The Language of War and Peace

At last, my strength has failed me. For two years, almost exactly, I have been trying not to return to War and Peace. This book has everything, even now, especially now, when Russia is at war again. The good and the bad, the power and the glory, the vanity of all that, and the despair and darkness of senseless destruction. Pretty much every book I have read since the full-scale invasion began has been chosen with the war on my mind, whether to avoid thinking about it or to engage obliquely with it. Yet it is also the one subject that I try to avoid talking about directly on this blog, even though I feel like I can write seriously about it, and perhaps have a moral responsibility to do so. With War and Peace, though, I actually was not trying to understand my war. I was trying to understand how Tolstoy wrote his war.

Today’s post comes from only the first of the four volumes. I have already been through the whole epic once, but that was a few years ago. Back then, I was so overwhelmed I could not write about it. Yet it is part of Tolstoy’s magic, which I will try to describe here, that I still remember vividly certain moments, certain fates, when entire books fade from the memory as if they were never there at all.

Here I want to describe some of the technical features of War and Peace that struck me, because I or we might learn something from them. The translation is Anthony Briggs’ – I have the Russian at home, but alas I do not quite have the time for it at the moment. I propose to take a few sentences and describe briefly how they seem to work.

A practical post, perhaps, but one I hope will hold interest for people beyond my fellow Tolstoy fanatics.

“Eh bien, mon prince”

Where Anna Karenina is memorable for its opening lines, War and Peace just throws us in there with this. Isaac Babel apocryphally said that if the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Unfortunately, Tolstoy only had time to do a small fraction of the world from 1805 to 1813, but such a beginning makes us think he had already been writing his story for years and with some arbitrariness chosen now to let us in. The opening is memorable by taking us immediately into history more than into the dynamics of characters. The first paragraph, reminding us of Napoleon’s conquests in Italy, gives us a sense that world politics is as much the book’s theme as the ‘little people’ novels normally only bother with. Part of the tensions in the novel, we sense at once, will come from men before maps, just as much as the plain passions of the human spirit.

It’s also notable, though Briggs chooses to translate it here, that the novel begins in French. That too – being so inconsiderate to one’s readers – takes a certain bravery as a writer. (My girlfriend still complains at every foreign word that creeps into my posts). But the novel dramatizes, amongst so much else, the partial rejection of French as the primary medium of communication for the Russian upper classes. As the novel goes on, French is used less and less. We find something similar today, in the millions of Ukrainians whose primary language was once Russian, but who now refuse to speak it at all. I will have to steal Tolstoy’s idea on that one.

“…this aunt, who was unknown, uninteresting and unneeded by anyone.”

One distinguishing feature of Tolstoy’s writing, I realise, is its harshness. He speaks clearly in his narration of the unpleasant realities that we might try to gloss over. An uninteresting aunt at a party is just that – and people do not want to talk to her. We neither hide her from view nor pretend she is anything but an obstacle to enjoying the evening. In general, a certain cynicism is an emotion he allows his characters. One of the officers, Zherkov, is all about taking advantage of the war for his own advancement. Boris, one of the younger characters, is determined to use all the networking skills he and his mother have to raise himself up out of relative poverty, but in his thoughts, we see quite unpleasant envy towards Nikolai Rostov, his richer friend.

The things a writer allows herself to say about the world and the people in it are the clearest path we have to her worldview. By including too much cynicism, we end up with a sense of the world’s misery. On the other hand, the easiest way to put forward an optimistic view of things is simply to give the characters the right only to positive emotions. Ultimately, both approaches can seem overwrought and fake. Writers are often scared of us disliking their characters, over whom they labour and love, so they do not allow them the nastiness that makes them real. But people really are cynical at times, not as monsters but merely as human beings, and by including both cynicism and heroism of spirit, unevenly distributed though it be, Tolstoy creates a world that seems more real for the fullness of human nature he puts in it.  

