Could you start by telling me who the Marquis de Sade was?
the marquis de sade was an aristocrat from a Provencal family, born in 1740. born into a very old family, and of which he was very proud, noble. he could date his aristocracy to the twelfth century and that was very important to him. he grew up in a royal household during the first years of his life. he got kicked out of that royal house when he was five years old for beating up a prince he was supposed to be the playmate of; that was the first sign that something was wrong. and then he was sent to the south of france to live with his uncle, who was also an interesting character, for a few years.
You are reading: Marquis de sade books
sade was educated in paris at a jesuit college and a military academy, then had a fairly short career as an officer. and he became known quite early in that military career for his exploits off the field in brothels.
and the rest? well, if you look at sade’s biographies, they’re mostly over a thousand pages long because it was such an extraordinary life. a ridiculous life a series of imprisonments, escapes, encounters with prostitutes, an affair with her sister-in-law, revolutionary politics, an encounter with Napoleon, and an insane asylum. there is one time when he escapes from a carriage that takes him to prison and jumps across the country. when he returns to his castle, he writes a letter to his lawyer telling her that this sounds like something out of a novel, and it really is.
“a series of imprisonments, escapes, encounters with prostitutes, an affair with his sister-in-law, revolutionary politics, an encounter with Napoleon and an insane asylum”
Even when he is in prison, his life is no less interesting. it is when he is in prison that he becomes a writer. and he writes plays like 120 days of sodom when he’s in the bastille. then, eleven days before the taking of the bastille, he moves, so he witnesses extraordinary events and also post-revolutionary events.
And all these prison terms did not affect the fact that he was president of a revolutionary district?
its aristocracy was a problem in the post-revolutionary period; it was one that persecuted him but which he repeatedly denied. the fact that he was imprisoned in the bastille saved him, in a way, because he made him a victim of the old regime, and a de facto enemy of the old regime became a friend of the new. it was that attitude that protected him for a while, though not for long and he soon got into trouble with robespierre and narrowly escaped the guillotine.
but it is true that sade was a victim of the old regime in the sense that he was imprisoned without trial. he was in prison simply because his mother-in-law wanted him to be.
And that was through the infamous ‘lettre de cachet’?
That’s right. a lettre de cachet was essentially a letter signed by the king authorizing someone’s indefinite imprisonment. it was often used to protect aristocrats (and their families) rather than punish them. it was a way of avoiding a public scandal. There were a couple of occasions when Sade was imprisoned by the king’s authority rather than the judiciary, and at least initially, that protected his family from further embarrassment.
We have mentioned the revolutionary period. i wonder how important you think it is for a writer like sade to place him in his environment. I’m thinking of both the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
In some way, it’s obviously important to place him within his own historical context because intellectually he’s a child of his time. he was a voracious reader; He read philosophers like La Mettrie and D’Holbach, and the works of great Enlightenment figures like Rousseau and Voltaire. It’s also important to have a strong sense of his social roots: his identity as an aristocrat and how that changes in the revolution.
my problem with sad critics is that there is a danger of doing that too much. there’s a question about what you do with your own ethics as a reader when you come across sade and his fiction because one way, and this is what critics of sade did throughout the 20th century, is basically apologize for him and defend him by saying that he was not much worse than the other nobles of his time and that times were different then. that’s kind of an apology to sade answer that i’m having trouble with. It is crucial that we, as readers of the 21st century, do not leave our ethics at the door when we read sadade, that we do not lose our identity and sense of our own time and place.
“there is a question about what do you do with your own ethics as a reader when you meet sade”
That said, it’s important to understand the context in which sade was writing, even if that doesn’t make it any easier to read. knowing that he is an aristocrat, for example, is important but also complicates things. so, in the revolutionary period, it is difficult to know how he identifies himself. he is, on the one hand, the chief of the piques section, so he is a revolutionary. and, ironically, he ends up getting in trouble for being too moderate in his revolutionary zeal.
Didn’t you have a strong moral objection to the death penalty and that’s why you resigned your presidency there?
one could cynically argue that this was selfish because he didn’t want to be executed. Sade was executed in effigy years earlier when he got into trouble in Marseille when an orgy with some prostitutes went wrong.
He had an aversion to state violence, an aversion to any kind of external authority imposed on him. and that is partly through an aristocratic sense of his own right. a theme he returns to quite a bit in his fiction is the futility of punishment; he often suggests that it makes more sense to forgive someone than to punish him for something he couldn’t help but do in the first place.
“a theme that he returns to a lot in his fiction is the futility of punishment”
He writes a really interesting story called “ernestine” about two young lovers and the jealous villain, oxtiern, who destroys them. It ends tragically with the lovers dying horribly, and Oxtiern being punished and sent to an extraordinary underground prison. or rather that should be the end of the story: you punish the guilty and then stop. But Sade’s story continues a bit longer, ending with Oxtiern’s release and an exemplary life. there is a kind of refusal to accept punishment as the correct response.
