De Sade and the enlightenment

I've been reading the Wicked Marquis. And I'm intrigued.

In The Marquise de Theleme he spends the firstparagraph building up a picture of happiness - an enlightened marriage of confidence between two equals, tender sentiments, rationality, equableness. It's a delightful vision. Then, in a couple of sentences, he destroys it - kills the husband, reduces the wife to penury, and starts a train of debaucheries and cruelties.

I'm intrigued by the way he sets up and casts down this image of happiness. Partly, I think, he does so out of a distaste for conventional pieties. A distaste for the kind of reasonableness and 'getting along nicely' that suffices instead of passion. I can share that - I always find the world of Jane Austen tempts me to rip the curtains, to throw ink at the wallpaper, to shout 'fuck!' - anything to bring a bit of real passion to her closeted texts. (Yes, I can read Austen, and I love her style - but God, I would hate to live in her world.) De Sade sees the reasonable and 'good enough' as inauthentic - in which he's an early Existentialist, demanding we live authentic lives, as Sartre does.

And de Sade can use the language of the Enlightenment just as well as any 'enlightened' writer.

But I think that there's a second urge, too. He really does want to destroy. It's not just an urge to cruelty, but also the sheer delight of the child who has built a sandcastle only to smash it, watch it crumble as the tide comes in, jump on the remains till there's only a hump of sand to show where the castle stood. It's a primal urge.

And like any rebellious child, he wants dirt. This isn't erotica - it's not written to delight; he wants dirt, excreta, flabby old bodies, the disgusting rather than arousing. Nobody loves him, everybody hates him, he's going in the garden to eat worms, and dirt, and shit, and look, nobody loves him. But few children devote themselves to writing about it, to smashing their childhood Edens in that way. The marquis de Sade's erotic is an erotic of rebellion.

There's something else that intrigues me. It's the utterly cool, scientific way that de Sade is proceeding here. Later on, in 120 days of Sodom, he actually tries to reduce sexual activity to painting-by-numbers; 120 days, 120 different tortures. (It makes it tedious reading.)

Now this isn't unprecedented in French literature -- particularly when the subject of the experiment is female. (That's an intriguing insight on its own, of course.) Rousseau for instance sees a young woman as something to be experimented with, taught, moulded. In a horrible way, de Sade is actually proceeding in a typically Enlightened way - despite the fact that he's trying to destroy the Enlightenment.

I find de Sade quite intriguing. Some works are more readable than others; at the end, I suspect, he was as mad as the other inhabitants of the Charenton lunatic asylum. But he has his points - and though I may not be following his example in my writing, he's certainly made me think.