“His smile was not like theirs – theirs were not real smiles”

I mean this is just great. As with the cynicism problem above, what we have here is directness. Society’s falseness is typically revealed in novels gradually and tragically, as with the character of Innstetten in Effi Briest. In such cases, writers adhere faithfully to the principle of “show, not tell”. But just as showing is important, so too is telling as a supplement. Telling here functions to make even more impactful what is shown, because language offers opportunities both in showing and in telling, which are not shared between them. Specifically, showing sentences soften up the victim to create the opening through which the knock-out punch of a perfect telling sentence can come. Without that softening up, the telling sentence can be easily deflected or blocked. One of Tolstoy’s many gifts is knowing when to tell, and when to show, and not shying away from one or the other.

“Suddenly there was a great rattling sound on the bridge, like a scattering of nuts”

For the greatest writer in the entire universe, Tolstoy does not do much of that image-making we typically associate with great writers. He mainly describes how things are. He is good at the telling detail, such as what people wear or eat, but really this is just the fruit of the gigantic research he did before writing War and Peace. What happens in the novel is simply the onrush of history. Characters, places, everything changes, but because so much is dialogue or simple description, because there is so much movement, the entire text is extremely engaging. We feel close to people because nothing gets in the way. Writing like Tolstoy is simple, if only you pay enough attention to the world to write it down just as it comes.

Yet on rare occasions, he does do images, and this image of a cannon’s grapeshot is one that you simply have to underline. At another point, blood pours from Prince Andrei’s wound “like liquid from a bottle”. These images are so rare because they are hardly ever needed. It’s not as if any of us have experienced the lives of the Russian high aristocracy around 1805, it is just that we are humans and so are they, so that Tolstoy need only describe them properly and we will find ourselves standing there alongside them. With war, it seems to me, he does find himself using the occasional image, because our experience of the battlefield is less widespread. Here, the images make us see clearer. What writers might want to take away is that in realistic narratives most of the images we try to introduce just get in the way, like frosted glass.

“Then he suddenly felt there was something dangling on his numb left arm that shouldn’t be there.”

Here we have almost the opposite to the comment above. The art, which Tolstoy mastered, is knowing what to say, and what not to. Here we have something imprecise, but precisely because of its imprecision and the knowledge we have of the actual fact of the injury, Nikolai Rostov’s own confusion at his (ultimately minor) wound becomes heightened for us. Gaps in knowledge create tension – Tolstoy does not take us for fools.

“Next day the troops were on the march, and Boris had no opportunity of seeing Bolkonsky or Dolgorukov again before the battle of Austerlitz. For the time being he would stay with the Izmailov regiment.”

The same thing happens here, at the end of a chapter. We know, as the characters do not, what Austerlitz means – a crushing defeat. Multiple chapters end while mentioning it is coming, but the characters meanwhile get on with their lives as if they are on holiday. The contrast is unbearable but brilliant. The one mistake Tolstoy makes is that he does mention the battle will be a defeat before it begins. That makes the ominous shape of the coming battle coalesce into something more prosaic, weakening the tension. You have to have history be familiar to fully enjoy this tension, but Austerlitz is so famous as a battle that Tolstoy cannot be faulted for expecting us to remember it.

“She clomped in”

Ultimately, as with Dickens, we can read Tolstoy to try and work out how to make vivid characters. Whereas Dickens’ characters gain power from his mastery of caricature, Tolstoy’s come from the details that he uses for them, in particular repetitions. Prince Andrei is at several times referred to as “indolent”, so that the word is associated with him in our minds. Now, this is worth giving more attention to. Normally, in creating and introducing characters, we dump the information on the reader all at once. We learn perhaps their history, their personality, their appearance. But I tend to forget this all myself – it’s too much, especially when detached from the world.

