SOURCE: "Inside the Sadean Fortress: Les 120 journées de Sodome," in Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 263-326.

[DeJean has published several books on French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on literature by and about women. In the following excerpt, she considers the relationship of The 120 Days of Sodom to the Classical literary tradition.]

The invitation to a literary feast that Sade has his narrator extend to the reader [in the introduction to The 120 Days of Sodom] is representative of just that strain in Sade's work to which recent critics have been most sensitive, Sade's rejection of convention and his invitation to literary liberation. Furthermore, the portrait of Sade as author implicit in these lines also conforms to the image that lies behind recent criticism of his works: Sade as author is the literary equivalent of Sade the liberator of the Bastille. Part of the recent fascination with Sade results from critical admiration for an author so confident of his philosophical and textual superiority that he can invite his reader—just as he invited the crowds that gathered outside the Bastille within earshot of his prison cell—to join him in tearing down the fortress, even when the fortress is his own construction rather than a prison symbolic of the system of authority that had deprived him of his freedom for so many years.

The current vision of Sade has its origin in part in the Surrealist fascination with this auteur maudit. One document that testifies eloquently to the power of that fascination, Man Ray's "Portrait imaginaire du marquis de Sade" (1938), also betrays the limits of the legend of Sade the liberating author. In the Man Ray portrait, the figure of Sade (shown from the shoulders up) dominates the image. The marquis is looking at a fortress in the background. The fortress is under siege; clearly the Bastille is being stormed. Yet the portrait represents far more than the triumph of a revolutionary spirit over the forces of oppression. Man Ray's most striking insight is his representation of the figure of Sade as a construction of stones, of the same stones that compose both the fortress under siege and its protective outworks: the divine marquis is himself a fortress. Man Ray's portrait illustrates above all Sade's paradoxical position, simultaneously inside and outside the fortress. Sade is made of the same material as the Ancien Régime.

The truth of Man Ray's vision is also borne out by Sade's oeuvre. The novels of the Ancien Regime's illustrious prisoner are too often viewed as a marginal manifestation of the archetypal Enlightenment drive. They are said to announce our modernity even as they bring down the fortress of Classical literature by throwing light on the dark areas repressed by earlier novelists. While this view is faithful to Sade's self portrait as author—witness the address of the 120 to the reader—it can account neither for Sade's views of his literary predecessors, including his (alleged) jealousy of Laclos, nor for the shape he chose for at least certain of his fictions, notably the (in)famous 120. Sade is an essentially equivocal author: he speaks simultaneously with two voices, a voice of liberation and a voice of control. The effect of this second voice on his fiction will be my principal subject here. I will take up Man Ray's suggestion that Sade was made of the same building blocks as the Ancien Regime. From this perspective, it becomes clear that Sade intended his fiction to be viewed not as a rupture with previous literary tradition but as its culminating point. Sade, the great rebel outcast, was trying not to destroy the great tradition of the French novel, but to continue it. The marquis foresaw what has become the prevailing view of the history of the early French novel, with Lafayette's La Princesse de Clves as that novel's origin, and the Liaisons dangereuses as its culmination.…

"Sade parvient au bout du discours et de la pensee classiques," in Foucault's evaluation. "II regne exactement a leur limite" (Les Mots et les choses). His statement is as intriguingly ambiguous as Man Ray's "portrait imaginaire." On the one hand, it contains in germ the philosophy that motivates the dominant tradition of recent Sade criticism: Sade must be situated "au bout du discours … classique" because he marks a sort of voluntary return of all the truths repressed in this discourse. This would seem to be the meaning of another of Foucault's striking formulations about Sade: "II n'y a pas d'ombre chez Sade" (Histoire de lafolie), a formulation that could serve as an epigraph for many recent readings of the divine marquis. For example, Foucault has been echoed by Roger [in Sade: La Philosophie dans lepressoir, 1976] "Sade ne menage aucun recoin obscur au récit."

