A novel by Octave Mirbeau 1899
Originally translated
by Alvah C. Bessi in 1931
Re/Search Publications 1989
Photography by Bobby Neel Adams
"Alas, the gates of life never swing open except upon death, never open except upon the palaces and gardens of death. And the universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. . ."
When I first received this book from a my old perverted buddy Chris, I doubted that I would enjoy it. Perhaps it was the word torture in the title that first put me off at first, but, more likely, it was from whom the book had come. Chris tends to have strong sadistic and extremely bizzare tastes in erotica. After all, this is the pervert who had first introduced me to the B-movies: Blood Sucking Freaks, Animal Farm and de Sade's Justine. Needless to say, the book sat for two weeks on my coffee table collecting purple, ring-stains from wine glasses until I finally picked it up and began to read.
Imagine my surprise when I started
to get into it. The version Chris gave me is a rare hard-cover picture
book of the novel printed by Re/Search Publications in 1989. On the
cover is a photograph of a
woman wearing a black mask as she
lies in the sand cradling the bald head of a man who is buried to his neck.
Her lips are pursed into a kiss and she looks as if she is in a state of
dreamy ecstasy. This picture
conjures up the feel of the entire
book, of the English woman Clara, and of the Torture Garden itself.
"They dug thirty holes in the sand, and they buried them up to their necks, naked, with their heads shaved, in the noonday sun. So they wouldn't die too fast they watered them from time to time, like cabbages. At the end of an hour their eyelids swollen, their eyes bulged from their sockets, their swollen tongues filled their mouths, which gaped frightfully, and their skin cracked and roasted on their skulls."
This is one of the descriptions
of torture that Clara relates with growing fever to her lover, our narrator,
a French bureaucrat, as she takes him on a depraved journey through the
most terrible and divine
place on earth. The Torture
Garden is a beautiful, lush garden in China, hidden within the walls of
a prison (a Bagnio), in which the most horrible and exquisite punishments
are inflicted upon the human body as a work of art. The garden itself
it extremely fertile, and thrives from the nourishment that enriches its
soil, "through the excrement of the prisoners, the blood of the tortured",
defying the atrocities of it's
vile surroundings by producing
the most lush, exotic and fragrant flowers in all of China.
It is in this magnificent and repulsive
setting that we uncover the desires of a delicate-looking English woman.
Clara, born an aristocratic, has all the perversities and bored exterior
of a woman of her breeding and era. Unable to obtain sexual pleasure
from the usual methods, or perhaps too jaded to try, she is driven to the
limits of sensation, seeking and becoming increasingly obsessed with beauty,
torture, blood and death. Clara seduces our narrator with promises
of the ultimate passion that human's can experience.
"I'll teach you terrible things. . . divine things. I promise you'll descend with me to the very depths of the mystery of love. . . and death!"
The Frenchman, a bourgeois and
corrupted politician, is captivated by Clara, even though her very nature
sickens and repulses him. He finds himself being drawn into her wild
web of enchantment and eventually
falling prey to her sinful and
wicked delusions.
"I realized that the very thing that held me to her was the frightful rottenness of her soul and her crimes of love. She was a monster, and I loved her for being a monster."
While he remained a weak and
uninteresting character throughout the book, I found myself becoming mesmerized
by Clara's debauchery, and by the book's exploration of passion and pain.
I began to easily identify with her character, and with her search for
the ultimate aphrodisiac: our fascination with beautiful death.
I also appreciated how Clara, and
women in general were portrayed in this book. Gone were the contemporary
stereotypes of a frail, dispassionate, and vulnerable woman. Instead,
I found a woman who was vibrant and alive, and emanated passion and sexual
exuberance. The author presented women as powerful creatures, commanding
the very forces of life and death itself.
"Women possess the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death—since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source."
The author, Octave Mirbeau,
who lived and wrote during the late nineteenth century, was rebellious
and held fast to the doctrines of anarchism which he passionately defended.
Throughout his novel, the
underlying element is the portrayal
of society's hideousness and hypocrisies, that much of what we believe
to be good and right, is evil in disguise. And, perhaps it is through
his juxtaposition of beauty and
horror, that my own realizations
as a reader came. At one point in the book he is describing a crowd
of exquisitely plumed peacocks devouring strips of human flesh in a feeding
frenzy. His words are elegant and poetic, sometimes singing like
a violin, and other times whispering like a breeze. His descriptions,
especially of the foliage throughout the garden, are deliciously lush and
vivid, invoking images of copulation amidst the "phalliform and vulviod
clusters". I had visions of Pink Floyd's The Wall, and
the savage blossoms like sex organs violently fucking, the female devouring
the male in a Black Widow orgy-feast.
The Torture Garden was not valued for its beautiful language nor for the social and political messages it proclaimed when Mirbeau wrote it in 1899. Instead, it was heralded as "the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century. . ." Well, at least they included work of art."She bent over a plant, a thalictrum which lifted a long, branching, light violet stem beside the path. . . a powerful phosphatic odor, an odor of semen rose from this plant. . . what a lovely plant! How it intoxicates me. How it maddens me! Is it strange that there are plants that smell of love?. . ."
manifest | covet | exhume | possess | bleed | breathe
gaze | sacrifice | writhe | stalk | lust | expose | intercourse
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