Character is shown in Tolstoy’s fiction as in life – one element at a time. Yet we need something solid, more than just a name, to attach the character’s traits to. Telling us too much is like making a clay statue and forgetting to fire it, so that it melts when left out on the mantlepiece. Tolstoy gives us very little, repeated over and over, with the result that we have something solid that we cannot possibly forget about a character. And thus everything that the character does after that is memorable too, because we have something structural to pin it onto, rather than just a mush. Andrei’s wife, the little princess, (already her name is a memorable thing), has a “downy lip”; Andrei himself has his indolence; Pierre has his glasses, Sonya her inner kitty; Berg has his inability to talk about anything but himself, Vera her crap personality.

It’s utterly staggering that I can just reel these things off. With Dickens, the people are so flamboyant in their personalities that we have to remember them. But Tolstoy’s people, real as you or me, are just described effectively from a technical standpoint. He finds their essence, and never lets us forget it.

Which brings us to “clomped”. The way we walk, like all the things we do with our bodies, is memorable. They can form the foundation for the rest of the novel’s description of them. Andrei’s poor, poor sister, “clomps”. That tells us all we need to know about the success she has had in her life, her confidence, and the distance between her hopes and her realities. If she did not clomp, if we did not know she clomped, we would not feel the full pain and sadness of the line when meeting the handsome suitor Anatole Kuragin: “She tried to be nice to him and didn’t know how.”

It’s brutal, but also not nearly as ambiguous as it looks when taken out of context. Marya clomps. She is not failing to be nice because she’s an unkind person – in fact, she’s one of the novel’s moral centres. She’s failing to be nice because her life is simple, sad, and cramped, living with her insane father on their estate. In other words, she can’t be nice because she doesn’t know how. And, of course, she doesn’t know how – she’s the kind of person who clomps.

These walking words are surprisingly useful for a writer, so it’s a shame few of them take full advantage of them. Characters always have to move around, so if we can find a way of describing their movements while also describing the innermost nature of their soul – why not kill two birds with one stone?

“And the three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and the giggling Katya’s, blended into a kind of happy babble like birds twittering.”

What’s interesting here is how we get to the image. Images, even striking ones, are as I noted above, not necessarily an unambiguous good in the writer’s arsenal. They can get in the way of the scene, being a barrier rather than a path. Here we have a rare non-war image, but now read it again. Here we don’t just have the image – we have its creation. The voices blend, and then they become this babble which is like birds twittering. Images are annoying because they slow things down – we need to stop and work out how they relate to the scene that we expect to see in our heads. But here, because we see the scene become the image, via that word “blended” and the “And” at the beginning, the sentence retains its vigour. We catch the image in its becoming, so that we take it in while still running to the next page.

“My, how you’ve changed”

One of the problems a writer has is that in the two to three hundred pages allotted them by the gods of publishing, there’s only so much space we have for the forking paths of destiny. A novel is not a novella, which is lightning-focused on a particular plot and character or small group of them; still, things are short and simple enough that we can “see where things are going”, ultimately taking the tension out of the work after a certain point. Then there’s the problem of worldviews. With only a few characters, it’s hard to avoid the writer’s views of how things are. There is no space to explore alternatives, so that the universe presented often ends up seeming quite simplistic.

Tolstoy does not have this problem in War and Peace. There are so many characters and so many pages that we simply do not know what is going to happen or when. We know the history, but not how it will be told or what role our little people have to play in it. The characters we expect to meet again, like Boris, from early on in the book, may turn out to have relatively minor roles. The general tension is greater not just because of the war, but because people can be replaced on a narrative level. In fact, one major character does die long before the novel’s end, and the epic just keeps going.

If characters were simple and only replaceable, there is a great danger – we might feel like we could choose not to care about them. The opposite is the case. Because there is space, we know that they have time to grow, so we care about even the ones we don’t like at first. This is doubled by the fact that so many of the characters – Nikolai and Natasha, Pierre and even Andrei – are young. With all respect due to my older readers, young people change much more over a given time period than older folks do. By focusing on young people growing up, we get a situation where we are truly invested in people’s fates, not just whether they live or die as in a normal story, but what kind of person they will become. At my own advanced age (26), I recognise this as a great pleasure from coming into regular contact with younger people – I want to see what they will make of their lives.