But this is to comment on only one aspect of Foucault's intuition. It is not sufficient to say that Sade brought all of Classicism's skeletons out of the closet. The marquis is not only a rebel striving to outdo the Classical model by pointing out its weaknesses. He is at the same time Classicism's heir, built of the same stones as the fortress of the Ancien Regime. It is only logical that the relationship between Sade's fiction and the novelistic models of the French Classical age must be more problematic than is generally allowed. For example, the incipit of the 120 openly proclaims its author's admiration for the Golden Age of French literature—"la fin de ce regne [Louis XIV's], si sublime d'ailleurs." Sade's own works of prose fiction have often been compared to the novelistic masterpiece of the Sun King's reign. Lely suggests [in Vie du marquis de Sade] that La Princesse de Clves may have served as a model for Adélaïde de Brunswick; Béatrice Didier contends [in Sade: une ecriture du desir, 1976] that "on trouve de curieuses analogies entre La Marquise de Ganges et La Princesse de Clves." Such analogies are frequently encountered, and they are "curious" indeed, for the reader never knows which interpretation of Foucault's evaluation may be invoked to explain them.

The 120 provides the best illustration of what might be termed Sade's aggressive eulogy of Classical discourse. For example, its incipit follows the model established for the French novel by Lafayette's masterpiece. The opening of La Princesse de Cleves situates the novel in the last years of a reign. The novel's first business is to introduce the reader to the principal characters of that declining rule and to inform the reader about the structure of its waning power. The 120 repeats this pattern, but the "tone" that governs its repetition is not easily classified. Sade's choice of historical setting for the 120 and his careful mapping out of the actors and the strategies that govern the libertine court within a court cannot be viewed as a parody of the founding text of the Classical French novel. Here, as at every moment when the Sadean text aligns itself most closely with Classical discourse, the point of textual contact is signaled by a sort of narrative bravado that initially seems almost comic. Yet the purpose of the incipit of the 120 does not run counter to that of its predecessor. The beginning of Sade's novel is closer to a positive appraisal of Lafayette's understanding of the workings of power, but an appraisal that, nevertheless, makes clear that the insights it is prepared to offer are keener than those of its precursor.

In Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Barthes reminds us that the burnt-out, frozen landscape of Sade's fiction is not, for all its awesome timelessness, a-historical. Unlike the fairy tale and the science-fiction story, which also unfold in minimalist settings, the Sadean novel does not reject history. "Les aventures sadiennes ne sont pas fabuleuses: elles se passent dans un monde reel, contemporain de la jeunesse de Sade, a savoir la société de Louis XV." For the 120, Sade shifts the setting from Louis XV's reign to the last years of Louis XIV's, only a slightly greater distancing. He revives the model for "historical" fiction established by La Princesse de Cleves by choosing a narrative that unfolds in the not too distant past, but in a past nevertheless just outside the collective memory of the writer's contemporaries. The exceptional precision with which the historical setting is inscribed into the incipit of the 120 is clearly intended to attract the reader's attention.…

In the 120, Sade matches his historical distancing with a form of what might be termed architectural distancing. The result of this process is a fictive architecture that repeats the relationship, already noted in the novel, of dissonant alignment with regard to the structures of French Classicism. Critics have often contrasted the two types of chateaux created to shelter the Sadean passion plays. They note first the gracious and open demeures of eighteenth-century inspiration, such as Mme de Saint-Ange's country home in which the "instituteurs immoraux" of La Philosophie dans ie boudoir devote themselves to the task of Eugénie's education. This is a chateau gracious enough to contain so feminine a space as a "boudoir delicieux," and a chateau so open that, as their pupil Eugénie remarks on several occasions, newcomers are able to enter that boudoir with great ease.

These elegant dwellings stand in sharp contrast to the fortresses surrounded by thick walls in concentric circles, of which Silling is perhaps the "classic" representative. Henaff interprets this second type of chateau as intended to "convoquer d'un coup tous les signes de la forteresse feodale avec ses implications historiques" [in L'Invention du corps libertin, 1978]. He sees the Sadean château fort as emblematic of the feudal system, and contends that the 120 grants a privileged position to the fortress, and therefore to the feudal system it is intended to represent, because of the unlimited powers that system conferred on the nobility, powers the libertines reappropriate behind Silling's walls. Henaff offers no justification for choosing to ignore Sade's own historical setting of his fiction, a setting that marks off far more restricted chronological limits for the 120. Sade situates his novel just after the apex of the French monarchy in a decidedly post-feudal atmosphere in which nobles and financiers conspire to bring down the monarchy in order to create a paradise doomed to self-destruction. The period that serves as the historical setting for the 120 also provides a model for the defensive architecture of its fortress.

