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New York Times, April 21, 2002
A Man for All Centuries, and Sins
By MARCELLE CLEMENTS
FATE 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. Arcade
recently published "Letters From Prison" for the first time in
English, revealing a very different Sade: often charming, tender and
introspective. And the much-praised biography by Francine du
Plessix Gray, "At Home With the Marquis de Sade," and Rikki
Ducornet's exquisite modernist novel, "The Fan-Maker's
Inquisition," were both recently reissued in paperback.
Philip Kaufman's enthusiastically received movie "Quills," with
Geoffrey Rush, was adapted by Doug Wright from his play of the
same name in 2000, and last month the long unfindable kitsch
legend "De Sade" (1969) was released on DVD. It stars Keir Dullea
as Sade and John Huston as his libertine uncle, Abbé de Sade;
Roger Corman is listed as an uncredited director. (Tagline: "He
made evil an art, virtue a vice . . . and pain a pleasure.")
"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. In reading his work we find
an echo of the eerie, opaque feeling many of us experienced
watching the tape of Osama bin Laden and his friends cheerfully
recalling the handiwork in the World Trade Center attacks. Why the
opacity? And what is the powerful discomfort about?
Perhaps in part the implosion of inexpressible outrage, but also the
bizarre voyeuristic fulfillment of seeing how the malefactor
laughs.
The Marquis de Sade was born in 1740 to a dissolute count and an
indifferent mother who sent him, at age 5, to be "educated" by his
uncle, the infamously degenerate Abbé de Sade, and then to the
Jesuits. A few months after his wedding to Renée-Pélagie de
Montreuil, he was arrested for the first time, having spent the night
with a prostitute trampling crucifixes and shouting insults at God,
Christ and the Virgin Mary. Many such arrests followed in the next
40 years.
Increasingly it is supposed that the virulence of the punishments
(for "crimes" well within the debauched norms of his class and
time) may be attributed to the vengeful rage of his influential
mother-in-law, who never forgave him for seducing his wife's
younger sister. In this revisionist view, Sade is an exasperating
egomaniac with only slightly kinkier than average tastes.
The personal correspondence, especially, shows us a Sade who is
much more playful, given to inside jokes with his wife about his
erotic predilections and sounding rather lucid and defensible. "Yes,
I am a libertine, that I admit," he writes to her in 1781. "I have
conceived everything that can be conceived in that area, but I have
certainly not practiced everything I have conceived and certainly
never shall. I am a libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a
murderer." It was a letter written in prison — probably written with
his own blood, because his writing implements had been taken
away.
It isn't surprising that while biography and criticism of Sade's work
have proliferated in the last 50 years, movies have lagged behind in
exploring the Sadeian universe. So much of what Sade evokes is so
incommunicable that what we try to make concrete degenerates into
absurdist costume porn. Indeed, maybe nothing short of a printout
from a brain scan would do justice to the images that the very word
"Sade" generates, perhaps juxtaposed with a cross section of
spasming muscle cell activity.
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.
But as incredible as this will seem, it may be that Pasolini's movie is
much too beautiful, too stately and too calm to truly convey the
satanic ambience of the scene.
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 and, needless to say, unmentionable acts
are perpetrated by priests, wardens and fair maidens with the faces
of camels, rats, pigs and roosters. 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.
But it is "Quills" that first regaled us with a full-length portrait of a
Sade we can believe in — crazy, lustful, shrewd, driven to write, to
trick and to survive. Indeed, many "Quills" fans may wonder why
they should go see another Sade movie. But one may as well ask
why the traveler who has visited Mars may also want to go to
Jupiter.
In the latest film, Mr. Jacquot's "Sade," the marquis is still miles
and a decade away from the loathsome Charenton asylum where we
found him in "Quills." In the 1790's, by some stroke of luck or
connections, the marquis was transferred to the Maison de Santé at
Picpus, a former convent turned into a "clinic," where aristocrats
hoping to avoid decapitation can buy room and board. The
guillotine is never far from the minds of the inmates, or from ours,
as carts of corpses and severed heads frequently arrive for mass
burials.
But for all the reminders of the carnage outside, Picpus is a place of
considerable calm and charm where the stranded aristocrats can
carry on with some vestige of their former style — at least enough
for witty teasing, flirting and badinage at the common dining tables
and for sneaking into one another's rooms at night. (It's less
reminiscent of a revolutionary prison than of a rustic artists'
colony.) A virginal, blond and ravishing young girl (Isild le Besco)
becomes fascinated with Sade and confides her worry that she "will
die without ever having existed." There is much talk of sex and
death, of duality and nature. There is more eating, and more witty
repartee. The inmates put on a play. The revolutionary carts deliver
more cadavers and more heads, and the smell becomes a problem.
The talk of sex and death and meaning swells and intensifies.
Finally, an extraordinary erotic scene involving Sade, the virgin, a
hirsute gardener and perhaps one or two others (surely, it would be
wrong to tell) fully justifies all of the preceding conversations, all of
the 18th-century philosophizing and the many eating scenes.
"Sade" may not have the narrative solidity of "Quills," but it is at
least as ambitious. The differences between the two films are
dramatic: "Quills" is about insanity, creativity and deception, and
Mr. Rush's Anglo-Saxon Sade is manic, magnetic and terrifying.
Mr. Auteil's Sade is not crazy — he is anxious and melancholy,
burdened by his fame. The Anglo-Saxon Sade is megalomaniacal
and complex but understandable. The French Sade is almost
comically arrogant, closed, perversely unfathomable. The sexuality
of the former is lusty, ribald and occasionally brutal; the eroticism
of the latter is subtle but pervasive. The Anglo-Saxon Sade is
phallic, dynamic, brutal, concupiscent, histrionic — he is an
uncontrollable, overpowering proto-sex maniac. The French Sade is
more feminine, oblique, nuanced, conflicted.
The Sade as imagined by Mr. Jacquot is the modern, re-envisioned
Sade, the Sade who is capable of great delicacy, the Sade who was
freed by the revolution and briefly became a judge. (He refused to
impose the death penalty and was therefore jailed again for the
crime of "moderantisme.") This Sade seems the most captivating of
all, perhaps partly because he is the most understandable of the
various Sades — all or none of whom may have actually once
existed independently of our imaginations. But also because he is
the least frightening of the Sades, allowing us to awaken interest
and pleasure in our own contradictions.
Both Benoît Jacquot's movie and Daniel Auteil's performance are
remarkable for their profound restraint. Their Sade is almost
withdrawn, so reserved that for most of the movie the ardor we
know him to possess can be tantalizingly glimpsed only in his
vigorous stride, the clattering alacrity with which he eats his soup,
the brief and sudden yielding to voluptuous desire when he kisses
his mistress, which just as quickly vanishes.
This discretion turns out to be an elegant seduction of the viewer.
He or she (Sade would have welcomed either) may be watching the
marquis with the young girl, taking in the talk of sex and death, and
concluding: "He is ridiculous." Yet a contrary thought persists:
"Maybe, maybe not." That's all it takes. Our ambivalence doesn't
interfere with the seduction. Quite the contrary.
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