What Octave Mirabeau Said About Ceylon!
By Laksiri Fernando -November 5, 2012
Dr Laksiri Fernando
Octave Mirbeau’s “The Torture Garden” is undoubtedly a classic novel, but a controversial one. Different people appreciate it for different reasons. Sadistic beauty or cruelty, literary brilliance, poetic humour, powerful critique against politicians and bureaucracy are some. He was also sarcastic about scientists and intellectuals. It was once described as “the most sickening work of art in the nineteenth century.”
I recently reviewed it for Torture: Asian and Global Perspectives, a publication by the Asian Human Rights Commission. The reason was that the novel, irrespective of being a fiction, powerfully depicts the horrors of torture, practiced both in the West and the East (particularly China), and some of the events and methods narrated are based on ‘some history.’ For example, the story relates the brutal beheading of our ‘child hero’ Madduma Bandara in 1814 by the last King of Kandy, Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe, but attributes it to the British by mistake or by purpose.
But that is not the only reason why the novel could be of some interest to the Sri Lankan readers. There are so many other interesting references to Ceylon, not necessarily complimentary though, and amusingly, there are similarities between the politics of today and politics in France of that time where the story actually begins. To understand the nature or nuances, the context of the novel needs to be understood.
The novel was first published in 1899 during the scandalous Dreyfus Affair, where an Army Captain was framed for ‘conviction of treason’ whereas the real culprit was another. Anyone can find references to this incident easily. This ‘affair’ is sarcastically criticised in the novel and one may even find some similarity to the ‘Fonseka trials’ in Sri Lanka recently.
Titled Le Jardin des Supplices, novel was translated from the French to English by Alvah Bessie in 1929. There are several editions to the book, but the present review is based on the Bookkake (London) publication in 2008, now available online as Google book with an excellent introduction by Tom McCarthy.
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