The 120 Days is so relentlessly obscene that Sade himself declared he hadn’t the stomach to revise it. Yet, when on the fourteenth of July the Bastille was stormed, and it seemed the manuscript was lost, he “shed tears of blood” because, despite its flaws, he knew he had achieved his objective: he had written a book that would never cease to do violence to its author and to the world simultaneously. And yet this novel, unlike any other, also provides a place of reflection (Sade always demands a great deal of reflection from his readers) and, for those who share his anomalous vertigo, perhaps release. Sade’s brand of sexual recklessness, however, provokes moral disquiet, and for all its flamboyance, The 120 Days is less a pillow book than a novel of dystopia. Its manic relentlessness and lethal mockeries all lead to a question whose answer was a matter of urgency for Sade himself and is, more than ever, a matter of urgency for us alclass="underline"
Why is it. . that in this world there are men whose hearts have been so numbed, whose sentiments of honour and delicacy have been so deadened, that one sees them pleased and amused by what degrades and soils them?
In other words, Sade, who wrote “the most impure tale that has ever been told since the world began,” a book that was the measure of the horror that would, in the name of brotherhood, drench Paris with blood, was onto something. The 120 Days is not only a rageful (and at times rueful) procession of the author’s own determinisms, it is a mirror of hell — six hundred crimes! — and like Jenin, where this morning as I write Palestinian civilians are digging in the rubble for their dead, it’s a hell of human manufacture. One man’s imaginary war zone, The 120 Days offers an occasion for necessary thoughtfulness. This is, unexpectedly, a moral novel. Sade called it his Book of Sorrows.
The 120 Days of Sodom opens thus:
The extensive wars wherewith Louis xiv was burdened during his reign, while draining the state’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, nonetheless contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously.
Sade’s satirical intention cannot be clearer. He continues:
One must not suppose that it was exclusively the low born and vulgar sort which did this swindling; gentlemen of the highest note led the pack.
Sade next offers up his “champions,” the “four bloodsuckers” and “traffickers” who will “assume the major roles in these unusual orgies”; orgies that will take place in the faraway castle of Silling. They are: the Duc de Blangis and his brother the Bishop of X*** (a nobleman, therefore, and a man of the church), the celebrated Durcet, and the Président de Curval, a business and secular authority. (How much fun Sade would have had with Enron, the current scandals rocking the Catholic church, and the skeletons that continue to kick in Kissinger’s closets!)
Now let us examine, beneath Sade’s burning glass, his four uncharitable and immutable villains, “ces messieurs,” who will live out their errant, costly lusts in Silling.
First of all, the Duc de Blangis, the inheritor of “immense wealth” has been endowed by nature “with every impulse, every inspiration required for its abuse.” What’s more, he was “born treacherous, harsh, imperious, barbaric, selfish. . (he is) a liar, a gourmand, a drunk, a dastard, a sodomite, fond of incest, given to murdering, to arson, to theft.” His brother, the Bishop of X***, “has the same black soul, the same penchant for crime, the same contempt for religion, the same atheism, the same deception and cunning.” Our financier, Durcet’s loftiest pleasure is “to have his anus tickled by the Duc’s enormous member.” (Speculators have always been tickled by inherited wealth.) Finally — and I have purposefully saved the Président de Curval for last — we come to this “pillar of society worn by debauchery to a singular degree,” who is little more than a skeleton caked with shit. Curval is exemplary of Sade’s emblematic, self-hating, pleasure-fearing endeavor. He surges throughout the novel in various guises; for example, “The man from Roule who fucks in shrouds and coffins and who, familiar with the idea of death [is] hence unafraid of it.” This is a sentiment familiar to those who have read the tales of torturers whose “little ceremonies” make them feel more virile, more alive, even immortal. Like all men who torture, Sade’s champions are fearful of the body and its determinisms — shit, sex, and death — and so must shiver it, reduce it from three dimensions to two, make it into meat:
Frigs the whore’s clitoris. . chops it up with a knife
and in this way demonstrate it never had any meaning, any individuality. Silling’s slaves are silenced, reduced to dumb beasts; their tongues may be cut out, their mouths sewn shut. Silling’s victims are emptied out and flattened — as some would do to an entire country in order to establish that it was never there.
Back to Curval. He is “entirely jaded.” He is, as was Sade, nearly impotent, and needs nearly “three hours of excess, and the most outrageous excess. . before one could hope to inspire a voluptuous reaction in him.” Already dead, animated by fantastications and the unlimited power Silling affords him, Curval frolics in the boneyards of his making and leaps to a particularly inspired danse macabre. He embodies all of Sade’s libertines, for whom the spasms of orgasm and death throes converge. This convergence never ceases to throb at the icy core of The 120 Days and to propulse an extremity of longing that, as time passes, seems less a boast and more a possibility:
Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world.
The promise of “general darkness” is the shadow beneath which the universe of Silling leans into entropy, a faded universe, its ancient machinery — space and time — grinding to a deafening halt, yet capable of igniting in one last, hideous conflagration. Masters of space, Curval and the other champions toil, with furious detachment, on the side of Time; they excel in the service of its machinations. Their little ceremonies assure an eternity of agony and, paradoxically, precipitous death. (Most of the victims of Silling are very young.) As the old saw would have it, money buys time; Curval is filthy rich, and it is wealth, Sade reminds us, that enables him and the others to indulge in “unusual pastimes.” Excessive wealth makes all our Sillings possible. It buys U.S. F-16S and Apache helicopters.
Like the One Thousand and One Nights, The 120 Days is propelled by stories. Radical and inexorable malice is assured by the virago storytellers’ unavoidable soliloquies that, “decorated with numerous and searching details. . apt to have an immense influence,” commence punctually at six o’clock, like the evening news. The storytellers are moulins à paroles — word mills — whose narrations keep the mill of death oiled with cum and ceaselessly wheeling. Like the ogresses of fairy tales or the winds of war, their mills grind bones. The sounds of bones breaking castanet the air, as do, with whirlwindish velocity, the champions’ groans. To keep the mill turning, the four agree to banish rational thinking from Silling and to replace it with the logic of nightmare: “Any friend. . who may take it into his head to act in accordance with a single glimmer of common sense. . shall be fined ten-thousand francs”—a rule that could have been invented by Robespierre (who sent lace-makers to the guillotine for practicing a frivolous craft); Ariel Sharon (who, as I write, will not allow ambulances into places he has besieged, nor allow for the burial of the dead); and our own President Bush, for that matter, so eagerly gearing up for a war with Iraq.