So, this is another part of the magic of the book – the wave of characters that, thanks to the characterisation skill described feebly by me above, are all distinctive and exciting to read about. They and the history itself form part of the drive of the work.

“The same night, after taking leave of the war minister, Bolkonsky was on his way to rejoin the army, not knowing where to find it and worried about being captured by the French on the way to Krems.”

We end the piece on a simple one: the beginning of volume I, part II, chapter 13. The conclusions we might draw from this blog post are as follows – detail is key, not quantity; showing and telling must work together; images are not as important as we might think; cynicism is a human emotion as much as any other; a sheer quantity of characters, provided they are made using the principles above, is only a gain for tension and engagement.

This final extract does not correspond to all of these lessons, but it shows how narrative works in War and Peace, and that’s important too. What we have is very simple – time, place, person, and purpose. It provides the minimum for us to keep going. With so many stories and personalities, Tolstoy needs to be on top of his transitions or else we will get lost. And he is. And what’s surprising is how simple this is. The sentence above is not technically complicated. We can write our own, taking it as a model, or have that time/place/person/purpose as a kind of checklist on the door of our fridge. But we must write it. If we do, we too can take readers running through our imagined worlds.

What I might be trying to say is that War and Peace is actually quite simple. It may be one of the greatest works in the entire world, but that’s because it is simple, not because it’s complicated. The challenge in writing it, aside from the deep knowledge of human nature that Tolstoy had, is just the research and the planning. If you know exactly who is going to be where, and when, and why, you too can gradually build up something similar from scratch. Tolstoy wrote this novel in his thirties – it’s not actually the work of a great and aged sage so much as of a rich young man who had the money and time he needed to devote himself fully to his research project. That might give us hope that we may yet imitate it, correct lottery numbers forthcoming.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not that simple. Great literature has no formula, neither in general nor even in its specific instances. There is something missing in my attempts so far to write in a Tolstoyan manner, whether it’s the impetus that the sense of history gives or the quality of my characterisations, I don’t know. Somehow, no matter how prosaic it is, I am swept up and along by War and Peace. I put the novel down after finishing the first volume and haven’t read it for a few weeks, but just going over it again for this blog post I am already raring to get back into it. There is some hidden force here, something almost mystical. Is it merely my interest in characters’ destinies? But I know them already – I remember it all. There is no tension of that sort, no illicit love affairs like in Anna Karenina.

But still, like a raging torrent, I cannot read this book and not be carried by it. What is the force? I must return and see if I can find it, or drown happily in the attempt.

If you are still interested in Tolstoy’s language after this piece you can try to track down Henry Gifford’s elusive essay “On Translating Tolstoy”, which delves further into the topic. If you find a copy, please consider sending one my way!

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.

Smart Smut? De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

This is one of the trickier books I’ve had to review here. As it was a gift from my girlfriend, I really have no choice in the matter, however. It is certainly interesting, being the only philosophical porn book I’m ever likely to read, while also advocating philosophies that I have little personal interest in. I have read some Anais Nin, which is as close as the canon seems to get to proper erotic fiction, but de Sade is more complicated than that. Here, he is trying to make philosophical arguments and at the same time describe fairly non-standard sexual practices in as explicit and shocking a way as possible.

The two are linked, of course. Any work of philosophical fiction gains its power from using the fiction part as much as possible to bolster and enhance the philosophical part. Dostoevsky’s and Camus’ characters put their ideas into practice. In the Magic Mountain we can see the irony of the lengthy philosophical discussions being only possible because the real world is elsewhere, down the valley. So, it seems to me that the best way of writing about Philosophy in the Boudoir is to ask whether it is effective as a work of philosophical fiction. Does the “plot” work with the ideas?

De Sade himself does not really need an introduction. We know that from his name comes sadism. Even if he got up to only a fraction of what he describes in his books, he would already well deserve his poor moral reputation. A glance at his biography on Wikipedia is quite the ride.

