Begun on October 22, 1785 and manically written upon a piece of makeshift parchment measuring 12 centimeters by 12 meters (4.7 inches by almost 40 feet), Marquis de Sade crafted 16 microscopic words per square inch over the course of 37 days in order to produce his first major work, and by some estimations his masterpiece, 120 Days of Sodom, a text so notorious that, over two centuries hence, it continues to be banned in various countries and is responsible for having killed a major Italian director after having adapted the novel to film.
Four elderly male aristocrats kidnap and make the black market purchase of 24 youths before retreating to an isolated castle with four veteran prostitutes. Their agenda is to explore the nature of vice over the course of four months using the oral reiteration of 600 of the prostitutes’ most extreme career experiences as their guide.
Many accuse Marquis de Sade of being a raving lunatic who, goaded by his hyperactive imagination, freely indulged his most carnal passions, in lieu of his awareness of their criminality. Others defend his title as that of a genius. Among the latter is the wife of Nobel prize-winning philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir (who many believe helped the existentialist compose his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness), as well as the whole of the French Surrealist movement, Benoît Jacquot, Bret Easton Ellis, Pierre Klossowski, Philip Kaufman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alec Baldwin, Martin Scorsese, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Angela Carter, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The latter was murdered shortly after the production of his adaptation of the novel, titled Salo, wrapped. By some assessments, the suspicious circumstances during Pasolini’s death suggest that detractors of the film contracted to have the filmmaker killed as a consequence of his, in their eyes, morally illicit product.
Yet to haphazardly dismiss Sade on the basis of reputation is unconscionable. As history has proven time and time again, the moral climate of the period in which a work appears may well be too frigid for a text, canvas, or reel of film to strive for, as the Chinese proverb succinctly attests, “What is vice today may be virtue tomorrow.” Moreover, as Friedrich Nietzsche observes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Insanity in individuals is something rare–but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” Thus, to assume that popular opinion is correct, even in the face of a work which houses countless acts which, even 200 years after their creation, have still yet to be supplied with descriptive labels, is aesthetically brusque.
Granted, today we do have terms for several of the acts which appear within the self-described “most impure tale that has ever been told,” such as kidnapping, murder, rape, flagellation and mutilation, cannibalism, sodomy, incest, urolagnia, abasiophilia, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, and analingus. But be forewarned, the number which we can linguistically encompass remain in the minority. For instance, as the text progresses through its four-part narrative structure, each recounted tale of vice increases in severity until we arrive at “She is given some respite and allowed to recruit her strength, then Messieurs resume work, but this time, as the nerves are pulled into sight, they are scraped with the blade of a knife. The friends complete that operation and now move elsewhere; a hole is bored in her throat, her tongue is drawn back, down, and passed through it [colloquially known as the “Columbian necktie”], ’tis a comical effect, they broil her remaining breast, then, clutching a scalpel, the Duc thrusts his hand into her cunt and cuts through the partition dividing the anus from the vagina [long before David Deflaco’s Chaos].”
Unlike most writers who remain hyperactively sensitive to the fact that most readers will inevitably associate subject matter with aesthetic worth, Sade refuses to kowtow to audiences after having found the perfect topical medium in which examine such diverse topics as the psychology and genesis of perversion, fetishism, and malevolence; the ethical obligation to familial relations; free will; the theory of desire; the philosophy of religion; rational egoism and altruism; gender relations; Aristotelian responsibility; (naturally) Sadomasochism; Machiavellian politics; aesthetics; and economic theory. The unbridled thinker not only refuses to suppress anything less that what he deems logistically necessary for the continuation of his plot’s naturalistic progression, but he unabashedly explores the ideas which such scenarios innately harbor. What results is Sade’s fashioning a forum by which to scrutinize subjects and theories which no other author has availed him or herself access before or since.
What is perhaps more remarkable than the breadth and scope which Sade’s material intellectually avails its writer, is the amount of ideas which would later be credited to many of the more famous thinkers throughout history. For example, 120 Days of Sodom includes explorations into the notions of Nietzschian power structures, Freudian/Lacanian sexuality and Death Drives, Darwinism, Marxism, the polarized influence of Erik Erikson’s Nature and Nurture, Emersonian theories upon charity, and Foucaultian Structuralism.
But, not only is Sade far from the gratuitous, hedonistic pornographer which many would like him to be, he proves to be a master craftsman of the written word. In lieu of the reader being issued a quartet of morally-deprived aristocrats who have their way with children, teens, and young adults of both sexes who are only restrained by their nearly limitless imaginations, the reader finds him or herself strangely pausing midway through the text as we are left to ponder our initial reaction to a particular scenario. Case in point: Despite the unjust legislation upheld by the four aristocrats, Adelaide–the 20 year-old granddaughter of the one of the tyrants and daughter to another–adamantly retains, while dogmatically clinging, to her convictions. The rub occurs in that Sade evokes, not admiration for such noble diligence, but outrage at what has become the character’s continuing naïve and, under the circumstances, ignorant assiduousness considering the consequences of so doing. As such, and much like his short story “Florville and Courval,” the author aptly, and with great ease and grace, deconstructs the principles which govern the “illegitimacy” of his work.
Aside from his grossly exaggerated premise which was interpreted by Pasolini’s as fodder for a political satire, 120 Days of Sodom evidences a wry sense of pitch black humor as the writer exhibits a philosophic comfort with his reasoning. Yet is it with his metaphorical depiction of corruption that he arrives as his unrepentant conclusions which all but begs that the foundations upon which morality and much of modern thought has been built is unfounded, contradictory, and only by happenstance still supporting its own weight–which says nothing (and, as a consequence, volumes) about what is standing upon it.
Furthermore, the work can be viewed as prophetic in many ways in that the 18th-century text presents a priest who accosts young, prepubescent males atop homosexual marriages. Lastly, aside from the writer’s supporters, there is the irrefutable influence which Sade has had upon his artistic successors, the foremost of which is Franz Kafka whose “In the Penal Colony” mimics a scene in Part Four of 120 Days of Sodom to an almost plagiaristic degree.
Much like Matthew Lewis’s composition to The Monk or Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” the passion with which 120 Days of Sodom was composed is second only to the dauntingly courageous manner in which its author unrepentantly delves into the human predicament. The only solace which both detractor and supporter can have is that Marquis de Sade only completed the first quarter of the text while leaving the notes for the other 75-percent of the work. As such, 485 pages of philosophical inquiry by way of moral depravity could have easily become, by ratio, a 1,300-page exposé of inundating theoretical sexual mayhem.
-Egregious Gurnow
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