A Different Sade: Food For Thought
This British Academy public, discussion evening took place on 7 June 2007 and was convened and chaired by Professor Marian Hobson.
Speakers
Katherine Astbury, University of Warwick
Bob Gillan, University of Manchester
Will McMorran, Queen Mary, University of London
Caroline Warman, University of Oxford
Thomas Wynn, University of Exeter.
Respondents
Philippe Roger, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales, Paris
SveinEirik Fauskevåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Papers are available at the end of this report
The Marquis de Sade, long-term prisoner and pornographer, was never a member of the literary establishment of his own time, even though he undoubtedly wished to be such. For posterity, he is equally undoubtedly the major writer in French of the turn of the eighteenth century. This was recognized already by his nineteenth century successors, even if not always openly. In the last decades of the twentieth century in France, his position in literary history has been consecrated by his appearance in a Pléiade edition; moreover, his life is more securely known through a monumental biography (Maurice Lever, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, 1991. Paris: Librairie Anthelme Fayard, pp. 912) and through publication of his correspondences. The discussion evening sought to broaden awareness of the variety of his writings and to debate whether his experiments in the theatre, his bold playing on readers’ responses and his classic style amounted to the development for literary history of a different Sade. The papers were given by a group of young British scholars, Katherine Astbury, Bob Gillan, Will McMorran, Caroline Warman and Thomas Wynn; their respondents were two established continental scholars (Professors Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg, Norway, and Philippe Roger, France and USA).
Sade’s wish for recognition as an homme de lettres, proved by his essay Idée sur les romans (1800) was discussed by Katherine Astbury (Warwick) and Thomas Wynne (Exeter). Sade’s estimation of his contemporaries, Astbury showed, corresponds to ours rather than to his own epoch’s: an emphasis on women novelists (Mesdames Graffigny and Riccoboni), an awareness of the difficulty of writing novels during a period of political instability, and his discussion of the relation of the Gothic novel to revolutionary anxieties and trauma. For Wynne, repetition and theatricality are threads linking his major explorations of debauchery and cruelty with his desperately unsuccessful but much more conventional theatre, and his continual efforts to get his plays performed. The idea of a rehearsal, with its adjusted order and allowed self-contemplation can explain a pattern in Sade’s actual behaviour: the repetition of attempts to be performed does away with the need to act out the role of reformed writer during the dangers of the Revolution. Caroline Warman (Oxford) pointed out that the unlikely and practically contemporaneous couple of Jane Austen and Sade shared effects of style – which Warman illustrated. Both move beyond a common irony on the topic of female education, and allow theatricality to work in their novels as a social structure concerned with disguise, with corruptability and with the ‘acting out’ of fantasies - performed on others: for Sade, in manoeuvres, in social interaction for Austen. Bob Gillan (University of Manchester) on the contrary discussed not the fantastic but the religious-political elements in Sade, underlining similarities between Sade’s ideas and those of the major figure of the anti-Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre. Will McMorran (Queen Mary, University of London) showed that the implied reader in a Sade novel cannot easily be aligned with the usual figure allowed in a reader response theory such as Wolfgang Iser’s; the teaching of Sade in “the academy” is pornography in the class-room, and needs to be thought through, so that we do not treat the sex and the cruelty as if they weren’t there.
The respondents expanded the papers by their comments, further complexifying the view of Sade developed during the evening: Philippe Roger for instance allowing that the classical elements in his style can be seen as part of a dynamic which undercuts and detabilizes the reader’s expectations in an almost dialectical manner, and Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg for instance remarking that the protocols for repetition in the pornographic novels may help us understand why Flaubert used the epithet ‘religious’ of the man known in his century as the “Divine Marquis”.
Marian Hobson, FBA
Professor of French
Queen Mary, University of London
Papers
Speakers
Katherine Astbury: The respectable M. de Sade, literary critic
Bob Gillan: Sade, Joseph de Maistre and Religion
Will McMorran: Reading and Teaching Sade
Caroline Warman: The ironic encounters of the Marquis de Sade and Jane Austen
Thomas Wynn: Theatre matters: Sade the stubborn playwright
Respondents
Philippe Roger
SveinEirik Fauskevåg
NOTES TO EDITORS
Published:
06 July 2007
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