Silling
A Sadean Mirror
Sade completed “that most impure tale”—and the words are his—The 120 Days of Sodom—in the Bastille where he was confined for infractions that, if they were outrageous, were not murderous and—unlike civilians in wartime—involved consenting adults. Sade was an outspoken atheist, a libertine and a sodmist at a moment in history when sodomy was punishable by a public breaking of the offending body on the wheel. The 120 Days was a purposeful declaration of war against those who would never cease to persecute its author for his singularity. Like a suicide bombing, it is a cry of rage and a rending of the veil; it is an act of defiance and morbidity, the willful embrace of the role of the bogeyman—whose arbitrary and inescapable destiny is acute humiliation and a horrendous death.
The 120 Days is so relentlessly obscene that Sade himself declared he hadn’t the stomach to revise it. Yet, when on the 14th of July the Bastille was stormed and it seemed the manuscript was lost, he “shed tears of blood” and this because, despite its flaws, he knew he had achieved his object: he had written a book that would never cease to do violence to its author and to the world simultaneously. And yet this novel, unlike any other, also provides a place of reflection (Sade always demands a great deal of reflection from his readers) and, for those who share his anomalous vertigo, sexual restlessness, perhaps release. Sade’s brand of restlessness, however, provokes moral disquiet, and, for all its flamboyance, The 120 Days is less a pillow book than a novel of distopia. Its manic restlessness and lethal mockeries all lead to a question whose answer was a matter of urgency for Sade himself and is, more than ever, a matter of urgency for us all:
Why is it… that in this world there are men whose hearts have been so numbed, whose sentiments of honor and delicacy have been so deadened, that one sees them pleased and amused by what degrades and soils them? (492)
In other words, Sade, who wrote “the most impure tale that has ever been told since the world began” (253), a book that was the measure of the horror that would, in the name of brotherhood, drench Paris with blood, was on to something. The 120 Days is not only a rageful (and at times rueful) procession of the author’s own determinisms, it is a mirror of Hell—600 crimes!—and like Jenin—where this morning as I write, Palestinian civilians are digging in the rubble for their dead—a Hell of human manufacture. One man’s imaginary war zone, The 120 Days offers an occasion for necessary thoughtfulness. This is, unexpectedly, a moral novel. Sade called it his Book of Sorrows.
The 120 Days of Sodom opens thus:
The extensive wars wherewith Lois XIV was burdened during his reign, while draining the state’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, nonetheless contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously. (191)
Sade’s satirical intention cannot be clearer. He continues:
One must not suppose that it was exclusively the low born and vulgar sort which did this swindling; gentlemen of the highest note led the pack. (191)
Sade next offers up his “champions,” the four “bloodsuckers” and “traffickers” who will “assume the major roles in these unusual orgies,” orgies that will take place in the faraway castle of Silling. They are: The Duc de Blangis and his brother the Bishop of X *** (a nobleman, therefore, and a man of the church), the “celebrated” Durcet and the Président de Curval (business and secular authority. How much fun Sade would have had with Enron, the current scandals rocking the Catholic church, the skeletons that continue to kick in Kissinger’s closets!).
Now let us examine, beneath Sade’s burning glass, his four uncharitable and immutable villains, ces messieurs who will live out their errant, their costly lusts, in Silling.
First of all, the Duc de Blangis, the inheritor of “immense wealth” has been endowed by nature “with every impulse, every inspiration required for its abuse.” What’s more, he was: “Born treacherous, harsh, imperious, barbaric, selfish… [he is] a liar, a gourmand, a drunk, a dastard, a sodomite, fond of incest, given to murdering, to arson, to theft…” (198). His brother, the Bishop of X ***, “has the same black soul, the same penchant for crime, the same contempt for religion, the same atheism, the same deception and cunning” (203). Our financier, Durcet’s loftiest pleasure is “to have his anus tickled by the Duc’s enormous member” (210) (speculators have always been tickled by inherited wealth). Finally—and I have purposefully saved the Président de Curval for last—we come to this “pillar of society” worn by “debauchery to a singular degree” (205) and who is little more than a skeleton caked with shit. Curval is exemplary of Sade’s emblematic, self-hating, pleasure-fearing endeavor. He surges throughout the novel in various guises—for example “the man from Roule” who fucks in shrouds and coffins and who, “familiar with the idea of death [is] hence unafraid of it” (505). A sentiment familiar to those who have read the tales of torturers whose “little ceremonies” make them feel more virile, more alive, even immortal. Like all men who torture, Sade’s champions are fearful of the body and its determinisms: shit, sex and death, and so must shiver it, reduce it from three dimensions to two, make it into meat:
Frigs the whore’s clitoris… chops it up with a knife… (582)
and in this way demonstrate it never had any meaning, any individuality (Silling’s slaves are silenced, reduced to dumb beasts; their tongues may be cut out, their mouths sewn shut). Silling’s victims are emptied out and flattened—as some would do to an entire country in order to establish that it was never there.
