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Rating: Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade - Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795)
De Sade, the famous Marquis. What would become of him in our days? At the end of the 18th century, De Sade was in jail with various charges, but by now he was sick, aged, overweight, and full of debts, as well as greatly undermined by the terrible experience in the asylum. After a dissolute life dedicated to pleasures and perversions of all kinds, including constant comings and goings in various prisons with infamous accusations, he was sentenced to death. He miraculously saved himself possibly due to a mistake (they searched for him in the wrong prison) maybe due to a lettre de cachet, possibly due to a numerical mistake (28 were listed as condemned to death in prison instead of 29), more probably thanks to the amnesty due to the end of the "terror" period and to Robespierre's death sentence, the Divin Marquis is freed and resumes writing in his home.
Among the various writings of that period, some lost or destroyed by his son after his death, the most famous is this "Philosophy in the Boudoir". A work that in any era it was written would have encountered serious problems with censorship and would have been accused of containing pornographic absurdities, pedophilia, pathological transgressions and whatever else you can think of.
The novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Eugénie and her troubled sexual initiation. Madame de Saint-Ange makes available her boudoir so that the perverted and lustful Dolmancé, a local squire, along with his acolytes, Augustin and La-Pierre (his servants), Chevalier de Mirvel, and Madame de Mistival, can "educate" the girl by subjecting her to the most imaginative and terrible practices and moving to coercive and manipulative acts and actions to convince her of the goodness of bizarre theses, not only on sodomy, incest, or promiscuity of all sorts, but also on more delicate matters such as murder, thefts and marital life, viewed with aberrant and cynical horror up to defining conception and reproduction as the obstacle placed by God, to the utmost carnal pleasure.
The direct and raw traits of the writing very well represent the principle of transgression and rebellion through which the Marquis operates his protagonists. The elegy of pleasure is contrasted with the restrictions of the Catholic and bigoted society, which the author attempts repeatedly to demolish.
The protagonists are mannequins, puppets in De Sade's hands and move on the narrow stage performing perverse and often unusual sexual acts, to demonstrate how these exceptions can become normal in the corrupted mind that attempts to corrupt, perpetrating and repeating the same behaviors until they are accepted as routine. Their description is detailed, extremely precise and particularized, demonstrating on one hand the great literary skill of the Marquis, and on the other how deviant and paroxysmally piloted Enlightenment towards the exalting, beastly, and primordial sex is a means of social, religious, and political condemnation, capable like nothing else of stirring reactions on a physical and mental level.
The author's sexual fantasy knows no limits and, empowered by personal experiences, he manages to transmit to the protagonists the desire to experiment anything that comes to their minds, up to making them utter phrases like: "... let nothing go to waste ..." while a pair of lips seal the sphincter apparatus where the semen is percolating. Everything revolves around an unfettered libidinous apotheosis and the static nature of the location is well compensated by the explosive whirlwind of events, positions, and exchanges.
What is ultimately demonstrated by this particular reading is what the Greeks, with such depth of thought, did, opposing Eros and Thanatos and highlighting how life springs from sex, but also its descent to its lowest level of self-destruction up to, indeed, death.
Despite the subject matter, we are facing a novel that generates more curiosity than excitement and I believe - in the end - that its value is merely subjective and that each one, in works like this, should look for what is most congenial to their personality, obviously also including the generalized refusal.
sioulette
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