Sade's 120 Days of Sodom

Ho boy, how do I explain this one.

Let's get out of this with honesty. I begin by listing Sade's (known) crimes:

1. A prostitute named Jeanne Testard testified that on October 18, 1763 Sade, 23 years old and recently married, shouted obscenities against Jesus and the Virgin Mary, masturbated with a crucifix and a chalice, and read irreligious poetry. (IMO? Not bad so far.)

2. A widow named Rose Keller testified that, on April 3, 1768 Sade, 28 years old, imprisoned her, whipped her, and threatened to kill her.

3. A prostitute named Marguerite Coste testified that, in June 1772 Sade, 32 years old, fed her and other prostitutes pastilles laced with Spanish fly during a series of orgies in Marseilles. She and another prostitute became very ill as a result.

4. A servant named Nanon Sablonnière testified that in September 1774, Sade, 34 years old (you never get too old for kinks, huh?), hired one male and five females, all around 15 years old for a property in La Coste. The details are fuzzy because Sade's mother-in-law suppressed her testimony, but the overall story resembles that of "120 Days of Sodom" well: the servants said they were imprisoned and forced into sexual acts without their consent.

...And I don't want to get into any more.

This is the bottommost fact before we continue our discussion: Sade is a criminal. The crimes in La Coste are in particular downright despicable. But I do want to dwell on the situation in Marseilles: evidently, Spanish fly was historically considered an aphrodisiac. I mention this because I would not be surprised if Sade inadvertently poisoned Coste, thinking it would make the situation even sexier. This is one of the themes of this essay: I am not sure which parts of "Sodom" are calculated and which parts come from sheer stupidity.

I have no desire to be an accomplice to Sade's crimes. I have no desire to sanitize his character. I have no desire to promote a book that details his crimes and his sick, twisted perversions and his genuinely degenerate ideology. I simply would not do that.

This is all to say, this book is absurd and I actually don't know if it's meant to be taken seriously.

You may have heard of this book. It is as bad as its reputation says it is. You may not have heard of this book. It is bad. It will make you feel awful, it will make you feel guilty as its accomplice, it will make you want to quit reading it, and it may haunt you for the rest of your life. It is, in fact, cursed. (Somewhat.)

But it's also really funny.

This is actual dialogue in the novel, translated by Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn:

"Come, my little one, piss!" he told me. "Right now! Flood my prick with that enchanting liqueur whose warm flow has such a hold on my senses! Piss, my sweet, piss and try to drench my come."

How are we supposed to react to this? Well, for one, we react with horror: the girl in question is younger than ten years old. But, two, if we look at Sade and understand how he doesn't question the girl's age, then we're left with ... this extremely confusing, extremely weird, and pretty funny scene of a friar wanting a girl to piss on his prick.

This is simply an immutable fact: fiction is fiction. No matter how much you hand-wring it, it's not real. George R. R. Martin is not going to jail for having killed people in "Game of Thrones" - and in those books children died.

You may ask, Where's the line? Let's say the Golden State Killer wrote a detailed account of how he killed his victims and how he felt. A critic may say, This is real; you are promoting this person's killing and you are encouraging his admirers. I would have two responses: one, yes, it is, in fact, real, and understandable, and preventable, and the reason we read is to know about the world; two, it actually isn't "real", in that it is impossible for a human being to describe the world objectively when they go exclusively by their own memory and voice. This is obvious: the human mind distorts and edits events to fit their current worldview. No matter what world is described, and no matter how trained the writer is in epistemology, they will inevitably write a fictional series of events wherein they themselves are biased as the protagonist.

To think fiction has any effect on reality is to believe that words have the power to command, to coerce, to impel - in short, that words have the same magic as Merlin does. The Bible describes God in this way: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." We are not God. We should not be afraid of words. Words have but these powers: the powers to clarify, communicate, and conclude. These powers are great. Sade's powers are not.

So let us, in earnest, dive into and discuss "The 120 Days of Sodom" and discover for ourself what it's really about.

The absurdity of Sodom

After the crimes mentioned above, Sade was imprisoned in Vincennes prison - not as a result of justice on behalf of his victims, but because his powerful mother-in-law did not want his continually embarrassing her family. Sade conceived "The 120 Days" in prison; his mental preparations were extensive. He began writing it on a scroll for 37 days in 1785, finishing the introduction, which includes the portraits of his "characters", and the first thirty days of stories, told by the prostitute Madame Duclos. What remains of the novel are notes concerning the remaining three parts. On July 4, 1789, Sade would be transferred to the asylum at Charenton, where he would lose his manuscript forever. Since July 4th is the American Day of Independence, I am joyous: our country not only rid itself of British rule, it also inadvertently canceled a timeline where Sade finished his novel of smut.

The story of "Sodom" is this: four very wealthy friends plan a retreat where they will satisfy all of their sexual cravings in four months, from November to March. They have four daughters whom they have married off to one another; henceforth I shall call them the wives. For this retreat, they hire four storytellers who have spent their lives satisfying men's lusts, four maids who are really, really gross (Sade's words, not mine), eight men (of whom only four are actually important) with very large members, and have abducted a host of young boys and girls (early teens) of noble background for various pleasures. Over the course of four months, the storytellers will tell stories of the most obscene lusts they have satiated, and the friends will reenact those "pleasures" for "fun". The place of their retreat is considered so remote that it is "impossible" for anyone to escape, thus allowing for the most depraved of orgies. This is set up in the introduction.

I already contend with the conceit of these stories.

1. The wives, except Julie, are considered utterly virtuous and utterly beautiful; they are lavished the longest descriptions in the novel concerning their beauty. Seeing as how three of the four women are somehow so virtuous, when you can hardly find a pious man in a hundred, I find this a coincidence hard to believe, particularly as they are the friends' biological daughters, as far as I recall.

2. During the events of "Sodom", the friends are served meals by chefs; it's not made clear who attends to the matters of the castle, as the aforementioned maids seem to have serious physical debilities. But nevermind that; there are chefs. Why would the chefs not tell people about the fucking murders in the castle after winter? To repeat: the. Chefs!

