by Steven Moore
Sade isn’t the greatest French novelist by a long shot: he wrote too much too quickly, repeated himself ad nauseam, relied too heavily on stereotypes and clichés, mistakenly believed “anything is good provided it be excessive” (Juliette, 236), and abused the superlative case so often he deserved caning. Not the greatest, then, but one of the most influential. He showed novelists that there’s nothing off-limits, nothing that cannot be not said; he encouraged novelists “to embellish and to astound. . . . What we expect from you are flights of invention, not rule-bound exercises” (“Essay on Novels,” 16). His novels were available only for a decade before the puritanical Napoleon outlawed them—he described Justine as “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination,” which Grove Press uses as a blurb on the back cover of their edition—so they didn’t make much of an immediate impact on serious writers, with one notable exception. In 1798, an army officer and dramatist named Jacques-Antoine Révéroni Saint-Cyr (1767–1829) published a short novel entitled Pauliska ou la perversité moderne (Pauliska, or Modern Perversity) which, according to Julia Douthwaite, “bears a striking resemblance to the marquis de Sade’s work” (195). Since this outré novel has not been translated, I’ll let her describe it:
In its bizarre scenes of experimentation, Révéroni Saint-Cyr borrows from contemporary work in pneumatics, chemistry, and electricity and mixes in the titillating effects of pornography. He conjures up the émigré mentality of postrevolutionary political angst by inventing fearful characters moving through a landscape that is physically varied but consistently nightmarish. The heroine is a young mother of noble Polish blood who must flee the Russian soldiers who have killed her husband and captured her home. As she makes her way through a war-torn landscape, she encounters melancholy foreigners, impoverished peasants, and other miserables who lament their misfortune and whisper of evils wrought by secret societies and political plots. . . . Its conflation of émigré conventions, postrevolutionary politics, pornography, and bizarre scientific machinery exemplifies the sociopolitical forces converging in the 1790s. (194–95)
Pauliska also exemplifies the legitimate descendants of Sade, not the countless pornographic novels, starting with Restif’s Anti-Justine, that ripped off his sex scenes but ignored the philosophical discourses that transformed those scenes into powerful metaphors. Many 19th century writers expressed admiration for Sade—Flaubert, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Huysmans—but it wasn’t until the 20th century that Sade’s work inspired some writers to appropriate as he did the language of pornography for transgressive cultural criticism: I’m thinking of Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, of course, but also his earlier Black Book, William S. Burroughs’s “Roosevelt after Inauguration” and his early novels, Pierre Klossowski, Chandler Brossard’s Raging Joys, Sublime Violations, Mishima, certain novels by Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Samuel Delany’s Mad Man, and Rikki Ducornet’s Fan-maker’s Inquisition, to name a few. Unfortunately, Sade also gave some novelists the “illusion that one comes to grip with reality only through the commission of evil,” as a sophisticated character in Gaddis’s Recognitions laments.247 In this regard, Sade’s novels are like a deadly virus that he deliberately let loose upon the world as the ultimate revenge; as a character in Justine says, “he is like unto those perverse writers whose corruption is so dangerous, so active, that their single aim is, by causing their appalling doctrines to be printed, to immortalize the sum of their crimes after their own lives are at an end; they themselves can do no more, but their accursed writings will instigate the commission of crimes, and they carry this sweet idea with them to their graves: it comforts them for the obligation, enjoined by death, to relinquish the doing of evil” (611).
Up until about 50 years ago, Sade was not even mentioned in most histories of the 18th-century French novel, which usually ended with Bernardin’s wimpy Paul and Virginia. But now the Marquis brings up the rear with his monsters from the id, seeing to it that the history of the early modern French novel ends not with a whimper but a gangbang. In the space of 200 years, from d’Urfé’s pastoral Astrea to Sade’s antipastoral Days at Florbelle, French writers transformed the novel from an elegant entertainment into a dangerous art.
