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, andthe savage blossoms like sex organs violently fucking, the female devouring the male in a Black Widow orgy-feast.

"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?. . ."

Still, 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.

If you ever have a chance to find this rare, profound, and enlightening
book within your grasp, I recommend that you hold on tight.  For with the sudden Renaissance and interest in Mirbeau's work, it is sure to be
highly coveted.  And, make sure you get the picture-book edition with its surreal photographs by Bobby Neel Adams, published by Re/Search
Publications in 1989.  It beautifully compliments Mirbeau's flowery prose and adds to the visual imagery of the novel.  I wish now that I had not used mine as a coaster.

 

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