Silling is actually the polar opposite of the medieval defensive enterprise. Apparently challenging its enemies to renounce their offensive position at the sight of its collective might, the medieval fortress makes an open display of its protective layers. The libertine fortress is no virile projection surmounting a pinnacle: the descriptions of its systems of protection note no towers jutting up over its walls to complete its domination of the landscape. On the contrary, Silling is camouflaged in the center of a forest, sunken first in a valley and then projecting even deeper "dans le fond des entrailles de la terre." The libertines burrow so deep into the earth for Silling's protection that Didier speaks of "le symbolisme uterin du chateau qui se manifeste par son caractere essentiellement souterrain de creusement infini." The Sadean fortified place erected at Silling has the hidden, devious, even discreet, nature of its defenses in common with Vaubanian fortifications. The Classical French fortress sits close to the earth, has its elaborate trenchwork dug into the ground. Its defenses are therefore so obliquely deceptive that the full panoply of its protective barriers is only visible from above.…

But the Sadean fortified place is more than a realization of Vauban's dream.…

It never occurred to Vauban to include more about the day-to-day existence of those left inside the fortress than the amounts of the various commodities they might consume. Those responsible for the defense of the fortified place are no more than statistics for him. In the 120, Sade's demonstration of the greatness of Vauban's system, the perspective on the siege traditional in military strategy is reversed. The story is told from the point of view of the defenders of the fortress, yet the reader is never asked to look out in the direction of the attacking forces. On the contrary, our vision is directed inside the fortress, and not on account of the possibility of attack from within, but because in the 120 the scope of life inside the fortress is explored as an end in itself. When Sade fills in an area left blank in Vauban's treatises, he sheds light on the paradox shaped in the "Idee sur les romans," his positioning of literary genius at the intersection of natural inspiration and revenge for humiliation.

The opening paragraph of the 120 can be read as a confirmation of Vauban's assessment of the balance of power in France at the end of Louis XIV's reign: the "fin de ce regne" was weakened by too many wars, and these wars were characterized by too blind an indulgence in offensive strategy; the Sun King should have protected his kingdom against internal ravages, from the creeping power of "leeches." Sade situates the novel he composed on the eve of the Revolution at what he views as the limit of Classical French military strategy. The operation of Vauban's theoretically flawless system of defenses is rendered impotent because a monarch has become libertinism's puppet.

Following the model established by Lafayette in La Princesse de Cleves, Sade realigns history in order to make a place in it for his fiction. His rewriting betrays his dream of omnipotence. As his story begins, his characters have already brought France's Golden Age to its knees; in the 120 they will profit from the lessons to be learned from Louis le Grand's weakness in order to make their defenses airtight. The creator of the quatrumvirate implies that his literary production likewise stands at the logical conclusion of Classical aesthetics. The 120 will be the masterwork of the aesthetics of Classicism because it is purified of the weakness inherent in the literary products of the Age of Louis XIV—their authors' refusal to come to grips with the strategy on which they are founded. Sade's novel tells the story of a libertine war: "Comme ce tableau reglait… toutes les operations de la campagne, nous avons cru necessaire d'en donner copie au lecteur." The novel that recounts that story is itself an act of warfare, the ultimate attempt to win the battle of/with Classicism, a last skirmish fought just as the Ancien Regime was breathing its last.

The 120 is the most Classical of Sade's novels. For his libertine utopia, the marquis rejects both the picaresque dispersal he adopts in Justine and Juliette and the epistolary polyphony chosen for Aline et Valcour in favor of an eminently contained and single-minded vision. The product of this repression of novelistic excess is Sade's blueprint for the novel. In the 120, Sade takes his reader inside the Classical fortress and shows him the ultimate manifestation of natural proliferation controlled by systematization. Sade's tabulating strategy is both more excessive and more rigorous than that of either Rousseau or Laclos. He uses his calculating rigor to make explicit a vision that previous literary fortifiers had only demonstrated implicitly: the Classical utopia is a fortress.

