THE READING RHEUM: TORTURE GARDEN (1899)

For horror fans. the name "Torture Garden" calls to mind a 1967 film-anthology that adapted a bunch of unrelated Robert Bloch terror-tales. Even in 1967 I doubt many readers remembered the 1899 fin-de-siecle novel by French writer Octave Mirbeau. Thus I've no clue as to why any of the film's producers thought the title worth conjuring with for contemporary filmgoers, in contrast, say, to titles borrowed by Edgar Allan Poe. For my part, I'd read a few remarks about this 19th-century book in Mario Praz's study of transgressive literature, THE ROMANTIC AGONY. Yet I didn't really expect much of a story, so I didn't get round to reading GARDEN until now, though I'd had a second-hand copy lying around for over ten years.

My intuition was correct: Mirbeau's work is a nearly plotless meditation on the human fascination with diverse kinds of torture, structured much like a travelogue. There's not much question in my mind that Mirbeau was grappling with issues raised by the Grand Master of Literary Sadism, the Marquise de Sade, though Mirbeau's ambivalence to the topic makes unclear as to how much he was of Sade's party. The novel might be considered the last of the European decadent movement of the 19th century, and the fact that Europeans were still emulating Sade might be deemed a compliment of sorts, given that most of Sade's major works had been completed (if not always published) before the end of the previous century.

Sade's works are so fervid in their description of torture that they verge on falling into the domain of naturalistic horror, and even possibly even the uncanny variety at times. GARDEN, however, is too meandering to sustain a mood of horror, and despite some description of inventive tortures, Mirbeau's work is too reality-based to rise to an uncanny level of artifice.

So what's it about? After a framing-device in which several men debate morality in a French men's club, one man, whom I'll call NoName because he refuses to give one, tells the story that fills the rest of the novel, without ever coming back to the frame-story. He briefly describes himself as a young layabout who imposes on a friend and gets a sinecure to study biology in Ceylon, though he's not at all a biologist, and is really just scamming the system. 

There are assorted comments about torture before NoName tells his story, usually in the context of people talking about using extreme measures to enforce colonial dictates. Mirbeau *may * be satirizing French colonialism in these segments, or he may be simply contrasting these functional uses of torture with Sade's uncompromising fascination with the subject-- though to be sure Sade is never mentioned. However, while taking a ship to Ceylon, NoName hooks up with Clara, a wealthy young European woman. Implicitly NoName becomes her gigolo, and he abandons his plans, following Clara to her home in an unnamed city in China prior to the Boxer Rebellion.

Clara is in essence Mirbeau's take on Sade's Juliette: a wealthy woman who is unregenerately fascinated with suffering and torture. In the city closest to Clara's estate, the Chinese authorities maintain a palisade known as "the Torture Garden," wherein criminals are subjected to harsh punitive torments even though they're surrounded by meticulously managed flower-gardens, replete with peacocks. While NoName merely flirts with transgression, Clara is orgasmically obsessed with the pain of others, celebrating the Chinese for their inventiveness in this art. "No other race," says Clara late in the novel, "knows how to tame and domesticate nature with such painstaking skill." The parallel between culling both flowers and rebellious citizens will probably strike contemporary readers as a pretty backhanded compliment to the Chinese. But one might note that Mirbeau speaks only through the voice of Europeans: there are almost no Chinese characters who get any dialogue to articulate their beliefs or obsessions. I tend to think that NoName is an unserious dilettante, who merely flirts with transgressive topics yet still has vestiges of conscience. Clara-- whose total fascination with human suffering remains undiminished by the novel's end-- stands comparison with those Sade characters who manage to liberate themselves from all conscience-considerations. Since the author does seem at times to be satirizing the deeds of European colonizers, maybe there was a part of Mirbeau that envied a Sade-like being who could look upon horror without any pangs of remorse or empathy.

Just as the tortures are too realistic to stand as uncanny crimes, Clara is never bizarre enough to stand alongside the many "fatal women" who, according to Mario Praz, throng the pages of European prose and poetry during this period. The one advantage GARDEN has over most of Sade's works is that, precisely because Mirbeau may have been ambivalent on the torture-topic, he doesn't become as obsessed as Sade with chronicling acts of cruelty until they become profoundly boring. That said, TORTURE GARDEN, while it has the virtue of brevity, is still just a mediocre fiction-travelogue with a few mildly memorable passages. Despite its subject matter, it belongs neither to the genre of horror or to any category of metaphenomenal fiction. 

