Sade

Phillips John

Description

'A fine addition to Sadean studies.’ Gaëtan Brulotte, Professor of French, University of South Florida



This is a lively and accessible introduction to the Marquis de Sade's four most notorious novels: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Justine and Juliette. Informed by a wide range of contemporary theories, John Phillips’s controversial study challenges conventional perspectives on the notorious 'pornographer' and suggests new ways of reading his most shocking narratives. Setting all four novels in their historical and biographical context, Phillips provides a comprehensive and highly readable analysis of works that have exercised an enormous influence on literature, art and cinema in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



Clearly written and accessible to the general reader, this study provides an indispensable guide to the creative achievements of the libertine’s libertine.
Foreword



1. Introduction



2. In the Cathedral of Libertinage: Les 120 journées de Sodome



3. ...and the Word was made Flesh: La Philosophie dans le boudoir



4. Virtuous Virgins and Lustful Libertines: Justine and the Misfortunes of Beauty



5. Femmes Fatales and Phallic Women: L’Histoire de Juliette



6. Sade and Transcendence



Notes



Bibliography



Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781849645270
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Sade The Libertine Novels

John Phillips

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © John Phillips 2001

The right of John Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Applied for

ISBN 0 7453 1504 6 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1598 4 paperback

10 10

09 9

08 8

07 7

0605 6

04 5

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Gawcott Typesetting Services Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England

To my good friend, Gaëtan Brulotte, in gratitude for his inspiration and support over the last decade.

Contents

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

Introduction

In the Cathedral of Libertinage: Les 120 Journées de Sodome

… and the Word was Made Flesh: La Philosophie dans le boudoir

Virtuous Virgins and Lustful Libertines: Justineand the Misfortunes of Beauty

Femmes Fatales and Phallic Women: l’Histoire de Juliette

Sade and Transcendence

Afterword

Notes Bibliography Index

1

32

62

87

116

147

166

169 191 198

Preface

In preparing this book, I have used the most accessible editions of Sade’s works in both French and English. These editions are listed in the first section of the bibliography, and all page references given immediately after quotations in the text are therefore to these French and English editions. Of the six primary texts which form the subject of the book, onlyLa nouvelle Justineis currently unavail- able in English, so translations from this text are my own, as are all unacknowledged translations of the secondary literature. The reader is advised that I have sometimes found it necessary to follow the practice of a number of other Sade critics, notably Angela Carter and Lucienne Frappier- Mazur, in using so-called ‘obscene’ language descriptively or denotatively. In so doing, I have not consciously set out to shock or to transgress the norms of academic language, but to avoid inaccurate, clumsy and even coy-sounding euphemisms and circumlocutions. I should like to thank Arrow Books and Grove Weidenfeld who were kind enough to provide on request free copies of editions of the novels in English. Among the publishers that I approached, only Oxford University Press, who publish the most recent translation ofLes Infortunes de la vertu, refused me this modest facility. My thanks also to all who have encouraged me to write this book and have helped smooth the path to publication, in particular the Research Committee of the Humanities Faculty at the University of North London for giving me the six-month sabbatical which enabled me to complete it more or less on time; Gaëtan Brulotte, David Coward and Peter Cryle for supporting the project at its early stages; my commissioning editor at Pluto Press, Anne Beech, for her invaluable suggestions and unflagging enthusiasm; and all

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Sade

those friends and colleagues too numerous to mention here, who have in their various ways influenced my thinking about Sade over the last decade.

