A Man for All Centuries, and Sins

[Dave Monroe]

>From Marcelle Clements, "A Man for All Centuries, and
Sins," NY Times, Sunday, April 21st, 2002 ...

ATE was always rather cruel to the Marquis de Sade,
even in death, though all he asked for was an unmarked
grave in a rustic setting. "All traces of my tomb will
disappear from the face of the earth," he wrote in his
will, "just as I hope all traces of my memory will be
erased from the memory of men."

But when Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade died in
1814 at age 74, at Charenton, a French asylum for the
insane, his son arranged for the usual Roman Catholic
rites, and he was buried in the cemetery there, his
grave marked by a cross. A few years later, Sade's
corpse was dug up and his skull taken away by a
doctor, who wished to study it.

The 21st century has not erased the traces of this
aristocratic revolutionary and provocateur, who spent
almost all his adult life incarcerated for sex crimes,
blasphemy or pornography — not his exuberant libido,
or his extravagant intellect, or his mark on the
bloodiest, most turbulent era of French history,
spanning Louis XV and XVI's reigns, the Revolution,
the Terror and Napoleon's empire.

On the contrary, Sade's demoniacal cultural energy
seems far from spent. On Friday, the marquis will make
yet another remarkable entrance, this time in the
captivating movie "Sade," directed by Benoît Jacquot
and starring Daniel Auteuil in what some French
reviewers deemed his best performance.

Far from forgotten, about a fourth of Sade's enormous
creative output has survived, and his books, published
by Grove Press since the 1960's, continue to sell.
"Juliette," "Justine: Philosophy in the Bedroom," "The
120 Days at Sodom" — these are bizarre, voluminous,
still shocking catalogs of sexual pathology
alternating with vociferous morality lessons. At the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition
"Surrealism: Desire Unbound" is now displaying homages
to the "Divine Marquis," an idol of the
Surrealists.... 

[...]

"Why does he merit our interest?" asked Simone de
Beauvoir in "Must We Burn Sade?," her extraordinary
1951 essay. "The fact is that it is neither as author
nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention;
it is by virtue of the relationships which he created
between these two aspects of himself." 

If he is remembered, it isn't only because his name
was given to a perversion. (Witness the relative
obscurity of the lesser known half of sado-masochism,
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of "Venus in Fur.")
The marquis has come to be credited for exploring
themes and articulating concepts that would be taken
up again a century after his death by Nietzsche and
Freud. And he is seen as a precursor of the
Surrealists and the Existentialists, to say nothing of
what some cultural critics call "the modern
imagination."

His arguments — and he never ceased to argue — touch
upon every current controversy: personal freedom,
privacy, violence, abuse, incest, abortion, pollution,
class, money, privilege, the corruption of
institutions, the absence of God, the role of nature
and the dilemma of gender. But even beyond these
conceptual categories, Sade's creative work reveals
the most primitive humanity: hate, rage, greed,
avarice, unquenchable lust, gluttony, jubilant
fascination with waste, the furious compulsion to
lacerate, pierce, despoil, violate, annihilate — and
vast systems of ideas constructed to justify its
expression.

One need only follow the news to see the relevance of
Sade's obsessions — and the pervasive sadomasochism of
everyday life. No, not S & M dinner cafes featuring
waitpersons dressed in leather and carrying fancy
cat-o'-nine-tails, but the despoiling of children's
innocence, the gross abuse of the weak, the politics
of cruelty and numbness. The marquis's texts make an
ideal voiceover for the reports of wife beating, of
slashings and burnings and rapes — and also of the
brazen chicanery of the powerful, the ruinous
machinations of financiers, the embezzlements, the
armies of homeless.

Literature can rarely match everyday news of the world
for horror and pain, but Sade provided us with
illuminating tableaux vivants — 18th-century close-ups
of the action....
 
Perhaps in part the implosion of inexpressible
outrage, but also the bizarre voyeuristic fulfillment
of seeing how the malefactor laughs.

[...]

The closest any movie has come must be Pier Paolo
Pasolini's long-censored "Salo, or the 120 Days of
Sodom" (1975). This is an adaptation of Sade's most
outré text, set in fascist Italy in the 40's. Roland
Barthes was credited with additional writing for the
movie, which begins with a suggested reading list of
French critics and thinkers and which features so much
defecation, coprophilia, flagellation, group sodomy,
rape and torture, domination, dread, derision,
passivity, sophistry and mockery — to say nothing of
the indefatigable disgorging of copious dialogue
involving the same — that those who can bear to watch
it will carry away some memorable clues to the Sadeian
iconography.

[...]

Another unforgettable movie was the surreal "Marquis"
(1989), one of the most entertaining avant-garde films
ever made. It was directed by Henri Xhonneux but is
usually credited as the brainchild of the French
artist Roland Topor, its art director and co-writer.
The actors wear animal masks .... The marquis is a
canine who spends a great deal of time quarreling with
his penis (named Colin) about sex, morality, politics
and literature. The action is intermittently
interrupted by raunchy claymation interludes,
re-enacting passages from Sade's texts....
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/arts/21CLEM.html

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