Gitmo

THE TORTURE GARDEN

In her analysis of the sources of artistic creativity, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel notes the
prevalence of charlatanism among those she classifies as perverts. In the world of Eugène Mortain
and his colleagues, there are no respectable fathers, no ego ideals worthy of embracing, no
principled tradesmen, no honorable statesmen or reputable scientists. Duplicity and fraud are so
commonplace that even the effort to cover them up is deemed unnecessary. No only does the son
try to displace the father, “due,” as Chasseguet-Smirgel says, “to the faulty introjection and
assimilation of the paternal attributes” (74). Additionally, as fathers are equated with government
ministers who vaunt their dishonesty, the normal super-ego functions of supervision and censure are
suspended. This is so because Mortain and his ilk inhabit a world of undisguised anality, in which
concupiscence and money-lust are so pervasive that they no longer need to be masked or hidden.
Political office-holders who crisscross their district, proclaiming "J’ai“ volé… j’ai volé” (185),
trumpeting their corruption along roadsides and in town squares relativize truth’s value by
proclaiming the truth of their dishonesty. Beloved of constituents whose thievery they consecrate,
politician climb to ever higher positions in a government hierarchy while falsely asserting their
support of a democratic rule by liars.
The confusion of high and low, father and son, paternal phallus and fecal stick, virtue and
money, intends restoration of an original state of horizontality and homogeneity, undifferentiation
and disorder, free of law and inequality, the world to which the utopian anarchist longs to return.
The removal of barriers and the violation of boundaries intend a mixture of subject and object, and,
“in the case of murder,” an end of the separation of “the molecules in the body from each other”
(Chasseguet-Smirgel 3). But as Mirbeau suggests, reestablishment of a primordial reign of love and
death also entails the obsolescence of art, the elimination of literature, the end of his authorial
practice, and the disappearance of language. Despite its scathing satirical indictment of French
society sick with scandal and vice, enfeebled by the Panama affair and the Dreyfus controversy,
Mirbeau could continue to work only in a decadent world of moral invalidism. Like the narrator, he
must abandon the lush realm of peonies and peacocks, depart from a garden whose atrocity and
beauty strike man dumb, in order to reenter the gray precincts of late nineteenth-century Europe, a
society choking on cigar smoke and stale conversation.
When the narrator admits to Clara his elaborate imposture, confessing that he is not really a
scientist dispatched to sift through the pelagic ooze in search of the primeval gastropod, he
renounces the search for origins in his life and its narration. At first, the appeal of the truth is born
of his attraction to Clara, as he chooses to replace Mortain’s mendacious bombast with the wordless
satisfaction promised by sex with a beautiful confidante. What Schehr calls “nature’s general
economy” (97) is opposed to the surplus economy of politics and business, where material reality is
supplemented by its symbolic value as language and money. As sex and death sustain the biological
circulus of putrefaction and new growth, in Europe, the same vital phenomena are culturally
subsumed to the smooth operation of commerce and government. In the Frontispiece, murder and
coitus are not primary activities but are cooked and served up as food for discussion. No longer
identifying man as a lustful hunter in a pre-verbal jungle, the speakers argue that the impulse to
mate and kill must be harnessed by politicians and industrialists to make profit for themselves and
justify their own functions.
Like the peacock, utilized by Mirbeau as the symbol of symbolization, art is a parasite that
feeds on death. Instead of succumbing to the pull of instinct and regressing to a state of action
without speech, life without stagecraft, art kills death and resurrects it as a theme. No longer
governed by the biological imperative of survival, Mirbeau’s intellectuals operate in an otiose realm
of decadent language play, talking just to talk. Progression from consumption to speech, from oral
objects to words, does not bring a disciplined acceptance of oedipal self-restraint but a perversion of
the values that French society both hallows and mocks. Goal-directed behavior - designed to
support a temporal dynamic that opposes a present of self-denial to a future of achievement -
instead becomes the object of contemptuous auto-subversion. In the European world of swindlers
and miscreants, the object of work is the ridicule of work. Once it is disconnected from its
communicative purpose, language becomes a toy for the clever, a cocktail snack enjoyed with
tobacco and brandy. Discussion of issues of life and death does not yield new insights or wisdom; it
is undertaken for its own sake. “Ayant copieusement dîné,” the Darwinian scientist, the member of
the Academy of Moral Sciences, a loquacious philosopher, and their gracious host begin their
debate about murder, “à propos de je ne sais plus quoi,” the frame narrator says, “à propos de rien,
sans doute” (165). Whereas killing, for Clara, is a powerful aphrodisiac, for the male partygoers, it
assumes a recreational inconsequentiality.
In their conversation, the men go on to posit a logical, causal, and temporal inversion
whereby the mechanisms of control exercised by society’s institutions preexist the crimes requiring
an application of the law. Instead of protecting against homicide and rape, courts, police, and
prisons are protected against the evidence of their uselessness by the prophylactic incidence of
homicide and rape. Thus, the anarchist Mirbeau creates the character of the scholar, for whom
murder provides indemnification against the lawlessness of freedom: “S’il n’y avait plus de meurtre,
il n’y aurait plus de gouvernements d’aucune sorte, par ce fait admirable que le crime en général, le
meurtre en particulier sont, non seulement leur excuse, mais leur unique raison d’être… Nous
vivrions alors en pleine anarchie, ce qui ne peut se concevoir…” (