200
PARTISAN REVIEW
of his forty-six characters would have survived. Thirty of them would
have been wiped out in a tidal wave of aggression that would not have
seemed to have its source either in fate or in the dominant characters.
Like Genet's
personae,
they are not fortified with the semblance of
autonomy. Genet told Sartre: "My books are not novels because none of
my characters makes his own decisions." "That," says Sartre, "explains
the desolation of the book.
It
is like a desert. Hope could have been
prompted only by active, free characters. Genet is concerned only to
indulge his cruelty ... a savage God who gets drunk on human blood."
The relationship of writers to their characters is like that of
parents to a child: they cannot give what they themselves lack, and if
the emotional lack is chronic, they will try to take. Sade and Genet both
achieved freedom by squeezing it out of their characters.
If
Apollinaire
was right to describe Sade, who spent more than half his adult life in
prison, as "the most free spirit that ever lived," this is how he achieved
freedom.
But is this freedom real or imaginary, sane or schizoid?
It
is worth
comparing both the real isolation of Sade and the isolation he ima–
gined for his libertine heroes with schizoid isolation as R.D. Laing
describes it. The individual
in one sense is trying to
be
omnipotent by enclosing within his own
being, without recourse
to
a creative relationship with others, modes
of relationship that require the effective presence
to
him of other
people and of the outer world. He would appear to be, in an unreal,
impossible way, all persons and things to himself. The imagined
advantages are safety for the true self, isolation and hence freedom
from others, self-sufficiency, and control.
When Sade, before his imprisonment, had had opportumttes for
making creative relationships with other people, he had been unable to
take advantage of them. There had been no rapport in any of his
relationships. Freed forcibly from the compulsion to take sadistic
pleasure from other people's bodies, he had to be self-sufficient-to
find a way of being all persons and all things to himself. The only real,
possible way was to create an unreal or fictiona.l world.
In
the notes he prepared for Parts Two to Four of
120 journees de
Sodome,
it is not only the days that are numbered, but the atrocities:
the I02nd in Part Four involves dragging the victim over red-hot spikes
and throwing her into a brazier. A reader ignorant of what Sade was
suffering might find his malice incomprehensible; his need to torture
his characters was like Genet's when he wrote, "It is time for this pimp,
cocky and so beautiful, to experience the torments reserved for the
