by Olivia Laing
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What Dworkin found in Sade was the playbook of misogyny, the source text that spliced sex and violence together, revealing them not as opposites but as the twin devices by which male supremacy is enforced. Too often, she thought, Sade had been let off the hook because admiring critics, from Baudelaire to Barthes, had argued that his crimes were purely textual, confined to the bloodless realm of the imagination. But for Dworkin there was no material difference between what he did and what he dreamt up. Just as the staged scenes of pornography laid bare real misogynistic ideology, so Sade’s fantasies were acts he had attempted, or would have tried to carry out had he not been locked away in the Bastille, his demonic career as seducer and sadist – ‘sexual terrorist’ – checked only by being confined to a cell for nearly twenty-nine years. ‘In him,’ she writes with grim relish, ‘one finds rapist and writer twisted in one scurvy knot. His life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real.’
They were there, the women; she knew they were, as shadows, footnoted names, scraps of gossip. She went back through time and found them, not as a scholar or historian, but as a prosecutor tracking down witnesses in hiding. She once wrote that if a reader lifted up the words on the pages of her books they would see – ‘far, far under the surface’ – her own life, and that if the print turned to blood, it would be her own blood, from many times and places. She wasn’t a memoir writer. She used that energy, that physical investment, to animate the dead, painstakingly disinterring Sade’s women from centuries of neglect and contempt.
The first of the three crimes she investigates is the case of Rose Keller, to whom Pornography is dedicated. Keller was a baker’s widow encountered by Sade begging on the streets of Paris on Easter morning, 1768. He persuaded her to come to his house, where he attacked her and cut her with a knife. She escaped by climbing out of the window, seeking assistance from the village women, who summoned the police. She was paid off and Sade was arrested the following day, imprisoned for seven months and banned from living in Paris. Four years later, he engaged in an orgy with a group of prostitutes in Marseilles, giving them sweets laced with the aphrodisiac Spanish fly, which made several of them violently sick. This time he was sentenced to death for sodomy and poisoning, both capital crimes. He fled the region, but was caught and imprisoned again in December 1772, escaping after four months.
Dworkin was a polemicist. Writing was shock therapy, a way to jolt the world out of its treads. Ambiguity, uncertainty, doubt did not suit her purpose. If there were six versions of a story, she took the worst and lit it with the most lurid filter, even if this meant underplaying women’s agency to make her case. She had sworn to tell the truth, but she also knew that the truth of her own experience and that of women like her wouldn’t be found in the official apparatus of police or hospital or legal records. It happened in the margins, unrecorded. Lean back through the centuries, listen for a struggle in the dark.
All the same, it is a matter of court record that none of the prostitutes in Marseilles were, as she claimed, forcibly sodomised, and all but one of the women refused anal sex entirely. Their own testimony suggests there was robust negotiation over what acts would be performed. As for Keller, the detail about the knife was not in her first testimony and Dworkin declines to record that it was she who negotiated a settlement with Sade’s mother-in-law, asking for an enormous 3,000 livres and eventually compromising on 2,400 livres.
This is not to say that Sade was innocent of all Dworkin’s charges. The final and most distressing act of his libertine years occurred in 1774, when he and his wife holed up in their chateau at Lacoste, procuring five teenaged girls as servants and sealing the castle for the winter. There is no surviving record of what happened inside, but Dworkin regarded it as indisputable that the focus was ‘sexual extravaganzas’. Whether this is true or not, the girls were held prisoner, despite entreaties from their parents; one received unnamed injuries and another died. When he was finally imprisoned three years later, Sade explained in a passionate letter that he had committed no crime, since under French law it was the procuress who was punished and not the purchaser, who was after all ‘only doing what all men do’ – Dworkin’s argument summed up in six words.