The 120 may be the ultimate work of prison literature. It was composed in a cell in the Bastille shortly before the French Revolution (1785). Moreover, it is a fiction confined by the limits of the paper on which it was written, since in order to protect it from his captors Sade wrote it on strips of paper that were rolled up and hidden between the stones of his cell wall. Under the circumstances, it seems almost inconceivable that the dream created by the prisoner is in fact a mirror image of the panopticon in which he created it: the 120 is truly the literary equivalent of the stones between which it was camouflaged. Sade is the first (literary) fortifier to portray life inside the fortress. And when he reverses the perspective on siege warfare, he reveals a mise en abyme. The external state of siege—which remains purely mythical in the 120, since there is never the slightest indication of any plan to attack Silling—contains an internal state of siege, which in turn unfolds around the "heart" of the libertine enterprise, a prison cell.

In Emile and Julie, the mise en abyme mirrors a situation among characters: an infans in machina reveals the true goal of (adult) strategy. In Sade's carceral master text, the reflection in the self-conscious mirror is architectural. A place of confinement and a center of offensive/defensive strategy is built around a miniature reproduction of itself. Silling's fortification within a fortification is a cachot, the torture chamber hidden in the bowels of the fortified place and Silling's true inner sanctum.…

The fortified place within the fortified place is the only true libertine "home": "II etait chez lui." And the home the libertine creates for himself is a prison, a prison designed simultaneously to keep out and to keep in. The cachot in the bowels of Silling lies at the heart of the Classical drive to systematize.

The narrator of the 120 informs his readers that when they have finished taking away all the pieces of his novel "tout aura trouve sa place." He would have the reader believe that the structure of the 120 is neither permanent nor definitive and that the place of Sade's book is elsewhere. It will be "a sa place" when it has been disassembled and its constitutive elements have been reassimilated into other systems. Yet Sade's invitation to a beheading cannot be reconciled with the insistence on strategy, system, and calculation that dominates the 120. Sade is merely echoing the rhetoric of liberation developed by previous defensive novelists as a smokescreen for their own strategic obsessions. In fact the 120 conveys its author's conception of the proper place of fiction and demonstrates that the novel itself—and everything in it—is "a sa place," in its proper place. That place is obviously at the culminating point of the tradition of the Classical French novel, for the admiration Sade voiced for Lafayette and Rousseau in the "Idee sur les romans" was sincere.…

In the 120, Sade develops computation and combination as an alternative to the developmental unfolding and temporal sequence that normally serve to structure the novel. In a parallel move, Sade subverts the traditional elements that constitute a novel's setting by limiting geographical and architectural description to a form of ordered placement. Thus, he creates what might be termed a flattened or metonymic topography for this encyclopedia. In the 120, situation in space means quite simply a particular type of framing, the placement of an activity in a certain place in a certain room—in other words, in its proper place. It is essential to note that Sade does not ask his readers to imagine the spaces of Silling, to give them a three-dimensional status in their minds. Instead, he literalizes the notion of space in the novel. The rooms in the libertine fortress are only architectural drawings, and the only space they occupy is on a page; setting means inscription of an activity in the blank areas of a two-dimensional backdrop.

In Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Barthes stresses the importance of theatricality in Sade's novels. The obsession with the theatrical is of course evident in the 120, but here Sade subjects theatricality to the same code that flattens and distributes spatialization in the novel. Silling's theater is a memory theater, to borrow the term devised in the 1530s by Guilio Camillo to characterize the enterprise that Frances Yates describes so eloquently in The Art of Memory. As Yates reconstructs it, Camillo's Renaissance theater had nothing to do with drama or staging. The term refers to a backdrop on which, faithful to the centuries-old tradition of memory arts, Camillo proposed to inscribe written clues that would enable the viewer (the spectator of the memory theater) to reconstruct subjects for oratory. Camillo's theater can be interpreted as a visualization or a making concrete of all the arts of memory. From the outset, practitioners of the memory arts had instructed their students in the technique of spatially situating the concepts crucial to their discourse. During their orations, they were to imagine themselves in a familiar architectural space and to place their key rhetorical points in the interstices (between the columns, etc.) of that space.

When Camillo actually built such a space for memory, he was attempting to realize the full potential of the art of memory. He was not trying simply to teach a method that could be applied to individual situations. He intended instead to construct a fixed space that would house a system of actual written clues or stimuli so complete that it would permit any orator who had mastered it to stand in his theater and not only make any speech he wished but make it perfectly. As Yates points out, Camillo's contemporaries considered the potentialities of his theater so awesome that they made ever greater claims for it. For example, a visitor to Padua wrote Erasmus in 1532 that the spectator admitted to the theater and its secret became instantly the equal of the greatest master of oratory, Cicero, able to discourse on any subject as fluently as he.