You mentioned this tendency in 20th century scholarship to point to La Sade’s counterparts. I wonder how important you think it is to at least acknowledge that the libertine novel already existed and that its writings are not sui generis in that sense.
yes, that’s true. it is striking that the only book he never talks about is the dangerous friendships of laclos, which is the great libertine novel, not because he has not read it, but because i think he wishes he had written it. and he mentions many other works of libertine fiction, in his juliette, for example. he is very immersed in that type of writing and that way of thinking. There are two sides to debauchery: there is the erotic aspect but also the intellectual aspect.
the only novel that sade alludes to in very positive terms is thérèse philosophe, which, in a way, is sade before sade. You have the same combination of sex scenes and long philosophical discussions (about nature, virtue, religion, etc.) that you find in Sade’s works: dissertation and orgy, theory and praxis. sade is writing absolutely within a libertine tradition, even if he is pushing it to the limit and beyond.
when giving a summary of his biography, he noted that he attended a jesuit school, louis-le-grand, and also saw military action. Personally, I’m curious to what extent he thinks his experiences in a religious school and also in the military affected his attitudes towards things like profanity and violence.
It’s hard to tell. inevitably, because of the man he became and the things he wrote, there is a kind of urge to psychoanalyze and search for answers in his childhood. we know virtually nothing about what happened in louis-le-grand. there would have been corporal punishment, so it has been speculated that this may be the origin of his interest in flogging. but that’s a pretty crude way of looking at it.
The trauma he does talk about is the trauma of the guillotine. from his window in picpus prison during the terror he could see his victims being buried in the garden. he said that it hurt him more than anything else he had experienced. But that doesn’t explain the violence of the fiction he wrote before the revolution: The 120 Days of Sodom was written in 1785, and it doesn’t get more extreme than that.
in terms of enlightenment, sade is an interesting figure because he is one of those, like william blake, who lives in the age of enlightenment but has an ideological reaction against it.
Its place in relation to illustration has been much discussed. in a way, you can see sadness as the logical extension of enlightened materialism; it is an incredibly dark and nihilistic vision. he says in justine that “selfishness is the first law of nature” and describes the world as a jungle. it’s darwin before darwin, and this is survival of the fittest, both in terms of gender and class. He talks a lot about social contracts, and the breaking of these; there is a strong sense in which man cannot and should not change because that would be to deny his true nature.
was heavily influenced by mettrie and there is that same sense in which man is a machine and essentially fixed in his tastes. No one ever convincingly changes in de sade’s fiction, and that’s quite striking. there is no evolution, there is no real psychological development, each one is as it is.
“no one convincingly changes in de sade’s fiction and that’s quite striking. there is no evolution, there is no real psychological development, everyone is as they are”
He is staunchly atheist and materialistic, but somehow a residual religiosity persists about his worldview. it just reverses it. At the end of Justine, lightning kills the virtuous heroine, a divine yet malevolent act of violence. it feels like a dark universe in which the devil is in charge, even though it is apparently an atheist novel. and there is something interesting about an atheist taking such pleasure in blasphemy. Another way he has been connected to the Enlightenment is this line drawn by Adorno and Horkheimer, not necessarily totally persuasively but influentially, in the dialectic of Enlightenment. they see a connection between sade and the concentration camps.
if you think about the ways de sade’s libertines police, control and discipline the daily existence of their prisoners, and the way absolute freedom can lead to a different kind of domination, then you can see how it can be traced a line drawn between some of the scenes you get in juliette and in the 120 days to the concentration camps of world war two. in fact, several writers after the second world war, when the truth about the camps came to light, make this connection with sade. In the 120 days, the prisoners’ names are removed, their names are changed, and their identity is removed. they are also color coded. So, there’s a sense in which the dehumanization you get in sade acts as a sort of precursor to the camps.
just before looking at the books, often with very famous writers you have a word derived from their name (kafkaesque, orwellian, etc) and of course “sadism” comes from sade. Is the way the term is used today appropriate, given your lineage?
‘sadism’ was first coined as a literary term but later adopted, towards the end of the 19th century, by sexologists. it becomes a clinical term, in the same way that “masochism” does. Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) devotes an entire section to “sadism” as a perversion. Sade at least had the benefit of being dead, while Masoch was still alive when he became a perversion, which he didn’t love. So ‘sadism’ enters the language and becomes a scientific term, but only in a broad sense because there is nothing very scientific about sexual science in the late 19th century. and sexologists didn’t know much about sadness other than certain episodes that had become something akin to fiction. for example, the orgy that sade had with four prostitutes in marseille was transformed into a story in an orgy where all the women of the town were possessed by a “uterine frenzy”.
