The Landscape of Death in Octave Mirbeau

The Landscape of Death in Octave Mirbeau Robert Ziegler F ILLED WITH the degenerate wreckage of victims of dermatosis, dyspepsia, and pharyngitis, the spa emerged as a favorite Decadent topos in 19th-century literature. Promiscuously sequestered in the hotel/sanitorium with its Casino, mineral springs, insipid cuisine, and ersatz luxury, stooped guests wracked by coughs and disfigured by eczema also displayed symptoms of a moral infirmity that was exacer­ bated by their boredom. It was to such a resort that playwright/novelist Octave Mirbeau repaired in 1897 in an attempt “ to rid himself of a troublesome catarrh.” 1There at Bagnères-de-Luchon the mature writer found confirmation of his longstanding views on the unhealthiness of upper middle-class French society. Published in 1901, Les Vingt et un jours d ’un neurasthénique pro­ vides an episodic fictional account of Mirbeau’s sojourn in the moun­ tains.2A gallery of teratologic specimens, the novel reiterates Mirbeau’s revulsion for anti-dreyfusism, militarism, and colonialism in a set of dis­ parate vignettes picturing genocidal officers, suave cambrioleurs, jaded American billionaires, and ex-convict anti-Semites. Beginning with Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s fic­ tions had begun to lose their center, becoming, as Martin Schwarz affirms, a disconnected “ suite de portraits et d’anecdotes” whose “ manque de composition [...] est voulu.” 3 Remarkable for their “ un­ conventional blending of fact and fiction,” 4Mirbeau’s later writings are part autobiography, part travelogue, and part personal reminiscence, and as hybrids, belong to no identifiable genre. Indeed, the desultoriness of these narratives may be structurally imaged by Mirbeau’s own sense of metaphysical disorder and impending cultural collapse. While his dizzy­ ing panegyric to the automobile, La 628-E8 (1907),5celebrates irrespon­ sibility, change, and speed, Les Vingt et un jours provides a more sober meditation on the Decadents’ conception of death as thermal depletion, inertia, and petrifaction. Mirbeau’s feeling of imprisonment in the granite jaws of cloud-obliterated summits, his dismay at the horizon’s disappearance, his horror of snow and stone convey a belief that life was movement, heat, and energy, while lethargy, cold, and immobility could only presage the end of the world. Vol. XXXV, No. 4 71 L ’E sprit C réateur In this study of Flaubert and Romanticism, the late Eugenio Donato remarked that “ the hasty extrapolation of the second law of thermo­ dynamics, according to which the solar system will die a frozen death, [was] an idea that the nineteenth-century imagination found striking.” 6 Contributing to the prevalent fin-de-siècle belief in racial exhaustion7 was a vision of planetary extinction and entropy that must have im­ pressed the volatile Mirbeau with his temperamental impetuosity and fire. Yet, as this essay argues, the proliferation in Les Vingt et unjours of Decadent images of hereditary impoverishment and artistic stagnation is offset by the automotive fugues, by the careening recklessness of a nar­ rative which, in La 628-E8, constitute an escape, a denial, and a cure for the cosmic ills that Mirbeau had previously diagnosed. Mirbeau’s pessimistic image of the end of the world may be best reflected by his impressions of Amsterdam, a network of canals and mir­ rored landscapes of sun and color, a city which, above water, is alive with barge traffic and trade, a place where each house is architecturally unique, from its gables to its windows. Beauty and vitality are suggested by movement and difference: “rien n’est plus divers, et plus bougeant qu’Amsterdam” (La 628-E8 260). Yet beneath the surface, a 300-yearold deposit of raw sewage relentlessly accumulates, contaminating the water and turning it into a destructive miasma that carries the germ of cholera, fever, and plague, triggering an apocalyptic vision of civiliza­ tion’s ruin: “ c’est toute l’Europe empoisonnée [...] c’est la mort sur le monde!” (261). Recalling Flaubert’s image of a doomed humanity “ dancing on the floorboard of a latrine,” 8Donato notes that, in supplanting a Newtonian worldview, thermodynamics portrays an image of temporality as seep­ age and sedimentation, “ a notion of history based on metaphors of decay, decadence, corruption,” which culminates in excremental undif­ ferentiation (Donato...