RONALD HAYMAN
201
feeble." Later on, during the revol ution, Sade would have a real
opportunity to revenge himself on Mme de Montreuil. But having
vented his hatred in fiction, he would have the strength to spare her
life. At the moment of venting it, he was feeble.
120 journees
is a diabolically ingenious machine which simulta–
neously inverts the reality of Sade's situation and subverts the morality
that justified it. He described his four debauched heroes as "champ–
ions"; they were for him what Beckett calls "vice-existers." They even
gave him a flattering mirror-image of his own isolation. To enjoy
flagellation, perversion and sexual excess, they imprison their victims
in a Gothic castle which is remote and inaccessible enough to guar–
antee freedom from society's interference. What Sade accepted in–
voluntarily they chose.
Realistic criteria are almost as irrelevant as they were to the
Dialogue.
Having total power over their victims, the libertines would
not need to explain anything, but the narrative is replete with explana–
tions. Subtitled
L'Ecole de libertinage,
the novel reverses the tradition
of the moral fable, while illustrating Sade's dictum that to be erotic it is
essential to articulate crime in language. It is not merely that words
were his only means of representing actions: what was revolutionary
about the book was its uninhibited exploration of the space between
sensation and formulation. Unlike animals, we cannot enjoy a sensa–
tion without describing it to ourselves. Awareness of pleasure or pain is
always impure, contaminated by words, even when they remain
unspoken. At the same time, verbalization extends the pleasure or the
pain. Once words have been let in, the imagination cannot be kept out.
The idea of using narrative to spice and protract sensual pleasure is at
least as old as the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments;
but Sade was
sensualizing language in a different kind of assault on the
"ami
lecteur,"
who is addressed in the second person singular with the
insolent promise of
the impurest story ever told since the beginning of the world.... No
doubt you will dislike a great deal in all the misdeeds described-one
i aware of that-but some of them will warm you lip so much it will
cost you sperm, and that is all we have
to
do; without telling you
everything, analyzing everything, how could we have found out what
appeals
to
you?
A play-within-a-play tends to focus attention on the relationship
between action and audience by offering an onstage simulacrum of it;
stories-within-a-story can question the relationship between fiction