It is on the basis of this type of material that sexologists ended up writing about Sade. Kraft-Ebing speaks of Sade as someone who liked to flog prostitutes and then pour wax on their wounds to heal them, but that is based on one particular incident, the Rose Keller affair, and is anything but reliable in his interpretation. . That said, “sadism” has survived because it’s a useful term.
“there is something interesting about an atheist taking so much pleasure in blasphemy”
you get more in de sade’s fiction than in sadism: jean paulhan suggested long ago that sade’s secret was not sadism but masochism. there may be a kind of masochistic identification with the characters of sadism as well as sadistic. but these terms are inescapable. i am very aware of the fact that when i teach sade the only thing my students will already know about sade is the term ‘sadism’ and i don’t think it is necessarily a bad starting point because it comes at the end. heart of sade’s fiction, dealing with the relationship between pleasure and pain.
and it’s good for undermining my students’ confidence in the idea that authors of literature are good people with good intentions. worrying, rightly or wrongly, that the author is a sadist is helpful in some ways because it means they have a little less confidence in how they interpret their texts.
your first choice is the marquis de sade’s own 120 days of sodom. sets the pitch as follows:
“The time has come, dear reader, for you to prepare your heart and mind for the most impure tale ever written…”
written while in prison, what is sade trying to achieve with this book? Are they the sexually frustrated fantasies of someone trying to distract themselves? Or do you have genuine authorial intentions?
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That’s a very good question. the 120 days is essentially unreadable in every possible way. unreadable in the sense that it is difficult to read, unreadable in the sense that it is annoying to read, and unreadable in the sense that it is difficult to decode. it’s easy to forget about authors when they’re well behaved. but when you’re dealing with an author you don’t quite trust, you become much more aware of him as a figure. and when fiction is extreme, as it is in sadistic fiction, then we do think more about intentions.
“It’s easy to forget about authors when they’re being nice. but when you’re dealing with an author you don’t quite trust, you become much more aware of him as a figure”
To further complicate matters, I suspect those intentions may have changed during the writing of the 120 days. the status of the manuscript is relevant here. the introduction and the first part are more or less finished. if you read the end of the intro and the first part, yes, it’s shocking and there’s nasty stuff in there, but one can imagine that it will get published. the rhetoric is quite polished, the style is quite formal, and it feels like a piece of realized fiction. from then on it gets more and more extreme and more and more unpublishable, certainly by 1785, so it’s hard to say what he’s trying to achieve.
I can see why you would ask if it’s just some kind of exorcism or fantasy of a prisoner living in an incredibly confined space. another way of asking that question is: who was the intended reader of that text? and it may well have been sad. there’s an allusion, towards the end of the first part, where he suggests that he was envisioning a four-part publication and says, if the reader is still interested, I’ll publish the rest. he may have latched onto the idea of it being a publishable text at that stage. but then he must have abandoned the idea of publication and at that point the text became something else, perhaps a test for himself to see how far he could go. he draws a lot of attention that he writes it in a very short space of time, he writes it in thirty-seven days. our translation took much longer than that! there’s just this outpouring of escalating violence.
is a really strange text. on one level, you can see it as a collection of stories. if it had been fully realized, it would have been thousands of pages long. it is a kind of decameron in its conception, with the classic configuration of a narrative framework. it is very important to recognize that it is a work born from his imprisonment and this informs the type of spaces that we have in the novel. he is writing in a prison cell in the bastille and the novel’s fantasies revolve around enclosed, underground spaces. and recounts the plight of the prisoners. and this raises the question: does he identify with the libertines or with the prisoners? and you are right in saying that it is a work of fantasy. It is not a realistic novel. so who knows? Did it have any therapeutic value for him? possibly. he was mentally ill at the time he wrote it, and there is evidently an obsessive quality to cataloging perversions.
Going back to this point about it not being a realist novel: is that something we see in the broader sade canon as well, this extension of the imaginable? I’m thinking, for example, of a description of gernande in justine that talks about him drinking twelve bottles of wine and staying sober.
yes, there is a grotesque exaggeration. One of the challenges for modern readers of Sade is that they are used to novels. we have a sensibility informed by 19th century fiction where you have characters drawn with psychological depth, characters you identify with, whose fortunes you follow and so on. Sade’s fiction is earlier than modern. it has less to do with the characters than with the types. you get these amplified figures, these exaggerated figures, like gernande the vampire or the giant minski in juliette, and they all represent a particular quality or vice.
justine and juliette are the same in that regard. Justine is a poster child for virtue, and to modern readers she feels like a character to empathize with, particularly when all these horrible things happen to her. but our empathy is probably not what an eighteenth-century reader would have had. So, in a sense, our fiction-reading habits are not what Sade would have anticipated.
can you briefly summarize the plot and structure of the 120 days of sodom?