Notes
1 Translated by Steven Rendall in the introduction to his English translation of volume 1 of Astrea, vii, hereafter cited by page number. For the rest of the novel, I’ll be quoting John Davies’ old translation by volume/page; his volume 2 is paginated 1–208, followed by 1–215 (probably typeset by two different shops), hence will be cited as 2A and 2B.
2 There is some controversy over how much of volume 5 is Baro’s work rather than d’Urfé’s, and one scholar has even suggested the concluding volume was written by another novelist named Marin Le Roy de Gomberville (who wrote some gigantic novels himself, as we’ll see), though this appears to be an alternative sequel. Consequently, some scholars ignore the fifth volume entirely, though it does bring closure to the huge work.
3 My page count comes from this modern edition, not the 17th-century one, which ran to more than 5,500 pages. In fact, throughout this book, my page counts approximate modern book layouts (say 400 words per page), not the originals.
4 Gregorio’s Pastoral Masquerade includes an 8-page appendix identifying all the characters in volumes 1–4, an invaluable census for the reader.
5 The book to read on this type, with special regard to this period, is Joan DeJean’s Libertine Strategies.
6 As translated by Horowitz in her excellent, compact study Honore d’Urfé (115); Davies’ translation (2B:27) isn’t explicit enough.
7 In his essay “Form and Ideas in L’Astrée,” Cherpack notes, “It is not surprising that the reader should find Celadon a Quixotic character, since the immortal Don was equally determined to observe Dulcinea’s order, a similarity which [Maurice] Magendie ascribes to a common source (Du nouveau sur L’Astrée [1927], p. 132” (324 n9).
8 See Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1:203) or, for the full story, Aratus’s earlier Phenomena (ll. 98–136).
9 Hembree, Subjectivity and the Signs of Love (6)—a sophisticated analysis of Astrea’s place in this paradigm shift.
10 Baroque Fiction-Making , 62. Turk goes on to say Gomberville did this even better.
11 Furetière, The Bourgeois Romance, 163 (see 230–36 below).
12 Verdier, Charles Sorel, 17—my source for Sorel’s early novels, which have never been translated into English.
13 Book 10 in Major Wright’s 1655 translation of the 1633 edition of Francion, hereafter cited by book.
14 The term “antinovel” is universally credited to Jean-Paul Sartre, who used it to describe Nathalie Sarraute’s 1948 novel Portrait of a Man Unknown. He makes no mention of Sorel.
15 Chap. 21 in Davies’ 1653 translation, hereafter cited by chapter. Davies omits the book-length Remarques at the end of the original, but summarizes them in a lengthy, chapter-by-chapter introduction.
16 The first edition of the novel included this ludicrous engraving, which is reproduced on p. 164 of Hinds’s Narrative Transformations. On the Web, one can find some colorized versions that are truly nauseating.
17 Clarimond is the author of a pastiche entitled “The Banquet of the Gods,” reproduced in chapter 3, which (like Alberti’s Momus and Barth’s Chimera) portrays the gods behaving badly (i.e., like humans).
18 OuLiPo = Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a group of mostly French writers founded in 1960 to explore new ways of generating fictions based on various rules and formal constraints.
19 Privileged Mortals is the title of an excellent monograph on this genre by Mark Bannister, which I will be citing often.
20 Gomberville’s Polexander, 2.3.
21 Book 4, part 1 in William Browne’s 1647 translation, which seems fairly complete but is merely “a pedestrian piece of work” according
to Wadsworth (100).
22 Some earlier prototypes might be mentioned—the Odyssey for those who consider it a novel, Lucian’s True Story, Arabian sea adventures like Sindbad’s, the last two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Luo Maodeng’s Adventures in the Western Ocean, et al.—but Polexander is the first nautical novel in the modern sense.
