Fantastic Metropolis

Silling, once seemingly so far is now very close. If Sade has been so vilified—and, despite the vagaries of fashion will continue to be, just as he always risks being embraced for all the wrong reasons—it is because Silling has never been one man’s uniquely aberrant vision, but a species of accelerated perspective, an anamorphosis that, when seen through the world’s own looking glass, is recognizable. Silling, like Ground Zeros everywhere, like the killing fields that separate our country from our neighbor to the south, like our own densely populated penitentiaries, is simply another name for all our own worst mistakes. It is my conviction that had we dared read Sade rigorously, dared respond to the terrible questions he poses, we might have been prepared for the worst. Silling’s fires continue to burn; they gather strength and momentum.

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Many years ago (this was in 1965) I was invited to have tea with the French wife of the American consul in Algeria. She received me, her face slathered in cream, in a room across the street from a notorious prison. I suggested that living in such close proximity to a place where so many Algerians had been tortured during the war for independence must be a cause for much distress. But no; she told me she’d had a maid tortured there herself, for stealing silverware. “But then,” she laughed, “I found the silverware!”

Needless to say, I didn’t stay for tea but left at once to learn soon after that the maid had been tortured so severely she had been crippled. The soles of her feet had been beaten to a pulp with heavy rods—a method perfected by the thugs of Francoist Spain. The consul’s wife’s allegresse reminds me of those criminally vapid presidential debates when Bush spoke so gleefully of the death penalty. In Curval’s words:

Better everytime to fuck a man than seek to comprehend him. (496)

Books cited

Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, compiled and translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, Grove Press, New York, 1966.

Marquis de Sade, Juliette, translated by Austryn Wainhouse, Grove Press, New York, 1988.

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1993.

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“Silling: A Sadean Mirror” originally appeared in CONTEXT No. 12.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of several novels, including The Jade Cabinet, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition, Phosphor in Dreamland, and Gazelle. Author of two short story collections, The Complete Butcher’s Tales and The Word “Desire”, she has also illustrated books for Robert Coover and Jorge Luis Borges. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and in 2004 she received a Lannan award for her body of fiction.