The Garden of the torments

the Garden of the torments is a French novel of Octave Mirbeau, published in Carpenter-Fasquelle in June 1899.

Ironically, the novelist supporter of Dreyfus dedicated To the Priests, to the Soldiers, the Judges, to the Men, who educate, the men, these pages of Murder and Blood control direct .

The novel

A disconcerting work

This novel, published in most extremely of the Business Dreyfus, the day before the lawsuit of Alfred Dreyfus with Rennes, results from do-it-yourself of texts designed independently from/to each other, at different times, in different styles and with different characters. One first of all finds articles on the “law of the murder”: they constitute the Frontispice novel, which presents a discussion of after-drinking between intellectuals positivists. Then On mission , first part of an oral narration entitled comes the Garden of the torments : it is about a grotesque caricature of the French political circles of the Third Republic, where the anonymity narrator is seen, small swindler of the become policy compromising for its partial trusteeship, to be made send to Ceylon under the farcesque pretext of a mission of embryologist… In the third part of the novel (second part of this narration, also entitled the Garden of the torments ), we are entitled to the account of a visit of the bagne of Canton, under the control of an English sadist, perverse and hysterical, Clara, which arrives at small death at the end of this exploration of the worst atrocities.

This mixture of let us tons and the multiple transgressions of the codes of probability, romantic credibility and propriety contribute to scramble the literary and ethical reference marks readers and to badly put them at ease in the disconcerting one.

The law of the murder

This faintness is reinforced by the inaugural discussion on the murder, considered as the infrangible law on which all the companies rest, including those which are said wrongly civilized ; by descriptions of torments particularly horrible, of which some are delights reversed (torment of the bell, torment of the caress, torment of the rat, which will durably mark one of the most famous patients of Freud); and by pages of black Humor, particularly destabilizers for the ideas morals of the readers, in particular the long interview of a débonnaire Chinese torturer, conscientious artist of the saw, clipper and scalpel. Consequently they are well in sorrow to draw a univocal conclusion, to make the departure between the beautiful one and the horrible one, the denunciation and kindness, the serious one and the ironic distance, in a work which is deliberately ambiguous.

A literary monstrosity

True literary monstrosity escaping any classification, the Garden of the torments is all at the same time: an initiatory novel (the narrator discovers crimes unknown and of darkness where it was not descended yet); a metaphor of the terrible human condition subjected to inexorable and monstrous law of the murder ; a judgment of all the companies, which constitute true schools of the assassination instead of fighting it; a denunciation of the crimes of the French and English Colonialisme S, which transform whole continents into true gardens of the torments; a handing-over in question of Western pseudo-civilization and alleged humanistic values on which it is prided; and also a fascinating exercise of black humor.

Adaptations

Very inaccurate and very melodramatic theatrical adaptation of the novel was carried out by Pierre Chaine and André de Lorde and was represented to the theater of the Large-Puppet on October 28th 1922.

A film adaptation, quite as inaccurate, was carried out by Christian Gion in 1977, with Roger Van Hool and Ysabelle Lacamp.

External bonds

Text of the “Garden of the torments”, also on Gallica
Pierre Michel, foreword of the “Garden of the torments”
Pierre Michel, “Bibliography of Mirbeau Octave”
Claire Margat, “Ensauvager our gardens”
Claire Margat, “The '' Chinese torture '', from Mirbeau to Bataille”
Claire Margat, “torment of the rat, floret of the '' Jardin of the torments ''”
Pierre Michel, “the first outline of the '' Jardin of the torments '': '' On mission '' (1893)”
Pierre Michel, “'' the Garden of the torments '': between patchwork and sudden starts of terror”
Jean-Luc Planchais, “Clara: torments and blandices in '' the Garden ''”
Gianna Quach, “Mirbeau and China”
Éléonore Reverzy, “Of poetic a mirbellienne: '' The Garden of the torments ''”
Fabien Soldà, “'' the Garden of the torments '': account of an initiation? ”
Fabien Soldà, “Mirbeau and Baudelaire: '' The Garden of the torments '' or '' Flowers of the revisited evil ''”
Robert Ziegler, “Utopia and perversion in '' the Garden of the torments ''”

Random links: