296
STEPHItN KOCH
THE UNDERGROUND MAN
THE MARQUIS DE SADE: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bed–
room, and Other Writings. Translated by Richard Seaver and Audryn
Wainhouse. Grove Press. $15.00.
The Marquis de Sad'e is a footnote to the eighteenth century,
hidden at the center of things. While he is not ranked among the
philosophes,
Sade is perversely necessary to the mentality they set in
motion. History, not his genius, is responsible for his moral and intel–
lectual position; as an artist, he cannot stand alone. I imagine few will
find Richard Seaver's and Austryn Wainhouse's new, respectable, well–
translated selection more satisfying than the old Sadean romance: the
one hundred and twenty savage nights behind the walls of La Coste;
the grandeur of unbridled lust; the damned old man burning out his
desire in the gloom of the Bastille.
If
one comes to Sade after Nietzsche, Symbolism,
les poetes maudits,
after the other great explorations of depravity in bourgeois society
(-Richardson, Lados), his effect is perhaps revelatory-certainly un–
settling. These hysterical, vile, comic, peculiarly unsatisfying books-so
inferior by c.onventional ideas of what the novel is-seem to foreshadow
the most interesting literary developments of modern times. Or rather,
they strive toward them with a certain vicious (Sadistic?) yearning.
But
if
it is embarrassing and absurd to compare
Eugenie de Franual
with
Adolphe, Justine
with
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
why should Sade
be so important? Why does one return
to
him, as Baudelaire said, again,
and again?
Pour expliquer Ie mal,
Baudelaire thought; and Sade probably has
become a more useful text in the criticism of depravity than most
traditional models. But Baudelaire's evil was part of a poetic principle;
and while Sade was the guiding light to authentic formal innovators like
Baudelaire, he himself could not create anything new. He could only
contort what was given. His failure to transcend traditional forms–
however much he might populate them with the obscene or bizarre or
gratuitous-determines his role in literature. The Divine Marquis, the
arch-immoralist, chose to write only didactic
recits,
Socratic dialogues,
Richardsonian picaresques-partly because these were the only patterns
the age had to offer. But more important, he chose them because he
was trying to vindicate himself in moral-that is, social-terms, and for
this, conventional forms offered the only imaginative possibility. In his
case, the two motives are actually the same. Sade was a man
in extremis
who wrote
to
save himself, and, sophistical fantasist though he was, he
was too honest, and his pathological solitude was too desperate, for the