POSSE COMIC-TATUS

1. A child living is in esse, but before birth is only in posse.-- from Your Dictionary's definition of *in esse.*

I should qualify one aspect of my recent screed against the ideological critics who so often cry "fascist" against superheroes, "crime comics," or whatever they find ideologically suspect. Though I think that Frye's "wall of play" usually throws a veil of unreality over popular fiction's usages of violence, there may be cases where the ideological critic's tendency to "cry fascist" may luck onto the real thing.

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

Now, given that I myself unleashed the *in posse, in esse* distinction in this essay, I wondered whether or not this logic could apply in any degree to the argument of the ideological critics cited in WORKING VACATIONS.  Naturally, Adorno, Wertham and the rest don't admit of any exceptions in their characterizations of the American pop-hero. Superman, Sherlock Holmes and Donald Duck (that one's from Adorno) are fascist power-fantasies *in posse,* and they never had the option of being anything else.

I prefer the reverse formula. Batman always employs violence and occasionally utilizes torture, but as long as that "wall of play" is there, he's only a fascist *in esse.* Frank Miller's twist on the theme, in which Batman quite obviously enjoys inflicting pain ("The scream alone is worth it"), plays a darker form of the pulp-hero game as articulated by Bill Finger and his contemporaries, but there is, in my opinion, still a sense of freewheeling fantasy in the mix.

Given the philosophy I've expressed here, is it possible for Batman to be a fascist *in posse*?" I would say yes, though the only story known to me that comes close to being an overt jeremiad is Andrew Vacchs' heavy-handed BATMAN; THE ULTIMATE EVIL, in which the Caped One goes on a crusade against child pornography-- but even this doesn't seem quite as much of an advertisement for the benefits of a police state as the aforementioned 24 and HAWAII 5-O.

My conclusion, then, is that *in posse* fascism is a possibility within popular fiction, but in contrast to the insistence of the ideological critics, it's a rare phenomenon, and occurs only when the creator of the character forgets that he's playing a literary game, and enters the mental state of someone who's using fiction as a means to promote particular means and ends.

TORTURED, PROSAICALLY

In two of my 2009 posts, here and here, I stated that I didn't become quite as hinky as some comics-readers upon seeing heroic characters practice "inquisitorial torture," i.e., physical or mental torture in order to force a given individual to relinquish information. While I did not in any way condone real-world torture, or express any belief in its real-world effectiveness, I did note that it was often used as a simple narrative device with nearly no moral resonance.

In stories where [inquisitorial torture] is used as a minor narrative device that has all the drama and suspense of driving one's car over a road-bump, it's morally neutral. The formula "hero needs info so he roughs up a hood to get it" has no more symbolic significance than "hero needs to get somewhere fast so he steals a horse/car/spaceship to get there."

I did not, however, state that the act never had moral overtones. I gave as one example the work of hardboiled mystery-writer Mickey Spillane.  In Spillane's novels it's clear that the hero's ability to haul ass on his victims possesses strong ideological content, given that the author uses the excuse of anti-Communism to unleash his hero's brutality.

Because I grew up in a time when scenes of inquisitorial torture were rare in the comics, it's possible that I have a predilection to see such scenes as having a purely narrative (and hence non-ideological) function. In other words, a scene with Captain America beating up the Red Skull to make him talk is not necessarily emblematic of the fascism in American culture. I can think of comparable scenes that *might* imply a real ideological stance as such, as when Mike Hammer hauls ass on Dirty Commies in KISS ME DEADLY, but not every such scene carries ideological weight. All cats may look grey when one dwells in the darkness of ideological thinking, but the light discloses quite a bit more variegation.

In the shadow of the 9/11 catastrophe, television gave us 24, an eight-season wonder described by Wikipedia as "the longest-running espionage-themed television drama ever."  Though in its first season 24 avoided endorsement of inquisitorial torture, it was soon retooled to reflect what some have called the "Bushco" ideological mindset.  Scenes of torture, in which Jack Bauer or his aides successfully wrung vital information from America's enemies, became more than simple "speed bumps," as I claimed that they were in, say, Batman stories.  But even aside from its bad ideological content, I disliked the 24 series because the torture-scenes became one of the main selling-points of the teleseries.  I once complained about the tone of the series on Some Forum, and the usual yapping jackals claimed that I was contradicting myself, given that I had defended violence in its non-ideological manifestations.

In the last couple of months, I happened across not one but two instances of "inquisitorial torture" which weren't even directed at "America's enemies" but still managed to exude the odor of bad ideology with regard to the rights of the accused.  I'll look up titles and airdates of the episodes involved should anyone inquire, but for right now, I'll confine myself to brief summaries.

