Fantastic Metropolis

Sade, always paradoxical, offers up this curiosity; he both despises the church and its stultifying myths, yet climbs into bed with a churchy arsenal of crucifixes and wafers and, when it comes to Nature, embraces with a vengeance the Catholic world view at its most extreme; an awkward backwardness for a man who was in so many ways a radical thinker—a champion of female sexuality, a vociferous detractor of the guillotine. In an earlier age the four libertines of Silling would have been witches.

I recall a story by the Belgian writer of fantasy, Jean Ray, in which a diabolical house—much like the Aztec universe—demands to be fed fresh corpses. Silling is such a place. And ces messieurs are famished; their famishment, too, is cosmical. They would take on everything, even the weather:

He passes an entire brothel in review; he receives the lash from all the whores while kissing the madame’s asshole and receiving therefrom into his mouth both wind and rain and hailstones. (584)

Such a madame, one supposes, can be nothing but the embodiment of Mother Nature.

When the four reach Silling, they destroy the bridge that allows them access and once inside decide

...it were necessary… to have walled shut all the gates, and all the passages whereby the chateau might be penetrated, and absolutely to enclose themselves inside their retreat as within a besieged citadel, without leaving the least entrance to an enemy, the least egress to a deserter… They barricade themselves to such an extent there was no longer any trace of where the exits had been; and they settled down comfortably inside. (240-241)

Tomb, gnostical world hermetically sealed, Silling is colonized like a defeated country, and like terrorized civilians its slaves are given two choices only: to be corrupted (some like certain survivors of Auschwitz become accomplices) or to submit. All resistance, imaginary and fabricated (the slaves are given emetics and forbidden to shit) is punished by torture and execution. Never does good resist evil; it is as if Sade cannot conceive it, as if helplessness and passivity serve as puissant aphrodisiacs. Then, again, the victims have always been figments only, flat, with no minds of their own. Silling, is, after all, a Looking Glass world; the world of the Red Queen whose vassals are merely cards. Among the vast store of things the four friends have brought with them are “many mirrors;” Silling, you understand, is the mirror of our most acute failures: a city under siege, a country burning with no road leading out, a place of perfect moral isolation. If I have chosen to evoke Sade’s sinister castle in this essay, it is not only because Silling’s mirror of bloody ink affords an exhaustive inquiry into what a world ruled by killers is like, but because it is Silling’s banality, after all, that should make us shudder, not its singularity.

Fantasy allows the reader to burn her own bridges and continue the tale à sa guise, to, in Sade’s own words, “sprinkle in whatever tortures you like” (671). Silling is potentially everyman’s fable, mirror, tomb. And if one has read The 120 Days to the bitter, the ironical end, has one at any moment been complicitous? Has one dared acknowledge and investigate this complicity? Has the reader sprinkled in whatever tortures she likes? Or was she made too ill to think and did she turn her head away in disgust? Fatal mistake! Or will she, will we, take up Silling’s challenge and offer a refutation? One that does not entail melting our enemies’ cities, as some fool recently proposed in The Denver Post—a jaded response that embraces Silling’s vertiginous bestiality, Sade’s own longing for cosmical conflagrations. What is needed, of course, is far less simple (and shall take much more than a single glimmer of common sense!); it depends upon a painful and necessary disentanglement from fatal habits of mind, a lasting and muscled recognition of common humanity, an ordered, a passionate vision for global justice, a veritable setting to rights. Compassion—for those the hottest heads among us choose to call, without knowledge or distinction “the enemy”—if it is to bring about peace, must be perceived as an active principle (unlike sentimentality which is, after all, simply another form of cowardice). In order to survive our next confrontation with Silling—the calamity we will suffer or inflict upon others, we will have to, each one of us, act in the manner Kant proposes and this if we are to, finally, overcome and abandon the pathology that dictates our unreason.