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Is Flourishing Forestalled? Reflections on AI and Fiction

In recent months there have been at least two controversies relating to AI-content and literature. In the first, Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish Nobel Laureate, said she used ChatGPT for her creative process (“How could we develop this beautifully”), noting “that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion”, before having to walk back some her statements later following online outcry, stating AI was only ever used by her for research. In the second controversy, Granta published a prizewinning story which it seems may have been written by AI, and which may even have been reviewed by AI too. (Granta was neither prize-giver nor reviewer here)

These controversies made me realise that I had a different view from most commentators on these topics. At the time I considered AI, by which I mean here large language models (LLMs) largely deployed as chatbots, to be a neutral or possibly even positive tool for fiction writers, indeed for literature as a whole. At the same time, I acknowledged that it seemed obviously a negative thing for readers.

This divergent impact of the technology is a serious challenge for literary production and consumption, one which I am on both ends of as writer and reader. I wanted to work out if giving the topic some proper thought might allow for a more harmonious view of LLMs’ impact, and this blog post is the result of that initial thinking.

But before we begin, three things. One, these are not deep convictions. I would be happy to change them if I read or heard something that suggested I should. I have already changed, and nuanced them, as I wrote and revised this piece. Two, while this post is certainly more “pro-AI” than most voices on the topic, I do not use AI while writing my blog and have no intention to change that. Nor have I yet used it for my fiction. Here, now, you are reading me. My posts are proofread by my partner, who is like me a human being.

Finally, my focus here is on the use of AI by writers like Tokarczuk, rather than attempts to create an entire work of art through prompting alone. In other words, it concerns the writer’s possible augmentation rather than their substitution. I think this is a more interesting area, because the latter remains for now a relatively distant prospect. The former, meanwhile, demands our attention right now.

The Reader’s Perspective

For the reader, I would identify the chief problems with the involvement of LLMs in fictional production as centring on three interconnected topic areas: authenticity, dignity, and complicity in the systematic harms associated with data centre buildout.

Authenticity

While in and out of the ivory tower we might talk about the “Death of the Author”, readers in general want to feel they are reading a real person’s work. The disregarding of authorial intentions in interpreting a work is not the same thing as saying the author does not matter. Their individuality does not, but their abstract personality does. We want the words to feel chosen, otherwise the act of their interpretation stops seeming worth the time. Hence the relative lack of literary interest which the formulaic backs of milk cartons offer. The best books have the greatest sense of chosen-ness behind their words, whether that comes from the painstaking craftsmanship of a Flaubert or the abstract workings of genius that produced Dostoevsky’s more hurried, yet no less haloed, works.

Perhaps this is why ghost-writing appears a lesser crime than the use of LLMs. Even if it is obvious that this political or sporting figure hardly picked up the pen except to place their name upon the cover, we know that someone did. This is also why the overzealous editor, such as in the famous case of the editor Gordon Lish’s treatment of Raymond Carver’s stories, where Lish chopped and chopped and chopped at the texts until we readers ended up with the bare and brutal masterpieces we read today, is upsetting to those who know it without fundamentally compromising the texts themselves.

Perhaps Carver’s authenticity is compromised, but the texts’ authenticity is not – they still stem from a human source. In a similar way, I wrote in an earlier draft that newspapers and social media compromise authorial authenticity by placing heavy pressures upon them to write a certain way. But the end products in those cases are still texts produced by people. Compromised people, confused people, but nonetheless human beings like you or me. They are authentically human documents, reflecting human emotions and human struggles.

Dignity

Depending on the degree of AI infiltration into a work’s creation, of which more below, that’s not necessarily the case with a text today. A work whose words are not entirely an author’s own is no longer an entirely human document in the same way. This matters to many readers. Its importance is not at the level of the text, however. Students often read unseen passages and may well be unable, if not already now then at least soon enough in the future, to differentiate between human and hybrid or even machine-generated documents. Yet once we return to the document as a whole the distinction is more important. The problem with what Tokarczuk may have done, if I understand people’s complaints correctly, is that she denigrated herself as a writer. If you do not respect writing enough to want your own to be your own, the argument goes, you probably should not do it. And if you do not respect writing, why should a reader waste time reading you?