In a two-part episode of ABC'S CASTLE, the light-hearted title detective walks on the rough side of life a la the Liam Neeson film TAKEN.  Castle's daughter is kidnapped and whisked away to Europe by dastardly types.  The police find a skeevy fellow implicated in the abduction, a man who has sustained some injury (I forget the specifics).  The cops won't torture him for info, but they leave the anguished father alone in a room with the perp.  In moments, implicitly because Castle has tortured the man's injury, the perp gives up the information.

More recently, a rough simulacrum of the CASTLE scene appeared on the CBS cop-drama HAWAII 5-O.  To be sure, scenes of inquisitorial "leaning" appear consistently in this series, with cops invariably managing to force confessions or info from their captives, with seldom any scenes of  a lawyer's involvement.  The episode in question, though, resembles CASTLE in that the stakes deal with a little girl being abducted by ransomers.  Toward the end the cops get hold of a perp who's unquestionably involved in the caper, who refuses to give up the girl's location because he thinks he has "leverage."  One cop, the one played by James Caan' son, punches the crook, who then claims that cops can't do that.  The other main cop (the two are barely distinguishable, being alike right down to their "badboy stubble") asks Caan to give him his badge and leaves the room while Caan punches the info out of the crook.

Now, what's interesting here is that in both of these cases, the cops flagrantly abuse the laws they supposedly protect, based on the exigency of a life in danger.  This is a familiar trope, whose best-known exemplar remains the scene in 1971's DIRTY HARRY, where the hero tortures a criminal in order to make him reveal the location of a kidnap victim. 

However, the greatest difference between HARRY and the two television versions is that in HARRY, there is blowback as a result of the hero's actions: the villain is exculpated because the evidence of his crime becomes "tainted."  Whether one views the movie's script as a subtle manipulation of moral attitudes or a condemnation of societal molly-coddling, clearly its writer was aware that the action of torture had consequences.

In contrast, these two recent shows, more in less in the vein of 24, show no consequence to the action of torture.  However, with 24, lack of blowback was probable, given the hero's governmental connections.  But with more mundane crime-shows, why wouldn't the perps who suffered inquisitorial torture make noise about it?  I don't know if their cases would get "tainted" as quickly as the one in DIRTY HARRY, but surely the crooks would attempt to milk their abuse for all that it was worth.  The one in CASTLE might be hard to prove, but the other assault leaves the crook with fist-prints all over him. 

One probably shouldn't expect two lightweight TV programs to display any cognizance of real-world legality.  And of course, a lot of cop shows prior to this were known for some level of inquisitorial torture, though probably not as overt as the one in the FIVE-0 episode.  It suggests that the Bush ideology is alive and well, that the police may now arrogate to themselves the level of discretionary power usually attributed to a Jack Bauer, and that any criminals they choose to target will just become lost in the system a la the accused at Guantanamo.

EVERYONE EXPECTS THE SUPERHERO INQUISITION

Over at the Sean T. Collins blog (whose sesquipedalian name I refuse to type out) he began an essay on superhero torture by saying:

"I suppose there's a degree to which we must give superheroes beating criminals for information a pass just by the nature of the genre, the same way we give their vigilantism a pass but probably wouldn't approve of anyone in real life kidnapping a criminal, pounding the shit out of them, and hanging them unconscious from a lamppost outside One Police Plaza. But I think that a good writer, on some level or other, owns up to the ickiness of this behavior."

And after referencing Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and some current JLA story I've not read, Collins ended:


"At any rate, isn't torture what bad guys do?"


My reply is appropriately Batmanesque: "Yes and no."


A more articulate reply will probably take more than one essay, so right now I'll confine myself to (a) defining what is meant by "torture" in this instance, and (b) defining how I see it functioning in a narrative context.

First, let's take torture. In an earlier essay I made a distinction between two forms of violence that I felt had been conflated by early comics-critics Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thusly:


"...I have to anticipate how these two deceased intellectuals might have found fault with my assertion that the paradigm of the adventure-genre (hero fights villain with both having the ability to defend themselves) does not match the paradigm of classical sadism (victimizer tortures victim, who has no ability to defend him/herself)."

Though both men repeatedly attacked the comics-medium as a breeding-ground for sadism, most of their examples of comic-book violence were drawn from stories featuring violent combat, rather than tales focusing on some helpless victim being tormented, though *here's* an example of an exception, from THE THING #9 (1953):






















However, by itself the picture doesn't tell readers why the hoods are tormenting the girl: whether they're doing it simply for the pleasure of cruelty (which would put the scene in Sade's territory) or (more likely) in order to gain information.




