His real name was Donatien Alphonse Francois, count de Sade. But he tumbled down the back staircase of history and landed in the shocked lap of the present day by a simpler name: The Marquis de Sade.
On Friday he will take a bow in theaters, as “Quills,” a movie about the life and work of the scribbling libertine, opens in theaters. The film may be one more sign that the Frenchman whose name was immortalized in the word “sadism” is getting a face lift 186 years after his death.
Thus time heals all wounds — including those doled out by a notorious 18th Century sexual outlaw.
Several major Sade biographies have been published in recent years. Sade’s novels, once dismissed as third-rate pornography, increasingly are the focus of scholarly study. And Sade himself, dismissed for a century and a half as a scandalous reprobate embodying the most sordid and repulsive extremes of human behavior, now is regarded in some circles as a hero, a liberator, a warrior for individuality.
Nonsense, scoffed Laurence L. Bongie, author of “Sade: A Biographical Essay” (University of Chicago Press). “It’s a bit puzzling. It’s much more than a rehabilitation. It’s the elevation of him almost to sainthood.”
Bongie, emeritus professor of French at the University of British Columbia, represents what might be called the old guard’s view of Sade: that he was, as Bongie writes, “one of the most obnoxiously adolescent, opportunistic, tantrum-prone, egotistical, self-absorbed, puffed-up hollow men of his age, the very epitome of bad faith and . . . the author too of the most monotonously egregious, long-winded pornographic novels imaginable.”
On the other side are writers such as Neil Schaeffer, author of “The Marquis de Sade: A Life” (Harvard University Press) and Chicago theater impresario Mary Zimmerman, who believe that Sade represented something unique and crucial in cultural and political history. He helped “define what it means to be human at the farthest limits of the imagination,” Schaeffer writes.
Zimmerman, a Goodman Theater artistic associate who wrote a 1996 play based on Sade’s life, “S/M,” said, “As a person, he interested me phenomenally. He was incredibly witty, so extreme, but you have to admire him always remaining himself.”
So the debate over Sade continues: Was he a smutty-minded criminal or a deliberate provocateur? Scandalous pervert or literary visionary?
In the ideological wars that routinely pit tradition-minded critics against more liberal-minded cultural studies specialists, Sade’s legacy is like a narrow strip of land upon which both are determined to assert naming rights.
Arriving in the midst of the fray is “Quills,” directed by U. of C. graduate Philip Kaufman. Based on a play by Doug Wright, it tells the story of Sade’s final years in prison, where he spent almost three decades for crimes such as rape and sodomy. Geoffrey Rush stars as the incarcerated nobleman; Kate Winslet is the prison employee who smuggles his work to salivating readers.
Laurence Mall, associate professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said via e-mail that scholarship on Sade is “quite active.” Yet while most undergraduates know that the word “sadism” is derived from Sade’s surname, few actually read the novels, she added.
“His novels are notoriously repetitive, presenting as they do an endless series of violent sexual activities of all kinds, including rape, torture and murder. What is striking or spicy for the modern reader is the fact that the most crude and precise descriptions of actions and positions are couched in an elegant, classical style–replete with imperfect subjunctives.”
While noting that “Sade is sure to offend just about everyone on just about every page,” Mall allowed as how “philosophically, Sade is extremely interesting for a student of the late Enlightenment, because he pushed some of its premises to their extremes with a ferocious logic, without compromise.”
Schaeffer, whose biography is a thoughtful and compassionate study of Sade’s early years, and who offers potential sources for Sade’s psychological kinks, defended the books, plays and letters. “To me, they’re a test of one’s definition of humanity. How far can we extend the term `human nature’? I think Sade meant to extend it very deep.”
Schaeffer, an English professor at Brooklyn College, is living temporarily in Chicago while his wife, novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, serves as a visiting professor at the U. of C.
He spent a dozen years researching and writing “The Marquis de Sade,” Schaeffer said, a task that included translating Sade’s letters. “Those served me well when I came to write. There was stuff that was interesting and new. The life was in the letters.”
That life began in 1740, when Sade was born in Paris to a titled French family. He was raised by an uncle in a vast castle near Avignon that was riddled with secret passageways and hidden chambers–an apt metaphor, Schaeffer believes, for the dank, shrouded places in Sade’s developing soul.
After military service, Sade married, but immediately embarked upon a life of debauchery with prostitutes and his male valet. When the prostitutes began complaining about his brutal methods, Sade was tossed into prison. He would be in and out of prisons the rest of his adult life.
That might have been bad luck for Sade, but it was good luck for literature, Schaeffer argues in his book. “It may be said that prison liberated Sade, redirecting his anger and intelligence to narrative purposes. Largely deprived of the freedom to act out his anger and his sexual fantasies, he had been forced to put them on paper . . . he began the process by which he would inscribe his name on human consciousness.”
That’s the kind of talk that drives Bongie to distraction. “Though extolled as the greatest of literary geniuses, as history’s only true revolutionary,” Bongie writes, “he is frequently revealed by both his acts and his words to be a hollow opportunist . . . a largely unoriginal thinker, and a tiresome–and tiring–pornographer.”
Zimmerman said it’s no accident that Sade has proven to be irresistible fodder for playwrights and filmmakers for decades. “His life story is so unbelievably cinematic. He was a sexual deviant and a sexual criminal. He never killed anyone, but he was a big pervert.”
Her play about Sade explored the connection between sexual voyeurism and the voyeurism implicit in attending a play. “You’re watching a spectacle. He was crazy about the theater, almost crazier than he was about sex.”
France has always embraced Sade’s contradictions, Zimmerman said, in a way that Americans fail to emulate.
“If you’re French, you’ve read him, and if you’re a French critic, you’ve written a book about him.” But in America? “When my mother heard I was writing about him, she thought I was ruining my career.”
IN HIS OWN WORDS
The Marquis de Sade spent 29 years in prison. He wrote virtually every day of those 29 years. Along with novels, he produced passionate, vainglorious letters to his wife, Renee. Here’s an excerpt from a letter written in November 1783:
“Either kill me, or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change — I have told you, the beast is too old — there is no room for hope — the most honest, the most candid, the most sensitive of men, the most compassionate, the most beneficent worshiper of my children, for whose happiness I would go through fire, conscientious to the most extreme degree not to wish to corrupt their morals, or to warp their minds, or to make them adopt in any way my philosophy. . . . So there you have my virtues — now as to my vices — arrogant irascibility — extremely hot-tempered in everything, with a dissoluteness in imagination with regard to morals such as has never been seen before, atheist to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in brief. To repeat, either kill me or take me as I am, because I will never change.”
Translation from the French by Neil Schaeffer