This argument does not have anything to do with the output upon the printed page, but about the context surrounding it. In that sense, it’s a moral accusation, a purity test. But it is one that is very different from being reluctant to read writers who were “bad” people. The alcoholics, the violent, the cruel – literary history is filled with such writers, and ever being replenished in its stock. We regret that Rimbaud stopped writing to be an adventurer, or that Nietzsche’s syphilis meant he was no longer able to write (in a way that made sense), or that Lermontov and Pushkin thought duelling for temporal honour was better than surviving to put more pen to more paper and buttressing their immortal honour.

Such failings fill us with regret for the missed works and unhappy families, but do not change what we have, those eternal masterpieces that fill us with gratitude for their creation. LLM use can make for an entirely different reaction. Usage does not reflect life getting in the way of art, but a kind of disinterest in art. If you don’t want to do the research for your book, why bother writing it? The implicit view behind this is that writing works of literature must be a holistic activity, where the artist must do all of it or none of it. It is a shame for a writer not to do something, not merely a moral failing. To find the traces of LLMs in a novel suggests a flourishing forestalled. The writer could have attained a more full writerly potential through efforts that have instead been replaced by a machine.

This is why the books can seem far more tarnished by association with LLM use than by an author’s personal misbehaviour. The latter means we get fewer books, but the former means we get less humanity in the books. It is quite fair, given this, for a reader to turn away, and refuse to read.

Complicity

The last set of reasons why LLM use is unpleasant for a reader rest upon the assertion that LLM use in itself is immoral because of the associated data centre buildout and therefore should be avoided as far as possible. These arguments are not so convincing to me, but they are important to others, and so I am setting them down here.

AI is driving a significant global infrastructure buildout through new data centres and the power systems needed to support them. Mothballed power plants, including those fuelled by fossil fuels, are being brought online provide electricity. New power plants are being built too, many using particularly energy inefficient but rapidly deployable technologies, such as the reciprocating engines and aeroderivative turbines used at xAI’s Colossus plants in Tennessee. While it is true that some of the new capacity being built is renewable and there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power plants, gas is the primary fuel source due to the operating profiles of data centres. Gas is a fossil fuel. If you care about avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions, you can easily make the case that writers should write the old fashioned way. (The moderately old-fashioned way that is – by themselves, with a laptop or pen and paper.)

A similar situation obtains for water use. We live in increasingly water-stressed environments and should not contribute to this with avoidable LLM use. But just as there are different ways of producing electricity, there are different ways of cooling large industrial enterprises. While closed-loop cooling essentially limits the water use of a data centre by reusing it repeatedly and air cooling uses big fans to achieve the same result, other cooling types can see more wastage and impact on end consumers. (More details in this article from The Atlantic.) If you do not want to contribute to poor use of water, you can argue similarly that writers should avoid LLMs, and you should avoid those who do not. But this water argument, though popular, is weaker than the carbon argument. Near-to-mid-term economic gas alternatives are basically unavailable for data centres, whereas this is not the case for wasting water.

Other problems with the data centres themselves involve their impact on local communities. Power quality decreases (think flickering lights), and then there are things like headaches and other health issues. As with oil and gas production and refining, it seems that data centres are creating sacrificial zones around them, where society supposedly accepts local harm in exchange for global benefits. As with mining and oil and gas, however, there is the problem of environmental justice. This is the issue that such “local harm” tends to be concentrated in areas where people are less able to defend their interests, being poor or of minority groups. If you care about this local impact, you would be warranted to be critical of a writer who used LLMs thoughtlessly.

