Category: European Literature

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth. 

Smart Smut? De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

This is one of the trickier books I’ve had to review here. As it was a gift from my girlfriend, I really have no choice in the matter, however. It is certainly interesting, being the only philosophical porn book I’m ever likely to read, while also advocating philosophies that I have little personal interest in. I have read some Anais Nin, which is as close as the canon seems to get to proper erotic fiction, but de Sade is more complicated than that. Here, he is trying to make philosophical arguments and at the same time describe fairly non-standard sexual practices in as explicit and shocking a way as possible.

The two are linked, of course. Any work of philosophical fiction gains its power from using the fiction part as much as possible to bolster and enhance the philosophical part. Dostoevsky’s and Camus’ characters put their ideas into practice. In the Magic Mountain we can see the irony of the lengthy philosophical discussions being only possible because the real world is elsewhere, down the valley. So, it seems to me that the best way of writing about Philosophy in the Boudoir is to ask whether it is effective as a work of philosophical fiction. Does the “plot” work with the ideas?

De Sade himself does not really need an introduction. We know that from his name comes sadism. Even if he got up to only a fraction of what he describes in his books, he would already well deserve his poor moral reputation. A glance at his biography on Wikipedia is quite the ride.

As for Philosophy in the Boudoir, it is, as seems from my knowledge of his others, a relatively milder work. Eugenie, the girl who is gradually corrupted by the older characters, is both a willing student and at the age of 15 in most countries just around the age of consent. Nobody is murdered, though there is plenty of (consensual) whipping, and the story does end with some rape and torture which only seems mild to me because I expected something far worse!

The Story

“I’m committing both incest, adultery, and sodomy, and all that from a girl who only got devirginized today!”

At least de Sade simplifies the summarising of his tale by barely having anything to it. Madame de Saint-Ange, a libertine, meets the girl Eugénie at a convent retreat and invites her round for a debauched weekend with her – the Madame’s – brother, Chevalier, along with Dolmancé, another libertine. Over a day Eugénie is introduced to pretty much every sexual act you can imagine – from anal sex to a wide variety of poses available when there are plenty of participants. She not only loses her virginity but also learns a lot about her partners’ libertine morals. Sodomy, incest, and blasphemy are just some of the sins they all commit which today may be slightly more (some of them) acceptable than they were in late 18th century France, but which are still more than a little spine-tingling for the moral-minded among us.

Structurally, the story is almost like sex itself, with built-in refractory periods. We get “tableaux”, where the characters are arranged by Dolmancé for maximum pleasure, then they do the deed, and once they have finished and need to rest, they discuss philosophy. Rinse (I wish! – nobody washes here) and repeat.

I may not have spent time closely reading the philosophy as I would with another philosopher, but I think I have enough of a sense of the gist of it to be able to talk about it. The book is dedicated “to the libertines”; the goal is pleasure. “Listen only to those delicious passions; their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.” Essentially, the whole thing is about pleasure, which here is equated with happiness. Since pleasure is natural and nature is good, we must act in a way that aligns with nature. Pretty much everything that we deal with regularly – laws, religion, social customs – is the work of humans, and hence unnatural and ought to be the object of scorn.

Because we do not know other people, we can only trust our pleasure and ignore their pain and cries for help. Because nature does not care for us, we being tiny and irrelevant on a cosmic scale, it provides no higher guide for right conduct and no consolation for it either. Once we are old and can no longer have sex or engage in gratuitous violence, we should at least aim to have a store of pleasurable memories to look back on. The death of another is meaningless, for we all become mulch for nature to create a new life upon our deaths, so the overall balance of the living and the dead never changes. Hence murder is legitimised, including of our parents and children, as are the (alleged) pleasures of the sexual acts of things like incest and paedophilia. As soon as we recognise the absence of any authority except our own sensory pleasure and deny the existence of others’ inner worlds, we create a simplified world of pleasure available for those with the strength to take it. This is de Sade’s world.

Need I say that there’s plenty wrong with it?

I want to begin by undermining all of this using the work itself, before moving on to a more direct engagement with the significance of the ideas. The primary problem with Philosophy in the Boudoir is that its two parts, the smut and the philosophy, do not work together. This does not seem obvious at first. The philosophical text advocates for hedonism, and the story shows some people having the wildest of orgiastic pleasures, after all. But the problem is that the sex is utterly dreadful, and the characterisation so lax, that every opportunity for proving the truth of the philosophy within the bounds of the story’s world ends up doing the opposite – the story makes the philosophy look silly.

