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PARTISAN REVIEW
with a seventeen-year-old laundress whose mother allowed her to visit the
once and future Marquis occasionally in his room-for a modest fee.
The striking thing about Sade's story was and remains its richness
and allusiveness as a historical "case"-a prism in which the famous
"Iumieres" (the Enlightenment) of the eighteenth century were most
luridly reflected. One cannot contemplate the life and work of the Mar–
quis de Sade without sensing that a great mutation was underway in our
civilization, and that this involved something more fateful than what
appeared on the surface-i.e., the transformation of the French from
subjects to citizens and the reshaping of political institutions. For most
of the
philosophes
and their followers these were the central issues, to
be sure, and the most immediate; but there was a radical element in the
eighteenth century which looked beyond them to a more far-reaching
revolution. At stake-a century before Nietzsche-was nothing less
than the redefinition of man. But this would take us far beyond our
purview since-thanks to that radical element, precisely-the perspec–
tives opened up by the Enlightenment have not merely remained to
haunt us; they have become in many respects our history: what distin–
guishes the West from the rest.
For this reason
I
find it incomprehensible that neither Gray nor Scha–
effer has seen fit to mention, let alone contend with, what strikes me as
far and away the most searching and brilliant consideration of the
divine Marquis to have appeared not only in recent years but since
"Sadology" began. This is a long chapter (seventy-one pages) in Roger
Shattuck's
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography,
published by St. Martin's Press in
1996.
The book is at least listed in
Gray's bibliography, and in the penultimate paragraph of her epilogue,
cited above, we did hear a faint echo of some of Shattuck's moral and
social concerns, albeit reduced to a sigh of pity,
diminuendo,
for the
unhappiness of Sade's life and the sheer childlike unreasonableness of
his character -with only a muted reference to the quality of his work
and to what he ("one of the great rebels of modern times," she says in
her very last words) is actually proposing for our edification. As for
Schaeffer, he ends no less lamely, advising us to read this boring and
humorless writer with care, "for he, more than anyone, can teach us
what it means to be human in the extreme"-which presumably means,
according to one of Sade's mouthpieces (in
Philosophy in the Boudoir)
eating the raw heart torn from the body of a child while buggering the
still-writhing corpse and explaining interminably that there is nothing
more sublime than violating a moral order which does not, in any event,
exist.