The plot is simple and terrifying. there are four libertines who each represent the four pillars of French society. you have a duke, a bishop, a financier and a judge. the novel describes the four months they spend in a castle one of them owns in the black forest, locked up with harems of teenage boys and girls, some old hags, some well-hung fouteurs or fuckers, and a few other servants. they also bring along four experienced prostitutes who are there to act as storytellers.
Over the period of one hundred and twenty days, the four libertines listen to various “passions” and then act them out. there is an escalation of violence, and during the hundred and twenty days, the passions become more and more extreme and most of the prisoners are murdered. It’s basically like the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron, the classic place for people to cut themselves off from the outside world and listen to stories. the difference with sade is that they interpret what they hear.
do you think it’s significant that this happens in the black forest instead of, say, france?
the castle moves, strangely. start in switzerland and then change the location to germany. there is a fairytale aspect to the location: the forest has always been a richly significant space in the narrative. it is the space in which the rules of the everyday world are suspended and where extraordinary things happen. what sade emphasizes in the introduction is the feeling of isolation from the outside world.
It’s not just that they’re in a forest, but they’re in a castle surrounded by a plain that is surrounded by mountains within that forest. it is a place of absolute isolation from the outside world. there is the strange kind of paradox that arises with the sadness that by locking themselves in they can be free. and creates these isolation spaces in all his novels.
In terms of the affective impact of this job, is it supposed to wake up? is that supposed to suck? is it a sinister blurring of these emotional categories? Is it horror or is it erotic?
One of the things that defines pornography is the intention to arouse the reader or viewer, but it’s not entirely clear if this is the case here. it might have been intended to wake up its author, who was also its reader, its only reader for a long period of time. it is complicated by the fact that what seems to be the driving force in the 120 days is that he is not interested in bland passions. he is not interested in ordinary sexual desires. takes perversions as its theme, what we might call paraphilia these days.
The narrator says in the first part, I am introducing you to six hundred dishes. You will not like all of them, but there will be one that you will like. and if that’s the case, he’s got you: you lose any moral authority if he finds the one you like. but the truth is that many if not most readers will find no such passion. Even the staunchest defenders of Sade have lamented the obsession with coprophagia and coprophilia. that material will have a niche audience, but it’s certainly not designed to have broad appeal.
I think that what drives the cataloging of perversions is not so much the desire to arouse as the desire to transgress and fantasize about transgression on a grand scale. It may sound strange, but sexologists presented the 120 days as a scientific work, indicating the shaky ground sexology was on in the early 20th century. but you can almost see why, because there is some kind of attempt at systematization. Passions fall into four different categories within which these almost endless variations exist. the set largely adopts the structure of a catalogue, so it reads like an early version of psychopathy sexualis (admittedly not a flattering comparison for the latter).
“there is some trepidation about publishing something that remains, arguably, the most extreme work of fiction ever written”
So sexologists promoted the idea that it was a scientific work and no one questioned it, because no one but a few hundred readers had access to the text (it was initially published in a very limited and expensive private edition). The myth of the 120 days as a scientific work endured into the 1950s and even the 1960s, and Sade was spoken of as a forerunner of Krafft-Ebing and even of Freud. it seems ridiculous now: a lot of the passions are just twisted ways of killing people, with no sexual element at all. some of the passions are horrible, shocking and disturbing, but others are just surreal and weird. it’s not a uniform text and in that sense you can’t really have a uniform answer. but in general I do not think that it is a text driven by the desire to wake up the reader. it may be to surprise the reader, which goes back to the question of him, or at least there is a desire to broaden the reader’s horizons. whoever that reader is…
You mentioned it briefly already, but can you tell me about the history of the manuscript and why it’s interesting?
sade wrote it in the bastille of 1785 on pieces of paper that he pasted into a scroll, which he then hid in a cylinder. although she only wrote an incomplete draft, she never returned to it at any time for the next four years. he had a chance to finish it, but never did. then events overtook him. just before the bastille is taken, he is transferred to another prison in the middle of the night, he says, naked, and he is not allowed to take all of his business with him. he begs his wife to look for her belongings, but the day she leaves is the day he takes his bastille. it’s hard to separate fact from fiction here, but that parchment disappeared between his departure and july 14th or during the storming of the bastille. . either way, it was stolen and sold to another Provençal aristocrat.
It remained in the hands of his family for the rest of the 19th century. so, for a couple of generations, it was a well-kept secret. Later, a German collector acquired it and a sexologist named Iwan Bloch first published it in 1904, but in an edition riddled with errors. Nearly thirty years later, Sade’s descendants purchased the scroll, and Maurice Heine completed a proper transcription and published an edition in the 1930s. He was the last publisher to see the scroll in its entirety, and the only one to publish the novel uncorrected. . all the French editions since the edition of him have corrected all the little errors and tidied up the punctuation. so the fact that it is a draft, not a complete novel, has been eroded by those later editions. therefore, in our translation, we try to go back to the “draft” of it. we kept the errors and tried to stay as close as possible to the original syntax.
