L'Œil de Sade: lecture des tableaux dans 'Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome' et les trois 'Justine' (review)

This book's title is rather misleading, for Emmanuelle Sauvage's study encompasses considerably more than an analysis of one literary device. It does treat the (not untouched) questions of narrative form and theatricality in some of Sade's key novels, but it also reaches out to offer a wide-ranging analysis of visual pleasure that may be usefully applied to his other works. The monograph comprises three parts, the first of which situates Sade within early modern debates about description and about the parallel of the arts ('ut pictura poesis'). Although somewhat lacking in clarity, this contextualisation allows Sauvage to demonstrate the highly structured nature of Sade's literary tableaux, and to show how his disturbing and excessive descriptions may be distinguished from the work of his contemporaries. The second part of the study is a more successful investigation of Sade's systematic parodying of the conventional, didactic and moralistic tableau (as found in Diderot, Mercier and Beaumarchais), whereby libertinage, incest and violence supplant sensibility, family communion and pathos. This pornographic reworking of the tableau is particularly evident in the reunion and recognition scenes, which, by replacing sentiment by purely physical sensations, elicit not tears but altogether different substances. Sauvage's point that Sade mixes sensibility and eroticism so as to devalue the former may be correct with respect to the four texts under consideration, but it is less convincing with respect to his later historical novels, for instance. Given the title of the book, the third section might seem to be adrift, given that it barely touches on the proposed subject of the tableau. Instead it offers a typology of visual relations, and pays especial attention to how Justine's point of view makes problematic her 'naïve' story of suffering. Sauvage's analysis of the modalities of vision is based on a close reading of the four novels (which she clearly knows in detail), and she convincingly argues how erotic pleasures are variously founded on exhibitionism, surveillance, the refusal to see and the refusal to be seen; some further attention to the question of power might have been beneficial. Despite some odd editorial choices (why is one chapter titled 'La passion du voir: Lyncée et Asmodée' when these two figures are mentioned but once, and on that chapter's last page?), this is a stimulating and erudite study that furthers our understanding of Sade's deliberate and considered narrative techniques and ambitions.