Allow me to explain. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic characters, or monsters, depending on how you look at them. Bad people exist, so that when Dolmancé declares he lit a bonfire for joy when his mother died, we can accept that. We can accept also, even, when someone says of Eugenie “What a delight to corrupt her, to suffocate in that young heart all the seeds of virtue and religion that were planted in her by her tutors!”. We’re all guilty of hamming things up from time to time.

Eugenie

But the problem, one of them, is Eugenie herself. We were all once teenagers – and many of us will have been horny teenagers. So we might think she really could be immediately corrupted by being removed from a convent and masturbated and abused for hours at a time. She might regret it afterwards, but who hasn’t, in the heat of arousal, done or thought things that the cooling water of the aftermath makes sting? No, we can tolerate that and still find her an utterly unbelievable creation. This comes across in the joints, the seams where de Sade is trying to stitch the two parts of the work together. Here is an example of one such shoddy transition:

“I’m dead, I’m shattered… I’m devastated!… but please explain two words that you’ve used and that I don’t understand. First of all: what does “womb” mean?”

Readers, I don’t know. I can accept orgiastic pleasures just as much as I can accept that a young girl in the 18th century may know very little about her own body. But the juxtaposition, this switch from post-coital exhaustion to notebook-on-lap schoolgirl is too sharp. It is laughable. Or, several orgasms later, how about: “What do you mean by that expression “whore”? I apologize, but I’m here to learn.” I know and you know damn well too. But in case readers of this blog post have become convinced that the poor girl really is just an innocent ingenu inducted rapidly into the world of physical pleasures and trying to catch up on the theory, I present the most egregious example:

“I’d like to know whether a government truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence of a nation.” This, I am afraid, is too much for post-coital discussion. I was an annoying 15-year-old, but even I wasn’t that bad – and that was without getting laid!

Other Problems

So, Eugenie’s characterisation rather makes the whole thing silly. There are plenty of other things too. One of them is de Sade’s tendency to pat himself on the back: “I can’t tell you how persuasive you are!”. Another is that classic mistake of any erotica, the oversized male member. We might believe that the average is eight or nine inches if we are regular readers of men pretending to be women on the internet, but de Sade, long before message boards, was way ahead of them. Take the servant, Augustin, who is brought in to deliver additional male firepower: “his member is thirteen inches long and eight and a half inches around.” I leave off the absence of lube in spite of all the anal and other sex, which seems the lightest graze against the edifice of realism when set aside such blatant howlers.

The Pamphlet – a moment of realism?

By showing the pleasures of constant orgies, we might come to believe that a good life really is one where we can say with Eugenie, that “Lust is now my only god, the single measure of my conduct, the sole basis of all my actions.” Instead, de Sade is constantly undermining himself. This is nowhere more obvious than in the pamphlet that appears halfway through the book.

This is a really interesting moment. I love texts-within-texts because they can do a lot to reflect and refract what goes on around them. Purportedly a pamphlet found on the street, Dolmancé reads it to the gathered pleasure-fiends. (Allowing for the reading out of lengthy texts is a concession to unrealism I can always allow – it gave us Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and a lot of lovely German novellas.) The pamphlet could, like the sex, bolster the philosophical arguments. By providing something similar, it could legitimise them by making them seem more widespread. By providing a, for example religious, alternative, it could allow the characters to create more finely formed counterarguments. Instead, and this is de Sade’s perennial problem, he can only talk like himself.

It begins well, or at least, it does not advocate violence, and it talks about republican virtues – virtue being hitherto a dirty word. It shares with the characters the simpler things, like a rejection of religion, for example. It is also boring and long, which has the singular advantage of making it seem more like a real pamphlet. But then de Sade’s restraint falls away, and this text too starts talking about the need for murder to be allowed, and the importance of pleasure. It just means that we are listening to the characters all over again, without the sex to make us laugh. It fails, in other words.

Concluding Complaints about Realism and Effectiveness

There are a few other things that Philosophy in the Boudoir does against itself. Its ending, where Eugenie rapes and tortures her mother, then infects her with syphilis, is unpleasant to read. It may be milder than the violence of the summary of the 120 Days of Sodom, but it still makes a reader interested in pleasure who may have enjoyed at least some of the sex go “this is too much.” To put it more simply, if de Sade wanted to be persuasive, he should have stopped earlier – instead, it seemed he was too interested in getting himself off. And it costs the book, and by extension us. But then again, perhaps de Sade didn’t want to convince – he probably just didn’t care, if he was doing his own philosophy properly!

