Inversely, his books take hold of us as soon as we become aware that for all their repetitiousness, their platitudes and clumsiness, he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, a tendency to be incommunicable. Sade’s aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. Just what is his place, however? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer, can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the “divine marquis” only betrays him. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade’s enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on “The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century,” or even on “The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century,” without once coming upon his name. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned-the ten volumes of Les Journées de Florbelle at the instigation of his own son-his books banned.
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