As for Philosophy in the Boudoir, it is, as seems from my knowledge of his others, a relatively milder work. Eugenie, the girl who is gradually corrupted by the older characters, is both a willing student and at the age of 15 in most countries just around the age of consent. Nobody is murdered, though there is plenty of (consensual) whipping, and the story does end with some rape and torture which only seems mild to me because I expected something far worse!

The Story

“I’m committing both incest, adultery, and sodomy, and all that from a girl who only got devirginized today!”

At least de Sade simplifies the summarising of his tale by barely having anything to it. Madame de Saint-Ange, a libertine, meets the girl Eugénie at a convent retreat and invites her round for a debauched weekend with her – the Madame’s – brother, Chevalier, along with Dolmancé, another libertine. Over a day Eugénie is introduced to pretty much every sexual act you can imagine – from anal sex to a wide variety of poses available when there are plenty of participants. She not only loses her virginity but also learns a lot about her partners’ libertine morals. Sodomy, incest, and blasphemy are just some of the sins they all commit which today may be slightly more (some of them) acceptable than they were in late 18th century France, but which are still more than a little spine-tingling for the moral-minded among us.

Structurally, the story is almost like sex itself, with built-in refractory periods. We get “tableaux”, where the characters are arranged by Dolmancé for maximum pleasure, then they do the deed, and once they have finished and need to rest, they discuss philosophy. Rinse (I wish! – nobody washes here) and repeat.

I may not have spent time closely reading the philosophy as I would with another philosopher, but I think I have enough of a sense of the gist of it to be able to talk about it. The book is dedicated “to the libertines”; the goal is pleasure. “Listen only to those delicious passions; their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.” Essentially, the whole thing is about pleasure, which here is equated with happiness. Since pleasure is natural and nature is good, we must act in a way that aligns with nature. Pretty much everything that we deal with regularly – laws, religion, social customs – is the work of humans, and hence unnatural and ought to be the object of scorn.

Because we do not know other people, we can only trust our pleasure and ignore their pain and cries for help. Because nature does not care for us, we being tiny and irrelevant on a cosmic scale, it provides no higher guide for right conduct and no consolation for it either. Once we are old and can no longer have sex or engage in gratuitous violence, we should at least aim to have a store of pleasurable memories to look back on. The death of another is meaningless, for we all become mulch for nature to create a new life upon our deaths, so the overall balance of the living and the dead never changes. Hence murder is legitimised, including of our parents and children, as are the (alleged) pleasures of the sexual acts of things like incest and paedophilia. As soon as we recognise the absence of any authority except our own sensory pleasure and deny the existence of others’ inner worlds, we create a simplified world of pleasure available for those with the strength to take it. This is de Sade’s world.

Need I say that there’s plenty wrong with it?

I want to begin by undermining all of this using the work itself, before moving on to a more direct engagement with the significance of the ideas. The primary problem with Philosophy in the Boudoir is that its two parts, the smut and the philosophy, do not work together. This does not seem obvious at first. The philosophical text advocates for hedonism, and the story shows some people having the wildest of orgiastic pleasures, after all. But the problem is that the sex is utterly dreadful, and the characterisation so lax, that every opportunity for proving the truth of the philosophy within the bounds of the story’s world ends up doing the opposite – the story makes the philosophy look silly.

Allow me to explain. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic characters, or monsters, depending on how you look at them. Bad people exist, so that when Dolmancé declares he lit a bonfire for joy when his mother died, we can accept that. We can accept also, even, when someone says of Eugenie “What a delight to corrupt her, to suffocate in that young heart all the seeds of virtue and religion that were planted in her by her tutors!”. We’re all guilty of hamming things up from time to time.