Finally, there are also impacts on local and regional power prices. But while it might seem as though data centres are entirely negative in their impact here, matters are likely more complicated, so it is perhaps best to focus on the other factors above, especially when their negatives are clearer. (For details on power prices, see section 8 in the International Energy Agency’s “Key Questions on Energy and AI”)

The above are general problems with data centres, ones that we have to think about personally every day unless we consciously add an “-ai” to all of our Google searches and are lucky enough to have jobs where there is no pressure to use the tools. More specific to writing, however, is the matter of copyright abuse. There are ongoing lawsuits against Meta and others over their use of literary (and other written) creations for training purposes without the consent of the creators or their compensation. A writer using an LLM is showing a certain lack of solidarity to their own people, and a reader who wants to show solidarity to the creatives displaced and stolen from by LLMs should not read those who are blasé about the tools’ impact.

The problem with these arguments, except the last one, is that the focus is on our and the writer’s contribution to the bad thing, rather than on the work. This allows the counterpoint of scale to be made. Your average programmer’s agentic workflow is several orders of magnitude worse than a writer asking an LLM a question – for the climate, for water, and for local communities. It becomes too much a matter of purity, rather than possible harm mitigation. I myself find only the dignity, authenticity, and writerly solidarity points convincing here.

The Writer’s Perspective

The previous section was an attempt to explore the arguments about why writers should not use LLMs from the perspective of a reader. The voices against LLMs are significant, strident, and seem to be growing in importance. Yet the problem with all of these arguments is that the closest they get to the text is the thing as a whole. They do not touch the words themselves. Yet adopting the perspective of a writer, I see huge opportunities in LLMs, which would place me on a collision course with readers of my fiction, if I had any.

One result is that until readers change their minds, those writers who use LLMs (and in a recent survey, it was already 33% of novelists in the UK who do) will take heed of Tokarczuk’s pillorying and simply keep their use a secret. If they do their job well, the readers will never find out. If a reader wants certainty of their book’s purity, the only way will be to return to the old ones. Faced with a cunning-enough writer – and good writers should be cunning – the search for tells will be epistemically hopeless.

But enough of that. What actually are these great opportunities? I see them as three – research, review, and (re)writing itself.

Research

Literature has, at best, a tenuous relation with the kind of truth found in history books. Yet while fiction is false, its truths are not. These truths, literature’s defenders claim, are higher. That’s why we read great works to begin with. You do not, or rather should not, read War and Peace or Life and Fate to learn about the facts of the Campaign of 1812 or the Soviet experience of the Second World War, though Tolstoy researched his epic extensively and Grossman was a journalist within the Red Army.

We read these and other books for a truth about human nature and human experience. Stalin or Napoleon may feature and strut about the stage, but their words are not their own. However historical or accurate a writer may try to be, a physical truth of what happened in the past is unreachable, merely a shadow cast upon the wall.

If we take a pessimistic or reasonably cavalier attitude towards truth in fiction, something that is done by most writers except for dedicated historical novelists, what obstacle to using AI for research could there be? What stone would my country house be made of in this location? What would a woman at a ball in 1843 typically wear? What on earth did people eat? These are questions where a specialist might have an answer, or they might have an opinion. A writer, determined, with unlimited or even limited time, should be able to find adequate answers to all of these. But for a “good enough” answer, the regurgitations of an LLM are fine. The fact is that regurgitations allow a writer to get on with the business of writing, not scene decoration. Later, should the writer feel a certain guilt before the truth, they can do their fact checking.

I am not saying that writers should cease the search for knowledge. I know, from experience, the joy of stumbling upon a thread or marginal detail in a history book that has inspired the mind to race to spin together a new story. Simply put, you cannot get inspired if you don’t keep your eyes open to the world’s offerings, whether in book or brick before you. The output of an LLM is limited, a thin stream of light upon a fact (or fabrication) that misses entirely that the real fascination lies just beyond the glowing rim in the half-darkness. But that same limitation nevertheless gives quick answers – not the telling detail but the good-enough background detail – which allows action, broadens the space for writing even as it narrows the space for inspiration. The overall effect is at least neutral, when used responsibly.

