Must We Burn de Sade? E-Book

Simone de Beauvoir

• Herausgeber: Olympia Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Simone de Beauvoir's essay was originally published in French as Faut-il brûler Sade? in Les Temps Modernes, December, 1951 and January, 1952. This work led to a renewed interest in the notorious author.

Leseprobe

An Essay by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Simone de Beauvoir's essay was originally published in French asFaut-il brûler Sade?inLes Temps Modernes, December, 1951 and January, 1952.

The Pensée was published inLe Marquis de Sadeby Maurice Heine ( Paris: Gallimard, 1950). The Letter to Madame de Sade was published inL'Aigle, Mademoiselle..., edited by Gilbert Lely ( Paris: Les Editions Georges Artigues, 1949).

Il faut toujours en revenir à de Sade, c'est-à-dire à l'homme naturel, pour expliquer le mal.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Journaux Intimes

PART I. Must We Burn Sade?

by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

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“Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which was never seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”

They chose to kill him, first by slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. “When the grave has been filled in, it will be sown with acorns so that eventually all trace of my tomb may disappear from the surface of the earth, just as I like to think that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men....” This was the only one of his last wishes to be respected, though most carefully so. The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends;1his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as “sadism” and “sadistic.” His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned—the ten volumes ofLes Journées de Florbelle,at the instigation of his own son-his books banned. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on “The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century,” or even on “The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century,” without once coming upon his name. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade's enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius; they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the “divine marquis” only betrays him. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us.

1

The aging Sade ordering baskets of roses to be brought to him, smelling them voluptuously and soiling them afterwards in the mud of the gutters with a sardonic laugh. Present-day journalists have taught us how this kind of anecdote is manufactured.

But just what is his place? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original; Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself. Sade's aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them. Inversely, his books take hold of us as soon as we become aware that for all their repetitiousness, their platitudes and clumsiness, he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, its win to remain incommunicable. Sade tried to make of his psychophysical destiny an ethical choice; and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance. Can we, without renouncing our individuality, satisfy our aspirations to universality? Or is it only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community? This problem concerns us all. In Sade the differences are carried to the point of outrageousness, and the immensity of his literary effort shows how passionately he wished to be accepted by the human community. Thus, we find in his work the most extreme form of the conflict from which no individual can escape without self-deception. It is the paradox and, in a sense, the triumph of Sade that his persistent singularity helps us to define the human drama in its general aspect.