Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism (review)

Thomas Wynn's study re-evaluates Sade's largely neglected dramatic corpus, contextualizing it more broadly within eighteenth-century debates about theatre and visual representation. Wynn argues convincingly for the importance of Sadean theatre, not so much as a literary genre, but for what it reveals more generally about a 'history of affects'. Unlike Sade's narrative writings, which challenged the boundaries of both the text and the reader's expectations, his theatre remained largely constrained by generic conventions, which has led a number of scholars to suggest that it is of little or no importance to our understanding of Sade. Wynn, however, argues that it is primarily through a reconsideration of Sade's dramatic works, and in particular the presumed role of the spectator, that the eminently theatrical construction of his narrative writings can be best understood. Locating the originality of Sadean theatre in the tension between the seen and the unseen, Wynn shows how the physical, material, and, above all, visual space of the stage becomes, with Sade, something best seen with the 'inner eye' of the imagination. He does so by drawing upon Michel Foucault and, more notably, Theodore Reik to suggest that the position of the spectator in Sadean theatre is similar to that of the masochist: both tend towards an imaginary rather than real satisfaction of desire, and both occupy a 'position of powerlessness before the staged illusion' (p. 11). In an original and persuasive interpretation, Wynn argues that Sade's detailed attention to the material elements of the stage and performance serves to intensify what can only be perceived by the mind's eye, thereby 'removing drama from the physical to the imaginary realm' in order to 'depict new excesses to the mind's eye' (p. 173). This highlights the importance of limited space (and the implied awareness of such limitations on the part of the spectator) to the unlimited imagination later associated with the Romantic sublime (treated in the final chapter). Wynn offers this re-evaluation of Sade's theatre as one possible way to account for the more general shift, thematized by Foucault but left undeveloped, from a visual-based culture of representation (as reflected by the tableau) to a more textual-based culture of the 'inner' imagination, with its emerging conception of the sovereign individual. In addition to the rich array of eighteenth-century sources evoked, this book is especially strong in its discussion of the limits of visual drama, in particular the way in which the 'obscene' functions as an oppositional construct that presupposes the prevailing code of bienséance. My only (very slight) caveat is that the theoretical framework could have been delineated more clearly from the close readings of the various texts, as the shifts from a 'historicist' to a 'theoretical' perspective were sometimes hard to follow.