BOOKS
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and silence have become annihilation. And in his will, Sade directed that
his own body be hidden in an unmarked grave.
Sade's interest, then, emerges from the record he left, at the begin–
ning of the modern age, of an esthetic impoverishment and excruciation
which has become one source of modern creativity. This is the real threat
of Sade, and the amazing energy he directed against a world defined
by its barrenness is the reason for his underground durability. No–
body but an incurably misguided romantic would read Sade for
titillation any more, and whoever prefers his fiction to that of, say,
Laclos, has pretty bad taste in fiction. Ultimately, it is a comic irony to
call this impotent, paralyzed man a liberating force. But there is, I
suppose, a certain freedom in knowing where one stands. His encounter
with the imagination and with language strikes, with the Sadistic energy
which is its only real merit, at the most pressing issues of modern
expression. "What is the answer?" Gertrude Stein once asked nobody in
particular. "Well then, what is the question?" For many, Sade is the
question.
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