[In the following essay on Le jardin dès supplices, Ziegler discusses the theme of the pursuit of non-reflective experience, or experience that is "not contaminated by thought or processed by interpretation." ]

Like an indictment containing a list of counts against an accused, Mirbeau's Le Jardin dès supplices opens with a prosecutorial cataloging of every fault of the "fin-desiecle" era in France. Targeted for criticism is each institution, each activity, which has the effect of stunting the blossoming of art and of thwarting the expression of intellectual energy. Commerce, having degenerated to the level of the corrupt trafficking of Huysmans' hated green grocers, becomes a kind of legal, doubly profitable theft, involving the misappropriation of goods from one party and their resale to another at inflated prices. Education is reduced to being a system which rewards young people for their sententiousness and fatuity, promoting the advancement of...