The sade family kept the scroll until the 1980s, and then a bookseller friend of theirs offered to appraise it. He smuggled it across the Swiss border and sold it to a collector named Nordmann. essentially, legal disputes ensued for the next three decades. In 2014, the bicentennial of Sade’s death, a private foundation bought the scroll for €7 million, brought it to Paris, and put it on display. but the director of this foundation is now being investigated for fraud due to the dubious ways in which he raised funds, and the foundation has been closed.
The scroll is now under lock and key and is likely to be sold as an asset. The circle has really come full circle. he started his life in prison and now he’s back there. i suspect, i hope, that what will happen next is that the french national library will buy it and make sure it never leaves france again.
your next pick is sade’s “eugénie de franval”. what is this story about?
this is sade’s version of pygmalion, really. and, being sad, it’s a pretty twisted version of pygmalion. is the story of franval, a libertine who marries a beautiful young woman but her interest is not really in her, but in the child he wants to have with her. so the Pygmalion myth of a man who falls in love with his own creation is represented in this text as an incestuous father-daughter relationship. Franval raises his daughter in isolation from her mother and the outside world, and creates his own curriculum for her education, a bit like Rousseau in Emile.
sade perversely presents franval as progressive; for example, she refuses to allow her daughter to wear restrictive corsets, etc. but there’s obviously a less than progressive reason why she prefers her in baggy clothes…
As Eugenia grows older, she falls in love with her father and the story becomes a battle between the Christian values represented by Eugenia’s mother and the libertine values represented by the incestuous lovers. Eugénie tells her father: “I was not afraid to challenge the customs that, since they vary from one country to another, cannot be considered sacred.”
Is the Marquis de Sade a moral relativist? Or is it better to think of him as an amoralist?
sade is keen to point out that different cultures have different values, and therefore there are no absolute values. there are different debates in that story. The priest, Clervil, serves as a mouthpiece for Christian morality, and Franval often uses moral relativism to reject Catholic doctrine. but I think you are right: deep down there is a kind of amoralism. there is a sense in which eugénie is free because she stays away from all these moral prejudices.
There is this contradiction in the text in which she is presented as a character completely free from any religious or moral contamination. at the same time, from a different perspective, she is obviously the product of a very controlled and manipulated environment in which her father has been the dominant and abusive figure.
how convinced are you of the presentation of franval as apparently going back on his ways?
I don’t think anyone convincingly becomes sade. whenever a character converts it is always for reasons of respectability. Sade published “Eugénie de Franval” in a collection called Crimes of Love and did so under her own name. he was now trying to become a respectable man of letters, so he evidently needed his villain to back down at the end. And the circumstances in which he does it are quite strange: Franval gets caught in a storm and suddenly realizes the error of his ways. and his conversion is pretty creepy too: the text talks about him desecrating the corpse of his wife.
Compared to the libertine defense or valorization of excess found elsewhere, how does the tone of this work compare?
this is sad to be respectable. What is striking in the edition that you will have read —in David Coward’s excellent translation— is that there are two scenes that were sadly cut from his edition. There is a scene in which Eugénie tries to seduce the priest, and there is another extraordinary scene in which Eugénie is literally put on a pedestal and offered as a spectacle to Franval’s best friend, Valmont, the classic name for a libertine. politely put, it is a scene of pornographic consumption and masturbation.
“eugénie de franval” is a fascinating text because it is sad writing for a reading public and it is about staying within the bounds of decency. I chose it as a kind of contrast to the 120 days, to show that there is another side to sadness. there is the sadness that apparently has no restrictions or controls. his opinion in the 120 days and other writings is “tout dire” (say everything).
That said, it doesn’t really tell everything in 120 days: it keeps little secrets in the text. there are small cupboards in the castle that remain closed to the reader. so even when it’s at its most excessive, it still creates the illusion of holding a little in reserve. but in “eugénie de franval” it is he who works with much stricter limitations. he wants this story to be read. So, there is an interesting dialogue between the narrator and his readers, but there is an even more interesting dialogue between the lines and that is between Sade and ourselves.
At what level of the narrative is this unreliability found? do we have an unreliable narrator?
that’s complicated. Is it the narrator who is unreliable or is it the author? we’re used to the idea of an unreliable narrator, a narrator we can’t trust. the classic unreliable storyteller is one who may be lying or wrong about the truth. con sade, i’m not sure if the narrator is unreliable. the narrator is doing a certain kind of work. the problem is that we are worried that the author is not trustworthy. If this story weren’t written by Sade, we’d have fewer worries about the narrator being unreliable. we may be a little suspicious, but we tend to assume, lazily, that the authors have good intentions; that when a moral point is made, it is done sincerely. Sade’s problem is that you no longer have those certainties. There seems to be hypocrisy in this story. but how much of that hypocrisy is the source of our own suspicion?
