Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau
Octave Mirbeau.jpg
Born 16 February 1848(1848-02-16)
Trévières, France
Died 16 February 1917 (aged 69)
Paris, France
Occupation Novelist, Playwright
Notable work(s) Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900)

Les affaires sont les affaires (1903)

Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 in Trévières - 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. His work has been translated into thirty languages.

Contents

Biography

Aesthetic and political struggles

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, he campaigned on behalf of the “great gods nearest to his heart”: he sang the praises of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, Félix Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard, and was an early advocate of Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Aristide Maillol, and Maurice Utrillo (cf. Combats esthétiques).

As a literary critic and early member of Académie Goncourt, he 'discovered' Maurice Maeterlinck and Marguerite Audoux and admired Remy de Gourmont, Marcel Schwob, Léon Bloy, Georges Rodenbach, Alfred Jarry, Charles-Louis Philippe, Émile Guillaumin, Valery Larbaud and Léon Werth (cf. his Combats littéraires).

Mirbeau's novels

Autobiographical novels

Georges Jeanniot, Le Calvaire (1901)

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 Vimmer, renamed Juliette Roux in the novel. In 1888, Mirbeau published L'Abbé Jules (Abbé Jules), the first pre-Freudian novel written under the influence of Dostoyevsky to appear in French literature; the text featured two main interesting characters: l’abbé Jules and Father Pamphile. In Sébastien Roch (1890) (English translation : Sébastien Roch, 2000), Mirbeau purged the traumatic effects of his experience as a student during his sojourn among the Jesuits of Vannes. The violence he suffered there probably included rape by priests.

Crisis of the novel

Sébastien Roch, illustrated by H.-G. Ibels, 1906

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), then Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique (1901). In these works, Mirbeau unsettled traditional novelistic conventions, practicing the technique of collage, transgressing the code of verisimilitude and fictional credibility, and defying the hypocritical rules of propriety.

Death of the novel

In his last two novels - La 628-E8 (1907) and Dingo (1913), he strayed ever further from realism, giving free rein to fantasy elements and casting his car and his own dog as heroes. Because of the indeterminacy of their genre affiliation, these last Mirbeau stories show how completely he had broken with the conventions of realist fiction.

Mirbeau's theatre

In the theatre, Mirbeau made his first steps with a proletarian drama and modern tragedy, Les Mauvais bergers (The Bad Shepherds, 1897). Then he experienced world-wide acclaim with Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business 1903) - his classical comedy of manners and characters 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 (Home) 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 charitable one.

Le Foyer

Six small one act plays, published under the title of Farces et moralités (1904), were considered extremely innovative. Among them, L'Épidémie (Epidemics). 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.

Posthumous fame

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, and he was considered as literarily and politically incorrect.

But, 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.

Mirbeau lies buried in Passy Cemetery, in the XVIe arrondissement of Paris.

Works

Novels

Théâtre

Short stories

Art chronicles

Political and social chronicles

Mirbeau-La Greve des Electeurs.png

Correspondence

Quotations

References, further reading

External links