Table Of ContentThe 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 -
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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.
