I wanted to contribute a review to correct some of the impressions readers may have gotten from other customers' reviews of 120 Days of Sodom. First of all, I do regard 120 Days as a masterpiece -- Sade's only masterpiece, and a dazzling contribution to world literature. I will spend the rest of this review hopefully providing 120 Day's future readers some keys to appreciate this mammoth, peculiar novel.
120 days is shocking, horrifying -- disgusting. This is pretty well universally agreed upon. This in itself says quite a lot. We live in a world where "shocking" has lost much of its meaning. Yet the Marquis De Sade continues to shock our jaded, supposedly unshockable sensibilities; if we want to read this book well, it's worth asking ourselves why. As Simone De Beauvoir says in her introduction to this edition, Sade was a good novelist -- and a great moralist.
One thing Sade definitely was not was a proselytizer for sexual freedom. The recent move "Quills" -- while not completely misleading on this point -- was still much too frivolous, too much of a French sex comedy ( and also too traditionally heterosexual ) to reflect the Sadean universe. Sade is not Henry Miller; with him, sexual freedom is not an issue. Power is. The powerful are sexually free. Sex interests Sade far less than pleasure, and pleasure for Sade can't exist without squashing the weak. An exemplar of the Sadean universe might be the Michael Douglass character from "Wall Street" except that now he knows that sex, even above money, is the ultimate fantasy thrill of power.
In other words, they coined the word "sadism" after him for good reasons! 120 Days is not only the story of four men who act out their sick, abusive fantasies, but of four men who employ storytellers to "entertain" them -- with stories describing every sexual variation conceivable. The stories are valued by the degree to which they explore the relationship between sexuality and crime.
The curiosity is that, although his books disgust us -- particularly when we first start to read --Sade isn't particularly graphic. I can think of books with incomparably more explicit depictions of sex and violence -- for example "American Psycho". The difference is that in books like "American Psycho" or films like "Kids" the corruption is viewed from a distance; the author doesn't approve of what happens, he merely "shows it like it is." This is not Sade's attitude at all. He is a cheerleader for the horrors and excesses of vice.
I read a review recently that compared Sade to rap music. The reviewer jokingly insinuated that Sade was the eighteenth century equivalent of Ice-T. This, too, is untrue. Rap music generally makes a rather moral case. Rap artists posture to their audience as members of an underprivileged society who justify their misogamy/criminality by denouncing the brutal conditions imposed upon them. Sade justifies his cruelty by invoking Nature -- nature made me this way.
Moreover, if you look at how the world works, you will see that nature sides with the powerful. Nature encourages us to satisfy ourselves by stepping on others. This is what Sade says. In short, 120 Days isn't just a succession of shocking scenes, which many contemporary books are -- it is an intellectual justification of a philosophy of vice. Be prepared.
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger," said Nietzsche. I lastly want to emphasize why I believe a book like 120 Days has a positive value. I know this sounds strange -- particularly before you have experienced the sweeping lyricism, the ferocity of Sade's prose, the intensity of his passions, the obstinacy of a vision that few adults could sustain, and a rare children articulate -- but I believe it. Sade makes the best case that has yet been given for cruelty, if you will, evil. If his arguments weren't skillful, 120 Days would be an exercise in futility. Sade is like a nasty child, who miraculously possesses the intellect as well as the shamelessness to defend his behavior rationally.
Sade succeeds as an artist if his vision strikes us as sensible within its own terms, as bizarrely accurate, or at least well-observed. He tempts us toward the abyss of cynicism. Yet for me personally reading 120 Days was a liberating and even religious experience. It was like having my worst fears articulated -- and there was a sense of liberation in the aftermath of that.
Sade has done humanity a favor by visualizing hell. In a bizarre way, by describing the worst we could perpetuate, he also gives us a vision of the divine we cannot live up to. If you take 120 Days and invert it, you would have a vision of heaven, the divine in ourselves we believe in solely by faith -- but which escapes the capacities of words. Sade truly writes with an uncanny purity; of absolutes, absolute evil and, by implication, of innocence.This is why he is so often referred to as the Divine Marquis.
