My problem with Sade is not *what* he shows but what I take to be his
attitude towards it and his reasons for showing it. Bloody horror in
literature is not for me troublesome in itself. The pretence that bloody
horror is part of a natural order we should "embrace" is perhaps more
troublesome. Its purpose is to exculpate.
Genet is an interesting comparison. I don't think he believes in Nature all
that much, although I could be wrong (haven't read all that much - one
novel, and I forget the name of that). Given the equation sex=death, I'd
want to ask: death for whom? "I come, obliterating myself" is harmlessly
onanistic, although notably indifferent to the presence or absence of any
other person; "I fulful you sexually by murdering you" is another matter.
And the way it usually scans is in fact: *female* sexuality=death (hazarded
by the male, whose triumph is to emerge unscathed; undergone by the female,
whose erotic destiny it is to be done in by some great saturnine hunk -
suicide a pre-emptive strike, guilty like masturbation, a denial of the
murderer she is supposed to desire).
Nobody living has any business "celebrating" the eroticism of Nazism,
though. Exposing it, yes. Desecrating it, ideally (desecration requires
exposure: I am not asking that anything remain hidden, which can always
mean: cherished in secret). I don't know - I simply couldn't say - whether
Genet desecrates the eroticism of Nazism or consecrates it (except that it's
pretty obvious that the actual Nazis would have taken Auden's spoof advice
in _The Orators_: "It is wiser to shoot at once"). I do think that Sade does
the latter: tant pis pour les victimes, but Eros rules...
Simone Weil talks somewhere about the need to punish Hitler by revising our
conception of greatness - she says that we concur with Hitler in finding
Hitler to have been a "great" man, albeit an evil one, and that our
assessments of his moral worth do nothing to deprive him of the triumph of
being so considered. The answer is to revise our conception of "greatness",
so that it can no longer mean Hitler: to make his idea of "greatness" seem
pathetic and despicable.
I am all for this kind of desecration. I've argued that it's what G. Hill's
up to in Mercian Hymns, where he confuses the great Offa with a vain,
bullying, solipsistic, neurasthenic schoolboy (himself, or some strange
likeness thereof: how's that for exposure?). His portrait of Peguy subjects
the "great prophetic intelligence" to all manner of Bergsonian pratfalls...
(Did I mention that Hill's new volume has one poem for each of the 120 days
of Sodom?)
The link, which appears to have been slightly garbled, was to an account of
Aleister Crowley, a seriously overrated tosser who flattered the sex
liberationists of the sixties that they were on to something cosmic. Same
old crock.
- Dom
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