{"id":8535,"date":"2016-12-21T16:50:56","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T16:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=8535"},"modified":"2016-12-26T16:55:11","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T16:55:11","slug":"the-120-days-of-sodom-counterculture-classic-or-porn-war-pariah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-120-days-of-sodom-counterculture-classic-or-porn-war-pariah\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ \u2013 counterculture classic or porn war pariah?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will McMorran<\/a>, Queen Mary University of London<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past year, politicians on the right have railed against the supposed tyranny of political correctness<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s fitting, then, that as 2016 draws to a close, arguably the most obscene<\/a> and offensive work of fiction ever written \u2013 a work that claims to \u201csay everything\u201d \u2013 is going to be sold in America as a mainstream classic for the first time. My new translation of the Marquis de Sade\u2019s \u201cThe 120 Days of Sodom<\/a>\u201d with Thomas Wynn is the first in 60 years.<\/p>\n

Sade has had a long and colorful history in the United States, and his controversial works were at the center of midcentury debates about censorship. Later, they became a flashpoint in the \u201cporn wars\u201d of the 1970s and 1980s. Now American readers will get to decide whether Sade\u2019s most extreme novel has truly become a literary classic. <\/p>\n

A 120-day orgy<\/h2>\n

In 1785, the Marquis de Sade wrote \u201cThe 120 Days of Sodom\u201d in his cell in the Bastille in 37 days. At this point in his life, he had spent eight years in prison. He had also been burned in effigy, survived attempted murder and lived for months on the run as an outlaw after a series of scandals with prostitutes. \u201cThe 120 Days\u201d was his first \u2013 albeit incomplete \u2013 attempt at a novel.<\/p>\n

The story goes something like this: Four debauched aristocrats shut themselves away in an isolated castle with a retinue ranging from teenage boys and girls to old crones. Over the course of four months, experienced prostitutes recount 600 \u201cpassions\u201d or perversions. It\u2019s a case of \u201cmonkey hear, monkey do\u201d as the four men, surrounded by their prisoners, act out each of the \u201cpassions.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n A 1912 portrait of the Marquis de Sade.<\/span>
\n National Library of France\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For all his notoriety, the man whose name inspired the word \u201csadism\u201d<\/a> has always been an author more talked about than read \u2013 at least, in French. <\/p>\n

In English, however, it\u2019s quite a different story. Earlier this year, for example, I discovered that several of his short stories, and the opening chapters of one of his novels, were translated and published anonymously in popular Victorian periodicals such as \u201cThe London Pioneer\u201d and \u201cThe Bon Ton Gazette\u201d \u2013 a case of Sade being read by tens of thousands of readers without being talked about at all. In the 20th century, too, Sade was read in far greater numbers in English than he ever managed in French, thanks largely to the efforts of successive generations of American translators and publishers.<\/p>\n

The reception of Sade in the English-speaking world is really a tale of two cities, Paris and New York. <\/p>\n

Sade goes global<\/h2>\n

Austryn Wainhouse, a young doctoral student on leave from the University of Iowa, spent the 1950s in Paris translating most of Sade\u2019s major works into English for the Paris-based Olympia Press<\/a> (which also published Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s \u201cLolita\u201d in 1955). While Sade\u2019s French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, was prosecuted in 1956 after putting his name to an edition of Sade\u2019s major works, Olympia was publishing the same works in far greater numbers with relative impunity. As far as the French government was concerned, obscenity was fine, as long as it wasn\u2019t in French. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in New York, Grove Press tested the American market in 1953 with a volume that combined an essay by Simone de Beauvoir with a (very) careful selection of passages from Sade. Any words or phrases that might be deemed objectionable were left in French. As far as the Grove Press lawyer was concerned, obscenity was fine, as long as it wasn\u2019t in English.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Barney Rosset.<\/span>
\n Tin House<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Olympia\u2019s Sade editions were evading customs officials and traveling the world, Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, decided to challenge the very obscenity laws that were preventing their entry into the United States. <\/p>\n

Over the course of a few years, he published three novels \u2013 \u201cLady Chatterley\u2019s Lover\u201d (1959), Henry Miller\u2019s \u201cTropic of Cancer\u201d (1961) and William Burroughs\u2019 \u201cNaked Lunch\u201d (1962) \u2013 that triggered a flurry of court battles and ultimately ended censorship of the printed word in America. As Charles Rembar, one of the Grove Press lawyers, would later say<\/a>, the publisher\u2019s long legal campaign ultimately heralded \u201cthe end of obscenity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosset\u2019s battles against the censors transformed the cultural landscape. According to cultural historian Loren Glass<\/a>, a generation of Americans now had access to a \u201ccommon culture of revolutionary reading\u201d \u2013 an eclectic mix of European modernist and avant-garde writing as well as previously exiled American works by authors such as Miller and Burroughs. Catering to booming enrollment in American universities, Grove Press paperbacks became the symbol \u2013 and the syllabus \u2013 of 1960s counterculture. <\/p>\n

