A Monster for Our Times: Reading Sade across the Centuries Matthew Bridge Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Matthew Bridge All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT A Monster for Our Times: Reading Sade across the Centuries Matthew Bridge This doctoral dissertation looks at several readings and interpretations of the works of the Marquis de Sade, from the eighteenth century to the present. Ever since he was imprisoned under the Old Regime following highly publicized instances of physical and sexual abuse, Sade has remained a controversial figure who has been both condemned as a dangerous criminal and celebrated as an icon for artistic freedom. The most enduring aspect of his legacy has been a vast collection of obscene publications, characterized by detailed descriptions of sexual torture and murder, along with philosophical diatribes that offer theoretical justifications for the atrocities. Not surprisingly, Sade’s works have been subject to censorship almost from the beginning, leading to the author’s imprisonment under Napoleon and to the eventual trials of his mid-twentieth-century publishers in France and Japan. The following pages examine the reception of Sade’s works in relation to the legal concept of obscenity, which provides a consistent framework for textual interpretation from the 1790s to the present. I begin with a prelude discussing the 1956 trial of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in order to situate the remainder of the dissertation within the context of how readers approached a body of work as quintessentially obscene as that of Sade. At Pauvert’s trial there emerged an opposition between readings that concentrate on the prurient nature of the texts and those that instead attempt to justify their place in society by stressing their intellectual merit. This opposition remains in effect throughout the remaining chapters, each of which focuses on a particular historical moment in the reception of Sade’s works and on a certain reader or group of readers. Chapter One establishes Sade himself as the first reader of his texts, and discusses how he situated them with respect to the genre of obscene books that had developed in France throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter Two focuses primarily on Rétif de la Bretonne as the first reader of Sade, one who publicly condemned the author and his works on moral grounds while simultaneously composing his own erotic novel in the Sadean vein. Chapter Three deals with the onset of a tendency among nineteenth-century French authors to admire him as the “Divine Marquis,” with a particular focus on Flaubert and his discussion of Sade in his correspondence. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the reception of Sade’s works during the twentieth century. Each subsequent chapter examines the interaction of mainstream intellectual readings—such as those of the surrealists, post-war essayists like Blanchot and Bataille, or Pasolini in Salò—and the underground readings that occur in the realms of erotic fiction and film, paying special attention to how Sade was used in various political and artistic debates. Finally, my conclusion discusses the place of Sade in contemporary society, including in recent films such as Benoît Jacquot’s Sade and Philip Kaufman’s Quills. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 PRELUDE: THE MARQUIS DE SADE ON TRIAL 11 CHAPTER 1 Obscene Books before Sade: A Libertine Library 38 Literary Criticism in the Boudoir: Juliette Judges the Classics 48 Sade, Reader of Sade: Hand-jobs and Footnotes 66 CHAPTER 2 Indecent Exposure: Sade’s Written Crimes in Post-Revolutionary France 80 “Que la poule ponde !”: Sade, Rétif, and the Prevalence of Filth in Justine 89 Rétif Responds: Cleanliness and Violence in L’Anti-Justine 99 Filth and Politics in the Boudoir 107 Rétif’s Revenge: The “Monster-Author” Unmasked 119 CHAPTER 3 Private Reflections: Sade in the Nineteenth Century 128 i In the Shadow of the Divine Marquis: Echoes of Sade in Romantic Literature 133 A Close Textual Encounter: Flaubert and “le Vieux de Sade” 146 CHAPTER 4 Sade on the Margins of Surrealism: Apollinaire, Aragon, and Bataille 172 Two Faces of Apollinaire: “Le Divin Marquis” and Les Onze Mille Verges 180 “Des abîmes de regret et de songe”: Le Con d’Irène and Aragon’s Reading of Sade 186 Dipping Flowers in Manure: Bataille as a Reader of Sade 199 CHAPTER 5 Returning to Literature: Sade and the Post-war Erotic Novel 214 Is It Literature? Paulhan as an Early Reader of Sade 219 “What Is Literature?”: Sade and Post-war Politics 223 Returning to Literature through the Post-war Erotic Novel 237 CHAPTER 6 Sodom on the Silver Screen: Sade in the Sixties and Seventies 254 From Sodome to Salò: Pasolini on Sade 256 ii Free Love in the Boudoir: Sade and the Spirit of ’69 271 Celebrating Decadence: Sade and the Hedonistic Seventies 297 CONCLUSION Censoring Sade in the Twenty-First Century 306 WORKS