Eugenie

But the problem, one of them, is Eugenie herself. We were all once teenagers – and many of us will have been horny teenagers. So we might think she really could be immediately corrupted by being removed from a convent and masturbated and abused for hours at a time. She might regret it afterwards, but who hasn’t, in the heat of arousal, done or thought things that the cooling water of the aftermath makes sting? No, we can tolerate that and still find her an utterly unbelievable creation. This comes across in the joints, the seams where de Sade is trying to stitch the two parts of the work together. Here is an example of one such shoddy transition:

“I’m dead, I’m shattered… I’m devastated!… but please explain two words that you’ve used and that I don’t understand. First of all: what does “womb” mean?”

Readers, I don’t know. I can accept orgiastic pleasures just as much as I can accept that a young girl in the 18th century may know very little about her own body. But the juxtaposition, this switch from post-coital exhaustion to notebook-on-lap schoolgirl is too sharp. It is laughable. Or, several orgasms later, how about: “What do you mean by that expression “whore”? I apologize, but I’m here to learn.” I know and you know damn well too. But in case readers of this blog post have become convinced that the poor girl really is just an innocent ingenu inducted rapidly into the world of physical pleasures and trying to catch up on the theory, I present the most egregious example:

“I’d like to know whether a government truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence of a nation.” This, I am afraid, is too much for post-coital discussion. I was an annoying 15-year-old, but even I wasn’t that bad – and that was without getting laid!

Other Problems

So, Eugenie’s characterisation rather makes the whole thing silly. There are plenty of other things too. One of them is de Sade’s tendency to pat himself on the back: “I can’t tell you how persuasive you are!”. Another is that classic mistake of any erotica, the oversized male member. We might believe that the average is eight or nine inches if we are regular readers of men pretending to be women on the internet, but de Sade, long before message boards, was way ahead of them. Take the servant, Augustin, who is brought in to deliver additional male firepower: “his member is thirteen inches long and eight and a half inches around.” I leave off the absence of lube in spite of all the anal and other sex, which seems the lightest graze against the edifice of realism when set aside such blatant howlers.

The Pamphlet – a moment of realism?

By showing the pleasures of constant orgies, we might come to believe that a good life really is one where we can say with Eugenie, that “Lust is now my only god, the single measure of my conduct, the sole basis of all my actions.” Instead, de Sade is constantly undermining himself. This is nowhere more obvious than in the pamphlet that appears halfway through the book.

This is a really interesting moment. I love texts-within-texts because they can do a lot to reflect and refract what goes on around them. Purportedly a pamphlet found on the street, Dolmancé reads it to the gathered pleasure-fiends. (Allowing for the reading out of lengthy texts is a concession to unrealism I can always allow – it gave us Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and a lot of lovely German novellas.) The pamphlet could, like the sex, bolster the philosophical arguments. By providing something similar, it could legitimise them by making them seem more widespread. By providing a, for example religious, alternative, it could allow the characters to create more finely formed counterarguments. Instead, and this is de Sade’s perennial problem, he can only talk like himself.

It begins well, or at least, it does not advocate violence, and it talks about republican virtues – virtue being hitherto a dirty word. It shares with the characters the simpler things, like a rejection of religion, for example. It is also boring and long, which has the singular advantage of making it seem more like a real pamphlet. But then de Sade’s restraint falls away, and this text too starts talking about the need for murder to be allowed, and the importance of pleasure. It just means that we are listening to the characters all over again, without the sex to make us laugh. It fails, in other words.

Concluding Complaints about Realism and Effectiveness

There are a few other things that Philosophy in the Boudoir does against itself. Its ending, where Eugenie rapes and tortures her mother, then infects her with syphilis, is unpleasant to read. It may be milder than the violence of the summary of the 120 Days of Sodom, but it still makes a reader interested in pleasure who may have enjoyed at least some of the sex go “this is too much.” To put it more simply, if de Sade wanted to be persuasive, he should have stopped earlier – instead, it seemed he was too interested in getting himself off. And it costs the book, and by extension us. But then again, perhaps de Sade didn’t want to convince – he probably just didn’t care, if he was doing his own philosophy properly!

