cette séparation de lui-même” [that separation from himself]. 112 With Sébastien’s first apprehension of an elsewhere, he is uprooted from the present, consigned to a desert nowhere of not here and not yet. Forbidden to enjoy the games he used to play with friends, still removed from the fairy world of aristocratic suavity and silk, he is stranded in a time of anticipation and regret. Like Sébastien’s journal, Mirbeau’s novel harkens back to the childhood eternity that inspired it, deprecating the adult writer’s role except as the voice of nostalgia. Longing to go back to a time when nothing had been lost, the work wishes there had never been a reason for writing. Literature begins, as Maurice Blanchot says, with a realization that something is now gone. “Something has disappeared. How can I get it back? How can I turn toward what came before when everything in my power consists in doing what comes after?” 113 Talking on and on about his pilgrimage toward silence, the autobiographer casts his eyes backward, toward the past: “The language of literature is a search for the moment that precedes it.” 114

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At school, Sébastien experiences repeated shocks of dislocation, his sense of permanence and continuity assailed by questions about his lineage and provenance. Never before had Sébastien noticed the discordant ridiculousness of his name. The cacophonous plosives of “quincailler” [hardware seller] and “Roch” become expectorated mockery on his fellow students’ lips as they throw Sébastien’s name in his face “comme un crachat” [like spit]. 115 Dissociated from identity, “Roch” is ugliness as phonation, the opposite of the music that envelops Sébastien in waves of bliss. The nighttime train ride to Rennes and the carriage journey to school are disorienting dreams foreshadowing Sébastien’s labyrinthine descent to the bedroom of Père de Kern. The fantastic desolation of the Breton terrain, first represented as romantic images of treeless moors, apocalyptic oceans, and wind-scoured beaches strewn with the bodies of drowning victims, is replaced by a confused vision of autochthons squatting in hovels, their livestock grazing in pastures of hopelessness. Since his self-estrangement is registered as exile from home, Sébastien’s wish to recover lost unity prompts an impulse to go back: “Avec l’intention vague de se réhabiliter, il bégaya, en un mouvement comique des lèvres: ‘J’suis d’Pervenchères’” [With a vague intention of making himself look better, he stammered, with a comical movement of his lips: “I’m from Pervenchères”]. 116 Modeled on the structure of Mirbeau’s book, Sébastien’s attempt to redefine himself and his place begins with dismantling the asylum of his past. Only after his father sentences him to exile does Sébastien see his father’s shop as dismal and confining. Only after Guy de Kerdaniel asks Sébastien, “Es-tu noble?” [Are you a noble?] does he begin to feel the shame of Adam conscious of his nakedness. Once a plant rooted in the soil, Sébastien is now socially and geographically set in opposition with himself. This is why, like other mystical characters in Mirbeau, Sébastien seeks repatriation in ecstatic states—in music and in shoreless lakes, where glimpses of the transcendental afford what Romain Rolland called an “oceanic feeling.” 117 As was demonstrated by Jean Mintié in Le Calvaire, recovery of a unitive state is sought through a homeward journey mapped out by the death drive. Before being “a young sapling” growing by the river, Sébastien had been a particle of matter, a saline drop of seawater. Stared at on the train, jeered at by his classmates as the son of an ironmonger—“Quincailler! . . . hou! hou!” 118 —Sébastien longs for the euthanasic effacement of his mother’s fading photograph, the flooding of his mind with “ondes fluides et de vapeurs grisantes” [fluid waves and intoxicating vapors], and a homeward walk down a path opening onto a prairie “plane, unie, d’un vert argenté” [flat and smooth, of a silvery green]. 119 A paradise where the elect are unaware of their lifelessness, childhood is a sanctuary to which only suicide affords access a second time.

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As Mirbeau’s novel divides the exiled storyteller from the lost homeland of his material, Sébastien enters the world of school and there is introduced to religious instruction and French history, experiencing again “le viol de sa virginité intellectuelle” [the rape of his intellectual virginity]. Opposing the suicide-god whom Sébastien imagines as a blond Jesus proffering bouquets, there is the psychotic Jesuit Yahweh of sin and homework, brandishing lightning bolts, presiding over a “rouge carnaval des massacres” [a red carnival of massacres]. 120 In Mirbeau’s book, there is no speech act more self-mirroring than confessional disclosure, with its promise to expunge guilt and restore the unity of self-forgiveness. The penitent’s conscience is the page he blackens with the names of his transgressions, creating a dichotomous text of sin separating the evildoer from his acts, then wiping them away with a profession of contrition. Using words to undo words, he creates a sense of innocence recovered. Unlike the autobiographer, who seeks reconciliation with his history, the confessor seeks reconciliation with God, producing not memories but an absolution of his past. Designed to abolish an existing state of things, eradicate corruption, and restore a tabula rasa bearing the promise of new beginnings, the sacrament of confession is an instrument of destructive hygiene. It does away with a discredited history, acts on a resolution to start over, and so corresponds to the anarchist’s gesture of constantly unmaking. It may be easier, as Abbé Jules alleged, to manufacture a Jesus or Mohammed, but it is in the confessional framework that Christians are able to fabriquer un Rien. Anarchism, confession, and the analytic cure may intend to leave no building blocks behind for future tyrants or neurotics. But the art produced by suicide is the cadaver of the artist; the conscience of the penitent is dung in which other flowers of evil grow; and a cure restores a state in which new maladaptive behaviors germinate. It is in this sense that Sébastien Roch diagnoses adulthood as an illness whose prodromal stage is the onset of adolescence. As with confession, literature perverts its inspirational motivation. Confession, in Mirbeau’s novel, does not erase a guilty past but imprints the sinner’s mind with inklings of even greater evils. Listening to his confessor, Père Monsal, Sébastien is not returned to an earlier time and cleaner state but is projected into a future of vaguely understood taboos. Unlike literature, which abstracts its material into language, Monsal’s words are dirty thoughts embodied as vile things: scaly toads, the batrachian form of lechery, shame made flesh. In the confessional booth, Sébastien’s mind is a white page sullied by adult knowledge. It is like the prepubescent body of his friend Marguerite Lecautel, about which Sébastien had been ignorant, defiled by the “baves gluantes” [sticky drool] of

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Monsal’s obscene insinuations, causing him to lose “quelque chose de sa pudeur, quelque chose de la virginité de Marguerite” [something of his modesty, something of Marguerite’s virginity]. 121 It is in Sébastien Roch that Mirbeau first attaches the quest for transcendence to art as the immediate and direct production of affect. The story of Sébastien’s arrival at school and his ostracism by highborn classmates ends with his dazed departure in search of the ocean. Later the same exaltation Sébastien feels when he looks at the sea is triggered when he hears the sacred music of Bach, Handel, and Porpora. Lorsque les orgues s’enflaient, terribles, lorsque s’exaltaient les voix des choeurs, célébrant le miracle eucharistique, c’était encore le même trouble poignant, le même écrasement d’admiration qu’il avait eu, devant la mer, un jour de rafale [When the terrible organs swelled, when the voices of the choir soared, celebrating the miracle of the Eucharist, it was the same poignant turmoil, the same crushing admiration he had felt one day facing the sea during a squall]. 122

Buffeted by the melodic swells of sonorous waves, Sébastien experiences a glimpse of the limitless. Here the symphony of the sea, the doxology of the ocean, are works, and their reception is beauty and the elation it inspires. Elaborating on the link between liturgical music, religious ecstasy, and shoreless waters, Mirbeau anticipates Rolland’s notion of the origins of the sense of the religious, which he explained to Freud in a letter of December 5, 1927. There Rolland describes “la sensation de l’éternel” [a sense of the eternal] as not necessarily eternal, “mais simplement sans bornes perceptibles, et comme océanique” [but simply without perceptible limits, as if oceanic]. 123 As an analytic tribute to childhood lost, Mirbeau’s text prefigures Freud’s image of the beatific indivisibility of the nursing infant, who experiences oneness with a mother whose separateness he cannot imagine. Like the sapling and the soil, like the listener who, enveloped by music, takes music into himself, the child incorporates the source of nurture. Like the mystic whose identity is fired away in the furnace of the divine, the listening subject is indistinguishable from his environment. Emerging from his rapturous immersion in choral music, Sébastien is like a swimmer rising out of the sea, “le goût de salure fort et grisant” [the taste of brine still strong and intoxicating] on his lips. 124 More common in Mirbeau’s fiction is evidence of a character’s frustration with the inadequacy of art, the triteness of an image, the poverty of a phrase. In Mirbeau’s next novel, Dans le ciel, when the painter Lucien cuts off his hand, self-ablation becomes an act of artistic expression, as Lucien’s physical diminishment corresponds to the magnification of his subject. Sacrificing the

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delusional grandiosity of the infant who believes his hunger creates the object that satisfies, the artist realizes he cannot swallow the sea or encompass the infinite in the smallness of his representation. But since Sébastien still stands on the threshold between childhood and adolescence, he is able to see music as an amniotic world in which the self has not assumed the shape of its unhappiness. Religious melodies awaken in him “quelque chose de préexistant à son être, de coéternel à la propre substance de son Dieu, la suite sans fin des immortelles métempsycoses” [something that preexists his being, that is coeternal with the substance of his God, the endless cycles of immortal metempsychoses]. 125 Revering composers, yet not evincing their prideful ambition to speak in “ce langage magique et béni, qui exprime tout, même ce qui est inexprimable” [that blessed and magical language that expresses everything, even what is inexpressible], 126 Sébastien exhibits only the artistic talent of a listener. When Sébastien begs his father to pay for lessons, hoping to play or write music himself, Father Roch refuses, thereby sparing his son the artist’s damnation, which is to worship beauty through self-mutilation—putting out his eyes, cutting off his ear, respecting the integrity of his inspiration by not trying to touch it. Sébastien’s passion for music also is rooted in the longing for nothingness that affects Mirbeau’s other mystical characters. Patterned on the sounds of nature—the roar of thunder, the lullaby of rainfall—music introduces the tension it alleviates through resolution, using “fragmentation, contrapuntal harmony, [. . .] and dissonance” so they might all be “resolved in the final cadence,” as Gilbert Rose affirms. 127 Since, as Stravinsky writes, “music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge toward a definite point of repose,” 128 it introduces stimulation as the life force of the piece then aspires to its own death when tension is dispelled. The laws that govern music operate in the same way as the Nirvana principle, which guides Mirbeau’s protagonists back toward a state of deathly calm. Sébastien may react to music as he does to his father’s stentorian tirades: noise whose loudness dissipates, restoring quiescence and serenity. As Gilbert Durand writes, thunder denotes sound as aggression, the chthonic horse’s infernal gallop, “like the roaring of a lion, the bellowing of the sea.” 129 Crashing sounds correspond to temporal upheaval, imbalance, birth as a fall into disunity. Conforming to the model of tension and release is the theory “that music may reach the listener’s ear as a chaotic and unorganized stimulus which, owing to its association with some archaic, frightening sounds, may arouse anxiety.” 130 But rather than acting as an artist who exercises his organizing intelligence, reconverting noise into the “lawful and recognizable forms of music,” 131 Sébastien assumes the passive position of

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the child wishing for unpleasure to cease, waiting for confusion to yield to euphony and order. When the frightening noises stop, the child’s crying stops, and soothing chords return him to tranquility and slumber. During his sojourn at Saint-François-Xavier, Sébastien comes to see the chapel as a shrine to the sea, the ocean as a celestial organ filling the cathedral of the world. On an outing to the Gulf of Morbihan, Sébastien wanders beside the still waters of an inland estuary, delighting in the synesthetic interplay of light, murmuring waves, the whisper of sun on wet sand. Glare, disorientation, dazzle give way to the softness of misty iridescence, “flamboiements chromatiques” [flares of color], and “une confusion météorique de reflets” [a meteoric confusion of reflections] resolved into eurhythmy. Similarly, the distant rumble of heavenly displeasure, “grondement sourd [. . .] venu du large mystérieux” [the muffled muttering (. . .) from the mysterious open sea], subsides into “berceuses chansons des criques roses” [the lulling songs of pink coves]. 132 Sébastien, who before had reacted to his father’s bombast as to meaningless clamor, begins to fathom the language of nature—“cet ensemble prodigieux de voix, de voix proches, de voix lointaines, de voix douces, de voix terribles” [that prodigious ensemble of voices, voices that are near and far, soft and terrible]. 133 Immersed in the symphony of the tides, his consciousness and senses washed clean by the lapping of breakers and the smell of resin, Sébastien experiences an aching serenity born of a merger with things, “le cerveau meurtri d’un endolorissement qui lui était plus doux qu’un baume” [his head throbbing with an ache more soothing than balm]. 134 Like mystics powerless to describe their vision of God, Sébastien gravitates to an art of the inexpressible, every syllable and note unimpoverished by semantic specificity. Sébastien’s art of the divine retains the oceanic limitlessness of plurivocality, distant, near, soft, and terrible. In his state of musically inspired exaltation, he registers every object, every sense impression, as susceptible to inexhaustible interpretation. His response is the opposite of artistic production, constrained by the requirement to choose an image, to accept a limited meaning, to try to seize a superhuman beauty and drag it down with the hand that defiles. Mirbeau’s own text aims at an ekphrastic enrichment of literature with the richness of the child’s aural and visual experiences, unshackling Sébastien’s perceptions from the author’s limiting and precise vocabulary. Sébastien’s apprehension of the transcendental moves him between impressions of disincarnation and embodiment, as the lexical forms of old ideas are shed so that they can assume a higher, seraphic significance. Wishing to internalize the incommensurable, Sébastien turns to attempts at tasting and swallowing, experiencing a divinity transubstantiated as melodies, enabling him to take into his body “la propre substance de son Dieu.” [the very substance of his God.] 135 Divine intuitions take shape while Sébastien’s

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groping expressions of the sublime are refined into the sacred idiom of music, which is first registered as fragrance and then dispelled into nothingness. Thus, while listening, Sébastien sees music, sees his prayers “se corporiser” [take on form], observes the memory of the fields of Pervenchères “s’emparadiser” [become like paradise]. The indescribable reality of “un monde immatériel” [an immaterial world] proceeds through the stages of its etherealization, budding, blossoming, and evaporating into “une exhalaison pâmée de parfums” [a swooning exhalation of perfumes]. 136 How different are Sébastien’s ecstatic glimpses of the numinous from his revolted verbal and tactile apprehension of actual bodies; his shrinking from the embrace of his childhood friend, Marguerite, as if from something unclean; and his conversion of Père de Marel’s prurient interrogations in the confessional into materialized disgust, the “baves gluantes” that cover him with their sticky accretions. Like art wishing to circumscribe the uncircumscribable, Sébastien’s First Communion ends by reducing God to a ball of dough, a small, comestible body wrapped in bitter saliva. Instead of swallowing God and experiencing the euphoria of an infinitely dilating ego, Sébastien chokes on the Host. Convulsed by esophageal spasms, he is thrown back into a body that becomes an enemy and a prison. Hypostatized as food, the body and blood of Christ are rematerialized as stuff that mastication cannot conquer and that consecration cannot spiritualize. Instead of joining the communicant with God, the body breaks down into its malfunctioning parts: mouth, tongue, mucous membranes, pharynx. An inability to swallow is projected as a diabolical threat, making the chapel appear like a malevolent orifice, opening before Sébastien its “mâchoire de monstre” [monster’s jaws]. 137 Eventually, during Sébastien’s stay at school, he abandons art as the immediate production of affect. Rather than seeking dissolution in an ocean of liturgical music, he accepts the compromise of representational imagery, turning to drawing and adopting a conventional style that houses lofty ideals in trite, pictorial form. Here, for a moment, Mirbeau’s own narrator espouses a decadent esthetic that associates old age and decline with an approaching deliverance from a corruptible body, death with a passage to a more lucid artistic state. Deploring Sébastien’s naiveté, Mirbeau’s narrator extols “la poésie de ce qui est vieux, courbé, chétif, de ce qui s’efface et de ce qui se voile” [the poetry of what is old, stooped, puny, of what is fading and of what is veiled]. 138 No longer equating the child’s consciousness with artistic genius, Mirbeau’s narrator obeys the death drive, not by looking backward to an earlier state of things, but by looking forward to an end of imprisonment in a confining subjectivity.

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The inarticulateness of the child exhibited by Sébastien extends to Mirbeau’s text, which falls into aporetic stammering, unable to say what Sébastien cannot say, struggling “à étreindre, à exprimer, à matérialiser, pour ainsi dire, ses aspirations bien vagues” [to embrace, express, materialize, so to speak, his vague aspirations]. The narrator assumes the confessional role of an old man, who—bent and frail—mourns the inexpressiveness of the child he has forgotten how to be. Showing how painting, sketching, and poetry are the exhausted art forms of a moribund culture, Mirbeau disqualifies the esthetics of decay, “la sublime beauté du laid” [the sublime beauty of ugliness] 139 that is all that the adult creator is capable of capturing. Literary language can only negate its own nothingness, as apophasis affirms Being—immaterial, immaculate, ineffable, and infinite—as the inverse of nothingness. What is pictured on canvas or expressed in an image is art saddened by a need to embody. This is the appeal of Père de Kern’s sensual melancholy, the morbid voluptuousness of the art that he teaches. The seducer’s role is to reposition his victim on another threshold, where he already mourns childhood’s obliviousness and grieves over the desolation of adult wisdom. In the character of the Catholic pedophile, Mirbeau illustrates the distinction that Abbé Jules had endeavored to make—between a longing for transcendence experienced by the prophet and the poet, and an espousal of church doctrine that inculcates repression and depravity. As Sébastien acquires the painful gift of moral awareness, he moves out of an environment of music and nature and into a world of analytical self-judgment. Simultaneously, Mirbeau’s language becomes less poetic and allusive and assumes the didactic quality of the social censor and critic. This shift in style accompanying the sexual and intellectual rape of a child illustrates the psychology of an author in conflict with himself: on the one hand, an artist straining toward an inexpressible ideal, on the other, a reformer grounded in the reality of social injustice. Once Sébastien’s image of oceans and skies is contaminated by Père de Kern’s poisonous lyricism, art’s only function is to sanction the pervert and advocate for his victim. Since childhood is an impossible utopia to which one is forbidden to go back, the novelist can only embrace the activist’s interventionism, the anarchist’s agenda: denouncing oppression, attacking its institutional mechanisms, demolishing the structures empowering the predator and enfeebling his prey. The central scene in Mirbeau’s novel, in which the criminal act is accomplished, reverses the movement toward hopefulness, dilation, and musical rapture, replacing it with an impression of immobility and paralysis. Unlike the infinite expanse of celestial blue—of seas and skies—the site of the sacrilege is dark and cramped, concentrating hell’s conflagration on the infernal red glow of Père de Kern’s burning cigarette.

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In the aftermath of Sébastien’s fall, guilt and shame are projected as wastelands of deformity, landscapes of forsakenness—stunted vegetation, barren soil, where sickly children are “déjà du passé” [already of the past], and old people are “pareilles à des enfants flétris” [like withered children]. 140 The school pilgrimage to the shrine of Sainte-Anne d’Auray introduces Sébastien, not to a world of miracles, cures, and the forgiveness of sin and disease but instead to a place where his guilt is externalized as amputees and hydrocephalics, a phantasmagoria of monsters “vomis d’on ne sait quelles morgues” [vomited from who knows what morgue]. 141 Forbidden by shame to confide in a friend or confessor, Sébastien is assimilated to grotesqueries “qui n’ont pas de nom” [that have no name]. 142 Earlier Mirbeau had described Sébastien’s sensitivity to the overlapping of music and meaning in the human voice, its sonority awakening in him an awareness “des idées correspondantes de couleur, d’odeur, de forme et de tact” [of corresponding ideas of color, smell, form, and touch]. 143 Combining the clarity of the world with the indeterminate expressive power of the melody, the voice had wedded communication to art. Later, when Sébastien is filled with self-reproach, he experiences auditory hallucinations, voices that tease and humiliate. Visions of grimacing boys cavorting immodestly on their way to Père de Kern’s lair become images of voices: “Nous sommes tes prières, tes poésies” [We are your prayers, your poems]. 144 In his vision of Marguerite, the mouth that speaks turns into lips that kiss and food to be eaten. As the promise of her body is perfumed with flowers as intoxicating, she says, as “l’haleine de ma bouche” [the breath from my mouth], her flesh is planted like a garden whose fruits are sweeter than “la pulpe de ma chair” [the pulp of my flesh]. 145 This is the poetry of guilty carnality that Sébastien learns the day after his fall. Following his expulsion from school and return to Pervenchères, Sébastien defies his father and risks his murderous fury then subsides into a crepuscular depression whose effects he transcribes in a journal. As Pierre Michel observes, this recapitulative self-narrative may allow recovery from the trauma that the author and character have undergone. This need “to work over in the mind some overpowering event so as to make oneself master of it,” as Freud has explained, 146 may not contradict the pleasure principle but work in service of it. Retelling old injuries that are given sense as literature may turn a victim of abuse into a narrator of his survival. Writing Sébastien Roch may have been a curative dialogue with the self in which, by writing in the present, Mirbeau engaged with a self damaged in the past, so that buried feelings might be unearthed and, in resurfacing, released. This is what Michel sees as the therapeutic benefit of the undertaking: “Writing the novel allowed Mirbeau to save himself, while Sébastien, imprisoned in himself, is lost.” 147 The crippled child whom Mirbeau had domiciled in his psyche is given voice as Sébastien Roch, who, in telling his story, is free to die.

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Once Sébastien begins to keep a journal, his role and Mirbeau’s overlap, and Sébastien’s redundant authorial function makes him increasingly expendable. Despite Pierre Michel’s professed surprise at Mirbeau’s disposal of his character, the elimination of this vessel of archaic injury seems an act of sanitation, a necessity of hygiene. One survives past adolescence only as an autobiographer who remembers. When life is not worth living, there is nothing left to do but write. And so Mirbeau euthanizes a fictional child belonging only to the past. Like the excremental flowers constellating Sébastien’s wallpaper, his journal is waste produced by an exhausted, dying character. At the end, there is a stilling of the life force that had transfused Sébastien as a child, a recrudescence of the death drive, increasing apathy and listlessness. Evincing a hatred of biology and a revulsion for energy and youth, Sébastien shrinks from Marguerite, preferring the ruined body of her mother. A sickly child’s attraction to his geriatric maternal counterpart is less a sign of incest than of a sentimental necrophilia. Madame Lecautel is just a surrogate for the longdead Madame Roch, first associated by Sébastien with her fading portrait on the mantel. Sébastien’s relationship with his mother is with a disappearing image, a spectral guide conducting him to the dormant waters of the afterlife. As Jean-Luc Planchais remarks, the figure of Madame Lecautel, “as a substitute for the mother, doesn’t conceal the transparency of the object in absentia.” 148 Sébastien is drawn to Madame Lecautel as to one with whom his suicide can be consummated. Incest is not a wish to supersede the father but a desire to go back to the night of nothingness. After having sex with Marguerite and experiencing la petite mort of orgasm, Sébastien nestles in her bosom while she cradles him and croons, “Dodo! . . . fais dodo! . . . mon chéri” [Sleep! . . . go to sleep! . . . my darling]. 149 Sébastien’s journal expresses longings for decrepitude and decay—for things now lost and consigned to the cemetery of his memories. Increasingly he retreats into dreams or bouts of feverish delirium, escaping the law of Eros that prescribes relationships with the living. Sébastien has recurring nightmares of Jesuits as ecclesiastic doubles of his father, persecuting figures who spread their cassocks out like bats’ wings. The predominant feeling left by Sébastien’s readings and ratiocinations is of the futility of everything, the pointlessness of existence. The Father’s gift to his children is not an appreciation of the infinite: “Dieu vous donne la douleur” [God gives you pain], as Père de Marel advises. 150 According to the Dolorist philosophy professed before by Jean Mintié, suffering is assumed, life’s horrors are accepted so that later they can be distilled by literature into wisdom. But Sébastien wants joy, not the solace of recollection. Absent that, he seeks the compensation of anesthetizing sleep. He dreams, reads books “ça et là, au hasard des emprunts” [here and there, as he borrowed them at random]. 151 He meditates on the revolutionary zeal of

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his former schoolmate Bolorec, the necessary slaughter that precedes the reign of justice, la grande chose, whose legitimacy is proven by the fact that it is ineffable. But all of that necessitates that Sébastien live another day. All of that only reawakens in him “le sentiment de l’inutile” [the sense that it was useless]. 152 In Mirbeau’s early novels, he explores the atavistic lure of war, illustrating the masochism that Freud sees as underpinning the death drive. The infant’s illusion of omnipotence couples with universalized aggression, then is harnessed by society as violence against an enemy. Annihilating the world means experiencing the limitlessness of God. Scenes of generalized copulation are assimilated to a battlefield, where writhing lovers strike poses of combat casualties in agony. Slaughter, confusion, sexual riot, transgressivity give a sense of exhilarating lawlessness, a spurious divinity. This is what Clara wants in Le Jardin des supplices, before she swoons and collapses from overstimulation and exhaustion. But in Mirbeau, the warrior/demiurge is less powerful than the child. The boy whose heart pumps blood like sap is superior to Mars. The antimilitarist excursus with which Sébastien Roch concludes applies literature to its proper task of lamenting social evils. While Mirbeau’s novel seeks to go back to the paradise of childhood, it survives as a denunciation of the misdeeds done by adults. The novelist’s jurisdiction is the domain of unjust institutions—army, school, and family—not a garden of innocence closed to art. In the final scene, aesthetics join with instinct, impulsivity with expressiveness, as Bolorec and Sébastien are reunited on the battlefield. War’s carnage brings an ironic adumbration of the coming utopia of equality, as the noble Guy de Kerdaniel is killed as gratuitously as Sébastien. Mirbeau’s book ends by acknowledging the futility of its premise, art’s hopeless goal of recapturing childhood’s enchantments. In Mirbeau, the child is a god having visions never realized, a poet whose lyric consciousness is untranslated into words. Depicting the child who might have been without the institutions that perverted him, Mirbeau presents his hero as a study in foreclosed possibility. Sébastien Roch thus belongs to a literature that performs its task too late, speculating on what might have been if the events it narrates had never happened. With its haloed recollections of the dreamlike era preceding it, Mirbeau’s novel asks what a child would be if language had the power to describe him. What would the bliss be accompanying a loss of self in nature, that comes from glimpsing God in the vastness of the sea, or that unfurls a heart expanding on “les grandes houles musiciennes” [great swells of music]? 153 What would the artistic integrity of a boy be without his provincial, pompous father, without a soul-destroying educator, or an officer who sends men off to die? There is only a beauty higher than what a text can apprehend,

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only what a writer could say if regret did not cloud retrospection’s mirror. Like Bolorec, who throws Sébastien’s corpse across his shoulder, the autobiographer bears away the identities he never lived, personas killed by circumstance, buried in a graveyard of hypotheses. This is the job of a writer who, in surviving into the present, mourns the potential selves whose remains he carries with him into the future—the artist and his burden, the author and things unwritten, the memorialist and his lost ideal, “le vivant et le mort” [the living and the dead]. 154 NOTES 1. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 163. 2. Ibid., 184. 3. Mirbeau to Paul Hervieu, December 30, 1883, in Octave Mirbeau, Correspondance générale, ed. Pierre Michel (Lausanne, France: L’Age d’Homme, 2003), 1:323–24. 4. Octave Mirbeau, Lettres de l’Inde (Caen, France: L’Echoppe, 1991), 61. 5. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2011), 51. 6. Ibid., 43. 7. Mirbeau, Lettres de l’Inde, 45. 8. Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau, s.v. “Schopenhauer,” http://mirbeau.assoc.fr/dictionnaire/. 9. Octave Mirbeau, “Le Suicide,” La France, August 10, 1885. 10. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” in Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie ThorelCailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 53. 11. Mirbeau, Lettres de l’Inde, 44. 12. Isabelle Saulquin, “La Mère et l’amante dans Le Calvaire et Le Jardin des supplices,” in Actes du colloque d’Angers: Octave Mirbeau (Angers, France: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), 185. 13. Octave Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:121. 14. Ibid., 127. 15. Ibid., 128. 16. Ibid., 126. 17. Ibid., 129. 18. Ibid., 128. 19. Ibid., 140. 20. Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 20. 21. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 140. 22. Ibid., 141. 23. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 108. 24. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 60–61. 25. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 140. 26. Ibid. 27. Mirbeau, “Le Suicide,” 3. 28. Pierre Michel, “Mirbeau et la masturbation,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 18 (2011): 10. 29. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 143. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 162.

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32. Ibid., 303. 33. Ibid., 302. 34. Ibid., 163. 35. Ibid., 167. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 168. 38. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 729. 39. Ibid., 727. 40. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 275. 41. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 207. 42. Ibid., 152. 43. Ibid., 303. 44. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 732. 45. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 231. 46. Ibid., 230. 47. Ibid., 187. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 179. 50. Ibid., 132. 51. Ibid., 229. 52. Ibid., 228. 53. See Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: “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 the nightmarish vision of hellish brothels glowing with lust and fire, filled with the 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” (30). 54. Donald Moss, “On the Fetishization of ‘Creativity’: Toward a General Theory of Work,” American Imago 54, no. 1 (1997): 4. 55. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 222. 56. Moss, “On the Fetishization of ‘Creativity,’” 13. 57. Mirbeau, Le Calvaire, 303. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 315. 61. Ibid., 332. 62. Ziegler, The Nothing Machine, 49. 63. Ibid., 50. 64. Octave Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:337. 65. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 445. 66. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), 21:81. 67. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 328. 68. Ibid., 327. 69. Ibid., 344. 70. Ibid., 470–71. 71. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 270. 72. Le Paradou is the Edenic garden in Émile Zola’s 1875 novel, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.

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73. “Le Connétable des lettres” was a title given by his admirers to French writer JulesAmédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889). 74. Pierre Michel, notes to L’Abbé Jules, in Oeuvre romanesque, by Octave Mirbeau, (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:1180. 75. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 347. 76. Ibid., 459. 77. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1989). 78. Ibid., 13. 79. William Meissner, “The Role of Transitional Conceptualization in Religious Thought,” in Psychoanalysis and Religion, ed. Joseph H. Smith and Susan A. Handelman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 103–4. 80. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 497. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 471. 83. Kevin Fauteux, The Recovery of Self: Regression and Redemption in Religious Experience (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 32. 84. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 485. 85. Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 260. 86. Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 209. 87. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 394. 88. Ibid., 387. 89. Jean-Claude Polet, “Ernest Hello: Un inspirateur de Léon Bloy,” La Revue des lettres modernes (1989), 935. 90. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 419. 91. Ibid., 498. 92. Ibid., 431. 93. Pierre Michel, “Mirbeau et la masturbation,” 10. 94. Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules, 515. 95. Yannick Lemarié, “Enquête littéraire sur la malle de l’abbé Jules,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 18 (2011), 33. 96. Meissner, “Transitional Conceptualization,” 111. 97. Mirbeau to Paul Hervieu, January 28, 1889, in Correspondance générale, by Octave Mirbeau (Lausanne, France: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 2:31. 98. Stéphane Mallarmé to Mirbeau, May 12, 1890, in Correspondance générale, by Octave Mirbeau (Lausanne, France: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 2:220. 99. Leonard Shengold, “Father, Don’t You See I’m Burning?” Reflections on Sex, Narcissism, Symbolism, and Murder: From Everything to Nothing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), xii. 100. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 35. 101. Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:23. 102. Pierre Michel, introduction to Sébastien Roch, in Oeuvre romanesque, by Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:528. 103. Jean Starobinski, “Le Style de l’autobiographie,” Poétique 3 (1970): 261. 104. Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire : Introduction à l’archétypologie générale (Paris: Bordas, 1969), 467. 105. See Starobinski, “Le Style de l’autobiographie.” 106. Octave Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 1:547. 107. Ibid., 595. 108. Ibid., 560. 109. Ibid., 556. 110. Ibid., 558. 111. Ibid., 709.

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112. Ibid., 547. 113. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 316. 114. Ibid. 115. Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, 586. 116. Ibid., 582. 117. Romain Rolland, “Un beau visage à tous sens,” Choix de lettres de Romain Rolland (1886–1944) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1967), 264. 118. Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, 586. 119. Ibid., 590. 120. Ibid., 607. 121. Ibid., 610. 122. Ibid., 619. 123. Rolland, “Un beau visage à tous sens,” 264. 124. Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, 619. 125. Ibid., 618–19. 126. Ibid., 619. 127. Gilbert Rose, “On Form and Feeling in Music,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music, ed. Stuart Feder, Richard L. Karmel, and George H. Pollock (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 70–71. 128. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 35. 129. Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques, 84. 130. Pinchas Noy, “How Music Conveys Emotion,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music, ed. Stuart Feder, Richard L. Karmel, and George H. Pollock (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 127. 131. Ibid. 132. Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, 628. 133. Ibid., 628–29. 134. Ibid., 629. 135. Ibid., 618. 136. Ibid., 619. 137. Ibid., 631. 138. Ibid., 635. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 662. 141. Ibid., 665. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 642–43. 144. Ibid., 670. 145. Ibid., 671. 146. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 600. 147. Michel, notes to Sébastien Roch, 1229. 148. Jean-Luc Planchais, “La Mère fatale, clé d’un faux naturalisme dans les trois premiers romans de Mirbeau,”Actes du colloque d’Angers: Octave Mirbeau (Angers, France: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), 171. 149. Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, 751. 150. Ibid., 694. 151. Ibid., 715. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid., 619. 154. Ibid., 768.

Chapter Two

The Seer

DANS LE CIEL The bliss of Nirvana, slumber in the sea, the peaceful dispersal of a corpse into the immensity of the forest, the end of suffering and the ineffable joy of resurrection as forgiven spirit: Mirbeau’s early novels had seemingly expressed and exorcised the seduction of the death drive. But as Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel remark, a concatenation of distressing circumstances and a host of psychological and artistic afflictions left Mirbeau in a state of creative paralysis. 1 Cyclothymic mood swings, the crisis of middle age, and constant quarrels with Alice that left the relationship in a state of chronic disharmony beset Mirbeau, triggering a bout of disabling depression. What Mirbeau experienced in his personal life he saw externalized as an expectation of the coming end of the world. The activist Mirbeau had long been convinced of the salutary effects of change and conflict, the benefits of engagement between intelligent antagonists. For Mirbeau, life was indissociable from energy and movement. “Qui dit movement dit lutte” [Whoever says movement means struggle], Mirbeau writes. “Bien avant Darwin qui la développa, Héraclite l’avait brièvement et joliment formulée: ‘La lutte est la mère des choses.’ Tout naît, grandit, s’épanouit dans l’effort universel et concurrent. Supprimez la lutte, c’est la mort” [Well before Darwin, who developed the idea, Heraclitus had nicely and succinctly formulated it: “Struggle is the mother of all things.” Everything is born, grows, and expands through universal and competing efforts. The elimination of struggle means death], he concludes. 2 However, by 1892, the appeal of struggle had become less compelling. A society undermined by mediocrity and cowardice, a government enfeebled by a galaxy of scandals—the bankrupting of investors in the Panama scheme, the prosecution of 77

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the anarchist Jean Grave, and the criminal alliance with Tsarist Russia— convinced Mirbeau that “la société bourgeoise fait oeuvre de mort” [bourgeois society does the work of death]. 3 Grappling unsuccessfully with the obstacles to his writing, Mirbeau came to equate life, as an agonizing ascent of Golgotha, with a vocation that, for so long, had brought him only despair and frustration. As the fields of happy childhood and the tired traveler’s resting place had been associated with death as a forbidden destination, so now, in this key transitional novel, the perfect work of art was elevated heavenward to a place of beauty and repose that the artist could never enter. In Dans le ciel, Mirbeau elaborates an aesthetic of suicide as he contemplates the prospect of abandoning the struggle—which, by his own definition, means relinquishing life. The attraction of the otherworldly, the sublime, and the transcendental had recently been profaned and trivialized by pretentious occultists like Joséphin Péladan. 4 However, to Mirbeau, the eternal was not so easily grasped. Bearded thaumaturges, epicene saviors, and astral-traveling Rosicrucians were charlatans who trafficked in the sacred as cheapjacks. The infinite to which the seeker wished to ascend and the masterpiece whose grandeur made it impossible to finish were the only worthy goals of an artist whose integrity condemned him to fail. The empty canvas, the blank page were manifestations of the death drive embodied as art. The clever journalist who had signed his travel notes “Nirvana” became in Dans le ciel the artist drawn to the ecstasy of nothingness. Projecting his plight into the novel, Mirbeau—mired in his own struggles as an artist—found himself unable to complete Dans le ciel. With the discontinuation of a novel unaccompanied by a conclusion, Mirbeau arrived at a crossroads where a decision had to be made: to experience transcendence through his death as an artist or to seek the infinite in the world of people who struggled and lived. Published between September 1892 and May 1893, when his fiction was oriented both toward political engagement and a subjectivist aesthetic that seemed to emanate from symbolism, Octave Mirbeau’s Dans le ciel interrogates the goals of his literary practice. As an enactment of its theme of unrealizable art, Mirbeau’s unfinished novel is a story of exile and separation. Taking as its setting the space between the earth and sky, it also maps the distance between the eye and a visual object, inspiration and execution, an idea and its expression, the hand and what remains infuriatingly out of reach. In his chronicle of creative impotence, Mirbeau asks whether art is a Pascalian diversion that turns the artist away from pressing social issues. If art is a worthy undertaking, why are its ascensional impulses always blocked? Where does inspiration originate? How is it most fittingly embodied? Is the beauty that the artist tries unsuccessfully to grasp an unformulated

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ideal lost in the recesses of his mind? Or it is located outside him, up above, dans le ciel? Is art’s material accessed in the unconscious where it is ordinarily irretrievable? Is its homeland a heavenly place to which a mortal cannot rise? Perhaps, as Ernst Kris suggests in a seminal essay on inspiration, “the voice of the unconscious”—once “externalized and attributed to God”—is “internalized again in the idea of creativity.” 5 A second, equally important issue that Mirbeau’s novel raises is whether the artistic endeavor is a salutary exercise. Serialized in L’Echo de Paris over the course of many months, Dans le ciel was written at a moment when Mirbeau was collaborating with Jean Grave, striving to finish an introduction to Grave’s La Société mourante et l’anarchie. 6 Reflecting Mirbeau’s interest in the political issues of the day, Dans le ciel brings up social evils examined in his earlier texts: the corrupting influence of family, the stultifying effects of education, and religion’s deleterious tendency to instill a longing for the transcendental. Is art just another pointless quest for the infinite, an abdication of social responsibility? “Doesn’t it risk,” as Nivet and Michel wonder, “becoming itself a kind of dupery or mystification?” 7 Perhaps involvement in social controversy—a defense of the poor, a critique of militarism, or a denunciation of Catholic dogma that breeds repression and maladjustment—is itself only a default position assumed by frustrated and failed artists unable to finish a book and bring inspiration to fruition. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel report that at the time Mirbeau was struggling with Dans le ciel, he had fallen into the throes of “an existential anguish.” Tormented by the “impenetrable mystery of things, oppressed by a cruel sense of radical impotence,” 8 Mirbeau might have turned to a literature of social action as compensation for an inability to plumb the mysteries of creation. Dans le ciel marks a crossroads in Mirbeau’s journey as a seeker and an artist, a crisis moment when it seemed that before he could continue, he would have to choose. God, as he appeared in Mirbeau’s three preceding novels, had been a harsh, forbidding figure prescribing pain and self-denial. Escape from guilt—the patrimony of a Father who condemned and disinherited—came in death alone, where the tormented seeker could find serenity in sleep. In Dans le ciel, what might have been a foredoomed search for God becomes an artistic quest for purity beyond expression. For years, Mirbeau had struggled with his creative unproductiveness, taxing himself with the undependability and paltriness of his expressive powers. Was le dieu caché of the forsaken man not the elusive genius of the artist, the flawless image, a masterpiece manifesting the eternal? Projected as the faltering artists he pictures in his book, Mirbeau describes how he had reached the turning point where he had to choose his own path as a seeker. Should he devote himself to

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fighting for worthy social causes? Or like a mystic should he turn to art, not as a means of self-expression, but as an immolation of the self through fusion with his material, immersion in the sublime? Mirbeau’s novel begins before his hero chooses suicide over compromise, as the characters are assigned a position similar to that of Baudelaire’s artist in “Le Confiteor de l’artiste.” There the poet complains of being crushed by the ironic, chaste limpidity and implacable calm of heaven’s vault. Confronting the incommensurable becomes a conflict between the writer and his subject, a duellum 9 opposing the perfection above and the smallness of the human observer below, terrifying Baudelaire’s narrator, who “crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu” [shrieks in terror before being overcome]. 10 Born of an encounter with the transcendental, the empty canvas represents both the ecstatic vision of an artist and his unrepresentable subject. As with the attempt by Mirbeau’s hero, Lucien, to paint the barking of a dog, the picture shows an unanswered call, as art’s message becomes the failure of its transmission. In what Pierre Michel calls a pre-existentialist novel, 11 Mirbeau’s narrative illustrates man’s thwarted search for clarity and understanding. Attempting to build a bridge between a sublunary hell below and an inhuman empyrean above, he succumbs to the vertigo of the abyss. There is no artwork that spans the gap between earth and sky. Instead, as Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, existential anguish originates in the space between, born of what Camus calls “a divorce.” 12 Camus’ writing is also full of vocabulary describing an aspiration to join a human wish to an inhuman goal, attempts at what he calls “absurd marriages” and “absurd treaties.” 13 In Mirbeau, this effort to connect an abbey on a promontory and the canopy overhead similarly ends in failure. The text alone can fill the interstice, what Camus describes as “the gulf between desire and conquest,” “the hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know.” 14 Given the sincerity of Mirbeau’s longing for transcendence, it is not recourse to art that is an evasion of responsibility but the novel’s return to wellexplored social themes. In Dans le ciel, the quest for the numinous is nagging and obsessive, and the only abdication of which the novelist can be guilty is to stop turning his eyes skyward, to stop barking at heaven, and to welcome the peaceful insentience of sleep in front of a kennel. When Mirbeau again takes up the injuries done by insensitive parents and intelligence-blighting educators, his indictment of families, schools, and governments reinforces his image as a social critic. But these issues also risk redirecting the writer’s eyes away from the sky toward terrestrial matters that trivialize true art. In the figure of Georges, author of nothing, Mirbeau transposes himself as the “radically impotent” artist whose preoccupation is exclusively with the injustices of life.