3. A lot of the lusts are scatalogical and, I'm sorry, you would get sick from eating runny poop all the time.

4. Furthermore, Sade describes outrageously intricate crimes relating to the friends and the abduction of the children, which all have one flaw: it only requires one person to spill everything. Like, the body count easily goes to the double digits; someone would notice.

5. The children assembled are, apparently, the sixteen most beautiful children in France and, I'm sorry, I can't even think of one woman in my life I've seen where I thought, "That's the most beautiful woman in the world." I strain to believe in the given timeframe that they happened to find sixteen exceptionally beautiful kids - and, by the way, what criteria even makes a kid "beautiful"? Furthermore, in the following stories, Duclos describes innumerable girls who are the most beautiful she's ever seen - it genuinely confounds the brain how, and no offense to French people, so many girls of the most incomparable buttocks and breasts are found, and I've personally never seen a breast I wanted to compare to other breasts, but maybe that's just me.

6. Some of the lusts would kill people. The one with the horse? The guy is dead. We know this.

7. Early on in Duclos's part, the narrator describes the children as being outfitted with all these clothes, and at one point there's even an unexpected swap in clothes. Where the fuck are these clothes coming from? They just put chests of clothes in the castle? Wouldn't the chest-carrying people think, Gee, I wonder what happened in that castle where people died?

It's an absurd premise. It makes no goddamn sense.

And yet there is something about the premise that terrifies you. It's the same terror as seeing a woman walking home alone in a dark alley, or seeing someone locked in a jail cell: the story invokes the primal fear of being unable to receive any human help whatsoever and being at the mercy of cruel and insane jailers. As absurd as the premise is, Sade taps at something animalistic inside of us, and "The 120 Days" is his indulging in those animalistic passions - of fear, of lust, of rage - to their extremes.

And what I struggle with is, Was he aware of the absurdity of his story? As had been mentioned, some of "Sodom" resembles events in his actual life, and yet too much of "Sodom" is divergent. Many, many, many of the lusts depicted have not been observed in Sade's life.

(However, going by his notes, he did apparently share in one passion:

Fifteen whores visit him, three by three: one flogs, one sucks him off, another shits, then the one who shat flogs him, the one who sucked him off, shits, and the one who flogged him sucks him off. He receives all fifteen this way; he sees nothing, he hears nothing, he is intoxicated - a bawd oversees everything. He repeats this episode six times a week. (This one is a charming one to carry out, and I recommend it to you: it has to proceed at a very quick pace, each whore must give twenty-face lashes of the whip, and it is between these lashings that the first one sucks and the third shits. If he wants each whore to give fifty lashes, he will have received seven hundred and fifty, which is not too many.)

This is the only time he has shown a personal affinity to a passion. This shows a number of things: one, he is concerned about the overall pain inflicted, with his "not too many" comment; two, this is all happening to him, drunk out of his mind; three, this is all by consent. It's overall a harmless passion. We will return to this theme, of Sade's actual relationship to his passions, as the essay continues.)

Then there's also the fact that "Sodom" ... just isn't sexy. From the jump it's not sexy. For those of us who are familiar with the romance genre or erotica or even the cadence of pornographic videos, the sexiness is almost entirely in foreplay, the lead up to the actual lovemaking. Sade's friends have such mechanical lusts that they're alien to us and we feel that there has to be some other word for them. I am no stranger to the envy one may feel when watching someone else satisfy their passions, and I can firmly say I have never felt this once while reading "The 120 Days". In fact, "Sodom" is just exhausting. When a character evidently cums six times in a row, I just think, "What a nightmare."

It's such a curious feeling. The only people who can enjoy the events of "Sodom" are the four friends who furthermore, as we know, were designed to enjoy "Sodom", because they're not real. Sade of course does not argue this, I do: "Sodom" really shows how ephemeral pleasure is and how substanceless, for pleasure is a lot of waiting around in empty rooms until pleasure comes around. The castle in the Black Forest is lesser to an apartment with a TV and cable as far as entertainment goes.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed an infamous adaptation of "Sodom" for the silver screen, and whose film, I think, is near-crucial to understanding how the audience is supposed to view "Sodom", believed Sade intended for "The 120 Days" to have a Dante-esque structure, that of the clear categorization of Dante's "Inferno" (1321) into circles of sins and their consequent punishments. I think he is not incorrect, and yet I will push back on that interpretation a little bit. "Sodom", in my viewpoint, is in the same vein as Boccaccio's "Decameron", Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel" - it's an episodic work whose episodes don't reveal an intellectual structure but are meant to give the content variety and spice.

To make myself clear: Dante, I can believe, had a philosophical pretension to organizing his "Commedia" the way he did; he may not have understood it while writing it, but the journey of his sinner involves shedding his most essential mortal functions and turning his eyes to the grand, beautiful, immortal functions of the intellect. I heartily believe Sade was just having fun and as "Sodom" goes by he was running out of gas. "Yeah, break a finger," Sade murmurs, "and then break a leg, why not? And a leg has feet, so he breaks the feet, and then he cums, yeah." I can believe this because I'm as lazy a writer as Sade, and "Sodom" screams of Sade trying to entertain himself, which I will touch on later.

Let's take some examples. Here are some of my favorite funny tales in "Sodom":

He has a naked whore straddle a large crucifix: he fucks her cunt from behind as she holds this pose so that Christ's head rubs against the whore's clitoris.

He carves [the sacramental bread] up with a knife and has the crumbs thrust up his arse.

He ties the girl up tightly by the hand and leaves her thus without feeding her; beside her is a large knife and before her an excellent meal; if she wants to feed herself, she must cut off her hand, if not she will die like this; he fucked her in the arse beforehand; he watches her through a window.

He fucks a goat from behind while he is flogged; he has a child with this goat, which he buggers in turn even though it is a freak.

Which beggars the question... Did he know this is biologically impossible, or is he taking a piss on pearl-clutching people who would even dimly believe this is true?