23 Sorel admired Polexander, even though it goes against his aesthetic. Gomberville wrote two other novels—the early pastoral La Carithée (1621) and another heroic novel called Cythérée (1640–42)—and left unfinished one on La jeune Alcidiane (1651).
24 Les Historiettes, as cited and translated by Levi, 392.
25 In historical fact, Statira was the wife of Darius, not his daughter. La Calprenède drew his story from the ancient writings of Plutarch, Justinus, and especially Quintus Curtius, the 1st-century Latin biographer of Alexander.
26 An abridged by translation by Sir Charles Cotterell of around 860 pages was published in 1652, and often reprinted, but it is unbearably verbose. I read the shorter (620 pages), anonymous, more readable translation published in 1703, cited by part/book.
27 Lazy La Calprenède stole one of these subplots, critics have detected, from a contemporary Italian novel entitled Colloandro Fedele (1652) by Giovanni Ambrogio Marini (Dunlop 2:420n2).
28 The name for a series of civil revolts against the monarchy that erupted between 1648 and 1653, led by aristocrats opposed to the oppressive policies of cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Women played an unprecedented role in the revolts; for this reason, Alexandre Dumas entitled his novel about the Fronde The Women’s War (La Guerre des femmes, 1844).
29 If curious, though, see Pitou’s old monograph on it; he argues that Faramond “is in some ways the most important of his contributions to French literature. It is not only the last roman de longue haleine, combining influences from the medieval roman de chevalerie, from French salons, and from contemporary theater, but it represents the epic tradition in the attempt of the two authors . . . to celebrate the French monarchy as Virgil had celebrated the rulers of Rome” (9).
30 The adjectives are from Dugan’s unconventional but richly informative “bioautography,” The Precious Lies of Madeleine de Scudéry, 1:176.
31 The unpaginated preface occupies the first six pages of Henry Cogan’s unabridged translation (1652); further citations will be by part/book.
32 Perhaps a misprint for “ease”; these early books are rife with typos.
33 Part 1, book 1 in the unabridged edition “Englished by F. G. Gent.,” which was begun before the last of Scudéry’s 10 volumes appeared, such was her popularity in England. (The subtitle on the title page reads The Grand Cyrus, but the running heads more correctly read Cyrus the Great.)
34 This particular story is available in a modern translation by Karen Newman as The Story of Sapho, the longest of the novel’s interpolated tales, and will be cited by page numbers. (“Sapho” is the older French spelling of Sappho, and was Scudéry’s salon nickname.)
35 From Aubrey de Sélincourt’s translation The Early History of Rome (1960; NY: Penguin, 2002). Scudéry’s other principal source was the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living and writing in Rome at the same time as Livy (early 1st cent. bce). Cloelia caught Scudéry’s eye years earlier: she delivers a harangue on heroism in Les Femmes illustres (1642), which Madeleine wrote with her brother Georges.
36 Roman Antiquities, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1940).
37 Selected Criticism, 27.
38 1.12 in the 1700 translation attributed to Tom Brown (hack writer and satiric poet), a Mr. Savage, and others, but largely based on the 1665 translation by “J. B.,” probably John Bulteel. Unlike most of the translations from the French cited so far, this one is not bad.
39 Scarron died before he could complete the novel and his notes vanished, but he was obviously moving toward this conclusion; the anonymous ending supplied by the French publisher marries them off and, surprisingly, kills off ridiculous little Ragotin.
40 Paul Scarron, 75. See also the structural analysis in DeJean’s excellent Scarron’s Roman comique.
41 See Goldberg’s Art of Joseph Andrews (43–53, 155–57) for an informative discussion of The Comic Novel and its influence on Fielding’s novel.
42 Jean Paul Richter admired him. His appeal was rediscovered by French writers of the 19th century: Scarron appears in Dumas’s Twenty Years After (1845), and after describing him in Les Grotesques (1844), Gautier essentially rewrote The Comic Novel as Captain Fracasse (1861–63). Even suicidal Gérard de Nerval acknowledged the influence of Scarron’s novel on a few of his nerve-wracked novellas.