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Mirbeau’s novel is constructed as a series of interlocking narratives in which hastily sketched-out characters assume a speaking role for a time before being forgotten and supplanted by another. As Pierre Michel says, Mirbeau adopts “the form of a novel en abyme: a first anonymous narrator introduces a second one, Georges, who is hardly any less anonymous, as he surrenders the speaking role to a third, the painter Lucien.” 15 Having first explored the reasons for the professional incapacitation of Georges the novelist—denigrated by his parents, numbed by a stultifying education—the narrative turns to Lucien, a painter tormented by his ideals. So impractical are his aspirations to capture perfection in his painting that he is driven to despair, committing suicide in a locked room after cutting off the hand that could not grasp the beauty he had intuited. After opening with an account by the frame narrator—a habit-, comfort-, and self-loving character whose friends are just an annoyance—Mirbeau’s text then turns to Georges and his horrified flight from the sky. Gladdened by the arrival of his compatriot, Georges begs that he accompany him to a tavern on a lock, down from the azure void, away from the vertigo of high places. With his phraseology disintegrating into anxious stammerings, Georges speaks in the language of clouds, inchoate words dissolving into wisps of meaning. Sky-haunted when trapped in the abbey, Georges descends a path. Watching his friend go down, the narrator remarks of Georges, À mesure que nous nous rapprochions de la plaine, que la terre semblait monter dans le ciel et l’envahir, que le ciel, au-dessus de nos têtes, reculait sa voûte diminuée, X . . . se calmait, se détendait, sa physiognomie redevenait en quelque sorte, plus humaine [As we again approached the plain, as the ground seemed to rise up and invade the sky, and as the sky above our heads withdrew into its receding vault, X . . . grew calmer, more relaxed, his features became, in a way, more human]. 16

When he lives on the summit, Georges is blind to the transcendental; as a taupe du ciel [mole of the sky], 17 he seeks a homeland among his fellow burrowers. Georges works to dull his sense of metaphysical anguish by cultivating incuriosity and habits that allow him to ignore the superhuman beauty he cannot capture. After the fashion of a naturalist writer, Mirbeau afflicts his character with an artistic temperament, a hypersensitivity that isolates him from others. This consciousness of the infinite is an anomaly or defect that, as Pierre Citti says, it is the novel’s purpose to diagnose. Not only is the artist overwhelmed by the inhuman majesty of his subject, he is also alienated from the society of his more brutish brethren: “In this relationship, the milieu is tyrannical and individuality is a morbid state.” 18 The perspective of Mirbeau’s book is neither that of an impassive god nor that of the mediocre denizens of earth’s surface, but rather the viewpoint of those estranged from divinities and animals. For Georges, the impulse is to

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come down from the sky, out of the unbreathable ether of absolutes and abstractions. Unable to tolerate beauty’s rarefied air, the artist finds his place among the lower beings. A zoography of unintelligence, Georges’s story is a catalog of spiders, moles, and dogs seeking the peace of oblivion. When he comes out of his warren and tries to take flight, he fears being shot down like a swan. Unlike animals, figures for heaviness and torpor, the swan expresses a wish for buoyancy and evaporation. An uncluttered page, silence undefiled by prayer or complaint, it is no longer a bird but, as Gilbert Durand says, “a simple accessory of a wing.” 19 An image of Georges’s ideal, the swan passes in the sky until it is killed by a hunter who despises everything that flies. The ascensional direction of Georges’s aspirations makes him long for disembodiment, for escape from the theriomorphic shamefulness of his corporeal identity. Artistic effort in Mirbeau’s novel brings a reenactment of the fall, what Georges calls “la retombée de l’ange que j’aurais pu être, à l’immonde, à la croupissante larve que je suis” [the fall of the angel I could have been to the level of the unclean, larval being that I am]. 20 Georges’s narrative follows this vertical axis from the perfection and integrality of heaven to the swarming, vermicular proliferation of the grave. Unable to plumb the secrets of the sky, Georges is sensitive to the body’s dismal teleology. He imagines the parents he loves, beneath their tombstone and entombed already in the preterition of his narrative: “chairs dissolues et vers grouillants” [dissolving flesh and crawling worms]. 21 An architecture of man’s abjection, the abbey Georges inhabits has an upper chamber like a mind where delusions beat like bats against narrow cranial walls. Its lower level is a sweaty trunk laid out on a dirty mattress, whose sheets exude a moldy smell: “une odeur de cadavre” [the smell of a cadaver]. 22 Variations on “l’aboi du chien” [the barking of the dog], the sounds emanating from the building are blasphemous shrieks of horror over the misery of man’s condition: “clameurs de foule” [the clamoring of a crowd], “miaulements de fauves” [the caterwauling of wild beasts], “rires de démons” [the laughter of demons], “râles de bêtes tuées” [the death rattles of slaughtered animals]. 23 Usually Georges is happy to move around the confines of his prison, like the spider spinning its filament toward the light, content to warm itself by the lamp. The spider is another of the chthonic, squirming creatures that Georges sees as the inverse of the artist. Like them, he sees himself as a caged and earthbound bird that once was native to the sky and yet has forgotten its disembodied state as whiteness, song, and wind. There are the canaries of Georges’s sister that twitter happily in their cage, their sounds contrasting with their owner’s “glapissements mauvais” [evil-tempered screeches]. These are different from the peacocks that Georges’s friend, Lucien, plans to highlight in his canvas, their “queue magique” [magical tail] evoking “une

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divinité hindoue” [a Hindu divinity], their scintillating oscillation like jewels strewn on a golden background. 24 But as Lucien realizes, the peacock’s plumage exceeds art’s ability to capture it. Even when fanned out as separate feathers, wings are the paintbrush of the sky. Georges cannot recall a time when he experienced inspiration as mystic rapture. Instead, inspiration incurs a painful alienation from a deadening environment, like the hyperesthesia from which he complains of having suffered: “le don fatal de sentir vivement, de sentir jusqu’à la douleur” [the fatal gift of feeling acutely, feeling to the point of pain]. 25 Sensitivity is an affliction from which Georges wishes to be cured, and even before his frustrating inability to change inspiration into imagery, he suffers from a surfeit of feeling that suggests that art is a stigma, a malediction. For Georges, abandoning the metaphysical quest for meaning and the artistic search for beauty begins with a longing for the dreamless sleep of imbecility or coma. Georges comes down from his abbey and seeks the oblivion of drunkenness; he enjoys convalescing from meningitis in a state of twilight unawareness, savoring “l’immense joie de ne penser à rien” [the immense joy of thinking nothing], “la sensation du repos éternel, dans un cercueil” [the sensation of eternal rest in a coffin]. 26 As a writer, Georges subscribes to the discredited notion of naturalist determinism, assigning his parents blame for his anguished creativity. Because the ineluctability of the past always vitiates the present, Georges experiences time as the inevitable fulfillment of a curse. When first introduced, Georges’s parents are pictured as provincial monomaniacs, his mother stricken by the ruinous extravagance of a new house, his father illumined by the reflected glory of his son’s virtuosity as a drummer. The next moment, they are shown dying of cholera, writhing on soiled sheets as their son sits at their bedside in terrified distress. Similarly, Georges describes his relationship with a concierge’s daughter, a young girl he had briefly courted while living in Paris, as containing from the outset the germ of its morbidity. Always a naive reader besotted with sentimental romances, his girlfriend Julia evinces an unsophistication that poisons her lover from the start. Unclean in her person, with her body already dilapidating, she is repellent, old, and vacuous even when she seems fresh and young and pretty. In Mirbeau’s novel, being and becoming always telescope into one another. Material bodies in their natural state are forever oriented toward the tomb. What Georges experiences is the heaviness of decadent temporality. “Youth and old age,” as Vladimir Jankélévitch remarks, “are opposed like levitation and gravitation; youth, drawn to the heights by its immense future and by the energetic aeration of hope, follows a vocation that is opposed to nature, whereas old age, polarized by the depths, succumbs to a natural inclination.” 27 The time of exhausted possibilities, the overripeness of completion, “decadence,” writes Jankélévitch, “is the very process of becoming.” 28

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In its ascensional aims, Mirbeau’s novel fights against the finality of decadence, against the tautological inevitability of biological determinism. Naturalism, as Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Durtal argues in Là-bas, denies the mysteries of the transcendental: It has “rejeté toute pensée altière, tout élan vers le surnaturel et l’au-delà” [rejected all lofty thoughts, all impulses to explore the supernatural and what lies beyond]. 29 In Mirbeau’s novel, Georges is a trespasser dans le ciel. He is disconcerted by the vehemence of Lucien’s aesthetic absolutism and by his denunciation of objectivity, representationality, and reason. Art has no business showing that two and two are four, Lucien argues. It shuns disclosures of bodily disrepair, the organic ineluctability of decrepitude. The rhetorical figure for the terrestrial principles of decadence is prolepsis, which forecasts the withering of youth, the shattering of hope, and the crashing of illusions that have barely taken flight. When Lucien assumes the role of narrator and explains his views on art, the directional orientation of Mirbeau’s novel is reversed. No longer confined to a nether world of gravity and degradation, of decaying bodies and animals that are blinded by the light, the story is resituated in the zone between earth and sky. Between the clarity of the firmament and the inertial stupidity of the creatures below, there is the plane of Impressionist beauty, which is art’s proper realm in Mirbeau’s novel. This is the point where the artist’s fresh perspective meets the blue eye of the sky and where a perception of the beautiful is an experiential artwork locked inside the artist’s mind, untranslated into words or pictures. Every gaze that is unsullied by prejudice or preconception is a masterpiece of originality as yet unexpressed. Like children, who are portrayed by Baudelaire as visionary geniuses—the space between their eyes and mouths unpolluted by banalities—the artist has an imagination “vaste comme un ciel et profound comme un abîme” [vast as a sky and deep as an abyss]. 30 As much as Dans le ciel measures the gap between infinite beauty and the finite capacity to express it, it also discusses the impulse to abdicate, to discontinue the struggle and abandon the quest. Between the “regard firmamental” of the deaf-mute girl Lucien encounters on the road and the azure pupil of the celestial dome, there is the domain of material reality whose mutability is its essence. Art is what Icarus sees during his fall from the sky: forms blurred by an inability to focus, by the speed of his descent—both transient visual impairments. But impermanence is the property of perishable things, which—when captured in a painting or a literary image—fulfill the Impressionist objective of conveying a fugitive temporality. Opposing unstable perceptions of changing phenomena are the fixity of the gaze and the steadiness of the hand. As Mirbeau writes in an 1889 article on Claude Monet (one of the artists on whom the character of Lucien is modeled), “Son oeil se forme au feu capricieux, au frisson des plus subtiles lumières, sa main s’affermit et s’assouplit en même temps à l’imprévu, parfois déroutant, de la

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ligne aérienne” [His eye adapts to the caprices of fire, to the subtlest shivers of light; his hand becomes at once stronger and more supple in capturing the unforeseen, sometimes confusing line in the air]. 31 While eternity can bring the monotony of satiation, the apprehension of a cloud in its vaporous evolutions stops time as an agent of disintegration. The aesthetic that Mirbeau elaborates through the character of Lucien is based on an impoverishment of the visual object that is accompanied by an enrichment of the perceiving subject. In this way, eternity can be experienced as the multifariousness of a present moment that is relieved of its sameness or recurrence. Thus the manure heap that Lucien contemplates with admiration need not oppose the ever-changing composition of corruptible matter to the smallness of an artwork that petrifies and congeals. Instead of disabling the artist with “a feeling of powerlessness” when faced with its inexpressible beauty, 32 the compost heap conveys in its temporal totality the antecedence of decay and the future potential of new growth— “des formes de fleurs, d’êtres, qui brisent la coque de leur embryon” [forms of flowers and beings that break out of their embryonic shell], 33 life and death in constant conjugation. According to Dominique Millet-Gérard, “the decadent is an artist in the throes of creation, frustrated by the empty nominalism of his practice and its conflict with the realism of substance which is necessarily mute and apophatic.” 34 This is the opposition between the gravity-bound creator and the loftiness of a subject that his art can never compass. But as Mirbeau suggests, the realm of art is the oxymoronic fullness of constant evanescence and permanent instability. Like the dung heap—like the processional phantasmagoria of cloud formations—art captures the life that houses the death at the heart of things. The central image in Mirbeau’s novel is of what is not yet or is no longer. It is of beauty that exists beyond images and words. Accordingly, the dénouement of Mirbeau’s novel takes place behind a door, as if looking at the sky’s impenetrable lid from below. As Lucien says, art should not undress its subject of esoteric majesty. In attempting to uncover “la beauté cachée sous des choses” [the beauty hidden beneath things], 35 it works in the opposite sense, clothing the unknown in even greater mystery. “L’obscurité est la parure suprême de l’art” [Obscurity is art’s supreme adornment], Lucien adds. 36 Lucien’s goal is to capture what Mirbeau saw in the canvases of Monet, who “a tout exprimé, même les fugitifs effets de lumière; même l’insaisissable, même l’inexprimable, c’est-à-dire le mouvement des choses inertes ou invisibles, comme la vie des météores” [captured everything, even the imperceptible and the inexpressible, that is to say, the movement of inert or invisible things, like the life of meteors]. 37

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Through the character of Lucien, Mirbeau sketches an aesthetic of liminality, an approach to mysteries that are higher than man’s capacity for expressing them. Despite his professions of irreligion and indictments of Catholicism, Mirbeau conveys a view of art partaking of the sacred. At the same time that Mirbeau was defending the premises of anarchism and meditating on the political motivations of the 1892 bomber Ravachol, 38 he was tormented by a desire that art accede to the level of the sublime. Exiled from its homeland, straining toward “l’inaccessible, l’inétreignable” [what cannot be embraced or touched], art seemed to hover on the threshold of the infinite, like the paintings of Redon, which reveal, as Mirbeau says, “douleureux horizons sur le mystère” [painful horizons opening onto mystery]. 39 For Lucien, art, not profaned by seeking to express the inexpressible, becomes an image of the painter’s anguished face. The description of his projects mirrors the fragmentation of the clouds—“choses vagues, haletantes, trépidantes, sans lien entre elles” [vague, gasping, shaking things with no link between them]. 40 Like Baudelaire, whose poem is a small, white sailboat lost on the sea; 41 like Stéphane Mallarmé, haunted by the abyssal irony of the azure, Lucien captures his subject in his haggard look, which “ressemblait aux ciels tourmentés et déments de ses paysages” [resembled the tortured, demented skies of his landscapes]. 42 Baudelaire no longer knows whether art’s subjects think through him or he through them. 43 Lucien can no longer differentiate between aesthetic consciousness and beauty’s gaze. The ocelli on the peacock’s tail intercept the painter’s look, each one watching, as Lucien says, “avec son oeil de perle noire” [with its eye of black pearl]. 44 The peacock’s plumage triggers vague, inchoate reveries; sparkling like gemstones, they are thoughts that emanate from things, “paons marchant dans les pensées” [peacocks walking among pansies]. 45 In later novels, Mirbeau’s characters flee the oppressive grandeur of the mountains, whose elevation is experienced as gravity that crushes. It is the inhuman scale of mountains that suggests the fragility of the visitor. Like Georges Vasseur, the narrator in Les 21 Jours d’un neurasthénique, artists in Dans le ciel sense the inhospitality of the summits, “paysages de la mort” [landscapes of death] exuding an “atmosphère irrespirable” [unbreathable atmosphere]. 46 It is the prophet or priest who climbs the mountain, hoping to experience God directly, while it is the artist who comes down, having desecrated a mystery by trying to embody it. If geography is the anthropomorphic diagram of landscapes, the elevated space is the site of man’s attempt at sublimation, moving him closer to the home of a divinity, where he vanishes into “ce grand rêve du ciel qui vous entoure d’éternité silencieuse” [this great dream of a sky surrounding you with a silent eternity]. 47 Climbing is a

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spiritual exercise. Every ascent is an aspiration to holiness. Every mountaintop is a temple—“la moindre colline est inspirée” [the smallest hill is sacred]. 48 The question unanswered in Mirbeau’s study of art’s provenance and execution is the role of the audience, art’s value apart from personal selfexpression. Dans le ciel seems to focus on the relationship of artists and their material, on the effort to circumscribe the infinite, containing it in imagery and language. Is the viewer of a painting inspired in the way that Kris says the painter is inspired by God? 49 Is art continuously transmitted, evolving like self-propagating clouds? Is the artist just a visionary? Or is he a seer charged with showing? Lucien’s amputated hand, the image with which the novel closes, suggests an inability both to grasp the thing and to open and reveal it. Mirbeau’s blank, unfinished page—like Lucien’s abandoned, empty canvas—suggests that the message of text and artwork is the impossibility of communication. In creating the character of a painter who “atteint les limites de la représentation, c’est-à-dire la peinture d’un objet qu’on ne voit pas” [reaches the limits of representation, that is to say a painting of an object that can’t be seen], Mirbeau becomes identified with his hero, who “aboutit également à l’indicible” [also ends up at the unsayable]. 50 In his colloquies with Georges, Lucien tells of wrestling with his ideas as a private struggle to which no outside witness is admitted: “Je n’aime point qu’on me voie forniquer avec l’art” [I don’t like to be seen fornicating with art]. 51 As God’s breath is what animates his creature, there is a marriage or interpenetration of the artist and his works. The self-obliviousness of the painter lost in the rendering of his vision allows a momentary resolution of the dualism of earth and sky, thought and image. Lucien locks the door so no one sees his failed attempt at intercourse, the impossible, desperate coupling of the painter and his canvas—the duellum of the artist “en lutte avec le démon de l’art” [struggling with the demon of art]. 52 Like l’Abbé Jules, whose screams of masturbatory frenzy are heard by listeners outside his library, Lucien, in his studio, produces no other art than his “jurons rauques” [hoarse curses]. 53 Like the mysteries of the sky, the last pages of Mirbeau’s book are concealed by a partition that becomes a barrier to discovery. Denial of access to a secret is art’s subject in Dans le ciel. Readers kept outside a door are like the painter who cannot see. As art’s purpose becomes less sacred—no longer magnifying the Creator—it ceases to pay homage to the divine. In the oracle or prophet of old, “the voice of the unconscious” was externalized so that God spoke “through the mouth of the chosen.” 54 With inspiration seen as springing from the unconscious of the artist, what was once a spiritual revelation has become an expression of creative genius. Yet despite this internalization of the processes

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of creation, Mirbeau shows that artistic labor still involves the building of a bridge: between the hilltop and the heavens, between what the eye can see and the hand can seize. Narrative tension in Dans le ciel arises from art’s two irreconcilable aims: to behold, as in a vision, the otherworldly and sublime; and to communicate that insight in the profane idiom of the multitudes. Lucien is like van Gogh, on whom his character is patterned; “il se noyait dans l’apôtre, se perdait dans l’évangéliste, s’égarait à travers des forêts de rêves qui lui étaient étrangères et obscures” [he was swallowed up in the apostle, lost in the evangelist, becoming disoriented in forests of dreams that, to him, were foreign and obscure]. 55 For Lucien, the blue eye of the deaf-mute girl is deep like an abyss; it mirrors the bottomless sky in its unfathomable secrecy. What she sees cannot be desecrated by a translation into language. The self-mutilating tendencies of Mirbeau’s seekers of infinity are foreshadowed by the visionary’s inability to speak. Ritual dismemberment in the quest for spiritual wholeness is identified with “the oblative sacrifice of the eye,” which, as Gilbert Durand says, “is an over-determination of vision as clairvoyance.” 56 In either visual or manual apprehension, the physical organ must be lost so that the higher, hidden object can be looked upon or grasped. By cutting off his hand, Lucien checks his sacrilegious impulse, disciplining a body that would defile truth with its touch. Ultimately, as Mirbeau’s novel shows, the domain of human art is one of speech and interaction with other fumbling beings. Involvement in campaigns of political reform is not an indulgence in “mystification” but the only possible expression of human agency. Dans le ciel strives to critique society’s formation of a child, elaborating on ideas promulgated in Sébastien Roch and L’Abbé Jules. Every child’s consciousness is potentially a masterpiece. Only when it is denatured by a parent or perverted by a teacher—“cet ensemble d’absurdités, de mensonges et de ridicules diplômés qu’est un professeur” [that diploma-bearing ensemble of absurdities, lies, and ridiculous things that is a professor] 57 —does the sky’s reflection in a child’s eye become lifeless, dull, and tarnished. Lucien’s goal had been to safeguard art by internalizing it in the subject, protecting an original point of view against contamination by corrupting influences. Unsullied by institutions of politics or pedagogy, the integrity of the artist’s vision is untouched by Pre-Raphaelites and naturalists with their obtuse claims “qu’un arbre est un arbre, et le même arbre” [that a tree is a tree and the same tree]. 58 But by taking beauty down and relocating it in the self—insisting, as Lucien does, that landscapes exist solely in the viewer—he risks severing sublime art from its higher origins. Art is a cowardly, hypocritical desertion of social duty only if one gives up the attempt to render nature’s “surnaturel mystère” [supernatural mystery]. 59 When Lucien casts aside his “outil gauche, lourd et infidèle” [clumsy, heavy, unfaithful imple-

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ment], 60 he acknowledges the purity of material that no artist’s tool can shape. By cutting off his hand, by accepting his position on the ground, he respects the cleanness of the unrepresentable, “l’impondérable éther d’un ciel” [the imponderable ether of a sky]. 61 At the end of Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Georges Vasseur decides to quit the mountaintop where his misanthropic friend had preached a philosophy of nihilistic transcendentalism. There is no humanity, no art on Roger Fresselou’s barren summit, and so, like Mirbeau, Vasseur goes back down “toward his fellow man,” toward “life and light.” 62 This is the middle path that Lucien the absolutist rejects when, behind the locked door of his atelier, he declines all further compromise. There are moments when the writer refuses language’s shabby bargain, when the artist reaches out his hands like a bird that spreads its wings. Then no small and dirty thing is brought down from the sky. Instead, the artist climbs into his subject, commingling with a beauty that is unspeakable. Renouncing the effort to apprehend, he can let it go and fly. 63 NOTES 1. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990). 2. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 457. 3. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 457. 4. Flamboyant, self-styled Rosicrucian and accomplished occultist, Joséphin Péladan was the author of the sprawling epic La Décadence latine: Éthopée. Péladan’s literary esotericism is analyzed in chapter 3 of “The Magus,” in Robert Ziegler, Satanism, Magic, and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France (Basingbroke, UK: Palgrave, 2013). 5. Ernst Kris, “On Inspiration: Preliminary Notes on Emotional Conditions in Creative States,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 20 (1939): 383. 6. Jean Grave, La Société mourante et l’anarchie, with preface by Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1893). 7. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 478. 8. Ibid., 463. 9. Alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Duellum,” in Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Guarnier Frères, 1961). 10. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Confiteor de l’artiste,” in Petits Poèmes en Prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 18. 11. Pierre Michel, introduction to Dans le ciel, in Oeuvre romanesque, by Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:9. 12. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 17. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Michel, introduction to Dans le ciel, 14. 16. Octave Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:26. 17. Ibid., 30. 18. Pierre Citti, Contre la décadence: Histoire de l’imagination française dans le roman 1870–1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 31.

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19. Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire: Introduction à l’archétypologie générale (Paris: Bordas, 1969), 147. 20. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 51. 21. Ibid., 61. 22. Ibid., 29. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 122. 25. Ibid., 33. 26. Ibid., 42. 27. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” in Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie ThorelCailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 53. 28. Ibid., 54. 29. J.-K. Huysmans, Là-bas, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 12, pt. 1 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1972), 7. 30. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 110. 31. Octave Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques 1877–1892, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Séguier, 1993), 357. 32. Eléonore Reverzy, “Mirbeau et le roman: De l’importance du fumier. De Dans le ciel (1891) aux 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901),” in Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), 99. 33. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 88. 34. Dominique Millet-Gérard, “Théologie de la décadence,” in Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 178. 35. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 114. 36. Ibid. 37. Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques, 357. 38. Octave Mirbeau, “Ravachol,” May 1, 1892, in Combats politiques, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 122. 39. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 464. 40. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 116. 41. Baudelaire, “Le Confiteor de l’artiste.” 42. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 81. 43. Baudelaire, “Le Confiteor de l’artiste.” 44. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 122. 45. Ibid., 123. 46. Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:21. 47. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 23. 48. Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris: Corti, 1948), 384. The phrase may come from the 1913 novel by Maurice Barrès, La Colline inspirée (Paris: ÉmilePaul). Another story of the tragic consequences of a failed quest for the absolute, Barrès’s book recounts the alienation and ostracism of cleric Léopold Baillard, disciple of the notorious mystic and heretic Eugène Vintras, whose apocalyptic vaticinations would influence authors from Léon Bloy to J.-K. Huysmans. 49. Kris, “On Inspiration.” 50. Maeva Monta, “Dans le ciel, un détournement de la figure de l’ekphrasis,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 18 (2011): 41. 51. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 125. 52. Ibid., 126. 53. Ibid. 54. Kris, “On Inspiration,” 380. 55. Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques, 441. 56. Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, 172. 57. Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, 54. 58. Ibid., 83. 59. Ibid., 99.

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60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 266. 63. I argue here that the temptation of professional abdication and of artistic suicide expressed in Dans le ciel bespeaks a wish to experience the perfection that the writer cannot verbalize. This parallels what I described in The Nothing Machine as a revolt against compromise: “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.” Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 93.

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LE JARDIN DES SUPPLICES With Dreyfus languishing on Devil’s Island, Zola convicted and sentenced to prison for two years, and Colonel Georges Picquart court-martialed for forging the documents exonerating Dreyfus, Mirbeau—slow to involve himself in the controversy riveting the country—began to shower readers with vituperative columns. Berating the military hierarchy, journalist Edouard Drumont, and the anti-Semitic press, Mirbeau also turned his ire on the church for its complicity in the Dreyfus affair, denouncing as well the politicians who he felt were too cowardly to speak the truth. The targets of Mirbeau’s diatribes vigorously responded, after disinterring his own anti-Semitic writings that had appeared years earlier in Les Grimaces. Mirbeau wrote a curious rebuttal (“Palinodies,” L’Aurore, November 15, 1898) in which he defended his prerogative to retract old views and change his mind. An intelligent man, Mirbeau argued, is an enemy of self-consistency. He is always growing and evolving, always moving closer to the justice and beauty he idealizes. Repudiating the discredited ideas that had earlier deceived him, he rejected the lies that “le retiennent, si longtemps, prisonnier de lui-même” [for so long held him a prisoner of himself]. 1 The palinodist, for Mirbeau, does not just retract his earlier beliefs. He is the one who, in his effort to become better, also becomes another person. In 1898–1899, while the Dreyfus case was simmering, Mirbeau was forging the disparate sections of what would be Le Jardin des supplices. With its genre heterogeneity and the changeability of its tone, the novel proved to be as unclassifiable and protean as its author: “a literary game, a pastiche, an allegory, a metaphorical novel, a lesson in philosophy and morality, an exaggerated satire, a prose poem, a celebration of life, a love story that ends 93

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unhappily, or simply a recycling of old material.” 2 As an ideological chameleon quick to take contradictory positions, Mirbeau expressed his metaphysical ambition to collapse oppositions and reconcile antagonists. The “bad Decadence” of France, as is it portrayed in the novel, is not much different from the “good Decadence” of China, as Lawrence Schehr has argued. 3 The horror of a loss of self, from which Mirbeau’s characters are in flight, is revealed to be a chance to escape the prison of identity. When Mirbeau’s characters lose their prejudices, they realize their affinity with their adversaries. They shed their skin or have it peeled away and experience the ecstatic torture of being everyone. 4 In Dans le ciel, the infinite had been fathomless blue space crossed by a procession of whimsical cloud-ideas. Art had coalesced as vaporous forms that a viewer projected as the chimeras of his unconscious: “de monstrueuses formes, d’affolants faunes, d’indescriptibles flores, des architectures de cauchemar” [monstrous forms, disturbing fauna, indescribable flora, architectures of nightmare]. 5 The sky was a museum where exhibits were changing constantly, a place where ephemeral creations were displayed for a moment, their purpose to look like something and then evaporate into nothing. Le Jardin des supplices marked a crossroads in Mirbeau’s career. At that juncture, he had exhausted his quest for absolutes—whether in a hell below, where one experiences the damnation of sexual bondage (as in Le Calvaire), or in a paradise above, where eternal beauty is unreachable for the artist (as in Dans le ciel). The search for the transcendental that had structured Mirbeau’s fiction had been oriented along a vertical axis: upward toward an ideal of immutable perfection, and downward toward the automatism of masochistic compulsivity. He had imagined the infinite as a place of changelessness and fixity. The imperturbability of the divine or of damnation’s unremitting agony had situated his characters, whether reprobate or elect, outside the vicissitudes of time. But the world that Mirbeau experienced was one of upheaval and transformation. Rotten governments, perverted churches, and schools infested with sexual predators were raised up by opportunists and cast down by reformers, repeating endless cycles of construction and demolition. Human history was a conveyance bustling passengers along. His fiction itself, Mirbeau realized, was a vehicle transporting readers across the page, past disorienting landscapes and panoramas of lush imagery. While the paradise Mirbeau was looking for was one of serenity and quiescence, the environment he lived in was one of instability and turmoil, propelling him faster and farther from himself. Galvanized by the ongoing prosecution of the Dreyfus case and the opening of the trial of Zola in February 1899, Mirbeau could no longer consider the fight for justice to be an abdication of his quest for absolutes. No longer could the anguished artist remain lost in his effort to plumb the mysteries of

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the sky. There were pressing matters to attend to in the world below, people whom the powerful had wronged and who needed to be defended. Abandoning the solitary struggle of the artist to merge with his ideal, Mirbeau resituated his writing in the world of the clash of ideological antagonists. In Le Jardin des supplices, the multiplicity of settings suggests the narrative’s headlong movement, a heedless plunge into the unknown. Beginning in a drawing room where scholars and artists congregate to discuss their differing theories of violence, the narrative is taken over by one guest, haggard and distraught, who identifies woman as the origin and instrument of man’s murderous impulses. He recounts his upbringing with a father who had instructed him in dishonesty and his acquaintance with a government official who had reinforced the same lessons in immoral opportunism. In possession of incriminating documents that could land his friend in prison, the narrator is awarded a sinecure, given false credentials as an eminent embryologist, and then dispatched on a spurious mission to Ceylon to discover in warm ocean waters the primordial cell from which life had originated. On board the vessel, the narrator converses with an array of comical, monstrous passengers: an explorer who practices cannibalism, a munitions expert adept at mass slaughter, and most important, the luminously sensual Clara who, in the course of the voyage, becomes his mistress. Reunited with the narrator in China, Clara and her pusillanimous consort spend a day touring a notorious penitentiary and its torture garden, where prisoners’ executions are offered as artistic performances. Clara’s syncope and collapse at the end of the day in no way change his conviction that life is a spiraling descent into depravity, since he is assured that Clara will recover and begin again the same pleasure trip through the garden of horrors. Mirbeau’s story is one defined by its motion, from the monochrome of the smoking room and expatiation about murder, into a world of violence and color. After boarding a vessel baked by the blinding equatorial sun, the narrator disembarks in Ceylon and then is deposited in China, where the intensity of his experience corresponds to the pungency of the smells, the clanging of the gongs, and the screaming of the peacocks. In Mirbeau’s novel, the ecstasy that expels the subject from himself is not the same as a mystical fusion of the individual with God. It is not the stasis of ataraxia, the contemplative immobility of Buddha, but a shattering of the ego assaulted by overpowering sensations. Mirbeau’s final novels (La 628-E8 and Dingo) build on these raptures that transport, as linear narrative breaches the partitions between chapters and moves in all directions, unmagnetized by a promised dénouement. What Georges Vasseur bemoans as the uncomfortable necessity of changes of place in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique accelerates into the frenzied rides in Mirbeau’s CGV in La 628-E8 and the slaughter fugues of Dingo rampaging across the countryside. Instead of the finality of transcendence as at-

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oneness with the divinity, Mirbeau’s characters dissolve into the universality of everyone. Never stopping, they cannot catch up or coincide with themselves. Orgasm and injury affect a rupture of the body’s envelope: I leak into another and flow into the anonymity of the blood pool. Designations that arrest change by naming and locating are forgotten in the precipitous advancement into strangeness. Things do not have time to solidify as meanings. Trips are unguided by destinations. Certainties are unsettled, and personal histories are blurred. More than focusing on ineradicable human violence and aggression, Le Jardin des supplices thematizes the principle of exchange and transmission. The brandy-quaffing scholars philosophizing about murder in the novel’s frontispiece have no identities, no past that distinguishes them as individuals. Like the Poet later encountered in the Chinese penitentiary, starved and brutalized in his jail cell, the discussants are identified with their similar occupations. Darwinian scientist, philosopher, moralist, and doctor: “Il n’y avait là que des hommes” [The only people there were men], as the anonymous narrator remarks, 6 only men who are vaporized into their inconsequential theories. Women in the novel are texture, scent, and music. They have flesh soft like petals, sinuous like poetry, sweet like perfume. Men are only words whose exchange enriches no one. In the novel, torture, sex, and dialogue are forms of intercourse that facilitate the conjugation and intermingling of participants. But saying words is less costly than spilling seed or shedding blood. The experience of transcendence that accompanies a loss of self is more meaningful when death ensures the transformational value of rebirth. The narrator’s ministerial colleague, Eugène Mortain, does not expend himself in his “intarissable éloquence” [inexhaustible oratory] in legislative chambers. He does not hemorrhage into bombast to be reincarnated as someone else. No death and resurrection sequence affects the political oracle, and the only person put to death by “la suicidante pluie du vocabulaire politique” [the suicide-inducing torrent of his political vocabulary] is Mortain’s listener, not the complacent elocutionist himself. 7 Thus the trajectory of Mirbeau’s narrative in its reckless movement forward follows experiences of mixture and interpenetration where the stakes for those involved grow higher and more transfiguring. Never at a loss for words, Mortain cannot talk himself to death. But as a breakable vessel, the victim in the torture garden is a limited reservoir of blood. Masturbation and exsanguination, combined in the torture of the caress, purge vital fluids, soluble identities that cannot be readily replenished. Extremes of pain and pleasure bring an erasure of body boundaries, a Passion that returns the individual to the undifferentiation of le grand tout. Beginning with an exam-

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ination of commerce and conversation, the novel then explores exchanges through intercourse and torture that are consummated in a mystical experience without God. While religious ecstasy is accompanied by a sense of timelessness, Mirbeau’s narrative unfolds in a world of corruption and renewal. Mirbeau’s characters, like Baudelaire, may fear that time moves toward finality, as an ever-shrinking present is constantly eroded and then added to a growing deposit of autrefois. Mirbeau’s description of the torture of the bell shows temporality as a violent loss of possibility, consuming victims’ lives that it dissipates into nothing: “Le gouffre a toujours soif; la clepydre se vide” [The gulf is always thirsty; the clepsydra is always emptying], as Baudelaire writes. 8 In the torture garden, the giant bell whose ringing inflicts the most exquisite of tortures is like the calyx of a flower or the sky’s inverted dome. It measures eternity decomposed into agonizing seconds, the infinite disintegrated by time’s destructive fragmentation. The bell, as Mirbeau describes it, is like “un gouffre en l’air, un abîme suspendu qui semblait monter de la terre au ciel” [a gulf in the air, a suspended abyss seeming to rise from the earth to the sky]. 9 There is a tautological clarity to Mirbeau’s identification of time as murderer, a bell whose tolling marks the extermination of those put to death by their mortality. The hyperbolic expression of time as an agent of decay— flaccidity, muscle atrophy, discoloration, sagging flesh—is conveyed in Mirbeau’s image of the person tortured by the bell, whose ocher-colored skin is raised “toute en houles violentes” [all in violent swells]. 10 Like Kafka’s harrow 11 that inscribes the point of torture on the victim’s flesh, Mirbeau’s bell writes out a text of punishment and enlightenment, inscribing pain as nature’s message and compressing the indignities of a lifetime into the span of several hours. The clock in Baudelaire is not an artist’s implement or medium, whereas the torture garden bell, by hastening physical degeneration, telescopes the body’s degradation into a campanological performance. “Quels artistes uniques! . . . et quels poètes” [What unparalleled and unique artists! . . . and what poets] Clara exclaims of the executioners, who are able to “assouplir et domestiquer la nature, avec une intelligence aussi précise!” [tame nature and make it supple with such precise intelligence!]. 12 Escape from time as an inexorable march toward extinction is the goal of the experiences of transcendence that Mirbeau identifies in his novel. In place of Christian teleology that designates an end-time for Creation—progression toward an apocalypse and a return of the Messiah—the divine in Mirbeau is manifested in the material world as immanence, eternity as cyclical recurrence. Whereas individual forms may die, the regenerative elements are everlasting. It is by dying that the singular bodies of torture victims replenish the imperishable germplasm, which, as Freud says, “is concerned

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with the survival of the species.” 13 There is a complementary relationship between “the mortal and immortal parts,” those governed by Thanatos, “which seeks to lead what is living to death,” and the germ cells acting in concert with the “sexual instincts, which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life.” 14 Often the spokesperson for Mirbeau himself, Clara is no longer the target of the inveterate misogynist who, like Jean Mintié, grouped all women together as exquisite sadists and biblical harlots. Like Célestine, the chambermaid in Mirbeau’s next novel, Clara is too disabused a critic of contemporary mores, too astute in detecting her peers’ hypocrisy and self-interest not to temper Mirbeau’s reputation as an unreconstructed antifeminist. Indeed, Clara’s critique of the moral flaccidity of European society is no different from Mirbeau’s own. If Clara is a monster—to use a term whose meaning she contests—it is because, unlike the author and his male characters who are adept at using language, she belongs primarily in the realm of pleasure and arousal. Thus when Clara celebrates the interplay of pleasure and pain, sex and death, she is voicing a belief in the interdependence of the mortal soma and the immortal germplasm. Corpses are the nutrient that enriches the soil of the garden: red blood, green turf, bright flowers, the iridescent plumage of peacocks that glean scraps of human flesh from scaffolds—all are elements on the palette of violently ever-changing nature. Nothing ever stops; the dead enjoy no rest in cemeteries. Instead, there is “a perpetual cycle of birth, growth, decadence, death, corruption, and resurrection.” 15 Man is “a ridiculous particle” that is broken up and decomposed in order to be reborn in another form, writes Pierre Michel. 16 Le Jardin des supplices explores approximations of transcendence, simulated ecstasies that leave the experiencing subject’s self intact. Sadomasochistic exercises in torture and scopophilia come from blurring the boundaries separating spectators like Clara and the sufferers she watches, razing the walls delineating the outer surface of a containing self, puncturing what Didier Anzieu refers to as the “skin ego.” The pleasure Clara finds in seeing prisoners crucified or flayed brings a dilation of the self that absorbs victims chopped up or liquefied. The more intense the others’ pain, the more intense her arousal. Surplus sensations are incorporated and turn their agony into her pleasure in a way that leaves “the Ego both intact in its functions and with its boundaries expanded through fusion with the object.” 17 For Clara, there is a failure of identification with the sufferer, whose pain and broken skin cause not coalescence but isolation. “Pain cannot be shared, except by being eroticized in a sado-masochistic relationship. Each person is alone in the face of it,” as Anzieu says. 18 Clara’s goal is not to bathe in a shoreless lake of other people, to find unity through exchanging singularity for multiplicity. She does not lose herself in them but assimilates their difference as her sameness. There is always

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a supervising consciousness that gauges excitation. Even in the grave, as Clara imagines it, there is no resolution of the duality born of self-appraisal. She sees her coffin as a temple devoted to the stimulation of her senses, adorned with erotica and stone images of hysterical bacchantes—a shrine to the hedonistic cult of death as a threshold to new experience. Like a pharaoh, Clara wants to be accompanied by pets into the afterlife. She asks that her Laotian dog be slaughtered and posed with a paw across her breast. She wishes that her lover kiss her teeth and hair as she embarks for the next world. Nirvana, which Mirbeau idealized as a blowing out of the candle, allows liberation from the cycle of death and incarnation. It is like Schopenhauer’s notion of emancipation from the Will, of attachment to the material world and its illusory satisfactions. But Clara does not imagine death as a dismantling of identity; she does not contemplate an old self lost in the darkness of oblivion, or the forgotten Clara reawakening in the form of a ranunculus or a maggot. When Clara says she wants to be a pistil pollinated by twenty stamens, or when she says, “Je voudrais être tout” [I would like to be everything], 19 it is her consciousness that colonizes the blossom or cadaver. Clara’s fainting spell may be experienced as a soul migration—into an anemone, a swallow, wings and petals, white stars and pools. But according to the woman piloting the sampan that carries Clara to the place where she recovers, she will just be reborn as herself, a thirsty blossom still irrigated by the vital fluids of tortured convicts. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau considers experiences of transcendence that come from changing the self as the protective container of the skin ego into a medium of transfer, allowing the possibility of exchange. The speakers in the smoking room declaiming on aggression and bloodlust are depersonalized by the conversion of their names into professional titles. Their theories on the “natural” inherency of violence are so similar that they seem to emanate from the collectivity of guests. Ideas rise and blend into the fog of their tobacco smoke, sourceless pools of speculation available to be reutilized by anyone. Metempsychosis, in applying to utterances as well as souls, ensures that clever insights expressed by one can be domiciled in another. Listeners take from speakers, students borrow from their teachers. Plagiarism, misappropriation, embezzlement, and imposture suggest the universal theft of others’ intellectual property. But as the narrator’s father says in a central passage from the novel, merchandise, like knowledge, remains alive through circulation. Clara is always racing to the next panoramic scene of torture, hurrying lest she stop and be overtaken by death and apathy. Only archivists and misers jealously hoard their acquisitions, constipating the flow of information and commodities. “L’honnêteté est inerte et stérile” [Honesty is inert and sterile], as Mortain tells the narrator, extolling his own unscrupulousness. “Elle ignore

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la mise en valeur des appétits et des ambitions, les seules énergies par quoi l’on fonde quelque chose de durable” [It ignores the value of appetites and ambitions, the only sources of energy useful for establishing something durable]. 20 Integrity may be lasting and eternal, as Mortain suggests, but it is immobilizing and encourages only fear and admiration. A lie comes alive in the act of being told, becoming more virulent and potent as it spreads into an audience. The conversationalists in the frontispiece may end with the expiration of their speeches, but their ingeniousness is metamorphosed to be reborn in another form. Their words soak into the anonymous matrix of shared ideas, reappearing in another body bearing a different author’s signature. They are housed in the paper scroll read by “l’homme à la figure ravagée” [the man with the ravaged face], whose unknown name allows his narrative function to be blown out like a candle so that his material can be reincarnated in the novel by Mirbeau. The propagation of falsehoods, sale of adulterated grain, and feeding of carrion to the garden sustain an economy of transfer. What interests Mirbeau more than producing “quelque chose de durable” [something lasting] is replenishing the energies that are used to fuel creation. The criminality of the narrator’s father assimilates him to the novelist, whose wares are fictions etymologically connected to dissembling. Blighted wheat and water-soaked oats like those sold by the father are fabrications passed off as wholesome merchandise. The novelist, like the grain merchant, puts deceptions into circulation, equating their utility with their capacity to propagate. The storyteller’s skill depends less on the cleverness of his material than on his ability to inspire listeners to deliver his narrative again. As money changes hands, stories pass on to different tellers. “Prendre quelque chose à quelqu’un et le repasser à un autre, en échange d’autant d’argent que l’on peut, ça, c’est du commerce” [Taking something and passing it on to someone else in exchange for as much money as one can get, that is commerce], 21 the narrator’s father declares. Art is not immortalized by being shaped from marble or bound in leather. Like Freud’s germplasm, it inhabits the creator for the duration of his work and lives on when it moves into the person it inspires. Like his father, the narrator is a perpetrator of mystification and deception, and he is related to the author as “un poète dévoyé” [a poet gone astray]. 22 The fiction he disseminates is not a book but his credentials as an embryologist. There is a cautionary note in the narrator’s biography of his father when the latter’s defective merchandise sickens the audience consuming it: “Une fourniture malheureuse [. . .] empoisonna toute une caserne” [An unfortunate provision (. . .) poisoned an entire barracks], 23 his son recalls. To effect regrowth, the seed must die without contaminating the soil. Mirbeau

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no doubt was sensitive to accusations of undermining public virtue, as noted by Michel: “Hasn’t he been taxed with immorality, obscenity, even sadism and pornography?” 24 When the narrator’s father extols the dynamism of his dishonest business practices, he announces what will come to be the novel’s central theme. The exchange of spoiled merchandise, the circulation of lurid stories will evolve into the idea of a migratory self. Property and identity become inextricably entwined: I am you; what was yours is mine. 25 In a novel eternalizing its circulation, a novel in which commodities change hands, body boundaries are dismantled, and forms are perpetually mutating, the writer ironizes the quest for origins and destinations. The story embarks on the pretext of finding the primordial cell in ocean waters— ”l’initium protoplasmique de la vie organisée . . . enfin, quelque chose dans ce genre” [the protoplasmic initium of organized life . . . well, something along those lines],23 as Mortain describes it—and ends with the hope of a death-delivering narrative climax. But there is no genesis in the theories on murder propounded in the frontispiece, no apotheosis for the narrator who knows that “arriver quelque part, c’est mourir” [to arrive somewhere is to die]. 26 The convention of the author as an originary source is undermined by the heteromorphic nature of Mirbeau’s novel: a patchwork born in different journals, christened with different titles, appearing in different years, and reissued for various reasons. The writer who published chapter-parts in Le Gaulois, Le Figaro, Le Journal, and L’Echo de Paris was no doubt a partial incarnation of the Mirbeau who sired the later volume. Mirbeau’s authorial identity is atomized like the book—like a torturer “who breaks up whole entities in order to reveal their constituent, separate pieces.” 27 If, as Pierre Michel has argued, Le Jardin des supplices points to the obsolescence of established and orthodox forms of fiction, it also announces its rebirth, in other forms and other guises. Mirbeau “is not concerned with concluding since nothing in life is ever over, and since there is no reason to inscribe the word ‘End’ in the middle of a story which [. . .] could be continued.” 28 However, the death drive underlying Mirbeau’s antecedent fiction had sought a cessation of philosophizing, an arrival in the harbor, remission from torture, and rest in the tomb of a white page. Aggression, first internalized as a quest for the oblivion of insentience, may again be directed outward as a wish to be a pain-inflicting god. Perforating the skin ego, breaching the “envelope of suffering” “mobilizes the Nirvana principle with its goal of reducing tension—and differences—to zero: better to die than to go on suffering,” as Anzieu concludes. 29 The vividness of Mirbeau’s description of nightmarish tortures: rats penetrating rectums, skin peeled back and draped

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over victims like a cloak, is experienced sympathetically as pain by Mirbeau’s readers who want the horror to be stopped and the novel to be finished. And Mirbeau’s anarchist ambition to undo injustice and fight oppression is offset by the longing for the anaesthetic harmony of utopia. Eros, manifested by the constant motion of energy transfer, is counterbalanced by a wish for immobility and repose—a hope that writing, reading, the torture of daily life will end. This quest for equilibrium between making and unmaking is attributed by the cocktail-drinkers in the opening section to megalomaniacs and assassins who synchronize the rape and murder of their victims, confusing the act of insemination with an impulse to annihilate. Here again, the peak experience of transcendence is achieved through a transient identification and merger with another. As in art, there is an interweaving of creative and destructive powers. Life is given and withdrawn with the spontaneity of play. Of the killer, a speaker says, “Son sport était que le spasme de plaisir de l’un concordât exactement avec le spasme de mort de l’autre: ‘Dans ces momentslà,’ me disait-il, ‘je me figurais que j’étais un Dieu et que je créais le monde!’” [His sport was synchronizing his pleasure spasm with the death spasm of another: “In those moments,” he told me, “I imagined that I was God and that I was creating the world!”]. 30 A divinity whose word enacts the Genesis and the Apocalypse, the writer aspires to experience at once the petite mort of orgasm and the omnipotence of unleashing Armageddon. In Mirbeau’s pantheon of little god-impersonators, there is the surgeon, the executioner, the novelist, and the woman. Their masterpieces are bodies that are disassembled and reconfigured. Never arriving at perfection, these masterpieces are a first creative gesture. Unlike God who, at the conclusion of the labor of Creation, stood back and appraised his handiwork and judged that it was good, the murder-artist can never disengage himself from his victim, can never stop and sign his work lest he be crushed by postcoital gloom. The surgeon referred to in the frontispiece, like the Chinese torturer who appears later, retains his optimistic cheer because if his operation is successful, the patient is still alive—still available for more incisions, more digging with probes and scalpels—and not a finished, lifeless object fit only to be discarded. When the narrator and Clara first encounter “le patapouf,” he is cleaning knives and saws in preparation for going back to work. Wiping blood from his steel instruments with scraps of silk, he exudes “la jovialité d’un chirurgien qui vient de réussir une opération difficile” [the joviality of a surgeon who has just successfully completed a difficult operation]. 31 Like Christ’s Passion, which is ongoing, the Creation is never finished, even though man, God’s greatest work, begs for deliverance from the process.

