Maurice Lever: Sade. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.
Originally published in the Washington Times, September 26, 1993.
Democratic nations can’t get the hang of aristocracy. Ask an American to name an aristocratic family and your likely to hear ‘the Kennedys’ (who, being not only American but Irish, are doubly disqualified) or perhaps ‘the English royals,’ whose Windsor line has served as one of this century’s most prodigious sources of rich, white trash. Better still, consider the phrase, ‘Hollywood royalty,’ when referring to famous movie actors—an oxymoron comparable to ‘Coney Island champagne,’ or ‘Duluth chic.’
By contrast, the French are a nation for whom democracy, aristocracy, and despotism remain live wellsprings of conflicting currents. One of the most powerful whirlpools among French intellectuals results from the collision of the aristocratic passions and pretensions with those of democracy. Aristocrats, impelled by what the ancient Greeks called thumos—the part of the soul that gets angry, waxes righteously indignant, quarrels at a straw when honor’s at the stake—detest modern democrats—peaceable bourgeois who pride themselves on being down-to-earth. But perceiving that there is no honor in being undemocratic in a democracy, aristocrats (nowadays more likely to be disaffected bourgeois) quickly learn to pose as plus démocratique que la démocratie—thundering against the modest inequalities of bourgeois democracies while deploring the vulgarity, the complacency, the selfishness, in a word the populism of the populace.
The modern aristocrat wants to be above the law and protected by it; he wants to despise the vulgar while exacting their adulation, or at least their obedience. The Marquis de Sade represented these contradictory inclinations at their pathological extremes. Maurice Lever’s biography exhibits a pedestrian French intellectual’s confusion with respect to this mélange of arrogance and servility, too like his own prejudices to condemn, yet too obviously absurd and nasty to praise.
Something of a literary courtier himself, Lever begins by flattering the Sade family, who cooperated with his research efforts. “The house of Sade distinguished itself over the years through important service to church and state… [producing] men who helped to make the France of the Ancien Regime what it was and whose feudal pride our hero would cherish throughout his life,” and producing as well many nuns, whom our hero did not much cherish. It quickly became clear that the Marquis’s immediate family did not provide young Donatien (as Lever chummily calls him) with a home fit for heroes. His father, a bisexual courtier-littérateur, his uncle, “the very type of the libertine priest,” his mother, absent, his grandmother and aunts, who “welcomed the child as a veritable Jesus—and immediately created a kind of cult around him,” and even his best friend’s guardian, a count whose “favorite amusement was to fire a musket at workmen repairing nearby roofs” (“When he hit one, he jumped for joy”), bent the young twig in decidedly roué directions, unfitting him for life in any of the several political regimes France saw in Sade’s lifetime. “At the age of four his despotic nature was already formed.” By the age of ten he had been moved from Provence to Paris, where a Jesuit grammar school developed his taste for theatrics, whippings, and sodomy. “Let the show begin!” Lever loopily exclaims.
And a wretched show it was. Given to arranging orgies at which he would perform obscene acts with crucifixes while bellowing such challenges as “If thou art God, avenge thyself!” Sade soon came to the attention of civil and religious authorities, who, acting in the name of God, did indeed revenge Him. Lever tries to explain Sade’s antics as the result of bad upbringing and mental imbalance, while allowing that “To whip a defenseless woman is an ignoble act, whatever the torturer’s inner drives.” On the one hand, under the Ancien Regime such acts, when committed by the unnatural aristocrats, were mere misdemeanors; on the other hand, Lever intones, “noble birth was an unfair advantage.” And then again, Sade was made a scapegoat for a public outraged at the ‘aristoi’s’ excesses. But remember, “the torture [Sade inflicted] was more cerebral than actual,” as he preferred to terrify than to cut prostitutes (though he did a bit of both) and, by the way, didn’t the religion of the time exalt flagellation?
The description of Sade’s usual living quarters—ranging from a prison-like château designed for “the sole purpose of protecting pleasure from outside attack” to the real jails and lunatic asylums—affords Lever the irresistible chance to prattle in Foucaultian terms about “carceral space” and to indulge in French lit-crit chitchat about how “existed in language only,” replacing “the hazards of life” with “signs” (portentous emphasis in the original). For the ‘aristocrats,’ the prisons of the Ancien Regime allowed one to surround oneself with excellent books at the price of enduring bad food, tedious or insane fellow-inmates, and intrusive authorities who pestered him with silly rules and red-penciled his prose. That is, an old-fashioned prison resembled nothing so much as a small, mediocre American liberal arts college of today. It being easy to earn a reputation for derangement living in such circumstances, Sade did, acting out the familiar pattern of the undergraduate: spending his considerable idle time writing home with requests for food (he put on weight), alternatively raging at and cajoling the administration, seeking relief in sexual fantasizing and autoeroticism. To top off the parallels, upon his release he found himself “with no idea where to go, where to stay, where to eat, or where to find money.” An American lad would, of course, head home to mom and dad, but Sade, aged 50, had outlived his parents and alienated his pitiably bovine wife of 27 years. He sank to the dregs. He became a writer.
This sets Lever off on some more nonsense about how “Sade may have written masterpieces without knowing it”—his novel Justine being “one of the most powerful and striking creations of French literature.” To Lever, as to Sade in solitary confinement, no device is too squalid: he quotes Barthes, calls Sade’s prose subversive, and shamelessly compares the old hack to Laclos.
The sovereign isolato, who nonetheless gassed up at the slightest affront, careened on, from porno potboiler to potboiler, from jail to mental hospital, ending up, under the Napoleonic regime, as the director of theatricals starring his fellow-inmates at Charenton, the Paris asylum where the saner ‘aristocrats’ were allowed in to gawk and giggle at woebegone thespians, whose performances were deemed therapeutic by the ‘progressive’ director. “Long before Nietzsche, Sade showed that dramatic art was not the fruit of Apollonian clarity alone but also the progeny of Dionysus,” Lever scribbles, having seen that the Marquis is best employed as the intellectual’s equivalent of an inflatable plastic woman, malleable for any sodden pleasure of mind or heart. This is the Marquis’s fitting legacy.
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