Leading to this ... utterly absurd, overly complicated scheme:

He has himself placed in a specially prepared basket that has only one opening, against which he places his arsehole, smeared with a mare's come; the basket is in the shape of a mare and covered with that animal's hide. An ungelded horse, trained for this purpose, buggers him and while it does so he fucks a pretty white bitch inside his basket.

To which I ask, why was the horse not enough?

Which is all to say: even he can't make a compelling case for sin. Dante makes sin more interesting! You can discern patterns in how Sade thinks - for example, the relationship between love, shame and violence, as seen in the Duc's love/hate relationship with Augustine, makes sense from a Freudian perspective - and yet the novel is a series of obsessions we perceive only Sade has, and we also perceive Sade is making up obsessions, particularly at the end where he gets quite lazy and says, "A murder; then he cums! Another murder; cumming!" He essentially becomes a director of horror B-movies, someone who comes up with the kills for "Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Friday the 13th".

Adding onto this interpretation, Sade, for reasons inexplicable, sprinkles very human, even comedic scenes with the friends throughout the novel. For example, the Duc becomes so drunk he doesn't remember what Aline looks like; in another, the friends have the victims fart in the others' faces because it amuses them.

So, no, "Sodom" is not an essential document whatsoever in understanding sexual perversity and mores. It's ridiculous and we're fairly certain the author himself thinks it's ridiculous.

Luckily, we are in the realm of fiction, and none of this matters. "Sodom" is an essential document on how one specific individual understands sexual perversity and mores, and, because this is fiction, through the individual, though we may not perceive the whole truth, we can still glimmer at the meaning in the many.

The women of Sodom

It's impossible to understand Sade's sexual attitudes without first examining the women of "The 120 Days".

Let me begin with a likely controversial statement that I've been debating within myself for a while: I think Sade is less of a misogynist than Voltaire and Jonathan Swift. You know, that Voltaire, "advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state" as Wikipedia says. That Swift, whom Yeats said, "Imitate him if you dare, / World-Besotted Traveller; he / Served human liberty."

For reference, "Sodom" was written in 1785.

Let's start with Voltaire. Voltaire, in his fiction at least, does not give any of his female characters agency. "Candide" (1759), we don't even need to mention Cunegonde; the Queen of "Zadig" (1747) doesn't do much except sigh; and in "The Huron" (1767), Voltaire essentially says the value of a woman lies in her sex. He is, of course, not saying this conclusively or philosophically, but we do have to note that he is saying, realistically, this is what the woman's value lies in. Let's not even discuss the dripping misogyny of "The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman" (1775).

Swift has even less regard for women in "Gulliver's Travels" (1726). To be fair to him, he preceded "Sodom" by 60 years, but, come on man, the only female in the novel with any agency is the fucking little girl in Brobdingnag who takes care of him. Meanwhile, Gulliver pisses on a tiny Lilliputian queen and stares lecherously at giant women in Brobdingnag while leaving his wife and children alone at home for years, without a source of revenue. Then, there's the added misogynistic twist - to be fair to him he's being satirical - where in Laputa he observes the phenomenon that the most well-bred and richest princess of the flying city would be happy to be beaten black and blue by the poorest and meanest peasant on the ground, no different than the women of his native England (in Swift's words). I'm fairly certain, even with his most empowered female character, Swift believes that the little girl's behavior comes from an awakened "maternal instinct" inherent in all women, which is kinda weird.

And so now we arrive at Sade, who has four categories of female characters.

The first category is that of the friends' wives. The friends hate their wives, who are also their daughters, and want to humiliate and hurt them as much as possible. They constantly mock them for being innocent and pious and enjoy watching them suffer for no other except for existing. Except for Julie, whom I'll get to.

The second category is that of the abducted victims. In one of the strangest and laugh-out-loud scenes in "Sodom", a whole bunch of girls are corralled to the friends, and the friends take a week evaluating the eight best of the bunch through a bizarre set of routines that resembles a degenerate beauty pageant. The purpose of the victims is to be beautiful and innocent and virginal; the wives are gutter-trash that are meant to whet the friends' appetites so that they can all the more savor their underaged victims. Basically, the victims are foie gras and the wives are Lay's potato chips.

The third category is that of the servants, whose job is not necessarily to serve the friends as it is to be as gross as possible. For example, Fanchon "has a squint, and is pug-nosed, short, fat, with no forehead and only 2 teeth; an erysipelas covers her arse, a bunch of haemorrhoids hangs from her arsehole, a canker devours her vagina, she has a burnt thigh and a cancer eating away at her breast; she is always drunk, vomits, farts and shits all over the place and at any time without even noticing." (To my readers: there is nothing wrong with having a squint and a pug-nose, nor is there anything wrong with being short and fat and having no forehead and only 2 teeth; however, everything else, to be earnest, is fair game, particularly the farting and shitting and vomiting.)

The fourth category is that of the storytellers, veteran whores who have lived a lifetime of sexual adventures.

Now, you might be thinking, seeing as Sade kills all of them by the end of the narrative, all of this doesn't matter; these are all minor details that only help in making Sade cum when he erases a human being's unique existence on this earth.

In which case, you would be wrong. Five women do, in fact, live: the storytellers Duclo, Champville, Martaine and Desgranges, and the wife Julie.

The fact that Julie lives, when the wives are explicitly told they are cattle, is already shocking and shows that Sade believes women can have an upward movement in his esteem.

You may argue: Sure, but his women only have an upward movement so long as she remains below a man. To which I answer: Not really. Sade values very little things in "Sodom"; he is actually very, very consistent about this. He's not interested in power, though many of the men are powerful, to explain how they do what they do; he's not interested in wealth, though many of the men are wealthy, to afford what they do; "Sodom" reserves its only praises for sexuality. And the storytellers and the friends are equal in sexuality. Not a single finger is laid on the storytellers without consent.

Add to this the fact that the storytellers are essentially the true protagonists of "The 120 Days". They - well, in reality Duclos only, but in terms of the planning of "Sodom" - have the most words spent on them. The friends are, in fact, essentially background characters who provide a different lens into the sexuality depicted in their tales. All of the emotional matter in the story comes from the storytellers and their sexual travails. All of the mystery in the story comes from the storytellers, as when a girl is discovering a man's kink in real time.