The way was now paved for Sade. Wainhouse\u2019s Olympia Press translations were revised with Grove editor Richard Seaver and published in three volumes from 1965 to 1968. Though Rosset and Seaver were expecting a battle, to their apparent disappointment it never materialized. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be convenient, I agree, for there to be a little scandal, that is a little censorship,\u201d Seaver admitted wistfully in a letter to Wainhouse in 1965.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, sales were spectacular: Grove\u2019s paperback edition of the first volume sold 240,000 copies in the space of a year. <\/p>\n

The \u2018porn wars\u2019 explode<\/h2>\n

But trouble \u2013 for Grove Press and for Sade \u2013 would eventually come from an unexpected source. <\/p>\n

On April 13, 1970, former Grove employee Robin Morgan occupied the press\u2019 offices with eight other protesters. Aside from demanding union recognition, Morgan railed against<\/a> the fortune Rosset had made \u201coff the basic theme of humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing women through sado-masochistic literature.\u201d <\/p>\n

This was the first sign of the prominent role Sade would play in the \u201cporn wars<\/a>\u201d of the 1970s and 1980s. Morgan, whose pronouncement \u201cPornography is the theory, and rape the practice\u201d became the slogan of anti-pornography campaigners, wasn\u2019t alone in seeing Sade as an emblematic figure of contemporary misogyny. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin devoted a chapter of her \u201cPornography: Men Possessing Women\u201d (1981) to Sade, whom she labeled<\/a> \u201cthe world\u2019s most foremost pornographer.\u201d Dworkin railed against the translators of \u201cSade\u2019s thousands of pages of butchery\u201d and was outraged that his work should now be \u201cin accessible mass-market editions in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone agreed with this assessment of Sade. The English writer Angela Carter acknowledged Sade\u2019s misogyny but claimed<\/a> he \u201cput pornography in the service of women\u201d by representing women as \u201cbeings of power.\u201d In America, when \u201cbad girl\u201d feminists such as Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia defended pornography, they were derided as \u201cSade\u2019s new Juliettes\u201d by Morgan. <\/p>\n

Sade in the classroom?<\/h2>\n

The controversies over Sade were as much about literature as they were pornography. Many started to question Sade\u2019s place in the canon \u2013 and on university campuses. <\/p>\n

Writing in 1990, cultural critic Camille Paglia hailed Sade<\/a> as \u201ca great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities.\u201d A few years later, however, literary critic Roger Shattuck noted with horror<\/a> that \u201cSade is now being taught in a number of colleges and universities.\u201d For humanists like Shattuck, Sade simply does not belong in the classroom alongside Dickens and Tolstoy.<\/p>\n

Though he stops just short of answering the question of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir \u2013 \u201cMust we burn Sade?\u201d<\/a> \u2013 in the affirmative, the thought of Sade\u2019s fiction becoming Literature is, to Shattuck<\/a>, beyond the pale:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cShall we receive among our literary classics the works of an author who desecrates and inverts every principle of human justice and decency developed over four hundred years of civilized life?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have been very fortunate to be able to teach Sade freely at my institution. Sade, however, remains unteachable on several university campuses in the United Kingdom and the United States. And he\u2019s rarely taught in France. <\/p>\n

If ever there was a time for placing misogyny and sexism under the microscope, however, surely it\u2019s now. In my experience, there is nothing quite like Sade for converting undecided students to feminism. <\/p>\n

Reading a novel like \u201cThe 120 Days of Sodom\u201d is not \u2013 and should not be \u2013 easy. Most readers are likely to find it deeply upsetting. But this is a work that needs to taken seriously: For all its imagined horrors, there are few that have not been perpetrated in recent history.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Will McMorran<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in French & Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will McMorran, Queen Mary University of London Over the past year, politicians on the right have railed against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Perhaps it\u2019s fitting, then, that as 2016 draws to a close, arguably the most obscene and offensive work of fiction ever written \u2013 a work that claims to \u201csay everything\u201d \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":8536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[1741,1743,1740,1747,1744,1746,1742,1745],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8537,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535\/revisions\/8537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}