Okay, I read “The 120 Days Of Sodom” because it's on the list, but I can't imagine why it's there. Now you know what you're in for if you decide to read this whole review.
The plot, such as it is, is pretty well known. Four middle-aged men – a duke, his brother (a bishop), a judge and a financier – get together for about four months in an isolated castle. With them they bring eight boys and eight girls aged between 12 and 15 years or so (all of whom have been kidnapped from their homes), four experienced prostitutes in their 40s, a number of young men whom they refer to as “f*ckers” (which tells you all you need to know), and (except for the bishop of course) their wives, each of whom is the daughter of one of the other “friends”. Each day, they gather in one of the castle's rooms and listen to one of the older prostitutes tell stories about the men they've serviced. Over time, the stories get increasingly savage, and periodically one or another of them gets so turned on that he takes his wife and/or some of the boys and/or girls into another room. The noises that come out of those rooms leave very little doubt what the “friend” is getting up to. Between these sessions, during meals for example, they have some semi-philosophical discussions about the pleasures they experience by being blasphemous, insatiable, and cruel to almost everyone within reach.
Now, I have no objection to erotic or even pornographic literature, but with all due respect I found this volume pretty boring. This was not at all what I expected. I mean, come on – the Marquis de Sade, boring? Vicious, decadent, even disgusting, but boring?
Yep. Although the tales and activities get increasingly violent, the actions remain pretty much the same from start to finish. Turns out there's only a certain number of things you can do to achieve orgasm, even if there's another person present. If you're a libertine, as these four “friends” are, the number of possible activities diminishes very quickly. This may be why those activities get progressively crueler. If all you're interested in is achieving orgasm, it's going to take more and more extreme stimuli to get the desired effect. So you can probably imagine what happens to the people that the “friends” make use of.
I wouldn't call that a spoiler, by the way. What did you expect?
In any case, the “120 Days” isn't exactly a story, either. Technically, in a story, the protagonist (main character, for lack of a better definition) changes in some way. Here, there's no definite protagonist, and no one changes. In fairness, that seems to have been one of Sade's main points. The four “friends” believe, and at various points argue, that no system of morality can or should have any impact on one's pleasure or how one obtains it. In nature, they point out, animals obtain what they need or want with no judgment or moral system to stop them, so those things should not prevent humans, specifically the four of them, from doing as they please. And of course, this all the more true because the four of them are so rich.
Which, I imagine, is how Sade got his reputation as such a representative of the out-of-touch nobleman that we think of him as. Wikipedia tells us that today, he is known to have beaten a housemaid and indulged in an orgy with several prostitutes, and that's the extent of his crimes. Which is not nothing, but it's hardly what his reputation, not to mention the fact that the word “sadism” is derived from his name, would lead us to expect.
As for the “120 Days”, Sade wrote it while imprisoned in the Bastille before the French Revolution. This is hardly surprising; Sade spent about 32 of his 74 years in prison. More surprising is how the work came to be found and published. He drafted it, rolled up his manuscript in a metal container, hid it before he had time to finish his first draft, and was then moved from the Bastille to another prison without the chance to take the manuscript with him. When the French Revolution began, the revolutionaries took over the Bastille (which is why French Independence Day is called “Bastille Day”), at which point someone found the manuscript and took it away. It remained with his family until 1904, 110 years after Sade lost it, when it was finally published.
As far as I can tell, the only reason to read this thing is out of curiosity, to find out just how far Sade was willing to go. Other than that – well, in 1975, the Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini directed a version of it titled “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom”, set in Italy just at the close of World War II. I saw it because, of course, it appears on the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”, after which I could say to myself, “Now I've seen this movie and I don't have to see it again.”
I can now say the same thing about this book; I have read “The 120 Days Of Sodom” and I don't have to read it anymore.
Benshlomo says, Some works are worth experiencing once.
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