The Nothing Machine The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau FAUX TITRE 298 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans The Nothing Machine The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau Robert Ziegler AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007 Cover illustration: courtesy of Vivian Herzfeld. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2237-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands Contents Introduction 7 Part I: The Statue 1. Art as Repair: Le Calvaire 19 2. Iconoclasm: L’AbbJ Jules 37 3. The Perfect Death: Sébastien Roch 57 Part II: The Matrix 4. Reaching Up: Dans le ciel 77 5. A Way Out: Un gentilhomme 95 6. The Undifferentiated Bed: Le Jardin des supplices 117 7. Fetish and Meaning: Le Journal d’une femme de chambre 133 Part III: The Nothing Machine 8. From Matter to Motion: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique 151 9. The Novel as Machine: La 628-E8 173 10. Non-human Narrative: Dingo 201 Conclusion 221 References 243 Index 249 Acknowledgements I am fortunate to have received inspiration and to have enjoyed the support of numerous colleagues and co-workers in the completion of this project. For helping me in the researching of this material, I am especially indebted to Julie Buckley and Carolyn Kamrud. For her tireless and good- humored assistance in the preparation of this manuscript, as with the others which preceded it, I am grateful to Evelyn Merkle. To the Montana Tech administration and research office, I owe thanks for their funding of travel to conferences from which I drew valuable information for this book. It is difficult to state how much I owe to Pierre Michel, President of the Société Mirbeau and preeminent Mirbeau scholar in the world. Pierre’s resources, knowledge, enthusiasm, energy, and friendship are truly inexhaustible. It is not an overstatement to acknowledge that this work could not have been brought to fruition without his unstinting support. My gratitude to him is profound and will be lasting. Finally, I thank my daughter, Mary, for her unfailingly penetrating insights into the material for this book. And to my wife, Louise, my trusted editor, my precious life companion, I give my thanks and my love. Portions of this work have appeared previously in other publications. For their permission to use this material in revised and expanded form, I wish to thank the editors of the Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, XIX, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Octave Mirbeau, passions et anathèmes (Actes du Colloque de Cerisy-la-salle). Introduction “Ne pas sentir ton moi, être une chose insaisissable, fondue dans la nature, comme se fond dans la mer une goutte d’eau qui tombe d’un nuage, tel sera le but de tes efforts. Je t’avertis que ce n’est point facile d’y atteindre, et l’on arrive plus aisément à fabriquer un Jésus-Christ, un Mahomet, un Napoléon, qu’un Rien” (L’Abbé Jules to Albert Dervelle, in L’Abbé Jules 1888). In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material, obsolete ideas, discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. Unlike his peers, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Whereas the Decadents stored the dead whose memory their writings venerated, Mirbeau killed the present in his impatience to move forward. In a fin de siècle obsessed with transience, the Decadents sought to compensate for their powerlessness to conquer death by enshrining the beloved as remains kept under glass. A tress of hair whose sheen never dulled (Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte), a bloodstained pillow whose vermilion never faded (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “Véra”), a sonnet by Baudelaire displayed on a mantel as on an altar (Huysmans, A rebours): art born of death was hallowed in a liturgy of remembrance. For the Decadents, the salon succeeded the chapel/crypt as the site of mortuary rituals meant to reverse the effects of narcissism, time, and healing. There, the art work substituted for a corpse subject to disappearance, as creation thwarted the obliterative power of adjustment and forgetting. For the Decadents, the indestructibility of art counteracted the ephemerality of love and beauty. However, Decadent art was also an anal affair. A loved one who left or died was retrieved as her aesthetic simulacrum. Protected against change, art substituted for the lost object in being fetishized and hoarded. Produced by the mourner and saved by the mourner, it was excrement become treasure. The body that disintegrated, the companion who slipped away was replaced by jealously guarded fragments laid out on a velvet bed, offered for view in an upholstered casket. The bookshelf or display case became another Decadent tomb where – deodorized and embellished – death was waste refined into gold. In the fiction of Mirbeau, there is little evidence of the funerary statelineness of Decadent creation. Renouncing his contemporaries’ predilection for stillness and preservation, Mirbeau evolved a fictional 8 The Nothing Machine dynamic that extolled speed and heat, vertigo and combustion. Mirbeau rejected the commemorative function of literature that combatted loss and disintegration, instead presenting the book as an agent of transformation, a grave