“con sade, I’m not sure if the narrator is unreliable. the problem is that he worries us that the author is not reliable ”
there is a very interesting bishop called jean-pierre camus who wrote stories very similar to sade but a century earlier. if you read them, you find exactly the same moral tone that sade adopts, and an equally lurid content. but he is a bishop. therefore, we don’t dismiss him as a hypocrite as quickly as we do, depending on how we feel about Catholic bishops, of course. so assigning distrust is complex in the case of sade’s fiction: it’s hard to know how much of our suspicion comes from the text and how much comes from our own preconceived ideas about sade.
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In this story, there is at least a superficial concern articulated by Franval about Eugénie’s emotions and desires, compared to the ruthless solipsism you have in her other libertine works where it’s all about pleasure at the expense of others. And in Justine, you have this passage from Bressac where she goes through the stages of motherhood and says that ultimately it’s about the mother’s self-interest.
absolutely. As for mothers, it is often said that Sade hates mothers. Sade was never close to his family, and had a terrible relationship with his mother-in-law, obviously, since she put him in jail. But there is a recurring theme in Sade’s fiction, and particularly in boudoir philosophy, about the breakdown of the sense of connection between generations, and between mothers and children in particular. It is striking that in “eugénie de franval”, eugénie is separated from her mother for the first seven years of her life and has no feeling of gratitude for having been born thanks to her.
In other works, this also extends to parent-child relationships: why should we be grateful to any of our parents for simply indulging their sexual appetites? As for Franval and Eugénie, there is a sense in which Franval falls in love with her daughter, as she falls in love with him. it’s not just a sexual but an intellectual attraction: she’s a perfect embodiment of his philosophy and the perfect opposite of her repressed, virtuous mother.
your next choice is sade/fourier/loyola by roland barthes. why did you choose this?
I chose it not because I strongly agree with it, but because it has been the most influential work of sad criticism. If you had to choose the only book that brought Sade out of the cold, I think this would be it. so it has a historical importance in terms of the reception of la sade in the culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. and, in many ways, it’s still where the sad criticism is today.
the first chapter of sade/fourier/loyola was published a few years earlier, in 1967, as an article. Barthes then published this book in 1971 with additional material on Sade. It comes at a really important time. During the first half of the 20th century, La Sade had only been read by a very select group of wealthy, bourgeois male readers. it is only in the 1960s and early 1970s that sade becomes accessible to the public, in cheap paperbacks.
barthes’s article-later-book on sade is a crucial intervention, and it is no coincidence that he writes “the death of the author” at the same time. there is a strategic reason to kill the author when the author you are reading turns out to be a criminal. By killing the author, Barthes kills all the reasons why sadé cannot be read. and it is much easier to read sade’s fiction if the life of the author is separated from the life of the work. sade/fourier/loyola set the tone for subsequent Sadian criticism for decades to come. The central argument in Barthes’s book is that it is a mistake to read Sade as more than words. something other than language. it is semiosis, not mimesis, she says. it eliminates all the reasons why sade was unreadable beforehand: the violence, the horror, the nihilism. to him, it’s just black ink on a white page.
“by killing the author, barthes kills all the reasons why you can’t read sade”
famously says in sade/fourier/loyola: “écrite, la merde ne sent pas”—“written, shit doesn’t smell” and that the only universe in sade is the universe of discourse. in other words, it is harmless. what he is effectively doing is separating de sade’s works from the real world. he is providing a safe sanctuary where you can look at these things without worrying about them. and there’s a lot of interesting analysis that comes out of that. barthes sheds light on all kinds of different signs and codes in the text etc. And a long list of critics continues and repeats Barthes’s phrase (that violence is linguistic) until the 1980s and beyond.
There are still many today who prefer to focus on language rather than content. A few years ago, I was at a conference on violence in the 18th century and was very struck by a reviewer who chose to speak of the word “violence” in Sade’s fiction rather than actual depictions of violence. that’s very much the barthian approach: you focus on one word. but it seems wicked to me. I’m not saying that the Sadean language isn’t interesting, but the reality is that that’s not what draws readers to Sade.
One of the critic’s jobs is to convey an idea of what it is like to read a particular text. and sad criticism largely fails to do that. the model for literary criticism has long been science, so we talk about analyzing and dissecting a text and so on. this encourages rigorous thinking and that’s obviously good, but in a way it’s also missing something. there is still a defensive attitude that leads some critics of sade to emphasize the scientific aspect of their interest in sade. they want to be seen as scientists in white coats, not perverts in dirty raincoats, clinical, not sexual.
Although the emphasis in critique of sadism has shifted from the linguistic to the historical, the latter approach also keeps sadism at a safe distance. the sade is neutralized and the reader is simply left out of the frame. The problem with Barthes’s approach is that he speaks of words on the page but never of the reader who reads them, visualizes them, and lives with them in his imagination. Barthes actually evolved from this position, but the sad critics didn’t really evolve with him. for example, they still largely refuse to discuss the sade biography.
