The Novel

by Steven Moore

  The lovely Rosalie went ahead; her agility gave her wings, and we could not keep up with her. Suddenly, having reached the top of a little hill, she turned toward us to catch her breath and smiled at our slowness.—Never before, perhaps, had the two colors whose praise I sing been so triumphant.—Her burning cheeks, her coral lips, her gleaming teeth, her neck of alabaster against a verdant background, caught the attention of all. We had to stop to behold her: I will say nothing of her blue eyes, or of the glance she cast at us, for this would divert from my subject, and because I try to think of these things as little as possible. Let it suffice that I have provided the best possible example of the superiority of these two colors over all the rest, and of their effect on man’s happiness. (11)

  Sternean sentimentalism is followed by Sternean typography in the chapter that follows, which reads in its entirety:

  Chapter XII

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  Maistre masterfully captures the restlessness of consciousnesses, recording “the variable and discordant assortment of sensations and perceptions that make up my existence” (38) in a startlingly modernist manner. He plays with the mind–body dichotomy (using the terms soul and beast) by dramatizing instances where his mind is off thinking about something else while his body performs some habitual task, nowhere more amusingly than when the narrator half-awakes one morning with an erection and masturbates to his mistress’s image while his soul is “still entangled in sleep’s veils,” sparking a sniffy debate between the awakened soul and “the other” in Sterne’s charmingly smutty fashion (39).

  The novel is a tribute to the powers of the imagination, which collapses time and space: “From the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables [a 1787 convocation]; from the very bottom of Hell to the last fixed star beyond the Milky Way, to the limits of the universe, to the very portals of chaos—such is the vast field I wander, lengthwise and breadthwise and entirely at my leisure, since I have as much time as space at my disposal” (37). Discussing his small library of novels, he praises them for taking him part of the way on his imaginary voyages and for inspiring him to add his own “diverse sensations I experience in those enchanted realms” (36). Not surprisingly, the librarian Jorge Luis Borges alludes to Maistre’s novel in one of his stories;224 at times it reads like one of his ficciones.

  Voyage around My Room is an astonishing dramatization of the mind at play, of the relativity of time, of the workings of memory, of the psychopathology of everyday life—such as the effect of your clothing on your mood—all conveyed with charm and erudition. Aside from Jacques the Fatalist, it’s the only successful 18th-century French attempt to emulate the profound whimsy of Tristram Shandy. A voyage of self-discovery, the novel concludes with Maistre’s triumphant realization that the authorities can confine the body but not the imagination:

  Imagination, realm of enchantment!—which the most beneficent of beings bestowed upon man to console him for reality—I must quit you now. Today is the day that certain people, upon whom my fate depends, presume to give me back my freedom—as if they they had taken it away from me! As if it were in their power to steal it from me and prevent me from traveling, as I please, the vast, ever open space before me!—They may have forbidden me to travel through a city, one place, but they left me the entire universe: infinity and eternity are at my command. (42)225

  In the chapter on his library of novels, Maistre finds “in this imaginary world a virtue, goodness, and unselfishness which I have yet to encounter thus combined in the real world I inhabit” (36). Without Maistre’s note of sarcasm, Bernardin likewise felt that fiction provided comforting escapism, in his case offering the reading public an island getaway, a modern pastoral that hides its head in the tropical sand rather than face modern problems. “Literature is the daughter of heaven,” says the old man in Paul and Virgina, “who has come down to earth to lighten the troubles of the human race. The great authors she inspires have always appeared in those times which all societies find most difficult to bear, times of barbarism and depravity” (113). But another novelist of the time thought it better to fight barbarism with barbarism, depravity with depravity. We can’t put him off any longer: Mesdames et messieurs, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade.

  The fiction of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) is the dark and bloody crossroads where d’Urfé’s way and Sorel’s way meet for a midnight orgy. His novels are like photographic negatives of those in d’Urfé’s romance/pastoral tradition, where the quest for virtuous love is turned into a crime spree of violent sex, set in inverted paradises where passions are satiated rather than sublimated. Like Sorel and his iconoclastic followers, Sade mocks the proprieties of the conventional novel, messes up its pretty face, toughens it up to meet the revolutionary changes underway. Virtually every early-modern French novelist followed Horace’s precept “to delight and to instruct”; taking a tough-love approach, Sade horrifies and instructs. In his view, the reader needs to be shocked, not delighted. A soldier and a notorious libertine, Sade might never have become a novelist had he not been thrown in jail for his scandalous exploits. Incarcerated in 1778, partly due to the machinations of his mother-in-law, the furious Sade decided to declare “all-out war on the society that had judged and imprisoned him, and on that virtue which it preached as the ultimate good.”226 Earlier, Sade had written some poetry, plays, a travel account to Italy, and the brief “Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man,” but his weapon of choice for his all-out war was fiction: Sade hijacked the novel as a vehicle for his terrorist attacks on civilized values and Enlightenment thinking.

