外国文学经典系列丛书之KAKOTOPIA_ THE POLITICS OF SADE.pdfVIP

KAKOTOPIA: THE POLITICS OF SADE The 120 Days of Sodom, with two introductions: by Simone de Beauvior and Pierre Klossovski. Translated by Austryn Wain- house and Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1966. Philosophy in the Bedroom, translated by Richard Seaver and Aus- tryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Justine ou les infortunes de la vertu. Paris, Les Editions du Point du jour, 1946. Sade, by Gilbert L膿ly, Paris, Gallimard, Collection "Idees," 1967. et us try to read for once the works of the Marquis de Sade L, without regard to the prurient, obscene, or pornographic (whichever way we wish to call it) passages, and we find that he describes a country where the greatest political excesses are com- mitted by nobility, petty nobility, clergy high and low, and gener- ally the privileged or favored classes. The reader becomes puzzled: his general culture, even if it is biased as a result of reading stereo- typed textbooks about royal despotism and feudal abuses, has painted for him a brilliant civilization in the France of the eigh- teenth century (second half), of courtly splendor and intellectual daring. More than that, he had assumed as he acquired some text- book-plus sophistication that this brilliance was not quite, like in pharaonic Egypt, let us say, procured at the expense of the suf- fering of pyramid-building masses, but that it had, as its back- ground, a reasonable prosperity of all classes, except the sporadic - victims of poor communication among provinces and the improvi dence for sudden catastrophies. True, Arthur Young, observant traveler through France for several years before the Revolution, noted that there were no smooth gradations between simple well- being and comfort, then again between comfort and wealth, this statement indicates only the absence of social mobility, not of