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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Theatre matters: Sade the stubborn playwright
Thomas Wynn, University of Exeter
Apparently Sade has a problem with repetition. The same plot of a young woman's brutal misfortunes is played out with increasing intensity in three of his fictions, Les Infortunes de la vertu, Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, and finally La Nouvelle Justine. His novels' philosophical harangues regularly borrow material from other eighteenth-century writers and thinkers, and are often considered to be repetitive, to say nothing of what one recent biographer dismissed as 'the monotonous pornography that marks much of the marquis' formal writing' (Lawrence L Bongie, Sade, a biographical essay, [Chicago, 1998], p.xi). Sade was keen to avoid certain kinds of repetition, as evidenced by the concluding notes to Les 120 journées de Sodome, in which the author recommends to himself noting down all those characters who appear several times, and listing beside their names their various acts of debauchery. 'This note is most essential', he insists, 'and it is the only way that you shall be able to see your work clearly and avoid repetition' (Les 120 journées de Sodome [Paris, 1975], p.446).
It is not only Sade's fiction that is beset by the problem of repetition, but also his seemingly unoriginal plays. Theatre in all its forms constitutes a major thread in Sade's life and works, indeed his mother-in-law described it in a letter dated 29 May 1774 as his 'dominant passion, not to say his folly' (Sade, Theatre III [Paris, 1991], p.358]. From the private théâtres de société of his youth to the boards at the hospice of Charenton, it was above all a social practice for him. He wrote at least seventeen works, and claimed to have written more, the others being lost during his transfer from the Bastille a few days before its fall. Judging by the response of some critics, it may have been better had no plays survived at all. Gilbert Lely, one of the marquis's most devoted exegetes, writes regretfully that the conventional nature of Sade's plays saved them from incineration by his family and the authorities (Vie du marquis de Sade [Paris, 1957], p.286). Apparently worthless in that they repeat tired dramatic tropes, these plays display, in one critic's suitably evocative words, 'a slavish devotion to earlier models' (Julie C. Hayes, Identity and ideology: Diderot, Sade, and the serious genre [Amsterdam, 1991], p.xi), an evaluation that recent research challenges. The question of repetition applies not only to the content of what one journalist evaluates as 'a lot of Mills-and-Boony, mawkish, non-sadistic, unsuccessful plays' (John Lichfield, 'Father of sadism is recast as "humane" maverick', The Independent on Sunday, 27 August 2000), but also to their performance history, or rather lack thereof. Sade repeatedly wrote to actors, playwrights and theatre directors in Paris and across France, to have his plays performed. He offered his works free of charge, advertised their republican virtues and commercial value, and made repeated attempts to join Beaumarchais's Société des auteurs dramatiques. Yet for all his repeated and multifarious efforts, there are only four and a half attested performances of any of his plays; three of his drame Oxtiern, half of his comedy Le Suborneur (a riot interrupted its sole performance on 5 March 1791), and one of La Fête de l'amitié at Charenton.
Biographers and scholars explain these repeated attempts by arguing that the theatre offered Sade the most effective means of rehabilitating his blackened public persona, and as early as 1784 the imprisoned author wrote that to have his works performed on the Paris stage would make his 'youthful mistakes' be forgotten (see Sade, Theatre III, p.391). Like Andy Warhol, Sade realises that 'repetition adds up to reputation'. Without denying the very real importance of forging a coherent republican persona at a time of unprecedented socio-political upheaval, I'd like to hazard a different explanation for Sade's stubborn persistence in the face of continual failure.
This persistence is itself a kind of repetition, and while we have so far used the word in a fairly negative sense, such repetition can be seen as a creative and particularly theatrical process if we understand the term in the French sense of 'rehearsal'. We might use this slippage of meaning to see why rehearsal might be a helpful way of thinking about Sade's repeated attempts to be performed. Such answers as there are, may be found in his meta-theatrical plays, narrative fiction and biography. Sade is not a writer of spontaneity; torture, orgies, mass murder – all are considered, ordered and adjusted accordingly. While this process of rehearsal usually leads to action, it can and does become an end in itself as the actors narcissistically gaze upon themselves in a measured and rigorous performance: for example, La Philosophie dans le boudoir may be seen as a series of rehearsals, with Eugénie being educated through the constant repetition of words and actions, preparing her for a libertine career beyond the boudoir. There is very real pleasure in gazing upon oneself in a closely monitored, strictly ordered and discrete repetition of finely tuned actions. As the participant becomes his own spectator, so rehearsal becomes a self-sufficient fantasy of repeated and insistent protocol. For Sade, too, the repeated attempts to have his plays performed allow him to act out the role of the man of letters, to abide by a suitable protocol of behaviour, without actually achieving success on the public stage.
The metaphorical wings in which the rehearsal takes place offer not only an area of formal rigour; they also represent a space of safety. One anecdote must suffice: in the summer of 1772 Sade planned a series of theatrical performances at two of his residences in Provence. Correspondence of this period shows him spending a small fortune on hiring actors and organising the festivities, thereby establishing himself as a man of culture and power (see Sade, Theatre III, p.344-50). But by late June, once such rehearsals were finished and the season of performances was underway, Sade attended an orgy in Marseille involving sodomy and flagellation, after which several prostitutes accused him of poisoning them. Sade fled to Italy, and during his absence was burnt in effigy.
This episode illustrates in striking fashion that the rehearsal space offers a delimited area of control and self-assertion, but that once that space is breached, the individual comes under the glare of publicity and damage ensues. It may help us better understand why Sade was such a stubborn playwright in the 1790s; by vainly (in both senses of the word) repeating his efforts to be performed, he maintains the pretence of a rehabilitated man of letters without ever exposing himself to a difficult performance of that role. He can rehearse his lines to perfection without fear of forgetting them on the dangerous Revolutionary stage.