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The only danger incurred by assassins and divinities in Mirbeau’s novel is the consummation of a project to which no improvement can be added. Executioners are failed artists, incompetents, and bunglers, like gourmands who eat too fast, not savoring the virtuosity of their tasting. Those who rush to kill their subject have nothing left to do. The signature on their work is an inscription on a tombstone. Another misfortune that is feared by the characters in Mirbeau’s novel is encountering an impediment in their trips through intersubjectivity. The skin ego, which—as Anzieu says—acts as protection and container, grows harder, obstructing the ease of interpenetration. This is the calamity that befalls Clara’s erstwhile friend Annie, whose death from elephantiasis is preceded by a thickening of dermal walls. Once a beauty whose soft skin brought to life the person touching her, she becomes a gargoyle whose ugliness extinguishes light and repels caresses. Rough and gray, she dims the glow of pearls on her body: “Elles se ternissaient d’abord, peu à peu . . . peu à peu s’éteignaient . . . aucune lumière ne se reflétait plus en leur orient . . . et, en quelques jours, atteintes de la lèpre, elles se changeaient en de menues boules de cendre” [Little by little they grew dull, little by little they lost their luster; no light was reflected anymore in their water and, in a few days, as if stricken with leprosy, they changed into little balls of ash]. 32 Circulation in the novel, which is figured by alimentary exchange, is arrested in the case of Annie, who is even disdained by vultures. Like the Poet who through his versifying had earned his daily bread, and then is imprisoned, starved, brutalized, and reconverted into his poem, the feeder in Mirbeau’s novel inevitably reverts to being food. As Lawrence Schehr writes, “The victims of supplice always mirror the flensing that will be theirs. As they grab for the unspeakably horrible victuals put before them, they become the equivalent of the pieces themselves.” 33 The best that Annie can hope for is that, as a victim of elephantiasis, she will be enshrined after death in the Temple of Elephanta. Once unctuous and smooth, she can memorialize lost sensuality by exchanging flesh for stone, as Dionysian images “qui se caressent et se déchirent” [that caress and tear at each other]. 34 In Mirbeau’s tribute to identity migration through sex and commerce and through talk and suffering, he ridicules the death-technologists who idealize entropy and stasis, arresting life’s generative processes in order to restore the coldness of the void. Mirbeau opposes the drabness of French business to the luxuriance of China, where penology and executions support a satellite economy. Outside the Chinese bagnio, there is a marketplace selling “charognes de toutes sortes” [carrion of all sorts]: dead rats, rotten poultry, drowned dogs, and gutted fish, with death supporting a lively trafficking in death. Among the sellers of sanious meats, the narrator’s father reappears, purveying spoiled comestibles, exchanging unwholesomeness for money. The rat that the torturer drives with heated rods into his victim’s bowel bites and

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chews, killing the condemned man by eating through his body. Then the rat is struck with sticks by boys collecting scavengers from the garden. It is taken to the market and sold to death-voyeurs like Clara, who feeds it to a prisoner awaiting execution in his turn. Publishing insalubrious novels like Le Jardin des supplices is like engaging in the rat trade, dispensing doubtful merchandise that sickens its consumers, who then expel and retransmit it. There is no moral edification, nor any contamination of readers by pornography. Didactic messages, social commentary, perceived affronts to public decency: these are publicity techniques subordinated to the dynamics of exchange. It matters less if Mirbeau’s novel is instructive or obscene than that it remain in circulation and, in so doing, foster life: “ça, c’est du commerce” [That’s business], as the grain merchant declares. Mirbeau draws a contrast between, on the one hand, the black and white of texts and the obliterative gray tobacco smoke enveloping the heads of academics, and on the other hand, the sapphire of the seas conveying passengers on the Saghalien and the polychrome lushness and exuberance of the garden. But the death-gods are embodied not as pontificating intellectuals but as ballistic experts and militarists, passengers on the Saghalien that readers pass by on their journey. The orality of taking the outside world into oneself is evidenced by the explorer who, in his cannibalistic experimentation, establishes a comestible hierarchy of human subjects. Universality may be experienced through subsuming others to oneself, but if one eats an object, one foregoes the pleasures deriving from the erogeneity of the body’s surface. An infant may seek the breast while enjoying the mother’s skin, its scent and texture. When other senses are unstimulated, the world is commensurately impoverished. The officer on the Saghalien who works on improving shells and bullets aims at disrupting commerce as a circulus that profits customers and sellers. Ordinarily war sustains an economy of pain and mitigation. Unlike decomposing flesh, which acts as a beneficial nutrient, the target of the Dum-Dum (or Nib-Nib) shell that he designs is only disappearing vapor: “une légère fumée roussâtre qui se dissiperait tout de suite” [a light reddish smoke that would dissipate immediately]. 35 The officer imagines suppressing the industry of battle, which exchanges armaments and soldiers for bandages and medics. Wounding and repairing are like selling and repurchasing, but with the perfect shell, a casualty would be eliminated as a commodity. “De la sorte, je supprime les chirurgiens d’armée, les infirmiers, les ambulances, les hôpitaux militaires, les pensions aux blessés” [In this way, I’d eliminate army surgeons, nurses, ambulances, military hospitals, pensions for the wounded]. 36 Pain, disease, and death support a multifaceted economy. Without patients, there would be no doctors; without criminals, no penologists. Without convicts, the rat vendors and the sadism-tourists and their entourages would

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vanish. Only the bankruptcy of death would result from the “économie incalculable” [incalculable savings] 37 that the officer imagines as being affected by the Dum-Dum shell. An abolition of the blood and murder that are described in Mirbeau’s novel would entail eliminating the pretext for writing the pages that deplore them. Like the “prêtres” [priests], “soldats” [soldiers], and “juges” [judges], the men who “éduquent, dirigent, gouvernent” [educate, control, govern], 38 the reformer indirectly benefits from the injustices that incense him. Beside the Dum-Dum shell designer, the only enemies of commerce— whether of putrefying meats or whimsical theories of aggression—are the semiologists who insist on the indisputability of their ideas. The epistemophobia that colored Mirbeau’s philosophy of life’s mysteries is apparent in what will come to be an aaesthetic of unknowing. Certainties and convictions are sterile, cold, and immovable. They are jealously guarded by the people who profess them. However, conjecture is alive, enlisting the collaboration of those discussing it. I am immaterialized as speculation that another appropriates and modifies. Before I know it, I know nothing and am no longer recognizable as myself. I have dissolved into a theory pool in which the collectivity bathes. Mirbeau’s antipathy for archives, monuments, and mausoleums came from their housing things whose meaning had been universally ratified— works that, in being canonized, could no longer animate their audiences. Facts are protected by the thick skin of stipulation, but ambiguities are permeable membranes that facilitate interchange and flow. In the frontispiece, the philosopher cites the universal law of murder as the foundation of society. Wherever one goes, whatever one does, as the philosopher intones, “il verra ce mot: meurtre, immortellement inscrit au fronton de ce vaste abattoir qu’est l’Humanité” [one will see this word: murder, immortally inscribed on the pediment of the vast abattoir that is Humanity]. 39 If this is so, the soldier who kills an enemy is no more deserving of society’s blame than the man who kills for profit or out of anger, “et c’est le gendarme, le juge, le bourreau” [and it is the policeman, the judge, the executioner], as the philosopher goes on, whose laws and penalties are gratuitously meted out in the slaughterhouse of the world. They are like the judges, priests, and soldiers who are denounced in Mirbeau’s dedication and who are criminal and wrong only if they are dogmatic in their righteousness. The “jeune homme” [young man] who responds to the philosopher’s pronouncements seems to articulate positions more consistent with Mirbeau’s own, opposing the malleability of open-mindedness to the profession of hidebound certainties. In La 628-E8 and in Dingo, Mirbeau suggests that intuitions of the suprarational are available to those who admit astonishment and wonder. Thus Mirbeau’s advancement of a universal law of murder is

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qualified, retracted, and left open for reexamination. This portmanteau explanation for human violence and aggression might be subject to erasure from Mirbeau’s “Pages de Meurtre et de Sang” [Pages of Murder and Blood]. 40 Hesitating to credit the validity of such a law, the young man says, “Je ne le sais pas et ne veux pas le savoir. J’aime mieux croire que tout est mystère en nous” [I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I prefer to think that everything is a mystery in us]. 41 In place of consensus that immobilizes and shared convictions that stop discussion, he gravitates to “les raisons uniquement poétiques” [reasons that are purely poetic], electing “de ne pas expliquer tout ce que je ne comprends point” [not to explain what I don’t understand]. 42 Clearly the weakest moment in the novel’s tour of the Chinese maze of contradiction comes when the narrator pauses in his rush past bloody gibbets, when—abandoning his horror—he assumes the role of exegete and teacher. Nothing is more deathly than texts that prescribe interpretations, excluding readers who participate in the discovery of meaning. Sterilized by the tautological clarity of their message, these works do not die with their deliverance from an author. They do not nourish the hermeneutic practice of their audience but are removed from circulation by writers who play with their own excrement. The young man who recommends the beauty of a mystery respects the polysemic richness of texts that spill from their containers. He is unlike the narrator, walled inside the Doors of Life and Gates of Death, who reads the universe “comme un inexorable jardin des supplices” [like an inexorable torture garden]. 43 This is a halt in Mirbeau’s narrative that turns from a garden into an allegory whose flowers wither in the barren soil of declamation and polemic. There is no opposition between a European technology of violence and the loving sensuality of the Chinese art of torture. Fluidity of meaning is held inside a skin of moral clarity. As Schehr writes, the contradiction that Mirbeau’s novel poses “is not resolved, nor can it be through some dialectical process. The contradiction is not a means of affirming an ideology, but rather of denying the possibility of any cogent ideological or political position.” 44 In the frontispiece, the speakers emit opinions that cross-pollinate, that collide, caress, and bite and tear at one another. But for the narrator, experiential wealth boils down to the poverty of an explanation: “Ce que j’ai vu aujourd’hui [. . .] n’est plus pour moi qu’un symbole” [What I saw today (. . .) was for me only a symbol]. 45 Here the analytical faculty becomes a correlative of the skin ego, an idea-fortress protecting against confusion and hysteria. Ignoring evidence that life is the generation of metamorphoses— that even Clara, whom he sees as embodying the real presence of life—is only the locus of her serial deaths and incarnations, he seeks shelter from the overstimulation that threatens to break down his defenses. Clara, for the

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narrator, is an intensity that overwhelms. She is the speed with which she runs through life and that outstrips his slow, bewildered gait. She is eagerness for change that confounds his capacity for assimilation. She is the willingness to surrender an identity he is terrified of losing. She is the unclassifiable being that he looks on as a monster who hurries forward until his frantic calls become faint and then inaudible: “Clara! . . . Clara! . . . Clara!” as the novel arbitrarily concludes. Even before succumbing to the sense of nauseating sameness whereby animal, plant, and human join in a frenzied lust for murder and where “l’homme-individu” [man-as-individual] turns into “l’homme-foule” [manas-crowd], 46 the narrator seeks stability by housing chaos under nominative rubrics. The profusion of flowers that dazzle him in the garden is explained as being glyphs in a book of secret symbols. Meanings preexist and order the objects that conceal them. Irises—less numerous, less indecipherable than they seem—are “étrangement simplifiées” [strangely simplified], inscribing “dans la magie du soir des signes fatalistes, échappés au livre des destins” [in the magic of the evening, fatalistic signs taken from the book of destinies]. 47 Resembling, he says, “des caractères kabbalistiques” [kabbalistic letters], 48 they are figures written out in the vast grimoire of nature. Rather than a cipher who is himself dissolved in a sea of perfume, blood, and color, he becomes a cryptographer who solves a mystery and thereby assumes mastery. Ecstasy transports and expels the subject from himself, while art immobilizes, creating static scenes and natures mortes. When one identifies meaning or appreciates art’s handiwork, death stops the flow of change and creates what Schehr calls “freeze-frame images, tableaux meant simultaneously to horrify and seduce.” 49 Doctor Trépan, proleptically likened to the Chinese master-torturer, paralyzes patients by administering chloroform. Surgery, for him, is a simulated act of killing: redesigning bodies, opening incisions, staging preludes to actual murder, while the unconscious patient imitates the stillness of a corpse. The surgical amphitheater where laparotomies are performed is assimilated by the doctor to the galleries of a museum: “L’art! . . . L’art! Le beau! . . . sais tu ce que c’est?” [Art! . . . Art! Beauty! . . . Do you know what that is?] he asks his son. “Eh bien, mon garçon, le beau, c’est un ventre de femme, ouvert, tout sanglant, avec des pinces dedans!” [Well, my boy, beauty is the belly of a woman that has been opened up, all bloody, with forceps in it!]. 50 Shattering experiences of agony or pleasure are threshold states that overlap into oblivion or syncope. Patients are anesthetized. Clara swoons and then falls prostrate. The storyteller’s pleasure gives way to intervals of silence. Aposiopeses break up texts, revealing openings onto nothingness.

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Clara may aspire to being conscious of her deadness, wishing to overcome the dualism of acting both as viewer and visual object. She may say, “Je voudrais être tout” [I would like to be everything], while remaining an appreciative subject: both everything and the pleasurable appraisal of her separateness. But like sedation, death is accompanied by a forgetting of identity. A loss of self in God cannot be savored by the mystic. Yet Mirbeau’s characters’ quest for ecstatic states still conveys a wish to be both singular and universal, to merge with everyone while preserving a distinguishing subjectivity. Mirbeau’s autobiographical novels (Le Calvaire; Sébastien Roch; L’Abbé Jules) had expressed a masochistic longing for submission, surrender, and annihilation by an angry God, followed by dispersal in a sea of mercy and forgiveness. In Le Jardin des supplices, one no longer rises into heaven but fades into the crowd, joining not the Creator but his creatures. Perhaps the best way to illuminate Mirbeau’s new quest for transcendence is through a modification of Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego, applying to Mirbeau’s story a version of the tale of Marsyas. In Anzieu’s view, the skin is first a surface that delimits, retaining inside it “the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words.” It also acts as a “barrier which protects against penetration by [. . .] aggression,” and finally serves “as a site and a primary means of communicating with others.” 51 As an interface, the skin regulates these competing functions, keeping the outside out while facilitating intercourse with others. The primary fantasy enacted in Le Jardin des supplices is an indefinite expansion of the subject’s dermal boundaries. This project seems to fulfill the infant’s desire for omnipotence, eliminating dependence through incorporation of the mother, allowing the self to grow into an infinite container. At the same time, it promises a dissolution in alterity as the subject swims in a sea of other people. The central image in Mirbeau’s text is flaying of the skin, as when the torturer removes the protective envelope of his victim, which, as Anzieu says, “follows along behind him like a shadow.” 52 From authorship to shipboard trips to far, exotic places, Mirbeau explores the different methods of identity transformation and attempts to achieve an ecstatic emancipation from the self. In the frontispiece, the poets, philosophers, and doctors are metamorphosed into verbiage that circulates like money. Mirbeau’s intradiagetic narrator notes the inconsequentiality of their views, which follow them like shadows, filling the drawing room with smoke, poisoning the air with the pollutants of their cynicism. Mouths emitting witticisms, like nostrils expelling smoke, are orifices through which a speaker evaporates into his colleagues. Painfully meaningful communication (like the narrator’s later exegesis) can scar the skin, as Anzieu says, leaving mnemonic traces on the

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body. But as the discussants are unnamed, becoming fungibly interchangeable, their opinions that come from everywhere coalesce and quickly dissipate. Corporeal holes stopped up by cocktails and cigars can as easily be reopened to allow the passage of more language. Unlike the rank tobacco fog that envelopes the host’s salon, the pink cloud Clara marvels at in the sky above the torture garden is like a transient human form whose purpose is to pass away. The miasma in the smoking room is toxic and opaque, whereas Clara, like the cloud, sees herself as fragile, pink, and sweet—a mist that “s’effiloche, s’éparpille, se dissipe, se fond dans le firmament” [unravels, disperses, scatters, and melts away into the firmament]. 53 Not believing it is a genie or remote Uranian sky-god, she sees it as “une âme qui voyage . . . une pauvre petite âme égarée comme la mienne” [a wandering soul . . . a poor lost soul like mine]. 54 What in Dans le ciel had been experienced as a horror of ephemerality, of reality as monstrous shapes that appear and melt in space, is interpreted by Clara as a euthanasic soul migration. In the opening section, thoughts of murder are breathed in by their listeners, are expelled again and proceed through an eternity of retransmission. There is no source for Mirbeau’s novel-fragments, no final resting place in libraries. As the pink cloud reforms at the same hour every day, discontinued novels and dead people “pourraient être continués.” 55 In the story of Marsyas, as Anzieu retells it, the musician is impressed into competing with Apollo, propagating auditory perfume and rose hymns that cross the sky. Since Marsyas can play the aulos but not sing at the same time, he is defeated by Apollo, who accompanies lyre music with his voice. Condemned to be hanged from a tree, his body pierced with lances, Marsyas then is flayed alive, yet his corporeal shell is preserved throughout eternity. The theme of ruptured envelopes, broken vessels, liquefaction is continued in Ovid’s story of the mourning done by Marsyas’s brothers, nature spirits dissolved as tears that create the River Marsyas in Phrygia. In the scene in Mirbeau’s novel on torture as removal of the skin, the executioner performs the artist’s task of improving on God’s creation. For Clara, the flaying of a prisoner’s skin represents a more intimate form of fusion than would normally be possible through conventional coitus. The “original masochistic fantasy” that Anzieu describes is “that the mother and child” at one time had shared “a single skin.” 56 Flaying undoes the work of identity formation, restoring an inaugural state of undifferentiated unity. Projectively, Clara sees a victim freed from the prison house of separation so that like Abbé Jules, he can bathe in an endless sea, a matter pool where forms constantly melt and flow together. But Clara can only watch and imagine at a distance, like prisoners who see tortures awaiting them as images on a wall. The centrifugal impetus that animates Mirbeau’s

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fiction pushes away the common skin, makes the sky’s wall seem more distant, enabling the subject’s ego to swell and become ever more all-encompassing. The explorer on the Saghalien who had eaten Germans and Italians shrinks the dimensions of the world to what he can incorporate by swallowing. But the one who removes the skin ego enjoys an endless self-expansion. The “patapouf” considers himself to be a guardian of tradition, depersonalizing victims as raw material to be sculpted. As an artist, he disputes the immutability of God’s design, using knives and saws to alter the anatomy of his subjects, modifying the genital configuration of the victims who are his masterpieces. Removing people’s skin, he dismantles the barriers that separate. He does not aspire to merge with God but rather to displace him. This is another goal of promoting confluence and merger. Undoing the work of Genesis that divided male and female, day and night, he seeks a restoration of the primordial chaos that existed before Creation. The torturer is not an anarchist after the fashion of Mirbeau, disassembling defective institutions, faulty structures, and oppressive governments. Instead, as Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel writes, he is an epigone of the Marquis de Sade who, in “eradicating the essence of things,” aims at “instituting the absolute mixture.” 57 For him, an experience of transcendence comes from an assertion of his power: “The man who does not respect the law of differentiation challenges God. He creates new combinations of new shapes and new kinds. He takes the place of the Creator and becomes a demiurge.” 58 In the person of the torturer, Mirbeau brings the divine berserker down to earth, the inscrutable, screaming sadist who rained catastrophe on his creatures. Still, in Le Jardin des supplices, amid the Buddhas and priapic idols, the suffering Christ still reappears, ironized as the artist consumed by those who follow him. For Mirbeau, as for Marsyas, the artist’s role is to suffer in the skin, communicating with the faithful through the open mouths of wounds. The wall that divides the frontispiece from the first part of the novel is the scroll of paper that the narrator takes out and unfolds carefully. The opening page of the second part describes another thickening of dermal walls, in the coarsened skin of Annie pocked with excrescences and tumors. But there is no end to Mirbeau’s book, which prolongs the lamentations of the narrator. It is only held in by leather bindings, skin containing other skins, parchment pages cut by readers to release the divine corruption inside. Writer and reader collaborate in practicing the sacred art of torture, flaying the bearer of the word who spreads out into the crowd. Like Christ, hypostatized as the aliment distributed to disciples, the author dies and is resurrected in passing into his audience. Holding out his book, he speaks to them forever, instructing them by saying, Open. Enter. This is my body.

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LE JOURNAL D’UNE FEMME DE CHAMBRE Serialized in L’Echo de Paris in 1891, the first version of Mirbeau’s famous novel Le Journal d’une femme de chambre was composed during a crisis of creative insolvency, the same that had plagued the author during his work on Dans le ciel. Exhausted by the least effort, his brain numb, driven to consume large doses of quinine sulfate, and incessantly badgered by his wife Alice to produce copy that could make them money, Mirbeau was finally able to finish a first draft of the novel. In a narrative from which there emanates the smell of “existential nausea,” 59 Mirbeau presents a picture of a hierarchical society in which disparities in wealth, family lineage, and status create only superficial differences. Masters and their ancillaries, ladies and their chambermaids are otherwise indistinguishable in their indigence of virtue. Underpaid domestics aspire to enter the bourgeoisie so that they can bully and mistreat servants like those they were themselves. A world homogenized by opportunism, duplicity, and vice is pictured differently in the subsequent version, written in 1900, when Mirbeau’s memories of the Dreyfus scandal were still vivid and disturbing. The rich and powerful are still no better, no more respectable than their servants. But Mirbeau’s image of society has taken on a new Manichaean clarity. Fervent nationalists clothed in Catholic self-righteousness are persecutors of the outsider and the Jew. The world that Célestine occupies is one where antiDreyfusards and anti-Semites are pictured as “assassins in positions of power.” Mirbeau encourages his readers to see that “the battle waged by the Dreyfusards is a battle of light against darkness, a battle of freedom of thought against the inhuman part of all people who are distant descendants of the great wild beasts.” 60 More than structuring his image of humanity by polarizing moral standards, Mirbeau shows that beneath the labels of aristocrat and menial, landowner and domestic, there is an element of the inhuman or the superhuman in them all. Célestine’s deciphering intelligence undresses the righteous of their disguises. Where the good and moral man once stood, there is now a pervert or a murderer. But even Célestine sometimes founders when encountering acts that are unexplainable, mysteries that even the most disabused witness cannot elucidate. A world universally vitiated by cupidity and selfishness can be preferable to one in which unintelligibility intrudes. When the social satirist discovers that his humor is powerless to enlighten, he is awakened to a world peopled by monsters, gods, and strangers. Beyond the lands mapped by analysis, there is the territory of the sacred. The stratified society pictured in Octave Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900) shows shininess on top and uncleanness underneath. The external face of things seduces with perfume, gilt, and velvet while the real-

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ity beneath exudes the stench of moral squalor. Mirbeau’s heroine and reader are guided by a scopophilic impulse, as the text leads them to see the world “through the keyhole.” 61 Yet the truth, once undressed of its finery of duplicity, reveals a gash, a wound, an empty space that one is anxious to repress. Working on a dual register as a prurient exposé, the novel also apologizes for its image of society as a meretricious sham. Every person of integrity, every rich and pious master has a secret that his servant strives mightily to uncover and then regrets when he or she reveals it as dissimulation and imposture. The society the book describes is a place of materialism and selfishness where the self and substance are also seen as inexorably putrefying. It is a world without transcendence, “empty of God,” says Serge Duret, for “no grace is granted the creature who is destined for extinction.” 62 The world is like Madame Lanlaire, the mistress of whom the diarist remarks, “C’est rose dessus, oui, et dedans, c’est pourri” [She may be pink on the outside, but she’s rotten on the inside]. 63 Compelled to look, reader and character are horrified by what they see, as their worst suspicions are confirmed that under reality’s skirts, there is nothing. Mirbeau’s autobiographical novels had begun by diagnosing a sick society unsupported by the institutions of family, school, and church. There Mirbeau’s characters had been disabled by a faulty upbringing, scarred by predatory teachers, crazed by sexual hunger, and poisoned by the fiction of romantic love. In Dans le ciel, Mirbeau’s hero had also been frustrated by his powerlessness as an artist, incapable of capturing beauty that was not of this world. Drawing on his experience of suffering and exclusion, he had hoped that God and peace might be attainable somehow elsewhere. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau had seemed to find a resolution, a way out of the impasse in which he found himself at the conclusion of Dans le ciel. Incensed by the injustice he had witnessed in the Dreyfus case, Mirbeau had abandoned the rarefied realm of aaesthetic absolutism in favor of a reengagement with his persecuted brothers. Empathy, compassion, even curiosity had motivated Mirbeau to imagine living inside the skin of others. But in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s evolution as an artist seems to stall. The shimmering exoticism of the torture garden has given way to the discouraging banality of the familiar. Flowers of sadism are no longer washed with the blood of convicts. The tapestry of gore and peacocks turns into a gloomy Normandy estate and a servant’s drafty room beneath the eaves where the consolations of the infinite are reduced to a porcelain Virgin on a table. Yet it is precisely because, in Mirbeau’s book, the atmosphere of nihilism is so unremitting that the heroine’s creative resources are constantly enlisted. The need to negate nothingness is the novel’s central theme, a conscious realization that glamor and wholeness are illusions combined with an unconscious wish that an essential thing may fill the empty place.

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An early episode describing Célestine’s service in the home of Monsieur Rabour and detailing his boot fetishism acts as a model for the effort to construct an impression of authenticity. Whereas perception of the reality of castration says no, the subject’s narcissism decrees that it is unassailable and answers yes. Freud’s premise that the subject denies the absence of the mother’s phallus 64 applies universally in Mirbeau to everything defective, partial, or missing. Metonymized as the crucifix and Madonna that Célestine keeps in her attic room, religious faith works as fetish magic to deny the divinity’s nonexistence. Heralded by Pierre Michel as the most popular of Mirbeau’s novels, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre is also a lacuna, as its ambiguous meaning is completed by differing interpretations. Loosely stitched together, it is a patchwork of memories, vengeance fantasies, political commentary, wishes, and revisionist autobiography. Célestine’s diary is presented as a statement lacking a response, an arraignment of society never followed by a prosecution. Like suffering humanity’s existential address to a silent God—like the dog in Dans le ciel that barks stubbornly at the sky—Célestine’s journal cries for justice but is not answered by justice done. Chronicling the vagabond existence of a disabused domestic, Célestine’s manuscript, in its raw state, charts the desultoriness of her experiences: service in the households of religious hypocrites and nymphomaniacs, some generous, others stingy, all capricious and uncaring. Like all narrative, a diary recapitulates its material, taking the fragmentariness of life’s events and giving them intelligibility and order. The diary— which, by definition, reviews the highlights of a day—is a text composed while the author’s experiences are still ongoing. Disintegrating the author’s life into many piecemeal segments, the diary lacks literature’s impression of development and progression. Since the writer may assume the role of the text’s exclusive reader, the complementary functions of interpretation and analysis may exclude an outside audience. Unlike most fiction that is structured by an explanatory ideology, Célestine’s journal is “a juxtaposition of jumbled recollections” which, in supplying “neither coherence nor continuity, looks out on an uncertain future, one that is admirably suited to an openended vision of the universe.” 65 Haunted by the alienating emptiness of her existence—driven, as Gabriella Tegyey says, to understand her own personality, “prey to a feeling of strangeness and vacancy” 66 —Célestine resorts to writing in her search for purpose and integration. Célestine’s manuscript is a congeries of unexplained occurrences, mysteries, and miscellanies that are rarely clarified or grouped together. Who killed “la petite Claire,” whose body is found mutilated in the woods? Why does Célestine antagonize the mistresses who shower her with gifts, provoking her dismissal from the most enviable positions? What is the mysterious appeal of her fellow servant Joseph, with his brutish taciturnity? What threat is really

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posed by Jews, the objects of polymorphous prejudice? Each question is a partial object uncompleted by an answer, like the “bouts coupés” 67 of Jews, whose familiarity is altered by circumcision. 68 Mirbeau’s account of the character’s search for a recovery of wholeness begins with his statement of the request for his authorial intervention. The female diarist’s work must necessarily be defective; a castrated body, it requires a professional novelist’s attention. On a page of opening remarks, Mirbeau alleges that the manuscript, in its unaestheticized condition, had reached him accompanied by a petition that it be completed by a man’s style. Filling in the woman’s book and the gaps that it contains becomes Mirbeau’s assignment, as he creates a fantasmatic unity, taking what was hers, as he says, and “y mettant du mien” [adding my own touches]. 69 Unprocessed, disconnected, meandering, and unreasoned, Célestine’s journal is a record needing a man’s synthesizing meaning. In a world unredeemed by order, encounters with inauthenticity are so common that Célestine is driven to repeat the acts of peering through the keyhole, searching through trunks and cupboards, and sifting through her mistresses’ intimate apparel, trying to deny that beneath the surface there is nothing. For Célestine, there is no ordered world patterned on the microcosm of the family, only the derisory facsimile of the master/servant bond: the mistress who condescendingly calls her chambermaid “ma fille” [my girl] and the maid who impertinently responds “ma petite mère” [my little mother]. In the novel, masters are morally identical to their servants. Distinctions in wealth and rank fade before the disbelieving gaze. The healthy and the sick, the honest and the criminal become nauseatingly homogeneous, as Serge Duret explains: “There is only a difference of degree between the dead and the living, who also lose their vital substance or remain under a constant threat of liquefaction. Thanatos acts by dissolving forms and destroying lines.” 70 Célestine’s experience of an existence amputated of its purpose moves from experiences of division to coalescence and confusion. God is not in heaven, above the wealthy’s lofty station; menials are not below, in positions of subservience. As insolence and insubordination raise the lowly up, exposure of the abjection of the powerful casts them down, and everyone swims together in a pool of vice and mediocrity. Hierarchies collapse, and the anarchy that magistrates deplore exists everywhere in practice, as grooms are more respected than the equestrian aristocrats employing them. Célestine’s memories of her own family are of chaos and catastrophe: a father drowned at sea, destroyed by water from the outside; a mother, who in her grief turns to alcohol and violence, complementing her dead spouse in being liquefied from the inside. Célestine remembers one night when she had been awakened by a lifeboat’s blaring horn, when, together with her mother, she had hurried to the pier. The first mention in the novel of popular religion

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is the villagers’ prayers to the God thought to protect fishermen from storms. Desperate invocations—“Ah! sainte Vierge . . . Ah! Nostre Jésus!” [Oh! Blessed Virgin! . . . Oh! Jesus!]—had gone unheard when Célestine’s father had been dragged out from the waves, laid out on a camp bed, “les membres rayés de balafres sanglantes” [his limbs striped with bleeding gashes]. 71 Jesus and the Virgin Mary—functional surrogates for the parents—had defaulted in their duty to intercede and rescue. After the death of Célestine’s father and her mother’s plunge into drunken rages, Jesus and the Virgin had lost their capacity to shelter. No longer apotropaic figures that ward off misfortune, the statues Célestine keeps on the mantel in her dormer room are only ornamental figures assimilated to her other furnishings. Célestine’s devotional automatism, her prayers to Saint Anthony of Padua, offer an illusion of constancy in the midst of her turbulent existence. There is hardly a tone of reverence in Célestine’s endorsement of Christian faith: “Si l’on n’avait pas la religion [. . .] et tout le bataclan, on serait bien plus malheureux, ça c’est sûr” [If we didn’t have religion (. . .) and the whole show that goes with it, we’d be even more unhappy, that’s for sure]. 72 Célestine’s attendance at Sunday Mass is no more than a social outing, a change of scene, an opportunity to show off her sophistication and Parisian finery. Religious services are no different from receptions in salons, a chance to see and be seen, another exhibition of hypocrisy: piety as spectacle, homiletic virtuosity, Célestine’s satisfaction in displaying “ma petite jaquette beige” [my little beige jacket]. 73 Despite her habit of assimilating mystical and sensual transports, she associates intensity of feeling, an increase in excitation, and a rapturous loss of self with sex and not with worship. It is not in prayer that she escapes from the plane of the quotidian; it is in the arms of a bearded lover that she passes through “the radiant gates of Ecstasy.” Religion, as was the case with other characters in Mirbeau, is valued for bringing a diminishment of tension, a return to quiescence. Devotional acts are performed in the service of the Nirvana principle, and what God bestows on man is not bliss but an ability to feel nothing: “Quand on est malheureuse—et dans le métier, on l’est beaucoup plus qu’à son tour—il n’y a encore que ça pour endormir vos peines” [When you’re unhappy—and in our job, we are unhappier than most—there is nothing like it (religion) to ease your sorrows]. 74 In church, one feels no impulse to distrust appearances and lift the mask. No discrepancy exists between superficial pageantry and inner emptiness. Jesus, the Holy Mother, saints, and angels—“tout le bataclan”—offer nothing, no salvation from humiliation, grief, and death. Christianity becomes associated with iconographic mass-production, mechanical acts, rote prayers said as shibboleths. Discredited as an avenue to experiences of the sublime, religion is invested with the value of its dependability. Since it is nothing uncomplicated by pretensions to be something, it has the tautological utility

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of being what it seems: “On aura beau dire et beau faire, la religion c’est toujours la religion” [No matter what anyone says or does, religion is always religion]. 75 In Célestine’s opinion of religion as something desacralized and ordinary, one sees an indication of a God identified as immanence. Not enthroned on a higher plane above man’s suffering and struggles, God is equated with the energy that operates life’s machinery: vitality that does not diminish but migrates between forms. But in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Célestine’s circular proclamations convey a fatalistic resignation, a reluctance to rebel. Things are as they are. There is no point in trying to change them, no point in overthrowing the ruling class or murdering masters in their beds. Instead, one steals their money so that, in becoming rich, one can supplant them. Célestine listens as Joseph exonerates the Lanlaires of their cupidity. Their vices are like ours, he says. We honor them as we honor ourselves: “Il faut aimer ses maîtres . . . Les maîtres sont les maîtres” [You have to love your masters . . . The masters are the masters]. 76 Whereas in Le Jardin des supplices, the fantasy of identity migration held out the promise of self-multiplication, for Célestine, the homogeneity of ignobility and selfishness traps the character in a world without transcendence: in trying to move faster, higher, farther from myself, I encounter only derisory reflections of my own smallness and materialism. Célestine’s narrative begins by showing a society unstructured by degrees of moral difference. Those privileged by ancestry or hereditary fortune may be stripped of their entitlement to lives of idleness and luxury. Beneath her gown, a mistress is flaccid buttocks and sagging breasts. Beneath the severity of his pressed pants and claims of moral probity, a master is a satyr fondling slatterns in a barn. Célestine sees repeatedly that their claims of superiority are groundless. She knows their money is a fetish substitute for virtue and propriety. Yet while acknowledging a rich man is “souvent imbécile et quelquefois meurtrier” [often an imbecile and sometimes a murderer], she sees him as a god whose benevolence is never demonstrated: “Je ne puis m’empêcher de le regarder [. . .] comme une espèce de divinité merveilleuse” [I can’t help but look at him (. . .) as a kind of marvelous divinity]. 77 Although Célestine’s insolence may qualify her as an instrument of subversion, her goal is not to overturn a system of hierarchical inequality but to change places with the oppressors whose exalted station is unmerited. Like the fetishist who never questions the reality of castration, only supplying an illusion that conceals a lack, the servants in Mirbeau work within a discredited social structure, rearranging its component parts but never challenging its basic premise. Even Monsieur Rabour’s fixation on Célestine’s “chères bottines” [dear boots] incorporates a recognition of an immutable social order, a stratified system that neither the master nor the servant questions. Thus as Gaétan Davoult observes, Célestine’s boots are “a primordial element of her

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uniform.” Sexual relationships are subsumed by class relationships: “From then on, the relationship established by the enchantment of the fetish is not a carnal one but a social one, and it assumes its value in the relation of the master to the domestic.” 78 Sexual exploitation, reinforced by social inequality, is like anti-Semitism in being stipulated as legitimate, beyond the capacity of language to dispute it. God may be a cruel mirage that never has saved anyone, the rich may be rapacious hypocrites more dissolute than their servants, but religion is religion, and the masters are the masters. While it may constitute only a small subversive exercise, reconfiguring relationships may create the possibility of change, destabilizing institutions that perpetuate exploitation. When it is recontextualized, an object may seem uncanny, fresh, and different. It may assume a magic power beyond its perceived utility and value. Even Célestine’s diary is a jumble of nonsequential memories, a record of days that, when taken out of their linear succession, suggests that the life the writer lived was not ineluctable or predestined. Mirbeau’s novel sets in opposition the wish for understanding and encounters with things that all at once seem disturbingly out of place. Chambermaids, as a matter of occupational necessity, routinely violate the boundaries of high and low, public and private. Spatial divisions are regularly collapsed; upstairs virtue and downstairs vice are promiscuously commingled. If God is not in church, perhaps religion is not religion. If grooms command more admiration than the wealthy who employ them, masters may not be masters. The fetish is a talisman that acquires its power through partiality. It completes anything, appears anywhere, and repairs any castrating disfigurement. Célestine’s mistress from the rue Lincoln who secretes a dildo in a jewel case aspires to a wholeness exempting her from the gaze of the male fetishist. Detached from a body, it affords its user a symbolic power superseding its function as a tool of masturbatory satisfaction. Instead of allaying fears of mutilation, the phallic woman contests men’s prerogative to assign meaning. The stupefied customs officer who forces open the object’s hiding place is like Mirbeau’s narrator, at a loss for words to describe what the woman is transporting. Both convey, in the aporia that appears in Mirbeau’s text, that what is lacking is not a biological feature of the woman but the expressive competence of a man robbed of his mastery of the symbolic. Beyond the conventional association of women’s genitals as jewels, the contents of the case are linguistically repressed. Once women regain power in terms of what they have, the castrating injury shifts to man’s capacity to speak. Under the mask, beneath the skirt or the signifying power of the word, there is the absent thing, the nothing accorded the prestige of the sacred. Where man encounters a lack of meaning, he erects a shrine to God. Where the phallus is seen as missing, he creates the magic talisman. 79

