British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A Different Sade: Food for Thought
Thursday, 7 June 2007
A British Academy discussion evening convened and chaired by
Marian Hobson, FBA, Queen Mary, University of London
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Reading and Teaching Sade
Will McMorran, Queen Mary, University of London
Sadean fiction poses a unique set of interpretative challenges to the modern reader. The sophisticated reader of novels may be used to dealing with unreliable narrators, but what happens when one suspects an author of unreliability? Reading is a far simpler activity when we know nothing about the author of the text we are reading – it leaves us free, perhaps dangerously so, to construct the author from the text alone, to create an implied author without any interference. This is the situation in which some of my first-year students found themselves this year when they read two of Sade's short stories, Eugénie de Franval, in which a father raises then seduces his own daughter, and Florville et Courval, in which the unfortunate heroine manages unwittingly to commit incest with her brother, son and father respectively, and to send her mother to the gallows. With minimal knowledge of the historical Sade, some of my students produced readings of these stories which cast Sade as a proto-feminist, campaigning for the rights of women in an oppressive patriarchal society. One, for example, argued, 'Sade accentuates the suffering of all the good women, which probably was his way of trying to encourage women to stand up more for what they want.'
This reading of Sade, which is not in fact without quite distinguished precedents in twentieth-century Sadean criticism, exposes some deeply held assumptions about literature and about authors of literature. One of these is that literature is good for you, and the other is that authors are our friends – that they share basic human values with us, and that they are always on our side. When Wayne Booth conceptualized the figure of the implied author in The Rhetoric of Fiction, an author constructed from the literary text by the reader, he conceived of him as a friendly and wise figure. Booth, a specialist of Henry Fielding, cast the implied author in the image of the convivial presence that looms large in Tom Jones, a novel in which reader and author are represented as fellow travellers in a stagecoach. When my students were reading Sade as a campaigner for women's rights, they were duplicating a generalized implied author based on their previous experiences of literature, one for whom incest is wrong and crime never pays. Neither Booth nor these students could imagine circumstances in which the reader might construct an author as an enemy, or rival, with views and values irreconcilable with his or her own, an author on the side of his libertine criminals rather than his suffering heroines. If we do construct Sade as an antagonist rather than as an ally, our reading is likely to become marked by resistance rather than co-operation. We may not want to be the kind of reader the more extreme Sadean texts want us to be - to play, in other words, the implied reader to Sade's implied author. We may instead wish to distance ourselves from the implied reader of a text like Juliette, La Nouvelle Justine or the 120 Journées de Sodome, because we may suspect him to be very much like Sade himself – who was, after all, an avid reader as well as writer of his own manuscripts.
The feminist conception of the unintended or resisting reader might be thought to offer a model for the reader's antagonistic negotiation with the Sadean text. One attraction of such a model would be that it would allow us to read Sade without feeling like fellow conspirators of an author whose fictional narratives enact various scenarios of brutal sexual violence - to read Sade without feeling like accessories to fictional rape. This casting of the reader in the role of resistor, battling nobly with a villainous author, may be more comfortable than the alternative part of the reader as fellow conspirator. It is also, it must be said, a rather quixotic scenario – and one that curiously echoes the way in which Sade himself has in the past been cast in the Romanticized role of a noble free spirit at odds with authority. One could argue that a true act of resistance for the reader of Sade would be to stop reading him - after all no-one is forcing us to. If we continue to read Sade it must be for the simple reason that we enjoy it, and this enjoyment is worth further reflection. In order to make Sade literary, to make him a subject available for academic discourse, it seems to me as if Sadean critics have with few exceptions projected a particular image of both themselves and their author to their peers. An image according to which the critic himself is impervious to the graphic representations of sex in the Sadean text – as if he or she were, in Browning's (and more recently Tony Nuttall's) words, 'dead from the waist down.' As Linda Williams has said of critical writing on pornography generally,
'Listening to men on this topic, one sometimes wonders how the pornography industry survives, since its products are claimed to be so boring and repetitious. Listening to women, one wonders how anything else survives in the face of a pornography that is equated with genocide.'
The sex in Sade has indeed often been described as boring and monotonous – far easier to say this perhaps, than to admit that it is pleasurable in any way. Aside from the fact that we wouldn't allow our students to dismiss a literary text as boring, and would berate them for failing to engage with it properly, critical declarations of boredom are often rather unconvincing. For example, Geoffrey Gorer, who did much to introduce Sade to Anglophone readers, wrote in the 1930s that 'On first dipping into Juliette, I found only the boring and nauseous perversity that I had been led to expect'(emphasis added). Boredom and nausea are an unlikely combination, the former suggesting a lack of response to the text, the latter suggesting an intensely physical (but of course not erotic) response.
If most readers read Sade's fiction for the simple reason that they enjoy it, this must include the sexual content that is, after all, its most obvious feature. This is not to make a monster of the reader, to make a sadistic villain of him or her, but to make him or her a little more human. Literary critics can learn much in this regard from recent film theory about the pleasures of the gaze, whether they be sadistic, masochistic or a fluid combination of the two, but in order to do so they must first be willing to admit the guilty pleasures of the Sadean text – pleasures which may otherwise become the elephant in the boudoir of Sadean criticism.
I was originally going to conclude by saying that Sade's place in the academy, made literal by this event, is secure enough now for us to broach these questions. Sade has been canonized in the Pléiade, has joined the ranks of Worlds' Classics, and is attracting considerable critical activity. But his place in the academy is not quite as settled as I had until very recently assumed: while critics are happy to talk about Sade to each other, they seem rather less happy on the whole to talk about him to their students. Sade actually appears on very few university undergraduate curricula in either the UK or in France – no more than half a dozen in either case. Are we afraid of shocking our students? I'm not sure we need to be so defensive. Teaching Sade is challenging, particularly if we are going to do it honestly. One cannot help but be aware of the sexual politics of the classroom when teaching Sade, particularly as a male teacher of predominantly female groups of students – a pedagogic situation that ironically and uncomfortably mirrors that of many Sadean texts, including La Philosophie dans le boudoir. However, perhaps because of its unique challenges, teaching Sade is also uniquely rewarding, and those who do teach it find that on the whole students respond well to the challenge. In any case, not to teach Sade is effectively to censure him, a rather absurd position given his widespread availability and healthy sales figures. Sade's place in the academy will mean very little if he continues to be excluded from the classroom.