> Dom, could you expand on what you said about not
> recognising fantasy as something apart from reality?

Sure. Reality is full of fantasies, and some of them got legs. "The Aryan
Race" is a fantasy construction, as is "England", as is "femininity". We are
plagued by the things. Their purpose is to make the world look more coherent
than it actually is, and to provide a rationale for scapegoating
"castrating" agents such as Jews, foreigners, feminists etc. for undermining
this illusion of coherence. De Sade consistently complains that religious
morality has sundered us from our own "nature", and frustrated or perverted
the true course of "the will". Sadeian perversion is thus restorative in
intent: it's meant to reunite us with the spontaneous inner primacy of our
"true selves". The keynote here, surprisingly, is thus not radical
innovation but infantile regression: a nostalgia for a lost "animal"
integrity, the integrity of the libertine committed to pleasure (which
always goes uninterrogated, as a kind of pure and original good in itself).
I think this goes some way towards explaining Sade's dullness, actually,
although I don't always find him dull (I can appreciate the prose style
myself): in the end, he really believes that only one thing matters. A
prototype of what Sheila Jeffreys calls "orgasm politics".

Sade is not simply a producer of literary fictions, which just float around
inanely in some separate literary sphere: he's an ideologist, a scriptor of
fantasies, a forger of icons. Also, of course, an iconoclast: he threatens
the fantasies of those who like to imagine that human existence can attain
to a sort of perfect moral coherence and integrity, with all dissonant
elements purged and cleansed. But it's a bait-and-switch operation: you
think you're getting a healthy dose of iconoclasm, when in fact what you end
up with is a fascist iconography.

Also, de Sade was a multiple rapist - he raped many more women than he was
prosecuted for - and a torturer, and a prostituter, and these things do
matter and are not peccadilloes however much they may have seemed so from
the perspective of the aristocracy that practised them routinely and as a
matter of right. They don't matter any less because he did them to
prostituted women, or poor women, or women who in any case were not
aristocrats and not wealthy and powerful and not liberated and above all not
men, women who had the misfortune to be born in a century in which, face it,
women mostly did not matter very much. They are not petty crimes but real
crimes, as real as if they had been committed against you or me.

> I
> think I might have got it wrong but it sounds like "if
> you can think it, you can do it".

Thinking is already a kind of doing, a deed amongst others. Now thinking of
closing the door and getting up and closing it are not the same deed; but
they are both deeds. The thinking doesn't happen in a different world. It
isn't innocent or unworldly. People talk about fantasy as if it could be
innocent of politics, innocent of violence; as if one's "fantasy life" were
not part of one's life tout court but a sort of spontaneous psychic quirk
unrelated to anything else. This is the kind of talk I find nonsensical.

 That may be true of
> de Sade; it isn't of all of us (I hope). And Jimmy
> Carter said lusting after a woman in your heart was
> the same as committing adultery.

Actually it was the other J.C. who said it first; although what he is
actually reported to have said is that whoever looks at a woman with lustful
intentions has already committed adultery in his heart. Blake would have
agreed, I think...

> But I'm fairly sure
> Mrs Carter, and still more Mrs Clinton, would disagree
> and would say there was a difference between a man who
> indulged his every whim and one who sought some kind
> of substitute relief, in fantasy or whatever.

The whim is presumably the same in either case. And there are whims and
whims. What is one to think of a husband whose whim is to commit adultery,
even if he is good enough to relieve that whim through some substitute
(quite a lot of men seem to have believed that prostituted women don't
count, for instance)? I'm not sure that my own sexual daydreams are for me a
way of committing adultery without committing adultery - that it is adultery
per se that they substitute for, or even that they are a substitute for
anything at all. But if it were adultery per se that I wanted, if that were
the desire I was seeking to satisfy through "fantasy or whatever", then I
imagine my partner might have some cause to feel upset about it. It's a
little like the way I'd expect my Asian neighbours to feel about someone who
liked playing video games in which the aim was to gun down as many Asian
characters as possible, with the reward for a successful killing spree being
an animated rape sequence at the end of every level: relieved that this
person sought a relatively harmless form of catharsis for his racist/rapist
animus, or horrified that the animus existed in the first place? At the very
least, I think it would be a bit rich to expect to be congratulated for
one's restraint in only venting one's fury on a bunch of pixels, or one's
courage in "exploring" one's "dark side" in so "honest" a fashion...

> It's
> when you consider a better writer who still has an
> unhealthy fascination with violence, and stimulates it
> in the reader, that it gets difficult. I don't see how
> one can hide from the fact that one reason Dostoevsky
> describes long agonising catalogues of cruelty is
> because he gets a buzz out of it; it isn't the only
> motive but it is there. I read a story like "Akulka's
> Husband" knowing that fascination is in me too, and it
> tells me things about both him and me that I don't
> want to know, but I wouldn't be without it.

I haven't read Dostoevsky - yet - and so I don't know whether or not he is
aware as a writer of that "buzz", and whether or not he is able to make some
kind of moral sense of it. Does he celebrate it, or offer it up for one's
naive enjoyment, or does he make one aware of it in order to make one
suspicious of it?

If the "dark side" really is a "dark side", and if it is really there, then
one should know about it by all means but also seek ways to defeat it or
tame it or circumvent it. If it's something you can just learn to live with,
then it isn't really all that "dark", is it?

We are certainly complex, murky, problematic beings full of passions and
motives that we don't find it comfortable to hear about; but we are not
faced with a choice between avowing and affirming those passions and motives
and simply pretending that they do not exist. De Sade's is not the only kind
of speech that might speak of them, and answering back to de Sade does not
mean silencing all "honest" speech.

- Dom



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