PARTISAN REVIEW
381
Nous sommes ... a l'oppose du bourreau insensible, ou du degenere
criminel: notre heros est generalement d'un culture approfondi,
d'une courtoisie insolite, il manifeste Ie plus souvent un humeur de
belle qualite, con<;oit Ie crime comme une oeuvre d'art et d'amour
... , et accepte loyalement les regles de son propre jeu, jusqu'a en
devenir la victime.
One can
understand
the cult, of course, just as one can understand
the appeal of Hitler's claim that
"I
free mankind from the yoke of
reason which weighs upon it, from the obscene and humiliating in–
toxications derived from chimeras, from so-called conscience and
morality, and from the exigencies of personal liberty and independence
of which only a few can serve." One can understand the appeal of
being a totally different kind of person from what one is, free of
inhibiting introspection, self-distrust, confused yearnings and timidi–
ties ("awkward, pasty, feeling the draught, / [With] health and
strength and beauty on the brain," in W. H. Auden's words). When
one comes, for instance, on Nietzsche's remarks in the
Genealogy of
Morals
about the casual unreflecting brutality of earlier types of
people, they seem surprisingly convincing, and one may well agree
that Our more humane times don't necessarily represent a total ad–
vance and improvement. But Sade himself, of course, was quite un–
able to recreate such "simpler" types, remaining hopelessly stuck with
intellectuals, and very inept ones at that (inept
qua
"thinkers,"
I
mean), all endlessly self-regarding and self-justifying, all intermin–
ably poking and messing around inside their own sensations and
"ideas"; and in point of fact, though admittedly my reading is
limited,
I
do not recall coming across his admirers adducing any
actual
monstrous figures as "good" Sadean figures, except perhaps
Gilles de Retz - another intellectual. (For that matter, the author
of
Le Sadisme au Cinema
seems scarcely able to come up with even
a
fictional
figure that he strongly admires.) And in any case the sort
of sentimentality
I
am pointing to is dangerous.
True, it might be argued that in it we may not have much
more than a yearning for a "pastoral" change in the rules of bodily
behavior (the sort of yearning that is very noticeable in
Histoire
d'O
in places) and that the carry-over from fantasy to action, as
with other kinds of pastoral fantasying, may
be
negligible. Sade
him–
self, after
all,
behaved more or less decently during the Revolution,
and the French group that has done the most to promote him seeJruJ
