originally printed in
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre Study Guide, vol. II issue 2, Madame de Sade
18th Century Bomb, 20th Century Fallout:
Psychoanalysis, the Surrealists, and de Sade
His name is the root of an adverb, two adjectives, and two nouns. But why does the name of the Marquis de Sade resonate in 20th Century English and modern culture? Why has Sade, and not another of the numerous aristocratic pornographers of 18th Century France, been taken up by psychoanalysis, art movements, and philosophy?
John LaConte of California State University observes (like many other readers) that Sade's work is monotonous and boring — painfully so, in an ironic twist. Sade's legacy comes not from his endless descriptions of debauchery, but rather from the philosophical scribblings in between them. Society's natural direction is to create structures — codes of behavior and ideological state apparati such as religion, family, and government. These structures remain virtually unchanged from one generation to the next, preserving "society." But this, according to Sade, is "directly opposed to the natural order of things, for nature is inherently destructive and it is our very recognition of this as participants in nature that provides Sade with the fundamental connection he places on the link between pleasure and perversity."
Sade's philosophical influences can be traced directly to Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire, as proponent of individual liberty and champion of reason over religion, spent time (like Sade) both in and in jail. Rousseau argued against social structures, for they shunt man away from the "brute, primordial passions we had in a state of nature." Sade pays explicit homage to Rousseau by titling La nouvelle Justine (1801) after Rousseau's Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise (1761), one of the most celebrated novels of the eighteenth century. In his novel 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Sade explores the full range of human's "natural" existence by cataloguing the activities of a group that has willfully extricated themselves from society. Sade takes Rousseau's Émile (1762) to an extreme and finds not the noble savagery of Mowgli or Tarzan, but he leering beast of the luring unconscious.
Later, Sigmund Freud would find this dichotomy of natural / social man useful in the foundations of psychoanalysis. A child is born of pure id (nature) but to fully become a person in society, he must accede to and align himself with the rules and structures of the society. He must forgo the "pleasure principle" of his natural state and accept the "reality principle" of society. When a person does not successfully accomplish this transition, the result is neurosis or even psychosis. There is always a tension, however, an ongoing negotiation between man¹s natural and social selves.
Some of this tension is resolved through the catharses of art. According to Freud, an artist is "a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of fantasy. He finds his way back to reality by making use of special gifts to mold his fantasies into truths of a new kind which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. He can only achieve [hero status] because of that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle, is itself part of that reality."
Artists of the Surrealist movement steadfastly refused Freud's reality principle and instead embraced the twilight, amoral, and natural world favored by Sade. The First Surrealist Manifesto, written by movement founder André Breton, calls for a return to innocence, to the very discovery of language and meaning — "natural man," before society. The goal is to "eliminate the mind's rational, conscious presence in order to eavesdrop on the unrehearsed murmur of the unconscious" — the seat of imagination, and where one's "natural" self is distilled. The tribute is tangible in many works of the movement, notably in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's film L'age d'Ôr, a reworking of 120 Days of Sodom. Sade also makes an appearance in Félix Labisse's painting of prominent surrealists, La Matinée Poétique. While the surrealists attached themselves to the writings of Voltaire (their favorite Parisian hangout bore his name) and Rousseau, they took up Sade as a hero, glorifying his status as both a political and sexual outlaw.
Sade's notoriety as a sexual outlaw later gained the attention of behavioral researchers in the 1950's, and with that, the attention of modern theorists. Sade's erotic writings were no longer considered beyond the pale, but to be considered as literature, as philosophy, and as part of the history of the unconscious. Philosophy in the Bedroom was taken up by the French Freudian Jacques Lacan. The foremost structuralist of literary criticism, Roland Barthes, deconstructed 120 Days of Sodom, and cultural theorist Jane Gallop has brought a feminist, pro-sex slant to the discussion of Sade's works. Modern man retains a grotesque fascination with the horrible, with monstrosity; Sade acts as a lens, making the ghastly humanity of the unconscious visible.
Bibliography:
Du Plessix Gray, Francine, At Home with the Marquis de Sade.
New York: Simon & Scuster, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things.
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body.
New York: Columbus University Press, 1988.
Mishima, Yukio. Madame de Sade. Translated by Donalde Keene.
New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Paz, Octavio. An Erotic Beyond: Sade.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993.
http://www.anova.org/voltaire.html
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/r/rousseau.htm
http://www.nabeshima.com/nb/mishima.html
http://www.cusimano.com/artist/surreal.intro.htm