Other arts of memory—that of Raymond Lull for example—are more scientifically abstract, more mathematical than Camillo's theatrical theory. If I choose to compare his memory art to Sade's encyclopedic monument to libertine passion, it is because of the extraordinary reputation Camillo enjoyed in his day for allegedly having brought a system to absolute perfection, for having attained status as a systematizer comparable to that enjoyed by Vauban. Indeed, the parallels between Camillo's career and Vauban's are striking. According to Yates, Camillo's contemporaries, like Vauban's, considered him "a divine man of whom divine things are expected" (p. 132). Moreover, in both cases these expectations were sustained despite the fact that few of their contemporaries were ever able to judge their work firsthand. Camillo displayed a wooden model of his theater—roughly the equivalent of the scale models of Vauban's fortifications—to a chosen few in Venice and in Paris, but he, like Vauban, was never to write any more than fragments of the great book that his supporters believed would preserve his secret for posterity. However, Camillo, also like Vauban, never intended to share his art (and therefore his "omnipotence") with the general public. He had planned to reveal his secret to only one man, also a king of France (in his case François I). Finally, Camillo, like Vauban, attained a type of mythic status, since his fame continued to grow after his death—in Yates's analysis, "in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fragmentary nature of his achievement." This, then, is the position reserved for those who can control the union of system and secret language, who are able, in Sade's terms, to uncover the natural code of spontaneous signals. And this is the type of legendary status Sade had in mind for his own memory theater, Les 120 Journées de Sodome.

The points of comparison between Camillo's theater of memory and Sade's encyclopedic monument to libertine passion are numerous. Both are totalizing systems—like the reputed supreme master of the memory art, Sade sought to create a vehicle capable of "tout dire," "tout analyser." In the 120, Sade constructed the literary equivalent of Camillo's legendary theater: in the interspaces of Silling's two-dimensional combinatory architecture, he was able to arrange in order the ultimate discourse on libertine life. Sadean architecture is flattened and geometrical because its sole function is to aid computation in the creation of an all-inclusive, flawless system, a system that, once perfected, will enable its practitioner to build a theater of memory in any space (even in a prison cell in the Bastille) and in that theater to re-create the perfect libertine discourse—without recourse to the treacherous brouillons to which Sade so frequently alludes.

One of the spaces inside Silling's concentric circles is described in a particularly detailed manner, the "champ de bataille des combats projetes," that is, "un cabinet d'assemblee, destine aux narrations des historiennes." This attention is fully justified. In the 120 the story of sexual deviations comes to dominate the enactment of these "passions," so the room in which the verbal accounts take place becomes the real theater of war. The discussion of the room's topology is prolonged by a description of the participants' disposition around the half-circle in which the encyclopedia is created: the historienne on call "se trouvait alors placee comme est l'acteur sur un theatre, et les auditeurs, places dans les niches, se trouvaient l'etre comme on l'est a l'amphitheitre."

Sade uses the storytelling situation familiar from all the collections of nouvelles nouvelles (revived earlier in the eighteenth century by, for example, Marivaux in La Voiture embourbee) to give the 120 the "Classical" narrative distance and passivity Rousseau and Laclos found in the epistolary form. We do not witness most of the action directly; instead we see it thirdhand, as the libertines themselves are already listeners, voyeuristically imagining the "horrors" of the action on the basis of the storytelling by the conteuses. There is no action in most of the 120, only a twice told, doubly controlled tale of an accounting for past events. Sade's (memory) theater, like Camillo's (and like French Classical theater), is a theater of words rather than events. Combatants in the novel's battle for memory are required either to tell or to listen to a story, with the members of the quatrumvirate, the novel's heroes and the masters of Silling's defenses, choosing the passive role of listeners and spectators. The four historiennes are substitute figures for Sade, who is telling his story, all their stories, on a rolled-up manuscript, "cette grande bande," inside a somewhat smaller and more solitary half-circle than that dominated by his female avatars in Silling—his prison cell in the Bastille. Even the time slots they reserve for storytelling almost coincide. The conteuses tell their tales of passion every day from six until ten o'clock in the evening; we know from Sade's annotations that he completed the rouleau manuscrit by writing from seven until ten o'clock each evening (on only thirty-four consecutive days).

