Books - 120 Days of Sodom

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	Books - 120 Days of Sodom

The 120 Days of Sodom or the School of Freedoms (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage) is a book written by the French writer Marquis de Sade in 1784. It relates the story of four wealthy men who enslaved 24 mostly teenaged victims and proceed to torture them with various sexual perversions, while listening to stories told by old prostitutes.

The book was not published until 1904. Originally written in French, it was translated into many languages, including English, Japanese and German. Due to its extreme sexual and violent nature, the book remained banned in many countries for a long time.

History

Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom in the space of thirty-seven days in 1784 whilst he was locked up in the Bastille. Being short of writing materials, he wrote it in tiny writing on a continuous, twelve-metre long roll of paper. When the Bastille was stormed and looted on July 14, 1789 during the height of the French Revolution, Sade believed the work was lost forever and later wrote that he "wept tears of blood" over its loss.

However, the long roll of paper on which it was written was later found hidden in his cell, having escaped the attentions of the looters. It was first published in 1904 by the Berlin psychiatrist Iwan Bloch (who used a pseudonym to avoid controversy). It was not until the latter half of the twentieth-century that it became more widely available in countries such as Britain, the USA and France.

Assessments

Due to the extreme content of The 120 Days of Sodom, it is understandably regarded as gruesome and difficult to read.

It does have its defenders however. The first publisher of the work, Dr. Bloch, regarded its thorough categorization of all manner of sexual fetishes as having "scientific importance...to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists." He equated it with Kraft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay titled Must We Burn Sade?, defending the 120 Days of Sodom when, in 1955, French authorities were planning on destroying it and three other majors works by Sade.

On the other hand, another feminist writer, Andrea Dworkin, condemned it as "vile pornography" and its author as the embodiment of misogyny, especially as the rape, tortures and murders are inflicted by male characters on victims who are mostly (but not exclusively) female.

It is likely that many people - whether they regard The 120 Days Of Sodom as being of any literary value or not - would not even classify it as 'pornography' because the sex is repetitive and not described in much detail. Furthermore, the paraphilias involved - such as coprophilia, pedophilia, rape, torture and murder - are those which the majority of people would find either unstimulating or downright revolting.

Synopsis

The 120 Days Of Sodom has been described as a Gothic novel. It is set in a remote medieval castle, high in the mountains and surrounded by forests, detached from the rest of the world and not set at any specific point in time (although it is implied at the start that the events in the story take place either during or shortly after the Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648).

The novel takes place over five months, November to March. Four wealthy perverts lock themselves in a castle, the Château de Silling, along with a number of victims and accomplices. They intend on listening to various tales of depravity from four veteran prostitutes, which will inspire them to engage in similar activities with their victims.

It is a remarkably well planned story, with a strict timetable of events drawn out in advance. It is not, however, complete. Only the first section is written in detail. After that, the remaining three parts are written as a draft, in note form, with Sade's footnotes to himself still present in most translations. Either at the outset, or during the writing of the work, Sade had evidently decided he would not be able to complete it in full and elected to write out the remaining three-quarters in brief and finish it later (he obviously did not get a chance).

The story does betray some black humor, and Sade seems almost lighthearted in his introduction, referring to us as "friend reader." In this introduction he contradicts himself, at one point insisting that we should not be horrified by the 600 passions outlined in the story because each of us has his own tastes, but at the same time going out of his way to warn us of the horrors that lay ahead and that suggesting we should have our doubts about continuing.

Characters

The four principal characters are incredibly wealthy men, who are libertine, incredibly ruthless, and "...lawless and without religion, whom crime amused, and whose only interest lay in his passions...and had nothing to obey but the imperious decrees of his perfidious lusts." It is no coincidence that they are authority figures in terms of their occupations. Sade despised religion and authority and in many of his works he enjoyed mocking them by portraying priests, bishops, judges and the like as sexual perverts and criminals. They are:

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