Again, to speak from experience, so many of us are crushed by the weight of jobs and responsibilities that writing is often only really possible about what lies in front of us. Relationships, workplaces, mental health. To research properly something else, or other lives, takes too much time to be practical in many cases. It is the domain of those with wealth, with working and well-earning or very patient spouses, or of a few professions like some of those in academia. LLMs allow imaginative but time-pressed contemporary authors to write something which retains a modicum of accuracy in its details beyond more sad girl fiction and professors having affairs with their students. Not everyone can be Kafka, after all.

Review

I noted in the first half of the post that almost any book you read today will have been through many hands before it reaches your own. At minimum, that’s agent and editor. It’s still an authentic document; it’s just not really entirely the writer’s authentic work.

Most books do not get that far, however, drowning under the weight of so many rejection letters no more helpful to the recipient than a rejection letter to a recent graduate for their hundredth job application. How on earth can a writer improve in such circumstances, when they hardly know where they are going wrong? Through feedback, among other things. An established writer may have writerly friends to review their work. In the 19^th century, at some literary salon, they all may have read their work aloud by a crackling fire. Yet try finding a group for writing literature online. Not a group for fantasy epics or erotic vampire tales, but actual literature. (And when you find it, let me know). It’s not at all straightforward.

I dislike using this “democratisation” argument about AI because I am a snob and disagree with it temperamentally, but it is absolutely legitimate here. An LLM can give feedback, just as it lets you research in a way that might otherwise only be possible to the very privileged. With sufficient prompting it can be loaded up with whatever personality or perspective you need and can focus on exactly what you want attention focused on. It won’t be perfect, but no beta reader is. What matters is the accumulation of perspectives, and LLMs can provide this. A writer, looking to improve, can now access far more feedback than ever before. If they are willing to take it on board, their potential achievement should also be greater.

A counterargument might be that the writer who claims they have no readers should go outside, maybe call their mother. But most friends and family are poor readers. Even if they seriously read fiction to begin with, which in this day and age is by no means guaranteed, they will be prejudiced by their acquaintance with you. Criticism will be voiced softly, misdirected, take months to arrive, or be left unsaid. With an LLM you can force it to give proper feedback instead of mere flattery, though of course many users do not.

In sum, unless you are already very much established, this is a clear instance where the machine is far better than the human alternative.

Write and Rewrite

Beyond reviewing, a writer can use AI to rewrite their texts, with as much variety as Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Indeed, they can use LLMs to generate text itself, a little or a lot. Tuhin Chakrabarty, an academic, caused something of a scandal when he and his colleagues published a paper suggesting readers preferred the output of AI trained on expert writers to the writers themselves. I struggle to defend either writing or rewriting using LLMs, but the point is that one can do it, and a writer may reasonably think it’s a good idea while they work.

Each person, writer and reader, needs to think about what authenticity and the dignity of the work means to them and at what point they would admit that to have been unfairly compromised. For me as a writer, the words must be my own or the accepted suggestion of another. The research can be from an LLM, but not the written words themselves. Otherwise, I’d be ashamed to call myself a writer to begin with. AI could provide suggestions, but anything rewritten or generated too much. For me, the use of the rewritten (“make this dialogue more punchy”) can only be to force me to reconsider what I’ve written, never to replace it.

Yet just because I do not like it, that does not mean this should not be an option, or that it is a bad one. This blog is written, after all, by someone who believes in writing as a skill and method, that even great texts can be torn apart and analysed, and that training can bring writers closer to them. I cannot, therefore, deny that LLMs can do a lot of the work for us. Henry Gifford, in “On translating Tolstoy”, noted the Russian’s preference for adjectival constructions indicating action (“freshly-picked strawberries lay on the table”.) I’ve written (without originality) about Conrad’s adjectives and Tolstoy’s physicality, while others have noted the way the latter’s characters contradict themselves.

Trained on all this and more, an LLM should be able to do a reasonably good job, especially if we focus on the individual paragraph or sentence, and are ourselves clear about the output we desire. LLMs probably cannot make a bad reader into a good writer. But I think they certainly can make a good reader into a better writer.

