Selected Writings of De Sade
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When I was asked to select and translate work by the Marquis de Sade for publication in England I knew that there would be two major difficulties at the outset — the difficulty of obtaining authentic texts and the difficulty of publishing in English important sections of his work which public opinion and legal precedent hold to be obscene and blasphemous. The former difficulty was partly overcome with the help of the British Muslim staff.
The second difficulty raised problems which I as a translator had no power to solve; the result is that the pict&re of de Sade as a writer and thinker given here must necessarily be limited in scope.
In 1942 a great deal of new material in manuscript form was discovered at the castle of Comte Xavier de Sade, the descendant of the Marquis, in Normandy, but so far only a small collection of letters and some other fragments have been published. Until these discoveries were made it was not known that- de Sade was writing as early as 1764 or as late as 1814, the year before his deal.
The events of his life and all the ideas expressed in his books have been described and analysed at length, notably by Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Heine, Gilbert L61y, Maurice Nadeau and Simone de Beauvoir in France and by C. R. Dawes and Geoffrey Gorer in England. However, when Maurice Heine referred to de Sade some time ago as the least read among the most talked of writers, he was not very far from the truth.
The orthodox 19th-century attitude to the work of the Marquis was understandable, but the scientific approach of the twentieth century has not led to any spectacular change. The critics who have written about de Sade recently have at least read him, but they have decided after unbiassed reflection that he is morally indefensible, that he discovered nothing new and wrote rather badly about a great number of disgusting and uninteresting things.
The normal judgment of today on Les 120 JoumJes de Sodome, La Nouvelle Justine and La Philosophie Dans le Boudoir is that they were the obscene productions of a diseased mind or that they were written as deliberate pornography t, and that in any case it is not necessary to read them. It appears therefore that sophisticated about these extraordinary works shows a surprising similarity to the traditional horror with which they have always been viewed. .
To assume that de Sade was not insane is to imply immediately that the whole problem of his personality is much more, not less complicated than it appeared originally, and the contrast between the obscene and the non-obscene work all the more striking and inexplicable.
There are few authors whose entire work needs to be considered at the saftie level of concentration — usually, a certain amount of it is only of academic interest. But with de Sade, if he is to be examined and understood in a level-headed way, this is very little that can be left out, because his range is so great and the extremes of his imagination so far-flung in the unknown territory.
During his lifetime he begged his detractors not to condemn him before reading to the end of whatever they were about to attack. The same holds good today, and "Obscene" is offensive to modesty or decency; expressing or suggesting lewd thoughts.
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