This, I promise, is my last comment on this subject.

>The point of such comparisons is that they are vicious and entirely just.
>The hero-worship of gangsters and thugs is an attestable cultural
>phenomenon, and de Sade has benefitted from it enormously. One doesn't have
>to think him irredeemably diabolical in order to find this kind of
>sucking-up revolting.

Cheap shots.

I am finding some of the terms of this discussion unbelievably
depressing: reminding me too much of the Herald Sun (a tabloid with few
qualms about practising sensationalism, for those without Melbourne
knowledge).  Why are Sade's literary crimes only read as actual crimes?
Sade was never accused of murder, or even manslaughter, unlike a few
other, less controversial, writers I can think of.  And for those who
haven't read him, it might be worth having a close look at his work.  And
I mean, a _close_ look: it's no use getting a soundbite grab and then
gasping in the requisite shock.   You have to read long enough to
understand the grinding, soul-destroying tedium of what he is writing:
and then perhaps you might understand the irony of thinking that Sade is
a simple, naive advocate of what he describes (and how could he describe
it, if he were really in that torrent of appalling desire?)  One must
never forget Sade's _powerlessness_.  (How do you know Sade's attitude to
his texts?  His letters, for example, are somewhat more ambiguous...)

Mon Dieu!  Do readers just swallow literature whole, without taking their
places as active interlocutors?  I'm not saying that it is compulsory to
like Sade - it's hard to do - but do I think anyone who cares about
literature at all has to think very hard before throwing his work on the
bonfire.  Quite apart from what might be drawn from his political
critique:  Sade is monstrous, but it is a monstrosity which lies at the
heart of all writing, whether we like it or not: and the excess he
demonstrates is only the most extreme and unpalatable version of a
quality we all have to come to terms with.  I'm sorry, but it is.  If you
think long enough about any of the great poems of, say, Emily Dickinson,
you find there a world of terrifying singularity, a tormenting solitude.
It's a quality that I find terrifying also in the paintings of van Gogh.
If you look at the bones of Lear, where all good is utterly extinguished
- even Kent goes on a "long journey" (to kill himself), leaving Albany to
utter his despairing little quatrain at the end in lieu of hope - you
have a glimpse of a universe that is as destabilising, as vicious, as
sexually depraved, as hopeless as Sade's.  It is not, I grant, so
monomaniacal, but Sade is ascetic in the extreme, which is perhaps his
one virtue.  And do you really think Emily Bronte sufficiently
"disapproved" of Heathcliff? (I'm not so certain, in view of the passion
Cathy Earnshaw preserved for him). I don't think the worlds of any of
these artists are as easily divorced from the universe of Sade as one
might hope.

And there's the rub.  And this is why I act as "apologist" for a writer
whom I do not place among my favourites, but who, nevertheless, I cannot
erase without, I feel, somehow betraying literature itself.  (Forgive the
soapbox).   If I followed the argument demonstrated here, I would have to
scotch most of my favourite writers.  I'm not at all certain, Dom, that
Geoffrey Hill would survive the subsequent inquisition. Or maybe I'm too
logical.

I'm afraid Genet does celebrate Nazism.  He leaves it to the reader to
work out their responses to his celebration, which seems to me the
writerly thing to do.  Reading his books can be an experience of moral
vertigo, at least I find them so: and I would say Genet is a moralist,
though I wouldn't go so far as Sartre and canonise him.

I begin to understand why there were riots at the Comedie Francaise...

Best

Alison










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