The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (review)

This book offers close readings of 10 novels by Octave Mirbeau, ranging chronologically from Le Calvaire to Dingo. Ziegler argues that Mirbeau’s fiction evolves ‘from a therapeutic instrument restoring the narrator’s sense of psychic wholeness to a vehicle of aggression targeting creative stagnation and paralysis’, that ‘for Mirbeau, creative energy is best utilized when it is directed at a program of hygienic destruction’. Given the nihilistic inclinations and creative impotence that afflict so many of Mirbeau’s protagonists (whom Ziegler generally assumes to be authorial projections), it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the writer’s lesser-known texts are seen to demonstrate the same stasis. Thus, Dans le ciel embodies the ‘self-annihilating artwork’, while in the case of the unfinished Un gentilhomme, ‘As an epistemological instrument, the novel moves from pretensions to grasp everything to a disqualification from explaining anything’. Ziegler observes that Mirbeau’s work is ‘a textual gulag where social niceties are systematically exterminated’ and that he increasingly disrupts the structural coherence of the novel; the first-person narrator of Les 21 Jours d’un neurasthénique ‘communicates the perceptions of an unstable, decentered subject whose organizing consciousness cannot structure his experience’. Although Le Calvaire depicts art as dolorism and the artist as a crucified Christ, and capitalism is perceived in La 628-E8 as a substitute ‘religion based on resurrection and multiplication’, Mirbeau generally remains on the ‘horizontal’ plane of human interaction and avoids the vertical axis of spirituality (hence perhaps his dislike of mountains and airships, and espousal of the automobile’s liberating possibilities). Mirbeau adopts the naturalists’ physiological determinism, with mind firmly ruled by matter and humanity in thrall to ‘biological abjection’. He derides most organized knowledge systems as tautological, self-serving or fallacious, since they deny the complexity and unintelligibility of existence. In his last novel, Dingo, the eponymous dingo displaces the human narrator as the novel’s structuring agent; the dog compensates for human longevity by living more intensely and interacts more immediately with the world, without the need for language and speech. The author’s own identity and status are further problematized by the fact that much of Dingo was actually ghost-written by Léon Werth (just as Mirbeau himself may have worked as an unacknowledged nègre at the beginning of his career). Robert Ziegler clearly has an excellent knowledge of Mirbeau’s novels and at his best is a perceptive commentator, although his readers are assumed to share this expertise and his familiarity with abstruse academic discourse. Too often, however, one is left pondering the sense (if any) of gnomic pronouncements (such as ‘mountains exhibit the immodesty of omniscience’) and wishing for a great deal more clarification and biographical, cultural or historical contextualization of the argument. When he does attempt to tackle Mirbeau’s troubled and complicated relationship with Zola, he mistakenly asserts that Zola was integrated into the Académie Française (missing the point that Zola’s humiliating multiple rejections effectively allied him with Mirbeau as a belligerent outsider). Ziegler has frequent recourse to Nivet and Michel’s vastly informative biography, but makes little reference to Mirbeau’s extensive correspondence, and seems unaware of the existence of earlier book-length studies by Schwarz, Carr, Lloyd, McCaffrey or Lair that complement his own work.