pullulating with growth, a site of corruption and resurrection. In place of the ponderous artifacts fashioned by Decadent embalmers, Mirbeau authored novels that aimed to unmake what he had made. Foremost among his contemporaries, Mirbeau was committed to the advancement of justice and the redressing of wrongs. At a time when studied apathy was the preferred political stance – when his peers kept their distance from the turbulence of public life or retreated to the solitary world of mysticism or the occult – Mirbeau occupied the public stage where he lashed his enemies with a tongue of fire. Denouncing conditions that contributed to the spread of hunger and the rise in infant mortality, Mirbeau was politically engaged when others embraced the fashion of aesthetic posturing. A native of Calvados, descendant of generations of notaries, Mirbeau rejected the autochthon’s insistence on unchanging tradition. Relocating from Rémalard to Paris in 1872, Mirbeau became involved in the world of journalism, acting as a literary hireling, serving as a personal secretary to the Bonapartist Dugué de la Fauconnerie. Obliged to prostitute his talent, Mirbeau espoused political views that were often contradictory, and antithetical to his own. Yet despite his appearance of ideological volatility, Mirbeau never lost his love of controversy and his passion for social causes. Initially writing for L’Ordre de Paris, Mirbeau became increasingly caught up in events that shaped politics and art, displaying his fondness for upsetting convention, rocking established institutions, infuriating the politically entrenched with his vituperation and bluster. In an era when the Decadents withdrew to the silence of the oblate’s monastery or the ornateness of the art collector’s sanctuary, Mirbeau filled the world of journalism, politics, art, and theater with his tempestuous presence. Renouncing the Decadents’ esotericism, their aloofness and lapidary style, Mirbeau adopted the angry diatribe as his favorite discursive mode, expressing his indignation over a host of public issues, espousing conflicting philosophical positions with the same immoderation and sincerity. The values that drove Mirbeau to champion the Impressionists, to defend Dreyfus, to lend support to the imprisoned Jean Grave, the anarchist and intellectual whose views Mirbeau adopted, inform the creative works that have earned Mirbeau the attention of cultural historians, the interest of literary theoreticians, and the admiration of political idealists. Many Decadents who sought to immortalize both the Introduction 9 beloved object and their own reputations have been consigned to oblivion, whereas Mirbeau – recognizing the benefit of disturbing habit and promoting change – speaks more compellingly to modern readers than do fin-de-siècle custodians of tradition. Paralleling Mirbeau’s career, his evolving aesthetic describes a passage from material to motion. Reparative creative work that had once healed a damaged subject, restoring him to a state of equanimity and wholeness, gives way to art resembling nature’s seething laboratory. Swarming with vermicular life, the text is like a blood pool in which dead bodies swim. Subject to natural cataclysm and self-directed violence, Mirbeau’s characters break down, their fragmentation mirroring the disjointed stories that feature them. Torture for Mirbeau becomes a metaphor for catalysis, and the crucifix on which the sufferer dies is the place where his body changes – where matter, seemingly destroyed, turns into the energy that brings rebirth. In Mirbeau’s later novels, the matrix gives way to the machine. No longer released by heat-generating decomposition, energy is produced by the operation of engines powered by the destruction of superfluous objects. In Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique, it is knowledge that the hero flees. And in La 628-E8 and Dingo, the speeding car and wild dog lay waste to the things they pass, their jubilant massacre equated with creative work that emancipates in hastening onward. In the later phases of Mirbeau’s career, his aesthetic rejected material forms in order to advance the processes of metamorphosis. In this respect, he was the antithesis of his creatively conservative contemporaries, who clung to an art of self-replication, topologizing their hero as a thébaide crammed with knickknacks. As projections of imperilled self-love, most Decadent works served as denials of man’s fugitive existence. In being pulverized by the passage of eons, the Decadent body turned to dust, the material aspect of mortality that time blew away. However, canonic art whose consumption spanned generations seemed to ensure the creator’s eternal life through the endurance of his artifacts – “time-defying monuments” wrought in marble, bronze, or language, these “accumulations of stone and gold make possible the discovery of the immortal soul.”1 For the narcissist, the water in which he beholds his image must be calm and clear. Yet Mirbeau’s characters are careening, racing, restless people, never stopping long enough for their reflection to congeal. Mirbeau’s novels are never familiar faces transposing an author apotheosized as his writing. Even when they derive from the writer’s life 1 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Wesleyen UP, 1959), p. 286.