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In Mirbeau’s earlier novels, confronting the meaninglessness of life elicited cries of anguish sent into a silent heaven overhead. Here for the first time, the experience of existential emptiness inspires the discovery of a god that is the subject’s own invention. Fetish, etymologically derived from the Latin facere, meaning “to make,” suggests the factitiousness of an artificial thing endowed with magic powers. A religious icon or sacred vessel, the fetish is subsequently vulgarized as the replacement for a body part, passing into the profane idiom of deviance or pathology. Yet in Mirbeau’s novel, the fetish reconnects the worlds of religion and sexuality, often associated by Célestine as sources of sublimity. As attendance at Sunday Mass eases the miseries of the poor, as faith counteracts their suffering, she says, “ça . . . et l’amour” [that . . . and love]. 80 Despite the comic or shock-producing intention of these episodes, Mirbeau’s use of fetish magic to link spirituality and eroticism reinforces the message that art is born of seeking meaning and finding nothing. People worship a divinity because they experience him as absence. Customs officials paw through the intimate apparel in women’s suitcases “puisqu’il n’y a rien” [since there’s nothing there], as the female traveler insists. Mirbeau’s most detailed elaboration on the portmanteau significance of the fetish comes in his story of the stone erection of the gargoyle on the Church of Port-Lançon. A gratuitous vignette unrelated to Célestine’s biography, the story is taken from an article in a Rouen newspaper. God, who should represent a whole as the harmony of its parts—who is mirrored in Creation and the ordered narratives celebrating him—is mocked in the farrago of Mirbeau’s random anecdotes. Nothing must necessarily precede or follow anything. Conclusions supply no retroactive explanations for what they summarize. Novels are like the women whose murders are reported in the newspaper: a limb here, a chapter there, another body “coupé en morceaux” [cut into pieces]. Célestine keeps a journal because her life has been directionless. She disintegrates her existence into bits of meaningless experience, then reassembles them in hopes that they will become intelligible as a book. The disheartening experiences of the present become tolerable only after life is rearranged into a narrative. Instead of despairing, Célestine “ressasse passionément ce passé, afin de reconstituer avec ses morceaux épars l’illusion d’un avenir” [sifts passionately through the past in order to piece its scattered pieces together into the illusion of a future]. 81 Unlike Célestine’s manuscript, the Church of Port-Lançon had initially been offered as an image of wholeness, based on the integrity of its architecture: sacred figures; a rose adorning the ogival door of the western arch; on the northern side, an array of capering demons and symbolic animals, as if taken, Mirbeau writes, from a page of Rabelais. One day while walking in an alley paralleling the northern wall, the vinegary Soeur Angèle had been

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shocked to see “un homme tout nu,” a tumescent gargoyle alarming her sense of decency. After being notified and then climbing up after nightfall to break off the offending member, the deacon resumed his duties with tranquility of conscience. Unbeknownst to him, a parishioner chanced upon the fragment and, believing it to be a relic preserved throughout the centuries, laid it on a velvet cushion flanked by flowers on an altar. However, when she prayed to the unknown saint, occasional impure thoughts and vague erotic reveries darkened “la joie pure de ses extases” [the pure joy of her ecstasies]. 82 As Célestine acknowledges, sexual pleasure and spiritual transports are aroused when one is elevated above the plane of daily wretchedness. Castration extends to a life unredeemed by glimpses of the transcendental, when one experiences no intuitions of the sacred, when one undergoes no loss of self in mystic contemplation or in intercourse with a lover. The power of the phallus comes from its capacity to make whole, from its ability to be moved wherever it is needed. The mutilating expurgation of the Church of PortLançon had paradoxically increased its signifying power. The priapic gargoyle phallus, ignored throughout the centuries, becomes invested with new meaning, inspiring dreams of paradise or fears of hell. Divine and sexual love, bestowed upon a subject, are the product of creativity activated by an encounter with a lack. Despite repeatedly endorsing conservative moral principles—heterosexual genitality, in which a man and woman are made one; the inviolability of the nation whose boundaries define the identity of its citizens; the sanctity of property conferring a sense of totalizing ownership—Célestine constantly unsettles these stabilizing institutions, breaking up what is intact, removing pieces of what is whole, perverting what is normal, defacing what is publicly respected. Célestine may voice incredulity over Monsieur Rabour’s deviant inventiveness. Where do men like this come up with their sick and strange ideas? “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” [And how do they imagine such things when it is so simple and so good to make love nicely like everyone?]. 83 Yet when circumstances force her again to seek shelter with “les bonnes soeurs de Neuilly” [the Sisters of Neuilly], Célestine happily resumes her experiments with lesbianism and fantasies of bestiality. In the novel, the finished thing is what incites the vandal’s gesture. Tear structures down, remove a portion, knock off the devil’s phallus—Célestine shares Mirbeau’s propensity to attack a stable order, to take component parts and rearrange them in order to create confusion. The artist’s task is to make room, as he opens up an empty space that he can fill in with his work. That is why the criminality of Joseph assumes an element of the sacred— not because of his campaign to rob the rich and help himself, thereby reestablishing the justice left undone by God. Over the course of the many years of

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her service as a chambermaid, Célestine had learned to look for meaning under appearance’s proper clothes. In the realm of social masquerade, there is a fetishizing of the surface, impediments to the vision that seeks to penetrate and probe. Manufacture of the fetish becomes more challenging and urgent if there is interference in the exercise of the dynamics of the gaze. Only the locked door beckons the voyeur to put his eye up to the keyhole. Neither the woman fully clothed nor the unambiguity of her nakedness mobilizes the inventive artistry of the fetishist. The conflict between what Freud calls an unwelcome perception and a reality-denying wish is what motivates the fantasy, requiring that the subject work in the transitional domain of illusion. The cynicism Célestine expresses on the subject of her masters’ rectitude is offset by her reluctance to discount their importance altogether. More than the garment of pretension or the nakedness of vice, she enjoys the lingerie of duplicity, the uncertainty of doors half-opened, conjectural games of peekaboo. Fetishism requires the collaboration of the exhibitionist and looker who participate in a fantasmatic cosmetology of surfaces. Again Mirbeau collapses the opposition between his seemingly honest heroine and her hypocritical employers. The maid who voices wonderment that boots are needed to achieve orgasm—who asks why it is so difficult to make love nicely, like everyone—is the same person who engages in a necrophilic idyll with Monsieur Georges. The servant who eschews masturbation with a dildo, who is horrified by a custom official’s rough handling of a woman’s underwear, acknowledges her own delight in manipulating fetishes: “J’aime à jouer avec les chemises de nuit, les chiffons et les rubans, tripoter les lingeries, les chapeaux, les dentelles” [I love playing with nightgowns, frills and ribbons, handling undergarments, hats, and lace]. 84 This is the intermediate zone in which Mirbeau situates his novel, the potential space in which fantasy is nurtured by uncertainty and guesswork. According to Donald Winnicott’s analysis in Playing and Reality, it is here that the fetish is fashioned as an adult version of the transitional object, in the “area [. . .] between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing.” 85 Fetish magic depends on the subject’s maintaining a precarious balance between a belief in the recovery of his omnipotence and an adjustment to reality that stipulates castration. Fleeting glimpses, uncertain spectacles, and the pleasure of trompe-l’oeil allow a momentary reconciliation of affirmation and denial. As the object of Célestine’s titillated speculation, Joseph offers the richness of an enigma unimpoverished by information. At times the indecipherability of Joseph becomes a matter of ontology. If he takes a trip to Cherbourg, is it certain he will come back? As she watches Joseph gardening from a window in the laundry room, she wonders, Does he stop existing when he disappears from sight? “Le temps de pencher la tête . . . et il n’y a plus

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personne . . . S’enfonce-t-il dans le sol? . . . Passe-t-il à travers les murs?” [In the time it takes to lower my head . . . there’s no longer anyone there . . . Has he been swallowed up in the earth? . . . Can he pass through walls?]. 86 As with vision games like hide-and-seek, fears are induced and then dispelled. The hidden other reappears. Mother is dead, then resurrected. In Winnicott’s view of play, there is collaboration between the mother who respects the enabling properties of the transitional object and the infant who is comforted by something whose illusory nature is unspoken. Similarly in their relationship, Célestine and Joseph play cooperatively, constructing mysteries the other refrains from trying to elucidate. Playing with the toy of patriotism, professing factitious ideologies, purveying anti-Semitic hatred— these are games in which Joseph enlists the Lanlaires’ other servants to participate. Do Célestine and Joseph hate Jews and really want to kill them? Leaving the question unanswered allows the game to be continued. The conclusion of the novel shows that antipathy for Jews is a comedy in which the actors have learned to collude. Having absconded with the Lanlaires’ tea service to get the money for his new business, Joseph, as Célestine observes, “a rajeuni” [had started to look younger]. Having put off the mask of trustworthiness and servility, he dons the costume of the jovial hosteller in his Cherbourg café: “rasé de frais” [clean shaven], “le jarret souple” [with a spring in his step]. Outfitted in “un petit décolletage aguichant” [a naughty, low-cut dress], 87 Célestine herself has a new wardrobe befitting her role as flirtatious barmaid. Joseph, as his wife remarks, still professes anti-Semitism. He is still “pour la propriété, pour la religion, pour la marine, pour l’armée, pour la patrie” [for property, for religion, for the navy, for the army, for the fatherland]. 88 But as Mirbeau shows, the fixity of taxonomic classifications is illusory and false. Actor, spectator, master, servant: all are interchangeable parts in the theater of exploitation. Joseph’s xenophobic rants and cries of “Mort aux juifs!” [Death to the Jews!] build a thriving business atmosphere conducive to drunkenness and violence. Despite affecting an air of bonhomie, Joseph is still the blank page of his unascertainable identity. He still invites Célestine’s theories about what he thinks and what he has done. He still spices their marriage with the aphrodisiac of his spouse’s curiosity: “Jamais je ne connaîtrai rien de Joseph; jamais je ne connaîtrai le mystère de sa vie . . . Et c’est peut-être cet inconnu qui m’attache tant à lui” [I’ll never know anything about Joseph; I’ll never know the mystery of his life . . . And perhaps it is this quality of the unknown that attracts me so to him]. 89 Mirbeau suggests that human relationships are between a subject and his imaginings, between myself and my hypotheses of the person you may be. All we know is what we project onto the screen of our perceptions. The underlying reality is unknowable or empty.

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As Winnicott’s title indicates, we escape reality through playing, and the servants’ favorite pastime is to expose their masters’ virtue as nothingness dressed up in the formal wear of their deceptions. Class hierarchy awards dispossession to domestics and satiety to the employers who are profligate or avaricious. Mistresses have babies. Their chambermaids have abortions. The rich consume excessively while they measure with a ruler the fullness of a brandy bottle from which they suspect their servants drink. However, the game of positional inversions as described in Mirbeau’s novel prescribes temporary redistributions of money, wealth, and status. In reallocating funds that allow their accession to the bourgeoisie, Joseph and Célestine commit a theft no different from the thefts done by their masters. Yet Célestine intuitively recognizes that the larcenies committed daily are fundamentally dissimilar to what she sees as sacred criminality. In Le Jardin des supplices, the narrator’s father, a practiced swindler, describes the dynamics of an economy based on transactional dishonesty. Removing a commodity from the circulation in which everyone cheats everyone is robbery, which is different from the daily practice of defrauding. Commerce, as the father defined it, involves taking something from one person and selling it to another for as much profit as one can get. As with fetish play, the act of moving things from place to place is recreational dishonesty in which everyone participates. If the object satisfies, does it matter if it is genuine? Is the orgasm achieved through the use of bijoux naturels any different from the climax reached with the dildo in a jewel case? Is the sense of a holy presence afforded by a gargoyle penis any different from the transports induced by a genuine relic in a shrine? In Mirbeau’s fiction, God can serve in the capacity of transitional object only by enabling the believer to pass from one stage to the next. Like merchandise passing freely between the hands of thieves, a fetish is a toy as long as it supplies a transient illusion. By definition, the fetish is a symbol invested with sacred properties, an object endowed with power that occults a God that cannot be imaged. The deus absconditus encountered in Mirbeau’s writing is an absence that can be filled only with the art of the incommensurable. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau shows that an experience of the divine comes from encountering criminality higher than the banality of daily pilfering. Retransmitting sums of money belongs to the realm of play while confronting absolute absence falls within the domain of the sacred. For Célestine, nothingness instills religious awe unlike anything she feels when attending Sunday Mass. Upsetting the social order is an expression of ludic anarchy, avenging the disenfranchised on the powerful who oppress them. But when transgression overlaps into the realm of the sacrilegious, she sees metaphysical revolt as manifesting the divine.

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In her early musings on religion, Célestine had stressed the institutional stability of church ritual, the fetish magic of religious knickknacks, and the anaesthetic value of collective worship. Condemned to a life of humiliated vagrancy, enduring her mistresses’ temperamental volatility, she had looked to faith not for shattering glimpses of God but for the soothing predictability of liturgical offices and devotional ceremonies. It is in the domain of the taboo that an absence of the rich man’s god suggests the existence of a darker counterpart. When Joseph prolongs the death throes of a goose he kills for dinner—when he is suspecting of killing “la petite Claire”—he does violence without reason. The sinner and the righteous man may occasionally change places. The power of the phallus may be reassigned to different players. The game of universal despoliation may seem tawdry and eternal, prompting Célestine’s cynical acquaintance William to admonish, “La vie est la vie” [That’s life]. 90 But sometimes, as with Joseph, Célestine encounters a mystery that is otherworldly, outside the boundaries of life as she experiences it every day. With Joseph, the supernatural is not a hobgoblin used to frighten willful children, not a transitional object to pacify a baby anxious over his mother’s absence. So coldblooded, gratuitous, and extreme is Joseph’s violence that he assumes the majesty of a God confounding human expectations of rationality. To Serge Duret, Joseph becomes an embodiment of the death drive—not as a personification of the biological tendency to equilibrium, but as a force of supernatural evil occupying the empty throne of the God of Justice: “an allegory of Thanatos, a cruel god who amuses himself with the suffering of wretched humanity. Everything about this character who emerges as the master of the game suggests that he is none other than the Prince of Darkness, the spirit of Evil.” 91 Readers familiar with Mirbeau’s distaste for religious fear-mongering may be surprised at a characterization of the novel as peopled with demons and death-gods. But Duret’s negative deification of Joseph as an agent of cosmic darkness shows the critic of the novel reacting in the same way as its heroine. However, for Célestine, Joseph also carries an aura of the supernatural since his actions seem unexplainable in terms of the politics of exploitation. Joseph resembles the God of Kierkegaard as Camus has described him: having the attributes of the absurd, he is “unjust, incoherent, and incomprehensible.” 92 In Joseph, one sees illustrated Freud’s views on sadism as an extroversion of the death drive, yet his aggression seems unaccompanied by any overt sexual aim. Embodying a destructiveness that appears purposeless and random, Joseph is like the devil, whom Freud describes as a convenient invention by a benign God. Satan also serves as a useful construct for society, at pains to explain the flourishing of wickedness in the world. The devil does not inspire man to commit unmotivated acts of evil. Rather, man is

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infected by an “inborn human inclination to ‘badness’” 93 and so creates the devil as a scapegoat for iniquity that is purely human. Here Freud also identifies the homologous roles of the Jew and the anti-Semite who, to each other, are mysterious aliens whose noxiousness is a product of a failure to understand. “The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God,” as Freud remarks. “In that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal.” 94 Mirbeau’s analysis of the jingoism that gripped France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair can also be illumined by Freud’s analysis of a group’s hostility to outliers. Referring to this phenomenon as “the narcissism of minor differences,” Freud explains the old antagonisms pitting countries against their neighbors. In describing the psychological wellspring of nationalistic hatred and anti-Semitism, Freud cites the need for destructive instincts to have a nemesis or enemy: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” 95 It is this principle that Joseph utilizes in the operation of his business, in which café patrons are bound together in their antipathy for outsiders. Yet whereas Joseph sees Jews as an evil collectivity, there is the singular evil that he represents himself and that springs from an obscure source. Joseph is the devil occupying the place that God leaves empty, the chaos-breeding adversary of a divinity who is reasonable yet absent. For Célestine, the appraiser of man’s hypocrisy and opportunism, Joseph is a fantasm born of admiration and perplexity. Through the keyhole, she had seen others undressed of their false virtue. But what if she searched through people’s dressing rooms and instead of finding pretense, discovered that things were what they seemed? For Célestine, Joseph rises to the level of the transcendental because, alone among his fellow men, he is both mysterious and obvious. Following her habit of ferreting out secrets, Célestine goes to Joseph’s room while he is traveling to Cherbourg. As with her mistresses’ fetishchiffons that she loved to spread about and fondle, she succumbs to the “désir violent de fouiller partout” [the violent desire to search through everything]. 96 There is an impulse to desecrate in Célestine’s violation of others’ privacy. But when her search is done, what she finds is that Joseph’s secret is to have none. Opening closets, drawers, and boxes, she uncovers no pornographic booklets, no incriminating love letters; only dormouse traps, garden seed, and an old missal with yellow pages. This is Célestine’s first encounter with the vacancy that God is meant to occupy: “Rien n’est mystérieux dans cette chambre, rien ne s’y cache” [There was nothing mysterious in this room, nothing hidden]. After the existential cry to God, the silence of an empty

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heaven is communicated to Joseph’s personal effects: “Les objets qu’il possède sont muets, comme sa bouche” [His possessions are as silent and unspeaking as his mouth]. 97 Joseph’s inexpressiveness is also a feature of Mirbeau’s narrative, which never conclusively identifies him as the murderer of “la petite Claire.” Whereas on the level of social interactions, Célestine’s tautologies are impoverishing, when they are applied to Joseph, they signify the inexhaustibility of a sacred mystery. Masters may be masters, thwarting a reordering of class hierarchies. Life may be life, prescribing passive resignation. But as a monstre sacré in the literal sense, Joseph is Joseph and so guards against attempts at simplifying or defining him. In the patient execution of his scheme to steal the Lanlaires’ silver service, Joseph perpetrates a crime violating the bourgeoisie in the sanctity of their material plenitude. Taken out of its “mystérieux et inviolable tabernacle” [mysterious and inviolable tabernacle], 98 the silver is inspected once a year with the veneration due a relic. Yet the Lanlaires’ silver is a fetish that conceals and underscores the futility of its owners’ iconolatry. The profane thing is protected inside strongboxes and coffers. The sacred thing, as in Joseph’s room, is left out in plain view. Unaware of Joseph’s true motivation, Célestine initially sees the theft as an act of political retribution, an attack on a materialist ideology privileging money over people. In a universe where God abdicates in his administration of justice, breaking the rules that enforce the sacrosanctity of personal property suggests the existence of a higher value system that Célestine can only vaguely apprehend. As Norman O. Brown writes of objects like the Lanlaires’ tea service, the “salient characteristic” of gold and silver is “their absolute uselessness.” Endowed with supernatural preciousness, treasure is amassed by postponing the pleasures it can purchase. Wealth is another divinity-as-absence; as Brown adds, “The imaginary value placed on gold and silver is derived from the domain of the sacred.” 99 Undefiled by self-interest, the purely transgressive act is incomprehensible and so can be performed by God alone. The murder of which Joseph is suspected and his assault on the master class through an attack on their sacred symbols are semioclastic acts violating an economy that equates material with meaning. Operating outside the universal code of acquisitiveness and egotism, Joseph commits a crime that Célestine experiences as spiritually uplifting and sexually arousing. Le crime a quelque chose de violent, de solennel, de justicier, de religieux, qui m’épouvante certes, mais qui me laisse aussi—je ne sais comment exprimer cela—de l’admiration. Non, pas de l’admiration, puisque l’admiration est un

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Despite reassuring Célestine by saying, “J’ai les sangs tournés de vous” [I’m crazy about you], 101 Joseph acts as a renegade god unmoved by lust for pleasure or money. The Creator’s antagonist, he is a force of the death drive externalized as unreasoned annihilation. His goal is the extinction of life and meaning on a universal scale. As Freud writes, In sadism [. . .] the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense [. . .] But where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of its destructiveness [. . .] the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. 102

Magic thinking, primary process, a display of antisocial tendencies, relinquishment of objects in favor of a return to primary narcissism: these are characteristics of the primitive and the infant who take themselves for God. Other people are expendable. There are no laws and no social contract, just an autonomous self whose needs are matched by a sense of boundless power. But the illusion of omnipotence, like the illusion of the fetish, inevitably encounters the disenchantments of reality. Célestine’s fantasy of Joseph operating on the plane of the transcendental is dispelled when she discovers he is just another larcenous domestic. What would happen, she wonders, if her religion of transgression were the product of her imagination “portée aux rêves exceptionnels” [prone to fantastic dreams]? What would happen if she found out that Joseph was “une simple brute [. . .] incapable même d’une belle violence, même d’un beau crime?” [a simple brute incapable even of a beautiful act of violence, even of a beautiful crime?]. 103 Although his mystery remains, Joseph is no cosmic saboteur but an entrepreneur focused on opening a patriotism-themed café. No longer operating in an underworld of infernal anarchy and bloodshed, he takes his place among others wanting only money and success. The anguish born of experiences of nothingness in Mirbeau’s novel is an incentive to produce theologies and art works. But as with the fetish, creativity and religion are only partial remedies. Having stooped over the abyss of Joseph’s empty soul and empty room, Célestine had imagined him as a god sowing carnage and confusion. But then she looked closer and found no sublimity to fill the emptiness. Célestine had fantasized Joseph as a swashbuckling pillager with a drawn knife but then found out he was just a man

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exploiting for profit his wife’s attractiveness: “Et voilà qu’il ne s’agissait que d’une réclame, petite et vulgaire” [And after all that, it was nothing but a cheap bit of advertising]. 104 While she clings to her illusions of Joseph’s mysterious charisma, saying that he holds her in thrall “comme un démon” [like a demon], 105 she returns him to a world where criminality has lost its romance. Joseph is no Luciferean rebel impervious to conscience, immune to law, independent from social etiquette. There is no hell of disobedience, only raucous brawls in a café. There is no God or devil that can fill the empty place, only the world here below where “rien c’est rien” [nothing is nothing]. However, the conclusion of Mirbeau’s book foreshadows his later theme of eternity as life that is endlessly regenerative. Sanctifying the principles of an economy of self-interest in which nothing is possessed but everything is traded, Mirbeau pictures a world in which forms perish but energy remains. This distinction augurs Freud’s remarks on inevitable mortality, on the death drive that applies only to the body’s mortal parts while sparing the germ cells, which are “potentially immortal,” capable of developing into “a new individual.” 106 This leads Freud to hypothesize that he is dealing with “two kinds of instincts: those which seek to lead what is living to death, and others, the sexual instincts, which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life.” 107 This is what Mirbeau discerns in the activity of the manure pile, or in the torture garden, where convicts are bodies that are crucified while their fluids feed the soil and promote the blossoming of flowers. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, the theater of death and immortality is resituated in the dull domain of money, class, and power. But the idea of morphological change as an inflection of the death drive applies to a society where servants can become the masters, where wealth is always catalyzed into the principle of circulation, where things do not die but are recontextualized and reimagined. Mirbeau’s novel begins as an exposition of the heroine’s cynicism. A society hierarchically arranged by differences in status, wealth, and virtue is a sham since masters and menials are identical in their opportunism. The chambermaid allows the reader to peer through the keyhole of appearances and, in so doing, see that the only truth is the universality of deception. Born of incredulity, this new knowledge restores a fixed and stable world, but it is one as illusory as the immutable system that has the powerful on top and the weak on the bottom. Having performed the salutary function of unmasking impostors and exposing frauds, Célestine’s narrative risks stagnating in its presumption of omniscience. It is the discovery of a lack, the encounter with a mystery, which upsets the narcissistic stasis of wisdom admiring itself. Were she able, Célestine might summarize this realization as

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follows: When I am confident in my convictions, I am imprisoned in myself, but when I confront the inexplicable, my creative resources are again mobilized. I am once more set on a course that takes me farther from myself. In Le Jardin des supplices, as in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, the death drive affects matter seeking dormancy and stasis while immortality is achieved by the vigorous and adaptable. The death of novels signals their rebirth as fresh analyses. Flowers sprout in blood pools, enabling embryological forms to grow. The collision of ideas, the clash of ideologies: Mirbeau’s world is an inexhaustible reservoir of combustibles. Coming down from the sky, the God experienced as nothing manifests himself as the dynamics of life, as mobility and aggression. Emptiness fleetingly glimpsed motivates the feverish work of creation. Where there were inertia, dead gods, and meaninglessness, there are kinesis, invention, and heat. NOTES 1. Quoted in Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 592. 2. Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 611. 3. Lawrence Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” SubStance 27, no. 2 (1998): 106–27. 4. For an altogether different interpretation of the novel, see Christopher Lloyd, who writes, “It is worth recalling that Mirbeau adopted the pseudonym ‘Nirvana’ when he wrote some of his Lettres de l’Inde fourteen years before Le Jardin des supplices, suggesting thereby the mystical urge to extinguish desire and be embraced by the world spirit. However, his fictional heroes as a rule prefer impotent indignation to serene resignation and mystification to mysticism. The narrator’s struggle with the vegetable kingdom in Le Jardin des supplices finally amounts to a failure to embrace otherness, a yearning revealed by the writer himself.” Christopher Lloyd, Mirbeau’s Fictions (Durham, UK: University of Durham Press, 1996), 39–40. 5. Octave Mirbeau, Dans le ciel, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:22–23. 6. Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:165. 7. Ibid., 194. 8. Charles Baudelaire, “L’Horloge,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1961), 87. 9. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 309. 10. Ibid. 11. “The harrow” refers to the torture machine in Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” first published in 1919. The machine etches the prisoner’s flesh with the crime committed. 12. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 310. 13. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2011), 55. 14. Ibid. 15. Pierre Michel, introduction to Le Jardin des supplices, by Octave Mirbeau, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:148. 16. Ibid. 17. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 200. 18. Ibid.

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19. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 297. 20. Ibid., 203. 21. Ibid., 189. 22. Ibid., 191. 23. Ibid. 24. Michel, introduction to Le Jardin des supplices, 133. 25. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 205. 26. Ibid., 231; see Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007): “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 [. . .] Finished works are useful only since new ones can destroy them, reutilizing material to fashion other self-dismantling 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” (130-31). 27. Michel, introduction to Le Jardin des supplices, 136. 28. Ibid., 138. 29. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 201. 30. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 166. 31. Ibid., 286. 32. Ibid., 245. 33. Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” 115. 34. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 297. 35. Ibid., 223. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 163. 39. Ibid., 172. 40. Ibid., 165. 41. Ibid., 172. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 320. 44. Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” 109. 45. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 320. 46. Ibid., 321. 47. Ibid., 318. 48. Ibid., 316. 49. Schehr, “Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence,” 110. 50. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 173. 51. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 40. 52. Ibid., 50. 53. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 306. 54. Ibid., 306–7. 55. Michel, introduction to Le Jardin des supplices, 138. 56. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 42. 57. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1984), 6. 58. Ibid., 9. 59. Pierre Michel, introduction to Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, by Octave Mirbeau, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:347. 60. Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau, s.v. “Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” http://mirbeau.assoc.fr/dictionnaire/. 61. Michel, introduction to Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 343. 62. Serge Duret, “Eros et Thanatos dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” in Actes du colloque d’Angers: Octave Mirbeau (Angers, France: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), 263.

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63. Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:391. 64. Discussed in Freud’s 1927 essay “Fetishism.” 65. Michel, introduction to Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 349. 66. Gabriella Tegyey, “Claudine et Célestine: Les Formes du journal et son fonctionnement,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001): 93. 67. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 465. 68. In The Nothing Machine, I characterize these encounters with the unknown as motivating speculation that leads to greater literary creativity: “By undermining the conviction that meanings inhere in things themselves, Mirbeau’s nothing machine destroys the certainties which impoverish and immobilize [. . .] By revealing the dialectical interplay of dismantling and reconstruction, Mirbeau’s text respects the disorganization of the diary it claims to be based on. Declining to change the story of a psychologically damaged servant girl into a seamless narrative, Mirbeau refrains from exchanging life’s complexity for “de la simple littérature” (135). 69. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 380. 70. Duret, “Eros et Thanatos,” 250. 71. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 447. 72. Ibid., 388. 73. Ibid., 416. 74. Ibid., 415. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 662. 77. Ibid., 406. 78. Gaétan Davoult, “Déchet et corporalité dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 11 (2004): 122–23. 79. In The Nothing Machine, I emphasized the value of the fetish as encouraging political change: “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” (145). 80. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 415. 81. Ibid., 471. 82. Ibid., 544. 83. Ibid., 387. 84. Ibid., 406. 85. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1989), 11. 86. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 506. 87. Ibid., 664. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 648. 91. Duret, “Eros et Thanatos,” 260–61. 92. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 29. 93. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 754. 94. Ibid., 755. 95. Ibid., 751. 96. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 590. 97. Ibid., 591. 98. Ibid., 653. 99. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 246. 100. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 655.

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Ibid., 585. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 755. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 663. Ibid., 666. Ibid., 667. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 54. Ibid., 55.

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LES 21 JOURS D’UN NEURASTHÉNIQUE Despite its discontinuous, piecemeal composition, Le Jardin des supplices had offered a coherent if depressing picture of the human condition. The garden, as the narrator had said in an edifying summary of the novel, was an omnibus signifier of natural violence and human cruelty. French surgeons and Chinese torture artists might work with different implements. Politicians, priests, and procuresses might stand on different rungs of the social ladder. But whether working in legislative chambers, hospitals, or bordellos, all were single-mindedly committed to doing the work of death. Up through Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s fiction had balanced its often chaotic exposition with a unifying message on instinctual and social behavior. The universality of suffering, the inexorable law of murder, the incomprehensibility of man’s existence had elicited attempts on Mirbeau’s part to order and explain. Mistresses and maids were governed by the same venality; “the Chinese bagnio becomes a horrible mirror of the European justice system.” Everything in nature “conforms to a rigorous dialectic.” 1 The redness of a peony is the bright vermilion of a convict’s blood. However, Mirbeau’s imposition of a philosophy of natural processes and social interactions had risked becoming a dialogue between the author and his intelligence: pathology and nosology, a conundrum and its elucidation. With the publication in 1901 of Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Mirbeau renounced the impulse to clarify that had long been indispensable to his survival. After resisting the lure of death by reasoning its attraction, Mirbeau turned from analysis of his ideas to astonished contemplation of other people.

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This was the first step in the reorienting of Mirbeau’s quest for the transcendental, turning it outward from death or preservation of the self to an invigorated appraisal of the world. In August 1897, on the advice of his physician, Mirbeau had traveled to the spa in Luchon in search of a cure for the catarrh that, if left untreated, threatened him with possible deafness. The claustrophobic oppressiveness of the Pyrenean landscape—mountains obliterated by constant cloud cover— had been alleviated by the fanciful incongruity of the sanitarium clientele. In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Mirbeau’s political positions remain unchanged: sanguinary military officers, grandiose doctors, puppet-like public officials still file by in a farcical parade. All still call down the apocalyptic revolution that Mirbeau waited for in vain, the collapse of society he dreamt of, “without believing that it would happen, naturally, since his materialist philosophy did not comfort itself with illusions.” 2 However, in his novel, the ideological condemnation that had grouped enemies together begins to give way to humor that differentiates its subjects, displaying the humility of surprise. Mirbeau’s derision most pointedly targets the gnosticrats who purport to encompass everything with their explanatory theories: ethnocentrists whose cultural superiority blinds them to the world’s diversity, psychiatrists who claim to navigate with equal ease interstellar space and the human brain. Mirbeau’s novel may appear to be an episodic inspection of a comical menagerie. But while a visitor to the zoo is proud of the supremacy of his species, his examination of the animals does not just fill him with contempt. Reminded of the narrowness of his affiliations—with Frenchmen, intellectuals, and humans—Mirbeau considers the creatures on display there with wonder. In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, there is no God to soothe society’s querulous children. No longer holding out the lure of Nirvana or promising dilation into nature idealized as a tranquil Elysium, God also disappears as the illusion of a utopian future, a source of hope encouraging the misbegotten to travel on into tomorrow. In Mirbeau’s previous novels, the quest for transcendence had given life its purpose and direction. Either the death drive had drawn Mirbeau’s character backward toward insentience, or religion’s unkept promises had prompted a wish to mitigate mankind’s suffering. Since hell was experienced every day, in this place, one sought heaven somewhere else, and so Mirbeau’s unbelieving pilgrims embarked on their uncertain journey. In Mirbeau’s fiction, life’s imperfections provide the incentive to work and to write. Dissatisfaction and impatience with a present state of things supply the energy sustaining Mirbeau’s campaign to reform, infusing his novels with their restless dynamic. Even when the pacifying illusion of relig-

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ion is gone, there is an ameliorative wish to change and redeem the world here below. It is not here that we wish to be, Mirbeau’s characters assert. It is not this that we want, but something else, somewhere else. In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, only genocidal officers, political careerists, and hedgehogs are content where they are. Rolling themselves up into balls that protect the viscera of their complacency, they ward off threats from outside with barbs of intolerance. While vitality is manifested by movement and exertion, neurasthenia—the faddish ailment alluded to in Mirbeau’s title—is evidenced by symptoms of lethargy and dejection. As Pierre Michel writes, it is “a morbid byproduct of an era obsessed with speed, where everyone is living in a state of constant acceleration, and where everything is changing much too quickly.” 3 Cut off from its metaphysical dimension, the quest for the transcendental shrinks in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique to an appetite for a change of scene, for glimpses of a new horizon. However, the psychogeography of Mirbeau’s fiction is still marked by a blocked ascensional impulse, a desire to rise above the horizontality of mediocrity and socially ratified vice. As Mirbeau pictures it, neurasthenia is characterized by depression and fatigue, yet it also stimulates a resolve to set off and find a cure. A male counterpart of hysteria, neurasthenia was one of the fin de siècle’s most prevalent complaints, indicated, as Freud theorized in analyzing his own condition, “by toxic damage, which he associated with excessive masturbation or sexual abstinence,” and susceptible to “‘palliative’ treatment, such as rest, change of environment and occupation, hydrotherapy [. . .] and so on.” 4 Diagnoses of what today is no longer a widely recognized affliction list the symptoms of neurasthenia as often conflicting and contradictory: melancholy and inertia combined with restlessness; sluggishness offset by a need to get up and move about. It is as if the failed search for meaning had been repressed and then had reappeared as an illness. The neurasthenic is too tired to alter the conditions of his life, too apathetic to challenge a status quo whose emptiness leaves him immobilized. Transcendental beauty, experienced as absence, instills cynicism and discouragement that one unconsciously seeks to alleviate. In Mirbeau’s novel, a godless world produces both a despairing paralysis and an obscure quest to find the thing that fulfills. As the spa replaces the church, and psychiatrists supplant the priesthood, all social, metaphysical, and physiological ills are seen as being susceptible to therapy. Wealth and leisure supply a climate in which neurasthenia incubates. It is like poverty, which Doctor Triceps says is a manifestation of dementia. Indiscriminately conflated as flaws and symptoms, vice and virtue are henceforth amenable to treatment procedures, Triceps believes, incorporating “analyses histologiques” [histological analyses], “frictions iodurées sur le crâne” [iodide friction of the skull], and “une combinaison de douches habilement seriées” [expertly arranged regimens of shower baths]. 5 From

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behind the veil of unknowing, the dieu caché of Doctor Triceps emerges as the clinician able to cure the genius of Homer and Molière. What was the existential dereliction of impotent artists and remorseful unbelievers becomes a universal disorder characterized by the telltale symptoms of idealism and intelligence. The death of God induces a universal complaint for which “l’unification des sciences” [the unification of the sciences] provides a miraculous panacea. If the etiology of neurasthenia is a loss of faith, Mirbeau’s narrator, Georges Vasseur, is driven by his condition to seek relief on the doorstep of heaven, the place where he knows that his symptoms will just get worse. Quests for sanctification become attempts to find a hydrotherapeutic cure, yet both drive Vasseur up to cloud-covered Pyrenean peaks, where he stands feeling metaphysically burdened, breathless, and despondent. The mountain in Mirbeau is a point of transit, bridging the cyclical rhythms of biological futility on earth and the perfection and immortality that are found in the sky. Vasseur is unlike the shaman scaling the mountain to gain a glimpse of God. His experience of the heights does not bring a sense of lightness and buoyancy. Instead, he shuns the mountain because of its crushing gravitational mass, despises it as the material byproduct of man’s failed effort to take flight. Mirbeau’s novel begins and ends with scenes of exile on the mountain: first in the sanitarium in Luchon and finally in the forbidden hermitage of Vasseur’s friend Roger Fresselou. As plaisir solitaire begets the neurasthenia offset by a fondness for society, so the ailment characterized by fatigue and depression also manifests itself as a compulsion to travel. In the same way that neurasthenia is born of boredom and leisure, “la mode, ou le soin de sa santé, qui est aussi une mode, veut que l’on voyage” [what is fashionable, or concern for one’s health, which is also a matter of fashion, requires that one travel], as Vasseur opens by saying. 6 Like Mirbeau’s text, lurching through its episodic stages, Vasseur’s interpersonal contacts move without direction and are transcribed as an accumulation of unrelated anecdotes. The neurasthenic’s existence is broken up into moments of leave-taking and dislocation: déplacements, which are meaning-quests that are quickly aborted. From its first page, Mirbeau’s story is defined by its axial structure: the overwhelming verticality of the mountain, and what begins as the flat, meandering drift of Vasseur’s encounters with other spa patrons. When oxygenstarved visitors to the summit are driven back to the low country, they abandon what had been undertaken as a spiritual quest. Similarly, the traveling neurasthenic gives up the comforts of home and engages with others he had expected to be vicious and vacuous, rehabilitating the humanity whose virtue he had initially seen as doubtful. As Vasseur moves out of himself and overcomes the comforts of inertia, he grows more appreciative of those he had believed to be monomaniacs and buffoons. Apart from the asylum patients and transients that Vasseur had regarded as visionaries, he had first

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enveloped his fellow man with dismissive contempt. But as his travel narrative takes him farther from the homeland of his untested preconceptions, he finds in the people around him mysteries that deserve exploration. What begins as a reluctant trip to a spa in the mountains ends as an anthropological discovery of the richness of human diversity. Marking this passage from self-centeredness to interest in others, the spatial organization of Mirbeau’s novel also calls attention to experiences of borders, boundaries, and thresholds, points of contact between mountain and sky. Ava Falk characterizes border crossings as regressive, obeying the death drive, violating the incest barrier, enacting a “search for a bounteous early mother who will unconditionally accept and embrace the child.” 7 However, for Mirbeau’s characters, they are journeys into terra incognita: beyond frontiers, past the “dernier bec de gaz de France” [last gas jet of France], and over the walls of incomprehension separating interlocutors. In incongruous episodes, Mirbeau problematizes the foundational events bracketing human existence: redefining birth and questioning the necessity of death. Like Docetists who reject the Incarnation, Clara Fistule, “un gros, lourd, et épais garçon” [a stout, heavy, dull-witted fellow], 8 insists on the sidereal purity of his corporeal form. Preaching “l’insexuat” [sexlessness], 9 proscribing intercourse between humans, he begins by disallowing the existence of his parents. Space is the womb in which a stellar egg is inseminated from below “par le pollen tellurique” [with telluric pollen]. 10 Causa sui, Fistule celebrates his birth in a multimedia theogony, describing his origins both as the appearance of a god and the production of an artwork: book, sculpture, and symphony. Coitally unstained by the “déshonneur originel” [original dishonor], he sublimates bodies and communicates via starlight: “[j]e suis arrivé à me libérer des contingences . . . je supprime l’ambiance . . . je biffe la matière” [I’ve freed myself from contingencies . . . I eliminate the environment . . . I cancel matter]. 11 No doubt Mirbeau envies the genius of a god impersonator capable of unifying art as “expression,” “conception,” and “symbole.” 12 Whereas Mirbeau implicates human life in cycles of individuation and dissolution—selves and bodies that die and are reabsorbed in the matrix—Fistule awards transcendence to himself in the legend of his interplanetary genesis. As Fistule erases matter with grandiloquence, so at the spa, death takes a holiday and corpses are magically elided. Visitors to the sanitarium with their dilapidated organs and frayed nerves are seemingly spared the shame of their mortality. As a merciful God is replaced by an idealized doctor, salvation is obtained as a medical cure. Thermal baths, like the water from the grotto at Lourdes, repair diseased organs and hold death at bay. Vasseur recalls another sanitarium visit when he had been amazed by the absence of coffins and burials. This is the dream of people, nostalgic for God, to achieve the permanence and indestructibility of the mountain. In a return to the inorganic

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nature of Pyrenean rock, the death drive combines with a quest for deification. However, the religious, biological, and therapeutic imposture nurtured by patients’ wishes for disincarnation is exposed when Vasseur discovers that visitors’ corpses are loaded in trunks that are secretly sent off on trains in the night. Their destination, Vasseur speculates, is not health but the afterlife, as the final déplacement takes them “à l’Eternité, n’est-ce pas?” [to Eternity, doesn’t it?]. 13 The dream of an imperishable self expresses an aspiration to godhood. Whereas Mirbeau’s characters—like Flaubert’s Saint Anthony—both fear and desire to commingle with matter, the phobia displayed by those whom Vasseur encounters is a compromise of ego integrity, a disintegration of body boundaries, a loss of control over critical faculties. When they are restored to the domain of prerational causality, they see disease and insanity as signs of demonic activity, of intervention by malevolent forces invading bodies and brains left unprotected by God. Exiled to hospitals, the sick and deranged are stigmatized by an affliction that is compounded by guilt since suffering is punishment for the divinity’s displeasure. The geography of the afterlife becomes the precincts of hell: the prison or madhouse as a purgatorial facility where pain is the price of deliverance from illness. Presiding over the asylum where the damned are interned, the psychiatrist—like God—is omniscient and cruel, punishing the unforgiven and saving the fortunate. Accompanying Vasseur to a “maison de fous” [madhouse], Doctor Triceps points out an institutional landscape: prisons, clinics, asylums, and barracks that are clustered together and suggest that all inmates are alike. Haunted by haggard, twitching, and soliloquizing patients, the facility recalls the Chinese bagnio in Le Jardin des supplices. There too, residents’ screams had reverberated from their cells: “un sourd lamento de cris étouffés, de hurlements baîllonés venant on ne sait de quelles chambres de tortures” [a dull lament of muffled cries and howls from gagged mouths, all coming from who knows what torture chambers]. 14 It is the doctor who penetrates the sick man’s skin, the therapist who invades his patient’s brain. Bodies and skulls, thought to be inviolable containers of subjectivity, are compromised by medical personnel wielding the scalpel of their analytical acumen. Physicians like Triceps are sadist gods touring their tortured creatures, artists like Trépan who, in Le Jardin des supplices, had argued that there is no greater masterpiece than the bloody, open abdomen of a woman laid out on an operating table. Resituated on earth, the inferno becomes a psychiatric hospital where the condemned are auscultated, studied, and drugged. Without a heaven above, the doomed seek a cure as salvation. Palpated and diagnosed, they are opened like books, as their identities escape like a fugitive blue butterfly.