Just as the 120 takes us back to a primitive union between storytelling and calculation, so it reveals an original and equally fundamental complicity on memory's part, a complicity that is evident in the story of the invention of memory arts, as Yates reconstructs it from various accounts. Simonides of Ceos, credited from antiquity with the invention of a system of memory aids, is said to have come upon this system in a manner relevant to Sade's tale of a four-month-long grande bouffe that was always already poised on the brink of disaster. The father of the Classical art of memory was a poet. At a banquet in Thessaly, Simonides recited a lyric poem that praised both his host, a nobleman named Scopas, and the twin gods, Castor and Pollux. Afterwards, his host refused to honor the contract that was to govern the poet's performance. He paid Simonides only half the price they had agreed upon for his poem, informing him that he could turn to the twin gods to settle the rest of their account. Shortly thereafter, a messenger informed the poet that two men wished to speak to him outside. Simonides followed the messenger from the banquet hall and during his absence the roof fell in, crushing his host and all his guests to death. Their bodies were maimed beyond recognition, and it was only because Simonides remembered exactly where each had been seated at the banquet table that the relatives were able to identify the bodies. Thus, the means chosen by Castor and Pollux to pay for their share of the panegyric gave Simonides the basis for the art of memory.

The story of the bard's mastery of the mnemonic art has much in common with the tale in the 120. In both cases, memory (defined as the ability to list in order, to recount, to account for) is born of violence. The poet's task is to reconstruct the final banquet before the holocaust. The 120 is situated at the end of Louis XIV's reign, characterized by Sade as a period of financial and physical "exhaustion," and just before what he sees as the regent's attempt to "faire rendre gorge a cette multitude de [sangsues]," from among whom he chooses the heroes of his novel. In both cases, memory is used to give account of a scene of violence, to provide a listing of bodies in pieces. In both cases, the poet adds up the maimed and those crushed beyond recognition, those who, in a sense, have no identity other than their place on the tally sheet. As one of his concluding gestures, the narrator of the 120 offers his reader a series of "recapitulative" tables that neatly provide the calculation of those "massacres avant le premier mars dans les premieres orgies," as well as the "sujets … immoles … depuis le premier mars."

Furthermore, in both these tales of conquest by memory, the poet is a survivor, not an infrequent phenomenon in "commemorative" literature—witness the examples of the bard spared from the Odyssey's final massacre and of "seigneur Gilles" who survives the slaughter at Roncevaux to tell Roland's tale. What is noteworthy about the survivors of the banquet of memory is that they are not innocent of responsibility for the bloody tales they live to tell. In these cases, memory is also an accounting in the sense of a settling of a score. Although those who recount Simonides' experience, from Cicero to Martianus to Yates, fail to comment on this aspect of his activity, the story of the invention of the memory art demonstrates that the violence that provides the poet's inspiration is in fact the poet's own act of revenge. When Castor and Pollux destroy both his patron and his public, they are acting as a projection of Simonides' desires.

Sade's encyclopedic novel is also an immense pedagogical treatise, his version of a "traite d'6ducation naturelle." In all Sade's extended fictions, the libertines share an interest in pedagogy and the cast of characters frequently contains an "instituteur." However, in the 120 pedagogy is far more than an interest: it is the novel's central concern. The novel's didactic passion is reflected in its pedagogical subtitle, "L'Ecole du libertinage." "II s'agit essentiellement d'une société educative," in Barthes's formulation, "ou plus exactement d'une societ&ecole (et meme d'une soci& te internat)." Thus all the controls the narrator and the historiennes exercise over their stories are justified as essential to the advancement of pedagogical concerns.

The narrator alleges that he includes so many tables of calculation just to maintain the reader's interest. For example, he explains the purpose of the "Tableau des projects du reste du voyage": "II nous a semble que, sachant apres l'avoir lu la destination des sujets, il prendrait plus d'interet aux sujets dans le reste des operations." According to his theory, the perfectly informed reader, the reader who has all the information about the characters, their environment, and their actions clearly laid out for him, the reader who therefore feels totally in control of the story he is reading, this reader is not likely to put that story down before he has learned all there is to learn from it. To make his point perfectly clear, the narrator even includes at the end of this "tableau" a resume of its contents, a listing of the listings in the event that the length and complexity of the original entry had created any confusion in the reader's mind.