A wrinkle in the question of Sade's misogyny is that the stories of Duclos, which are the only fully-fleshed-out stories, have a marked difference once she formally becomes a prostitute. One notices this in her story of the Great Danes: the master's fetish is that Duclos acts like one of his dogs, but Sade notes that the dogs are very well-behaved and respectful to her and the trough from which she eats out of is very clean. Why these details? Why is so much respect lavished for Duclos in what is a very disrespectful situation for women? In general, Duclos actually gets a lot of respect as a prostitute; she's put into very degrading situations, sure, but both participants are aware of the situation and the client often makes the session as accommodating to her as possible. Compare this to Duclos' experiences as a child working exclusively for priests. It's very odd Sade makes this distinction; there seems to be a conscious categorization in his attitude toward the friends, his attitude toward the church, and his attitude toward sex work.

Let's look at the very opposite of the storytellers: Adelaide, who by her actions is by far the most devout and decent of the women in the story. The friends, for this reason, absolutely hate her and in stomach-churning scenes harass and beat her. However, though my sympathy goes to the poor Adelaide (who is not real, to be clear), I understand why the friends are frustrated with her: rather than accept the reality of her situation, she instead turns to a remote God to somehow free her from her situation. As ridiculous as the friends are, their main point is right: "We are here," they are saying, "this evil is real, and there is far more evil in this world than good, and there is far more evil in the human heart than good." What is exceedingly interesting is that, in my Penguin translation, at the end of Martaine's narrations, Adelaide goes through truly horrific torture, and Sade says "she endures all this like a true heroine". Indeed, in the introduction, Sade says "an alluring air of sensibility suffused her whole body and her face in particular, giving her the air of a heroine from a romance". Adelaide, indeed, is the one who predicts the horrors that will come. So what is going on here? What is the author's perspective on Adelaide? It's clear that Adelaide, whose character is utterly contrary to the events of the novel, is not entirely hated by the writer.

We should also note the protagonists of most of Sade's works are female.

One could argue his contempt is against powerless women; he reserves, not grudging but admiring, respect for powerful women, women confident in their worldly knowledge and authority. Though the servants do die, they're treated actually quite well throughout the novel; only in the end do they meet the ultimate fates and, who fucking knows, maybe Sade is saying, in a nihilistic bent, they wanted to die. This leads to the shocking revelation that Julie lives at the end, for the reason that she has accepted her role as a whore.

Again, I don't believe Sade believes a woman's whorishness is strictly at the service of a man; sexuality is mutual. True, the men enjoy sex far more than the women (which proposition in real life is debatable), but the women in "Sodom" don't dislike sex either, except for the wives (except Julie) who consistently have contempt for the friends' sexual shenanigans. One could argue that sexuality, in fact, makes men and women equal.

There's another way of looking at this. The storytellers make one think of the Wife of Bath. The Wife of Bath's tale, from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", describes a man forced to marry who in the man's eyes is a very ugly woman. When pressed on whether the man would rather have a beautiful but unfaithful wife or an ugly but loyal wife, the man answers that the woman should choose; the woman then becomes a beautiful and loyal wife. Silly story I know, but the Wife of Bath's tale reveals something essential in how men view marriage, whether this is true or not. Sade, when sat next to the Wife of Bath, is unable to choose: he allows his friends to be surrounded by beautiful but unfaithful wives (unfaithful, to be fair, because the friends are true assholes) and ugly but loyal storytellers. In an odd way, Sade does not want women to choose what they themselves wish to be, and yet he doesn't make a statement saying he doesn't want them not to choose either; he simply doesn't give an answer, or his answer is, "I'll take both!" Considering the friends enjoy being the objects of sodomy, it really speaks to the extent Sade permits his passivity in shaping his life and his habits. It's worth noting too that most of the men described in the storytellers' tales do not enjoy having the same woman twice - there is a pervasive fear of commitment, or an obsession with "purity".

Perhaps this is Sade's conceit: "In order to embrace women, I must accept their extremities, extreme beauty and extreme ugliness." And then he ... doesn't. His intellectualizing on pleasure and pain arrives nowhere. He still hates and needs women.

The bisexuality of Sodom

To be clear: not actual bisexuality, I mean Sade's concept of bisexuality.

We analyze the two central poles of the novel: the extremely virtous and extremely beautiful wives, and the rather-ugly and whorish storytellers. In a reversal of what we think would be rightful morality, the wives are treated like dirt and the storytellers are put on marble pedestals. Is it a mistake to be beautiful and virtuous in "120 Days"? It seems to be, and perhaps that's what Sade was at the edge of the cliff of getting at: the women who can't care at all, the storytellers and the servants, are ugly and have accepted and have indeed consumed the ugliness of the world. They are no longer innocent, so they aren't outraged by evil. They accept their misfortune with indifference, and are even rewarded for their willingness to be ugly.

So let's now look at the other males of "Sodom", the male victims and the buggers, whose sole saving attribute is their large penises. As with the other groups in "Sodom", there are eight of both groups (ironic because 8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture). What supports our arguing of Sade's philosophical equality between the sexes is that all of these men die except for three special buggers: Brise-cul ("Break-arse"), Bande-au-ciel ("Erect to the sky"), and Antinous.

On the third day of November, the friends devise strange events for February: each of them will take one of the buggers as a husband, and one of the male victims as a wife. The symbolism is clear: because the buggers are responsible for performing sodomy on the friends, they are husbands, and because the friends sodomize the boys, the boys are wives; what is also made abundantly clear from the text is that sodomy is painful, if not inherently (and it surely is), then it is intentionally made painful by the largeness of the buggers' members. Therefore, the clear relationship between husband and wife is that husbands inflict pain and wives receive pain, which is made apparent by the relationship between the friends and their actual wives.

