"There is an allegory about the hypocrisy of European 'civilisation' and about the 'Law of Murder'. There is also a denunciation of bloody French and British colonialism and a ferocious attack on what Mirbeau saw as the corrupt morality of bourgeois capitalist society and the state, which he believed were based on murder.
But Mirbeau's multiple transgressions of the rules of verisimilitude and his disregard for novelistic convention confuse the issue of the novel's genre affiliation and leave open the question of the author's moral message."
(trechos daqui)
* * *
"I'm positive that I believe I am a normal man, with affections, high sentiments, superior culture and the refinements of civilization and sociability. Well, how often have I heard the imperious voice of murder snarling in me! How often have I felt the desire rising in a surge of blood from the depths of my being to my brain - that bitter, violent and almost invincible desire to kill. Do not believe that this desire arose in a passionate crisis, accompanied a sudden, unreflective rage, or was combined with a keen lust for money. Not at all! This desire is born suddenly - powerful and unjustified in me - for no reason and apropos of nothing... In the street, for example, behind the back of an unknown pedestrian. Yes, there are some backs on the street which cry for the knife. Why?"
Como obra realizada, O Jardim Dos Suplícios (1899) não passa de um requentado à base de Sade (perversões, sexualidade grotesca), Nietzsche ("a civilização é uma farsa!"), anarquismo ("contra tudo o que aí está!") e outros ingredientes.
É um exercício de espanto em reação a um mundo cada vez mais sombriamente mecanizado e infernalmente industrializado, não importa o que os altruístas dissessem sobre uma nova era de positivismo, de avanços da medicina e dos transportes ou algo que o valha.
Nossa existência retratada como um salão de festas do Calígula. Mas é olhar para esse "quarto dos fundos" da Belle Époque e a gente consegue vislumbrar, sob a lente do exagero, a semeadura de misérias - individuais e institucionais, materiais e espirituais - que ao longo dos anos só fez piorar e culminar na Grande Guerra, quando alguns daquela geração encontraram a catarse que há muito esperavam. A pressão que estava no ar, que angustiava, que dava ansiedade, e que finalmente achara sua válvula de escape.
A seguir, trechos do prefácio de uma edição em inglês.
(Tom McCarthy, October 2007)
Novels that produce a physical effect upon their reader, sending jolts outwards from the spine to the remotest nerve-ends, tightening the throat and burning the ears, must number very few; and The Torture Garden must stand near the top of any list of these. Yet not only is it - in its extremity, its viscerality and violence - an uncommon or "exceptional" work of fiction; it also sits neatly in the middle of what, when the dust of time has cleared and the staid realist novels of the early twentieth century have been forgotten, will be seen as a canonical mainline running between the counter-enlightenment visions of Sade and the post-industrial ones of Burroughs and Ballard. Perhaps it will even acquire the status, in the English-speaking world, of a kind of missing link.
- - -
An anonymous narrator tells a story about a group of men sitting around a table - a safe, European one - listening to a story-within-the-story, a tale of far-flung exoticness and transgression that, for all its "otherness", reveals an inner or home truth about the "civilised" society in which the tale is being consumed.
- - -
Rich and sophisticated, the English beauty Clara not only reveals herself, in the delight she takes in showing a male companion round a garden in which tortures of all kinds are practised, to be degenerate, rapacious and utterly corrupted, but also, in so doing, becomes for the primary narrator (her admirer), a "lustral creature through whom I was being revealed to myself as a new man" - that is, a mirror in which both he and, by extension, European civilisation in its entirety are shown in their true light.
At a rhetorical level, the language of The Torture Garden is stunning. A random scan of the text's surface throws up word-clusters such as obscene, vile, throat, screeching, poison, pestilential, rotten, fever, decomposition, stench, fetid, entrails; or, later, dancing, whirling, rushing, burst, distorted, slash, split, mutilated, gaping; or, later still, diabolic, pullulation, swarmed, cadaverous, vermicular, tumour, convulsed, bulging.
- - -
That the narrator's trip to the Far East is presented to the French government and public as a scientific journey is no accident: like philosophy itself, it is a quest for knowledge.
- - -
He finds it, of course, in the Torture Garden, a place that by its very nature is an orgy of entropic materiality. The excrement and blood of the tortured and the organic debris the crowd throws them is turned in retting vats into a fertile compost which is scattered on the plants, making them "vigorous and beautiful" - and the plants, in turn, provide a setting for the torture, generating more blood, excrement and debris: a perfect little eco-system.
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadent_movement
Octave Mirbeau
