The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  But the ideal erotic act was never to be realized. This is the deeper meaning of the words Sade puts into the mouth of Jérôme: “What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.” It was not merely that really heinous crimes were forbidden in practice, but that even those which one could summon up in the midst of the wildest ravings would disappoint their author: “Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! oh, that would be a crime . . .” But if this dream seemed satisfying, it was because the criminal projected into it his own destruction along with that of the universe. Had he survived, he would have been frustrated once again. Sadistic crime can never be adequate to its animating purpose. The victim is never more than a symbol; the subject possesses himself only as an imago, and their relationship is merely the parody of the drama which would really set them at grips in their incommunicable intimacy. That is why the Bishop in The 120 Days of Sodom “never committed a crime without immediately conceiving a second.”

  The moment of plotting the act is an exceptional moment for the libertine because he can then be unaware of the inevitable fact, namely, that reality will give him the lie. And if narration plays a primary role in sadistic orgies and easily awakens senses upon which flesh-and-blood objects cease to act, the reason is that these objects can be wholly attained only by their absence. Actually, there is only one way of finding satisfaction in the phantoms created by debauchery, and that is to accede to their very unreality. In choosing eroticism, Sade chose the make-believe. It was only in the imaginary that Sade could live with any certitude and without risk of disappointment. He repeated the idea throughout his work. “The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.” It was by means of his imagination that he escaped from space, time, prison, the police, the void of absence, opaque presences, the conflicts of existence, death, life, and all contradictions. It was not murder that fulfilled Sade’s erotic nature: it was literature.

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  It might seem, at first glance, that by writing Sade was merely reacting as many other prisoners do in the same situation. The idea was not completely new to him. One of the plays presented at La Coste in 1772 was doubtlessly written by him; and his strongbox, forced open by order of Madame de Montreuil, contained certain “leaflets,” probably notes on sex, in his own hand. Nevertheless, when he was imprisoned at Vincennes, he waited four years before undertaking a real work. In another cell of the same fortress, Mirabeau, who was also groaning that he was “being buried alive in a tomb,” tried to divert himself by doing translations, writing an essay on the lettres de cachet, and carrying on a pornographic correspondence. He was trying to kill time, to distract his weary body, and to undermine a hostile society. Sade was driven by similar motives; he set to work; and more than once, while composing his novels, he had to “whip himself up.” He also wanted to revenge himself on his torturers. He writes to his wife in a joyous rage: “. . . you fancied you were sure to work wonders, I’ll wager, by reducing me to an atrocious abstinence in the article of carnal sin. Well, you were wrong: you have produced a ferment in my brain, owing to you phantoms have arisen in me which I shall have to render real.”

  Although his decision may have been prompted by his confinement, nevertheless it had much deeper roots. Sade had always spun stories for himself around his debauches; and the reality which served as a frame of reference for his fantasies may have given them a certain density, yet it also cramped them by its resistance. The opacity of things blurs their significance, which is the very quality that words preserve. Even a child is aware that crude drawings are more obscene than the organs and gestures which they represent, because the intention to defile is asserted in all its purity. Blasphemy is the easiest and surest of sacrilegious acts. Sade’s heroes talked on and on indefatigably; and in the Rose Keller affair he indulged in endless speechifying. Writing is far more able than the spoken word to endow images with the solidity of a monument, and it resists all argument. Thanks to the written word, virtue maintains her dreary prestige even at the very moment when she is denounced as hypocrisy and stupidity. Crime remains criminal in its grandeur. Freedom may still throb in a dying body.

  Literature enabled Sade to unleash and fix his dreams, and also to transcend the contradictions implied by any demonic system. Better still, it is itself a demonic act, since it exhibits criminal visions in an aggressive way. That is what gives Sade’s work its incomparable value. Anyone misunderstands Sade who finds it paradoxical that a “solitary” should have engaged in such a passionate effort to communicate. He had nothing of the misanthrope who prefers the company of animals and virgin forests to his own kind. Cut off from others, he was haunted by their inaccessible presence. If he craves for the presence of other persons at the most intimate moments of his life, it is normal that he wish to expose himself to the large public to which a book can aspire.

  Did he wish only to shock? In 1795 he wrote: “I am about to put forward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.”10 And in La Nouvelle Justine: “To falsify such basic truths, regardless of their consequences, reveals a fundamental lack of concern for human beings.” After presiding over the Piques Section and drawing up speeches and petitions in society’s name, he must have liked, in his more optimistic moments, to think of himself as a spokesman for humanity. Of this experience he retained not the evil aspects, but those which were genuinely rewarding. These dreams quickly faded, but it would be too simple to consign Sade to satanism. His sincerity was inextricably bound up with dishonesty. He delighted in the shocking effects of truth; but if he set himself the duty of shocking, it was because in this way truth might be made manifest. While arrogantly admitting his errors, he declared himself in the right. He wished to transmit a message to the very public he was deliberately outraging. His writings reflect the ambivalence of his relation to the given world and to people.

