Octave Mirbeau

From Free net encyclopedia

Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 - February 16, 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde.

Contents

[edit]

BIOGRAPHY

After his debut in journalism in the service of the Bonapartists, and his debut in literature when he worked as a ghostwriter, Mirbeau began to publish under his own name. Thereafter, he wrote in order to express his own ethical principles and aesthetic values. A supporter of the anarchist cause and fervent supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, Mirbeau embodied the intellectual who involved himself in civic issues.

Independent of all parties, Mirbeau believed that one’s primary duty was to remain lucid. As an art critic, Mirbeau campaigned on behalf of the “great gods nearest to his heart”: he sang the praises of Rodin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Félix Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard, and was an early advocate of Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Aristide Maillol, and Maurice Utrillo.

After authoring ten ghostwritten novels, he made his own literary debut with Le Calvaire (Calvary, 1886), in which writing allowed him to overcome the traumatic effects of his devastating liaison with the ill-reputed Judith, renamed Juliette in the novel. In 1888, Mirbeau published L’Abbé Jules, the first pre-Freudian novel written under the influence of Dostoyevsky to appear in French literature; a text featuring two main characters: l’abbé Jules and Father Pamphile. In Sébastien Roch (1890), Mirbeau purged the traumatic effects of his experience as a student during his sojourn among the Jesuits of Vannes. The violence done to him there included rape by priests.

Mirbeau then underwent a grave existential and literary crisis, yet during this time, he still published in serial form a pre-existentialist novel about the artist’s fate, Dans le ciel (In the Sky), introducing the figure of a painter directly modeled on Van Gogh. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair - which exacerbated Mirbeau’s pessimism - he published two novels judged to be scandalous by self-styled paragons of virtue: Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden 1899) and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), 1900).

In these works, Mirbeau unsettled traditional novelistic conventions, practising the technique of collage, transgressing the code of verisimilitude and fictional credibility, and defying the hypocritical rules of propriety. In his last two novels - La 628-E8 (1907) and Dingo (novel) (1913), he strayed ever further from realism, giving free rein to fantasy elements and casting his car and his own dog as heroes.

In the theatre, Mirbeau experienced world-wide acclaim with Les Affaires sont les affaires (Business is business 1903) - his classical comedy of manners and character in the tradition of Molière. Here Mirbeau featured the character of Isidore Lechat, predecessor of the modern master of business intrigue, a product of the new world, a figure who makes money from everything and spreads his tentacles out over the world.

In 1908 - at the end of a long legal and media battle - Mirbeau saw his play Le Foyer performed by the Comédie-Française. In this work, he broached a new taboo subject, the economic and sexual exploitation of adolescents in a home that pretended to be a chairitable one.

Published under the title of Farces et moralités (1904) were six small, one-act plays that were themselves considered extremely innovative. Here Mirbeau can be seen as anticipating the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco. He calls language itself into question, demystifying law, ridiculing the discourse of politicians, and making fun of the language of love.

Mirbeau has never been forgotten, and there has been no interruption in the publication of his works. Yet his immense literary production has largely been known through only three works. More recently, Mirbeau has been rediscovered and presented in a new light. A fuller appreciation of the role he played in the political, literary, and artistic world of la Belle Epoque is emerging.

[edit]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[edit]

Novels

  • Le Calvaire (1886).
  • L'Abbé Jules (1888).
  • Sébastien Roch (1890).
  • Dans le ciel (1892-1893).
  • Le Jardin des supplices (1899).
  • le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900).
  • Les Vingt et un jours d'un neurasthénique (1901).
  • La 628-E8 (1907).
  • Dingo (1913).
  • Œuvre romanesque, 3 volumes, Buchet/Chastel – Société Octave Mirbeau, 2000-2001, 4 000 pages. Website of Éditions du Boucher, 2003-2004.
[edit]

Théâtre

  • Les Mauvais bergers (1897).
  • Les affaires sont les affaires (1903).
  • Farces et moralités (1904).
  • Le Foyer (1908).
  • Dialogues tristes, Eurédit, 2005.
[edit]

Shorts stories

  • Dans l'Antichambre (Histoire d'une Minute) (1905).
  • Contes cruels, 2 volumes (1990 et 2000).
[edit]

Art chronicles

  • Combats esthétiques, 2 volumes (1993).
[edit]

Political chronicles

  • Combats politiques (1990)
  • L'Affaire Dreyfus (1991)
  • L'Amour de la femme vénale (1994)
[edit]

Correspondance

  • Lettres à Alfred Bansard des Bois (1989)
  • Correspondance avec Rodin (1988), avec Monet (1990), avec Pissarro (1990), avec Jean Grave (1994).
  • Correspondance générale, 2 volumes already published (2003-2005).
[edit]

STUDIES

  • Reginald Carr, Anarchism in France - The Case Octave Mirbeau, Manchester, 1977.
  • Pierre Michel and J.-F Nivet, Octave Mirbeau, l'imprécateur au coeur fidèle, Séguier, 1990, 1020 pages.
  • Pierre Michel, Les Combats d'Octave Mirbeau, Besançon, 1995.
  • Christopher Lloyd, Mirbeau's fictions, Durham, 1996.
  • Samuel Lair, Mirbeau et le mythe de la nature, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004, 361 pages.
  • Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau et le roman, Société Octave Mirbeau, 2005, 276 pages (http://membres.lycos.fr/octavemirbeau/darticles/PM-Mirbeau%20et%20le%20roman.pdf)
  • Pierre Michel, Bibliographie d'Octave Mirbeau, Société Octave Mirbeau, 2006, 412 pages (http://home.tele2.fr/michelmirbeau/Michel%20-%20Bibliographie%20d%27OM.pdf)
  • Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, n° 1 to n° 13, 1994-2006, 4 600 pages.
[edit]

LINKS

  • Website of Société Octave Mirbeau at [[1]] and [[2]]
  • Website of Éditions du Boucher - [3]
  • Website of University Library, Angers - [4]
  • Pierre Michel’s website - [5]
  • Mirbeau'page on anarchist website : [[6]]
[edit]

QUOTATIONS

  • “Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”
  • “Dead trees enclosed the bodies of men and women, violently distorted and subjected to hideous and shameful tortures.”
  • “Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.”
  • “Every intellectual effort is bent towards committing the most diversified violations upon the human being.”
  • “Honesty is negative and sterile; it is ignorant of the correct evaluation of appetite and ambition – the only powers through which you can found anything durable.”
  • “I feel something like a powerful oppression, like an immense fatigue after marching across fever-laden jungles, or by the shores of deadly lakes…And I am flooded by discouragement, so that it seems I shall never be able to escape from myself again.”
  • “I had, at that moment, another soul – an almost divine soul, a creative and sacrificial soul.”
  • “It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of upper-class existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.”
  • “It isn’t dying that’s sad. It’s living when you’re not happy.”
  • “Murder is born in love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.”
  • “Nature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.”
  • “Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child’s scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.”
  • “The greatest danger of bombs is the explosion of stupidity they provoke.”
  • “There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.”
  • “There is something more mysteriously attractive than beauty: it is corruption.”
  • “The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.”
  • “The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the great majority of us…Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why... why?”
  • “To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.”
  • “When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.”
  • “You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
[edit]

External links

es:Octave Mirbeau it:Octave Mirbeau hu:Octave Mirbeau pl:Octave Mirbeau pt:Octave Mirbeau sv:Octave Mirbeau de:Octave Mirbeau

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Octave_Mirbeau"