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But then, the sick and the crazy, freed from their prison of egotism, are those who come closest to being seers and geniuses. The true saint encountered in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique is the vagabond wandering the roads of the countryside. Similarly, madmen are those nearest to God: “Ils conservent les traditions de la liberté spirituelle, de la joie créatrice . . . Eux seuls, maintenant, ils savent ce que c’est que la divine fantaisie” [They maintain the traditions of spiritual freedom and creative joy . . . They alone know what divine imagination is]. 15 This is a quality that Mirbeau had attributed to van Gogh, who also understood the look in the eyes of the poor and misbegotten. 16 Like a vagrant, Mirbeau’s novel becomes a series of peripeteia, disjointed stages on a directionless trip. Vasseur enters his interlocutors’ biographies as a psychiatrist would, issuing summary appraisals and then moving on to the next patient. There is no stability in time or place, only fleeting analyses. Even neurasthenia, the aristocrat’s privileged illness, is allowed to last just twenty-one days. Mirbeau opposes the egocentricity and ethnocentricity of colonial butchers like General Archinard to the homeless unfathomability of the truly free person. Thus the novel pursues its circuitous journey by emulating wayfarers like Jean Loqueteux and Jean Guenille. For them, Eden is not an upholstered enclosure but the unbounded promise of ubiquity. Mirbeau’s own work rejects the comforts of bourgeois claustrophilia, “that sedentary quality, that desire for integration into a world that he abhorred,” as Jean Wagniart describes it, adding, “Writing for Mirbeau remained the last and only way of escaping this confinement.” 17 As I argued in The Nothing Machine, “both in its 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.” 18 No longer seeking a reassuring encounter with delimiting boundaries, body surfaces, and national frontiers—the mapped terrain illumined by the last gaslight of France—Mirbeau begins to reposition God-in-heaven as the anarchist-onearth. Instead of concentration, there is expansion. The goal of Mirbeau’s character is not security but freedom. Mirbeau’s paean to automobile travel in La 628-E8 is a celebration of border crossings, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship in all countries of the continent. The travel compulsion that in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique is a sign of neurasthenia is recognized as evidence of fraternalism and openmindedness. Already in Vasseur’s narrative, the need for displacement ceases to be a symptom of neurosis and becomes an opportunity for discovery. Contrasting with the anality of the rich—intent on possessing the self as

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object—is the adventurism of the traveler who sees the walls of habit crumble. No longer fearing a porous body from which identity leaks away, he experiences transcendence as the multifariousness of creation. At the other extreme, Vasseur encounters those isolated by geography or superstition, preserved by temperament or circumstance from intercourse with strangers. Genetically impoverished by endogamy and inbreeding, the inhabitants of the Isle de Sein live in xenophobic squalor. Stunted and chlorotic like the anemic vegetation on their island, they slowly waste away in “persistantes consanguinités” [persistent consanguinities]. 19 Only a thin sleeve of water separates them from the mainland, but it is enough to keep the autochthons steeped in idiocy and alcoholism. On the Isle de Sein, God is protection against extra-insular realities: gyrating windmills like epileptic crosses, cows “as big as a thousand rats” and having horns as twisting as the horns of Satan. This is the God of terrified parochialism not found in the expanses of the sky or experienced in stimulating interaction with other people. Only when Mirbeau’s character succumbs to a hunger for alterity does he relinquish “ses bonnes paresses, ses chères intimités” [his cherished indolence, his precious privacy] so that he can allow himself to “se plonger dans le grand tout” [plunge into the enormity of everything]. 20 The innocent vagabonds whose journeys are chronicled in Mirbeau’s books are repaid for their homelessness by trusting everyone and hoping for everything. Not sequestered on islands or installed in asylums or salons, they wander the highways where they experience humanity’s diversity. Having nothing, they have no fear of loss or despoliation and are therefore different from rich aristocrats like the self-despising Baron Kropp who, despite his wealth, is disabled by an incapacity to give. His love is depreciated as gifts whose expressive value is measured monetarily. And so Kropp showers his unfeeling mistress with mansions, horses, and jewels, yet he applies the Midas touch to everything he bestows, turning generosity into calculation and romance into cost analysis. Only in the body, which is Kropp’s world and his treasure, can he exchange physical reality for something rare and painfully acquired. Petitioning Doctor Triceps to precipitate the iron from his blood, Kropp becomes the gaunt and wasted byproduct of the conversion of his love into a tiny, ferrous jewel. Counteracting the novel’s outward movement, its centrifugal dilation, Kropp is concentrated as the worthlessness of love expressed in objects, as what he calls “l’immensité de mon amour” [the immensity of my love] is reduced to a “menue parcelle de métal” [a tiny bit of metal], a pinch of powder his mistress spurns in favor of a clock. Unlike Baron Kropp, who mines his body for its resources, Jean Loqueteux is rich in his perfect dispossession. Not turning inward in a futile attempt at self-depletion, he is freed by the deaths of his wife and son to take to the road. Dressed in rags, his beard festooned with bits of feathers and straw, he

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gnaws stale bread with bleeding gums, yet his poverty is offset by an experiential wealth that comes from interacting with the people of the world. Vampire of his own heart, Kropp had liquidated his love, turning it into currency he spent until there was nothing left but the iron quintessence of his obsession. On the other hand, Loqueteux is hospitable to everyone, illustrating the aphorism that the greatest wealth is what one gives away. Loqueteux dissipates himself in gifts to other beggars, wandering mercenaries, disconsolate old men standing in doorways, pretty girls whose songs illumine the hedges by the roadside. The sack of pebbles he mistakes for ten million francs is never diminished but is continually replenished since generosity is a treasure that can only increase. The vagrant unwittingly conforms to the anarchist’s agenda: structuring interpersonal relations in a way unsanctioned by social institutions. In loving others, helping others, and engaging with them creatively and openly, he learns a fraternalism untainted by concerns over power, status, and money. Like the Wandering Jew, the vagabond has an identity uncircumscribed by property attachments or national affiliation. His freedom is construed by society as a threat that can be neutralized by confining him to a prison or asylum. He can only purchase release with abject professions of conventional opinion: I only love others resembling me. My portable fortune is the stones that lie by the roadway. In Mirbeau’s novel, walls are beautiful only if they are dotted with irises growing from cracks. Otherwise—like partitions, skin, and architectural and body boundaries—walls are defenses against unwelcome intrusion. Fetishized for their contiguity to doors, cavities, and orifices, protective surfaces are susceptible to breaching, becoming points of entry allowing access to internal organs and private thoughts. Cherishing security yet craving adventure, Mirbeau’s characters pause in the doorway, ambivalent about the prospect of displacement or leave-taking. It is for this reason that gatekeepers regulating ingress and egress are accorded a power that makes them admired and hated. Only when a character is a criminal or a patient does he relinquish control over a self as container and contents, allowing surgeons to make incisions, psychiatrists to analyze, and municipal officials to redraw property boundaries. Believing himself entitled to repair the crumbling masonry of his wall, Père Rivoli takes up trowel and mortar but then is intercepted by a road surveyor who forbids him to continue his work. The wall is the face the private citizen presents to society, yet it is also the peripheral boundary that defines the public world. Père Rivoli worries that if his walls fall down, nothing will stop thieves and vagrants from entering and stealing his chickens. With nothing to safeguard his property, his possessions might fly off like the blue butterfly of a madman’s lost reason. However, staying safe behind

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his wall or allowing unmonitored access to outsiders both entail a violation of municipal codes that require or forbid repairs. Obliged to pay an exorbitant fine regardless of his actions, Père Rivoli decides to hang himself from the branch of a fruit tree. Self-immurement and self-dispersal thus seem equally unwise practices. However, Mirbeau insists that one approach an experience of transcendence by mingling with everything, by losing oneself in “le grand tout” [the enormity of everything]. There is a recommended balance between identity and multiplicity—between what Baudelaire describes as a loss of self in crowds and a recovery of self that comes with a return to privacy and solitude. 21 On the one hand, traveling to sanitariums, climbing mountains, and seeing famous sights are the spatial equivalent of visiting others’ minds, more exotic locales than those recommended in Baedecker guides. On the other hand, staying home where one is never solicited by fresh experience—where one slumbers in the lethargy of routine—allows Mirbeau’s character to act in obedience to the death drive, minimizing stimulation, evacuating energy, discharging tension, and restoring the twilight oblivion of homeostasis. However, Vasseur chooses to relocate to new places where he can visit a stranger’s consciousness and see the world from another’s viewpoint, enjoying a catholicity of experience that multiplies an absent God as everyone. It may be easier to be dead, swaddled in “bonnes paresses” [cherished indolence]. It may be painful to rise out of the tomb of routine, yet Vasseur is also terrified of a paralyzing surrender to comfort. In a dream, Vasseur imagines being unable to climb into a train car, expressing a subconscious wish that is somatically enacted. If, in the nightmare, he cannot emulate others who ascend “dans les wagons avec aisance” [into the train cars with ease], 22 it is because he wants to go nowhere, wants others to leave him in peace where he is. The leaden heaviness of Vasseur’s limbs contrasts with the celerity with which life outside of him is passing. The electric clock in the train station gazes down on him ironically; partridges fly away; a hare pauses, then races by. These are the fleeting possibilities of novelty that beckon then vanish from before the despairing eyes of the dreamer. The impossible staircase that rises five vertiginous floors is like the mountain that leaves the climber breathless and perspiring. It represents a promise of transcendence, an arduous yet transfiguring elevation out of the self. But a numbing torpor prevents Vasseur from deciphering his dream, stops him from unraveling its symbolism and keeping up with its meaning. As the dream work accelerates, its interpretation comes to a standstill. Lucidity fails, the hunter’s rifle malfunctions, the petrified subject cannot budge while “le cauchemar galope . . . galope” [the nightmare keeps galloping . . . galloping]. 23

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In Mirbeau’s text, God’s death blots out the sky. Sojourners at the spa look to the summits of the Pyrenees yet cannot see the heavens hidden by a procession of “gros nuages qui traînent [. . .] leurs pesantes masses opaques et fuligineuses” [big clouds dragging along (. . .) their heavy, opaque, fuliginous masses]. 24 As in the dream, a secret wish is what makes the challenging feat impossible. It is because the sky is empty that Vasseur cannot see it. Unlike Lucien in Dans le ciel, who had been haunted by the azure, Vasseur is an unbeliever for whom the celestial dome is untenanted: “Et pas de ciel . . . jamais de ciel, au-dessus de soi!” [And no sky . . . never any sky overhead!]. 25 If Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique stresses obstacles to ascension, it also shows Vasseur welcoming lateral movement between people. Compensating for God’s absence is the inexhaustible interest of his creatures. Unlike a hedgehog warding off predators with its panoply of quills—unlike General Archinard barricaded in a fortress whose walls are the skins of his victims— Vasseur seeks a sense of difference and novelty. This marks a fundamental change in the psychology of Mirbeau’s narrator who, as Arnaud Vareille comments, had started off as “the only true neurasthenic in the text, geographically enclosed by the summits of the Pyrenees, mentally cut off by his intractable refusal of all interaction with society.” 26 Henceforth, Vasseur becomes more like a disciple of Baudelaire, who vaunts the “incomparable privilege” of merging with strangers in the streets. Vasseur also projects himself into others he encounters in points of transit: “dans les gares et sur les paquebots” [in train stations and on steamers], 27 in city hotels frequented by travelers. Vasseur escapes the dullness of the egotist or introvert, who, as Baudelaire writes, is “fermé comme un coffre” [locked up like a box], “interné comme un mollusque” [closed in like a mollusk]. 28 While Vasseur acknowledges the unpleasantness of departures, he sees himself in others who are obliged to leave their homes and whose expressions betray l’ennui inconscient que ressentent les gens jetés hors du chez-soi, les gens errants à qui la nature ne dit rien, et qui semblent plus effarés, plus déshabitués, plus perdus que les pauvres bêtes, loin de leurs horizons coutumiers [the unconscious dismay felt by people expelled from their homes, wanderers whom nature cannot comfort and who seem more bewildered, more disoriented, more lost than the poor animals who find themselves far from their usual environment]. 29

Here Vasseur experiences the confraternity of exiles who share a sense of forsakenness and abandonment on earth. From the uterus to the grave, all are sojourners passing along the highway en route to the hospital or cemetery. Compassion for a stranger that externalizes self-pity is what had drawn Jean Mintié to the Prussian scout he had seen riding on the battlefield (Le Calvaire). The challenge is converting a transient, empathetic impulse into an

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expression of loving understanding of another. It is to translate what Baudelaire called “cette sainte prostitution de l’âme” [that holy prostitution of the soul] 30 into a union with people, a dispersal in “le grand tout.” Vasseur is also tempted to abscond with people’s mystery, to take their unhappiness and consume it in the confines of his fantasy. Indeed, Vasseur can be a tourist in the land of human suffering, collecting postcard impressions of the inhabitants’ miserable grotesqueness. This is the impulse that the humanitarian reformer must resist: to make mocking observations and then again take up his journey. Rather than participating in the adversity of strangers, Vasseur initially succumbs to “une forme aiguë de la curiosité” [an acute form of curiosity], 31 an emotional surrogacy that emerges as opportunistic and condescending. In the construction of his narrative, he appropriates others’ stories, stealing their incongruous confessions and self-incriminating personal histories. There is a predatory quality in his hungry observation of a grieving father, a widower whose wife’s disease is revisited on his son. Moved “par un instinct de cruauté” [by an instinct toward cruelty] 32 as much as by compassion, Vasseur assumes the role of a sadist god whose creatures’ misery entertains him. The grief-stricken father, whose back is bent with worry, is a vessel drained of pathos, discarded and forgotten. Vasseur ends his account of collecting specimens of secret anguish by describing his installation in a cozy, whitewashed Breton inn. Purging his consciousness of all memory of human sorrow, he relishes his indifference, enjoying “une heure délicieuse et sans remords” [a delicious hour spent without remorse]. 33 Vasseur’s self-satisfied complacency is what keeps him locked inside himself, his feet stuck to the ground, unable to climb onto the train that, in his dream, is the conveyance in which fellow-travelers are passing. His deadened limbs are the symptom of his emotional disengagement: a turning inward, an avoidance of intercourse with others, a form of masturbation that Freud saw as the cause of neurasthenia. As Pierre Citti writes, the cure for Decadent self-involvement was a resolve to travel outward and endure the unpleasantness of interaction. Having been shut away “in his inner universe out of aristocratic disdain,” the Decadent subject finally recognizes the need for contact with his brothers. “Let’s express it with a verb,” Citti adds, “to come out, come out of oneself.” 34 Often Mirbeau’s ideology is contrasted with the structuring principle of Vasseur’s narrative, which is to seek in others a reflection or deformation of his self-image. The parodic element of Vasseur’s comments is usually paramount, as the humanity of other people is subsumed to his tendency to ironize. Vasseur is a double of the stylish, self-deprecating burglar—“le clubman parisien”—whom he finds stuffing valuables in a briefcase. He is a thief of prized possessions as Vasseur is a purloiner of people’s stories. The intruder,

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dressed elegantly in formal attire, illustrates the apology of shallowness that says that clothes make the man. Since everyone steals everything, criminals are distinguishable from ourselves only by the shabbiness of their dress and the poverty of their diction. Vasseur cannot impugn a man as glib and welldressed as himself, and so the home invader is exonerated as the forgiven self caught in a mirror. Likewise the story of the Marquis de Portpierre is one of multiplied identity, as the aspirant to elected office must flatter the vanity of his constituents, imitate their locutions, and wear the peasant’s blouse de France. As Roland Barthes writes, a candidate presents a synthetic image of the electorate. In the politician, “the voter is at once expressed and made a hero; he is invited to elect himself.” 35 Yet despite his wry superiority and critical conceit, Vasseur’s story points the way to a more fruitful engagement with humanity. His horror of barren mountain summits suggests revulsion for the self-exalting pretensions of the megalomaniac. Aspirants to divinity who want to rise above the world are like Clara Fistule, who rejects his derivation from egg and sperm. Claiming the spotlessness of his parthenogenetic origins, the narcissist is spared the humiliation of having a beginning and an end. Born from a telluric ovum inseminated with starlight, he is inhuman in his genesis and superhuman in his immortality. The character in Mirbeau who climbs a mountain and tries to fly, borne aloft by artistic genius and repression of his organic limitations, is a madman, a misanthrope, or a suicide. If there is a God whose home is in the galaxies, he is unknowable and unresponsive. Only congress with his creatures frees man from the prison of self-absorption. The spiritual search that had motivated an ascension of the mountain is identified as the precipitating agent of neurasthenia. Vasseur goes up higher, and “le ciel se plombe davantage” [the sky grows more leaden]. 36 He joins other alpinists whose eyes scan the heavens for a sign, training “les mêmes jumelles [. . .] sur les mêmes lourds nuages” [the same binoculars (. . .) on the same heavy clouds]. 37 The mountains from which one looks for God become a figure for theologies with their crushing mass of dogma. On the mountaintop, the vanity of all human undertakings, the otiosity of love, and the speciousness of literature are revealed, leading Mirbeau’s character to the impassivity of nihilism. Mirbeau associates the mountain with the geology of the death drive: a place of coldness, immobility, and silence. Before Vasseur returns from his hydrotherapeutic holiday, he undertakes an arduous visit to an old friend and erstwhile man of letters, Roger Fresselou, who years earlier had taken up residence in a remote Pyrenean village. The final chapter of Mirbeau’s book reiterates its psychogeographic message: linking the energy of Eros with the ease of life in valleys, praising the benignancy of the low country “où tout est remuant et vivant, les herbes, les arbres, les grandes lignes onduleuses des horizons” [where everything is moving and alive, the grasses, the trees, the great sinuous lines of the hori-

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zons]. 38 This Vasseur contrasts with the coldness of the summits where the opaqueness of the clouds and the silence of the gods weigh down “sur le crâne, comme le poids d’une montagne” [on one’s skull with the weight of a mountain]. 39 The search for omnipotence and immortality drives the idealist to climb to high places, where he clamors to shed his human limitations and radiate with the scintillation of a star. This is the aspiration of the Parmenidean philosopher who rejects motion, time, and change in favor of the stasis of eternity. Doctor Triceps claims that all knowledge is concentrated in his brain, the umbilicus from which streams the multiplicity of sciences. He resembles Clara Fistule in claiming astral perfection, an autonomy unspoiled by ancestors or children, where the ego becomes a point of light from which creation emanates. Human defects, like neurasthenia, are like shadows on the sun that are fired away by the paranoiac’s incinerating genius. There is no contingency, no death for an inhabitant of the planets. Everything is resolved into a necessary synthesis: Triceps suggests, “[r]emarque [. . .] comme tout s’enchaîne . . . comme une découverte en amène une autre? . . . Astre et cerveau, comprends-tu?” [Note (. . .) how everything is connected . . . how one discovery leads to another? . . . Star and brain: you understand?]. 40 An obsession with systems characterizes the schizophrenic’s mathematical consciousness, which, as Gilbert Durand says, tends toward rigidity and sclerosis. For those like Triceps and Fistule, “thought is opposed to feeling; analysis is opposed to intuitive understanding, proofs are opposed to impressions, the foundation is opposed to the goal; the brain is opposed to instinct, and plans are opposed to life.” 41 For them, the solidity of the mountain represents indestructibility and permanence, lithified immobility that is comforting and stable. After the shifting of tectonic plates and the eruption of volcanoes, insanity subsides. Upheaval gives way to the serenity of a mountain as the vestibule of heaven. It is here that Roger Fresselou lives when Vasseur comes to visit him, in Casterat, where the silence of the spheres teaches detachment and indifference. Fresselou’s philosophy displays the hopelessness of cosmic entropy, a perception of a future already stiff like a cadaver. Man may believe he is progressing, but for Fresselou, “il s’achemine vers la mort” [he is traveling toward death]. 42 For Fresselou, the mountain is a figure for exhausted possibility, hope dispelled as air, illusions petrified as disappointment. This is a fundamental tenet of fin-de-siècle pessimism, which, as Vladimir Jankélévitch says, moves toward refrigeration and finality.

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Once it is mineralized, what was alive knows only the physical laws of gravity. When the future, through a progressive usury, is reduced to zero, and duration is congealed in a closed and airless past, then what exists finally touches the unrepresentable limit of despair. Only then has everything been said and accomplished. Only then does the absolute coldness of death prevail. 43

In Vasseur’s description of Fresselou’s philosophy and environment, the barrenness of Jankélévitch’s image of Decadent temporality is rendered as a landscape. It is on the mountain where gravity and the unalterability of an unforgiving preterition are represented by the mass of rock underfoot. Vasseur professes horror as he listens to his friend expatiate on the uselessness of living, but he had once shared Fresselou’s sense of disillusionment. For Vasseur, yesterday had once drained tomorrow of its promise, and children were “déjà du passé” [already of the past]. In his narrative, Vasseur’s pessimism was projected onto his interlocutors as a progeria that accelerated the onset of decay and despair. Longtime acquaintances Fistule and Triceps were already poisoned by their reputations and could be only foolish or delusional. In his journey through the people he meets at the spa, Vasseur’s narrative for a while loses its potential to revivify with optimism or surprise. By the time he reaches Fresselou’s desolate aerie, there is no God in a sky blotted out by the clouds. There is little point in traveling onward through the valleys of society. Yet it is here in the final pages of Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique that Mirbeau’s text is all at once reoriented. No longer seeking an absolute above, the character and author resolve to seek life’s purpose not from the Creator but in his handiwork. The model for Mirbeau’s hero ceases to be a sage like Sumangala in Lettres de l’Inde. In Fresselou’s mountain village, Vasseur finds a land of schistous soil grazed by starving goats, a land where flowers have blooms as sharp as hedgehog quills. Here the vegetation is as joyless as those who see it, having “le ton décoloré, l’opacité vitreuse de prunelles mortes” [the colorless tone, the vitreous opacity of dead and vacant eyes]. 44 Fresselou may be right to describe idealism as childishness. In Fresselou’s climatology of the hopeless heart, there is only the inertial resistance of rock, the weight of frozen snow that deadens sound, extinguishes energy, and erases features of the landscape. Ameliorative effort is given up in favor of quiescence and resignation. Like the Nirvana-seeking guru plunged in meditative inwardness, Fresselou preaches disengagement from other people who have nothing more to offer. Fresselou’s views are a reasoned implementation of the death drive, exchanging temporal promise for the repose brought by the end-time: Do not burn with indignation or impatience for social change. Renounce the agitation of enthusiasts and visionaries. Give up the noise of literature, the futility of idealism. Interaction with the people from whom one learns and whom one loves is like the wind that carries pollen, inspires

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dreamers, and shakes the tree. But then the wind subsides; “l’arbre redevient immobile comme avant” [the tree becomes still as it was before]. 45 To Fresselou, the peace of futility is already present on the mountain, “où il n’y a plus que des cendres, des pierres brûlées, des sèves éteintes” [where there is nothing but ashes, parched rocks, and dried-up sap]. 46 In his earlier novels, Mirbeau’s characters had set out on a journey in flight from suffering, traveling to the ocean where they sought to dissolve “dans le grand tout.” Like Abbé Jules, they had wished to drown their anguish in a lake of milk. But on the mountain and in the sea, pain is mitigated only by silence and oblivion. As Philippe Ledru writes, a character in Mirbeau, having attempted “to accede to an eschatological awareness through intuition and imagination” and having been “hemmed in by crowds of lunatic puppets, sets about, through a series of aborted endeavors, to grasp the ineffable.” Only after casting off an impossible idealism is the author reconciled with the world. Rediscovering “a sympathy with matter, the being in harmony with Everything can finally apprehend things as they are.” 47 In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, the quest for the transcendental is reimagined as an outward movement, traveling far from oneself. Despite Vasseur’s jaundiced view of mankind, he finally begins to follow his narrative’s radiant motion. While professing a love of comfort, he vacates the carapace of habit, forsaking the mollusk’s immobility. Unlike the organism oriented toward homeostasis by the death drive—unlike the mystic frozen in contemplation of the infinite—Mirbeau’s hero remains a seeker who is not happy where he is. This is the reason why the author eschews the sterility of utopia where contentment with the state of things brings the journey to a standstill. For the seeker, driven forward by curiosity and restlessness, each new literary undertaking is a promising departure. “C’est qu’on a l’espace devant soi et pour soi” [That is because we have space before us and for us], as Mirbeau says, “et qu’ayant l’espace, on a le temps aussi, et qu’au bout de l’espace et du temps cela ne peut être que le bonheur” [and since we have space, we have time as well, and at the end of space and time, there can only be happiness]. 48 At the end of Vasseur’s narrative, Fresselou counsels acceptance and surrender, advising Vasseur that in being dead already, there is no purpose to his journey: “Pourquoi t’agiter de la sorte? . . . Reste où tu es venu!” [Why be agitated like that? . . . Stay where you are!]. 49 But the unwritten page before him beckons Vasseur to come down from the mountain, and he resumes the journey that had begun with his embarkation for the spa. He quits the past, which had transfixed him with its oppressive monument of rock, and sets off for the future: “Dès l’aube, demain, je partirai . . .” [Tomorrow, at dawn, I will leave . . .]. 50

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The destination of Mirbeau’s character is not paradise but elsewhere, up ahead in a place reached through effort and dislocation. It is not a place one stops, since completion means stagnation. To arrive is to die, as Mirbeau had written before. The goal of Mirbeau’s text is not the blessedness of heaven or the tranquility of the grave. It is not a final sentence that seals the casket of a story. Rather than being the place the author is, it is the point toward which he moves. Unreachable, it pushes him toward countries undiscovered, driving him further, “invinciblement vers la grande unité humaine” [invincibly onward, toward the great unity of man]. 51 LA 628-E8 When he was commissioned in the fall of 1903 by editor Henri Desgrange to serve as a regular contributor to the sports daily L’Auto, Mirbeau at first agreed, submitting articles that combined humorous accounts of the motorist’s misadventures with a warning against the abuse of automotive technology. This new mobility, Mirbeau believed, could aggravate the brutishness, discourtesy, and disconnection from the world of a traveler hurriedly passing through. Rather than facilitating interchanges with the populations with which he was brought into contact, the car risked encasing the traveler in a shell of technological superiority. While it afforded pleasurable experiences of speed, it also atrophied muscle, dulled intelligence, inured prejudice, and bred isolation. No doubt Mirbeau’s cautionary message left subscribers to L’Auto unenthused, and after only a handful of articles, Mirbeau discontinued his collaboration. How different is the tone of the dedication to Fernard Charron that accompanies his 1907 volume, La 628-E8. Assimilated to a robust, fuel-transfused organism with its electric innervation, its heart and lungs of steel, the automobile animates the traveler’s body, dazzles his eye, and sharpens his mind. In the novel’s dedication, Mirbeau complains of his intellectual coevals’ preference for aesthetics over engineering, their favoring artworks—deposited as inert matter after parturition from their creator—over machines whose longevity is measured by their capacity to do work. This, as Marie-Françoise Montaubin argues, is the contribution of Mirbeau’s novel, in which the automobile, while offering a deeper knowledge of the self, also serves as a pretext for a literary work that challenges the reticence of fin-de-siècle esthetes. Opposed to their chilly withdrawal into works of art, the automobile allows a conquest of the other, and through the other, of oneself, the world, and the writing that captures it. 52

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Certainly Mirbeau acknowledges the gracefulness of the automobile, the curve of its chassis and hood, the eurhythmy of its form and movement. However, the beauty of the vehicle is its conversion of matter into experience. Critics have remarked on the impressionism of Mirbeau’s text in which speed blurs apprehension and certainty, substituting confused excitement. But more important, Mirbeau’s travelogue abridges distances and curtails parochialism. Ejected from himself by noise, velocity, and surprise, expelled from the world of routine, “loin de mes petites affaires” [far from my petty concerns], he is introduced to the mystery of his European neighbors. The virtue of the car trip and the novel that records it is to hasten the reconciliation of human differences, to bring together “les êtres si divers” [such diverse beings], to accelerate and foreshorten “la force énorme et lente qui, malgré les discordes locales, malgré la résistance des intérêts, des appétits et des privilèges” [the slow, enormous force that, in spite of local discords, in spite of conflicting interests, appetites, and privileges], resolves national antipathies into tolerant unanimity. 53 Mirbeau’s CGV is a bullet piercing barriers of ignorance, his book a vehicle bringing matter to life, turning waste into energy and light, irradiating the places it crosses with new understanding, transforming “un univers qui échappe à l’attraction perfide des miasmes, de la boue, pour devenir ‘météores’” [a universe that escapes the perfidious attraction of mud and miasmas in order to become “meteors”]. 54 Writes Paul in Philippians 3:13–14, “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” 55 No doubt that when Octave Mirbeau wrote La 628-E8, his feverish panegyric to speed and flight—on ice skates, in balloons, on swings, in boats, and especially in cars—he did not have in mind the little-known philosophy of fourth-century Neoplatonist and follower of Paul, Gregory of Nyssa. And yet the latter’s endorsement of an ever-rising, ever-accelerating process of theosis—a divinization that never attains its goal, never reaches its destination— is similar to the aesthetic informing Mirbeau’s account of his euphoric drive through Austria, Holland, and Germany. As the ascent of the spirit never comes to rest, “the speed of the car merges with the movement of the individual in order to emphasize perpetual movement as the fundamental law of the universe.” 56 Like the apostle who forgets what lies behind, the motorist is oblivious to the terrified horses, upended cows, and flattened dogs littering the pavement as he careens, speed-crazed, down the highway. Racing higher, faster, never crossing the finishing line, becoming lighter, cleaner, more disembodied and inhuman, Mirbeau’s narrator is wed to his vehicle as if it were a soul irradiated by Jesus. The travel impulse of which Mirbeau writes with such enthusiasm is like epektasis, which Gregory of Nyssa describes as

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a state of constant hunger: for higher elevations, faster speed, greater distance from what lies behind, “pour tout ce qui m’élève et m’emporte, très vite, ailleurs, plus loin, plus haut, toujours plus haut et toujours plus loin, au-delà de moi-même” [for everything that raises me up and takes me away, elsewhere, very fast, farther, higher, always higher and always farther, beyond myself]. 57 In La 628-E8, the car works like prayerful adoration that lifts the mystic out of himself and sends him hurtling into unmapped territory. In the perpetual ascent of the soul, a temporal dynamic replaces the stasis of eternity as the motorist speeds through history and across landscapes, experiencing simultaneity and ubiquity through the constancy of his change and dislocation. A time machine propelling the passenger into the past, the vehicle takes the ineluctability of history as what is finished and enriches it with the conjectural possibility of what it might be. Mirbeau’s car becomes an instrument of epistemological destabilization, changing the inert stuff of knowledge into “des idées en travail” [ideas at work]. 58 It is in the notion of work, of self-replenishing energies expended in the striving for something better—in the journey toward a half-glimpsed goal whose unattainability motivates more work—that an absent God is resurrected as the unfolding of creation. Gone is the raving hobgoblin that had terrified the young Sébastien Roch (Sébastien Roch). Gone is the palliative Virgin with the inscrutable plaster smile who had promised to allay the fears of Jean Mintié (Le Calvaire). These had been the projections of frightened children, hyperbolic images of castrating fathers and soothing mothers. In Mirbeau’s autobiographical novels, God had been identified with death, as annihilating violence or the welcome deliverance of euthanasia. But in later works, religion as an institutionalization of the death drive survives only in the rictuses and sepulchral devotions of fanatics, in the “érotisme mystique” [mystical eroticism] that Mirbeau associates with pious fervor, or in the “chuchotement mortuaire” [mortuary whispering] of the beguinages that enshrines death in Bruges. 59 In La 628-E8, the snugness of the room is renounced in favor of the freedom of roads advancing toward a vanishing point on far horizons. Likewise, the cathedral or museum, tombs preserving the past as corpse, gives way to the factory as the center for the production of the future. Mirbeau’s car is a machine that burns the past as propellant in order to set him on course toward a destination he never reaches. Excrement of time, the past is reutilized as a combustible that fuels a journey into the present experienced as the euphoria of its self-begetting. When his chauffeur stops the car and Mirbeau descends from the present back into history, he resumes the hygienic task of killing old gods, scouring the world of the filth of cultural artifacts, and dispelling the illusion of a future as its finalized perfectibility.

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The angry divinity presiding over Mirbeau’s early novels had been created in order to assign guilt and grant pardon. Repressed, self-loathing characters like Abbé Jules had needed God to accept the contrition they could not bestow upon themselves. As Norman O. Brown writes, God exists in order to forgive the debt of sin that creates the past as the time of guilt and that promises eternity as the reward for absolution. Seeking to liquidate history and reenter the paradise of innocence, the penitent wishes for the forgiveness that abolishes time, which has been “constructed,” as Brown says, “by an animal that has guilt and seeks to expiate.” 60 Trying to undo imagined transgressions, Mirbeau’s autobiographical characters are oriented backward by the death drive, “an urge inherent in organic life to return to an earlier state of things.” Jean Mintié is conditioned by a genealogy of suicides, a death-seeking chain of maternal ancestors directing his life’s journey. Counseling Albert Dervelle to throw away his books, Abbé Jules seeks liberation from churches and libraries, “monuments of accumulated guilt and expiation.” 61 For Jules, religious injunctions construct the past as a network of taboos—on sexual pleasure, expressive freedom—which are then internalized as self-reproach. Jules’s image of a lake of milk, which he visualizes on his deathbed, is like the ocean in which Sébastien Roch seeks eternal dissolution. Both are images of the peace of a uterine water-world, reflecting a “thalassic [. . .] regressive trend—the desire to get back to the womb, the incapacity to accept the individuality of life, the morbid death instinct.” 62 By the time Mirbeau took up his stories of gregariousness and vagrancy, this unforgiving God had become invisible on the highest mountaintops. He had been put to death by the intelligence of philosophers like Nietzsche or dismissed as irrelevant by Mirbeau’s life-directed characters. In Le Jardin des supplices, Clara first advocates forward movement, past vendors of rotten meat, past beatific Buddhas, past peacocks feasting on dead torture victims. Not a sinner but a sensorium, Clara has no more time for God. The erotic frisson that Clara feels is nothing compared to the one that is waiting ahead, and so like a motorist, the hedonistic Clara races from one pleasure to the next. Ignoring the brake of the narrator’s guilty conscience that attempts to slow her down, she encourages him to ignore the gore and flower-dappled beauty of the garden: “Ce n’est rien encore, mon chéri . . . Avançons!” [That isn’t anything yet, darling . . . Let’s press on!]. 63 Between Le Jardin des supplices and Mirbeau’s later novels, God had metamorphosed into the energies of Creation, life continually regenerating from decomposing substances, from established fact whose controversion gives way to the astonishment of a new discovery. Succeeding an obsolete Creator, the author fashions novels-as-machines that transport an audience across a landscape of impressionistic fragments, disconnected episodes, incongruously juxtaposed vignettes, creation left unfinished by the rapidity of

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its production. Before an image can solidify, becoming recognizable and stable, the narrative engine reengages, and the novel roars back into motion. What was that that Mirbeau’s reader saw from his textual conveyance? “N’est-ce pas plutôt des rêves, des rêveries, des souvenirs, des impressions, des récits, qui, le plus souvent, n’ont aucun rapport, aucun lien visible avec les pays visités?” [Isn’t it rather dreams, reveries, memories, impressions, stories that most often have no connection, no visible link with the countries visited?]. 64 In La 628-E8, Mirbeau elaborates an aesthetic of incomprehension that thwarts analysis before it can come to rest as certainty. Creation is a fugue state propelling the artist and reader always faster and farther from the self. Mirbeau’s writing gives pleasure like that experienced by the African king who knows no French and to whom Mirbeau’s friend Weil-See reads from Salammbô, eliciting “a delirium of enthusiasm,” 65 pleasure coming from words not yet embalmed as the indisputability of their meaning. If the mystic accelerates upward, flying ever faster and higher, if the motorist zooms past the epileptic dance of telegraph poles before they recompose as themselves, their experience launches them into a state of reality, dream, and madness. 66 “L’automobile a cela d’affolant qu’on n’en sait rien, qu’on n’en peut rien savoir” [The maddening thing about automobiles is that one knows nothing and can’t know anything]. 67 Unlike the sage made melancholy by his wisdom, the visionary and the motorist live the ecstasy of never knowing. As Weil-See says, “Voyez-vous, mon cher, quand on comprend, on est triste” [You see, my dear friend, when one understands, one is sad]. 68 Opposed to the self-satisfied incuriosity of understanding is the exhilaration of amazement. For Mirbeau, received ideas are lifeless things on which the grime of consensus and unreflection accumulates. Classical culture has been so thoroughly analyzed that it is never cleansed by the astringency of new ideas. Louis XIV’s gilded court at Versailles, with its bewigged attendants and absent latrines, is a midden stinking of accretions of “la crasse” [filth]. The unalterability of the Comédie Française repertoire, with its unvarying performances, takes the living art of theater and turns it into the marmoreal art of statuary. Mirbeau’s novel is structured by its antipodal values: the health and dynamism of innovation, the mortuary stasis of orthodoxy and uninquisitiveness. The excremental vision permeating the novel is fostered by a sense that what does not grow or change will stagnate and putrefy like cadaverous dejecta. When artworks are finished, they are corpses vacated by inspiration’s soul, like the paintings in Mirbeau’s library that cast death’s shadow on the wall. 69 On the other hand, because it moves, the car is a living body like its passenger, throbbing and humming, transmitting vitality, bringing upheaval. Unlike art criticism, which congeals as consensus, the car revolutionizes, it “boule-

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verse déjà, et bouleversera bien davantage les conditions de la vie sociale” [unsettles already and will unsettle still more the conditions of life in society]. 70 Beginning with the credo of the narrator’s father in Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau had begun advancing a defense of commerce and exchange. Mirbeau’s hymn to life immortalized through cycles of decay and regrowth had been repeated in the novel’s tribute to its own eternally retransmitted narrative. When a man takes a story or commodity and keeps it for himself, it is theft. But when it changes hands—when the story is retold by another—it enriches the participants, even when the customers in the marketplace are cheated or defrauded. Like merchandise, the car promotes health through circulation: “Instrument docile et précis de pénétration” [A docile, precise instrument of penetration], 71 it facilitates the exchange not of goods but of ideas. Motorists unencumbered by parochialism visit countries whose inhabitants’ views are challenging and new. The flaw that Mirbeau sees in the Francophilia of Belgians is that Belgian culture is not different or identifiable enough. The novel celebrating cars takes the perspective of the author, passes it through the customs house of readers’ verifying consciousness, and then exposes it to the countless reactions of the public. Quartered in the often unaccommodating hostelry of others’ preconceptions, the novel enriches and is made richer by publication’s journey. For Mirbeau, the destination of the car trip and fictional endeavor is the enlightened tolerance of Cosmopolis. The peripatetic record of Mirbeau’s travels across Europe is lubricated by the flow and flight of his excitement and enthusiasm, then slowed by his labored denunciations of coagulation and convention. Running water is clean. It sings, while alluvium is black and toxic. It is the fever of Mirbeau’s journey that ensures the attractiveness of the scenery; the beauty of nature depends on his hastening passage through it. If God is rendered obsolete by technology, he survives as the unverifiable impressions of a mechanistically revolutionized universe. From the vantage point of his car, Mirbeau proclaims that he experiences everything. Impressions locked inside book covers or inside the confining frames of paintings are reawakened, accorded a second life by Mirbeau’s galloping descriptions: “tout cela est remuant, grouillant, passant, changeant, vertigineux, illimité, infini” [all that is bustling, swarming, passing, changing, vertiginous, unlimited, infinite]. 72 Like the dance of roadside objects convulsed by the motorist’s vision, Mirbeau’s adjectives cannot stop and express certainty and understanding. The religious seeker who is subject to hunger or dehydration may find a God created by his altered state of consciousness. The man nostalgic for the transcendental may eat or fast, drink or thirst, and thereby be illuminated, given an unexpected view of heaven. This is what Mirbeau

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means when he mentions modifying states of matter, which determine and supersede “ce que Paul Bourget appelle des états d’esprit” [what Paul Bourget calls states of mind]. 73 According to the smoothness of Mirbeau’s ride, according to the ease of his digestion—depending on whether “mes organes fonctionnent bien ou mal” [my organs are functioning well or badly] 74 —God may or may not exist. Velocity induces the drunkenness extolled by Baudelaire (“Enivrezvous”). 75 Like “le vent” [the wind], “l’oiseau” [the bird], “l’horloge” [the clock], “tout ce qui fuit” [everything that flies], and “tout ce qui roule” [everything that rolls], 76 the car liberates the person enslaved by habit, time, or boredom. It causes an intoxication that multiplies things whose appearance it alters. Car travel upsets reason, which impoverishes the world that it makes reasonable. The hallucinatory persistence of disordered vision that speed causes in the motorist, the buzzing in his ears, and the uncertain solidity of material objects are symptoms of a psychosis that is similar to genius. And what genius, Mirbeau asks, “peut se vanter de n’être ni fou, ni malade?” [can boast of being neither mad nor sick?]. 77 The geniuses, madmen, and artists whose creativity Mirbeau celebrates are machines producing masterpieces only as long as they are alive. Once they pass into posterity, their works are integrated into the canon. Their legacy is tarnished by “la crasse” of academic commentary. Mirbeau remarked that Zola—once an engine of turbulent prolificacy—could not prevent himself, in death, from becoming a cold and pompous statue. Commissioned to produce a sculptural monument to the author, Belgian artist Constantin Meunier fashioned an allegorical figure whose conventionality, in Mirbeau’s view, contradicted the spirit of Zola’s work: “Derrière ce Zola, banal et pauvre, une Vérité nue étendait les mains. A droite, un mineur, à gauche, une glèbe. L’invention était quelconque” [Behind this poor, banal figure of Zola, a nude statue of the Truth extended her hands. On the right was a miner, on the left, a clod of earth. The idea was mediocre]. 78 This is what Mirbeau decries in classical and sacred art: that it takes natural energies and turns them into iconography. When Zola was still productive—“avant de se pacifier dans l’immortalité” [before being pacified by immortality] 79 —he had been the target of anti-Semitic vituperation and the object of liberal adulation. Like a car, he had spread outrage and wonderment in his passage: “Zola a créé, toujours, autour de lui, de la tempête. Il n’est pas étonnant que la bourrasque souffle encore” [Zola always created a tempest around himself. It is not surprising that the gusts are still blowing]. 80 Before a god is petrified by liturgical adoration, before he is a statue, he is the unfolding of his creativity. If Mirbeau’s novel exercises its role as doxological expression, it is by reawakening dormant gods whose images slumber in chapels, unleashing the storm by which their power had first been manifested.