43 As this novel has never been translated in full—only some selections in the early 18th century that omit the crucial frame material—my discussion is based on Showalter (22–23), DeJean’s Tender Geographies (52–55), and Donovan (118–19), plus what I could glean from the French original. The translated block quotation is from Beasley’s Revising Memory (32).
44 His latest biographer, drawing upon recently discovered documents, suggests Cyrano died of complications from a head wound sustained when he was shot in an attempted assassination, evidently ordered by a representative of the Jesuits (Addyman, 243–47)
45 Page 25 in Strachan’s 1965 translation of the complete work, hereafter cited parenthetically. Since then there have been attractive translations of part 1 by Donald Webb and Andrew Brown; the former is an online hypertext with copious commentary. Richard Aldington’s earlier complete translation (1923) is more stylish than Strachan’s but not as literal; however, it sports a fine introduction and useful notes and illustrations.
46 Strachan’s edition, like Aldington’s, follows the unreliable 1657 edition for these notes; my examples represent those in the original manuscript.
47 Libertine Strategies, 15. DeJean later dismisses Le Petit’s novella L’Heure du berger (1662), playfully subtitled “demy-roman comique ou roman demy-comique” in homage to Scarron, as a “rather colorless, third-person pseudo nouvelle espagnole” (206). Ioan Williams, on the other hand, feels “it represents a significant step towards a straightforward treatment of contemporary experience outside the frame of comedy, and is quite unlike anything produced by more cautious contemporaries who died in their beds” (43).
48 English grammar mandates that or which instead of who when referring to animals, but this novel suggests they should likewise take the human relative pronoun.
49 For reasons of space, I decided not to pursue later examples of French imaginary voyages to utopias, for though their coded criticisms of current mores provide an invaluable record of countercultural dissent, their literary qualities, like those of most Neo-Latin utopias, seldom arise above those of generic adventure novels, and thus they may be more at home in a history of social theory. Two possible exceptions, both set in the recently discovered continent of Australia, that can be recommended are The History of the Sevarambians by Denis Veiras (or Vairasse, 1675) and The Southern Land, Known by Gabriel de Foigny (1676). Both are available in modern scholarly editions (see bibliography). Geoffroy Atkinson’s two books on the extraordinary voyage in French literature (also in the bibliography) testify to the popularity of this genre.
50 As a result, what follows is based on discussions of the novel by Harth (Cartesian Women, 34–43), Jaouën, and Maher.
51 “In the strictest sense, it refers to the space between the bed and the wall of the bedroom. Guests visiting the hostess sat in this area” (Maher, 136n6).
52 This too has never been translated into English, so I’m relying on Alkon’s analysis in Origins of Futuristic Fiction (17–44). He follows the tradition of ascribing the novel to Jacques Guttin, though recent critics are convinced it was written by de Pure.
53 Actually, the title page of the 1671 English translation reads “Scarron’s City Romance,” under the publisher’s assumption it was a new translation of Le Roman comique or a sequel.
This anonymous translation, annoyingly abridged somewhat, will be cited hereafter by page number.
54 A detail left out of the English translation, retrieved from Levi (312).
55 Also omitted from the English translation (grrr!), so adapted from Levi (312–13). I’ve converted the original’s livres to dollars, @ 1 livre = $2.50.
56 A mere page after introducing Charroselles, the hypocritical narrator claims, “I dare not name any author that is alive . . . [nor do] as some writers do who, speaking of them, only invert their names, hash or anagrammatize them” (87–88). Showalter suggests the narrator is not Furetière himself but “ ‘the Novelist,’ a creature imagined by Furetière to be an object of ridicule” (114).
57 In their defense, most aristocrats married solely for economic and/or political reasons—women especially had little or no say in these alliances—and hence were almost expected to seek sex and/or love elsewhere.