Sade’s casual attitude is matched by his biographers. They speak cheerfully of giving ‘a spanking to a whore’, ‘a sore behind’, ‘a rather disagreeable hour or two’. In 1953, Geoffrey Gorer remarked disbelievingly of Keller: ‘a woman so badly wounded would surely have had some difficulty in climbing walls.’ And in 1999, nearly two decades after Pornography was published, Neil Schaeffer observed of Sade’s behaviour in Lacoste: ‘the sort of girls . . . and the sort of parents such girls were likely to have, made Mme de Montreuil’s suspicions about blackmail rather more plausible.’ In these accounts, the poor are untrustworthy and prostitutes manifestly fair game.
Dworkin casts off this pervasive way of thinking. In all her books, she demonstrates a refined ability to think her way into the reality of violence, to locate her account from the position of the person with the least power, and to detrivialise the ex-perience of hurt and terror. A former sex worker herself, she refuses the pervasive fallacy of regarding those who work as prostitutes as automata, not people; insensate and disbarred from saying no. Furthermore, she sees that what is supposedly transgressive and radical about Sade’s writing is actually business as usual, that ‘advocacy and celebration of rape and battery have been history’s sustaining themes.’
What she is not skilled at is separating actual from imaginary wounds. Dworkin’s entire argument in Pornography is that there is no such thing as a purely imaginary sphere. As she says in her introduction, her work is distinguished from other books on pornography ‘by its bedrock conviction that the power is real, the cruelty is real, the sadism is real, the subordination is real: the political crime against women is real.’ What is imagined always impacts on someone’s body, either literally or by creating a climate of possibility. This is why it was so necessary to prove Sade’s actual crimes, and why years later the actress Linda Lovelace’s testimony about being abused on the set of Deep Throat would become the prime exhibit in Dworkin’s case against pornography. A classic pro-censorship activist, she regards Sade’s novels – The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette – as a direct extension of his lived experience, the pen stroke equal to the multiple instruments of torture wielded by his fictional libertines. The life stains the work. It is a totalitarian model of reading, in which no ambiguity or complexity can be allowed.
Not all women agreed. In the summer of 1973, around the time that Dworkin was writing the introduction to Woman Hating and Mendieta was spilling pig’s blood on the streets of Iowa City, Angela Carter put together a proposal for a book about ‘de Sade and sexuality as a political phenomenon and the myth of gender.’ She was thirty-three, newly divorced, recently returned to London from Japan, the author of five strange and entrancing, aggressively sexual novels. Unlike Dworkin, she wrote as happily for the soft-porn magazine Men Only as Spare Rib, the feminist bible, both of which emerged in the early 1970s.
Although Carter was far too individual and independent ever to be a doctrinaire feminist, she took her Sade idea to Virago, the new women’s publisher whose books my mother loved so much. She pitched it over lunch at the glamorous San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge (a favourite of Princess Diana, it’s not where one imagines the machinations of the women’s movement taking place). The proposal was accepted at the very first Virago commissioning meeting, in September 1973.
Carter warned her new editor, Carmen Callil, that she’d need ‘as long as a year to complete it’. In the end it took her five difficult years to construct an argument out of her gut feeling that there was more to Sade than misogyny, that there might even be something useful for women to discover in the interminable prison cells and torture chambers of his unhappy imagination. For all its elegance and erudition, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History is a
sleek anatomy of hell. Each time I read it I have an image of Carter swinging her long legs above an abyss, undeceived as to the horrors on display but formidably certain there’s a way out; protected, like the wise children of her own fictions, by her curiosity, her intelligence, her strong stomach and her interest in reality.
Her take on Sade, finally published two years before Pornography and criticised in it as a work of pseudo-feminism, is far more willing to assign agency to women, even if the system in which they are trapped offers few opportunities for independent action. She doesn’t entertain female victimhood, or consider it an empowering foundation for feminist futures. Her Rose Keller flipped a nasty situation on its head, using her ingenuity to get one over on the aristocracy. As for Sade himself, his misogyny is counterweighted by his advocacy for a full female sexuality, unchecked by reproductive obligations (he was as vocal an advocate of abortion as Reich, though the grotesque things that happen to pregnant women in his books suggests that liberation was not his only motivation).