Since torture for cruelty's sake is performed for different reasons than torture for information's sake, it seems logical to specify that the kind of torture Sean Collins references is the latter type, which I'll term "inquisitional torture." To the best of my recollection, Legman and Wertham never referenced scenes of heroes wreaking torture on villains, as Collins does above, though probably they could have found such scenes without much effort if they'd looked.



Inquisitorial torture had certainly been around in fiction for a long time prior to the birth of Superman. It's likely it reached its most prevalent (and cliched) form in various offshoots of the crime genre, where it gave us such gems of dialogue as, "Let me beat it out of him, captain!" And though the superhero genre was a fairly distant offshoot from the dominantly realistic crime-genre, Superman's first printed adventure does end on a note of inquisitorial torture, as the Man of Tomorrow sweeps up a criminal conspirator and dangles him from a high building in order to force the malefactor to tell all.

It goes without saying that none of Superman's juvenile readers (and maybe not all his adult ones) would have worried about any consequences stemming from the hero's literally high-handed machinations. Certainly none of those readers thought Superman a "bad guy" for forcing info from a criminal, because narrative omniscience allowed both the hero and his readers to know absolutely that the man was a criminal and so deserved rough treatment. The same would probably hold true for any stories in which Batman or Captain America slapped or punched a crook around to make him disclose needed info. To my knowledge that's as far as most Golden or Silver Age heroes ever went, and usually the crooks gave in so quickly that the heroes weren't forced to indulge in prolonged clobberings, in contrast to your basic Fiendish Orientals, who implicitly enjoyed torturing for pure cruelty's sake.


So it seems demonstrable that this basic, "muss-'em-up" level of inquisitorial torture wasn't viewed as "bad" by the reading-audience. In fact, I'd say that it was approached in such a cavalier fashion that it was little more than a rote storytelling device, whose purpose had more to do with building narrative tension than wallowing in the violence as such. Though superheroes were always omniscient as far as discerning bad guys from honest citizens, said heroes weren't quite omniscient enough to know where all of the evildoers hung their hats, and so "unfriendly persuasion" was necessary.




Now I will admit that as I grew up in the 1960s, I don't believe I saw a lot of inquistional torture by heroes, even of the "muss-'em-up" variety, in the mainstream comics of my time. Thanks to the postwar anti-comics crusade in which Wertham participated, most 60s comics were fairly restrained, even formalized, in regard to how much violence they showed. I feel sure that there must have been instances of "roughing up," utilized as I said for the purpose of building narrative tension, but all I can think of is the schtick in SPIDER-MAN #10 where the hero terrifies a thug into talking through the clever use of a phony spider-monster. As newsstand comics-sales declined in the 1970s, however, the major companies would slowly start pushing a harder brand of violence in the hope of reaching older audiences.


Because I grew up in a time when scenes of inquisitorial torture were rare in the comics, it's possible that I have a predilection to see such scenes as having a purely narrative (and hence non-ideological) function. In other words, a scene with Captain America beating up the Red Skull to make him talk is not necessarily emblematic of the fascism in American culture. I can think of comparable scenes that *might* imply a real ideological stance as such, as when Mike Hammer hauls ass on Dirty Commies in KISS ME DEADLY, but not every such scene carries ideological weight. All cats may look grey when one dwells in the darkness of ideological thinking, but the light discloses quite a bit more variegation.


I'll also admit that scenes of inquisitorial torture never had much significance to me. Since they show one character managing to overcome the will of another, they certainly provide some sort of dynamizing thrill to the audience, whether used in superhero yarns or crime stories. But they certainly weren't as thrilling as the fight-scenes, where the hero could theoretically lose (and at least might have to get help from some ally to win out). Such inquisitions were far more of a foregone conclusion: the hero would slap the villain around a bit and the villain would give in. Such scenes were too drably functional to incite any great moral concern, which is more or less what Collins is talking about when he talks about the possibility of giving such scenes "a pass;" i.e., recognizing them as essentially escapist and so not responsive to the concerns of realism.

And yet, Collins *does* question whether or not some scenes of more extreme nature don't require that their authors 'fess up to "the ickiness of the behavior." Certainly one of his main examples, Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, is one of the pivotal works that made the scene of inquisitorial torture a focus rather than a simple narrative function, and so in my next essay I'll talk more about the moral ramifications of the superhero inquisition.