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

The Nothing Machine contains three parts: The first one is entitled "The Statue." It includes three chapters, each devoted to Le Calvaire, L'Abbé Jules and Sébastien Roch. These novels mark the early works written by Mirbeau and are considered autobiographical. Part Two entitled "The Matrix" comprises four chapters, including Dans le Ciel (Chap. 4), an unfinished work recently edited by Pierre Michel, a key Mirbelian scholar who is amply recognized in this volume. Un Gentilhomme (Chap. 5) is another unfinished work which saw publication in 1920, three years after Mirbeau's death. Both Le Jardin des supplices (Chap. 6) and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Chap. 7) appeared during Mir-beau's lifetime, and are among his masterpieces. Entitled "The Nothing Machine," Part Three includes Les 21 Jours d'un neurasthénique (Chap. 8), La 628-E8 (Chap. 9) and Dingo (Chap. 10). The last novel in which "the animal communicates in its inhumanly accurate repertory of barks, growls, glances and postures" (207) needed a friend's [Léon Werth's] helpful intervention before completion and publication in 1913. Ziegler's "Introduction" gives a quick overview of the contents of his own book.

Ziegler sees Mirbeau as an innovative writer, whose work is "an agent of transformation, a grave pullulating with growth, a site of corruption and resurrection" (8). He sees Mirbeau as different from the stale "claustrophobic Decadents immured in the impregnable sanctuary of their ornate style and obscure intrigues" (10). But Mirbeau was a man of his time – Decadence's finest hour – in search of new forms of expression, and forgotten for over half a century. After Le Calvaire appeared in 1886 the editor promptly announced that "Resurrection" would follow, but it never did. Yet every volume published by Mirbeau is an attempt at resurrection, new growth, new life, and a literature that he reinvents and renews in the finest Decadent tradition.

The author of The Nothing Machine makes every effort to extirpate Mirbeau from the stale definitions that plague the much maligned Fin-de-siècle Decadent writers who still await a biographer to account for their attempt to reinvigorate, reinvent and renew literature. Yet, Mirbeau is a man deeply anchored in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus Affair and the events that led to World War I. He is a Fin-de-siècle writer, a Decadent of the finest innovative kind.

Mirbeau, indeed, has been considered a Naturalist, a Decadent, a Fin-de-siècle writer, and more recently Modern and even Post-Modern. All these labels may fit Mirbeau depending on the angle from which we look at him and his work. In the end he is an explorer of the present with a vision for newness, change and transformation of which Ziegler discusses many aspects, often from the dark side with the opposites of death/life domi-nating: "Manifested by death's dynamic that dissolves cadavers into fertilizer is evidence of the natural cycles of putrefaction and rebirth. Mirbeau's paradoxical affirmation of biophilic death is based on the self-replenishing energy of organisms that decompose and live. In a world governed by movement, circulation and transformation, there is no death, only the emergence of new form from the manure heap" (192). Mirbeau's fiction, for instance La 628-E8 ("the novel-as-car") is seen as a machine that contributes to "the perishing [or decomposing] of old forms" [that] "reemerge in different guises."

An eighteenth-century French writer, Antoine Pecquet, once said that there is no greater fallacy than to always agree with the author. Disagreeing is looking at a writer's work from a different point of view. Without contradicting in any way the ideas presented in The Nothing Machine, a brilliant and original study of Mirbeau's fiction, I would say that there are other approaches than psychoanalytic and Freudian and they lead to different conclusions. The author...