“the problem with barthes’ approach is that he speaks of the words on the page but never of the reader who reads them, visualizes them and lives with them in his imagination”
so in one corner you have sade biographers and in another you have sade critics but there is no interaction between the two. it seems vulgar to posit life in relation to works. There’s a weird sense in which all the things I think make Sade’s fiction fascinating, all the things readers notice and are surprised by, are exactly the things we don’t talk about. That seems like a missed opportunity to me, really. it’s a shame that sade is hardly taught anywhere, neither in france nor in england.
Is it because of shame or because of elitism?
my suspicion is that the linguistic or historicizing approach adopted by sad critics would not be well received by students. If you try to teach Barthes’ line to your students, they will simply look at you in disbelief. this idea of examining the text in complete isolation from the experience of reading that text would no longer work. i feel very lucky to have been allowed to teach sade, and there is no doubt that he has shaped my thinking about him in all sorts of ways.
I also suspect that there is a reputational concern that has kept some reviewers from teaching sade. for others, it’s just awkward and embarrassing, especially when you’re a middle-aged man teaching largely female student cohorts. you can’t help but be, you must be, self-aware about teaching sade.
your next choice is angela carter’s sadian woman. Can you start by telling me what her project is with this book?
this was written a few years after sade/fourier/loyola, and carter had obviously read both barthes and foucault. Foucault can be read between the lines throughout the Sadian woman. Carter is a fascinating writer in all sorts of ways. She was one of the first English writers to engage with Sade, who was a banned author in England at the time she was writing due to the moral panic that followed the Moorish murders (when it was learned that Ian Brady had read Justine de sade). It’s also a time when second wave feminism is beginning to exert its influence in Anglo-American culture, and indeed, Sade becomes a highly contested figure within feminism at this time.
On the one hand we have angela carter’s book on sade in 1979 and on the other, andread dworkin’s pornography, dedicated to rose keller, and with a very interesting chapter on sade. and dworkin is furious with carter for his book. there is a heated debate between these different strands of feminism around the power of pornography and the relationship between violence and pornography. Sade becomes a totemic figure in this debate, a poster boy for pornography and violent pornography. Carter and Dworkin see him as the true face of the men who lurk behind porn. But Carter brings back the sadness for female readers, which seems like a really counterintuitive move in a lot of ways.
is not the first to do so. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire compiled a small anthology of selections from Sade in 1908, and in his introduction he speaks of Justine and Juliette as two different visions of femininity, the first subjugated and the second liberated. He describes Sade as “the freest spirit that ever lived” and as someone who wanted women to be as free as men. Oddly enough, Apollinaire is presenting Sade as a kind of proto-feminist, and it is striking that Carter cites him in the Sadeian woman. Carter is obviously fascinated by the sadist and deeply influenced by her reading of her fiction: the damn camera has sadists everywhere. And Carter is fascinated by Juliette in particular, by this female power figure: a woman of action. Juliette becomes a model for some of the female leads in Bloody Chamber. What Carter is also interested in is Sade’s recognition of women as sexual beings, something she considers revolutionary.
there are problems in terms of the historicity of all that, and I think that sade is a little less revolutionary than she thinks, but she is right to say that sade sees sexuality as the heart of human identity. and sade is certainly interesting in women. Carter de Sade’s reading is idiosyncratic and provocative, but no less brilliant for that. it is not a historicized reading of sade, it is using sade and thinking of sade in relation to the moment in which he is writing. Basically it’s about two cultures coming together and you see what comes out of them.
and how does dworkin interact with sade, compared to carter?
dworkin extols sad critics for downplaying his violence against women, and he’s right to do so. she goes too far in all sorts of ways, but she’s a good controversial writer. she is brilliant in roland barthes’s dehumanization of rose keller. In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Barthes says that what fascinates him about Sade are the small details, like the fact that instead of saying “mademoiselle” she says “milli”, a Provençal variation.
barthes says he is also fascinated by the “white sleeve” in the rose keller case story. Dworkin rightly points out that Barthes marginalizes Keller and her suffering: she disappears from the picture and he focuses on objects. So, there is a sense in which Sade’s critics simply double down on the misogyny they read. Dworkin then attacks Carter, but with less success: he underestimates her.
carter does not say that juliette is as women should be, he expressly says that she is not a model for female behavior, but he does say that through juliette sade he dismantles the myths about femininity (myths about motherhood, etc.) . For Carter, the fact that sex in Sade’s fiction is for recreation and not procreation is important and helpful; she puts sade to work serving women and that’s a very interesting idea.
Different editions of this book have different subtitles. one is “an exercise in cultural history” and the other is “the ideology of pornography”. which do you think is more appropriate?
