Intertextuality and Urtextuality: Sade's Justine Palimpsest
Only relatively recently have all three incarnations of Sade's story of Justine become available in print at the same time, and this availability raises a number of new issues for the prospective reader. Although Michel Delon's Pléiade edition accommodates all three within a single volume, inviting the reader to begin with Les Infortunes de la vertu, continue with Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu, and end with La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu , few readers, other than those engaged in academic research or with a particular enthusiasm for Sade, will ever read more than one of the three "Justines." No single, authoritative text subordinates the others, and a strong sense of textual instability consequently permeates each of the variations of Justine's story. Sade reverses the direction of the typical writing process: text reverts to paratext, finished article reverts to rough draft as one version is consumed by the next. Nor does La Nouvelle Justine mark the end of this evolutionary narrative. A copy of La Nouvelle Justine seized by police in 1801, and covered in authorial annotations, suggests the beginning of a process that would have led, as Delon puts it, to a "nouvelle Nouvelle Justine, comme si ce texte était infiniment voué à la réécriture."1
The three versions of the Justine story offer three snapshots of a text in flux, written to be written over, and which ends only [End Page 367] to begin again. The figure of the palimpsest, adopted by Gérard Genette in his studies in intertextuality, seems to represent perfectly this process of rewriting undertaken by Sade. Genette invokes "la vieille image du palimpseste , où l'on voit, sur le même parchemin, un texte se superposer à un autre qu'il ne dissimule pas tout à fait, mais qu'il laisse voir par transparence."2 Genette uses the palimpsest, or hypertext, in relation to what he classes as a "littérature au second degré" that includes parodies, pastiches, adaptations, and continuations of existing "hypotexts." While he suggests that hypertexts can offer prequels, sequels, or lacunae-filling additions to an existing hypotext, he does not allude to the kind of rewriting that Sade undertakes in the Justine narratives, which in many ways seems to conform more closely than any other to the figure of the palimpsest. Curiously, it is Les 120 Journées de Sodome, not the Justine narratives, that has previously attracted the label of palimpsest. Delon, in the Pléiade edition of Les 120 Journées, observes, "la réapparition, d'une partie à l'autre, de certaines figures, selon une méthode comparable à celle des personnages récurrents dont Balzac fera systématiquement usage, tend à superposer les quatre parties comme quatre versions d'une même histoire, quatre moments d'un palimpseste dont les gazes seraient progressivement levées pour atteindre une idéale nudité du texte, un impossible absolu de la cruauté et de la souffrance."3 This article makes the case for exploring the three Justine narratives, rather than Les 120 Journées, as a palimpsest, and examines the questions of primacy, originality, and authorship posed by this highly unusual form of intertextuality. Although striptease, as Roland Barthes noted, is striking for its absence in Sadean fiction, Delon's striptease narrative is suggestive here: it echoes Sade's own use of the imagery of voile and gaze , but more importantly for this article it offers an interpretive model for the complex shifts in narration and focalization that take place from one version of the palimpsest to the next.
Editors as Authors
The same textual instability that allows for the creation of the Justine palimpsest also undermines the very status of one of its [End Page 368] three texts as a text in its own right. Les Infortunes de la vertu, the first version of Justine's story, only definitively acquires textual as well as paratextual status long after...