Good bits

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I want to mention some qualities of the book that do make it interesting and not only the unrealistic, unrewarding picture I painted of it earlier. For one, the book is aware of its context. Written during the French Revolution, we have a sense of the Enlightenment and its consequences quite forcefully here. Eugenie has come “to be taught” – like Rousseau, de Sade is interested in education, good and bad, and is trying to advocate for a “right” version. We have a sense at times of the advancement of science and world exploration (Captain Cook is mentioned) and how these are destabilising a Eurocentric, Christian worldview.

At times, de Sade sounds a lot like Nietzsche or Freud. He has a keen, if probably more intuitive than reasoned, sense of the origins of social rules. For example, he claims incest is only considered bad because it allowed wealth concentration within families – hence people had to find a way to prevent people from marrying their siblings. By showing how other people practice murder or casual sex, (in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder the section on Tahiti is extraordinary – and very sad) de Sade does successfully make his ideas seem more reasonable or acceptable. He also uses the Bible to show how incest has been acceptable or practised at one point or other, letting him both devalue the Bible a little and legitimise incest in the same swipe.

What is here would understandably be shocking to a reader in the 18th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21st. But what is exciting at the same time is how de Sade really does fall into an intellectual tradition by showing its more extreme points. He is a fool, for example, when he says that despotism in bed and despotism in the halls of power are not linked. But precisely by being that fool, he presages the fools that eventually did gain power and placed violence on a pedestal. By revealing the tendencies of the Enlightenment towards the extinguishing of ultimate truths, he’s like a horny Max Weber.

And the real problem, intellectually rather than in the sense of quality as before, is that it seems the closer to the present we get, the more de Sade seems to be saying something almost true. Sodomy and blasphemy are now well tolerated in my country. Sex is mass-marketed and widespread – you can buy toys and lube in any supermarket. Contraception means that coitus and reproduction are now divorced. Apps make casual sex even more widespread than before, while recent trends towards step-sibling porn are merely a slope that ends eventually in simulated sibling porn, and then real sibling porn.

For example, it seems to me, intellectually, that there really is no good argument against incest, provided the people involved are over the age of consent and are not groomed before then (these are gigantic if’s), and conception does not take place. It may take people out of society because of the taboo and hence social discrimination, and also the way that having a partner within one’s own home gets in the way of going out to find a mate. But we value choice, and let people legally ruin their lives in many other ways. I am not sure we will be happy with this – but what I mean by bringing it up as an example is that de Sade taught us long ago that we don’t really have good arguments against it, only feelings. Likewise, with books like Open being reviewed in the New York Times, the nuclear family continues its dissipation into a startling – or refreshing? – array of alternatives.

I am not about to say what I think of this – a piece like this is not the place for moralising. To repeat, what I am saying is that seems de Sade saw where we are going. We may get there in my lifetime or yours, but society really does seem to be slipping towards a kind of freedom where we can do everything we want, with whomever we want, provided power is sufficiently evenly distributed (through the mutual consent of people in a position to give it). It is only this check, consent, that separates the future world from the world of de Sade’s dreams. Is it a good world? I’ll admit I may have some doubts.

Another thing we must grant de Sade is that by being wrong but different, he still has value in the context of women’s rights. Women certainly were not made just to have fun having sex, but at least by questioning what women were made for de Sade makes us think women may not just be made for whatever most people thought they were made for (babies), back in the 18th century. He loosens our ideas of what is right and wrong, and if we may not like what he puts in their place we at least can get started with thinking of what we ourselves might put in their place. This, the challenging of received ideas, is never unwelcome, even when it comes in so strange a guise as here.

To conclude, then, there really are some interesting thoughts in this book. The problem is that de Sade was not willing to make his fiction and philosophy work together. He was too much writing for himself in the sex/plot scenes, to be able to allow them to speak to the rest of the work in a way that enhanced it. Do I regret reading it? At 170 pages in the Penguin translation by Joachim Neugroschel, it’s not too bad. But I cannot see myself reading de Sade again. Readers, I believe I can say I have saved you the trouble too.

Thank me later.