This is also shown in the sexual acts: we commonly think of the pleasure in sex as coming from the abundance of nerves in our sexual organs, but Sade specifically believes pleasure comes from doing something to someone, as pooping in their mouth or peeing on them. But what's also curious is that Sade fundamentally believes that inflicting and receiving pain both give pleasure, as the subjects of the storytellers' tales show a mix of both. (Well, this isn't really true as you get to the last two parts of the novel, but, again, those parts weren't finished.) I want to establish, clearly, that "Sodom" can't be simplified as a power fantasy: the friends have the victims poop in their mouths and the friends themselves are flogged. "Sodom" is strange in that it's almost zen-like: to achieve the peak of pleasure, you must be both frigger and frigged.

And this is also incorporated into the morality of "The 120 Days". We can look at it this way: Sade is every character, including the women. He is both frigger, delighting in his power and his ability to project sin, and frigged, content in his powerlessness and his inability to prevent sin. I will touch more on this later, but Sade was very much not happy in prison. In his actual writing environment, he probably saw himself as a frigged. He saw himself as a victim of fate. "The 120 Days" was his compromise: in the book I can be a frigger, but I am also aware that I must be content being frigged.

The aesthetics of Sodom

Sade's bluntness and desire to condense pleasure and morality and society into one absolute rule makes "Sodom" such a fascinating read. And into this totality he experiments in aesthetics too.

Observe this passage I have conceived:

The man liked poop. Every morning, he would poop big brown poops. Every evening, he would bath in his poop, eat his poop, lather himself with poop, rinse his face with poop and pee.

Observe how you are not disgusted whatsoever. You become numb to the word "poop", or rather, you quickly make the shift from the "poop" you know into the "poop" the narrative describes. These two concepts - poop as an unhygienic thing and poop as meal, water and emollient - are separated in the course of the narrative. In this sense, the word "poop" becomes hollowed out, it loses its meaning.

This is the ultimate aesthetic effect of "Sodom": you are barraged with so many differing and extreme sexual acts that you become numb to it. One of the reasons why "Sodom" is funny is that Sade always finds different ways to involve poop and pee in an act.

But why... just, why? Why is he so interested in the artifacts of the human body, i.e. poop, pee, and cum? I assume it's precisely because they're considered "dirty", they're unwanted, as unwanted as the storytellers and the servants are. Sade enjoys mixing the "pure" and the profane, as if by making something so shameful it somehow goes the other way and becomes spotless.

And this is one of the curious effects "Sodom" has on the reader: you get the sense that the writer is trying to shock you - particularly with the blasphemous stuff - and you get the sense that the writer is trying to pull you into their world (as Sade arrogantly puts it in the introduction, "no doubt many of the various excesses you shall see depicted shall displease you, we know, but there shall be others that inflame you to the point of spilling your come", which, no), and yet none of this is convincing because fiction is fiction and we don't see what he sees.

And the one-million-dollar question is: Was Sade aware of this? Did he understand how ridiculous his book was by premise alone? And I, unfortunately, don't have a good answer to that question. Sade does not strike me as substantively philosophical - I refer you to his attempting to bludgeon morality and psychology into one pigeonhole - and so I'm perfectly happy to say he was not aware of the point he was actually making, but you also don't see signs of artlessness in the novel. It's very easy to try to get a rise on the reader, to go into how much the poop smells and how bad it tastes and how much the victims hate it, but he ... doesn't. He accepts it as fact. He doesn't need to elaborate because there's nothing to elaborate; he merely wants to present the sex act as neutrally as possible.

One could use this to argue, for Sade, all of these acts were normalized, but I don't think you can make that assumption, as it would imply that Voltaire actually did see people get murdered and raped and quartered in order to write "Candide". Voltaire is detached from the events in "Candide" because he believes merely showing the events is enough to prove his cynical point; why do we not extend this courtesy to Sade, what, because he's a villain? I do think it's dishonest to think in such a way and his life really didn't show much familiarity with these "pleasures".

So I do think he was aware of this and, seeing as I haven't read his other works (yet), it remains to be seen whether his clinical, detached, rather lucid writing style was part of his disposition or an actual artistic choice. And if we take this to be true, it's quite difficult to argue that Sade had a rooting interest for any of the characters in the novel; I mean, yes, Sade was overly fond of underaged kids, there's no narrative purpose for the victims to be the ages they are, but it's difficult to say that Sade wants the friends to succeed and that he approves of the storytellers' tales equally.

So...what are we left with? We're left with the ten-million-dollar question: Why did he want to write this, if it didn't satisfy his own kinks?

I think the simplest reason is that he was bored in prison and he'd thought it'd be neat to write something like this.

I've thought about writing something about this.

Well, not this; after reading "Sodom", I'm retiring. I could never imagine even a percent of the depravities in it.

I think "Sodom" is ultimately Sade questioning the mechanism (and this is the right word to describe what goes on in "Sodom", as the process of pleasure is machine-like) of sexuality and showing curiosity and coming up with more questions than answers. The fourth part, Desgranges' part, is boring for that reason: I don't think Sade actually enjoyed murder. I think the farces of Duclos' part are closer to what he himself actually enjoys: he likes to pretend to be ashamed when he really isn't, and he likes his victims to think he's a bad guy. In short, he's a prankster. He's a troll, in the wrong era. And the tone of "The 120 Days" is ultimately mischievous, an "aren't I a stinker?" attitude.

Power and fragility in Sodom, and Sade and Sodom

Very early on the Duc gives this long speech to the wives (the storytellers and servants also hear this, but it's really for the wives) that the only purpose of their existence is to pleasure the friends and if they fail to do so they will be harshly punished for it; furthermore, the friends' power is so absolute that the wives can be punished for infractions they did not know ahead of time, i.e. if you don't do such-and-such when I want you to even if I give you no indication for it, I will punish you. The ultimate message, therefore, the friends give is that you are at the mercy of our whims, and we have no mercy, and so we will use you like objects and you will have no choice but to suffer.

So...why do the victims of "Sodom" buy this?

I mean...I assume the meals involve cutlery, right? Why not just cut them up?

