The 120 Days of Sodom

"That’s a very good question. The 120 Days is essentially unreadable in every possible way. Unreadable in the sense that it’s hard to read, unreadable in the sense that it’s upsetting to read, and unreadable also in the sense that it’s difficult to decode. It’s easy to forget about authors when they’re well behaved. But when you’re dealing with an author you don’t entirely trust, you become much more aware of him as a figure. And when the fiction is extreme, as it is in Sade, then we do think about intentions more. “It’s easy to forget about authors when they’re well behaved. But when you’re dealing with an author you don’t entirely trust, you become much more aware of him as a figure” To complicate things further, I suspect that those intentions may have changed during the writing of the 120 Days . The state of the manuscript is relevant here. The introduction and the first part are more or less finished. If you read the end of the introduction and part one, yes, it’s shocking and there are unpleasant things in there, but one can just about imagine it being published. The rhetoric is quite polished, the style is quite formal, and it feels like a realised piece of fiction. Thereafter it becomes more and more extreme, and increasingly unpublishable—certainly in 1785. So it’s difficult to say what he’s trying to achieve. I can see why you’d ask if it’s just a kind of exorcism or fantasy of a prisoner living in an incredibly confined space. Another way of asking that question is: who was the intended reader of that text? And it may well have been Sade. There’s an allusion, towards the end of part one, where he suggests that he was imagining a publication in four parts and says, if the reader is still interested then I will publish the rest. He may have held on to the idea of it being a publishable text at that stage. But then he must have abandoned the idea of publication and at that point the text became something else—maybe a test for himself to see how far he could go. It’s very striking that he writes it in a very short space of time – he writes it in thirty-seven days. Our translation took a lot longer than that! There is just this outpouring of escalating violence. It’s a really strange text. On one level, you can see it as a collection of stories. Had it been fully realised, it would have gone on to be thousands of pages long. It’s a sort of Decameron in its conception, with the classic set-up of a storytelling frame. It’s very important to acknowledge that it’s a work born out of his imprisonment and this informs the kinds of spaces that we get in the novel. He’s writing in a prison cell in the Bastille and the fantasies in the novel revolve around enclosed and subterranean spaces. And he does recount the plight of prisoners. And this raises the question: is he identifying with the libertines or the prisoners? And you’re right to say it’s a work of fantasy. It’s not a realist novel. So, who knows? Did it have some therapeutic value for him? Possibly. He was mentally unwell at the time he wrote it, and there is evidently an obsessive quality to the cataloguing of perversions. Yes, there’s grotesque exaggeration. One of the challenges for modern readers of Sade is that they are used to novels. We have a sensibility that’s informed by nineteenth-century fiction where you have characters drawn with psychological depth — characters with whom you empathise, whose fortunes you follow and so on. Sade’s fiction is more early modern than modern. It’s less to do with characters than types. You get these amplified figures, these exaggerated figures, like Gernande the vampire, or the giant Minski in Juliette —and they are all representing a particular quality or vice. Justine and Juliette are the same in that respect. Justine is an emblem of virtue, and for modern readers she feels like a character with whom we should empathise—particularly when all these horrible things happen to her. But our empathy is probably not one that an eighteenth-century reader would have had. So, there is a sense in which our habits of reading fiction are not those that Sade would have anticipated. The plot is simple and horrifying. There are four libertines who each represent the four pillars of French society. You have a Duke, a Bishop, a financier, and a judge. The novel describes the four months they spend in a castle one of them owns in the Black Forest, locked away with harems of teenage boys and girls, some old crones, some well-endowed “fouteurs” or “fuckers” and some other servants. They also take with them four experienced prostitutes who are there to act as storytellers. Over the period of one hundred and twenty days, the four libertines listen to various “passions”, and then enact them. There is an escalation of violence, and over the one hundred and twenty days, the passions become increasingly extreme and most of the prisoners are murdered. It’s basically like The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron , the classic locus of people shutting themselves away from the outside world and listening to stories. The difference with Sade is that they perform what they hear. The castle moves, oddly. It starts off in Switzerland and then he changes the location to Germany. There is a fairy-tale aspect to the location: the forest has always been a richly significant space in storytelling. It’s the space in which the rules of the everyday world are suspended and where extraordinary things happen. What Sade emphasizes in the introduction is the sense of isolation from the outside world. It’s not just that they’re in a forest but they’re in a castle surrounded by a plain which is itself surrounded by mountains within that forest. It is