CITED 324 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my sponsor, Professor Elisabeth Ladenson, who has provided continuous guidance and support over the years. I am also indebted to my advisor, Professor Joanna Stalnaker, for her encouragement and constructive criticism from the earliest stages of my research to the final defense. I also want to thank Professor Phil Watts for reading early drafts of several chapters, as well as Professor Jenny Davidson and Professor Edward Mendelson for being part of the dissertation committee. Finally, I owe much thanks to the staff of the Department of French and Romance Philology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, in particular Benita, Isabelle, Meritza, Catherine, and Sarah. iv 1 Introduction This dissertation considers the reception of the works of the Marquis de Sade, from the initial publication of his texts in the 1790s up to the present. After a preliminary discussion of the censorship trials that took place in France and Japan during the mid- twentieth century, it follows a linear historical approach, wherein each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular set of important readers during a given historical period, beginning with Sade himself and ending with twentieth-century filmmakers of various nationalities. At issue is the question of how certain individuals and groups have gone about reading an oeuvre whose obscenity, for the most part, has been taken as an established fact. Sade, for instance, situated novels such as Justine and Juliette within the genre of “livres obscènes,” and that view prevailed through Jean-Jacques Pauvert’s 1956 trial for openly distributing Sade’s complete works, where both the prosecution and defense agreed that his literature was obscene. While the judgment of what constitutes obscenity in specific instances may vary over time in accordance with changing views regarding publicly acceptable moral behavior, the basic definition of obscenity has, arguably, remained relatively stable since the emergence of the concept in its modern form during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 By definition, obscenity involves transgressing the boundary between the public and private realms, wherein material or behavior that might be acceptable in private is considered unfit for public circulation and display. For instance, when Louis- Sébastien Mercier criticizes the leniency granted to the press under the Revolution, he does so because such freedoms have allowed Justine and other abominable publications 1 Joan DeJean discusses the origins of obscenity during the early modern period in The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. 2 to be sold publicly in places such as the Palais de l’Égalité (Le Nouveau Paris 340, 430). Over a century and a half later, when Jean-Jacques Pauvert stood trial following his publication of Sade’s complete works in 1956, the specific offense of which he was accused involved the transportation, distribution, and sale of materials deemed “contraires aux bonnes mœurs” (Pauvert, L’Affaire Sade, 8-13). Similarly, although the United States Supreme Court has ruled (in its 1969 decision Stanley v. Georgia) that adults have the right to possess and view obscene material within their own homes, contemporary American pornographers continue to face trial (and serve time) for distributing their DVDs and internet videos because, according to Title 18, Part I, Chapter 71 (Sections 1461, 1462, and 1465) of the U.S. Criminal Code, it is a federal offense to mail, transport, or otherwise distribute (including via internet) “obscene matters” across state boundaries.2 In other words, the crime of obscenity today necessarily involves the public distribution of inappropriate sexual material, as has been the case for centuries. Sade’s tales of rape, torture, and coprophagia elicited cries of moral reprobation from the on set, beginning with the publication of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu in 1791 under the relaxed censorship regulations of the Revolution. Early readers such as Rétif de la Bretonne (who was himself an author of licentious works) and Louis- Sebastien Mercier considered Sade’s novels to be a public danger for their potential to corrupt readers and inspire imitators. This image of Sade as a monster prevailed in France throughout the nineteenth century, as editions of Justine and other works were summarily banned, confiscated, and either destroyed or collected in the special reserve 2 For instance, filmmakers Paul Little (better known by his screen name, “Max Hardcore”) and the husband and wife duo Rob Zicari and Lizzy Borden (of Extreme Associates) were recently imprisoned on federal obscenity charges (in 2008 and 2009, respectively). In July 2010, charges were thrown out against Evil Angel owner John Stagliano after federal prosecutors made several procedural errors (failing, for example, to connect Stagliano to the DVDs in question).