  Taking Boccaccio’s Decameron as a model for his first attack, Sade between 1782 and 1785 wrote The 120 Days of Sodom (Les Cent-vingt journées de Sodome), “the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began,” he warns the reader, “a book the likes of which are met with neither amongst the ancients nor amongst us moderns” (253). The novel starts off grim and menacing, not with the stagy foreboding of a Gothic novel but with the sickening feeling that something seriously fucked-up is going to happen.227 In the early 18th century, four representatives of the oppressive ruling classes—a nobleman (the Duc de Blangis), a clergyman (the Bishop of X***), a magistrate (the Président de Curval), and a banker (Durcet), all of whom profited from Louis XIV’s military expansionism—plan an elaborate, four-month orgy at Durcet’s hidden château in Switzerland during winter. Assembling 42 others for their orgy (their four daughters, four female storytellers, eight male prostitutes, and 16 kidnapped boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 15, plus staff), the plan is for each historienne to narrate five stories a night for a month, each illustrating 150 examples of sexual depravity, moving month-by-month from “simple” to “murderous” ones to amass a 600-entry catalog of perversion. Early on, the narrator boasts: “he who should succeed in isolating and categorizing and detailing these follies would perhaps perform one of the most splendid labors which might be undertaken in the study of manners, and perhaps one of the most interesting” (218). (Of course there’s the less splendid likelihood that Sade was also making deposits in his spank bank of masturbatory fantasies.) As the debauchees
listen to the stories during the evening, they are inspired to act out some of them with their victims, though all day long they indulge in repulsive activities, ending each night in a drunken orgy. They begin mutilating their sex slaves—“Horrid things were perpetrated in the salon” (669)—then torturing them to death. At the end of the 120 days, only 16 of the original 46 participants remain alive.

  Sade didn’t complete the novel. In the autumn of 1785, he wrote out a working draft (with notes to himself for revision) consisting of a 70-page introduction, the first month’s cycle of stories—basically an account of all the perverts encountered by a whore named Madame Duclos during her long career—and an outline for the remaining three parts. He set it aside to work on other things, but lost the manuscript when he was transferred from the Bastille to the Charenton lunatic asylum in 1789, to his bitter frustration.228 Perhaps it’s just as well, for the novel was doomed to fail for several reasons. First, the mesmerizing introduction, with its chilling backstories of the protagonists and their philosophies, makes the novel’s points well enough—the abuse of power; sex abuse as a metaphor for the predatory relationship between the upper and lower classes; the indifference of Nature to virtue and morality, and the instinct for cruelty it plants in some individuals; the erotic excitement of crime; selfish pleasure as the only goal in life—rendering further elaboration almost unnecessary.229 Second, the further elaboration is boring: the quality of writing falls off once Duclos begins her stories, which are just obscene anecdotes, not well-made tales as in the Decameron. And Sade knew this: as early as the first day, Curval interrupts Duclos to complain her stories lack the “searching details” necessary for him to “judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners” (271), and on the final day of her narration, Duclos beseeches “Messieurs to have the kindness to forgive me if I have perchance bored them in any wise, for there is an almost unavoidable monotony in the recital of such anecdotes; all compounded, fitted into the same framework, they lose the luster that is theirs as independent happenings” (568).230 The material surrounding her tales is equally sketchy, just repetitious tallies of who does what to whom and in which orifice. There are a few striking images, as when the hostility between sex and religion is evoked (albeit somewhat ludicrously) by the Duc’s “heaven-threatening prick,” which “had not the least inclination to lower the awful stare whereby it seemed bent on cowing heaven” (294–95). But most of it is cliché-ridden porn that gets old in a hurry. In his “Essay on Novels” Sade says a novelist’s main duty is to “maintain the [reader’s] interest until the very last page” (16), but even many of Sade’s admirers lose interest after a hundred or so pages, as I did when I attempted Sodom in my twenties. Finally, Sade quickly realized that his “framework,” engineered with anal precision, was flawed; he organized it so as to progress from simple to murderous perversions, but that meant concealing extreme ones (involving coprophagy and torture) that take place offstage from day one.231 There are a dozen occasions in the beginning where the narrator apologizes for having to draw the curtain over certain outrages because “the structure of this very complex fiction prevents us from revealing [them] at this stage” (379), and near the end of part 1 he even feigns ignorance of what’s going on behind closed doors. (It could be argued he’s deliberately creating suspense, but given the abominations he recounts in part 1, only a pervert would be titillated to read on.) On the other hand, he reveals some matters too soon, as he admits on a manuscript page following part 1 entitled “Mistakes I Have Made” (570). A first-time novelist, Sade became a prisoner of his own devise; a more experienced writer would have found a way to have his cake and whip it too.

