120 Days of Sodom - Marquis de Sade

...their actions over the following 120 days are chronicled to prove who is indeed the most debauched. And that, my friends, is the plot.

I was very curious to know how good a standard of writer Sade actually was and I can confirm with confidence that he was well, distinctly poor. The writing style is ironically rather stilted and unimaginative in my opinion. The characters are never fully explored and the plot is tenuous in the extreme.
...it rather difficult to care: 120 days of debauchery quickly came to feel like 120 years.

The interest in the novel is in determining to what extent the man and the author can be separated. It can be contended that the lonely figure writing in his prison cell courted infamy in his lifestyle yet purposefully wrote in an unreadable and distant style to push the reader away but to justify himself to himself at the same time. It is just ... more

Please be aware that this novel is explicit in nature and if there are any “ikkle” Ciao-ers out there I would really feel more comfortable if you gave this review a pass. Unfortunately there is no rating system for novels, but if there were this would be an XXX. However, I have checked with Ciao and they are more than happy for me to review it, so here goes…

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Now I like to think of myself as broad-minded: don’t we all, and that was my main reason for picking up The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom.

Written during Sades imprisonment, this novel was lost after the 1789 storming of the Bastille and only republished in 1936. Sade is alleged to have wept “tears of blood” at the loss of what he considered to be his masterpiece.

The Marquis de Sade lived his life for eroticism and contended that virtue was insipid and essentially boring and for this reason he turned to cruelty, tyranny and debauchery, which in his philosophy showed strength of character. It is interesting that Madame de Sade covered up for the famous orgies at the Chateau of La Coste and other delinquencies for many many years and with no form of thanks, for Sade saw gratitude as weakness. Madame de Sade was amongst a variety of people who allowed the tyrant to tyrannise, and of course to successfully live his debauched lifestyle for as long as he did.

The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom is undoubtedly one of the most controversial of novels, lets face it, you don’t get Sadism named after you for nothing. It is basically a catalogue of all sexually and physically abusive and intrusive acts that can be perpetrated on willing and less-than-willing men, women and children. Sade rather wittily sub-divides these into:

Simple Passions
Complex Passions
Criminal Passions
Murderous Passions.

Printed over 800 pages the plot is as follows:

Four chaps have a bet about who is the most “libertine” amongst them – and from here on their actions over the following 120 days are chronicled to prove who is indeed the most debauched. And that, my friends, is the plot.

I was very curious to know how good a standard of writer Sade actually was and I can confirm with confidence that he was well, distinctly poor. The writing style is ironically rather stilted and unimaginative in my opinion. The characters are never fully explored and the plot is tenuous in the extreme.

The principle issue with this thinly disguised “novel” is that it is essentially repetitive. I understand fully how shocking is was and still is to write and publish a work such as this, but when you are perpetually facing “then he did this” and “then he did that” I actually found it rather difficult to care: 120 days of debauchery quickly came to feel like 120 years.

The interest in the novel is in determining to what extent the man and the author can be separated. It can be contended that the lonely figure writing in his prison cell courted infamy in his lifestyle yet purposefully wrote in an unreadable and distant style to push the reader away but to justify himself to himself at the same time. It is just about possible, and if correct then I put myself in the category of those who have been successfully pushed.

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The edition I have is the 1990 Arrow reprint charged at £7.99 translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, which contains a variety of essays about Sade himself and about the work. Most notably it opens with the beautifully written and equally famous essay “Must We Burn Sade?” by Simone de Beauvoir (originally published in 1952).

Recommended? No. Although he gets two stars from me for cheek and originally, and for the essay by Simone de Beauvoir that he inspired...and ironically that really is worth a look.

Thanks for reading.

 

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