Ronald Hayman
THE BIRTH OF THE MIDDLE-AGED
WRITER
The Marquis de Sade would probably never have become a
writer if he had not had
to
spend so much time in prison. As with
Genet, the experience which engendered the writing also encouraged
habitual masturbation. Fantasies of revenge against society and against
women began to revolve around vivid visualizations of other men 's
penises, punitively large.
After six and a half years in his cell at Vincennes, Sade had
nothing he valued more than what was going on in his mind:
My way of lhinking is the fruil of my refl eclions; il is a part of my
exislence, my conslilulion ...
[Ill
is my only comfort; il alleviales all
my sufferings in prison, creales all the pleasures I have in the world
and I value il more highly lhan life.
It
was a way of thinking that depended on a rejection-partly
involuntary, partly voluntary-of external reality. H e had no means of
knowing how much distortion there was in the accounts that reached
him of what was going on in the world outside his cell; as h e wrote
retrospectively in 1803, "Wanting peace of mind, I preferred
to
believe
nothing, scoff at everything. " This affected the formative period of his
development as a novelist. His fi ction has littl e purchase on the
objective world of people and things.
If
you try to read it as realistic
narrative, it is boring. As Roland Barthes says, "the spectacle consists
entirel y of discourse."
He was only twenty-four when he started making notes in the
library of the Carthusian monastery at Dijon about Isabel of Bavaria,
the subject of the novel he wrote nearly fifty years later. H e was twenty–
nine when he wrote his
Voyage de
H
ollande, en forme de lettres,
and
thirty-one when he wrote a comedy for performan ce in his chateau at
Lacoste, where he employed professional actors. Then, in about
August 1782, he began working on
120 journees de Sodome.
He seems
to
have started writing more plays in a bout April 1779, hav ing been
arrested in February 1777 at the age of thirty-six after his mother-in-law