John Phillips London February 2001

1

Introduction

This book has two main aims: firstly, and most importantly, to introduce the Marquis de Sade’s most controversial works of fiction to a new generation of readers, especially in the English-speaking world; secondly, to attempt to recuperate these works from the margins of eighteenth-century litera- ture, to which they have for too long been relegated by censoring discourses, ranging from the puritanical to the politically correct. Sade was the author of a large number of novels (many of which are perfectly respectable), of plays (all conventional in style and content), journals, letters and a few essays, but those writings upon which the Marquis’s sulphurous repu- tation rests, and which have been of particular interest to critics as much as the general reader are the four ‘libertine’ novels composed over a twelve-year period from 1785 to 1797, known asLes 120 Journées de Sodome,Justine,La 1 Philosophie dans le boudoirandJuliette. There has certainly been much critical interest since the 1960s, most of this coming from French intellectuals, whose promotion of Sade has had some impact on American universities but very little on universities in the UK or elsewhere in the English- speaking world. Consequently, while a handful of advanced studies have appeared – mostly in the United States – in recent years since Sade’s writings have been legally available to the public in unexpurgated editions, there has not been an introductory guide in English which could provide acces- 2 sible readings of his four libertine novels. This critical gap is no doubt explainable in terms of a reluctance on the part of many university teachers to expose their younger charges to Sade’s work, so that, while some graduate literature and humanities programmes are beginning to require a reading of Sade as a philosopher if not as a novelist, his appearance on undergraduate courses is still rare.

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Sade

This absence of Sade at less advanced levels of study is of course reflected in the literary manuals and histories that accompany them: if these primers mention Sade at all, it is usually in dismissive tones. This book therefore represents an attempt to make the study of Sade accessible to a wider circle of English speakers, including the student of literature at any level as well as the more general reader, by providing individual introductory analyses of the four gospels of Sadean libertinage, and situating each work in its historical, political and philosophical context, as well as in the author’s own personal trajectory. After focusing on each of the novels individually in the following four chapters, I devote a final chapter to my overarching theme. Ranging over all four novels, Chapter 6 explores the hypothesis that the Sadean project is essentially that of a quest for an impos- sible object, formulated unconsciously as a transcendence not of the soul but of the body. Notwithstanding my general thesis, this book was conceived essentially as an introductory study, rather than an ideologically driven polemic defending Sade against the various charges that have been levelled against him in the 3 past. I have therefore not set out to address in any depth or detail the vexed question of the ‘pornographic effect’ (in other words, does the representation in writing of sexual crimes lead to their enactment in the real?). Although my reader will find references to the question, especially in Chapters 2 and 5 where it is raised by the text itself, the complexities of the issues surrounding it, coupled with the lack of conclusive scientific evidence relating to it, place it well outside the scope of an introductory study. The question, when it does arise, is left open and readers are implicitly invited to form their own conclusions. At a time of creeping intellectual conservatism in the West, induced by economic as well as cultural imperatives, the contemporary reader of Sade will be directly confronted with issues of sexual violence, paedophilia, sado- masochism, fetishism and perversion that politically correct discourses tend to repress or address only in sanitised form. This reader will certainly be horrified by the violence of Sade’s text and, above all, by its objectification of human beings, by images of the darker side of our nature that we

Introduction

3

would prefer not to acknowledge: the inhumanity of man (or woman) to man (or woman), the utter selfishness of lust, the tyranny of an ego that is unfettered by laws or lacks the humane influences of socialisation. The horrific rapes and burnings of Kosovo or the primitive and unfeeling treat- ment of orphans and handicapped children in Romania after Ceaucescu bear a stark testimony to the existence of this darker side. Confronting it in the fictions of Sade may just help us to some kind of understanding of a potential for cruelty that his libertines tell us we all possess. The reader will also perhaps be surprised that the same fictions challenge norms of age, gender and sexuality, presenting women as sexually autonomous and under- mining modern culture’s binary distinctions between young and old, male and female, hetero- and homosexuality. Certainly many have found and will continue to find his libertine works abhorrent, but nowadays most will wish to confront, not censor, him. Yet, censorship can take far more subtle forms than outright banning: as we have already seen, the exclusion of a writer from courses of study or literary histories or the shelves of public libraries can be just as effective in keeping him out of the public domain. While writing this book, I was struck by the number of young people of my acquaintance – all intelligent and well- informed individuals – who had never heard of the Marquis de Sade. Before turning in this introductory chapter to his literary and philosophical ideas and finally reviewing the critical background, I shall therefore summarise the known facts of his existence. Who or what, then, was the ‘divine Marquis’?

Biographical Details

There are as many Sades as there are biographies of him, in that every biographer is ideologically motivated to present a particular version of his life, thought and attitudes. Given that the sources of information are almost entirely confined to letters written by Sade himself from prison or by others who took up positions on his behaviour, any attempt to write about the Marquis de Sade’s life runs an exceptional risk of fictionalising further that which has already been