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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Response from Philippe Roger, Ecole des hautes Etudes Sociales, Paris
Sade (whose books were still hidden in bookstores' closets when I was writing my Mémoire de maîtrise under the guidance of the late Robert Mauzi) had to fall prey some day to Academia. Let us rejoice, in any case, that he should have inspired such talented and inventive commentators.
Katherine Astbury has underlined the 'need to recognise Sade's modernity firmly within the 18th century context in which he was working'. I could not agree more. Previous (and diversely brillant) generations of writers insisted, in the wake of the Surrealistic and Freudo -Marxist readings of Sade, on praising Sade mostly for his supposedly modern (if not most -modern) radicality and radicalism. However well -intentioned, such approaches did not only make Sade into some kind of literary UFO ; paradoxally and unwillingly, they reduced the originality of Sade. It has been the task of more recent scholarship to reinstate Sade in his time and place, even though he has been very much untimely, intempestif, and out of place.
Just as Katherine Astbury is right to evoke the 'respectable M. de Sade, literary critique' (his Idée sur le roman is one of the most intuitive essays on the genre), Caroline Warman is right to draw a parallel between his writings and Jane Austen's (the fact that Sade deeply disliked the British -Gothic fad, especially on the stage - see his letters complaining that French audiences were becoming 'cannibalistic' under British influence - does not weaken, but on the contrary adds weight to her argument); and so is Thomas Wynn, when he calls Sade a 'stubborn playright', an excellent description of a 'homme de qualité' who always dreamt of becoming a man of letters (like his father and uncle, by the way) and who picked on theatre as the obvious place wherein to build a reputation for himself (it should be added that even if some of his failures as a dramatic author seem well deserved, others of his plays do not strike us as worse than some of the hits of the time, Merciers's. for instance. Sade was, once again, remarkably unlucky : his pet play Le Suborneur fell victim, not to its weaknesses, but to the storming of the theatre by the sans -culottes who were inaugurating a new strategy of permanent control and censorship of theatrical representations…) ; similarly, I found quite interesting Robert Gillan's remarks on the echos that can be found between De Maistre and Sade's œuvres : in spite of the fact that Sade was deeply and firmly anti -religious, that he literally hated and constantly reviled revealed religions and their clergy, a cautious parallel with De Maistre can be quite enlightening : both authors repudiate Rousseauism as an error (Sade), even a criminal one (De Maistre) ; the convergence of their political discourses, however, is more apparent than real : De Maistre the 'reactionary' (Cioran's words) wants to rebuild society on a highly hierarchical system based on political theology ; Sade, a political moderate engulfed in the revolutionary storm, contented himself with pushing some of the key principles of the French Enlightenment to absurd consequences, as we can se in The Philosophy in the Bedchamber, a book which your own Aldous Huxley recognized as 'a reductio ad absurdum of Revolutionay principles'.
How are we to read Sade? With pleasure, Will Mc Morran reminds us. What do we make of him, not in the bedchamber, but in the classroom? There is no simple answer to that question. But I am convinced that , in all fairness, we must see Sade as a man of letters of his time, if only to be able to perceive how much he was déplacé in his own time - and places. Sade is not a 'product of his milieu', notwithstanding Beauvoir's rather reducive views ; intellectually, he belongs to many times : his culture is pre-Enlightenment, his atheism is of a XVIIth century breed, his tastes go towards Ariosto and to his 'parent', his relative, Petrarch - and, with all his archaisms, he IS modern after all....
Sade is never where he should be. He missed Bastille day, having called on the people to storm the dungeon a few days before and got himself transferred to another prison for that. He even missed his own execution during the Terror. When guards came to take him to the guillotine, they could not find him - thanks to his having been shuttled to yet another jail - and they could only write after his name, on the 'fatal list' : ABSENT. The next day, Robespierre was indicted and Sade survived…
Sade does not belong : it might well be the reason why he is so much alive.