7/28/2019 Josh Weiner, L'Affaire Mirbeau : "The Torture Garden" as Novel 'on Strike'

1/2

JOSH WEINER

Graduate Student

Department of EnglishUniversity of California, Berkeley

L'Affaire Mirbeau:

The Torture Garden as Novel on Strike

What kind of social "work" exactly do we expect from art? Would it be possible to

make art while refusing to do that work? Much of post-Structuralist thought about art and

literature was launched around the slogan of the "death of the author"; this paper wonders

what kind of (literary) production would answer instead to the "death of the artwork." And

what could be said to happen to the working, writing person that survives the "death" of

their "work"?

I contend that the late decadent French novel Le Jardin des supplices (The

Torture Garden, 1899) by journalist, art critic, novelist, Dreyfusard, and sometime

anarchist Octave Mirbeau, was an attempt to protest -- within the form of a novel "the

literary" itself. The novel consists of a patchwork of vignettes depicting extravagant

scenes of corruption, sexualized violence, and wild, orientalist descriptions of flowers.

This ostentatious content has bifurcated the novel's critical reception into readers that

take the text's misogynistic and imperialist eruptions as accusing the author of these,

and readers that see the novel as a critique of the degrading, hypocritical bourgeois

culture whose violence the author is trying to

parody.

I try to solve this problem by arguing that the novel is a self-parody of the author

insofar as he (and the form of the novel he is working in) participates in and is contaminated

by the culture he despises. I draw on Niklas Luhmann's theory of literature as a social systemthat makes possible a very particular kind of communication event to explain what

7/28/2019 Josh Weiner, L'Affaire Mirbeau : "The Torture Garden" as Novel 'on Strike'

2/2

specifically Mirbeau is trying to protest. Mirbeau's contemporary and fellow anarchist

Georges Sorel gives an account ofsocialist activism centered on what he calls the "myth

of the general strike" the generalized refusal to do work which I argue explains

precisely the nature and structure of the violent gesture Mirbeau performs in writing

this text: the novel is a working figure of the refusal to work -- a novel "on strike."

I come to terms with the shocking content of the text by arguing that its

development is governed by a precisely structured 'torture-system' (which I develop

from some analyses in Barthes) that contradistinguishes and then spectacularly crosses

metaphorically and metonymically ordered torture-logics. Comparing this model with

Elaine Scarry's work on torture, I argue that Mirbeau's torture system has the effect of

liquidating any 'secret' that pain could be used to produce out of its victim. Producing a

novel without a "secret" a self-consuming novel, continuously shredding itself of its

secrets is tantamount to saying: this is a novel that shreds itself of the undead author,

whose absence guarantees its legibility. What remains as an image of literature at a

standstill or a text that slaps a consumer of literature in the face something like a

pornographic picture of an undead life, writing.