For Carter, fantasy is not the same as fact. She regularly points out the gulf between the real and the imagined, observing that while Sade invented multiple horrific fictional ways of killing, as a judge on the revolutionary tribunal he was so adamant in his opposition to the death penalty that he was imprisoned yet again, this time for being too moderate (Dworkin, on the other hand, believed in the death penalty for rape, once arguing that if the first woman attacked by Sade had killed him, many lives would have been saved).
What’s more, Carter doesn’t believe Sade’s fantasies are primarily about sex at all, and nor does she regard misogyny as the driving force of his novels. She thinks they are actually about power and the lamentable, hateful consequences of power imbalances. Gender and genitalia are relevant, of course, but so too are class and money. Even more radically, she argues that the aim of Sade’s fiction is to expose this abhorrent system, even if in the pre-incarceration years of his libertinage he profited abundantly from it. For her, Sade’s subject is not the joy of freedom, but its obscene price.
In Pornography, Dworkin decried the way Sade was perpetually celebrated as someone in pursuit of freedom, by Sartre and de Beauvoir among many others.
Throughout the literature on him . . . Sade is viewed as one whose voracious appetite was for freedom; this appetite was cruelly punished by an unjust and repressive society . . . Sade’s violation of sexual and social boundaries, in his writings and his life, is seen as inherently revolutionary. The antisocial character of his sexuality is seen as a radical challenge to a society deadly in its repressive sexual conventions . . . The imprisonment of Sade is seen to demonstrate the despotism of a system that must contain, control, and manipulate sexuality, not allow it to run free toward anarchic self-fulfilment.
But what Carter saw was Sade’s deep ambivalence about total freedom. She doesn’t regard the novels as revelling in depravity, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the nightmarish consequences of unchecked appetite. Her Sade is sceptical, even paranoid, about freedom, and obsessed in particular with weighing and calculating its cost. Part of the pain of his novels is that they peel back the myth of liberty, exposing the multiple ways in which any individual’s sexual and political freedom depends upon the servitude and abasement of others. A connoisseur of mutilations, Carter calls him, meaning the mutilations that arise out of inequalities of every kind.
The people who have the power in reality – the bankers, judges, bishops, law-makers, financiers and politicians – are the people who have the power in Sade. The libertines in The 120 Days of Sodom, say, spending their profits from the Thirty Years War on a murderous blow-out, ‘leeches always lying in wait for the calamities they provoke rather than quell in order to profit from them all the more.’ Disaster capitalists, we call them now. Likewise, the people who don’t have power in reality suffer its lack here. Wives, daughters, women, girls, boys. The poor, the badly educated, the innocent, the young. Freedom in Sade’s universe is a zero-sum game: you either have it or you don’t, which is one of the reasons he continues to resonate in a twenty-first century of rape camps and Me Too. Neither the sexual practices of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein nor the dehumanising effect they had upon their many victims would have surprised Sade, and nor would the ascent of Trump. As Carter puts it: ‘One of Sade’s cruellest lessons is that tyranny is implicit in all privilege. My freedom makes you more unfree, if it does not acknowledge your freedom, also.’
Part of the reason her interpretation seems to me so accurate is that it attends, as very few people do, to the actual experience of reading Sade: what it feels like on a sentence by sentence level, in the body of the reader. Although Dworkin talks about Sade’s novels as gratifying lust, they aren’t comparable to other pornographic literature, and not simply because they contain scenes of extreme violence. Unlike S&M classics like Story of the Eye and The Story of O, they’re fundamentally untitillating.
To say, as people often do, that the sex is like a complicated formal dance or the action of machines in a factory is to catch at the immense tedium and mechanisation of the Sadeian debauch, while failing to convey its horror, which is not just that of observing a grisly spectacle. Sade’s fantasies and the way he writes about them have a capacity to perform a kind of internal severance, a spectacle of absolute nihilism that makes you at once reduced to and a stranger in your own body. One gets a brief, immolating whiff of what it might be like to be, as Simone Weil put it, a soul housed within a thing, a ruin with a human face.