Nor is the pedagogical combination of repetition and recapitulation limited to this occurrence. The narrator includes resumes of all his most important resumes. "[C]et arrangement, qu'il est a propos de recapituler pour la facilite du lecteur," so he describes his strategy to keep his reader with him through the complexities of the libertines' marital arrangements. Perhaps the most remarkable occurrence of this technique of doubling involves the presentation of the novel's cast of characters. Initially, the characters are described at some length and in an exceptionally detailed and systematic manner. After this first overview of the actors in the 120's drama, the reader finds himself at least as well-equipped to identify the principal characters as he would be after reading the first sixty pages of any other novel. He cannot but be slightly puzzled to encounter at this point a repetition in shortened form of the basic information about the cast of characters labeled "Personnages du roman de l'Ecole du libertinage." "A mesure que l'on recontrera un nom qui embarrassera dans les recits, on pourra recourir a cette table et, plus haut, aux portraits 6tendus, si cette legere esquisse ne suffit pas a rappeler ce qui aura ete dit." Ever the pedagogue, the narrator of the 120 is careful to point out that should any reader find himself in a difficult situation and unable to remember one of the characters, he has only to turn back to the handy resumés.

Never has the task of reading been made so effortless. The narrator's technique is pedagogically sound, and through the combined effects of his tables and the system of cataloguing he employs, it is seemingly impossible for his reader to miss anything or to be even momentarily lost or confused. The dominant narrative ideology of Sadean fiction thus appears to be the antithesis of the code governing any work that could be termed modernist; the narrator of the 120 desires above all to make his tale as clear and as undemanding as possible. It is inevitable that the reader should wonder why Sade created a narrator so concerned with sharing control of his narrative with his reader and why Sade and his narrator are so interested in the question of the reader's sense of security.

Only once do the narrator's comments on the repetitions he so obviously relishes hint at an explanation for his concern. He contends that his pedagogical simplifications of his text are necessary to ensure the reader's jouissance. Just before he launches into the proclamation of the "code de lois" that governs life at Silling, the narrator pauses for an apostrophe to "notre lecteur," "qui, d'apres l'exacte description que nous lui avons faite du tout, n'aura plus maintenant qu'a suivre legerement et voluptueusement le recit, sans que rien trouble son intelligence ou vienne embarrasser sa memoire." The Sadean narrator's version of the texte de jouissance is a narrative so well controlled that its reader will never find it necessary to make the slightest effort to recollect its details or to ponder its complexities. The narrator explains his attention to order and completeness as essential for the reader's liberation, as if the slightest movement in the direction of active participation in the "making" of the text would be fatal to the proper appreciation of it.

However, an obvious result of the form of reader passivity the narrator prescribes is a reluctance on the part of the reader to give up that passive stance in order to form an interpretation of the work. The insistence in the 120 on catalogues and computations is intended to "liberate" the reader from his usual hermeneutic concerns to the extent that he will eventually relinquish an essential part of the imaginative space generally permitted him by fiction. The 120's author/narrator refuses to allow the reader to forget or to become confused. In the process, he also attempts to deny him any interpretive freedom, the right to step out of the line the narrator traces for his reading. Under the guise of making life easier for his reader, the 120's authorial dictator moves to take over the reader's space.

"Au langage de la maitrise, lie a celui de la propriété, de l'accaparement," Roger contends, "s'oppose directement le flot continu et depersonnalise du texte sadien, oiu la multitude des locateurs interchangeables font du langage, non le bien de quelques-uns, mais la production de tous." What Roger calls "le flot continu et depersonnalise du texte sadien" is one of the most striking features of the 120; it is this "neutralization" of language that explains the reader's difficulty in remembering and the narrator's compulsion to repeat. But it is impossible to accept Roger's assessment of this language as unpoliced, communally shared, and liberated from the "commander/obeir" dialectic that stymied the progress of the tutor's student in Emile.