a place of absolute isolation from the outside world. There’s the strange kind of paradox that you get with Sade that by locking yourselves up you can be free. And he creates these spaces of isolation in all his novels. One of the things that defines pornography is an intention to arouse the reader or spectator, but it’s not entirely clear if this is the case here. It might have been intended to arouse its author—who was also its reader, its only reader for a long period of time.It’s complicated by the fact that what seems to be the driving force in the 120 Days is that it is not interested in anodyne passions. It is not interested in run of the mill sexual desires. It takes for its subject perversions—what we could call paraphilia these days. The narrator says in part one, I’m presenting you with six hundred dishes. You’re not going to like all of them but they’ll be one there that you will like. And if that’s the case he’s got you: you lose any moral high ground if he finds the one you like. But the truth is that many if not most readers will find no such passion. Even Sade’s staunchest defenders have lamented the obsession with coprophagy and coprophilia. That material will have a niche audience, but it’s certainly not designed to have broad appeal. I think what drives the cataloguing of perversions is not so much the desire to arouse but the desire to transgress, and to fantasize about transgression on a massive scale. It may seem bizarre, but the 120 Days was presented by sexologists as a work of science—which tells you the dodgy ground sexology was on at the turn of the twentieth century. But you can almost see why, because there is some sort of attempt at systematization. Passions are divided into four different categories within which there are these almost endless variations. The whole very much takes the structure of a catalogue—so it does read like an early version of the Psychopathia Sexualis (not a flattering comparison for the latter it must be said). “There is a certain amount of trepidation about putting something out there which is still, one could argue, the most extreme work of fiction ever written” So, sexologists promoted the idea that it was a work of science and nobody questioned it—because nobody other than a few hundred readers had access to the text (it was initially published in a very limited and expensive private edition). The myth of the 120 Days as a work of science endured right into the 1950s and even 1960s, with Sade talked about as a precursor to Krafft-Ebing and even to Freud. It seems ludicrous now: many of the passions are simply twisted ways of killing people—with no sexual element at all. Some of the passions are horrible and shocking and upsetting, but others are just surreal and strange.It’s not a uniform text and, in that respect, you can’t really have a uniform response to it. But overall I don’t think it’s a text driven by the desire to arouse the reader. It may be to shock the reader, which goes back to your question, or at the very least there is a desire to broaden the reader’s horizons. Whoever that reader may be… Sade wrote it in the Bastille in 1785 on bits of paper that he glued together to form a scroll, which he then hid in a cylinder. Although he only wrote an incomplete draft he never returned to it at any point in the next four years. He had the opportunity to finish it but never did.Then he was overtaken by events. Just before the Bastille is stormed he is moved to another prison in the middle of the night—he says, naked—and is not allowed to take all his affairs with him. He pleads with his wife to fetch his belongings but the day she goes is the day the Bastille is stormed.It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction here but that scroll disappeared either in between him leaving and the 14th July or during the storming of the Bastille. Either way, it was pilfered and sold to another Provençal aristocrat. It remained in the hands of his family for the rest of the nineteenth century. So, for a couple of generations, it was a well-kept secret.Then a German collector acquired it and a sexologist called Iwan Bloch published it for the first time in 1904, but in an edition riddled with errors. Almost thirty years later, Sade’s descendants bought the scroll and Maurice Heine completed a proper transcription and published an edition in the 1930s. He was the last editor to see the scroll in its entirety, and the only one to publish the novel uncorrected. All the French editions since his edition have corrected all the little errors and tidied up the punctuation. So, the fact that it’s a draft—not a completed novel—has been eroded by those subsequent editions. That’s why, in our translation, we tried to get back to the “draftness” of it. We kept the mistakes and tried to stay as close as possible to the original syntax. The Sade family kept the scroll until the 1980s and then a bookseller friend of theirs offered to have it valued. He smuggled it over the border to Switzerland and sold it to a collector called Nordmann. Legal wranglings ensued for the next three decades, essentially. In 2014—the bicentenary of Sade’s death—a private foundation bought the scroll for 7 million euros, brought it back to Paris, and exhibited it. But the director of this foundation is now being investigated for fraud because of the dubious ways in which he raised funds, and the foundation has been closed down. The scroll is now under lock and key and is likely to be sold as an asset. It’s come full circle, really. It started its life in prison and now it’s gone back there. I suspect—I hope—what will happen next is that the French National Library will buy it and make sure it never leaves France again."