I like the idea of ”an exercise…” because I think in a sense she’s proving something. and it’s not perfect, but there are fascinating little insights that pop up all the time. he speaks of the moral strength of the victim en sade, for example. It is also striking that the most convincing literary criticism of sade has been done by women: somehow women have found it easier to write about sade than men. maybe it’s because they’re not framed in the same way by her.
“It is also striking that the strongest literary criticism of sade has been carried out by women”
This also applies to the academic study of pornography in general. Linda Williams, who wrote a groundbreaking study of pornography called Hard Core, said a few years ago that the most interesting work in the field has been produced almost entirely by gay women or men. Straight men haven’t done very well on the subject, and I think the same thing has happened with Sade.
your latest book is a play dramatizing the last days of the marquis de sade’s life while incarcerated in charenton asylum and how he continues to publish despite the best efforts of his wife and the director of the asylum to deprive him of writing instruments. this is doug wright’s “feathers”. why did you choose this?
I thought it would be interesting to have a creative response to sade as well as a critical one. creative responses to sadness have been mixed. most of the sade adaptations have been pretty bad—with the exception of salò—and movies about sade haven’t been very interesting either. but “quills” interacts with sade in intriguing ways. it plays fast and loose with the facts, and is completely, deliberately, historically inaccurate, but that doesn’t bother me. focuses on what’s interesting about the sadist in a way that academic criticism doesn’t always do, and in particular develops a debate about the power of fiction over the reader.
Obviously, it is not going to position itself against freedom of expression, but it does explore the idea of fiction as something dangerous, as something that can change us. there are some very interesting scenes where the act of reading is staged and shown as performative rather than passive. there is a scene in which sade, without pencil or paper, has to transmit her words orally from one prisoner to another until they reach madeleine, who transcribes them. and there’s another scene where sade has written a story on the walls of her cell, a really nondescript story with no sex and no violence. But Charenton’s director, Royer-Collard, interprets it as a story about his wife’s infidelity. so he shows how much a reader brings to a text and how subjective our interpretations are.
in fact, the story is open to all kinds of readings: it is about sade’s love for madeleine and also about the power of fiction. is a truly revealing example of what can happen to a story in the hands and minds of different readers. I think that’s why I chose it. enlightens the reader, and that’s what the sad critics haven’t done quite right.
a central theme of this work is censorship, and i think wright wrote this work in part as a reaction to the political controversies over “decency” in arts funding in the united states in the 1990s. you already mentioned to ian brady —the murderer of moors— and we know that he read and appropriated sade. As a translator of Sade’s work, do you think there are compelling reasons to censor Sade?
the translation was interesting in that sense. I had been working on sade, and teaching it, for a while at the time, but putting something like the 120 days into the public arena is different because you don’t have the same kind of control. when i’m teaching, i’m setting the tone in the classroom and asking students to think about sade’s works in a particular way, so there’s an element of direction. the only equivalent for that when you’re publishing a translation is the introduction, but how many people actually read the introductions? probably not that many.
Therefore, there is some trepidation about publishing something that remains, arguably, the most extreme work of fiction ever written, and even more so because I don’t rule out the idea that texts have negative effects on readers. It’s not like I think it’s completely safe. That said, because it’s such an extreme text, it strangely makes it a bit easier: there are other works by Sade that are less extreme but potentially more disturbing.
The 120 Days is by no means a seductive text: most readers will simply be horrified and revolted by it. and what we tried to do in our translation was to make it just as horrible and disturbing in English as it is in French. I can’t imagine censoring sade for an adult audience. That being said, do I want my kids to read it? No. Do I warn my students before inflicting them? yes.
just to end with a slightly more general question, sade’s work and sade himself have been morally condemned throughout history. In “Pens”, Sade defends his work before the abbot, saying that “it is a fiction, not a moral treatise”. To what extent do you think it is appropriate to morally evaluate works of fiction?
That’s a great question and it’s the kind of question that literary critics and analytic philosophers treat very differently. The problem with literature—and this is the kind of thing that analytic philosophers don’t always recognize—is that the same text can be interpreted even by the same reader in different ways. what a question like that is often about is the author’s intent. The problem with sade is that it’s very hard to tell what those intentions might have been, and I’m not sure it matters.
“the 120 days is not a seductive text by any means: most readers will simply be horrified and rebel at it”
For me, the question is not so much the moral value of a text as the moral value that we can extract from it. There are ethical issues raised by reading Sade because these are predicate texts about violence and we are part of that violence on some level. the critic marcel hénaff used to say that “to read sade is to conspire with him” and that is the kind of dilemma i think about a lot. how can we read a vicious and misogynistic text without becoming accomplices? and it’s something my students and I discuss a lot. so for me reading fiction is—must be—an ethical as well as an aesthetic experience. the two are inseparable.
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