Of the people who are voluntarily there, we have the four storytellers, the four servants and the eight buggers, totaling sixteen people. Of those not voluntarily there, you have the eight male victims, the eight female victims and the four wives, making twenty people. Then, there's the twist: the buggers and the servants are actually condemned to die and there is no mercy for them, so the number of involuntary victims swells to thirty-two, though realistically three buggers and Julie will be fine, so twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight people can fuck up ten people. As Hobbes argues, a person can be stronger than another, but the difference in strength is not by an order of magnitude; safety lies in numbers than in personal strength. And, not counting the buggers who are in the range of twenty to forty years of age, the male victims are from thirteen to fifteen, which is not peak physical condition but arriving there. And I will say, I am personally terrified of fourteen year olds. I am terrified of 6-7. They don't know who The Beatles are.

Sure, as the months go by maybe the victims get Stockholm Syndrome and maybe they think they individually will live, sure. But when the murders start happening, like, it's ridiculous someone like Curval doesn't die. Like, who wouldn't think, OK, I'm going to die, but I'm still going to spite-kill you when I go?

And, oh, we're in the middle of fucking nowhere, so your wealth literally means nothing and there are no policemen to intercede? Like, the great plothole of "Sodom" is that the friends' vast powers come from civilization, from civil society, which, Sade is arguing, is ignorant of their crimes and thereby allow them their injustices. Once you remove civilization, you are just a sixty year old man surrounded by murderous children in a "Lord of the Flies" waiting to happen.

This train of thought reveals more of Sade's bent: the victims have to be docile, with no desire to defend themselves whatsoever. Everything about "Sodom" screams of a fear of losing control: the crime HAS to be perfectly executed; the climax HAS to be perfectly timed; the castle HAS to be perfectly isolated; the children HAVE to be perfectly beautiful; et cetera; and if they are not, someone is irreparably, unfailingly, overwhelmingly punished, which itself is perfection, for it happens that the friends, more than any other pleasure, cum to cruelty. And if one of these things fails? Then there is simply no story.

Because the humans are devolved into objects, their transactions are mechanical, and we the readers are allowed to paint in whatever we want into the interactions. The famous adage is that "tragedy plus time equals comedy", and while the whole situation is horrifying we are reminded that, in the moments of tedium, the victims are living. Again, this highlights the absurdity of the text, but it's also revealing on how Sade approached his whole work, that time only resumes when someone is cumming, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

The cums of the friends must be planned or they must be given the utmost preparations. These people are so pathetic Sade needs to make them all-powerful to prevent them from being cripples, and I do wonder if Sade is aware of this aspect of his unfinished novel.

Which describes the novel overall: it's pathetic. We talk often about the vileness of inhumanity, but philosophers inherently recognize inhumanity as pathetic. Inhumanity simply doesn't accord with the facts of living. Sure, we live in a real world where power dynamics are primary, but 1. power blesses both the good and the bad as it's not relative to goodness or badness whatsoever, and 2. the accumulation of power has to be for the cause of something, otherwise you expended energy to acquire power for no reason, and as we don't live in an anime power can only be acquired by compromising and cooperating with one's fellow man.

Which analysis reveals the conceit of "Sodom": the four friends are essentially alike, being four aspects of the same depraved person. It actually makes no sense why the Duc, Durcet, Curval, and the Bishop don't betray each other. Notably, in the storytellers' tales, the men operate alone; this makes sense, even though it doesn't make sense, because someone would have to do the nasty shit the men want them to do; but the friends are sewn hip to hip on their depravities. The other conceit is that the friends are all-powerful, despite their many, many infirmities, with only the Duc known for having considerable physical strength.

The friends can only be all-powerful in the world of fiction, as otherwise in the real world they would be losers, rich losers, sure, but losers all the same. Dictators can only be all-powerful in a world constructed of lies. These are facts. I honestly don't know what Sade's intentions for "The 120 Days" were, but the construction of "Sodom" almost demonstrates this premise by the Devilest of Advocates. "Sodom" is a hypocrisy that wants to assert that absolute power can only be achieved through absolute evil, and yet that absolute evil is something that cannot accept any compromise and must be absolute in its authority, and so ... what is the foundation of all of these absolutes? How can something partial as intelligence and wit and wisdom and jollity, which can be either good or evil, comprise something as complete as absolute power, which can only be evil? Voltaire ridicules the idea of an absolute heaven, and somehow Sade ridicules the idea of an absolute hell.

This is Philosophy 101. This is Plato's "Republic". As Plato argues, pure innocence cannot be equal to "goodness", for goodness must consist of knowledge, our ability to grasp the world around us, and wisdom, our ability to observe change. As Socrates says to Thrasymachus, the good comprehends the good and the bad, while the bad can hardly comprehend the bad. In constructing his elaborate republic, Plato consults life: its joys and its sadnesses, its virtues and its evils, its majesties and its poverties, everything that makes life miserable but also everything that makes life worthwhile. Sade, in contrast, wants only one part of life: its joys, its virtues, its majesties, while holding in contempt its sadnesses, its evils, its poverties, and yet these latter things are so overwhelming they cannot be ignored and he has to incorporate them somehow in his ever-complicated philosophy. Eureka! he screams, as he cums, obviously. Joy is trampling over sad people, virtue is being more than evil, and wealth is earned by holding poor people in contempt. If Sade cannot be correct, he can at least be consistent. And that is what makes "Sodom" so interesting: it is, in fact, consistent in its mythology, no different than Tolkien's Middle-Earth or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. It's not real, but who cares. Its unreality, because it is presented earnestly, can inform us of reality.

Speaking of reality, let us touch briefly on Sade's life, beyond his crimes.

Sade was the only surviving child of his father, Comte de Sade, and his mother, Marie-Éléonore de Maillé de Carman. They actually had a thoroughline to the House of Bourbon-Condé, so they were provincial nobility. Sade, therefore, was a rich kid who hung out with other rich kids, notably Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, whom he quarreled with often. However, Comte de Sade would lose favor with the king and become mired in debt, withdrawing Sade from this circle of society ... for a time.