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In the museum of The Hague, Mirbeau is apostrophized by Rembrandt’s Homer while giving voice to this painting on which “la crasse” of platitudes has accumulated. Stirred to life, the portrait complains of the imbecility of its viewers. Pointing to Homer, a “grosse dame en rose” [heavy woman in pink] instructs her children and intones, “Examinez bien ce vieux-là, mes enfants. Comme il ressemble à votre grand-père!” [Look carefully, children, at that old man. How he resembles your grandfather!]. 81 The purpose of Mirbeau’s book is to give voice to other books, to allow paintings struck dumb by consensus to contradict the verdict of history. Whereas dogmatists stop time with the immovability of their opinions, epektasis affords a vision of the transcendental, inducing vertigo, bewilderment, rapture, and awe. The new aesthetic that Mirbeau associates with immediacy and freshness converts the consciousness of history into astonishment at the present. On the other hand, images of dilapidation and inertia belong to an art that glorifies the beauty of necrophilia: “le triomphe de l’ordure [. . .] où croupit toute la poésie du passé” [the triumph of filth (. . .) where all the poetry of the past continues to stagnate]. 82 Mirbeau is chilled by the funerary loveliness of Bruges: swans like ghosts imprisoned in the pallid cerements of their feathers; Beguines whose habits confine them, like swans unable to take flight; eternity not experienced as Dionysian freedom, but as time brought to a standstill in the still water of the city’s canals. If art becomes a parasite attached to the corpse of inspiration, it is like the moss and lichen growing on houses in old, dark streets. Commemorative objects that celebrate the deadness of an artist do disservice to the energies that created works that never perish. Standing as an indestructible stone requirement to remember, the statue is an embodiment of duty, an expression of the superego, which, as Freud says, “represents more than anything the cultural past.” It is “an example of the way in which the present is turned into the past.” 83 This, for Mirbeau, is the sanitary function of the art-machine: to be an instrument of iconoclasm that tears down shrines and smashes effigies. Artistic work combines the power of annihilation and construction, channeling into “une domination créatrice” [a dominating creativity] “toutes les farouches forces que la nature n’employait qu’à la destruction” [all the ferocious forces that nature uses only for the purpose of destruction]. 84 Like the wind of which Georges Vasseur had spoken admiringly in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, the car distributes pollen, is the disseminator of seed, the voice of thunder. No longer an object of steel and rubber, it is volatilized like passing scenery. When it flies by, trees are transformed into “des reflets, des ombres [. . .] qui galopent. La plaine aussi s’immatérialise, emportée dans un galop surnaturel” [reflections, shadows (. . .) galloping. The plain is immaterialized as well, carried off in a supernatural gallop]. 85

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A favorite image in Mirbeau’s novel for the excitement of the car trip is an immersion in water that crashes, sings, baptizes, and rebirths, washing away time and restoring an innocence forgetful of the past. A drop of water joins with a stream, a cascade, a flood. “The dynamism of water is what makes it a source,” writes Gaston Bachelard. “It is what gives life its inexhaustible impetus.” 86 Unlike embalming fluids or preservative liquids bathing a specimen in eternity, the turbulence of waterfalls plays the awakening music of living nature. In his drive to Belgium, Mirbeau crosses a landscape spellbound by alcoholism where distilleries perform the death-disseminating labor of addiction. Highways are filled with the “lourdes voitures des liquoristes” [liquor merchants’ heavy vehicles] bringing “aux rares humains de ces régions la tristesse, la maladie et la mort” [to the few humans of the region despondency, sickness, and death]. 87 This is the vehicular traffic of morbidity and despair, circulation as contagion, the spread of stupidity and laziness. Commerce invigorates participants, while the distribution of alcohol brings paralysis. Selling liquor is work that discourages work. What Mirbeau commends is not the nepenthe of drink but cascading water that performs the elemental work of nature. When technology harnesses the resources of the world, it does work that Mirbeau sees as artistic expression. At the foot of a waterfall in the Romanches Pass, there is a power station generating the music of electricity, taking falling water and transforming it “en énergie motrice, en lumière, en source infinie de travail” [into energy that moves, into light, into an infinite source of work]. 88 As with an appreciation of the sublime, the aesthetic response to joyful work is lyrical. In the face of such a spectacle, as Mirbeau inquires of his reader, “[e]st-ce que vous ne sentez pas une poésie autrement grandiose que devant quelques pierres effritées?” [Don’t you feel a sense of poetry more uplifting than what you feel before a couple of crumbling stones?] 89 Like the artist whose task is to burn material and transform it into beauty, the machine uses fuel to create energy and movement. In Mirbeau’s secular cosmogony, there is no opposition between the Creator and his Creation, no separation of the artist into an admiring consumer of his handiwork. In Genesis, God stops and assesses his accomplishments: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was good” (Gen. 1:36). With the completion of divine labor, there is the designation of the Sabbath, a suspension of God’s work so that he may bless and hallow it. But when God finishes Creation and consecrates it on the Sabbath, the world turns into Mirbeau’s library/museum. No longer a production site animated by the power of the Logos, it is a temple filled with like-thinking worshippers who judge their beliefs and find that they are good. In Mirbeau’s model of creative labor, energy is never

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exhausted: when the final brushstroke is administered and the book’s last line is written, the finished object is discarded, thrown back into the furnace, where it supplies fire and heat for the creation to come. Balzac, the Promethean genius, had been an indefatigable worker, a car that never idled, a machine that was never turned off. Balzac’s health was fuel he used in the production of his fiction. He never paused to judge his work and proclaim it to be worthy: “Loin d’être accablé, écrasé par les besognes du présent, aux courtes heures du repos, il conçoit avec une lucidité merveilleuse les besognes de l’avenir” [Far from being overwhelmed or crushed by the tasks confronting him in the present, he conceived with marvelous lucidity, in the brief hours of rest accorded him, the tasks to be completed in the future]. 90 Mirbeau shows Balzac as able to prosecute countless projects all at once: writing four books, amassing enormous debts, traveling, corresponding with countless people. While executing manifold tasks, he filled the present to overflowing with ideas for the future. A modern avatar of the Creator, Balzac was more tireless than God: “Balzac ne s’est pas reposé le septième jour” [Balzac did not rest on the seventh day]. 91 For Mirbeau, endings are not mourned as tragedies but heralded as triumphs, moments in a chain of glorious renewals. A sunset over the Meuse becomes a celebration of the day’s labor, illuminating the nightfall with a superhuman blacksmith’s blazing forge. The burning of a star, the bustle of a harbor leave no time for remembering or for lamenting what is over. The twilight—the day’s death—is like the departure of a vessel or a goodbye to a lover embarking on a train. There is the heartache caused by transience, but there are other tasks to do. One grieves over “le terrible mouchoir qu’aucune main [. . .] n’agite plus” [the terrible handkerchief that a hand (. . .) no longer waves]. 92 One mourns the lost capacity to weep, but there is no time to indulge in the luxury of regret. Like the narcissism of God who mirrors himself in his creation, melancholy is sadness that rests and judges itself good. For Mirbeau, no cosmic pathos reflects nostalgia for lost youth. The pleasure of mourning is another layer of “la crasse” deposited by arrested time over futility and idleness. Sorrow not used in performing the labors of the universe only sustains “une hypocrite et sotte manie de littérature” [a hypocritical, foolish mania for literature]. 93 The world does not participate in one’s tearful retrospection; rather, in its impersonal enactment of natural processes, the world attests to what Meursault in Camus’s L’Etranger calls the tender inhumanness of the universe; or in Mirbeau’s words, “l’indifférence à ma vie, comme à ma mort” [indifference to my life and to my death]. 94 Much of La 628-E8 is devoted to unmasking the hypocrisy of literature and the anthropocentrism of religions that construct God as a projection of their adherents’ anxieties. The unknown is not welcomed as a liberation from

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parochialism but is feared in a way that only faith’s revealed truths can allay. When one understands, one is sad, but the man who is ignorant is alive. The campaign to propound a philosophy that reassures and consoles bespeaks a wish to live less and exchange experience for knowledge. In his elaborate schemes, Mirbeau’s mad entrepreneurial genius Weil-See proposes to offer an insurance plan protecting policyholders against turmoil and change. Formerly the proprietor of a power station in Grenoble, WeilSee had elected to apply to business the principles of probability theory. In Weil-See’s business model, insurance replaces religion, safeguarding customers—as God had done in prerational times—from drought and locusts, accident and fire, rain, hail, shipwreck, and revolution. Mirbeau had long denounced religion, not only for promoting repression and fanaticism, but also for encouraging adherents in their resistance to new ideas. A man in the throes of doubt, struggling with metaphysical anguish, unaware of final causes, and perplexed by eschatological mysteries can be helped by a priest offering the comfort of dogma. What the priest sells is what Weil-See sells: “réassurances contre le doute, les désillusions” [reinsurance against doubt and disillusion]. 95 Sketched in his novel, Mirbeau’s own philosophy is the opposite of WeilSee’s, in advocating receptivity and wonder. If to understand is to be sad, Weil-See’s statistical theory promotes sorrow by foreclosing future possibility. Unlike God, who protects his followers from adventitiousness and accident, Mirbeau invites his reader to welcome adventure, surprise, and danger. Weil-See argues that the dreamer is not an idler and that to imagine something affords a foretaste of possession. For Weil-See, the wealthiest man is the one whose fantasies are the richest. He belongs to an elite worthier than “notre ploutocratie misérable” [our miserable plutocracy]. 96 But in the exposition of the novel, Mirbeau shows that he is the opposite of the gnosticrat, arguing that no fact is incontrovertible, no conviction unassailable. In the manner of Montaigne, Mirbeau turns declarations into questions. Is his book a diary, a travelogue, a compilation of dreams and memories? Do these anecdotes reflect the countries and the people that he visited? Does the voice that Mirbeau hears crying or singing in the wind—did he ever actually hear it? Is the landscape he thought he traveled through just a lyrical construction? In his novel and in his life, what part is dream, what part reality? “I have no idea,” he answers in an anticipatory rebuttal of Weil-See. Yet despite equating imagination with acquisition, Weil-See himself represents energy more than matter. He is a conjecture-machine fueled by the fortune he dreams of but never amasses, an engine generating mathematical delirium. In Weil-See’s pronouncements on theology, he takes positions similar to Mirbeau’s, debating indisputable truths, undoing irreversibly consequential acts, which are solid, lifeless, malodorous things like Louis XIV’s gilded excrement. Once God finishes Creation, it solidifies as “la crasse.”

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Unlike the divinity, Weil-See says, he would have continued to dream and produce nothing. But God had blundered and made the world. “Et il l’a créé tel qu’il est encore?” [And he created it the way he did?]. 97 Mirbeau differs from Weil-See in believing that God’s error is reversible, that Creation is not a disaster site but a chantier where repairs are undertaken. Weil-See operates in the opposite sense of the curator or priest who advocates uncritical reverence for what is unchangeable and sacred. WeilSee’s madness unballasts the world of its rationality and substance. Subjected to the disordering processes of Weil-See’s brain, Creation is unmade, certainties are undone, and knowledge becomes chimerical: “[i]l avait cette puissance extraordinaire de communiquer son malaise, sa peine, son vertige, sa torture, à la matière la plus inerte . . . À son contact, la nature elle-même s’affolait” [He had the extraordinary ability to communicate his malaise, his pain, his vertigo, his torment to the most inert forms of matter . . . When nature came into contact with him, it went mad]. 98 In the longest meditation on Christianity in the novel, Weil-See comments on the temptation of Christ related in Matthew 4:8. There the devil offers Christ dominion over lands already his, taking him to a mountaintop and showing him “all the kingdoms of the world.” In his reflection, Weil-See focuses on the elevation of the vantage point, the loftiness of the Messiah poised with his nemesis on the summit, and the lowness of the material world lying beneath them in the distance. Underscoring the disparity between conception and execution, Weil-See suggests that the created world, in its material vulgarity, is unworthy of its designer and should have remained an uncompleted project. Rather than offering Christ sovereignty, the devil subjects him to the vertigo of his downward gaze: “[s]ous prétexte de lui offrir un monde, c’est un gouffre qu’il lui montrait” [Under the pretext of offering him a world, it was the abyss that he showed to him]. 99 Mirbeau uses Weil-See to emphasize the two poles of creation: imagination and accomplishment, invention and production. At one extreme, there is the futility of dreams that are never realized or embodied; at the other is the finished work fetishized as artifact. Religion becomes idolatry when, instead of worshipping the Creator, one adores the inert stuff left in the gulf below. Galleries, cathedrals, and historic preservation headquarters are where art is stored and venerated, becoming heavier, more crasseux. But in the company of Weil-See, the environment’s gravitational pull diminishes, and weightless fantasies float in air. Neither the impotent dreamer unable to bring his projects to fruition nor the collector of treasures incapable of making them himself does the work that Mirbeau considers the sole ennobling human enterprise. Weil-See’s schemes are like the smoke spiraling from the tobacco pipes of speculators who gather with him to drink beer and eat plovers’ eggs

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in Rotterdam. Unlike God who makes the world through the efficacy of his Word, Weil-See emits his gaseous speech and then he deflates “comme un ballon” [like a balloon]. 100 Mirbeau may concentrate on the magic instant when work moves from design to implementation—when the ship unmoors before it sets sail from the harbor. God is most majestic before he chooses to create—before he fulfills a vision that, once given form, precludes the possibility of other worlds. Yet Mirbeau rejects the false antithesis of pursuing empty daydreaming or idolizing an embodiment of things judged perfect and immutable. Adopting nature’s dialectic of destruction and re-creation, Mirbeau follows the definition of epektasis, whereby one cannot move higher unless one breaks the shackles holding him to the past. Forgetting what lies behind, the worker improves what lies ahead. Bibliophiles must burn their libraries, art lovers must cast old masterpieces onto the trash heap. One must throw away the art that casts death’s shadow on the wall. Emptying the museum, one must open its curtains and let in the light. The world is like the sewage-poisoned waterways of Amsterdam and their sickening miasmas. When creation incorporates the necessary element of waste removal, work resumes so that it again plays its hygienic music— made, as Mirbeau says, “pour courir, s’épandre et chanter sur les cailloux d’or” [to run, to scatter and sing over pebbles of gold]. 101 If an old god must be cast down to make way for human avatars, Mirbeau’s appending of the sacrilegious tale of Balzac’s death may seem the most aesthetically defensible conclusion to the novel. The Balzac put to death in Mirbeau’s coda to his travel book is the master whose life had already passed into posterity’s fixed judgment. The dead Balzac is his reputation, his worldwide acclaim, the glory that had solidified and changed him from a machine into a monument. In an insightful essay, Marie-Françoise Montaubin describes Mirbeau’s chapter as a necrology that resurrects its subject. In challenging the public’s unreflective devotion to Balzac, Mirbeau’s defamation of the author becomes a testimonial that honors him. Instead of a cenotaph from which the decedent’s spirit has escaped, Mirbeau’s narrative, like Balzac, promotes the fertility of new ideas. As with the “fumier” [compost pile], about which Eléonore Reverzy has written, 102 Balzac is a matrix that converts corruption into energy. In performing an iconoclastic task that desecrates and builds, Mirbeau pays homage to Balzac who, like Zola, was a storm, a gale, a torrent, an elemental force that never expired or subsided. Yet Mirbeau also denigrates the immortal master victimized by his recklessness, the Great Man derided for the smallness of his penis. As long as Balzac is the work site from which masterpieces emanate, Mirbeau’s account is an encomium assimilating Balzac to a car. Just as Mirbeau has decried the institutions that canonize and

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consecrate, preserving uninspiring art that settles as “la crasse,” so he extols the Balzac deprecated by the arbiters of public taste: The Academy, as Mirbeau summarizes, “n’a pas voulu de Balzac” [had no use for Balzac]. 103 Recalling the principle of epektasis that strives for what lies ahead, Balzac’s ambition always outstripped his present undertaking. Balzac was a visionary whose prescience positioned him in the future: “Il ne suivait pas les idées, il les devançait” [He didn’t follow ideas; he anticipated them]. 104 Unlike the sediment of consensus that settles on academies, Balzac did work whose vastness overflowed the present moment. A vaticinator and oracle, he realized tomorrow’s promise: “L’habileté reste, attend et récolte” [Competency stops, waits, and harvests]; “le génie sème et passe” [genius sows and then moves on]. 105 Thus, while praising the transitivity of Balzac’s industry and vision, Mirbeau smashes the idol of Balzac concretized as his fame. This Balzac is the target of Mirbeau’s creative demystification: the wastrel and Lothario, the “faiseur” and the cuckold. Montaubin notes that Mirbeau’s story exudes a pestilential stench, like that rising from the author’s prematurely rotting body: “The entire scene is permeated with an odor of corruption.” 106 As Balzac had been likened to an elemental force, Mirbeau’s deicidal exposé sows chaos and confusion, profaning the temple in which Balzac’s celebrity had been laid to rest, unleashing a tempest of controversy over his remains. But as Mirbeau had underscored, the generative power of manure is the antithesis of the lifeless waste that derives from immobility. Mirbeau thus establishes a hierarchy of excremental substances: those that fecundate and those that poison, the healthy fertilizer and the toxins. From this perspective, “La mort de Balzac” charts the conversion of one waste into another: the corporeal Balzac, whom Mirbeau shows as conceited and lubricious, and the creative Balzac, burning with impatience and ambition. Balzac’s inextinguishable intelligence is designated as the furnace that consumes his failing body and converts it into projects still unrealized. The “odeur de pourriture” [smell of decay] permeating the narrative and noted by Montaubin is the rich smell of Mirbeau’s textual manure that fertilizes a new impression of Balzac. In another catalyzing matrix of corruption and regeneration, Mirbeau changes the anteriority and lowness of what lies behind into the nobility of what lies ahead where it is waiting to be realized. Balzac’s body becomes the site of this dual operation: “Balzac s’en allait, mourait par le bas, mais le haut, la tête, restait toujour bien vivant” [Balzac was dying from below, but from above, his head was still very much alive]. 107 The immortalized Balzac, housed in the pantheon of great artists, had become a piece of filth left festering by critical unreflection. Crowned with accolades, Balzac had ceased to be an elemental force, becoming instead a machine that had fallen silent, a Rembrandt portrait of Homer whose voice no longer spoke. The anarchist Mirbeau acts in his capacity as iconoclast

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when, in disputing old stereotypes and challenging consensus, he yields to “the temptation of the tabula rasa,” so that new construction can begin. 108 The final image of Balzac is of his liquefying face, decomposition setting in with the speed of a moving car, his nose melting as it spreads over the covers on his deathbed. The last chapters in Mirbeau’s novel foreground the established theme of boundaries, thresholds over which the vehicle of Mirbeau’s fiction passes. Taxonomies, conventions, accepted judgments are overturned. A stop in Berlin as it existed in the era of the Kaiser shows it to be a city where the fixity of sexual norms yields to the dynamic exercise of perversion. The heterosexual that society makes one becomes the homosexual that one is. Transgression, regendering, the uncanniness of new literary forms: the novel’s “tendency to cross genres is like the crossing of a border.” 109 La 628-E8 unsurprisingly privileges the liminal landmark of the custom house, the border crossing that becomes a site of erotogeneity and transformation. It is at the border that nations and their citizens collide and interpenetrate. The car trip of the novel changes the motorist as Frenchman into a cosmopolitan tourist who becomes a resident of everywhere. Like the speed of shocking narratives that accelerate the decay of dead gods’ flesh, the book—no longer safely parked in the familiarity of reader recognition—is valued for its ability to unsettle and defamiliarize. Mirbeau is impatient with the customs officers who work in messy quarters. He is revolted by their insistence on opening trunks and seeking contraband. Audiences can demand that texts be opened, their contents verified as harmless, or they can facilitate exchanges that make neighbors into brothers. When it stops moving, art is squalid, and Brossette, Mirbeau’s chauffeur, proclaims a country to be a dirty place only when it is inhospitable to the stranger. Adopting the principle of epektasis, La 628-E8 champions astonishment and novelty, bringing a wish to forget the past and leave old knowledge at the border. It ignites a fever to climb higher and farther from oneself, toward a god not hidden in his name but revealed in the ceaselessness of his works. DINGO Beset by occupational vexations and uncertain health, Mirbeau began work in 1907 on what would be his final novel. Following the controversy surrounding Le Foyer, Mirbeau’s exposé of Catholic charities as lairs of sexual predators, he had again sunk into despondency. Unsure, as he had been in earlier days, of his ability to create, he started writing Dingo, predisposed to assume again his long-established role as vituperator and raging prophet, “the intemperate scorner of the vices of his time.” 110

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As Mirbeau had come to prefer machines to books and technology to literature, so he fled the society of men in order to explore his affinity with the animal with whom he had shared several years of his life. In a letter to Francis Jourdain, Mirbeau explained, “Dingo est l’histoire d’un chien. Ça me changera des hommes” [Dingo is the story of a dog. For me, that will be a change from men]. 111 An example of what Pierre Michel characterizes as autofiction, Mirbeau’s novel recapitulates, alters, and refines events from the life of the author: his temporary residence in the filthy hamlet of Cormeilles-en-Vexin, his uneasy interactions with the villagers, and especially the adventures and tragedies he shared with the Australian dingo in whom he saw reflected the mysteries of himself. As in Dans le ciel and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau turns to the vindictive play of social satire, here avenging himself “by interposing a dog” 112 on the grasping provincials in whose midst he had unwisely chosen to live. Dingo, like Célestine, unmasks frauds and pretenders, discerning the moral uncleanness hidden by the cosmetics of false probity. However, the principle of animal infallibility also proves unreliable, as Mirbeau learns that dogs cannot unearth the truth any more than social critics can distinguish sincerity from imposture. Infatuated with perfumed ladies, Dingo befriends a child-rapist/murderer. Like the fiction of omniscient narrators, Dingo is a judge who sometimes judges wrongly. As the theriomorphic doubles of the people who are their masters, dogs are credulous, discriminating, murderous, and loyal. Once more in the character of Dingo, Mirbeau elaborates his epistemology of unknowing, suggesting that reality is what we take for real before we recognize our mistakes. Mirbeau’s novel follows the author as he discards his untenable convictions, discovering that a dog can no more naturalize his master than a man can civilize his pet. Since culture and instinct are only differences in point of view, Mirbeau finally relinquishes his pretension to educate animals and audiences. He thus exhibits in his novel “a desire for emancipation that implies the destruction of all authority, beginning with that of the writer.” 113 The glimpse of the transcendental that is given in Mirbeau’s novel is made possible when the writer gives up his claim to understanding. The last stone in the foundation of the edifice that the anarchist demolishes is the anarchist’s conviction that he knows himself—that he is right. The story of love and loss that is narrated in Dingo relates the taming of something wild, the spoiling of something natural that had been caged inside a structure of stifling social theory. Like Dingo, who had died “after sixteen days of terrible agony, watched over, nursed, and mourned by his master as if he were the most faithful of his friends,” 114 the dingo is christened “Dingo” and given a second life in Dingo. As art honors inspiration, so the novel pays tribute to its subject, acknowledging that in creating art, the artist tries to leave his

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material undefiled. In the brown pools of Dingo’s eyes, Mirbeau sees a humble self reflected, small as the world’s mysteries are great in their remaining unresolved. As the infinite intelligence preexisting the world’s conception, God disappears from Dingo (1913). The timeless Being unfathomable to his creatures can be apprehended solely in the material aspect of Creation. However, seeking an experience of the transcendental is not necessarily a vain endeavor since any effort that raises man above the shabbiness of existence is a noble undertaking. But as Mirbeau’s fiction shows, what religions usually consecrate is an idealization of the worshipper who adores a self endowed with godhood. There are no metaphysicians in Dingo, no oracles, priests, or visionaries, and if they appeared, they would seem as foolish as the scientists who purport to explain reality. In Dingo, the decline of Western culture is evidenced by the pretentiousness of scientific discourse. At the dawn of time, there was the vastness of Australian prairies, moonless nights when carnivores hunted marsupials in the outback. In the Götterdämmerung, there are arachnologists analyzing specimens in jars, savants as inconsequential as the subject of their studies. In Dingo, Mirbeau creates another eponymous hero: not a child unable to survive the violation of his innocence (Sébastien Roch), not a priest whose reason cannot withstand the burden of his guilt (L’Abbé Jules), but an animal whose instincts are the subject of the author’s nostalgia. This is the universal scope of Mirbeau’s sad, ironic novel that, in its yearning to go back, telescopes the primitivism of a pet into a present moment occupied by its sophisticated master. Rather than trying to find meaning in the clutter of scientific theory, anatomizing truth and fitting it into taxonomic pigeonholes, Dingo reverses the course of time and seeks the Creator in the world’s genesis. Forsaking zoological sanctuaries where predators waste away, Mirbeau idealizes an Eden where an animal can still flourish. Infinite, immortal, omniscient, unintelligible, God is a chimera projected by a dying race. Man makes the divinity in the way he trains his dog, to be a reflection of himself, a reassuring euphemism, “un fantoche absurde [. . .] lequel n’a ni queue ni tête, puisqu’il est théologiquement démontré qu’il n’a ni commencement ni fin” [an absurd puppet (. . .) without head or tail, since it has been theologically demonstrated that he has neither a beginning nor an end]. 115 In what Pierre Michel calls an exercise in “auto-dérision,” Mirbeau appoints himself a new god who reshapes Creation’s raw material. This is what describes the forward trajectory of the novel: to replace nature with culture, to complete the humanization of an animal; to hasten the end of civilization and the coming apocalypse. On the one hand, a higher being instructs and fashions a dependent. On the other, a disillusioned god envies the innocence

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of his creature. Paradoxically, it is the death drive that orients the story forward, motivating instruction in the foundational principles of French republicanism. Eros operates in the opposite sense of what Freud specifies, directing a bourgeois culture to turn backward to an earlier state of things— not toward the insentience of inorganic matter, but toward the vitality of an animal. Just as Mirbeau exposes the latter as an example of speciesism, he shows the first as a mirage that the Decadent intellectual can never reach. Like childhood, which, in Sébastien Roch, is the lost homeland of exiled adults, an illusory place of harmony produced by civilization’s discontents, animality in Dingo is another spurious ideal. Dingo may be more perceptive than his human counterparts, who are blinded by money’s glitter and beguiled by power, wealth, and status. Guided by smell, Dingo interprets squalor as a sign of honesty. But Dingo is not always a dependable judge of character, and the forthrightness of the animal that ensures his fidelity and goodness is inseparable from the instincts that drive him to savagery and mayhem. Mirbeau’s novel is therefore structured by its self-cancelling objectives. Dingo is seen as trying to train Mirbeau to be a dog, while Mirbeau learns the futility of teaching Dingo to be a man—not just any man, but an exemplar of fin-de-siècle French intellectualism, imbued with egalitarian beliefs, conditioned to control his impulses, and convinced of the transformational power of the French language. Whether advocating atavism or extolling the benefits of culture, the lessons that Dingo teaches finally prove to be unworkable. Like “dingo,” a term that, according to the narrator’s friend Sir Edward Herpett, “signifie: ni chien, ni loup” [means neither dog nor wolf], 116 the author is neither animal nor human, neither altogether flesh nor spirit. Myths of life’s origins in a pure and pristine past—myths of man’s evolutionary path toward perfection and enlightenment—are revealed for what they are: edifying shams, uplifting fictions. 117 Mirbeau disallows hope in a teleological purpose of creation, insists on “the absence of any divinity that organizes original chaos into the cosmos.” 118 He rules out the possibility of improving reality’s flawed design and dispels illusions that it is salvageable through human creativity and wisdom. The course that Mirbeau recommends is an attempt at collective remediation—expressed in the Hebrew idea of tikkun olam, the shared responsibility for repairing the world. Mirbeau’s fictional oeuvre is laid out in opposite directions and consists of autobiographical novels seeking the happiness of childhood—innocence that does not know death and that declares that death does not exist—and energetic paeans to technology and progress proclaiming that through exposure to diversity, man’s vice can be overcome. This idealizing quest for destinations and departures is evident in the opening paragraph of Dingo,

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where the novel is defined as a receptacle and conveyance. Thus Dingo arrives in a shipping crate that is both a cradle and a casket—“un menu cercueil d’enfant” [a little child’s coffin], 119 as the recipient describes it. As a fresh, unspoiled import into a scientifically advanced society, Dingo is new life assimilated into a world in its cultural senescence. He reflects the Decadents’ rejection of sterile academicism, of the Comtian idea of progress that puts the divinity to death. A wish for the rebirth of man absolved of civilization’s sins explains Sir Edward Herpett’s gift of a wild dog delivered to his friends on Easter. At the beginning, Mirbeau recognizes that the relation of the pupil and the teacher should be reversed so that the dingo teaches discernment to his master. The neuroses engendered by civilization’s strictures have made man a maladjusted animal. The loss of the natural equilibrium that is enjoyed by the dingo and the infant comes from the adult’s language acquisition. Mirbeau’s satire of the Bildungsroman describes a regimen of unlearning in which the intelligent human is voided of his prejudices and preconceptions. The more learned a man is—the more polysyllabic his adverbs are—the more urgent is the need to replace the spoken word with barking. 120 In Dingo, Mirbeau’s picture of a postreligious world is one in which the operational power of the Logos has degenerated into the idiolect of pedants. In the evangelist account by John, the Word is God’s identity and attribute: “In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). But in Dingo, the Word is profaned, Creation’s innocence adulterated, when language loses the transitivity it had displayed in the beginning. Whereas divine speech had enacted—producing physical reality—human language becomes expressive, then works to analyze and classify. The scientists ridiculed by Mirbeau in his novel deal with living things that they suffocate with the aridity of their vocabulary. As scientific language devolves into fastidious taxonomies, academic bombast is inflated while its material diminishes. Dingo is subjected to linguistic vivisection, analyzed “[p]hysiologiquement, histologiquement, ostéologiquement, odontologiquement, paléontologiquement” [physiologically, histologically, osteologically, odontologically, paleontologically], 121 as he wastes away beneath the scrutiny of zoologists and naturalists. As obscurantism swells the artificial life of words, dingoes in decline move toward their inevitable extinction: dépouillés de leurs belles formes et de leur fière allure, avec des oreilles cassées et des queues amoindries, malades, galeux, stériles, déchus, jusqu’au jour prochain où nous ne les verrons plus du tout [robbed of their handsome form and their proud gait, with crumpled ears and shrunken tail, sickly, mangy, sterile, continuing to diminish until the coming day when we won’t see them anymore at all]. 122

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The scholarly idiom of fin-de-siècle French society works in the opposite sense of the life-infusing power of the Logos. Parasitic, it destroys the life that God created. Mirbeau also questions the value of scientific discourse, whose lexicon grows more luxuriant as its meaning is obscured. Purporting to be a polymath conversant in a wide array of disciplines, Herpett is a dabbler in everything and an authority on nothing. Studying coconut trees in Monte Carlo, he claims far-ranging expertise, pursuing “des lointaines études biologiques, linguistiques, sismographiques, océanographiques, anthropologiques, je ne sais plus trop” [remote studies in biology, linguistics, seismography, oceanography, anthropology, and I don’t know what all]. 123 The delirium of Mirbeau’s lists suggests the scholar’s poverty of knowledge. The narrator in Dingo proves his wisdom by his ignorance. Like passengers in cars who experience an evaporation of their convictions, the sage in Dingo is the one who acknowledges, “Je ne sais plus trop.” Mirbeau’s novel shows that erudition locks the savant in his knowledge, while encounters with the unknown open the way to other worlds and other people, motivating the discoverer to travel onward toward self-transcendence. In his tour of the fallen world of Ponteilles-en-Barcis, Mirbeau identifies the lowliest specimen by the floridity of his speech. Unlike dogs that cannot talk but are conversant in every language, the notary and lawyer communicate in a secret, arcane language. A receipt prepared by notary Anselme Joliton is so crammed with recondite legal formulas and obsolete locutions— it is so incomprehensible, Mirbeau writes, “que la tête m’en tournait” [that it made my head spin]. 124 Gone is the Word of God that had begotten the material world, and in its place is the decadent language of intimidation and exclusion. Garbling the original message imparted by God through his Creation, the stylist, savant, and poetaster conceal what reality discloses. Res ipsa loquitor: the referent ideally communicates through the word, privileging clarity over style, reestablishing a lingua franca. In Mirbeau’s initial interaction with his new Australian pet, he adopts a modest view of language deferring to reality’s expressive power. A word can best define a thing by an inability to capture it. In Genesis, God accords to man the prerogative of naming: “every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens” (Gen. 2:19), such that Adam equates his designation with their identity—“whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). The science of onomastics assumes an oracular authority. Not arbitrarily assigned to cattle, birds, and fish, Adam’s names for things reveal what they are. Mirbeau’s practice of language anarchy destroys the word as an agent of confusion in order to

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restore its capacity to reveal. While he admits to having given silly names to other pets (calling his cat “Miche” and naming Dingo’s predecessor “Pierrot”), he respects the signifying autonomy of the dingo he names “Dingo.” In dealing with his pet, Mirbeau abandons the anthropocentrism that had characterized the relationship between Adam and other creatures. Having created the “birds of the heavens” (Gen. 2:20) and “every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen. 1:26), God makes man in his image, appointing him master of the world, instructing him to bring forth children who will assert their ascendancy over animals: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:29). To Mirbeau, there is no hierarchical ordering that positions man at the apex where he exploits beasts for food and labor. It is wrong to inculcate human values in an animal, “comme s’il n’y eût que des hommes dans l’univers et qu’une même sensibilité animât indifféremment les plantes, les insectes, les oiseaux, tous les animaux et nous-mêmes” [as if there were only humans in the universe and a selfsame sensibility that affected plants, insects, birds, all the animals and ourselves]. 125 The lesson in tolerance Mirbeau learned in his car trips throughout Europe was to relinquish ethnocentrism and adopt a modest stance. Germans, insects, Austrians, and fish are animated by different sensibilities. They are guided by different needs, and their differences can be instructive to the French humans who live among them. Mirbeau’s effort to be silent and attentive to the voice of others cannot stop him from ventriloquizing the dingo whose words he cannot translate. Offering to take Dingo on a walk, Mirbeau renders the animal’s joyful yelps in French sentences expressing happiness and impatience: “Qu’est-ce que tu fais? Mais dépêche-toi donc! . . . Nous ne partons pas pour la Chine” [What are you doing? Come on, hurry up! . . . we’re not leaving for China]. 126 Ungifted in the universal fluency of dogs who speak Hindustani or Russian according to the provenance of their owners, Mirbeau treats Dingo as an imaginary dialogic partner. Beginning with Georges Vasseur and his migration through the consciousness of others, Mirbeau’s characters aspire to appreciate the plurivocality of Creation. Tired of confinement in the echo chamber of species, self, and nation, they seek to understand the speech of others and acquire the language facility of a dog. Not invoking Adam’s nominative authority, Mirbeau tries, if unsuccessfully, to listen and interpret. Mirbeau’s first impression of Dingo is that his inability to speak—to convey meaning outside of growls, yelps, and whimpers—suggests a greater sensitivity and awareness of his surroundings. The speaking subject is selfinvolved, inattentive to interlocutors. Attunement to clever diction, infatuation with effects of style divide the speaker from his listeners and curtail awareness of their reactions. Dingo is a consumer of environmental signals,

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reading a vagrant’s filth as honesty, detecting the cruelty of men in uniform. Stop talking, Mirbeau recommends, so that with your nose and intuition you can read beneath the shimmer of ingenious phraseology. Besotted with conceit or numb with insecurity, a human is a brute that is both prolix and inarticulate. Mirbeau recalls how, in Noirmoutierss, he had had a griffon named Pierrot. Abandoning the pretense of taxonomic competence, Mirbeau says the dog was a breed unique unto itself. As Dingo was neither dog nor wolf, Pierrot was a special being: “Objet unique, il s’était fait aussi une race à lui” [A unique specimen, he formed a race unto himself]. 127 Graceful, sensuous, and silky, Pierrot was the animation of art’s body. Unlike people who hold up monsters, masochists, and martyrs as divinities, Pierrot sought happiness and bestowed affection. Mirbeau’s neighbor in Noirmoutierss had been a woman of rare ugliness, a grotesquerie so extraordinary that she rose to the level of the transcendental. Transporting man out of the realm of linguistic self-adoration, hideousness—when it becomes sublime—is something to be worshipped. Like Pierrot, Mirbeau’s neighbor is undefinable, sui generis, so repulsive that she is situated “hors l’humanité, hors l’animalité” [outside the boundaries of humanity and animality]. 128 But rather than devoting to her a cult of reverential horror, Pierrot awakens from a nap and sees her hooked nose and hairy lip: ugliness so inexpressible that it stifles his bark and stops his heart. This is the punishing God that presided over Mirbeau’s early fiction, a hobgoblin inspiring dread in children and self-hatred in adults, requiring holocausts, enduring crucifixion, drinking the blood of human sacrifices. Because people endure calamity and anguish without reason, they posit a divine causality justifying suffering as expiation for unknown sins. What surpasses understanding in its barbarity and awfulness becomes a feature of the eternal demanding adoration and appeasement. This is how Camus identifies a God who “is perhaps full of hatred and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory, but the more hideous is his face, the more he asserts his power.” 129 To a devout man, the unsightliness of Mirbeau’s neighbor is divine. To Mirbeau, she is an anomaly, an aberration, neither animal nor human. To Clara in Le Jardin des supplices, she would be like a tiger or a spider, “comme tous les individus qui vivent au-dessus des mensonges sociaux” [like all individuals who live above the lies of society]. 130 But to Pierrot, ugliness that exceeds the bounds of nature is a transgression that nature sanctions by killing the monster and those who see it. This is Dingo’s role in the opening section of Mirbeau’s novel, where he passes nature’s verdict on a society grown defective and infirm. Ponteillesen-Barcis, where the novel first unfolds, is a postlapsarian locus of cupidity and prejudice. It is a zoological garden without cages, walls, or fences where

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degenerate human specimens are exhibited for the appraisal of a dog. As Mirbeau tries to gain proficiency in the language of cynology, translating barks and wagging tails into the words that people use, he comes to see the townspeople from Dingo’s point of view. The first pages of Sébastien Roch had been a paean to verdant childhood, an idealization of the candor and vegetal innocence of youth. Like a baby, Dingo is praised for his status as a newborn, accorded a moral superiority for his limited longevity. Mirbeau’s attitude reflects the philosophy of the anarchist, for whom the inchoateness, confusion, and randomness of things are preferable to the order imposed by social institutions. Mirbeau is inclined to champion dogs that don’t live for long, whom society cannot denature because they always run too fast, hurrying “comme des fous vers la vieillesse et vers la mort” [like madmen toward old age and death]. 131 “Bien trop pur de tout contact humain, bien trop vierge de toute civilisation” [Much too untouched by human contact and unspoiled by civilization], Dingo is too quick to be domesticated by an author. All Mirbeau knows is that the pet and owner share the same jaundiced view of mankind. Like the cynologist who finds himself reflected in his subject, Mirbeau writes in his book, “Le chien naît misanthrope” [Dogs are born misanthropes]. 132 In his novel, Mirbeau assimilates Dingo to a car. Both rampage through the countryside, leaving carnage in their wake: dead chickens, sheep, and cows. Dingo’s hunting grounds are like a highway littered with “la faune de la route” [fauna of the highway]. 133 Both automobile and dog, in their frenzied impetuosity, are unencrusted with “la crasse” that accumulates on creatures stupefied by routine. Mirbeau admires the dog and automobile for their heedlessness of rules, for the eagerness and violence with which they race through unmapped territory. Like a train whose course is limited by a geometry of rails, a dog on a leash sacrifices freedom to obedience. In Ponteilles, the stagnation caused by incuriosity and habit turns the energies of life into the immobility of death. Ponteilles is like the villages Mirbeau had crossed in La 628-E8, clusters of dormant shops with dull-witted merchants on the doorstep. Places spellbound by passivity, they lack the activity of commerce that would reawaken them to life. The provincialism of autochthons makes them suspicious of outsiders. Dingo resembles no dog that the inhabitants of Ponteilles have ever seen. Both master and dog originate in exotic, distant places—in Paris or Australia—and inspire xenophobic dread. Because Mirbeau comes from elsewhere and is uncontaminated by “la crasse,” he is anonymous and rootless, like a Wandering Jew or homeless vagabond. He has no ancestry, no derivation, no history, no homeland. An alien sojourner, he is ostracized by the villagers: “Je n’avais donc pas un pays à moi? . . . Je n’étais donc né nulle part?” [So I didn’t have a country? . . . I wasn’t born anywhere?]. 134