Instead of exhilaration, the depersonalized flow of Sadean language only produces a numbing effect on the reader being harangued by it. The linguistic leveling process operative in the 120 takes the novel beyond pedagogy to didacticism, and the drive to impose at any cost the ideology serviced by this neutered voice destroys such potentially deviant forces as individualized psychology. The nondifferentiated Sadean language is neither liberated nor liberating: "le flot continu et depersonnalise" is indicative of the uncontested reign of the master teacher's language. The Sadean discourse can in no way be considered an attempt to share the speaker's traditional power with his audience, to become truly dialogic. The fact that all those in power sound alike and speak with the same language restrains the reader's urge to identification or projection. The dominant discourse in the 120 is a monolithic force that seeks to hold Sade's reader in check, to turn him into the victim of the master who has thought of everything.

Granted, readerly freedom is an elusive affair at best. No author, not even the author of the most extreme modernist texts, creates a text supple enough to allow the reader absolute interpretive freedom and accords his reader license to make of his work what he will. Yet this is just what the Sadean narrator-authorial projection claims to do—"C'est a toi a le prendre et a laisser le reste"; "choisis et laisse le reste." On the basis of these pronouncements, the 120's potential reader would imagine that he was about to embark on an experience with fiction in which he would be encouraged to be as active and creative a reader as possible. The image the 120 seeks to project of itself is of a type of narrative that corresponds to Benjamin's definition of storytelling [in Illuminations, 1968], that is, a fiction that does not attempt to lead the reader through its narration from beginning to end. "It is half the art of story-telling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it," Benjamin affirms. "It is left up to [the reader] to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." For Benjamin, the appeal of storytelling lies in the space it leaves the reader to flesh out the narrative with his interpretive vision. He views such fiction as analogous to the city for Baudelaire's fldneur, as constructs open to their observer's personal contribution.

The fiction Sade shapes in the 120 is anything but a flexible construct, a set of building blocks put out for the reader to rearrange and reshape into a personal interpretation of the 120's story. The narrator holds out to the reader the freedom to use any of the encyclopedic building blocks he may find useful to construct his own encyclopedia. He then makes it clear that as he has arranged them, these blocks form a complete and perfectly ordered entity. Like the master's language, the 120's numbered passions add up to a monolithic structure, a narrative ruled by a pedagogical order so authoritarian that only a foolhardy participant at the 120's banquet could imagine that its narrator/author meant his invitation to deconstruct his edifice to be take literally. The 120 is powerfully and indelibly marked by its author's struggle to bring it to structural perfection: Sade provides a fitting mise en abyme of his authorial activity in the image of his libertines erecting barriers around themselves so flawless that "il ne devenait meme plus possible de reconnaitre oii avaient ete les portes."

In Les Liaisons dangereuses, Merteuil, a self-proclaimed "new Delilah," betrays the man she typecasts as a "modern-day Samson," Valmont. She cannot fail to know the end of the Biblical story she adopts as her "emblem," that is, that Samson will take revenge for his victimization by pulling the house down, crushing himself to death along with all the observers of his humiliation (the new Delilah, like her Biblical namesake, escapes, but she is obliged to flee the world of action—and of literature). Simonides also displaces his revenge by confiding it to the pugilistic twin gods (literally his enemy twins?). He, like Merteuil and unlike Samson, is not caught when the roof caves in, for the ultimate revenge of the poet with mnemonic gifts is to live to tell the tale of his victimization and his subsequent settling of accounts. Sade's narrator is cleverer still. His victimization has already taken place when his performance begins. He is, according to the logic of the "Idée sur les romans," in the novelist's proper place, "a la juste distance oii il faut qu'il soit pour etudier les hommes." From this distance, he is able to control not only the outcome of the literary banquet, but its disposition as well. He invites the guests and shows them to their places at the table in the storytelling theater. He then proceeds to regale them with a tale of mastery that, as far as narrator and author are concerned, is actually a tale that demonstrates memory's power of control—six hundred passions (or very nearly so) all tidily put in their places, rolled up tightly, and tucked away between the stones, the stones destined to come tumbling down only a few days after the new Camillo is taken away.

Sade describes the 120 to his reader as "I'histoire d'un magnifique repas oii six cents plats divers s'offrent a ton appetit." The reader may see Sade's novel as an invitation to a pleasure party; he may view its violence as aesthetically pleasing; but these ways of writing violence out of the Sadean text underestimate its goal. Memory is murderous. All those who are guests at the banquet at which the poet of memory performs have a sword of Damocies suspended over their heads, for the writer with mnemonic gifts also possesses death dealing powers.