Quills and Other Plays

"I thought it would be interesting to have a creative response to Sade as well as a critical one. Creative responses to Sade have been a mixed bag. Most Sade adaptations have been pretty awful—with the exception of Salò —and films about Sade have not been very interesting either. But “Quills” engages with Sade in intriguing ways. It plays fast and loose with the facts, and is completely—wilfully—inaccurate historically, but that doesn’t bother me. It homes in on what’s interesting about Sade in a way that academic criticism doesn’t always, and in particular plays out a debate about the power of fiction over the reader. Obviously, it’s not going to side against freedom of expression, but it does explore the idea of fiction as something dangerous, as something that can change us. There are some very interesting scenes in which the act of reading is staged and shown to be performative rather than passive. There’s one scene in which Sade, without pen and paper, has to relay his words orally from one prisoner to the next until it reaches Madeleine, who transcribes them. And there’s another scene in which Sade has written a story on the walls of his cell—a really anodyne story with no sex or violence. But the director of Charenton, Royer-Collard, interprets it as a story about his wife’s infidelity. So it shows how much a reader brings to a text, and how subjective our interpretations are. In fact, the story is open to all sorts of other readings: it’s about Sade’s love for Madeleine, and it’s also about the power of fiction. it’s a really telling example of what can happen to a story in the hands—and minds—of different readers. I think that’s why I chose it. It shines a light on the reader, and that’s what Sade critics haven’t done very well at all. The translation was interesting in that respect. I’d been working on Sade—and teaching him—for a while by that time, but putting something like the 120 Days out there into the public arena is different because you don’t have the same kind of control. When I’m teaching, I’m setting the tone in the classroom and asking students to think about Sade’s works in a particular way, so there is an element of direction. The only equivalent for that when you’re publishing a translation is the introduction, but how many people actually read introductions? Probably not that many. So, 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 — and all the more so because I don’t dismiss the idea of texts having negative effects on readers. It’s not like I think it’s completely safe. That said, because it’s such an extreme text, that strangely makes it slightly easier: there are other works by Sade which are less extreme but potentially more unsettling. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The 120 Days is not a seductive text in any respect: most readers will simply be horrified and revolted by it. And what we tried to do in our translation was to make it as horrible and as upsetting in English as it is in French. I can’t imagine censoring Sade for an adult readership. That said, would I want my children to read it? No. Do I warn my students before inflicting it on them? Yes. That’s a big question and it’s the sort of question that’s treated very differently by literary critics and analytic philosophers. The problem with literature—and this is the sort of thing that analytic philosophers don’t always acknowledge—is that the same text can be interpreted even by the same reader in different ways. What a question like that often ends up being about is authorial intention. The problem with Sade is that it’s very difficult to know what those intentions might have been, and I’m not sure it matters. “The 120 Days is not a seductive text in any respect: most readers will simply be horrified and revolted by it” For me, the question is less about the moral value of a text but the moral value we can extract from it. There are ethical questions raised by the reading of Sade because these are texts predicated on violence and we are party to that violence on some level. The critic Marcel Hénaff said that “to read Sade is to conspire with him” and that’s the kind of dilemma that I think about an awful lot. How can we read a vicious, misogynistic text without becoming complicit? And it’s something my students and I discuss a great deal. So for me reading fiction is—must be—an ethical as well aesthetic experience. The two are inseparable."