>That is, do we concur with the authorities that the
>rapes really didn't matter all that much, that the important thing is the
>spectacular naughtiness of the man's language? Is a loathing of rapists and
>of literary celebrations of rape merely a matter of bourgeois literary
>taste?
Dom, it's a long time since I've read about Sade, or indeed read him: and
so my remarks may well be fogged by inaccurate memory (I don't have time
to read back). But the man was jailed for one rape, committed in the
pathetic process of attempting to have an orgy, and the woman objected to
being whipped (it is not my intention to condone this, but simply to
point it out). The books, written in prison, are fantasies. He was
imprisoned by the ancien regime and freed by the revolutionaries and put
to work as a judge, and was in fact sacked because he wouldn't sentence
anyone to death. Doesn't that argue a complexity in itself, a fault line
between the writing and the man? Equating him with the unspeakable
brutalities (and brutal consciousness) of Fred West is not accurate,
extremely wrong I think, and raises to me the disturbing image of
literature in chains, of imagination chained by dead literalism: of the
inability, in writing or reading, of play (I don't mean anything
frivolous by the word "play"; it's a profound human gift). Do we then
condemn Rabelais or Voltaire for their literary cruelties? Doesn't
Justine, for instance, say something about human innocence which,
perhaps, might be worth thinking about? And doesn't the whole corpus
raise, for a reader, difficult questions about the nature of freedom?
I don't disagree with some of your reservations, nor do I pretend that
Sade or any other of the more extreme writers have not been dangerous in
psychotic hands, even if I question that they would be the decisive
factor. The important thing about Sade is not his "spectacular
naughtiness". I refer you to Simone de Beauvoir's book on him, which
makes a good argument for the defence.
Sade would have been, I guarantee it, repudiated by Hitler as a decadent
writer. He is a troubling extreme in literature, and continues to be
troubling: and so he should be. He writes about disturbing extremes of
human possibility, however you look at it; but for me the strongest
reaction to the endless permutations in his books is _boredom_, ennui
(the philosophy in between is more interesting); and surely he makes a
frightening dystopic critique of the ancien regime itself?
Do we just pretend that those extremes do not exist in human beings, or
if they do, that writing must not investigate them? I simply do not
accept the Andrea Dworkin line that we must burn Sade. If we burn Sade,
do we then get rid of the Fred Wests? I think not, emphatically not.
And if we do burn Sade, where do we stop? Anyone who investigates in
writing something uncomfortable about human beings? Any writing which
frightens us?
Best
Alison
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