CHAPTER 10

Unrequited Love in The Torture Garden

Octave Mirbeau’s 1899 novel Le Jardin des supplices (The Torture Garden), begins with an evening discussion on the topic of murder, with one character, a philosopher, arguing that the desire for murder is inherent in the human, and that society reflects that by normalizing, even sanctifying that murderous impulse: “Murder raised to the level of duty and popularised to the point of heroism accompanies him at every stage of his existence […] He is made to respect only heroes, disgusting thugs burdened with crimes and red with human blood” (26). I emphasize “respect” to illustrate how this argument underwrites “Archives of Pain” — the outsourcing of mass murder to our political leaders, cleansing ourselves of responsibility.

There is much common ground between The Torture Garden and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, especially the central thesis that Western society has moved away from a model of punitive corporal justice centred upon atrocities on the human body, toward the soft punishment of the carceral state. Where Foucault uses a historical analysis, Mirbeau constructs a gendered and Orientalist fantasy, in which an English woman, Clara, and a Chinese Torture Garden embody and enact a performance of the alleged genuine cruelty at the heart of the human, which Western society has come to disavow.

The second part of the novel constructs a kind of Dantean inferno through which femme fatale and Virgil stand-in Clara leads the hapless and fretting nameless first-person protagonist on a stroll through a sequence of graphic torture tableaux, in which victims are tortured, suffer and die. This journey purports to enact the violent spectacle of the true meaning of life and nature, which decadent Western society has retreated from acknowledging, attempting and failing to cover it up with Enlightenment’s faith in reason and belief that humanity is somehow salvageable and reformable from nature red in tooth and claw.

The passage quoted on the back cover of The Holy Bible is part of one of Clara’s lectures, and occurs when the two lovers are parting ways, for the time being, at the end of a ship journey from Marseilles to Ceylon. The two had met on board, with the protagonist becoming besotted with Clara and her philosophies of cruelty. Their relationship is a sado-masochistic one in which he acts as Clara’s frustrated submissive: he can’t keep up with her insatiable appetite for cruelty, he leaves her and then returns, meekly sidelined, confused and emotionally defeated. Clara’s pleasure comes first, and takes place between herself and the torture scenes she enjoys; the male protagonist tags along, dog-like, and falters, emotionally overwhelmed.

Reading Richey interviews and biographies, there is a strong narrative of his inability to form meaningful romantic relationships with women. When he sees his bandmates shacking up, and tells Gillian Porter he’ll be married within the year, she tells him he doesn’t even have a girlfriend yet. His final interviews cryptically refer to a woman who he is in love with, and one of his final acts is to leave her a box in his room at the Embassy Hotel. The band have respected the privacy of this person, and not much is publically known about her. In any case, one of Richey’s central tragedies is romantic failure. Yet romantic failure is not one of Manic Street Preachers’ central lyrical themes, unlike so many bands in the 1990s, who built their entire lyrical framework around romantic misery and its attendant self-loathings, with an accusatory male ranting against a demonic and unjust female villain who has done him wrong by rejecting or deceiving him (from Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine to Limp Bizkit and Glassjaw, nu-metal and emo solidify this narrative of the poor, woebegone, self-pitying male me, and the evil, heartless, cruel female bitch you).

The Holy Bible does not do this at all. It contains many female figures and voices, itself performing an aesthetic becoming-woman, from the cover art to the female characters of “Yes,” “She Is Suffering” and “4st 7lb,” haunted by the Sutcliffe victim’s relative and the words and lives of Plath and Solanas. Figures of femininity in The Holy Bible are most often emblems of suffering, embodiments of brokenness and pain: the prostitute, the anorexic, the obese woman. The Holy Bible depicts an image of abject, fractured femininity, heightening its critique of patriarchal violence by having its male subject self-abjectify by becoming-woman. Though there is certainly space here for these female characters, in loss and failure and defeat and bodily breakdown, to uphold a perverse sense of victory and self-control, what of Clara’s assuredness and clarity and philosophical conviction? What of femininity as strength, power, assertion, agency, self-control?

Though Clara enacts a philosophical and misogynistic idea of the female as closer to and more honest about nature’s matrix of cruelty than men, her reality is more ambiguous, and her façade of control hides a more complex enslavement to cruelty as pleasure. After taking her pleasure in the Torture Garden, she retreats into a depleted and absent state, collapsing in a paroxysm: “Leave me alone […] Don’t touch me […] don’t say anything to me […] I’m sick” (195). The protagonist believes she is suffering, and at death’s door, but the Chinese maid Ki-Pai scorns this: “Die! Her! You must be joking! It’s not suffering that infects her body. It’s filthiness! [...] She is still with the evil genies” (198–203). The book ends with Clara coming out of her trance, swearing “never again” whilst the protagonist watches over her sleeping, wishing she would never awaken again.

The female protagonist of “She Is Suffering” could certainly be a Clara figure, who sucks Mirbeau’s male narrator into a web of sick pleasure and self-loathing and depletion. In many ways, Clara is a traditional femme fatale, robbing the narrator of his vitality (as is the case in Mirbeau’s earlier novel Le Calvaire, 1886, in which the protagonist Mintié is brought low by scheming courtesan Juliette Roux). He is unable to muster the will to escape her spell. Clara remains unattainable to him: the femme fatale as modern reiteration of the pedestal dwelling lady of courtly love poetry, who the poet admires from afar, debasing himself below. This is a patriarchal fantasy that others and confines femininity as a victorious sexuality that must be managed through strategies of male submission. The Holy Bible sidesteps this well-worn and clichéd tradition by recasting femininity as weakness and suffering, for the most part shorn of any erotic power. Rejecting romance and sex, it steps into an aesthetic of asexual, or desexualized femininity, which is then worn as a proxy by a masculinity in search of depatriarchalization. The Torture Garden ends in paroxysms of despair as the protagonist wishes he had the strength to escape the torture that is unrequited love: Clara cannot return his love because she cannot respect him, because he cannot sever his devotion to the values of civilization that she has left behind. The Holy Bible short-circuits the imprisoning dynamic of the love-couple by desexualizing femininity and identifying with that paradigm. It walks a line between the radical and feminist move of desexualizing femininity in a pop music context, exploring female spaces and consciousnesses with empathy and identification, and appropriating and colonizing these very tropes to mask and re-assemble classic white male self-loathing and fragility.