BOO KS
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consolation of some visionary transcendence of the bourgeois world-view
his age was rapidly making the modem condition. At the same time,
Sade's energy-the clenched, intense
ressentiment
of impotence-im–
measurably surpassed the limitations of the standard formulas. He does
not fully exploit the formulas, he batters against them, as
if
they were
his prison. The gruesome repetitions of incident, the ghastly "philosophy"
that has to be endured again and again, the vapid, walk-through chapters
in which he has, for the moment, given up, are the hysterical scratchings
and bangings of claustrophobia.
Language itself is Sade's prison; he is irrepressibly tempted by the
demonism of tampering with the Word. And perhaps the only philo–
sophically justifiable aspect of his bitter hatred .of everything outside him–
self is his hatred of language. I t is thus the only aspect of his
furious, logorrheic desire for self-vindication he cannot even begin to
put into words. Like Faust, who cannot be a poet, but only the subject
of poetry, Sade fails because he is transfixed by his will to rebellion.
"Always choose in favor of yourself," he never tires of saying in an
iconoclastic blaze. But despite the supreme egoism of his characters and
the sense in which he displays the selfishness of a man who lives under
perpetual threat, Sade, in the deepest sense, could not choose in favor
of himself because he could not speak for himself. He could only listen
to
his own voice talking about others and his own hatred of them.
His demonism can never move beyond demonism, for the very Sadism
of his writing negatively establishes the impenetrability of Virtue, reason
and measure. Justine-and the eighteeenth-century novel-govern him.
"Cruelty," he writes in
Philosophie dans
le
Boudoir,
"is simply the
energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted"; and this
relation between energy and society is decisive in Sade. To be sure,
he could only fail using the literary forms of his age (i.e., its assumptions
about the nature of man). But the problem in Sade is not merely
esthetic, or, for that matter, ethical; it is the problem of solitude. His
work is a tragic reinterpretation of Rousseau's famous sentence: for
Sade, man is born alone, and everywhere we see him with others. For
just as bourgeois sociology has undermined the metaphysical support for
fantasy, it has denied solitude as the ground of freedom. Premodern
and romantic imaginative forms-religion, tragedy, the epic, visionary
elevation, prayer-support a fundamental privacy by a denial of things
as they are and a dream of reconciliation. They make the unique com–
munal. The eighteenth century wanted only the communal to be com–
munal; in the bourgeois world, solitude has characteristically been offered
nothing to affirm or authenticate its value. The artist cannot assimilate
others into his imaginative life; instead, he must himself be assimilated
into a purely social reality. When Sade asserts the claims of the "in-
