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Chapter Three Change Chapter Three Change Self-acknowledged palinodist, enemy of all political or aesthetic positions that risked fossilization or verged on sclerosis, Octave Mirbeau practiced art as an expression of self-liberating inconsistency – a form of anarchism of the kind he professed over the course of his career. Each novel Mirbeau wrote contained the germ of its super- session. Each novel was the locus of its decomposition and re- generation. For Mirbeau, the text was a machine “effecting its destruction as an object in order to generate the energy needed to conceive a newer model of itself.”1 Similarly, Rachilde’s oeuvre embodies the contradictoriness of gender politics, disclosing the latent misogynist inside the champion of strong women. Her female avenger’s hollow victories explain Rachilde’s later declaration Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe. In the realm of art as ideology, Decadence describes the diver- gence of the line and asymptote as authors use their writing as a means of transformation and renewal. For Mirbeau and Rachilde, the text is not the usual Decadent looking glass, in which an exalted subject gazes transfixed at a loveable reflection. If a literary work is a weapon in the war against oppression, it is also a principle of hygiene effecting salutary changes in the authors, ridding them of hateful impulses involving race and gender. In all of Mirbeau’s polemical writings on politics and art, he embraces a philoneism that legitimizes change. Mirbeau condemns the criminal bloodshed caused by Ravachol, the terrorist, but also acknowledges the detergent benefits of his violence: “C’est le coup de foudre auquel succède la joie du soleil.”2 Mirbeau’s endorsement of 1 Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 13. 2 Octave Mirbeau, L’Endehors, May 1, 1892, Collection Pierre Michel. 108 Asymptote Impressionism, his enthusiasm for Rodin are as expressive of his an- tipathy for cultural institutions as they are indicative of his personal artistic predilections. Critic of colonialism, advocate for the indigent, Mirbeau espoused positions that invariably set him at odds with the status quo: “C’est l’histoire même de sa biographie,” as Christian Heslon writes: “rompre sans interrompre, […] se rebeller pour renouveler et non pour fonder à nouveau.”3 Beyond agitating for a state of permanent cultural upheaval, Mirbeau’s writings also showcased his struggle to make changes in himself. Rompre sans interrompre: Mirbeau’s fiction shows greater ideological continuity than often is suggested by his controversialist proclivities. An image better suited to the change at work in Mirbeau’s fiction is not the lightning storm but the hidden process of gestational development. Mirbeau’s novels make apparent that there is only a gradual evolution from the vehement anti-Republicanism evident in his Grimaces to the tolerance and utopianism toward which his later writings turn. Eléonore Reverzy focuses on the image of the fumier or manure pile as a metaphor for Mirbeau’s literature as slow and unclean transformation. With its filth and pestilential smell, the compost heap is an evocative figure, suggesting that healthy change results from unappetizing processes. The fumier combines the work of corruption and purification, as organic matter rots in order to fertilize the flower. The manure pile implies the homology of cleanliness and dirt, the scatological and sublime, base matter and the literature ennobling it. Since, as Reverzy remarks, “l’ordure est précisément ‘l’antidote de l’ordure,’ […], elle constitue […] un parfait oxymore.”4 It is as the site of the apparent convergence of the asymptote and curve – a display of anti-social themes in the fiction that expels them – that Mirbeau’s fiction is cleansed of its sordid motivations. The traditional isomorphism of Decadent authors and their characters is operative in Mirbeau only as he works out his old prejudices. Offal in the torture garden, the manure of misogyny and racism breaks down, releasing heat and miasmic vapors in Mirbeau’s novels. But Mirbeau’s 3 Christian Heslon, “Octave Mirbeau, un enfant rebelle dans les révolutions esthétiques,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 9 (2002), p. 174. 4 Eléonore Reverzy, “Mirbeau et le roman: de l’importance du fumier. De Dans le ciel (1891) aux 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901),” Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), p. 104. .
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