Justine
I haven’t written in the reading journal for quite some time, but since I finished my Sade reading group today I thought I would write a quick post about any conclusions we might have come to. Truthfully, I’m not sure that we did come to any conclusions, at least ones that we hadn’t come to before.
We finished the group with Justine, which I’d anticipated would be Sade’s attempt to integrate his philosophy and outlook into the form of the novel. Justine defied those expectations, though Al and I couldn’t quite put our fingers on exactly how or why. Though Justine is, ostensibly at least, a novel, we both found it far duller and less narratively complex or satisfying than Philosophy in the Bedroom, which is (again, ostensibly at least) a philosophical dialogue. We talked for a while about Justine’s ending. After being raped, sodomized and tortured for years and years Justine is finally struck in the heart by a bolt of lightning and dies, the narrator informing us that we should take away from her story the lesson that virtue is, indeed, always rewarded. Of course the balance of the novel (which amounts to some 350 pages compared with the ending’s 3 pages) illustrates how Justine’s moral sentiments are always repaid in the worst ways imaginable, and there is also the fact that being struck by lightning is perhaps the prototypical example of God exercising his wrath. However, I don’t find it satisfactory to read this ending as one of those characteristically 18c perfunctory endings or as a parody of those endings; instead, Sade seems to cast his story aside carelessly just as his heroes cast aside their victims once they are done with them. To call it flippant isn’t quite right, as it misses the element of brutality in ending the narrative this way.
We also continued our running discussion of Sade’s attitude toward plot. As always, for Sade the form of fictional narrative seems to be equated with the trajectory of the typical sex act, but in Justine I noticed a tension in how this plays out on a micro and macro level. On the macro level Justine has no plot, or at the very least the plot of a porno movie; the action is always moving Justine into a new situation in which she can be raped and brutalized; sense, flow and other seeming constraints on narrative be damned. However, within the scope of each sexual encounter there seems to be an impulse to delay the climax as long as possible; scenes normally cycle through several tableaux before reaching their inevitable climax. Because of the tension between these two narrative strategies you always get the sense that the story is rushing either toward or away from something, never comfortable in the place where it actually is.
Al and I also talked about our mutual disgust for the novel’s title character. Like her literary forbearers Pamela and Clarissa, Justine’s moral system is based almost entirely on sympathy and sentiment, but as a heroine she is unable to evoke these sentiments herself. This is obvious from her interactions with the characters in the story, most of whom become sexually excited by her tales of terror, as well as our reactions to the book itself. Justine is stupid, obnoxious and arrogant and, as bad as it might be to say so, these judgments prevented us from having any real sympathy for her plight. Who knows if this feature of the novel was intentional; perhaps this was just Sade’s intense hatred of women creeping into his narrative.
Tags:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: the_post_keytags() in /usr/home/deepfry/public_html/18cblog/wp-content/themes/desert_theme/index.php on line 22