The Torture Garden

Octave Mirbeau

A new edition of a nineteenth-century classic of decadence is usually a good thing, right? The problem being that nineteenth-century classics of decadence often end up reading more like Henry James-- in his long-winded later years-- than actual decadence. The Torture Garden is redeemed in this respect only by being shorter than most.

While it cannot be argued that, along with its brevity, The Torture Garden was certainly one of the most explicit books of its time, that time is long past, and one has to ask the question of whether the book has any relevance at all to the modern reader. In most cases, the answer will be no. Today, The Torture Garden is going to appeal to an extremely select group of people-- those who both hunger for the explicit and have enough tolerance for the diction of nineteenth-century writing to be able to get the explicitness out of it.

Somewhere along the way during the twentieth century, fiction got a lot less heavy on the description and replaced what was missing with an emphasis on plot. Now, normally I'm the first person to rush into the breach, screaming about how awful an idea this usually is. It leads to things like Danielle Steel selling uncounted millions of novels that are not, one presumes, being used for their most appropriate purposes (e.g., lining cat pans). However, the parallel to this is that there had to be some sort of previous description-heavy movement, and it had to lead somewhere decadent enough that the literati felt the need to rebel against it. The previous remark about Henry James in his later years is quite an excellent example of where it had led-- bloated, flowery books that weren't really about anything, in any meaningful sense of the word. The Torture Garden is one of these, minus (thankfully) some of the bloat, and literally flowery. There is much breast-beating, a good deal of horror (in the beginning, anyway) at the thought of women showing their ankles in public, the common trope of a faraway country (in this case, China) being picked as a setting because no one really knew all that much about it, and a whole lot of description, but underneath, there's really nothing at all. Worse, Mirbeau seems to have decided to ignore such things as continuity (contrast, for example, the endless, intensely boring frame at the beginning of the novel with its final page, and wonder how the narrator got from point B to point A). To the reader of the modern pornographic novel, this will not be new. In fact, it's a mark that's branded the cheap, low-quality pornographic novel... well, seemingly at least since the turn of the twentieth century.