NOVEL AND At.4ERICA
5&
underground emotions (of what the period itself euphemistically
called "the heart") into high culture. Quite as influential
as
Diderot (or Richardson or Rousseau) in the
bouleversement
of
the eighteenth century is the Marquis de Sade, who stands al-–
most emblematically at -the
cr~roads
of depth psychology and·
revolution.
-
Not only did de Sade shed new light on the ambivalence of
the inner mind, revealing the true darlrnes; and terror implicit
in
the drive which the neo-classical age (revolting against Chris–
tian notions of sin) had been content to celebrate as simple
"pleasure" or polite "gallantry"; he may even have caused that
symbolic storming of an almost empty prison with which the
French Revolution begins. Himself a prisoner in the
Tour de la
liberte
of the Bastille, de Sade, through an improvised loud–
speaker made of a tube and funnel, screamed to bystanders to
rescue
his
fellow inmates who were having their throats cut–
and scattered handwritten leaflets complaining about jail condi–
tions to the crowd he attracted. On July 3, 1789, he was fInally
transferred elsewhere to insure "the safety of the building," but
not before he had started to write
Justine, or the Misfortunes of
Virtue,
that perverse offshoot of the Richardsonian novel, and
had thus begun to create the first example of revolutionary por–
nography, Maurice Blanchot, in an essay called
Lautreamont et
Sade,
describes
his
method as follows: "What is striking is
this:
the language of de Sade is precisely opposite to the cheating
lan–
guage of hangmen; it is the language of the victim; he invented
it
in
the Bastille.... He put on trial, reversing the process of
his
own judgment, the men who condemned him,
God
himself,
and
-in
general-every limitation against which
his
frenzy clashed.
"
In the Marquis de Sade, the Break-through found itS most
stringent and spectacular spokesman: the condemned man judg–
ing
his
judges, the pervert mocking the normal,
the
advocate
of.
destruction and death sneering at the defenders of love
and
life;
