RONALD HAYMAN
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virginity-rules which are made by the novelist only to be broken by
the characters. They are like a grid made of ropes. The subject-matter
can burst its bonds, while the anarchy can be measured against a scale.
But if Sade had finished the novel, he might have found himself
needing to modify his style, as if he were progressively introducing
discord into a classical symphony. The 120 days are spread over four
winter months, November to February, and each of the story-tellers is
on duty for a month. We know that the criminality will increase
steadily, both in the main narrative and in the story-tellers' stories, so
the mounting disorderliness of the behavior creates a disturbing,
almost disrupting, pressure within the geometrically orderly frame–
work.
The Duc de Blangis regards man as a machine in the hands of
nature, and he boasts that he has been faithful to the principles he
formed in his youth. ''They taught me that virtue was empty, a nothing
... only vice was made so that man could experience that. moral and
physical vibration, source of the most exquisite pleasures.... So I have
nothing to hold me back except the laws.... My money and my credit
put me above the vulgar plagues which should attack only the people."
Properly regarded, the laws are valuable because they stand
between desire and its attainment, and there is no satisfaction to be had
if desires are attained too easily. As Sade makes Durcet, the financier,
put it, "Happiness consists not in consummation but in desire, in
shattering the restrictions imposed as obstacles to it." Living at the
opposite pole of deprivation from his characters-having unlimited
opportunities for desire and none for consummation-Sade led them to
conclusions from which he could take comfort. They find it very
frustrating to have pleasure so readily available. "I swear," says Durcet
on the eighth day, "that ever. since I have been here, my sperm has not
flowed for what is here.
It
is things which are not here that make me
come." The principle of negation had never been stated more simply or
more powerfully. Here is a rationale for rejecting reality in favor of the
imaginary alternative, denying what is present for the sake of what is
not. Sade is squashing his characters into incapacity for enjoyment of
immediate action. Implicitly, sexual activity is being negated, and
fantasy invested with the energy taken from it, as if thought and
language were the only valid components in the experience of sex.
At the same time, what Sade was writing was relevant to his own
situation: he was making his sperm flow for things which were not
there.
If
his jailers had been genuinely campaigning for his moral
restitution, they might have done better to apply his own logic of
inversion. Referring to himself by the number of his cell, he suggested
