Prompted by the thoughts of Foucault, I picked up Sade in order to understand for myself the most infamous heathen of the modern era. Despite the evolution of his character through-out history, such as the inclusion of his name in describing complicit acts of sexual violence, it seems on a broad level that he is poorly if not completely misunderstood. The book is a collection of short stories written early in Sade’s career at which time he still occasionally conceded to the prevailing morals of the time. The narratives for the most part and formulaic and repetitive, there is the noble young lad, his pious virgin, their doting parent and naturally the libertine scoundrel who ruins all in the chase to satisfy his ravaging desires. The bad guys want revenge for being duped and the good guys will blindly kill themselves for love. The exceptions of this are Sade’s essay at the beginning, the allegorical tale in the middle and the incestuous romp at the end. These three are by far the most enjoyable (if you can say such a thing), including fatality which is too hilariously convoluted to miss, though more importantly they are works of depth that pay finer tribute to the secular and realist aims of Sade’s argument.
Perhaps because it is one of his early works and he had not yet sunk to the level of horrendousness which has made him both mad and famous, for the contemporary reader who daily withstands pornographic ads on the net and MTV video clips the works provocative punches seem somewhat less then packing. Despite the lack of shock in the aesthetics of the novel Sade’s ingenious in the debunking of soppy sentiment, useless manners, conservative ideals and pious devotion are as fresh and relevant than ever. It is from this thought that the likes of Freud, Degas, Picasso, Bataille, Sartre and Camus have continued to explore and all of whom reinforce what is natural to humans: to fuck and to shit.
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‘But the man who, by dint of long study and sober reflection, has succeeded in training his mind not to detect evil in anything, to consider all human actions with the utmost indifference, to thing, to regard them all as the inevitable consequence of a power – however it is defined – which is sometimes goods and sometimes perverse but always irresistible, and gives rise both to what men approve and to what they condemn and never allows anything to distract or thwart its operations, such a man, I say, as you will agree, sir, may be as happy behaving as I behave as you are in the career which you follow. Happiness is an abstraction, a product of the imagination. It is one manner of being moved and depends exclusively on our way of seeing and feeling. Apart from satisfaction of our needs, there is no single thing which makes all men happy. Every day we observe one man made happy by the very circumstances which makes his neighbor supremely miserable. There is therefore nothing which guarantees happiness. It can only exist for us in the form given to it by our physical constitution and our philosophical principles.’
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