… life itself, the perfect composition of flesh elevated into a cathedral of fluids and organs, into a little god of misery.
The Torture Garden, Octave Mirbeau (1899)
… This morning, the actual sight of Ceylon filled me with anxiety, and more than anxiety, it filled me with terror. What I glimpsed from afar, beyond waves the colour of forget-me-nots, was not a territory, nor a port, nor the burning curiousity of everything aroused in a man when the veil covering the unknown is finally lifted; it was the brutal reminder of a life of evil, the return to my abandoned instincts, the biting and desolate awakening of everything that was dormant in me during my crossing… and that I believed to be dead!…
*
In China, life is free, happy, complete, unconventional, unprejudiced, lawless – for us, anyway. You’ve no limits to freedom save yourself… Europe and her hypocritical, barbaric civilization is a lie… You’re obliged to feign respect for people and institutions that you find absurd. You remain cravenly attached to moral or social conventions that you scorn and condemn, that you know are baseless. This permanent contradiction between your ideas, your desires and all these dead orders, all the self-serving illusions of our civilization, that is what makes you so sad, troubled, unbalanced… In Canton, I own a palace set amid marvellous gardens where everything is arranged for a life of freedom and love. What are you afraid of? What do you have to lose?…
***
Pornographia, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (2013)
The rentboy walks with a casual air, untroubled by whether I can keep up with him. His contempt incites my desire to catch up to him, to seize him by the arms, to order him to acknowledge me. Without hesitating, I allow myself to be overpowered by my need for this body that denies me with each step, that portends thickness and density and the rotation of muscles and the roiling of blood and the heat and the convulsions of innards and the weeping of glands and the flow of sweat, of saliva, of bile and of ejaculate; life itself, the perfect composition of flesh elevated into a cathedral of fluids and organs, into a little god of misery.
*
I undo a few buttons of my shirt. The stale air and humidity of the city envelop me like a warm tongue. I take a few steps toward the unmoving rentboy and I see through the window, part of a yellow street cut off by a shared wall and the brief flash of a car. Desire moans and throbs in my stomach, fed by the stench of the room, the smell of sordid sex, rotted wood, bruised fruit, stale piss, tropical sweat. I need to wallow in this corruption, revel in it with impunity. I would make of myself a free and devastated man.
***
All passages translated from French by Kawai Shen.
n.b. The Torture Garden is a satirical novel featuring a group of Europeans travelling to China, depicted as a playground of torture, art, opium, and orgies. Once described as “the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century,” it’s the darker, kinkier, Orientalist twin of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (also released in 1899) that similarly explores colonial fantasies soaked in blood, violence and madness. Pornographia, which remains untranslated into English, follows a gay white man as he fucks his way through a city in the tropics in a story that’s light on the plot and heavy with mood. Although it is not set in Asia, its lush and lurid prose, with its sense of abasement and flagrancy, and its sensuous exoticization of colonized landscapes and persons, makes it an inheritor par excellence to a long tradition in European culture of Orientialism and ambivalent solidarities. These translations are juxtaposed here, along with the other texts included in the ULTRAVIOLET issue, to prompt the reader’s consideration of lineages of decadent, experimental, and outsider prose – who gets praised in writing it and who it is so often written about. – K.S.
***
Octave Mirbeau (1850-1917) was a French journalist, writer, art critic, and playwright. All his novels, from Le Jardin des supplices to Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, were merciless satires.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is a French writer and the author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une éducation libertine, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, his fourth novel, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, Prix Femina, Prix Medicis and Prix Wepler. His most recent novel, Le Fils de l’Homme, was published by Gallimard in 2021, won the Prix Fnac and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina. It is being translated into 11 languages.
Kawai Shen, your guest editor, is not a professional translator.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 