I find this aspect of Sade's life amusing because it parallels with Cao Xueqin's, the writer of "Dream of the Red Chamber" (which, ironically, is also unfinished!); however, whereas Xueqin turned to repentance in his work, Sade ... uh, doesn't.

Sade was sent to a military academy and did serve in the Seven Years' War for a while, promoted all the way to captain. He demonstrated some virtues of a good soldier, but he was also known for insubordination, gambling and womanizing. Comte de Sade was notably displeased with his son's behavior - considering he was greatly in debt and ill - and attempted to marry Sade to the eldest daughter of the Montreuil family, a bourgeois, wealthy family with influential contacts. I'm taking this quote off Wikipedia, from Comte de Sade concerning his son, so be mindful of its veracity: "As for me, what makes up my mind is that I will be rid of the boy, who has not one good quality and all the bad ones." This would be a sad thing to say for any other son, but for Sade we nod our heads and say "Yup."

Sade would be wed to that eldest daughter, Renée-Pélagie; earlier I mentioned that shortly after their marriage was the Testard affair. After the Testard affair he moved to his own family's castle at La Coste, which would be the place of the final La Coste affair. He renovated the castle, including building a theater for public performance; later, after the Arcueil affair, he put effort into theatrical productions at the castle.

Now is the right time to touch on this, as I may not return to this again: Sade did not stay in prison forever. The French Revolution freed Sade, and he refashioned himself as "Louis Sade, man of letters". He devoted himself to writing plays for profit (which I believe worked well on some days and poorly on others), and, notably, publishing novels anonymously; these dark, pornographic novels are his legacy, and his plays are not. I touch on this because it's clear Sade had set his heart on fiction, but the question is when; was it always something that interested him, or was it something that inflamed him while he was in prison?

Circling back to his wife: I do not think Sade hated his wife, as he had a long correspondence with her in prison, but he definitely showed his contempt for his wife at almost every turn. In 1765 he tried to pass off a mistress of his as his wife, which is, you know, offensive to pretty much every wife. In 1771, Sade was in a relationship with his wife's younger sister. And then there were the orgies. Which his wife and his mother-in-law helped cover up.

It would be that same mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, who had so eagerly protected Sade from ruining her family's reputation, who would order his incarceration. He would be imprisoned for thirteen years, starting in Vincennes, moving over to the Bastille, and then to Charenton insane asylum.

Sade hated prison. As my Penguin translation notes, his eyesight worsened, he was denied exercise, and he hated the solitude of prison, which led to a madness where he believed certain numbers would help him escape. In a letter to M. Lenoir, the lieutenant general of police, he said:

It is not by such procedures that you will gain anything from my soul. You sour it, you revolt it by accumulating the feelings of hatred and vengeance with which this wretched and tormented soul ceaselessly suffers, and all that you will have gained - be quite sure of this - will be to have made me worse than I would ever have been in my life.

Of course we are empathetic to the pain of our fellow man, but, since this is Sade, we do think to ourselves ... "Hyuck hyuck! Rot in jail you fucking douchebag!"

From Vincennes, Sade wrote in a letter to his wife on February 1781;

Yes, I am a libertine, I admit I have imagined everything that can be imagined of this kind, but I have surely not done everything I have imagined and will surely never do so. I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal or a murderer.

Clearly, this is what "Sodom" is: ever since childhood Sade longed to be a dramatist, but his cruel, rigid father said, No, son, you can only be a marquis. Sade, ever the victim, held his head down reluctantly and accepted his fate, as well as a wife who by all appearances was pure and innocent but deep down was as cruel as his father. Only in sex was Sade free, and after being liberated from the evil influences in his life did he become what he longed to be ... a dramatist.

This story is as fictional as "Sodom". No, I'm not suggesting this whatsoever, but it's easy to see how these aspects in his life were rocks around which the flow of his life was dictated. Clearly he had an inclination toward drama, he could have done anything else in prison except write and he could have done anything else to make money as a free man other than write plays. He clearly did not have a good relationship with his father, who correctly evaluated his son as a scoundrel; what remains to be concluded is if Sade ever regarded his father at all. Considering the curious bisexuality of "The 120 Days", his contempt for his father strikes one as quite interesting.

His relationship with his wife is far more fruitful, because his wife is essentially Adelaide, as in, the girl in the novel the friends torture the second worst. It is actually quite unusual to see the friends complain and fixate so much on religion; it is so difficult to not contextualize these scenes with the fact that Renee was considered quite devout. Then, the friends make very well-known their hatred for pregnant women, which Renee was, thrice, with his children. This makes the incest in "Sodom" uncomfortable to read, however in real life the most Sade did with this is run off with Renee's sister. To tie this in a little bow, the crimes I had mentioned earlier, were discovered shortly after his marriage to her.

Oh, and another connection: Renee's family was far more powerful than Sade's, to the extent Renee's mother was able to hide Sade's crime and later imprison Sade on her own whim. Doesn't that sound exactly like the friends' abuse of their own privileges to manipulate events to their own whims?

Of course, the girl tortured the worst in the novel is Augustine, whom the Duc is so infatuated with he can't help but fawn over her and break her. Considering our earlier discussion on the relationships between "Sodom" and The Wife of Bath's tale and between frigger and frigged, it is really tempting to see Sade as resenting the feeling he owed something to his wife, his impeccable, pious, innocent, utterly faithful and wealthy and connected wife (and though impeccability, piety, and innocence can be disputed, she was in fact very faithful, probably more than any woman would be willing to be), and he was rather thrilled with shaming her and forcing her to approve of his shittiness every single time. Of course, this is all theorycrafting, I'm not an authority on his life; again though, it's so tempting to think all this because so much of what fuels "Sodom" is shame. So much of "The 120 Days" is feeling you shouldn't get away with something and then getting away with it.