  Even more surprising, perhaps, is the mode of expression he chose. We might expect a man who had so jealously cultivated his singularity to try to translate his experience into a singular form, as, for example, Lautréamont did. But the eighteenth century offered Sade few lyrical possibilities; he hated the mawkish sensibility which the time confused with poetry—the time was not yet ripe for a poète maudit. And Sade was in no way disposed to great literary audacity. A real creator should—at least on a certain level and at a given moment—free himself of the yoke of the given and emerge beyond other men into complete solitude. But there was in Sade an inner weakness which was inadequately masked by his arrogance. Society was lodged in his heart in the guise of guilt. He had neither the means nor the time to reinvent man, the world, and himself. He was in too much of a hurry, in a hurry to defend himself. I have already said that he sought in writing to gain a clear conscience; and in order to do this, he had to compel people to absolve him, even to approve him. Instead of affirming himself, Sade argued; and in order to make himself understood, he borrowed the literary forms and the tried and tested doctrines of contemporary society. As the product of a rational age, no arm seemed surer to him than reason. He who wrote: “All universal moral principles are idle fancies,” submitted docilely to general esthetic conventions and contemporary claims for the universality of logic. This explains both his art and his thought. Though he justified himself, he was always trying to excuse himself. His work is an ambiguous effort to push crime to the extreme while wiping away his guilt.

  It is both natural and striking that Sade’s favorite form was parody. He did not try to set up a new universe. He contented himself with ridiculing, by the manner in which he imitated it, the one imposed upon him. He pretended to believe in the vain fancies that inhabited it: innocence, kindness,
devotion, generosity, and chastity. When he unctuously depicted virtue in Aline et Valcour, in Justine, or in Les Crimes de l’Amour, he was not being merely prudent. The “veils” in which he swathed Justine were more than a literary device. In order to derive amusement from harassing virtue, one must credit it with a certain reality. Defending his tales against the charge of immorality, Sade hypocritically wrote: “Who can flatter himself that he has put virtue in a favorable light if the features of the vice surrounding it are not strongly emphasized?” But he meant the very opposite: how is vice to be made thrilling if the reader is not first taken in by the illusion of good? Fooling people is even more delicious than shocking them. And Sade, in spinning his sugary, roundabout phrases, tasted the keen pleasures of mystification. Unfortunately, he generally amuses himself more than he does us. His style has often the same coldness and the same mawkishness as the edifying tales he transposed, and the episodes unfold in accordance with equally dreary conventions.

  Nevertheless, it was through parody that Sade obtained his most brilliant artistic successes. As Maurice Heine points out, Sade was the precursor of the novel of horror, but he was too deeply rationalistic to lose himself in fantasy. When he abandons himself to the extravagances of his imagination, one does not know which to admire the most, his epic vehemence or his irony. The wonder is that the irony is subtle enough to redeem his ravings: what it does is lend a dry, poetic quality which saves them from incredibility. This somber humor which can, at times, turn on itself, is more than a mere technique. With his shame and pride, his truth and crime, Sade was the very spirit of contentiousness. It is when he plays the buffoon that he is really most serious, and when he is most outrageously dishonest that he is most sincere. His extravagance often masks ingenuous truths while he launches the most flagrant enormities in the form of sober and deliberate arguments; he uses all kinds of tricks to avoid being pinned down; and that is how he attains his end, which is to disturb us. His very form tends to disconcert us. He speaks in a monotonous, embarrassed tone, and we begin to be bored, when all at once the dull grayness is lit up with the glaring brilliance of some bitter, sardonic truth. It is then that Sade’s style, in its gaiety, its violence, and its arrogant rawness, proves to be that of a great writer.

  Nevertheless, no one would think of ranking Justine with Manon Lescaut or Les Liaisons dangereuses. It was, paradoxically, the very necessity of Sade’s work which imposed upon it its esthetic limits. He did not have the perspective essential to an artist. He lacked the detachment necessary to confront reality and re-create it. He did not confront himself; he contented himself with projecting his fantasies. His accounts have the unreality, the false precision, and the monotony of schizophrenic reveries. He relates them for his own pleasure, and he is unconcerned about imposing them upon the reader. We do not feel in them the stubborn resistance of the real world or the more poignant resistance that Sade encountered in the depths of his own heart. Caves, underground passageways, mysterious castles, all the props of the Gothic novel take on a particular meaning in his work. They symbolize the isolation of the image. Perception echoes data’s totality and, consequently, the obstacles which the data contain. The image is perfectly submissive and pliant. We find in it only what we put into it. The image is the enchanted domain from which no power whatever can expel the solitary despot. It is the image that Sade was imitating, even while claiming to give it literary opacity. Thus, he disregarded the spatial and temporal coordinates within which all real events are situated. The places he evokes are not of this world, the events which occur in them are tableaux vivants rather than adventures, and time has no hold on Sade’s universe. There is no future either for or in his work.