Pleasure is not the point, either for the reader or for the libertines who control and operate the devilish machinery. The meticulous rituals that may or may not culminate in their difficult orgasms rest almost entirely on two things: forcibly assuming control over other bodies, including their involuntary or semi-voluntary functions, and the associated power to inflict serious pain, to wound and to kill. But this does not result in satisfaction. The more they seek gratification, the more empty, repetitive and tortuous their world becomes. The problem with creating hell is that you have to live there, too. Meanwhile, the bodies of their victims pile up, drained of blood, burned, cut apart and stitched back together, subject to atrocities that recall the work of Idi Amin or the Khmer Rouge.
A libertine himself, Sade embodies the complexities of the word liberty, which contains sinuously opposed meanings. From the Middle Ages on, it has meant freedom from bondage, slavery or imprisonment, from arbitrary control or dictatorship, but also the faculty or power to do as one likes without hindrance or restraint; freedom from fate or necessity; freedom of will; permission, leave; unrestrained use or access to a specific thing; action beyond the bounds of custom; licence; a privilege, immunity or right.
What this reveals, and what Sade is at pains to tell us, is that taking liberties is not the same as bestowing them. It’s no accident that the libertine’s paradise is a prison camp, walled and sealed, from which no one whose liberty is taken or who is taken at liberty will escape. Total liberty to act can and does have hellish consequences for the bodies unlucky enough to be acted upon. Absolute freedom, Sade warns, is closer to Auschwitz than Eden.
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Sade’s unwavering scepticism about the nature of sexual freedom is especially interesting in the light of reading Reich. Both imagine a society organised around the orgasm. But while Reich’s vision is utopian, Sade’s is an even more apocalyptic version of the vision of unbounded violence and rape imagined by Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents. Reich thought that sexual expression was a route not just to individual freedom but also to a freer world, composed naturally of equals. Sade, on the other hand, knew – indeed Sade’s own name attaches to the knowledge – that sex is not just about pleasure, connection, intimacy or transcendental joy. It’s an act that has multiple different intentions and imperatives, among them to hurt, to subdue, to humiliate, to punish, even to destroy.
The evasion of this darker aspect of sex was one of Sontag’s many criticisms of Reich. I
n her interview with Rolling Stone in the autumn of 1979, the year The Sadeian Woman was published, she talked about the naivety of his vision of sex. ‘I think that he really didn’t understand the demonic in human nature,’ she said, ‘and that he had a picture of sexuality only as something wonderful. And of course it can be, but it’s also a very dark place and a theatre of the demonic.’
This is typical of Sontag’s selective approach to facts. Reich was well aware of the possibilities of the demonic. It’s just that he regarded it as a symptom of damage, a warping of what he termed natural sexuality, which he believed could only ever be equable and benign (you can practically hear Foucault snorting from the grave). In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he specifically uses the word ‘demonic’ in a bravura account of how sexuality becomes distorted under patriarchal capitalism, that binding and pervasive system of submission and control. The limitation of sexual freedom for women and children – Sade’s perennial victims – makes sexuality into a commodity. As for men, they undergo so much shaming and repression in childhood that gentleness turns into rage. ‘From now on,’ he writes, ‘sexuality is indeed distorted; it becomes diabolical and demonic and has to be curbed . . . That this dirty sexuality is not natural sexuality but patriarchal sexuality is simply overlooked.’
Like Dworkin, Reich’s analysis was bedded in personal experience. When he was a boy of eleven, he realised his beloved mother Cecilia, a woman so unassuming she was nicknamed das Schaf, the sheep, was having an affair with his tutor. He saw them kissing. He heard the bed creak when they were together. Finally he watched them through a door, fascinated, disgusted, jealous. Part of him wanted to take the tutor’s place, and he fantasised about using the threat of telling his father as Oedipal leverage into his mother’s bed.