Which leads to the final reference in "Sodom" to Sade's own life: as Curval explains,

Who doesn't understand that punishment itself produces raptures? And haven't people been seen getting hard at the very moment they were publicly shamed? Everyone knows the story of the Marquis de ..., who, as soon as he learned he'd been sentenced to burn in effigy, pulled his prick from his breeches and cried out "Holy fuck! Here I am just where I wanted to be, here I am covered in opprobrium and infamy - leave me be, leave me be, I need to come!" And so he did, there and then.

Curval is not subtly referring to Sade here. Do we know if this actually happened, or does Sade think it's funny that he masturbated to his own burning? We don't know, and yet it's clear he thought about it and it was vivid enough he wanted to impress this imagination into the book. In any case, "The 120 Days of Sodom" becomes much funnier when you think of it as a "fuck you" to his wife, moreso when you realize that his wife had all of the power in the relationship and the "fuck you" is an impotent gesture. He wrote an entire novel for the sake of his pettiness. It's hilarious.

Sodom left unfinished

And let's briefly discuss the novel being unfinished: Part One, Duclos's stories, are more than three-fourths of the novel. I believe Sade tried to write "Sodom" literally in 120 days, before losing the manuscript entirely. I've only read "Sodom" once with re-reads in-between breaks, and this is my impression: Duclos' material is actually quite tame, despite the scatological stuff and the pedophilia, from Champville onward the material becomes pretty cursed starting right off the bat with extreme pedophilia. It's possible I scrubbed the genuinely awful parts of Duclos' narration from my mind, but I recall Part One made me most uncomfortable with the sexual abuse instigated by the friends. Duclos' stories have the pleasant quality of having consent (I think is the general case) for each sexual act. It's also possible that Sade's floral pen makes the genuinely evil acts seem less evil.

For example, Sade, in his "notes", describes a man "of Hell" who does unspeakably evil things to minors, and he, interestingly, asserts this man appears in Duclos' part, under the twenty-ninth day. And yet, if I have the man right, he is by no means as evil as Sade describes: his kink is that he gets aroused by seeing the body of a dead girl, who is in actuality a living girl pretending to be dead. This is pretty tame; again, there's a day-and-night difference between thinking something and then writing it out in detail, and Sade didn't write out the by-far worst things he planned for the book.

The novel is unfinished, ultimately, for either or both of two reasons: 1. Sade got lazy and didn't bother with a rewrite, 2. Sade got bored, or Sade got lazy because he got bored. I think that's very revealing about "Sodom": if Sade truly thought it was a great work, he would have put more energy into resurrecting it; he clearly had energy to finish other original work. I do think - though I'll never know - that he either found the conceit of "Sodom" boring over time or he found the concepts of Desgranges' parts to be too boring to get into them. I mean, the author is also a participant in the text's reading. (Unless everything you publish is ghost-written, I guess.) Apart from putting a light on the nature of Sade's ambitions, it reveals that murder just isn't that sexy. And that's a big part of "Sodom": being told not to do something is more of a turn-on than doing it.

I hope this isn't seen as a great attempt to apologize for Sade, but you just can't ignore the fact that he didn't finish it. We can possibly cite an endless number of drafts that great writers have drawn up for works of unimaginable magnitude, and most of them weren't completed because they sucked. And if Sade thought "Sodom" sucked, then how do we relate it to that author's ambitions, their identity?

The other way to look at this situation is to look at the author himself, who, as a human being, sucked. He was a sucky person. Again, for someone who believed that vice was in fact virtue, he didn't have the virtue of finishing his novel. Which reveals the inherently hollow nature of vice: vice is so meaninglessness that it requires the symbols of success of other things to justify itself, until it loses each and every one of those symbols, at which point the sinful man looks around at his landscape of nothingness and dies from boredom, as his vice no longer has no object to wrap around. There's a reason why Mammon is foremost among the false gods of the Bible; it's so easy to delude yourself into finding spiritual ecstasy from material things. And, by gum, that's what happened: he didn't get the pleasure of completing "The 120 Days of Sodom", though, from what I understand, he has written some other really fucking strange novels that I want to get my hands around, as "Juliette" (1791), "Aline and Valcour" (1795) and "Philosophy in the Boudoir" (1795), which could surpass "Sodom", I don't know.

Is The 120 Days of Sodom a Masterpiece?

And now for the final question, after the great pile that arose as we survived "The 120 Days": is it regrettable that Sade did not finish it? Indeed, it has the artistic promise of being a masterpiece. As cursed, like really, really, truly cursed as the other parts are, you wonder: How could this possibly be expressed in prose? If a writer tried to "finish" the other parts today, I would know how I feel already: too obvious; too mean; too shocking; too sexual; not funny enough; not cruel enough; not ironic enough; not strange enough. Sade, I think, truly straddles that line. I was genuinely thrilled with Duclos' stories and their bizarre texture.

The current "Sodom", by crude analogy, is as if Joyce hadn't finished "Ulysses" past Sirens; what would exist would be impressive, but we wouldn't have the impression of an artist outdoing himself after outdoing everyone else. I am confident to answer for myself, No; I'm glad Sade didn't finish it, for he would have been fortunate to finish it (clearly, he lacked the virtues of persistence and fortitude to take on the project again, despite losing Duclos' part), and I really don't want Sade to be fortunate, which misfortune is a pleasure, as he himself knows, I may savor as his characters delighted in the misfortunes of others. I may empathize with him in his long, long confinement, and I may empathize with his being directionless in his life (I think writing was a positive outlet for him that nevertheless did not negate his worse ones), but ultimately he's just ... a dickhead, an opportunistic one too. The funny thing is, Sade is such a jerk that, in spite of his potential brilliance, it's very easy to see him as an object, and as a result when he fails it's just as easy to gleefully kick him while he's down, which fate Sade's writing, hilariously, predicts, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of Sade being a dickhead, then everyone persecutes him, then, see? I was justified in being a dickhead! "NATURE IS NATURE!" he shouts exultantly.

It can be clearly seen that I love talking about Sade and no matter how irritated I am by him I feel infinitely uplifted in this.

I'm happy that, while Sade deserves to be read, we do not have much occasion to give him praise; and my pleasure in this conclusion reveals a great deal about my psychology as well.