  Not only do the orgies to which he invites us take place in no particular time or locality, but—what is more serious—no living people are brought into play. The victims are frozen in their tearful abjection, and the torturers in their frenzies. Instead of giving them lifelike density, Sade merely daydreams about them. Remorse and disgust are unknown to them; at most they have occasional feelings of satiety. They kill with indifference; they are abstract incarnations of evil. But unless eroticism has some social, familiar, or human basis, it ceases to be in any way extraordinary. It is no longer a conflict, a revelation, or an exceptional experience. It no longer reveals any dramatic relationship between individuals but reverts to biological crudity. How is one to feel the opposition of others’ freedoms or the spirit’s descent into the flesh, if all we see is a display of voluptuous or tortured flesh? Horror itself peters out in these excesses at which no consciousness is actually present. If a story like Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” is so full of anguish, it is because we grasp the situation from within the subject; we see Sade’s heroes only from without. They are as artificial and move in a world as arbitrary as that of Florian’s shepherds. That is why these perverse bucolics have the austerity of a nudist colony.

  The debauches which Sade describes in such great detail systematically exhaust the anatomical possibilities of the human body rather than reveal uncommon emotional complexes. Nevertheless, though he failed to endow them with esthetic truth, Sade adumbrated forms of sexual behavior unknown until then, particularly those which unite mother-hatred, frigidity, intellectuality, “passive sodomy,” and cruelty. No one has emphasized with more vigor the link between the imagination and what we call vice; and he gives us, from time to time, insights of surprising depth into the relation of sexuality to existence.

  Are we, then, to admire him as a real innovator in psychology? It is difficult to decide. Forerunners are always credited with either too much or too little. How is one to measure the value of a truth which, to use Hegel’s term, has not become? An idea derives its value from the experience it sums up and the methods it initiates. But we hardly know what credit to give a new and attractive formulation if it is not confirmed by subsequent developments. We are tempted either to magnify it with all the significance that it acquires later on or else to minimize its scope. Hence, in the case of Sade, the impartial reader hesitates. Often, as we turn a page, we come upon an unexpected phrase which seems to open up new paths, only to find that the thinking stops short. Instead of a vivid and individual voice, all one hears is the droning drivel of Holbach and La Mettrie.

  It is remarkable, for example, that in 179511 Sade wrote: “Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.” Not only does Sade, in the first part of this text, anticipate what has been called the “pansexuality” of Freud, but he makes of eroticism the mainspring of human behavior. In addition, he asserts, in the second part, that sexuality is charged with a significance that goes beyond it. Libido is everywhere, and it is always far more than itself. Sade certainly anticipated this great truth. He knew that the “perversions” that are vulgarly regarded as moral monstrosities or physiological defects actually envelop what would now be called an intentionality. He writes to his wife that all “fancy . . . derives from a principle of delicacy,” and in Aline et Valcour he declares that “refinements come only from delicacy; one may, therefore, have a great deal of delicacy, though one may be moved by things which seem to exclude it.” He understood, too, that our tastes are motivated not by the intrinsic qualities of the object but by the latter’s relationship with the subject. In a passage in La Nouvelle Justine he tries to explain coprophilia. His reply is faltering, but clumsily using the notion of imagination, he points out that the truth of a thing lies not in what it is but in the meaning it has taken on for us in the course of our individual experience. Intuitions such as these allow us to hail Sade as a precursor of psychoanalysis.

  Unfortunately, he reduces their value when he insists upon harping, like Holbach, on the principles of psycho-physiological parallelism. “With the perfecting of the science of anatomy, we shall easily be able to show the relationship between man’s constitution and the tastes which have affected him.” The contradiction is glaring in the striking passage in
The 120 Days of Sodom where he considers the sexual attraction of ugliness. “It has, moreover, been proved that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.” One might wish that Sade had defined this link between horror and desire which he indicates only confusedly; but he stops abruptly with a condition that cancels the question that has been posed: “All these things depend upon our structures and organs and on the manner in which they affect one another, and we are no more able to change our tastes for these things than to vary the shapes of our bodies.”

  At first glance, it seems paradoxical that this man who was so self-centered should have given such prominence to theories which deny any significance to individual peculiarities. He asks that we make a great effort to understand the human heart better. He tries to explore its strangest aspects. He cries out: “What an enigma is man!” He boasts: “You know that no one analyzes things as I do,” and yet he follows La Mettrie in lumping man together with the machine and the plant and simply does away with psychology. But this antinomy, disconcerting though it may be, is easily explained. It is probably not so easy to be a monster as some people seem to think. Sade, though fascinated by his own personal mystery, was also frightened by it. Instead of expressing himself, he wanted to defend himself. The words he puts into Blamont’s mouth12 are a confession: “I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasures.” The first of these tasks of liberation was, as he repeated countless times, to triumph over remorse. And as for repudiating all feelings of guilt, what doctrine could be surer than that which undermines the very idea of responsibility? But it would be a big mistake to try to confine him to such a notion: if he seeks support in determinism, he does so, like many others, in order to lay claim to freedom.