Silling
A Sadean Mirror
Back to Curval. He is “entirely jaded.” He is, as was Sade, nearly impotent, and needs “nearly three hours of excess, and the most outrageous excess… before one could hope to inspire a voluptuous reaction in him” (206). Already dead, animated by fantastications and the unlimited power Silling affords him, Curval frolics in the boneyards of his making and leaps to a particularly inspired dance macabre. He embodies all of Sade’s libertines for whom the spasms of orgasm and the death throes converge. This convergence never ceases to throb at the icy core of The 120 Days and to propulse an extremity of longing that, as time passes, seems less a boast and more a possibility:
Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world. (364)
The promise of “general darkness,” is the shadow beneath which the universe of Silling leans into entropy, a jaded universe, its ancient machinery—space and time—grinding to a deafening halt, yet capable of igniting in one last hideous conflagration. Masters of space, Curval and the other champions toil, with furious detachment, on the side of Time; they excel in the service of its machinations. Their little ceremonies assure an eternity of agony, and, paradoxically, precipitous death. (Most of the victims of Silling are very young.) As the old saw would have it, money buys time; Curval is filthy rich and it is wealth, Sade reminds us, that enables him and the others to indulge in “unusual pastimes.” Excessive wealth makes all our Sillings possible. It buys U.S. F-16s and Apache helicopters.
Like the One Thousand and One Nights, The 120 Days is propelled by stories. Radical and inexorable malice is assured by the virago storytellers’ unavoidable soliloquies that, “decorated with numerous and searching details… apt to have an immense influence” (271) commence punctually at six o’clock, like the evening news. The storytellers are moulins à paroles—word mills—whose narrations keep the mill of death oiled with cum and ceaselessly wheeling. Like the ogresses of fairytales or the winds of war, their mills grind bones. The sounds of bones breaking castanet the air, as do, with whorlwindish velocity, the champions’ groans. To keep the mill turning, the four agree to banish rational thinking from Silling and to replace it with the logic of nightmare:
Any friend… who may take it into his head to act in accordance with a single glimmer of common sense… shall be fined ten-thousand francs. (248)
—a rule that could have been invented by Robespierre (who sent lace-makers to the guillotine for practicing a frivolous craft), Sharon (who, as I write, will not allow ambulances into places he has besieged, nor allow for the burial of the dead), and our own President, for that matter, so eagerly gearing up for a war with Iraq.
When coupling—and their couplings are hectic and meticulous—the Messieurs, their jaded imaginations ignited by the storytellers’ descriptions of bodies “reduced to scarlet shambles” (463), of “pricks stabbed with a heavy cobbler’s awl” (409), of “bone-shattering cuffs” (459) are incapable of not only compassion but erotic delight; they collide into the bodies of those they hold in thrall like tanks slamming into kitchens. Is it surprising, then, that they like to dine on shit? In Silling, sexuality is the embodiment of fury, a bloody theater, an act of terror. Like a species of athanor in reverse, Silling transmutes everything into lead.
You will recall that in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant proposes that each one of us “always act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become universal law” (V). It is evident that for the individual with a will to do good, Kant’s criterion affords a rigorous practice in moral living, one that, above all, demands a searching conscience and fearless inquisitiveness, and the willingness to restlessly question dogmatic thinking - one’s own and that of others—to engage in, and tirelessly, a process of disenthrallment.
Sade’s Silling offers a Manichean reversal and negation of such a moral practice. In Silling, Libertine Law, Universal Law and the Law of Nature are one and the same. The friends are simply acting as Nature intends: brutal and blind—Sade an anti-Rousseau (although he did admire that “threat for dull-witted bigots!”) and, curiously, very much in keeping with the teachings of the Inquisition which, fed by stories of naked New Worlders worshipping devils and buggering one another, argue that nature, a satanic realm studded with glamors and perversions, demons in the shapes of bears, wenches and wolves, the semen of frogs and serpents teased into malefic powers—leads straight to madness. Such pessimism evokes a radical Gnosticism, proclaiming as it does man’s active place in a scheme of chronic pain and interminable night. Sade’s Nature knows nothing of pity and is forever tormenting her creatures with plagues and mortifications; later, in Juliette Sade will write: “are plants and animals acquainted with mercy, pity… brotherly love?” (888)