Good bits

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I want to mention some qualities of the book that do make it interesting and not only the unrealistic, unrewarding picture I painted of it earlier. For one, the book is aware of its context. Written during the French Revolution, we have a sense of the Enlightenment and its consequences quite forcefully here. Eugenie has come “to be taught” – like Rousseau, de Sade is interested in education, good and bad, and is trying to advocate for a “right” version. We have a sense at times of the advancement of science and world exploration (Captain Cook is mentioned) and how these are destabilising a Eurocentric, Christian worldview.

At times, de Sade sounds a lot like Nietzsche or Freud. He has a keen, if probably more intuitive than reasoned, sense of the origins of social rules. For example, he claims incest is only considered bad because it allowed wealth concentration within families – hence people had to find a way to prevent people from marrying their siblings. By showing how other people practice murder or casual sex, (in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder the section on Tahiti is extraordinary – and very sad) de Sade does successfully make his ideas seem more reasonable or acceptable. He also uses the Bible to show how incest has been acceptable or practised at one point or other, letting him both devalue the Bible a little and legitimise incest in the same swipe.

What is here would understandably be shocking to a reader in the 18th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21st. But what is exciting at the same time is how de Sade really does fall into an intellectual tradition by showing its more extreme points. He is a fool, for example, when he says that despotism in bed and despotism in the halls of power are not linked. But precisely by being that fool, he presages the fools that eventually did gain power and placed violence on a pedestal. By revealing the tendencies of the Enlightenment towards the extinguishing of ultimate truths, he’s like a horny Max Weber.

And the real problem, intellectually rather than in the sense of quality as before, is that it seems the closer to the present we get, the more de Sade seems to be saying something almost true. Sodomy and blasphemy are now well tolerated in my country. Sex is mass-marketed and widespread – you can buy toys and lube in any supermarket. Contraception means that coitus and reproduction are now divorced. Apps make casual sex even more widespread than before, while recent trends towards step-sibling porn are merely a slope that ends eventually in simulated sibling porn, and then real sibling porn.

For example, it seems to me, intellectually, that there really is no good argument against incest, provided the people involved are over the age of consent and are not groomed before then (these are gigantic if’s), and conception does not take place. It may take people out of society because of the taboo and hence social discrimination, and also the way that having a partner within one’s own home gets in the way of going out to find a mate. But we value choice, and let people legally ruin their lives in many other ways. I am not sure we will be happy with this – but what I mean by bringing it up as an example is that de Sade taught us long ago that we don’t really have good arguments against it, only feelings. Likewise, with books like Open being reviewed in the New York Times, the nuclear family continues its dissipation into a startling – or refreshing? – array of alternatives.

I am not about to say what I think of this – a piece like this is not the place for moralising. To repeat, what I am saying is that seems de Sade saw where we are going. We may get there in my lifetime or yours, but society really does seem to be slipping towards a kind of freedom where we can do everything we want, with whomever we want, provided power is sufficiently evenly distributed (through the mutual consent of people in a position to give it). It is only this check, consent, that separates the future world from the world of de Sade’s dreams. Is it a good world? I’ll admit I may have some doubts.

Another thing we must grant de Sade is that by being wrong but different, he still has value in the context of women’s rights. Women certainly were not made just to have fun having sex, but at least by questioning what women were made for de Sade makes us think women may not just be made for whatever most people thought they were made for (babies), back in the 18th century. He loosens our ideas of what is right and wrong, and if we may not like what he puts in their place we at least can get started with thinking of what we ourselves might put in their place. This, the challenging of received ideas, is never unwelcome, even when it comes in so strange a guise as here.

To conclude, then, there really are some interesting thoughts in this book. The problem is that de Sade was not willing to make his fiction and philosophy work together. He was too much writing for himself in the sex/plot scenes, to be able to allow them to speak to the rest of the work in a way that enhanced it. Do I regret reading it? At 170 pages in the Penguin translation by Joachim Neugroschel, it’s not too bad. But I cannot see myself reading de Sade again. Readers, I believe I can say I have saved you the trouble too.

Thank me later.