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The species differentiation that enshrouds Dingo in uncanniness extends to Mirbeau, whose occupation inspires suspicion and exclusion. Dogs that are polyglots fluent in German and Greenlandish are like novelists who write in an esoteric idiom, resembling the visitors to Mirbeau’s house “qui parlaient des langues étrangères” [who spoke in foreign tongues]. 135 Divinities recognizable by their unusual appearance also speak in magic tongues incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Even Dingo’s defender, the day-laborer Piscot, compares the creature to a mythological Chinese monster, “comme il y en avait autrefois du temps des dieux” [of the kind that existed in the time of the old gods]. He is like a dragon spitting flames, with “une longue queue garnie de suçoirs, des ailes griffues, des pattes ailées” [a long tail with suckers, wings with claws, paws with wings]. 136 A hybrid neither bird nor beast, neither animal nor god, he is like Mirbeau’s neighbor in Noirmoutiers who, in early times, would have demanded infant sacrifices. So hideous or majestic that to see him is to die, God is the Logos whose power is enough to strike the profane dumb. In Mirbeau’s earlier reflections on the attributes of God, he distinguished the writer’s expressive aims from the world-embodying power of the Creator. Since God’s face cannot be seen, since truth cannot be grasped, it is better to experience the mind-erasing exhilaration of the car trip, in which “on n’en sait rien” [one doesn’t know anything] and “on n’en peut rien savoir” [one cannot know anything]. 137 Mirbeau’s final novel offers a reflection on the divinity and the dingo, and on man’s attempt to invoke them in literature and religion. The thoughts of God and dog are secrets, and people’s efforts to interpret them prompt recourse to what Mirbeau’s derides as “cet éternel vocable: la beauté” [that eternal vocable: beauty]. 138 The arc of Mirbeau’s fiction moves from a lover’s crucifixion on the Calvary of Passion (Le Calvaire) to a world in which a noble animal is sacrificed by society. The focus of these novels remains on what is transcendental, beyond analysis—on mysteries that defy human efforts to explain them. In the writings of an author committed to the demands of social justice, there is a need to reconcile literature to subjects that literature cannot compass. The lure of ecstatic silence weighs on all of Mirbeau’s fiction. It calls climbers to the mountaintop where they deny gravity and reason so that, weightless, they can launch themselves with the faith of birds into the sky. It calls activists to cast off the flesh that holds them down and break the shackles of expression that check the flight of inspiration. The book is a cage of compromise in which nature’s ferocious forces shake the bars. Captured by art’s trickery, beings higher than man’s intelligence, stronger than his instinct, and more beautiful than his images try to escape into the openness of

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the ineffable. The only painting worth finishing is one whose subject has disappeared into invisibility, the only worthy text an empty sepulcher from which the spirit has risen. In La 628-E8, Weil-See had told Mirbeau the biblical story of the devil who offers Jesus dominion over the kingdoms down below. It was the temptation of support, the devil’s steadying hand, that Christ had to refuse in order to demonstrate supremacy. For Mirbeau, the abyss is one that beckons overhead, the infinity of the firmament into which the humble artist spirals upward. The vertigo he experiences “sur la montagne, au bord du gouffre” [on the mountain, on the edge of the abyss] 139 is the impulse to surrender, to abandon the support of words and images, to shed expression’s body and reascend into the sacred. This is the delirium of the motorist speeding farther from himself, the longing of the painter who amputates his hand and who lets go of triteness and reaches upward toward perfection. Either God is an irrelevance, a mystification, a distraction, or he is that before which the artist, in laying down his pen, confesses his impotence and is reunited with his material. In Dingo, Mirbeau is transfixed by another glimpse of the unknowable, as the look in Dingo’s eye recalls the deep cerulean sky that Lucien had seen in the gaze of a deaf-mute girl encountered on the road. What is hidden in Dingo’s eye or in the canopy overhead? Is it the splendor of heavenly hosts or vacancy and nothingness? Creative abdication is ultimately the cost of this bewitchment, as the emptiness in a dog’s look is like the empty promise of artistic effort, “qui ne signifie rien . . . rien du tout” [that signifies nothing . . . nothing at all]. Mirbeau’s novels are pocked with these openings onto mystery and blackness, as the flow of vehicular narrative falls into chasms of the inexplicable. There is suddenly a gap, a hole, a terrible interstice: Jean Mintié’s panicked view of death in the space of a missing bath tile; Mirbeau’s journey, “la belle chanson des cylindres” [the cylinders’ beautiful song], 140 unexpectedly interrupted by an encounter with Martians on the highway in the night. There is always a bridge of language, of rational analysis, that mends the quotidian world and reconnects it to its usual insignificance. Christ himself had had the chance to take the devil’s hand and renounce sovereignty to his nemesis. When Mirbeau transcribes Dingo’s comments on material culture into French—his antipathy for food additives, his disdain for Louis XVI furniture—he clarifies, as in the Bible, the mysterious utterances of an alien being, adjusting the word of dog and God to a familiar human idiom. But sometimes there is the untranslatable majesty of the original; Dingo’s “gestes avaient une éloquence plus expressive, plus précise que nos paroles” [movements had an eloquence that was more expressive, more precise than our words]. 141 This hunger for the impossible is a recurrent theme in Mirbeau’s writing: the

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wish to fathom Dingo’s eyes and express their “inexpression hallucinante” [haunting lack of expression]. 142 Mirbeau gravitates toward what he does not know, loves what he cannot understand. It is what motivates him to strive harder, to travel farther from himself, toward a perfection that he recognizes because it cannot be expressed in words. In striving toward the unsayable, Mirbeau’s writing deviates into approximations, attempts to suggest the infinite through the forms of material reality. There are miners whose eyes see chthonic gods in the sparkle of a diamond. There is the crowd’s universal viewpoint that dissolves man’s singular perspective. There is the abjection of debased nature redeemed by the masterstrokes of artifice: facets of painted faces, the luminosity of tinted hair that, when refracted by “un peu d’imagination neurasthénique” [a little neurasthenic imagination], projects the unseen as a sheaf of “rayons multicolores” [multicolored beams]. 143 Like blank spaces, dark lacunae, the ellipses in Mirbeau’s writing, there are shimmers of the otherworldly reflected for an instant in common objects. This is the case with William’s magic hats in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, in whose oceanic sheen the totality of things is mirrored—“où les ciels, les arbres, les rues, les fleuves, les foules, les hippodromes se succédaient en prodigieux reflets” [where skies, trees, streets, rivers, crowds, racetracks followed one another in prodigious reflections]. 144 To contemplate William’s hats, to gaze in Dingo’s eyes, to decipher the text of coffee grounds, or to follow the phantasmagoria of passing clouds is to part the curtains hiding the secrets of the supernatural. On the threshold of renunciation, Mirbeau pauses for a moment, hesitating before abandoning the effort to grasp the absolute. But there are social evils still to rectify, vitiated governments to overthrow, fanatics to combat, prostitutes and paupers to be championed. The writer’s practical tasks remain. Achievable goals require his labor, and so, ignoring the summons of the infinite, Mirbeau returns to the plane of daily problems. Taking Dingo out on the street, he introduces him to the populace of Ponteilles. This is the domain in which most of Mirbeau’s narrative unfolds: the world of matricidal hostellers, larcenous notaries, and murderous vagrants where through the intermediary of his dog, Mirbeau resumes his role as social critic. It is not as if, as an artist, Mirbeau can choose the arena in which he operates. As the transcendental hushes speech, resists imaging, and defies expression, only the human milieu with its injustices elicits the writer’s efforts to reform them. Mirbeau’s caricatural portraits of mayors, teachers, and notaries pretend to the unprejudiced astuteness of a dog. Mirbeau frequently suggests that people and objects in constant motion remain vibrant and clean, unsoiled by the sediment of history. As Enda McCaffrey suggests, it is by escaping the supervision of his master that Dingo preserves the animal integrity of his perspective; “it is the movement

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of the dog itself that contributes to the narrator’s disappearance.” 145 Racing dogs and speeding cars accede to the timelessness of amnesia that wipes away the memories of preceding days and preceding journeys. Permanent encampments are like graveyards and museums, storehouses of the material byproducts of culture. Movement of the animal, the automobile, and the bowel signals health that may be jeopardized by a costive regimen of communal life. Mirbeau’s first image of Ponteilles is of its pleonastic excrementalism, the morbidity of a populace wallowing in mournful, fecal stupor. There is a single street “où s’accumulent les bouses, les crottins et les fientes, où les ordures ménagères s’éternisent au creux des pavés” [where cow dung, horse dung, and bird droppings continue to accumulate, where household garbage piles up eternally in the hollows of the pavement]. 146 Filth and time build up where change and movement are discouraged. Mirbeau’s scatological lists bog down in repeated syllables and halting images: “culs de bouteilles” [bottoms of bottles] scattered amid “excréments humains” [human excrement], courtyards “où les tas de fumier fument [. . .] dans un bain de purin” [where piles of dung smoke (. . .) in a bath of liquid manure]. 147 A correlative of waste is the villagers’ hostility to change, their insistence on tradition and suspicion of outsiders. Residents of Ponteilles merge with their unalterable reputations. Unpleasant odors emanate from unhygienic thinking. The town church is like a barn desecrated by passing birds: “Il fiente sur le tabernacle comme il pleut sur la ville” [Bird droppings shower down on the tabernacle as rain falls on the city]. 148 Citizens of Ponteilles are facsimiles of their ancestors. Every notary is a savior then an embezzler and a fugitive. The mayor is eternally comforted that train service does not disturb the people’s slumber. The publican, Jaulin, esteemed for his immutability, presides over a business that is a sacred institution: “Même pour ses camarades d’enfance, Jaulin est Jaulin, brièvement, simplement, comme Dieu est Dieu” [Even for his childhood friends, Jaulin is Jaulin, briefly, simply, in the same way that God is God]. 149 Having originated elsewhere, in “Autre-Alasie,” Dingo upsets the status quo, represents an unknown species, and is excommunicated from the hierarchy of familiar village dogs. Like his Parisian master, Dingo is an exoticism, worrisome and suspect, and cannot be pacified by the blandishments of a bone or piece of sugar. Soon the radius of Mirbeau’s story begins to widen and expand as its subject strains against the leash of analytical domestication. Once the narrative moves outside a population center—once it takes to woods and plains— it loses its self-assuredness as social commentary. Wayfarers, dingoes, and solitary dwellers in the forest express their refusal to fit in taxonomic niches. Outside of town, even Dingo ceases to be a reliable judge of character. In places no one lives, in the wilderness or paradise, the trespasser knows noth-

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ing; “il n’en peut rien savoir” [he can’t know anything]. 150 Mirbeau’s sympathy for vagabonds, seen in many of his novels, comes from their immunity to the effects of normative institutions. It is natural that Dingo should feel a fraternal solidarity with transients, who smell bad, are unsocialized, and are animalistically sincere. But Dingo also delights in the perfumery of fancy ladies. His detection of virtue is as undependable as that of humans misled by hypocrisy. A seemingly meek and harmless wanderer that Dingo encounters on the road, whom he greets with wagging tail, is presumed to be an honest vagabond. But Coquereux is unmasked as a sexual predator and assassin who rapes an adolescent girl who gives him shelter in a barn. No inerrancy is attributable to dingoes or to judges. Men cannot safely invoke the authority of either God or dog. “Ah! nom de Dieu! Ah! nom d’un chien,” they exclaim in exasperation. This is the effect of Mirbeau’s program of epistemological disqualification, which cites the acumen of chambermaids undeceived by masks of social probity then dismisses them as aspirants to bourgeois selfishness and comfort. Dingo is an animal surrogate for the elusive honest man. But he is no more innocent than the myth of benign and pristine nature. Dingo “doesn’t kill just for food; he also kills for pleasure,” notes Pierre Michel. 151 Dingo is a marauding engine of massacre and havoc, but unlike the automobile careening forward (“Place au Progrès!” [Make way for Progress!]), he is a destructive force of atavism arising from a night of primordial chaos. Once Dingo is stripped of the presumption of moral superiority, the propadeutic focus of Mirbeau’s tale is readjusted. Wisdom no longer emanates from the wordless voice of nature. Instead, Mirbeau teaches Dingo the lessons of French gentility. Mirbeau ironizes his role as an enlightened Godsuccessor who redoes the work of Genesis, who replaces the novel’s backward orientation toward an ideal of animal primitivism with a future ideal of cultural refinement. Instead of the perspicacity of the dog, Mirbeau extols the wisdom of himself as intellectual. Instead of citing an abuse of language as the cause of man’s unhappiness, he praises the “prestige de la parole humaine, [. . .] la puissance de ses vertus éducatrices” [prestige of the human utterance, (. . .) the power of its educative virtues]. 152 The satire of the logocentrism of French scientists and politicians is reinforced by his portrait of the verbosity of the novelist. In evangelizing Dingo, Mirbeau reaches new levels of homiletic grandeur: the forcefulness, rhythm, and suavity of his voice enhance a message conveyed by the judiciousness of his diction: “[l]es prosopopées les plus éloquentes [. . .] je les lui adressai de ma voix la plus vibrante” [The most eloquent prosopopoeias (. . .) I addressed to (Dingo) in my most resonant voice]. 153 But Dingo remains unmoved by the effect of Mirbeau’s phrasing,

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and with a hard look in his eye, “il suivait le cheminement dans l’herbe d’un coléoptère corseté de bleu” [he followed in the grass the path of a beetle corseted in blue]. 154 Dogs that are fluent in all the languages spoken by their masters remain obdurately unpersuaded of the merit of any. So while Mirbeau is delivering an academic presentation, addressing a multilingual audience on “l’indiscutable supériorité de la langue française” [the indisputable superiority of the French language], 155 Dingo is at home, using his mouth to bite and kill. By incorporating evidence of the futility of grandiloquence, Mirbeau makes the powerlessness of words into the subject of his text. Unlike Lucien’s empty canvas, Mirbeau’s overwritten page employs satire to show the impotence and inexpressiveness of the artist. The lesson that Dingo teaches is that there can be no turning back, no repatriation in the Eden of a lush Australian outback. And so the biography of Dingo proceeds onward irreversibly, as the Decadent fin de siècle moves toward an apocalyptic fin du monde. Having been unleashed on sheep and cattle, Dingo becomes a force of eschatological extermination, awakening a village stewing in its excremental slumber and hurrying it toward its final hour. Even Mirbeau cannot ignore the signs of the approaching tribulation, of Dingo as the harbinger of the coming Weltuntergang: “J’en arrivai presque à croire que Dingo était réellement un être mystérieux, une force inconnue, un fléau de Dieu, lâché sur la terre” [I almost came to believe that Dingo really was a mysterious being, an unknown force, a scourge from God unleashed on the world]. 156 However, Dingo does not end with famine and burning cities but with the pathos of nature’s “ferocious forces” waning and growing feeble. There is no cosmic cataclysm but instead a quiet decrescendo as Mirbeau takes his pet and relocates with him to Paris. There, food is served, not captured. There, killing is aestheticized as the sport of venery. Without the revitalizing interaction of predator and prey, Dingo grows slower, tamer, sicker, and more housebound and obedient. The city is a place of commerce, not production; a center of parasitic work dependent on criminality and disease, employing policemen and veterinarians who treat what nature would eradicate. In Paris, Dingo cannot escape acculturation’s sickening influence. Without quarry, he becomes—like other city dwellers—a consumer of lifeless surplus, attacking skins and pelts and furs, ghost residue of living otters and chinchillas. He seizes a canvas that assimilates a predator to its victim, a picture of a “chienlièvre” [dog-hare] that he rejects as an abomination. In a Decadent staging of the primacy of the capture and the kill, Dingo is later caught up in the aristocratic entertainment of the hunt, where violence is sublimated into cynegenetic pageantry. Before, in pursuing prey in the forest near Fontainebleau, he had disinterred old shoes, dried bones, and discarded

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rags, acting out the urge to kill on things already dead: “Il chasse on ne sait quoi . . . des fantômes” [He’s hunting I don’t know what . . . ghosts], as a forester suggests. 157 In the hunt, the foundational acts of extermination and creation lose their biological urgency and become dilettantish recreation. Horsemen sound the horn and ride brashly through the forest. Their female entourage, reclining softly on their pillows, watches the starting of the stag, the savagery of the “curée,” with Dingo taking part as a theatrical supernumerary. This is the Decadent trivialization of life and death as play and art. Unlike God, Dingo has a head and tail, a beginning and an end. Suffering from the Parisian regimen of domesticity and confinement, he lies quietly on the floor. Dingo’s spiritedness and energy, his ferocity and pride degenerate into the affection and docility of a house pet. Mirbeau is touched by the sensitivity and devotion of his companion, but he is powerless to reverse the decline of nature into culture. Vagabonds that cross the land are like loved ones who cross our lives, transients soon gone despite our treasuring and mourning them. In Mirbeau, an absent god, eternal and irrelevant, is knowable only through the creatures that are made to pass away. The fulgurating drama of the apocalypse that Dingo presages gives way to the discreetness of a burial behind the house. “Qu’est-ce que la mort d’un chien?” [What does the death of a dog matter?], 158 as the grieving Mirbeau wonders. “Un fléau de Dieu, lâché sur la terre” [God’s scourge, unleashed on the earth] recalls the pestilence whose ravages Camus would chronicle decades later (La Peste, 1947). There too, characters grapple with the problem of mortality. Camus’s narrator is also unconsoled by “aucune formule imbécile touchant l’éternité de la personne” [any idiotic formula concerning the eternity of the human person]. 159 Doctor Rieux rejects the idea of an afterlife, of loss that can be palliated by a reunion of friends in paradise. In Dingo, the bereaved are comforted by the artworks of their memories. As Camus writes, there is “no more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it.” 160 The endurance of the attachment that Mirbeau feels for Dingo, the unfathomability of the mystery his friend had represented, ensure the manner of his survival in the book that bears his name. They allow Dingo to overrun the boundaries of birth and death, of head and tail. There is a paradoxical return of an unknowable Creator in the story of one of the least and most incongruous of his creatures. It is in the literature and love that are inspired by an animal that what is fleeting can be raised to the level of the transcendental. Where is the bottom of the affection that bonded Mirbeau to his friend? What is the key that unlocks the mystery in Dingo’s eyes?

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Mirbeau again protests his skepticism on matters of religion: “[j]e suis un esprit fort et, chacun le sait, ennemi de toutes les superstitions et toutes ‘les croyances’” [I am a strong-minded person, and as everyone knows, an enemy of all superstitions and all “beliefs”]. 161 But in the blue dome of the sky, in the looks of geniuses and madmen, in the eyes of flies and vaudevillians, there are depths that incredulity cannot fathom. Mirbeau may dismiss the gullibility of cooks who pray to Saint Anthony of Padua. Yet he returns to a profession of humility and nescience: “[o]n ne pénétrera jamais rien de tout ce qui nous entoure” [We will never fathom anything about what lies around us]. 162 Is there a difference between a novel that immortalizes a beloved pet and the childish dreams of poets or the visions of a prophet? All we have, as Mirbeau says, is our ignorance of life. But ignorance lies within, and mystery is outside. Mirbeau’s quest, in directing him toward an ever-greater mystery, points him outward, toward a possible reality that is higher, nobler, better— guiding him “toujours plus loin, au-delà de moi-même.” NOTES 1. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), 549. 2. Pierre Michel, introduction to Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, by Octave Mirbeau, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:11. 3. Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau, s.v. “Neurasthénie,” http://mirbeau.assoc.fr/dictionnaire/ . 4. Peter Hartocollis, “‘Actual Neurosis’ and Psychosomatic Medicine: The Vicissitudes of an Enigmatic Concept,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83, no. 6 (2002): 1362. 5. Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:212. 6. Ibid., 21. 7. Ava Falk, “Border Symbolism,” in Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. Howard Stein and William Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 145. 8. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 29. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 31. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. Ibid., 41. 15. Ibid., 239. 16. Octave Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques 1877–1892, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Séguier, 1993), 443. 17. Jean-François Wagniart, “Les Représentations de l’errance et des vagabonds dans l’oeuvre d’Octave Mirbeau,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001): 308. 18. Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 165. 19. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 230. 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Charles Baudelaire, “Les Foules” and “La Solitude,” in Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962).

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22. Ibid., 130. 23. Ibid, 137. 24. Ibid., 22. 25. Ibid. 26. Arnaud Vareille, “Un mode d’expression de l’anticolonialisme mirbellien: La logique de lieu dans Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 9 (2002): 163. 27. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthenique, 226. 28. Baudelaire, “Les Foules,” 60. 29. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 226. 30. Baudelaire, “Les Foules,” 61. 31. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 226. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 229. 34. Pierre Citti, Contre la décadence: Histoire de l’imagination française dans le roman 1870-1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 75. 35. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 92. 36. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 137. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 211. 41. Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire: Introduction à l’archétypologie générale (Paris: Bordas, 1969), 213. 42. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 265. 43. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” In Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 53. 44. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 262. 45. Ibid., 265. 46. Ibid., 263. 47. Philippe Ledru, “Variations du thème de l’espace clos chez Mirbeau,” in Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), 77. 48. Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:397. 49. Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, 266. 50. Ibid. 51. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 285. 52. Marie-Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin, “Impressions de route en automobile: Variations sur l’esthétisme chez Proust et Octave Mirbeau autour de 1907,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 11 (2004): 150. 53. For this quote and those preceding it in this paragraph, see Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 285. 54. Claude Foucart, “Le Musée et la machine: L’Expérience critique dans La 628-E8,” in Actes du colloque d’Angers: Octave Mirbeau (Le Mans: IUT du Mans, 1991), 269. 55. This and all other biblical translations are from the English Standard Version. 56. Enda McCaffrey, “La 628-E8: La Voiture, le progrès et la postmodernité,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 6 (1999): 130. 57. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 386. 58. Ibid., 285. 59. Ibid., 380. 60. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 285. 61. Ibid., 283. 62. Ibid., 290. 63. Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:303. 64. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 295.

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65. Ibid., 465. 66. In a recent article, Claire Nettleton perceptively situates Mirbeau’s novel of automotive delirium in terms of the medical and psychiatric beliefs of the era: “Nineteenth-century physicians also indicated a connection between neurasthenia and altered perception. According to Charcot and Dutil, the shock often associated with transportation technology not only leads to ‘des troubles nerveux’ and ‘la névrose traumatique,’ but it also has the power to dramatically alter visual perception [. . .] Although hystéro-neurasthénie is not limited to trauma occurring after accidents, this illness illustrates the link between high-speed transporatation technology, trauma, and aberrant (or possibly innovative) ways of thinking or behaving.” Claire Nettleton, “Driving Us Crazy: Fast Cars, Madness, and the Avant-Garde in Octave Mirbeau’s La 628E8,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 42, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 2014): 253. 67. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 295. 68. Ibid., 465. 69. Ibid., 288. 70. Ibid., 291. 71. Ibid., 287. 72. Ibid. 288. 73. Ibid., 298. 74. Ibid. 75. Charles Baudelaire, “Enivrez-vous,” in Petits Poèmes en Prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garniers Frères, 1962). 76. Ibid., 107. 77. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 296. 78. Ibid., 359. 79. Ibid., 361. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 365. 82. Ibid., 393. 83. Quoted in Brown, Life against Death, 296. 84. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 393. 85. Ibid., 423. 86. Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1942), 14. 87. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 317. 88. Ibid., 393. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 564. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 442. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 453–54. 96. Ibid., 458. 97. Ibid., 458–59. 98. Ibid., 459. 99. Ibid., 461. 100. Ibid., 468. 101. Ibid., 470. 102. Eléonore Reverzy, “Mirbeau et le roman: De l’importance du fumier. De Dans le ciel (1891) aux 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901),” in Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), 102. 103. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 564. 104. Ibid., 566. 105. Ibid. 106. Marie-Françoise Montaubin, “Mort de Balzac,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 4 (1997): 271. 107. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 584. 108. Montaubin, “Mort de Balzac,” 277.

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109. Ibid., 278. 110. Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau, s.v. “Dingo,” http://mirbeau.assoc.fr/dictionnaire/. 111. Mirbeau to Francis Jourdain, December 22, 1909, in L es Cahiers d’aujourd’hui 9 (1922), 178. Quoted in Pierre Michel, introduction to Dingo, by Octave Mirbeau, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:615. 112. Pierre-Jean Dufief, “Le Monde animal dans l’oeuvre d’Octave Mirbeau,” in Actes du colloque d’Angers: Octave Mirbeau (Angers, France: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1992), 287. 113. Pierre Michel, “Mirbeau et l’autofiction,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001): 131. 114. Michel, introduction to Dingo, 618. 115. Octave Mirbeau, Dingo, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:657–58. 116. Ibid., 641. 117. Christopher Lloyd writes similarly: “If man is an uncertain hybrid, neither ape nor angel, so too is Dingo, who is [. . .] suspended between domesticity and the wild. In this sense, to accuse Mirbeau of anthropomorphism [. . .] is doubly inappropriate, if we are meant to accept a truly evolutionary conception of both man and beast: human nature is not radically separate from other species; all are subject to the same materialist determinations.” Christopher Lloyd, Mirbeau’s Fictions (Durham, UK: University of Durham Press, 1996), 83. 118. Pierre Michel, notes to Dingo, by Octave Mirbeau, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:1239. 119. Mirbeau, Dingo, 635. 120. “Dingos’s superiority to humans lies in 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?’ In the novel, Mirbeau uses Dingo to comment on creativity and art as byproducts of a culture of anality and necrophilia. Unlike artists who stop to mirror themselves in their productions, animals do not admire their kill or their virtuosity as predators.” Ziegler, The Nothing Machine, 217. 121. Mirbeau, Dingo, 641. 122. Ibid., 645. 123. Ibid., 639. 124. Ibid., 713. 125. Ibid., 657. 126. Ibid., 659. 127. Mirbeau, Dingo, 659. 128. Ibid., 660. 129. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 26. 130. Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, 302. 131. Mirbeau, Dingo, 663. 132. Ibid., 638. 133. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 480. 134. Mirbeau, Dingo, 787. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 786. 137. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 295. 138. Mirbeau, Dingo, 653. 139. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 461. 140. Ibid., 512. 141. Mirbeau, Dingo, 656. 142. Ibid., 664. 143. Ibid. 144. Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2000), 2:630. 145. Enda McCaffrey, “Le Portrait d’un artiste en jeune chien: Incarnation et mouvement dans Dingo d’Octave Mirbeau,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 7 (2000): 72. The translation is mine.

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146. Mirbeau, Dingo, 667. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid, 673. 149. Ibid., 675. 150. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 295. 151. Pierre Michel, “Octave Mirbeau le cynique,” in Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), 5. 152. Mirbeau, Dingo, 748. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., 749. 156. Ibid., 805. 157. Ibid., 832. 158. Ibid., 851. 159. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 262. 160. Mirbeau, Dingo, 664. 161. Ibid., 665. 162. Ibid.

Conclusion

Octave Mirbeau’s tendency toward extremism manifested itself in matters of metaphysics, ontology, politics, and art. Yet his first books were influenced by the attraction of Nirvana—expelled breath affecting a passage from candlelight to darkness. Initially he aspired to write novels without a conventional sense of plot and, by withholding them from audiences as he had done with Dans le ciel, eliminated them as containers of their emptiness. Mirbeau’s nihilist aaesthetic, as Marie-Françoise Montaubin describes it, was to create literature “where there is nothing.” 1 Guided both by the Buddhist wisdom counseling a cancellation of desire and by Schopenhauer’s advocacy of emancipation from the will that enslaves, Mirbeau’s desire to make books was an expression of Eros, while his impulse to write nothing-books was governed by the death drive. As Montaubin argues, the Mirbeau of Le Calvaire and Dans le ciel belongs in the pantheon of Decadents who practiced art as mortification, as a form of asceticism in which writing destroyed itself. Lucien, the painter in Dans le ciel, produces an empty canvas as an approach to an ideal of silence, purity, and whiteness. He is an unactualized hero in an unfinished novel left at first unpublished by its author. Perfection, for Mirbeau, shuns compromise and accommodation. The only true art, in Mirbeau’s view, is art that protects its purity through abstaining from art as practice: “a voluntary and complex substitution of silence for the word, and of Nothing for creation.” 2 In the biography of Mirbeau by Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, 3 one finds repeated complaints by the author of his costive unproductiveness: blocked inspiration, words that flowed sluggishly or did not flow at all. Of L’Abbé Jules, a novel whose composition hobbled along painfully, Mirbeau wrote in exasperation: “Je travaille peu encore, tant le travail me devient pénible et douleureux. Je ne puis rien m’arracher du cerveau. Mon roman 185

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[. . .] avance très lentement” [I am still accomplishing little since work is so laborious and painful. I can’t extract anything from my brain. My novel (. . .) is progressing very slowly]. 4 Up through the crisis of Dans le ciel, Mirbeau experienced writing as a crucifixion whose culmination promised an end to the suffering caused by creation. Nothingness was proof of the flawlessness of an artwork, while it also represented the promise of finality and peace. In Mirbeau’s early novels, death is imaged as a place: amniotic seas, pastures grazed by sheep, bowers, orchards, expanses of lacustrine oblivion. Providing an escape from the fornication battlefield of Paris where skeletons struck off the skulls of their enemies, death is a locus of rest, the utopian nothingness of the tomb. The zero principle pulling life toward its opposite applies equally to the identity of an author who incorporates inauthenticity as himself. Mirbeau fictionalized his years of day labor as those of “un prolétaire de la plume” [a proletarian of the pen]—secretary, hireling, ghostwriter, cipher—in his unfinished novel Un Gentilhomme (1920). There the title character, the Marquis d’Amblezy-Sérac, is the person who exists, invading and occupying the narrator—Mirbeau’s protagonist, secretary Charles Varnat—who attends him. The secretary’s personality is a topology of emptiness. Performing his duties requires him to stop living his life as truth in order to stage the comedy of his alienated servitude. Varnat describes his role in images of voiding and filling: “La première condition, la condition indispensable pour remplir, à souhait, une si étrange fonction, implique nécessairement l’abandon total de soimême dans les choses les plus essentielles de la vie intérieure” [The first and indispensable condition that must be met, if you will, is a strange function requiring an act of total self-abandonment in the most essential aspects of one’s inner life]. 5 Like Varnat, Mirbeau had assumed a chain of identities as amanuenses: body-instruments operated by the will of their employers. During his intervals of joblessness, Varnat, like Mirbeau, had worked “à des travaux dérisoires de journalisme, de copies à peine payées” [at pathetic jobs in journalism, copy work that scarcely paid anything]. 6 He had ventriloquized his paymasters’ views, acting as a mouth from which issued words unattached to opinions. Working for “un républicain athée” [an atheist Republican], “un bonapartiste militant” [a militant Bonapartist], “un catholique ultramontain” [an Ultramontane Catholic], he had served as their ideological prosthesis, adapting himself “aux pires de leurs idées, de leurs passions, de leurs haines, sans qu’elles aient eu la moindre prise sur moi” [to the worst of their ideas, their passions, and their aversions without their ever having the least hold over me]. 7 Varnat absolves himself of the charge of prostitution, calling it mimesis on the grounds that he has never been allowed to entertain a thought of his own. Channeling unreflected positions, Varnat is innocent of deceit or hypocrisy. A pure protean being, a self as “Rien,” he is too poor to afford a point of view.

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The death drive is manifested in Mirbeau’s first novels as the murder of a surrogate whose only mission was to suffer. In Le Calvaire, Jean Mintié confessionally kills the sex-addicted victim he was in order to come back, redeemed, as an evangelizing storyteller. In L’Abbé Jules, having burned a guilty past consigned to a trunk filled with pornography, Jules rejects the God of repression, lust, and guilt. He disavows the Jesuit pedagogy of sin and prohibition so that he can reteach a virgin self in the person of his nephew, Albert Dervelle. Fleeing the library/hell of erotic literature and masturbation, Jules seeks the nothingness of ignorance in the pastoral paradise of nature. The most transparent parable of transmigration, or rebirth through authorship, is Sébastien Roch, where Mirbeau exhumes a childhood trauma that is overcome, as in therapy, through the act of narration: The situational selves I was—the wage-slave and the prostitute—are put to death as characters so that I can become a writer strong enough to survive. The corollary of Mirbeau’s identity suicide is the outward turning that awakened him to the value of other people. In Un Gentilhomme, it is Varnat’s alienation from himself that makes him hold humanity in high esteem. Mirbeau’s experience of négritude enabled him to see from multiple perspectives and speak in different voices. Like dogs, who enjoy the gift of polyglotism (Dingo), secretaries are adept in mimicking the idiom of their employers. Thanks to his status as a “Rien,” Mirbeau could occupy the consciousness of others, creating disparate selves as characters whose language he could imitate. The emptier the vessel, the more it can contain. For Mirbeau and Varnat, the need for professional self-effacement was complemented by a heightened appreciation of their fellows. Curious to discover men in whom his complexity was reflected, Varnat applied his capacity for identification to a study of humanity. Self-analysis led to an interest in the entertaining mystery of people. As fascinated by others as he was attentive to himself, Varnat professed a curiosity about society in which he operated inconspicuously. L’Homme me réjouit par le composé, extrêmement varié, extrêmement grotesque, extrêmement fou, d’incohérences, de ridicules, de contradictions, de vertus funestes, de mensonges sincères, de vices ingénus, de sentimentalités féroces et de cruautés naïves qu’il est réellement [Man delights me as the extremely varied, extremely grotesque, extremely mad ensemble of incoherent, ridiculous, and contradictory qualities—baneful virtues, sincere lies, ingenuous vices, ferocious sentimentality, and naive cruelty—that he really is]. 8

A similar statement of the creed of the migratory narrator could apply to Georges Vasseur in Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique. Different from his protagonist, Mirbeau was fortunate that luck had oriented him toward literature so that—unlike the secretary and underling, forced to parrot others’ words—he retained control of his creation and could

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experiment with self-invention. Mirbeau’s observations of the human animal—ridiculous, ferociously sentimental, and admirable—define an anthropology that launched him on his literary quest, taking him higher and farther from himself. Yet no matter how often he sought to clarify the paradox of man, exploring the facsimile characters with which his books were peopled, his experience of the many never afforded him the mystic’s sense of oneness. The crisis of Dans le ciel revived the temptation of annihilation, not because the writer’s self was nothing, but because the ideal he aspired to was everything. In Dans le ciel, the littleness and powerlessness of the artist are not necessary concomitants of his humiliated masochism but a consequence of his acknowledgment of the sublimity of his subject. Projected on his characters, Mirbeau’s aspiration to the infinite resituates the appeal of suicide in the domain of representation. Corresponding to the cult of perfect art is “an aesthetic of whiteness and blankness.” 9 Along with a mortification of the artist whose humility leaves him impotent, there is “the radical negation of his object, unequivocally restored to the invisible and the ineffable.” As Montaubin concludes, “The novelist cultivates Nothing in order to arrive at Everything.” 10 What is staged as a conflict between political action and aaesthetic absolutism is also a competition between a wish to experience the plurivocality of humanity and an impulse to lose the self in the multifariousness of man. To live and love and talk, or to experience a transcendence that commands silence: for a moment, during his work on Dans le ciel, Mirbeau hesitated before the requirement to choose. In 1892, Mirbeau’s rededication to the anarchist’s agenda and his continuing advocacy for the rights of individuals seemed to disqualify his art as self-indulgence. Man, the being whom Charles Varnat had described as mad, incoherent, ridiculous, contradictory, and given to deadly virtue and ingenuous vice, called the artist to descend again into the valley of suffering. Renouncing an ascent to the mountaintop toward the ineffability of the One, Mirbeau came back down in order to take up the grievances of the many. In his controversial essay “Palinodies,” Mirbeau credits the Dreyfus case for focusing the anarchist’s attention. First Dreyfus and then Zola had held up to persecutors and defenders alike a mirror that reflected their inhumanity or fraternalism. Il faut bénir cette affaire Dreyfus de nous avoir en quelque sorte révélés à nous-mêmes, d’avoir donné à beaucoup d’entre nous, trop exclusifs ou trop sectaires dans leur compréhension de la vie sociale, un sens plus large de l’humanité, un plus noble et ardent désir de justice [We must bless the Dreyfus affair for having revealed us to ourselves, for having given many of us, too exclusive or sectarian in our understanding of social life, a wider appreciation of humanity, a nobler and more ardent desire for justice]. 11

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From passing interest to impassioned outrage, Mirbeau’s political and literary concerns manifested a new extroversion. Out of the self, away from the narcissistic solution of suicide and farther from the solipsism of the artist’s hopeless idealism, Mirbeau turned back to the world of struggle and life. The arraignment of Zola had brought the issue of injustice closer to home. Human cruelty was no longer an abstraction. Paroxysmal rages, contorted features, and the hateful cries of anti-Semites put a frightening face on the idea of prejudice. Exiled to Devil’s Island where he was subjected to torture, Dreyfus was still harried by the murderous demands of his enemies, followed by calls for his eyelids to be cut off and poisonous spiders fixed to his pupils. The thematic reorientation of Mirbeau’s fiction—from death for the self to life for others—had been the result of painful change. No longer did Mirbeau need to defend a beleaguered identity from powerful patrons and wagepaying sponsors. Since oppression’s victim had so long been himself, he could readily identify with the despised and exploited. In Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau implies that the capacity for selflessness is won at a price. Breezy intellectual banter on the subject of human bloodlust and the trivialization of torture in China as a spectacle for jaded European tourists suggest that the impulse toward violence arises from a failure of empathy. Which tastes better, the flesh of Germans, Africans, or Southern Europeans? Which ballistic technology can kill more people more efficiently? The jovial executioner with whom Clara speaks in the garden has the virtue of personalizing the science of murder. Just as Mirbeau had been dubbed by Georges Rodenbach “le Don Juan de l’Idéal, 12 so the “patapouf” is a Don Juan in the administration of pain. No matter how legendary the lover who takes innumerable mistresses, he is a boor if he does not possess each one individually, artistically. For the executioner, each victim is raw material he sculpts lovingly with knives and saws. Mirbeau’s antipathy for collectivism, which subordinates individuals to causes, is like his hostility to institutions that justify aggression in the name of principle. Missionaries, teachers, colonialists, and patriots do violence to anonymous aliens in order to assimilate them. For Mirbeau, the love of neighbor is radically reinterpreted in Le Jardin des supplices and entails removing the skin as a barrier to identification and compassion. Flaying is the technique that allows one to move farther from oneself. The bland sociopathy of Mirbeau’s disparate characters in Le Jardin des supplices—homicide theorists, artillery designers, torture voyeurs—is like the cries of their victims that elicit no response, like Mirbeau’s textual provocation in need of expressions of reader outrage. When Clara is aroused by the concussive tolling of the bell, when Frenchmen are indifferent to embezzlement and fraud, Mirbeau invites his audience to supply the horror absent from his characters. The incompleteness of the novel, whether formal or implicit, requires collaboration by a reader who makes contact. When the

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tormented young man finishes reading from his paper scroll, when the reaction of brandy drinkers is stricken from the text, it is the responsibility of readers to condemn “l’horreur sanglante” [the bloody horror] they have heard. The nothingness that occupies a central place in Le Jardin des supplices is not the nullity of the creator or the work he cannot finish. It is an ellipsis that mobilizes audience intervention. Had there been a return to the smoky drawing room, the conclusion of the narrative would have likely been met with expressions of sarcastic incredulity, a demand for fresh cigars, and tolerance of the story’s bloody horror. Closing the narrative circuit, it would have instigated no dismay. But by suppressing the Darwinian scientist, the amiable philosopher, and the famous writer—all murdered by omission—the novel opens possibilities of reader participation. The novelist and his book remove the covering that has enclosed them, the skin that has held them in and contained their moral indignation. Then the narrative bleeds out into the consumers that it irrigates. The shift in Mirbeau’s emphasis in Le Jardin des supplices from the emptiness of the artist to the plenitude of his audience brings an end to the introverted quest for the equilibrium of Nirvana, beginning a dilation into a universe expanding ever faster. Thereafter, in Mirbeau’s work, the death drive operates only in closed systems resistant to modification and impervious to reform. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, the legitimacy of bourgeois ideology is a conservative principle discredited as cynical imposture. But no sooner does Célestine’s narrative perform the task of anarchistic disassembling than it replaces government by a master class, ruled by carnality and money and with a kleptocracy of servants as unprincipled as their masters. The only sterile thing in Mirbeau’s work is what purports to be complete. The accepted wisdom disproved by Célestine’s manuscript is that all property owners are heartless, all servants larcenous and lazy. More than the nihilistic dogmatism of the visitor to the torture garden, for whom every culture and every faith enshrines a lust for violence, Célestine’s story gives a picture of self-interested opportunism where immorality is a feature applying equally to everyone. More than money, sex, and power, the hunger for totalizing explanations is what motivates Mirbeau’s characters to deny that anything is missing. The universal law of murder and the need to scapegoat the outsider are reassuring images of a reality that is irredeemably corrupt. Everyone is bad, every motive is pernicious, everything is understandable, and nothing can be done. Opposing the temptation of totality 13 is the creative function of the fetish, motivating inventiveness necessitated by the discovery of a lack. Encountering nothing stimulates an impulse to create something. Castration fears, in provoking an effort to contain them, are the original incentive to produce a work of art. The cold, chaotic universe compels man to create a god who

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orders it. The maternal phallus is empty space that magic footwear must fill in. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, the fetish is an apotropaic shield protecting its user against contingency and incoherence. No longer sexual, it accedes to the level of the sacred. The people in whom something is considered to be missing, in this novel, become targets of persecutory opprobrium and harassment: the circumcised Jew, the woman with a dildo hidden in her jewel box. Because these are figures on whom an intolerable absence is inscribed, they are policed, hunted down, or, like Joseph, revered as gods. Subhuman, superhuman, they defy the analysis that profanes. Impervious to science, they are consecrated mysteries. These encounters with the unintelligible are critical points in Mirbeau’s writing. The absent phallus, the knowledge gaps, the baffled silences bring insights into the otherworldly. They are the fecund nothingness to which the anarchist returns after the provisional fetish-substitute proves to be unsatisfying. The utopian model, the new president, a lacy undergarment, a polished shoe: all temporarily assuage the anguish arising from confrontations with an absence. Metaphysical self-delusion, political optimism, and the undiscouraged quest for love are expressions of existential courage, like Sisyphus’s resolve to push the rock back up. Nothingness is what impels the artist to create another work that, in time, he will come to see is still not good enough. By 1901, when Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique was published by Fasquelle, Mirbeau was sufficiently established to enjoy a feeling of well-deserved accomplishment. Critically apotheosized in the aftermath of his comedy Les Affaires sont les affaires (1903), Mirbeau might have renounced the temptation of totality in favor of an enjoyment of enough. The danger of selfsatisfaction is what threatens the narrator of Mirbeau’s meandering collection of previously published vignettes. The desire to stay home and incubate his neurasthenia is less uncomfortable for Georges Vasseur than setting out to find a cure. The anarchist’s agenda and his rejection of simple answers had been easier for an author still struggling to make ends meet. No longer was Mirbeau a vacancy filled by remunerative employers. No longer was his anonymity compensated by diffusion into the multitudes. While savoring the luxury of celebrity and wealth, Mirbeau resisted complacency and therefore opens Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique with an acknowledgement of the need for self-renewal. This is the dialectic structuring Mirbeau’s stories of the upheaval that revitalizes, as they alternate between a state of illusory stability and the hygienic unleashing of social turmoil. Each of the invalids, malingerers, and oddities that Georges Vasseur encounters during his convalescent sojourn is a puzzle, an anomaly eliciting the creativity of his analysis. Many are examples of recognizable pathologies: freakish, malformed children—fruits of a sickening endogamy; politicians and military officers prone to illusions of

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omnipotence. But Vasseur’s hermeneutic self-assurance, like Mirbeau’s satirical superiority, sometimes founders when he comes across specimens resistant to diagnosis. There is the grieving father and his son whom Vasseur twice meets on a train, whose problematic story Vasseur reimagines many times. There are the philanthropic paupers, the beneficent vagabonds, and the clairvoyant lunatics: abysses of unintelligibility, geniuses like the person who succeeds in understanding them. Depravity and madness, generosity and wisdom are more complex and multifaceted than Mirbeau’s narrator suspects. What Samuel Lair sees as Mirbeau’s desire for global comprehension—a simultaneous grasp of things as unity and multiplicity—is a goal that is unreachable because there is always something higher: “If the concept of totality essentially implies a finite, circumscribed universe, conversely, the image of Mirbeau’s aaesthetic ideal of a totalizing representation conveys uneasiness, since this absolute is as inaccessible and necessarily unsatisfying as its realization is inconceivable.” 14 In the closing chapter of Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, Vasseur, a grudging visitor to the sanitarium who is reluctant to forego his homey comforts, embarks on the last leg of his journey. He undertakes the arduous ascent to the village of Casterat, climbing to the inhospitable mountain hermitage of his friend Roger Fresselou. Once there, he finds that Fresselou, immobilized in pessimistic inflexibility, neither ventures forth from his lair nor abandons his long-held points of view. An embodiment of the death drive in which the quest for motionlessness is realized, Fresselou is changeless like the mineral eternity of the landscape. Never wrinkling or turning gray, he is the stasis of his closed mind. The weight of entropic futility forecloses hopeful speculation. The future is a wall of disenchanted certainties, against which dreams of pleasure, ambitious projects, and thoughts of progress have been dashed. Fresselou experiences an exhausted temporality, a time where possibility is no longer and ineluctability is already: “Alors, je suis resté ici où il n’y a plus rien que des cendres, [. . .] où tout est rentré, déjà, dans le silence des choses mortes” [So I have remained here, where there is nothing but ashes, (. . .) where everything has already returned to the silence of dead things]. 15 The refrigerated nihilism with which Fresselou views the world defines by opposition Mirbeau’s aaesthetic of exploration, of energy exchange, effort, growth, and work. Against the crushing preterition that weighs on Fresselou’s mountain summit—a place of dried-up sap and towering walls of rock and schist—Vasseur offers a narrative that opens on an unmapped land of possibility. The future tense of the last sentence, “Dès l’aube, demain, je partirai . . .” [Tomorrow, at dawn, I will leave . . .], suggests the inconclu-

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siveness of Mirbeau’s text, whose final page is not yet written. This indeterminancy points to a territory up ahead that invites the journey to continue, as its mystery accelerates the forward thrust of curiosity. With La 628-E8, Mirbeau’s text becomes the nothing machine I have written of before. In his car, “the artist is impatient to continue, creating nothing, devouring distance, flattening impediments, turning frustration into prey.” 16 But more than that, the car traveler deletes the record of what he did, erases the trace of where he was, and forgets the substance of what he knew, becoming a vehicle transporting a consciousness uncertain of the present into a future that unsettles preconceptions and convictions. Ellipses still break up a text with interstices of ignorance, spaces of uncertainty filled with fetishist conjecture. Yet now Mirbeau contributes to the production of unknowing whose transcendent scope restores enchantment to the world. Ellipses are superseded by the interpellation of the question mark, engaging readers who enrich the text not with answers but with suppositions. What, Mirbeau asks, is the genre affiliation of his travelogue? The events that it transcribes, are they figments, dreams, or memories? When he left Bordeaux one morning, did he arrive that night in Lille? Was it to Lille, Berlin, or Budapest that his travels had taken him that day? From nothingness to everything, from anonymity to community, the speeding vehicle conveys Mirbeau from a place that familiarity turned into nowhere to innumerable destinations that excitement universalizes as everywhere. When Mirbeau stops too long, he finds a repository of hoary artifacts, an archive suffused by “the penetrating melancholy of ancient things.” 17 There the poignancy of recollection becomes the mustiness of crypts—as in the town of Rocroy, unpaved by the inquisitiveness of motorists—where businesses are shuttered, inactivity depopulates, and only a few ghosts remain, slumping gloomily on benches. Whereas time stops in Rocroy, spellbound by residents’ automatism, it is aspirated into the future in harbors like Anvers. Mirbeau’s paradise is beautified by its distance from where he is. Crisscrossed by shrieking sirens, pungent with the smell of tar and sweat, dizzy with the infinite upward thrust of working cranes, the port is the commercial intersection of points of embarkation and destinations. Unlike history—which conserves events as their material precipitates—the dream of countries far away, born of watching ships set sail, multiplies a present spectacle as countless exotic musings. Each experience of leave-taking is an analogy of Mirbeau’s birth, expelling him from the moment, propelling him ahead, carrying him “toujours plus loin, au-delà de moi-même.” This is why Mirbeau preferred technology to art, since machines, like cars conveyed along the trajectory of their work, convert a present state of things into an affirmation of their improvement.