  Had Sade finished The 120 Days of Sodom, the result would have been a daunting, 1,000-page compendium of perversion, a shocking supplement to Diderot’s Encyclopedia, anticipating by a century Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, but probably of more interest to students of aberrant psychology than those of literature. The 500 foam-flecked pages that survive are admirable only for their balls-out daring. Earlier French novelists, as we’ve seen, had criticized their culture’s failings, questioned the validity of religion and of concepts like virtue and honor, and had even edged toward greater realism in sexual matters. But Sade pushes all this to unprecedented extremes, making explicit what they left implicit, excessing in exaggeration, transgressing every boundary, inverting all norms, and roughly mating pornography with psychopathology for a no-holds/holes-barred assault on everything the French held sacred. Sade especially intended the novel as a fuck-you to the corrupt judicial system that imprisoned him in the prime of life; he has Curval say,

  Everyone knows the story of the brave Marquis de S*** who, when informed of the magistrates’ decision to burn him in effigy, pulled his prick from his breeches and exclaimed: “God be fucked, it has taken them years to do it, but it’s achieved at last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, leave me, for I’ve got absolutely to discharge”; and he did so in less time than it takes to tell. (495)

  As the title indicates, the sexual orientation of Sodom is homosexual, not because Sade was one but because he knew that would make it more shocking, especially since sodomy was punishable by death. The novel’s defiant deviancy is finally more revolting than revolutionary, but Sade’s uncensored exposure of the darkest aspects of human nature, his vicious repudiation of all civilized values, is frightening and unforgettable. Sade would develop the same themes in his later, more accomplished novels, but never with as much enraged ferocity.

  Having grunted all that out of his system, Sade turned to a more publishable project, Aline and Valcour; or, The Philosophical Novel, which he wrote in the Bastille between 1785 and 1788.232 This extravagant, 700-page epistolary novel falls roughly into quarters: the first and last fourths concern the doomed romance of 19-year-old Aline Blamont and her 30-year-old boyfriend, M. de Valcour. (His backstory, which he relates in letter 5, resembles Sade’s in many respects.) Although Aline’s mother approves, her father forbids marriage: this lecherous judge has reserved Aline for his libertine buddy, the banker Dolbourg. (This sexually insatiable pair recall the magistrate and financier in The 120 Days of Sodom and fulfill the same function: personifications of France’s corrupt judicial and financial systems.) The father sends his wife and daughter to their country estate, where they are joined by Valcour’s friend Déterville and his new wife. In the woods nearby, they come across a young woman who has just given birth; her story suggests she might be Mme de Blamont’s lost daughter Sophia, though actually she was a sex slave to both Blamont and Dolbourg. Departing even further from the romance template—which usually doesn’t include sex slaves and hints of incest—Aline and Valcour do not overcome the obstacles to their marriage: though Blamont tries and fails to bribe and then assassinate Valcour, he nearly succeeds at forcing his daughter to marry odious Dolbourg (after he poisons his wife), but Aline fatally stabs herself, and Valcour retreats to a monastery, where he eventually dies.

  The second and third quarters of the novel consist of two narratives recited by a couple who lose their way and come across the group out in the country, who persuade them to tell their story, and which Déterville conveys to Valcour in two novel-length letters. Unlike the title characters, Sainville and Léonore are a proactive couple who defied parental objections to their marriage, performed their own wedding ceremony, and managed to find happiness after an incredible series of adventures. Sainville explains how he smuggled Léonore out of the convent to which her parents confined her—a racy tale that involves crossdressing, flimsy clothing, and a Catholic statue—then took her to Venice, where she was kidnapped. For the next three years, Sainville searches for her worldwide: first to Turkey, then to Morocco and central Africa, then to Tahiti, and eventually back to France where he finds her performing in a Bordeaux playhouse. Sainville devotes most of his narrative to describing two contrasting societies: the tyrannical African kingdom of Butua (a libertine dystopia, erotic only in a Natio
nal Geographic kind of way), and the utopian island of Tamoé.233 Then Léonore tells her story, describing how she maintained her chastity in an African harem and against the assaults of various pirates, robbers, monks, and other lechers. Some critics are harsh on Léonore, sharing Geoffrey Gorer’s opinion that “She is a most disagreeable character, cheating and lying, using her beauty to lead men on and exhort favours and help from them with promises she has never any intentions of fulfilling” (71); but given the nature of the men she has to deal with, and of the world she has to live in, her actions seem justified. She survives; the more conventionally admirable Aline doesn’t. (Léonore turns out to be Mme de Dolbourg’s long-lost daughter, linking this story with the main narrative.) There’s little attempt at characterization here (or in Sade’s other novels): aside from Léonore, who grows as a result of her experiences, Sade’s characters are static stereotypes and/or spokespersons for philosophical views. During their adventures – which overlapped at many times, unbeknownst to them – Sainville and Léonore discuss philosophical issues at length with various people (hence the novel’s subtitle), unconventional thinkers through whom Sade airs his views on moral relativity, politics, sex, gender roles, culture, climatology, religion, slavery, inequality, war, cannibalism – an encyclopedic range of topics that he will expand upon in later novels.