When coupling — and their couplings are hectic and meticulous — the “messieurs,” their jaded imaginations ignited by the storytellers’ descriptions of bodies “reduced to scarlet shambles, of pricks stabbed with a heavy cobbler’s awl, of bone-shattering cuffs,” are incapable of not only compassion but erotic delight; they collide into the bodies of those they hold in thrall like tanks slamming into kitchens. Is it surprising, then, that they like to dine on shit? In Silling, sexuality is the embodiment of fury, a bloody theater, an act of terror. Like a species of athanor in reverse, Silling transmutes everything into lead.
You will recall that in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant proposes that each one of us “always act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become universal law.” It is evident that for the individual with a will to do good, Kant’s criterion affords a rigorous practice in moral living, one that, above all, demands a searching conscience and fearless inquisitiveness, and the willingness to restlessly question dogmatic thinking — one’s own and that of others — to engage in, tirelessly, a process of disenthrallment.
Sade’s Silling offers a Manichean reversal and negation of such a moral practice. In Silling, Libertine Law, Universal Law, and the Law of Nature are one and the same. The friends are simply acting as Nature intends: brutally and blindly. Sade is an anti-Rousseauian (although he did admire that “threat for dull-witted bigots!”) and, curiously, very much in keeping with the teachings of the Inquisition, which, fed by stories of naked New Worlders worshipping devils and buggering one another, argue that nature — a satanic realm studded with glamours and perversions; demons in the shapes of bears, wenches, and wolves; the semen of frogs and serpents teased into malefic powers — leads straight to madness. Such pessimism evokes a radical Gnosticism, proclaiming as it does man’s active place in a scheme of chronic pain and interminable night. Sade’s Nature knows nothing of pity and is forever tormenting her creatures with plagues and mortifications; later, in Juliette, Sade will write, “Are plants and animals acquainted with mercy, pity. . brotherly love?”
Sade, always paradoxical, offers up this curiosity: he despises the church and its stultifying myths, yet climbs into bed with a churchy arsenal of crucifixes and wafers and, when it comes to Nature, embraces with a vengeance the Catholic worldview at its most extreme. It is an awkward backwardness for a man who was in so many ways a radical thinker — a champion of female sexuality, a vociferous detractor of the guillotine.
I recall a story by the Belgian writer of fantasy, Jean Ray, in which a diabolical house — much like the Aztec universe — demands to be fed fresh corpses. Silling is such a place. And “ces messieurs” are famished; their famishment, too, is cosmical. They would take on everything, even the weather:
He passes an entire brothel in review; he receives the lash from all the whores while kissing the madame’s arsehole and receiving therefrom into his mouth both wind and rain and hailstones.
Such a madame, one supposes, can be nothing but the embodiment of Mother Nature.
When the four reach Silling, they destroy the bridge that allows them access and once inside decide
it were necessary. . to have walled shut all the gates, and all the passages where the chateau might be penetrated, and absolutely to enclose themselves inside their retreat as within a besieged citadel, without leaving the least entrance to an enemy, the least egress to a deserter. . They barricade themselves to such an extent there was no longer a trace of where the exits had been; and they settled down comfortably inside.
Tomb, gnostical world hermetically sealed, Silling is colonized like a defeated country, and like terrorized civilians its slaves are given two choices only: to be corrupted (some, like certain survivors of Auschwitz, become accomplices) or to submit. All resistance, imaginary and fabricated (the slaves are given emetics and forbidden to shit), is punished by torture and execution. Never does good resist evil; it is as if Sade cannot conceive it, as if helplessness and passivity serve as puissant aphrodisiacs. Then again, the victims have always been figments only — flat, with no minds of their own. Silling is, after all, a Looking Glass world; the world of the Red Queen, whose vassals are merely cards. Among the vast store of things the four friends have brought with them are “many mirrors”; Silling, you understand, is the mirror of our most acute failures: a city under siege, a country burning with no road leading out, a place of perfect moral isolation. If I have chosen to evoke Sade’s sinister castle in this essay, it is not only because Silling’s mirror of bloody ink affords an exhaustive inquiry into what a world ruled by killers is like, but because it is Silling’s banality, after all, that should make us shudder, not its singularity.
Fantasy allows the reader to burn her own bridges and continue the tale à sa guise; to, in Sade’s own words, “sprinkle in whatever tortures you like.” Silling is potentially every man’s fable, mirror, tomb. And if one has read The 120 Days to the bitter, ironical end, has one at any moment been complicitous? Has one dared acknowledge and investigate this complicity? Has the reader sprinkled in whatever tortures she likes? Or was she made too ill to think, and did she turn her head away in disgust? Fatal mistake! Or will she, will we, take up Silling’s challenge and offer a refutation? One that does not entail “melting our enemies’ cities,” as some fool recently proposed in the Denver Post — a jaded response that embraces Silling’s vertiginous bestiality, Sade’s own longing for cosmical conflagrations. What is needed, of course, is far less simple (and shall take much more than “a single glimmer of common sense”!); it depends upon a painful and necessary disentanglement from fatal habits of mind; a lasting and muscled recognition of common humanity; an ordered, passionate vision for global justice; and a veritable setting to rights. Compassion — for those the hottest heads among us choose to call, without knowledge or distinction, “the enemy”—if it is to bring about peace, must be perceived as an active principle (unlike sentimentality, which is, after all, simply another form of cowardice). In order to survive our next confrontation with Silling — the calamity we will suffer or inflict upon others — we will have to, each one of us, act in the manner Kant proposes — and this if we are to, finally, overcome and abandon the pathology that dictates our unreason.
Silling, once seemingly so far, is now very close. If Sade has been so vilified — and, despite the vagaries of fashion, will continue to be, just as he always risks being embraced for all the wrong reasons — it is because Silling has never been one man’s uniquely aberrant vision, but a species of accelerated perspective, an anamorphosis that, when seen through the world’s own looking glass, is recognizable. Silling — like Ground Zeroes everywhere, like the killing fields that separate our country from our neighbor to the south, like our own densely populated penitentiaries — is simply another name for all our worst mistakes. It is my conviction that had we dared read Sade rigorously, dared respond to the terrible questions he poses, we might have been prepared for the worst. Silling’s fires continue to burn; they gather strength and momentum.