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This is why Mirbeau insisted on the transformational power of his work: My location may be cramped, tightly circumscribed by what I see, but my aspirations expand into the imprecision of what I can imagine. The dream of self-annihilation gives way to a desire for totality when the nothingness of the self becomes a cog in the machinery of the universe. Rather than an instrument of death, time is a vehicle of becoming. The spinning of propellers, the rolling tires of a car, the hands rotating on a clock face describe the revolution that continues. As Mirbeau says, they multiply “à l’infini les circonférences d’air ou d’eau, concentriques à mon regard, avec sa portée pour rayon, et leur addition vertigineuse fait ma notion de l’espace mouvant” [to infinity the circumferences of air or water spreading out concentrically from my gaze, whose range defines their radius and whose dizzying accumulation creates my sense of moving space]. 18 From the peace of immobility, tension reduced again to zero—that is, from the equilibrium of Nirvana—Mirbeau moves to a new sense of transcendence in which everything is alive, changing, rising, growing. A molecule of air, a drop of water, a spark of energy: the humble self contributes to the work done in “cette inconcevable usine: l’univers” [that inconceivable factory: the universe]. 19 Like the mystic whose self-abnegation magnifies the God in whom he vanishes, Mirbeau rejoices in his smallness in the service of life’s purpose. Helping to turn Creation’s wheels or press Creation’s springs, he does his part to make the future, serving as “un atome en travail de vie” [an atom doing the work of life]. 20 With eyes unfocused by impatience and delirium, Mirbeau drives past things on the roadside blurred by ecstasy. Car travel, Mirbeau says, is amnesia and the madness of unknowing; literature, a careening journey past bodies mangled by the frenzy of Mirbeau’s breathless expression. More slowly, more appraisingly, Georges Vasseur had grouped people under similar zoological rubrics, “faune de la station thermale.” This he had done not to immobilize them in a taxonomic straightjacket, but to redefine them as unstable specimens of extra-human freakishness. What in Dingo is an experiment in domesticating the undomesticated or reconverting to wildness what is impoverished by culture appears in Mirbeau’s car book as the speed-crazed reimaging of animals changed by their encounter with Mirbeau’s vehicle: horses rearing in terror as the automobile passes, the imperturbability of camels glimpsed inexplicably by the roadside. Experiences of the otherworldly, resulting from disorientation or surprise, in La 628-E8 become occurrences more common in the world below. Thresholds, points of transit, intermediate zones, and intersections assume importance as places that, like machines, initiate change. Ships sailing from a harbor begin a journey toward exoticism that transforms them. Customs of-

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fices on border crossings regulate sameness as it enters into difference. The world seen from Mirbeau’s vehicle is richer for the motorist’s experience of estrangement. In Dingo, the tone and setting of the narrative are different, as if Mirbeau realized that life’s mysteries need not lie so far away. Time elasticized by velocity in La 628-E8 had given Mirbeau a sense of having lived months in a day. Epektasis—the soul’s accelerating ascent toward the sublime—had been simulated by the car trip that purified life of its contingencies. The present had been a launching pad catapulting the traveler into the unforeseeable as, behind him, his departure point dwindled in its forgotten insignificance. Having left Bordeaux in the morning and arrived in Lille later that same day, Mirbeau overcomes the limitations of space and time, experiencing simultaneity as ubiquity. In Dingo, there is no illusion of eternity as the rapidity of ascent. While centered on a place-bound narrator, the story follows Dingo on his rampages but also imparts the doleful lesson that instinct cannot outrun the morbidity of culture. Bracketed by the animal’s infancy and death, the narrative unfolds within life’s biological parameters. Mirbeau’s journey through space and time seems shorter than his tour of Europe. Even if motorist and dog “brûlent les étapes de la vie” [pass through life without stopping], they race toward the same finishing line, “vers la vieillesse et vers la mort” [toward old age and toward death]. 21 No more eloquently than in Dingo does Mirbeau illustrate his apothegm that since arriving means dying, only our passage here is precious. In many respects, Mirbeau’s last book recovers important themes from earlier writings. The candor and simplicity of animals and children cut them off from an artist spoiled by his glib sophistication. Animality is a virgin state to which fallen man is denied access. Hortus conclusus, it is a garden paradise both proximate and forbidden. In Sébastien Roch, childhood is crowned with a nimbus of retrospection. It is a state preexisting man’s capacity to mourn its loss in words. In Dans le ciel, a deaf-mute child’s eyes mirror the canopy of the sky. Her wisdom masked as ignorance, she has preserved her treasured secrets by not divulging them. Is God’s perfection found in a place that is infinitely high? Or is heaven, with its promised grace, as close as the happiness of yesterday? Mirbeau’s search for transcendental states differentiates between joys that are ineffable and the religious practices and written formulas that promise to disclose them. In acknowledging “je ne sais pas ce que c’est que la beauté” [I don’t know what beauty is], 22 Mirbeau equates the ideal of art with what he does not know and cannot say. For the magus, there are the rituals—the clavicles and the grammar—the secrets and ceremonial practices purporting to reveal them. For Mirbeau, a mystery is desecrated by the scriptural blueprint that unlocks it. Whether or not he believes in the divine, Mirbeau rejects

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systems of divination. Like Catholicism, the occult sciences are discredited by their explanatory methodologies. Readers of the arcana, palmists, and decipherers of coffee grounds are charlatans because they claim to know and because their knowledge is untrue: “C’est le propre de toute magie qu’il lui faille un grimoire” [It is the nature of all magic that it requires a grimoire]. 23 As in most of Mirbeau’s fiction, Dingo is divided between social satire— skewering the brutish natives of Ponteilles-en-Barcis—and Mirbeau’s groping investigations of life’s unillumined corners. There is culture that produces knowledge, art that depreciates that knowledge, and nature that knows nothing and cannot profane ignorance with language. There is irony in the position that Mirbeau occupies in his novel, as the one who idealizes, analyzes, instructs, loves, and fears Dingo with the very intelligence and language that are impediments to knowing him. Sébastien Roch is put to death by the author before he can grow up to resemble him. The artist unlearns the gift of speech, cuts off his hand, puts out his eyes so that he can again become a bird whose wings write messages in the air. When Mirbeau speaks for Dingo, when he imagines what Dingo means, he is acting as a novelist who gives his characters the gift of speech. Yet in trying to say what they would say, he is separated from them. Literature for Mirbeau was both the cause of alienation and an uncertain means of achieving reconciliation with the world. There is the critic who heaps scorn on the anointed custodians of culture, and the reformer who sets bigots and oppressors on fire with his fury. But this same artist and public figure, notes Samuel Lair, “gives his friendship and last few pennies to very different artists, defends tooth and nail an inordinately rich Jewish officer, and rallies to the cause of Zola, whom he had earlier decried.” 24 Writing, which is a weapon with which to visit retribution, was a way for Mirbeau to forge new alliances with victims. The close of the nineteenth century had witnessed a flourishing of interest in supernaturalism, the occult, mystical experience that defied rational elucidation. This trend had been a backlash against the spread of democratizing institutions and the rise of medicine and science that discredited both faith and superstition. And yet these developments were ones that Mirbeau had vocally endorsed. While fin-de-siècle mysticism—most prevalent among Catholic reactionaries—segregated the illuminati in the exclusive realm of fellow converts and coreligionists, Mirbeau’s exploration of the transcendental brought him into closer contact with humanity. Unlike Joris-Karl Huysmans, who became an oblate in the Benedictine abbey in Ligugé (L’Oblat, 1903); unlike Léon Bloy, who enveloped his contemporaries with his misanthropic hatefulness (Le Désespéré, 1886); and unlike Stanislas de Guaїta, Papus, and Joséphin Péladan, steeped in their Rosicrucian esotericism, Mirbeau sought to fathom the unknown in an effort to understand his fellow man. Bloy and Huysmans had experienced God in the mountain shrine of La

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Salette; Péladan’s Rosicrucian characters had withdrawn to the fortress aerie of Montségur (La Vertu suprême, 1900). But having climbed the mountain, Mirbeau came down to take up the cause of the unfortunate, resolved to carry on the fight for justice in this world. For Mirbeau, the greatest mysteries were those that reattached him to his brothers. Impossible to solve, they solicited his fascination because he believed they would bring an understanding of the beings he most cared for. In the unfocused look of vagabonds, in the oceanic gaze of children, in the “épaisses ténèbres” [thick darkness] of Dingo’s eyes, Mirbeau saw “les translucidités mystérieusis” [translucent mysteries]. 25 What his art could do was cast down the self-righteous he despised. What it could not do was unriddle the secrets of the beings he most loved. Beyond the bombast and the thunder of “l’imprécateur au coeur fidèle” [the imprecator with the loyal heart], there was Mirbeau’s “profound goodness, an altruism inspiring a passion to embrace everything.” 26 Mirbeau’s anger shook the walls that separated brothers from one another. His silence honored beauty that exceeded his capacity to say it. The wrongs that men commit inspire efforts to undo them—in books that restore a zero state of injustice overturned. But it was the mystery of people’s honor, their cleverness and fancy that sustained Mirbeau in his quest, pushing him to go farther and climb higher. NOTES 1. Marie-Françoise Montaubin, “Les Romans d’Octave Mirbeau: ‘Des livres où il n’y aurait rien! . . . Oui, mais est-ce possible . . . ?’” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 2 (1995): 47. 2. Ibid., 48. 3. Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990). 4. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 331. 5. Octave Mirbeau, Un gentilhomme, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:890. 6. Ibid., 891. 7. Ibid., 900. 8. Ibid., 901. 9. Montaubin, “Les Romans d’Octave Mirbeau,” 48. 10. Ibid., 49. 11. Quoted in Nivet and Michel, Octave Mirbeau, 557. 12. “M. Octave Mirbeau,” Le Figaro, December 14, 1897. 13. From the title of Samuel Lair’s article “D’Octave à Mirbeau: La Tentation de la totalité,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 6 (1999). 14. Ibid., 45. 15. Octave Mirbeau, Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:265. 16. Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 16. 17. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” In Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 54. 18. Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:389.

198 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Conclusion Ibid. Ibid. Octave Mirbeau, Dingo, in Oeuvre romanesque (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), 3:663. Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 389. Ibid. Lair, “D’Octave à Mirbeau,” 49. Mirbeau, Dingo, 664. Lair, “D’Octave à Mirbeau,” 49.

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Index

L'Abbé Jules (Mirbeau), 9, 14–15, 23, 42–57, 185–186; death in, 34; pornography in, 187; religion in, 152 absolute, 3, 15; in L'Abbé Jules, 45; aesthetic and, 188; in Dans le ciel, 84; in Le Jardin des supplices, 94; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 147 abstraction, 50–51, 82 Adam (biblical character), 60, 63, 168 aesthetic, 185, 188, 192; in Dans le ciel, 78, 84, 85, 86; in Sébastien Roch, 72; in La 628-E8, 153, 156, 157 Les Affaires sont les affaires (Mirbeau), 10, 191–192 aggression, 28, 66; in Dingo, 21; in Le Jardin des supplices, 101 Albert Dervelle (fictional character), 43, 45, 45–46, 47, 187 anarchist, 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 52, 188; in L'Abbé Jules, 43–44; in Dans le ciel, 86; in Dingo, 166; illusion and, 56; in Le Jardin des supplices, 102, 110; in Sébastien Roch, 64; torture and, 110; utopianism and, 52 animals: in Dans le ciel, 81–82. See also Dingo (Mirbeau) Annie (fictional character), 103 anthropocentrism, 158, 169 anthropophagie littéraire, 10

anti-Semitism, 12, 52, 111, 155; Freud on, 124; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 111, 121, 124 Anzieu, Didier, 98, 103, 108–109, 109 apathy: in Le Jardin des supplices, 99; in Sébastien Roch, 71 apocalypse: in Le Calvaire, 27; in Dingo, 177; in Le Jardin des supplices, 97, 102; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 134 Apollo, 109 apophasis, theology of, 53 Apter. Emily, 13 archives, 105 art, 4, 6, 36, 50, 86, 185; in L'Abbé Jules, 43–44; in Le Calvaire, 32; Creator and, 87; in Dans le ciel, 65–66, 78, 78–79, 83, 84–85, 91n63, 94, 112; death of, 8; in Dingo, 164–165; Freud on, 35; God and, 87; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 112; Nirvana and, 32; in Sébastien Roch, 65, 65–66, 67, 68, 69, 70; in La 628-E8, 155, 156; sublime in, 7, 88; suffering for, 36 assassins, 103, 176 Athalie (fictional character), 54 L'Aurore, 93 L'Auto, 149 auto-dérision, 165

203

204

Index

autofiction, 164 automatism, 37, 94, 115, 193 automobiles: in Dingo, 171; in La 628-E8, 17, 139, 149–163 autrefois, 97 Bachelard, Gaston, 157 Balzac, 161–163 Balzac, Honoré de, 18–19, 158 Barbey, Jules-Amédée, 48 Baron Kropp (fictional character), 140 Barrès, Maurice, 90n48 Barthes, Roland, 13, 145 Baudelaire, Charles, 11, 19, 84, 97, 142; art and, 86; Dans le ciel and, 80 beauty: in L'Abbé Jules, 45; of automobiles, 150; in Dans le ciel, 78, 78–79, 83, 84–85, 85, 112; in Sébastien Roch, 60, 67; of self, 88; in La 628-E8, 157 la Belle Époque, 1 bijoux naturels, 122 birth, 193; in Dingo, 178; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 137 Blanchot, Maurice, 62 Bloy, Léon, 2, 90n48, 196 Blum, Léon, 9 Bolorec (fictional character), 72 Brown, Norman O., 47, 125, 152 Buddhism, 3, 11–12, 185; in Le Jardin des supplices, 95, 110, 152; in Lettres de l'Inde, 29

113–114, 117, 118; fetish and, 118; God and, 124; religion and, 116, 123; sex and, 119 Charles Malterre (fictional character), 37, 39 Charles Varnat (fictional character), 186, 187, 188 Charron, Fernard, 149 Chavette, Eugéne, 37 children, 5, 49, 58, 61, 166; in L'Abbé Jules, 49; in Dans le ciel, 84, 88. See also Sébastien Roch Christ, 31, 37, 38, 52, 173; in L'Abbé Jules, 55; in Le Calvaire, 35, 40, 42; crucifixion of, 11, 31, 35; in Le Jardin des supplices, 110; Passion of, 31, 38, 102; in La 628-E8, 160 Christianity, 2, 3, 97; in L'Abbé Jules, 55; in Le Calvaire, 27; in Sébastien Roch, 64; in La 628-E8, 160 Citti, Pierre, 81, 144 Clara (fictional character), 72, 95, 98, 98–99, 102, 103, 106–108, 109, 170, 189; Dans le ciel and, 109; God and, 152 Clara Fistule (fictional character), 137, 137–138, 145, 146, 147 Claretie, Jules, 10 class: sex and, 117; struggle and, 8 clock, 97 collectivism, 189 La Colline inspirée (Barrès), 90n48

Le Calvaire (Mirbeau), 23, 27–42; crucifixion in, 172; death drive in, 187; decadence in, 185; passion in, 28, 172; statue in, 35; Vimmer and, 27 Camus, Albert, 80, 123, 158, 170, 178 Carr, Reginald, 7, 15 castration: in Le Calvaire, 38; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 113, 117, 120, 190 catastrophe, 4, 22 Catholicism, 2, 4–5, 23, 93; in L'Abbé Jules, 42, 44, 50–51, 51; in Dans le ciel, 79, 86; in Sébastien Roch, 58 Célestine (fictional character), 14, 24, 111, 113–115, 116, 120–121, 122, 124–125, 126–127, 190; Clara and, 98; diary of,

Comédie Française, 10 commerce, 122, 154, 157 confession: in Sébastien Roch, 64, 68, 69; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 144 "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" (Baudelaire), 80 Coquereux (fictional character), 176 Creation, 43; Christianity and, 97; in Dingo, 165, 169; God and, 13, 152, 159–160; in La 628-E8, 153, 194 creativity, 40, 52, 79; in Dans le ciel, 83; in La 628-E8, 155 Creator, 87, 158; in L'Abbé Jules, 53; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 126; in Sébastien Roch, 57; in La 628-E8,

Index 160; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 147 crucifixion: in Le Calvaire, 28, 34, 38, 41, 172; of Christ, 11, 31, 35; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 113 cynicism, 16, 37, 108, 120, 127 Dans le ciel (Mirbeau), 7, 8, 77–89, 109, 185; art in, 65–66, 78, 78–79, 83, 84–85, 91n63, 94, 112; beauty in, 78, 78–79, 83, 84–85, 85, 112; decadence in, 185; God in, 112; Le Journal d'une femme de chambre and, 112; Lucien on, 21–22; self in, 188; social causes in, 23, 78, 79, 80; suffering in, 112 Daudet, Alphonse, 57 Davoult, Gaétan, 116–117 death, 34, 173, 186; in Le Calvaire, 28; of Christ, 52; in Dans le ciel, 78, 79; in Dingo, 178; of ego, 32; of God, 136, 143; in Le Jardin des supplices, 97–98, 98, 99, 104–105; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 127; in Sébastien Roch, 68; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 137 death drive, 9, 72, 123, 126, 127, 192; in Le Calvaire, 27, 30, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 187; Eros and, 185; in Le Jardin des supplices, 101; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 123, 128; in Sébastien Roch, 57, 63, 68, 71; sex and, 126; in La 628-E8, 151, 152; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 142, 145 decadence: in Le Calvaire, 185; in Dans le ciel, 83–84, 185; in Dingo, 177–178; in Le Jardin des supplices, 94; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 144, 147 de Guaïta, Stanislas, 196 déplacements, 136 Le Désespéré (Bloy), 196–197 Desgrange, Henri, 149 determinism, 32, 83, 84 deus absconditus, 122 devil, 7, 119, 127, 173; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 123–124; in La 628-E8, 160, 173

205

diary: in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 113–114, 117, 118; in La 628-E8, 159 Diderot, Denis, 20 dieu caché, 136 Dingo (Mirbeau), 20–22, 24, 95, 163–179, 195, 196; suprarational in, 105; tabula rasa in, 21 disclosure, 64 disenchantment, 50, 126 disillusionment, 28 Doctor Rieux (fictional character), 178 Doctor Trépan (fictional character), 107, 138 Doctor Triceps (fictional character), 135–136, 138, 140, 146, 147 Dolorism: in Le Calvaire, 38, 39; in Sébastien Roch and, 71 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1, 42 Dreyfus, Alfred, 3, 4, 9, 15; Catholicism and, 93; Le Journal d'une femme de chambre and, 111; narcissism and, 124; "Palinodies" and, 188 Drumont, Edouard, 93 duellum, 80, 87 Dugué, Henri-Joseph, 10 Durand, Gilbert, 66, 82, 88, 146 Duret, Serge, 114, 123 Durtal (fictional character), 84 L'Echo de Paris, 79, 101, 111 ecstasy, 3, 24, 65, 78, 107, 115 Eden: in L'Abbé Jules, 56; in Dingo, 165, 177; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 139 education, 58 Edward Herpett (fictional character), 166 egalitarianism, 2, 166 ego, 32, 52; in Le Jardin des supplices, 98; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 139 L'En Dehors, 7 endings, 158 energy, 102, 106, 116; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 116; in La 628-E8, 150, 157–158, 159; in Les 21 jours d'un

206

Index

neurasthénique, 134, 142, 145, 147 epektasis, 24, 150–151, 156, 162 epistemophobia, 105 Eros, 41, 102, 106, 185; in L'Abbé Jules, 52; in Le Calvaire, 28, 32, 35, 36, 41; in Dingo, 166; in Le Jardin des supplices, 102; in Sébastien Roch, 71 ethnocentricity, 134, 139, 169 L'Etranger (Camus), 158 Eugène Mortain (fictional character), 96, 99–100, 101 exchange: in Le Jardin des supplices, 96; in La 628-E8, 154 excrement: in Dingo, 175; in La 628-E8, 162 executioners, 103 existentialism, 79, 118 extinction, 30, 97 extremism, 185 faith: in L'Abbé Jules, 44, 53; neurasthenia and, 136; seekers and, 6; transitional objects and, 52 fatalism, 116 Father Roch (fictional character), 57, 60, 61, 66 Fauteux, Kevin, 42, 51 fetish, 122, 123, 141; in L'Abbé Jules, 48; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 13–14, 113, 116–117, 117, 118, 120, 126 filthy acts (saletés), 46 finality, 97 fin-de-siècle, 1 First Communion, 68 Flaubert, Gustave, 138 forgiveness, 108, 152 Le Foyer (Mirbeau), 19–20, 163 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 27, 28, 33, 40; on antiSemitism, 124; on art, 35; on Dreyfus, 124; fetish and, 13; on germplasm, 97–98, 100; inorganicism and, 29–30; masochism and, 72; on neurasthenia, 135; on religion, 35, 45, 49, 65; on

sadism, 126; Sébastien Roch and, 57; superego and, 156; utopianism and, 47. See also death drive futility, 71 The Future of an Illusion (Freud), 45, 49 Le Gaulois, 11, 101 General Archinard (fictional character), 139 General Debray (fictional character), 54 Genesis: L'Abbé Jules and, 47; in Dingo, 168–169; in Le Jardin des supplices, 102; in La 628-E8, 157 genius: in Dans le ciel, 84; in La 628-E8, 155; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 137 Un Gentilhomme (unfinished work by Mirbeau), 186, 187 Georges (fictional character), 80–84, 87 Georges Robin (fictional character), 48–49 Georges Vasseur (fictional character). See Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique germplasm, 97–98, 100 Gigoux, Jean, 18 God, 39–40, 44, 152; in L'Abbé Jules, 43, 44, 51–52, 52–54, 57; art and, 87; Camus on, 170; Célestine and, 124; Creation and, 13, 152, 159–160; in Dans le ciel, 79, 112; death of, 136, 143; devil and, 123; in Dingo, 165, 167, 170, 172, 178; energy and, 116; forgiveness of, 152; in Le Jardin des supplices, 11, 95, 102, 115; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 13, 122, 124; Jules and, 43; Kris on, 79; masochism and, 108; narcissism of, 158; un Rien and, 50; in Sébastien Roch, 64, 67, 68, 72; in La 628-E8, 151, 154–155, 157, 158, 158–159, 159–161; torture and, 109; transitional objects and, 49, 55–56, 56; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 134, 137–138, 138, 143; utopianism and, 19, 52 Golgotha, 31, 39, 42, 78 la grande chose, 72

Index Grave, Jean, 3, 8, 15, 52, 78, 79 Gregory of Nyssa, 150–151 Grévy, Jules, 27 Les Grimaces, 27, 93 guilt, 152; in Dans le ciel, 79, 80; in Sébastien Roch, 64, 70 Guitry, Sacha, 22–23 Guy de Kerdaniel (fictional character), 61 happiness: of children, 166; in Dingo, 166; in Sébastien Roch, 57 heaven: in L'Abbé Jules, 54, 57; in Dans le ciel, 82; in Le Jardin des supplices, 108; in Sébastien Roch, 59; in La 628E8, 154 Hennique, Léon, 7 Heraclitus, 77 Hervieu, Paul, 27 higher states of consciousness, 2 holy prostitution, 10–11, 25n32 Holy Spirit, 11 Homer, 136 Homer (Rembrandt), 156, 162 hopelessness, 58, 69 Hugo, Victor, 37 human depravity, 3 L'Humanité, 17 Huysman, Joris-Karl, 33, 84, 90n48, 196 hysteria, 135–136 Icarus (fictional character), 84 idealism, 148. See also utopianism The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 42 illusion: anarchist and, 56; of art, 36, 50; of religion, 36, 45, 49, 50 "L'Illustre Ecrivain", 9 Immaculate Mother, 31 immortality: in Le Jardin des supplices, 11; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 127; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 146 Impressionism, 3, 6, 17; automobiles and, 150; beauty of, 84; Dans le ciel and, 84–85

207

incest: in Le Calvaire, 32, 71; in Sébastien Roch, 71 Indiana (Sand), 51 infantilism, 49 innovation, 153–154 inorganicism, 29–30 "In the Penal Colony" (Kafka), 128n11 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 83, 146–147 Le Jardin des supplices (Mirbeau), 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 17, 23–24, 93–110, 170, 189–190; Buddhism in, 152; God in, 11; immortality in, 11; lawlessness in, 72; otherness and, 128n4; selflessness in, 189; torture in, 11; violence in, 12 Jaulin (fictional character), 175 jealousy, 99, 105 Jean de Kerral (fictional character), 61 Jean Guenille (fictional character), 139 Jean Loqueteux (fictional character), 139, 140–141 Jean Mintié (fictional character), 9, 31–49, 41, 98; death and, 34, 173; God and, 39–40; suicide and, 32, 152 Jean Roch (fictional character), 60 Jesus: in L'Abbé Jules, 51, 51–52, 55; in La Calvaire, 39; in Sébastien Roch, 64; in La 628-E8, 150; statue of, 35 Joseph (fictional character), 14, 116, 119–120, 123; Célestine and, 120–121, 124–125, 126–127; murder by, 125–126; supernatural and, 123, 123–124 Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch (fictional character), 60 Jourdain, Francis, 164 Le Journal, 101 Journal des débats, 11 Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Mirbeau), 4, 12–14, 23–24, 111–128, 174, 190–191; Dans le ciel and, 112; fetish in, 13–14; God in, 13 Julia (fictional character), 83 Juliette Roux (fictional character), 27, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40 Kafka, Franz, 97, 128n11 Kierkegaard, Søren, 123 Korff-Sausse, Simone, 20

208

Index

Kris, Ernst, 79, 87 Kropotkin, Peter, 1 Là-bas (Huysmans), 84 Lair, Samuel, 192, 196 language: in Dans le ciel, 89; in Dingo, 166, 177; in Sébastien Roch, 69 Lantier, Claude, 36 lawlessness, 72 Ledru, Philippe, 148 Lettres de l'Inde (Mirbeau), 11, 11–12, 23, 28, 147; Buddhism in, 29; Nirvana and, 128n4 Lirat (fictional character), 35, 38, 39, 39–40, 41 literature: in Dans le ciel, 79; in Sébastien Roch, 67, 72; in La 628-E8, 158–159 Le Livre de Monelle (Schwob), 5 Lloyd, Christopher, 24n2–25n3, 128n4 Loewald, Hans, 52 logocentrism, 176 Logos, 167, 172 Louis XIV (King), 153 love, 27, 28 Lucien (fictional character), 8, 65–66, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85–86, 87, 88–89; Dans le ciel and, 21–22; Dingo and, 173 Madame Lanlaire (fictional character), 112 Madame Lecautel (fictional character), 71 Madame Mintié (fictional character), 30, 31 Madame Servières (fictional character), 46 Madonna, 31, 32, 113 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 57, 86 Marguerite Lecautel (fictional character), 64–65, 68, 71 Marquis d'Amblezy-Sérac (fictional character), 186 Marsyas (fictional character), 108, 109, 110 masochism, 33, 38, 72, 94, 108, 109–110 masturbation, 135; in L'Abbé Jules, 43, 55; in Le Calvaire, 33; in Dans le ciel, 87; in Le Jardin des supplices, 96; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 120, 191 materialism, 44, 46, 54, 112, 116 mausoleums, 105

McCaffrey, Enda, 174–175 meaninglessness, 118 Meissner, William, 51, 55–56 mercy, 108 Messiah, 2, 28, 39, 40; in Le Jardin des supplices, 97; in La 628-E8, 160 Meunier, Constantin, 18–19, 155 Michel, Pierre, 8, 13, 17, 29, 98, 165, 185–186; on L'Abbé Jules, 48; on Le Calvaire, 27, 33; on Dans le ciel, 77, 79, 80, 81; on Dingo, 164, 176; on Le Jardin des supplices, 101; on Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 113; on Sébastien Roch, 70–71; on Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 135 Millet-Gérard, Dominique, 85 mole of the sky (taupe du ciel), 81 Molière, 136 Monet, Claude, 6, 22–23, 84–85 Monsieur Rabour (fictional character), 113, 116 monstre sacré, 125 Montaubin, Marie-Françoise, 149, 161, 162, 185, 188 monuments, 105, 152 morality: in Le Jardin des supplices, 93, 98; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 116, 119; in Sébastien Roch, 69 Moss, Donald, 40, 41 mountains, 86–87, 136, 137, 145 murder: in Le Jardin des supplices, 105, 105–106, 107; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 125–126; sex and, 125–126 music: in Le Calvaire, 41; in Sébastien Roch, 63, 65, 66–67, 67–68, 70 The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), 80 narcissism, 124; in Le Calvaire, 34, 35; in La 628-E8, 158 naturalism, 42 natures mortes, 107 necrophilia, 40 négritude, 187 Nettleton, Claire, 181n66 neurasthenia, 135, 139, 181n66 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 152

Index nihilism, 185, 192; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 112; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 29–30, 89, 145 Nirvana, 3, 4–5, 22, 29, 32, 185; in Le Calvaire, 27, 31, 32, 40; in Dans le ciel, 77, 78; in Le Jardin des supplices, 99, 101, 115; in Lettres de l'Inde, 128n4; in Sébastien Roch, 66; in La 628-E8, 194; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 134, 147 Nivet, Jean-François, 8, 17, 185–186; on Le Calvaire, 27; on Dans le ciel, 77, 79 nostalgia, 28–29, 38, 59, 62 The Nothing Machine (Ziegler), 3, 4, 129n26, 130n68, 130n79; Dans le ciel and, 91n63; on Dingo, 182n120; on Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 139 nothingness: in L'Abbé Jules, 50; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 112, 122, 126–127; in Sébastien Roch, 66, 69; in La 628-E8, 193, 194 L'Oblat (Huysmans), 196–197 oblivion, 40, 43, 82, 83, 99, 101 oceanic feeling, 63 old age, 68, 83 Ollendorff, Paul, 57 omnipotence: in Le Jardin des supplices, 108; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 120, 126; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 146 orgasm, 71, 96, 102, 120, 122 orthodoxy, 153–154 otherness, 128n4 Ovid, 109 "Pages de Meurtre et de Sang" (Mirbeau), 106 pain, in Le Jardin des supplices, 96, 97, 98, 104 "Palinodies" (Mirbeau), 93, 188 paradise, 46, 63 Pascal, Blaise, 51, 78 passion: in Le Calvaire, 27, 28, 172; in Le Jardin des supplices, 96; of sex, 27 Passion, of Christ, 31, 38, 102 Paul (Saint), 150 pedophilia, 61, 69

209

Péladan, Joséphin, 78, 89n4, 196–197 Pensées (Pascal), 51 Père de Kern (fictional character), 58, 60, 61, 63, 69, 70 Père de Marel (fictional character), 68 Père Monsal (fictional character), 64 Père Pamphile (fictional character), 49, 53–54 Père Rivoli (fictional character), 141–142 perfection, 19, 94, 136, 146, 166, 173; in art, 185 pessimism, 28 Le Petit Chose (Daudet), 57 Le Petit Meuble (proposed work by Mirbeau), 57 phallus, 117, 119 Picquart, Georges, 93 Pierrot, 170 plagiarism, 37, 99 plaisir solitaire, 136 Planchais, Jean-Luc, 71 Playing and Reality (Winnicott), 49, 120, 122 pleasure: in Le Jardin des supplices, 96, 98; of sex, 119 Polet, Jean-Claude, 53 population control, 15 pornography, 55, 187 potential space, 49 prolepsis, 84 un prolétaire de la plume (a proletarian of the pen), 10 rape, 61; in Dingo, 164, 176; in Le Jardin des supplices, 102; in Sébastien Roch, 58 Ravachol, 7, 86 reality principle, 51, 122 The Recovery of Self (Fauteux), 42 La Rédemption (proposed work by Mirbeau), 36, 42 Redon, Odilon, 86 Regnault, Alice, 42

210

Index

religion, 14, 152; in L'Abbé Jules, 44–46, 50–51, 51, 56–57; in Dingo, 179; fetish and, 118, 123; Freud on, 35, 45, 49, 65; illusion of, 36, 45, 49, 50; in Le Jardin des supplices, 97, 115; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 116; in Sébastien Roch, 64, 65, 66; in La 628E8, 151, 158–159, 159; transitional objects and, 52, 56 Rembrandt, 156, 162 Le Rêve de d'Alembert (Diderot), 20 un Rien, 50, 53 Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, 52 Rodenbach, Georges, 189 Roger Fresselou (fictional character), 16, 29–30, 89, 145, 146, 147, 147–148, 148; death drive of, 192 Rolland, Romain, 63, 65 Rose, Gilbert, 66 Rosicrucians, 78, 196–197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 royaume blanc, 5 Sac au dos (Huysman), 33 sadism, 112, 126 sadomasochism, 98 saletés (filthy acts), 46 Sand, George, 51 satire: in Dingo, 164, 167, 176, 196; in Le Jardin des supplices, 93; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 16 Saulquin, Isabelle, 30 Schehr, Lawrence, 94, 103, 106 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 29, 99, 185 Schwob, Marcel, 5–6 science, 6; L'Abbé Jules and, 42; in Dingo, 165, 167–168 scopophilia, 98 Sébastien Roch (Mirbeau), 5, 23, 57–73, 171, 187, 195–196; Dingo and, 166 seekers, 6, 147 self: automobile and, 149; beauty of, 88; Creation and, 43; in Dans le ciel, 188; in Le Jardin des supplices, 99; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 112; loss of, 94, 96, 142

self-centeredness, 137 self-hatred, 23 self-interest, 127 selfishness, 112 self-judgment, 69 selflessness, 189 self-multiplication, 116 self-mutilation, 88 self-sufficiency, 37 Semences de vie (projected work in L'Abbé Jules), 55 sex, 27, 119; class and, 117; death drive and, 126; in Dingo, 176; in Le Jardin des supplices, 98, 103; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 117; murder and, 125–126; neurasthenia and, 135; suffering and, 103 Shengold, Leonard, 58 Sisyphus (fictional character), 41, 42 La 628-E8 (Mirbeau), 17, 19, 24, 95, 193–195; automobile in, 17, 139, 149–163; devil in, 173; suprarational in, 105 skin ego, 98, 99, 103, 108–109, 110 sky, 82, 84, 86, 87, 137, 143 social causes, 3, 8, 15; in Dans le ciel, 23, 78, 79, 80 social inequality, 12 social injustice, 3, 69 La Société mourante et l'Anarchie (Grave), 8, 79 soul murder, 58 Souvenirs sur l'affaire (Mirbeau), 9 Spencer, Herbert, 37 spirituality, of children, 5 staircase, 142 Starobinski, Jean, 59 states of matter, 155 statue, 31–32, 32–33, 35, 155 statues, 35 Stravinsky, Igor, 66 struggle: class and, 8; in Dans le ciel, 77, 78 sublime, 7, 118; in L'Abbé Jules, 48; in Dans le ciel, 78, 80, 86, 88; in Le

Index Jardin des supplices, 115; in Sébastien Roch, 67–68; in La 628-E8, 157 suffering, 36, 103, 148; in Le Calvaire, 40–41; in Dans le ciel, 77, 112; in Sébastien Roch, 58; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 144 suicide, 32, 36, 152, 187; in Dans le ciel, 78, 80, 81, 91n63; in Sébastien Roch, 57, 63, 64 "Le Suicide" (Mirbeau), 29, 33 Sumangala (fictional character), 29, 29–30, 147 superego, 156 supernaturalism, 123, 123–124, 196–197 suprarational, 3, 105 swan, in Dans le ciel, 82 symbolism: in L'Abbé Jules, 50–51; in Dans le ciel, 78 tabula rasa: in Dingo, 21; in Sébastien Roch, 64; in La 628-E8, 163 talisman, 117 taupe du ciel (mole of the sky), 81 Tegyey, Gabriella, 113 Thanatos, 98 theology of apophasis, 53 theosis, 150 tikkun olam, 166 time, 97 torture, 9, 11, 98, 109, 110; in Le Calvaire, 27, 28, 30, 36; in Le Jardin des supplices, 11, 96, 97, 99, 101–102, 107, 109, 110 tradition, 37 transitional objects, 49, 52, 55–56, 56 travel, 148; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 139–140, 148 Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (Mirbeau), 15–16, 24, 86, 89, 95, 133–149, 187–188, 191; nihilism in, 29–30; wind in, 156

211

unbelief, 2 universal law of murder, 2, 13, 105–106 Urmutter, 30 utopianism, 1, 15, 17, 40, 52; in Le Calvaire, 34; Freud and, 47; God and, 19, 52; in Sébastien Roch, 69; in Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 134 van Gogh, Vincent, 88 via eminentiae, 55–56 Vimmer, Judith, 27 Vintras, Eugène, 90n48 violence: in Le Calvaire, 28; in Le Jardin des supplices, 12, 94, 99; in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, 123. See also murder; torture Virgin, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39 walls, 141–142 war, 72 water, 157 Weil-See (fictional character), 153, 159–161, 173 Weltuntergang, 177 Werth, Léon, 22 Wilde, Oscar, 3 William (fictional character), 123 wind, 82, 147–148, 155, 156 Winnicott, Donald, 49–50, 51, 56, 120, 121, 122 Word, 167 wretchedness, 119 xenophobia, 47, 121, 140, 171 youth. See children Zola, Émile, 9, 15, 18–19, 93, 188–189, 196; anti-Semitism and, 155; Balzac and, 136; "Palinodies" and, 188; in La 628-E8, 155

About the Author

Retired in August 2014, Robert Ziegler was professor of humanities at Montana Tech, where for forty years he taught French language and literature. Professor Ziegler has published extensively on French decadence and fin-desiècle French fiction. His books include Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the fin de siècle (2001); The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans (2003); Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction (2009); and Satanism, Magic, and Mysticism in fin-de-siècle France (2012). The present volume is intended to complete his first work on Mirbeau, The Nothing Machine (2009).

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