The 120 Days Of Sodom and Other Writings [Paperback]

Because of the extreme obscenity that we find in his writings they have always been a favorite target of censors, and it wasn't until the mid-sixties that unexpurgated editions of Sade's works became available in English translation in the United States.

For those who would like to read the authentic texts, I can strongly recommend the present authoritative and critical English edition. It has a full introduction, critical essays, bibliographies, etc., and is beautifully translated. But it is not for the beginner, and definitely not for the squeamish. Read 'Justine' and 'Juliette' first.

There are a lot of other 'Sade' books on the market, or books that pretend to be giving you Sade, but the present ediition contains the only authoritative and uncut English translation. As for earlier translations, some of them tend to be rather expensive, possibly because they have usually been issued in limited editions and book dealers have a nasty habit of classifying them as Erotica, as, in other words, "the sort of book that one reads with one hand."

In fact, Sade is not not really erotically stimulating at all. My own feeling is that his descriptions of sexual high jinks are intended more to provoke laughter than to excite, and anyone who goes to him for titillation is going to come away disappointed.

Roald Dahl, the famous writer of children's books, pointed out somewhere that children love the grotesque, the exaggerated, the monstrous, the ugly, the dirty; they find such things hilarious. I think there's more than a bit of this in Sade, and perhaps buried deep down in all of us too. Sade was able to see into the depths of the subconscious mind, and for anyone who is interested in understanding who and what we really are he is unsurpassed.

Those who know of DeSade only by reputation are only vaguely aware that his interests are thoroughly grounded in areas of sexual perversion and torture that have led to his name being held synonymous with the wish to maim, torment, and disgust. For those who have actually gone to the trouble to read his works and are familiar with the general tools of literary criticism, such readers soon enough recognize that his literary impact rests primarily on just the three works listed above. In each of these three, DeSade posits a universe of closed in spaces. Most often, the protagonist is one who is powerful, wealthy, dissolute, and eager to convince his unwilling victims--usually young females--that the God of the Bible and the benevolent Nature of Wordsworth is a fiction created by blind and cowardly writers who refuse to see that life is Darwinian to the extreme. All that matters, his protagonists urge relentlessly, is that life belongs to the strong and the only way to justify the existence of the strong is to prey on the weak. Much of this line of reasoning sounds suspiciously like the extended monologue that George Orwell put into the mouths of victim Winston Smith and torturer O'Brien in 1984. O'Brien's comment to Smith that the future of the human race could be seen as a boot stamping forever on a human face is one that DeSade might have heartily agreed with. In order for DeSade's various dissolute priest/noblemen/merchants to carry out their respective debaucheries, they must first have a place of safety. These places of safety are most often underground, in cavernous dungeons of churches or brothels. The victims are usually kidnap victims as in JUSTINE or prostitutes held in bondage as in 120 DAYS OF SODOM. It is only in closed in boxes that DeSade's protagonists feel safe enough not only to carry out their deeds unseen but these boxes also give them a forum to fulminate against a benevolent God/Nature that does no more than to ensure a steady supply of helpless women whose only purpose in life is to justify the unlimited power of those who can exercise that power only in the limited confines of those walled-off dungeons.

As for what goes on in those closed in spaces, one finds--at least in 120 DAYS OF SODOM--not so much a standard novel of plot, character, theme, and setting, but rather a cataloging of a greviously long list of sin and evil. The list of both tormentor and victim is so depressingly long that one has trouble keeping straight who is doing what to whom. Instead, what the reader finds is a nameless and nearly faceless catalog of willing and unwilling participants. The evil that DeSade holds up as inverted good has no lasting impact on tormentor, victim, or reader. Victims are subject to horrendous bouts of necrophilia, coprophilia, sodomy, and cannibalism to such as extent that the ripples that ought to appear in the stream of an outraged consciousness are somehow muted. And that perhaps is the inner meaning of most of DeSade's thought. Evil and horror are such commonplaces in his inverted cosmos that those who are truly kind and decent are forced to see themselves as does Winston Smith in 1984: as one who is the last and dying remnant of his species. The world must then belong to those who trump the virtues of anti-life. That I can today even question whether DeSade has won out indicates that he has not.

The story begins with four, let us politely say "sexual adventurers" (many would say sexual criminals) who kidnap a bunch of women and whisk them off to a very, very secluded castle or mansion, where in four months every sexual proclivity is indulged in between nihilistic philosophical dialogues.

Sade advocated the removal of all social, moral, and sexual rules, and this book is his most fervent fantasy of that ideal. Trained psychologists and laymen alike will find it a fascinating look into the mind of sexual extremism.

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"