The result of this LLM use and misuse will not be strictly original, but then what is? I don’t fundamentally believe writers create works devoid of the impact of others. Most of us are under the “Anxiety of Influence”, as Harold Bloom called it. Flaubert, who hated cliches, makes me feel like every sentence is a discovery. But the vast majority of writers, including very great ones, do not. There are enough metaphors and images and similes out there that seeking a truly original one is probably a poor use of time. Why not instead bash out a mediocre novel, then go through it, page by page, asking a friendly LLM to make it like your favourite writer – in my case Tolstoy – with the following or similar prompt: “rewrite this to include more adjectives associated with labour, and remove all similes and metaphors. Add additional focus upon body parts and separately identify instances where characters can organically contradict themselves.”

You can do it easily enough.

But should you?

Originality and Atrophy

Well, that’s really up to you, writer. Readers will hate you for it if they ever find out. Before you do, though, think back. Did you become a writer to write, because you loved language itself, or because you’re a little Napoleon wanting to control some small corner of the world? (I worry it’s the second for me). It seems awfully unfair and uncool that we can outsource a lot of work to the machine. At the same time, it also seems hard to argue that partial outsourcing is a not an effective way of building something that is impactful as a work of fiction. Increasingly so, given the pace of advancements in AI over the past few years. It’s a real dilemma.

Tokarczuk, possibly, was asking AI for ideas. Which is a great way of forgetting how to have them for yourself, but it’s probably not a bad way of getting a few of them to begin with. Again, the writer has to decide how much to give up for this, not the reader.

I am a person who thinks it’s important to take care of myself, and the last thing I want is for my brain to atrophy, as it seems is happening to many that rely overmuch on AI, whether friends, family, or colleagues. Yet I still use LLMs during the course of my day job, when I have to and sometimes when I do not. AI use is only one thing, alongside my sugar and vitamin intake, the amount of sleep I get, the amount of sport I do, the number of interesting conversations I have, and how much time I spend on my phone, which has an impact upon my becoming the person I want to be. A thing to be monitored, analysed, and motivate remedial actions as necessary.

But these are decisions for me as a writer and human to make, based on the outputs I want from my limited time on earth, and me alone.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to approach the AI topic here from two angles – that of the reader, and that of the writer. Readers want to feel that they are reading a writer, not a machine’s output. They value authenticity and the sense that they are reading something that has had thought and care put into it. The writer who is blasé about LLM usage can, fairly I think, be criticised for not caring enough about their calling. And if they do not care about their books enough to write them themselves, why should a reader care enough to read them?

For the writer, however, AI offers significant benefits, as long as they are willing to use it sparingly and carefully. It can help with reviewing, help with research, and possibly even help with rewriting. At the same time, the writer needs to take care not to become too reliant on it, lest they lose their ability to be inspired or think. We come back to the classic question about cyborgs and transhumanism. How far can we change before we give up who we are? I think that AI is suddenly forcing writers to think about this question with real urgency, and the answers are far from clear.

Still, I want to end by going back to the Cambridge study I linked, which indicated that many writers feel significant anxiety about their livelihoods in an age of LLMs, whether they use it or not. I am reasonably confident that we will see the quality of literature becoming better with the assistance of LLMs. But literature is written by people and for people, and for writers and readers as a whole, the technological ascendency of LLMs is far from benign. We are sinking into a sea of slop and gradually losing our ability to value what is truly good. Perhaps, terrifyingly, a hundred years from now, a few of us will look back and find that the most brilliant tool for writing was created, but that that very same tool destroyed the readers and the writers needed to make proper use of it.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. As this is a highly emotive topic, and if you’ve read this far you’ve hopefully been prompted to have some thoughts of your own, so what do you think about all this?

How to Read an Aphorism

The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.

An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.

Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.

Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.

For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.

We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.

This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.

All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.

The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.

To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.

Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.

Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)

Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.

Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.

They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.

We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.

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 18^th 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 18^th 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!

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 18^th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21^st. 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 18^th 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.

Category: Thought