For horror fans. the name "Torture Garden" calls to mind a 1967 film-anthology that adapted a bunch of unrelated Robert Bloch terror-tales. Even in 1967 I doubt many readers remembered the 1899 fin-de-siecle novel by French writer Octave Mirbeau. Thus I've no clue as to why any of the film's producers thought the title worth conjuring with for contemporary filmgoers, in contrast, say, to titles borrowed by Edgar Allan Poe. For my part, I'd read a few remarks about this 19th-century book in Mario Praz's study of transgressive literature, THE ROMANTIC AGONY. Yet I didn't really expect much of a story, so I didn't get round to reading GARDEN until now, though I'd had a second-hand copy lying around for over ten years.
My intuition was correct: Mirbeau's work is a nearly plotless meditation on the human fascination with diverse kinds of torture, structured much like a travelogue. There's not much question in my mind that Mirbeau was grappling with issues raised by the Grand Master of Literary Sadism, the Marquise de Sade, though Mirbeau's ambivalence to the topic makes unclear as to how much he was of Sade's party. The novel might be considered the last of the European decadent movement of the 19th century, and the fact that Europeans were still emulating Sade might be deemed a compliment of sorts, given that most of Sade's major works had been completed (if not always published) before the end of the previous century.
Sade's works are so fervid in their description of torture that they verge on falling into the domain of naturalistic horror, and even possibly even the uncanny variety at times. GARDEN, however, is too meandering to sustain a mood of horror, and despite some description of inventive tortures, Mirbeau's work is too reality-based to rise to an uncanny level of artifice.
So what's it about? After a framing-device in which several men debate morality in a French men's club, one man, whom I'll call NoName because he refuses to give one, tells the story that fills the rest of the novel, without ever coming back to the frame-story. He briefly describes himself as a young layabout who imposes on a friend and gets a sinecure to study biology in Ceylon, though he's not at all a biologist, and is really just scamming the system.
There are assorted comments about torture before NoName tells his story, usually in the context of people talking about using extreme measures to enforce colonial dictates. Mirbeau *may * be satirizing French colonialism in these segments, or he may be simply contrasting these functional uses of torture with Sade's uncompromising fascination with the subject-- though to be sure Sade is never mentioned. However, while taking a ship to Ceylon, NoName hooks up with Clara, a wealthy young European woman. Implicitly NoName becomes her gigolo, and he abandons his plans, following Clara to her home in an unnamed city in China prior to the Boxer Rebellion.
Clara is in essence Mirbeau's take on Sade's Juliette: a wealthy woman who is unregenerately fascinated with suffering and torture. In the city closest to Clara's estate, the Chinese authorities maintain a palisade known as "the Torture Garden," wherein criminals are subjected to harsh punitive torments even though they're surrounded by meticulously managed flower-gardens, replete with peacocks. While NoName merely flirts with transgression, Clara is orgasmically obsessed with the pain of others, celebrating the Chinese for their inventiveness in this art. "No other race," says Clara late in the novel, "knows how to tame and domesticate nature with such painstaking skill." The parallel between culling both flowers and rebellious citizens will probably strike contemporary readers as a pretty backhanded compliment to the Chinese. But one might note that Mirbeau speaks only through the voice of Europeans: there are almost no Chinese characters who get any dialogue to articulate their beliefs or obsessions. I like to think that NoName is sort of the unserious dilettante, who merely flirts with transgressive topics yet still has vestiges of conscience. Clara-- whose total fascination with human suffering remains undiminished by the novel's end-- stands comparison with those Sade characters who manage to liberate themselves from all conscience-considerations. Since the author does seem at times to be satirizing the deeds of European colonizers, maybe there was a part of Mirbeau that envied a Sade-like being who could look upon horror without any pangs of remorse or empathy.
Just as the tortures are too realistic to stand as uncanny crimes, Clara is never bizarre enough to stand alongside the many "fatal women" who, according to Mario Praz, throng the pages of European prose and poetry during this period. The one advantage GARDEN has over most of Sade's works is that, precisely because Mirbeau may have been ambivalent on the torture-topic, he doesn't become as obsessed as Sade with chronicling acts of cruelty until they become profoundly boring. That said, TORTURE GARDEN, while it has the virtue of brevity, is still just a mediocre fiction-travelogue with a few mildly memorable passages. Despite its subject matter, it belongs neither to the genre of horror or to any category of metaphenomenal fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment