Sade/Fourier/Loyola

"I chose it not because I agree with very much of it, but because it’s been the most influential work of Sade criticism. If you were to pick out the one book that brought Sade in from the cold, I think it would be this one. So, it has a historical importance in terms of the reception of Sade in twentieth and twenty-first century culture. And, in many ways, it’s still where Sade criticism is today. The first chapter in Sade/Fourier/Loyola was published a few years earlier, in 1967, as an article. Barthes then published this book in 1971 with additional material on Sade. It comes at a really important time. For the first half of the twentieth century, Sade had only been read by very select group of wealthy, bourgeois, male readers. It’s only in the 1960s and early 1970s that Sade becomes accessible to the public, in cheap paperbacks. Barthes’ article-then-book on Sade is a crucial intervention, and it’s not a coincidence that he writes “The Death of the Author” at the same time. There’s a strategic reason for killing off the author when the author you’re reading happens to be a criminal. By killing off the author, Barthes kills off all the reasons why you can’t read Sade. And it’s a lot easier to read Sade’s fiction if you separate the life of the author from the life of the work. Sade/Fourier/Loyola set the tone for subsequent Sadean criticism for the next few decades. The central argument in Barthes’ book is that it’s a mistake to read Sade as anything other than words. Anything other than language. It’s semiosis not mimesis, he says. He eliminates all the reasons Sade was unreadable beforehand—the violence, the horror, the nihilism. For him, it’s just black ink on a white page. “By killing off the author, Barthes kills off all the reasons why you can’t read Sade” He says famously in Sade/Fourier/Loyola : “écrite, la merde ne sent pas”—“written down, shit doesn’t smell” and that the only universe in Sade is the universe of discourse. In other words, it’s harmless. What he’s effectively doing is severing Sade’s works from the real world. He’s providing a safe sanctuary in which you can look at this stuff without worrying about it. And there’s lots of interesting analysis that come out of that. Barthes shines a light on all sorts of different signs and codes in the text and so on. And a long line of critics follow and repeat the Barthes line—that the violence is linguistic—right into the 1980s and beyond. There are still many today who prefer to focus on language rather than content. A few years ago, I was at a conference on violence in the eighteenth century, and I was very struck by a critic choosing to talk about the word “violence” in Sade’s fiction rather than actual representations of violence. That is very much the Barthian approach: you focus on a word. But it seems perverse to me. I’m not saying that Sadean language isn’t interesting, but the reality is that’s not what draws readers to Sade. One of the jobs of the critic is to convey some sense of what it is like to read a particular text. And Sade criticism largely fails to do that. The model for literary criticism has long been science, so we talk about analysing and dissecting a text and so on. This encourages rigorous thinking and that’s obviously good, but there’s a sense in which it’s missing something too. There is still a defensiveness which leads some Sade critics to emphasise the scientific aspect of their interest in Sade. They want to be seen as scientists in white coats, not perverts in dirty macs—clinical, not sexual. Although the emphasis in Sade criticism has shifted from the linguistic to the historical, the latter approach also keeps Sade at a safe distance. Sade is neutralized and the reader is simply left out of the picture. The problem with Barthes’ approach is that it talks about words on the page but never about the reader who reads them, visualises them, and lives with them in their imagination. Barthes actually evolved from this position, but Sade critics didn’t really evolve with him. For example, they still largely refuse to discuss Sade’s biography. “The problem with Barthes’ approach is that it talks about words on the page but never about the reader who reads them, visualises them, and lives with them in their imagination” So, in one corner you have Sade’s biographers and in another you have Sade’s critics but there’s no interaction between the two. It’s seen as vulgar to raise the life in relation to the works. There’s a strange sense in which all the things that I think make Sade’s fiction fascinating—all the things that readers notice and are shocked by—are exactly the things that we don’t talk about. That seems like a wasted opportunity to me, really. It’s a shame that Sade is hardly taught anywhere—in France or in England. My suspicion is that the linguistic or historicising approach adopted by Sade critics would get short shrift from students. If you try to teach the Barthes line to your students, they will simply stare at you in disbelief. This idea of examining the text in complete isolation from the experience of reading that text wouldn’t wash anymore.I feel very lucky to have been allowed to teach Sade, and there’s no doubt it’s shaped my thinking about him in all sorts of ways. I also suspect there’s a reputational concern that has prevented some critics from teaching Sade. For others, it’s simply awkward and embarrassing—particularly when you’re a middle-aged man teaching largely female cohorts of students. You can’t help but be—you need to be—self-conscious about teaching Sade."